The Female Spirit Guide

A conversation with Tamara J. Madison

By Cynthia Via

Tamara J. Madison is a poet, author, editor, spoken word artist, and instructor. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, Poetry International, Callaloo, The Amistad and other journals and magazines. Her book, Threed, This Road Not Damascus, is published by Trio House Press. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is creator and host of BREAKDOWN: The Poet & The Poems, a YouTube poetry conversation series. Her work is also featured on the TEDx platform.

Tamara enjoys facilitating generative creative writing workshops. She is a MFA graduate of New England College and a Hedgebrook, Ucross, and Anaphora Literary Arts Fellow. Tamara has received Individual Artists Awards from United Arts of Central Florida and has received an Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant from South Arts. She currently lives and teaches in Florida while completing a new poetry collection based on her lineage.

I spoke with Tamara about her collection Threed, This Road Not Damascus and its connection to ancestry, spirit guides and motherhood. We dove into the persona voice she created, the inclusion of family artifacts, how her literary surroundings keep her writing, among other topics.

CV: I like the use of the mythical being [Three-Breasted woman] to dive into the collection. A middle breast can be a kind of third eye, a center, or maybe a community between two realms. What were the two realms you were trying to bridge through this poetry collection?

TJM: I’ve never really thought of it in that kind of way. When I thought of her as having the three breasts, I was thinking of the breast as representing compassion. And so, with her having three of them, and we only having two, meaning that she had more, then evidently we have devolved, and lost something. So I wasn't really thinking of the bridging of worlds in terms of her breasts themselves. To me, she was in pristine form, primordial. We, or the speaker, is in the devolved form. So, if it was the bridging of any worlds at all, it would be more of hers and ours, and the speaker remembering that she is a descendant of her, and to call upon that power.

CV: I can definitely see that she was in a more pristine world, and the speaker, or those that came after her have devolved from the original. How did this mythical being of the Three-Breasted woman surface as you were excavating through your family lineage?

TJM: It was many years prior, actually. For me, she's more of a spirit guide as opposed to a mythological character. I remember having conversations with women friends, my women community. And there would often be these conversations about feminine power. About which goddess are you, or who do you feel most akin to? Is it this one, or that one? There were representations of Oya, Yemaya, Oshun, and other feminine deities, and what they represented. I remember thinking at a certain point, why is it that we're only supposed to be one. What if she had all of these powers wrapped into one? And upon musing over that, I had this vision, and that vision became the Three-Breasted Woman. I did not see specific features of her face. I just saw her moving, how powerful she was, and I realized, once I started working on the manuscript, it was really important that I try not to paint any pictures of her face, simply because anyone who needed to identify with her would see what they needed to see. If that makes sense.

CV: Yeah, totally. It doesn't restrict your own imagination of what she could be. In thinking about her, it's an open ended question, because it could be the very first being, or it could also be the original descendant of your own family. Connecting to that idea, some of your poems feel as if your maternal ancestors are reaching forward or waiting for you to reach back, like in the poem, “Prophecy: Maternal Lineage 2” with lines like, “You long saw me coming…/ staring across generations at me / daring me to be free.” And then Contact: Poet Encounters Three-Breasted Woman has a line, which I love. “She sacrifices herself to chaos / that I'd be born.” And then The physical, which is about a child, “...all the threed that ever were/ lay our fury down and weep.” So there's a sort of going back, being pulled into the past, but also your ancestors are present in the moment. What was that process of reaching back to your own maternal ancestors to write some of these lines?

TJM: That process is ongoing, and that is what my new book is about. And I realized, within this past year, that Threed is actually the starting block for the book that I'm working on now. The poem you mentioned, “Prophecy” with the line, “You long saw me coming," is actually a true story that occurred during the editing of the manuscript. I was working with Tayve Neese, and we were editing this manuscript, and I remember it was February, and I was away at a writing retreat in Miami, and my sister sent me a text message with this picture. On the back of the picture, it says, this is Malinda. So we knew that it was our second great-grandmother. And I was like, oh my god. As soon as I saw her and the photo, I felt like she was looking at me, and I felt immediately I had to have a piece for her in the book. I just knew she needed to have her place. So that's a true story that was actually in the making of the book, but we were all the way into the editing phase before that piece came along.

The Three-Breasted Woman was a spirit guide. I wanted to track the bridge back to her, and then the bridge from me back to her, to me, and then the bridge from me forward, if that makes sense. And so, going back to Three-Breasted Woman, and then the oldest ancestor I could find, which was from that photograph, and then moving forward from there. That's the first third of the book. The new book I'm working on is both about maternal and paternal ancestry based on photographs, archives, and digital research.

CV: I love when you have to include research, collect journal entries, photographs. It tells you so much about the people, the time, and the place.

TJM: I do want to say there was one other process that helped evolve in the earlier stages of the manuscript. I shared it with a peer who did a critical reading of it. She wrote different notes and said, it sounds like you're bragging here. The reader doesn't want to see you bragging. By the time she got to the end of the manuscript, she said, you may want to consider if you are writing in a persona. And so that was when I went back to the manuscript and said, wait a minute, what voice can identify as being absolutely mine, and what voice feels to be the other? And if this voice is the other, who is this other? That was when I made the connection between that voice and this vision that I had seen years earlier, and I realized, I'm a part of her voice, but her voice is not mine.

CV: There were a few poems about your paternal lineage, and I felt more conflicted reading those. They were less nurturing and loving. How did it feel writing about your paternal lineage?

TJM: The stories I know best are from my maternal lineage, because my mother kept them. She was a wealth of resource; stories, photographs,letters. She shared many of those stories with my sister and me. So there was a wide range of information, an openness. My mother had two daughters that she could share all this with. And my mother was also the youngest and the only girl. When it came to my father's side of the family, I didn't get the same sharing of stories. I had to gather bits and pieces. A lot of things were simply not discussed. And so what I've learned since that time is that a lot of the culture and the lineage is carried through women, who hold those stories, who hold those links, and bring things together.

CV: I noticed Bible verses in the collection. Why was it important to prompt the reader to read these verses before each section?

TJM: My mother’s family and lineage are ministerial, so her father and her grandfather and her oldest brother are all ministers, and they were all pastors of a church. So growing up in the church, biblical imagery had a very strong imprint on me, both as a child and a writer. The whole tutelage of women through biblical and religious understanding I find very interesting, so I did a lot of ruminating on that when creating the manuscript. That's the reason why you see some of the conversations with King James, in terms of how women are viewed, how women are valued, the interaction with women, their place.

CV: Yeah, I thought that was an interesting lens. The biblical lens of how women were treated back then, but it also mirrors how unfairly women are still treated today. In some ways, those remnants have stayed. I see this theme in the poem Manifesto: The Ten Commandments where the speaker is intertwining modern themes and structure with language based on Christian teachings. How did you go about writing this poem?

TJM: That poem actually started in a workshop, but it was not a writing workshop. It was a workshop that I was doing at the college where I worked. It was many years ago, so it was a very different time. The workshop was about equality, equity and diversity. It was all about learning how to interact with students. There was a gender component, an ethnic component, and a racial component. There was a systemic component in terms of getting us to see our own biases. It was the gender portion of the workshop, where they asked us to write down everything we were taught in terms of the tutelage of our gender. So I just started writing all of these things down that I heard as a little girl in terms of how I was supposed to carry myself as a girl and as a woman.

CV: Did the structure come after?

TJM: Yes, the structure came long after. At first in the middle of this workshop with a bunch of other professors, it was just writing down everything from my head. I have to say that it was influenced by a piece that I used when teaching by Jamaica Kincaid, the prose poem “Girl,” where there are these stringent rules, and this really edgy voice about what a girl must do to keep from being a slut. And the word slut is used throughout the piece. And so the piece is like a poem, flash fiction. I was thinking about what I had in common with it. When I started looking at the piece outside of the workshop and as a poem, I thought, how does all of this work? What do we hear originally? How does that translate into directions? Why are those directions there? What is the purpose behind them? I was trying to take each one of the tenants, or the commandments, and put them in that structure.

CV: Thinking back to the original commandments and seeing this poem, the structures mirror each other.

TJM: It's almost like thinking about it in that traditional or religious setting. And then, how does that show up as language today? And one of the things I was thinking about, as I was writing it, was how many of those voices and those teachings were supposedly to protect women. But in doing that, it's also women passing their fears onto their daughters, right? So I was thinking of all of that as I was writing as well.

CV: Yeah, sometimes we don't know what we’re passing down, and it could be subconscious. I noticed that you also write essays and short stories. In your previous collections. What’s different about focusing on poetry and building this collection, and also, where do the genres overlap?

TJM: My poetry is storytelling even though I don't necessarily write a lot of narrative poetry, it's still very much storytelling. I have a propensity, or a drive to produce collective works. I find that most of the writing that I've been doing for the past few years is about this one collection. There's not a lot of stuff outside of it. I write now with a collective mindset, and I'm really pondering the idea that what I'm working on now might be a novel in verse. And just like in Threed, where there's a speaker who is asking questions and having a dialog with the Three-Breasted Woman or with King James. My current book is similar where the speaker is having a dialogue and asking questions of these ancestors, and more of the poems are in their voices.

CV: How did your children surface in some of the writing, or how did you integrate them into the poems?

TJM: How could I not? How could they not be a part of all of that? I have three children. I call them wound babies, because I also have children from a marriage, but I have three children from my own body, and there is a piece for each one of them in there. And they’re real people. So when I was thinking about the book, that first section was more of my ascendance before me, leading up to me. The second section was about me, and those that are descending from me. And then the third section of the book, for me, in my mind, was more about ascension, transition and me as a spiritual being, or the speaker as a spiritual being. In that middle section, the idea of having a mate, a partner and children, it organically made sense, and I didn't see how the book could not have that with the Three-Breasted Woman breast being the chalice that holds humanity. It's also that which nurtures. And I did nurse all of my children as well. So that was very much a part of my life for many years. I had a ten year gap, and then there was another one. And the last one was born at home, so that has had a deep influence on my work.

CV: I really enjoyed those poems because it made me think about my own experience, and what I hope to look forward to, the thoughts that will come into my mind as my daughter gets older. I really liked Covenant. It felt like there was a binding agreement between you, the speaker and the daughter.

TJM: There is actually, believe it or not, a video about this book, where I am being interviewed by my daughter. She's the one doing the interview and we're talking about books and poems. It turned out to be really interesting, because several people got back to me talking about just how moving it was because of exactly what you said. They said, it's very obvious the agreement that is between the two, and how that has developed over time.

CV: While you were writing this collection, what were the writers surrounding your work?

TJM: I often say that Lucille Clifton saved my poet life. And that is not at all a poetic notion. This book was in a previous form called Breast Poems, believe it or not, and I was submitting it everywhere, and it kept being rejected, and it just kept coming back. Finally in 2015, it was shortlisted, down to four, and I was so excited about that, and they chose another manuscript, and they did not include other manuscripts in the prize. After that, I was just like, you know what? Forget it. I'm not doing this anymore. Maybe my writing is not for this place or at this time. Maybe somebody will find it when I'm dead and gone. I'm always going to write poetry for me, because it is part of my growth, but I'm not putting anything out there anymore. That summer I happened to be unemployed, and I sat down and read the collected works of Lucille Clifton from cover to cover. It was three-hundred plus pages. And as soon as I finished, I heard, okay, pick it back up. It's time to get busy.

I literally do mean when I say it saved my poet life, because I have not had a low moment, where I said, I will never put poetry out again. I've never experienced that since, and it's been ten years. The poet Ai [Ogawa] is definitely an influence. Ai is a grand master when it comes to persona poems. I remember reading her in grad school. One of my mentors had me read her first book, Cruelty, and I was blown away that a black woman could write in the voice of a white male serial killer, and it was believable. It was just so new to me, this idea of taking on a voice, and be so powerful and so believable. And later, I had the opportunity to research and study her, to write about her for the The Dictionary of Literary Biographies (DLB), where I published some work. I love the work of Toni Morrison, and I don't care what anybody says. Toni Morrison is a poet, And the my other influence, I would say, is Octavia Butler. I don't consider myself to be a Science Fiction writer, but I love that aspect of the surreal, or the magical realism, or something otherworldly. It’s important to always keep that in mind and as a possibility.

You can experience Tamara J Madison and her poetry in person at AWP 2025 in Los Angeles at the following events:

Thursday, March 27, 2025 @ 7:00 pm
Off Site. On Purpose Reading (sponsored by Mom Egg Review, Cultivating Voices Live Poetry, SWWIM and others)
MG Studio, 1319 W. 11th St., Los Angeles, CA

 
Friday, March 28, 2025 @ 1:00 pm
Book Signing w/ Trio House Press
AWP Booth #944

 
Friday, March 28, 2025 @ 5:30–7 pm
Prose & Poetry Reading
(sponsored by Betty Books and Mom Egg Review)
Shoo-Shoo Baby, 717 W. 7th St., Los Angeles, 90017

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Cynthia Via is a journalist, poet, and editor based in the DC area. Originally born in Peru and raised in New York, her work explores gender, culture, everyday absurdism, and the relationship between humans and nature. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Acentos Review, Coffin Bell Journal, Write or Die, among others. She's a Tin House and VONA Workshop alumna for Fiction and CNF. She is a copy editor and reader for Trio House Press. During off hours she spies on birds and ice skates. Find her ig: @nekoenlaluna