Megan Williams is a poet who knows how to craft beauty from pain. Her two collections, Twentysomething and Window Person, invite readers into a world that is haunting, fierce, and intimate. Williams writes about the connective tissue of sorrow, her experiences in recovery, and pop culture. These poems are a battle cry – harrowing and darkly funny, they will stay with you long after you've put them down. 

I want to chat first about how you got started writing and what your journey has been.

I guess this might not be surprising, but I started writing seriously in cognitive behavioral therapy when I was sixteen. I was struggling to speak about being sexually assaulted and my therapist was an intensive trauma therapist, and she decided to have me write out my experience.

She showed me examples, redacted of identifying details of past patients who had consented, and many of their works were like four to five pages recounting the traumatic event. I ended up writing eighty pages about mine. It stretched beyond being about the single instance of sexual assault and instead encompassed the entire fallout.

I found that through writing about it, I felt less scared of it and more a sense of ownership. I don't want to make it seem like writing is cathartic or cures everything all the time, but it was the only way I had been able to explain what had happened to me. Or to make sense in any way as to what had happened to me. So, from there, I sort of fell in love with writing as a way to express myself.

So many writers question that. I’m with you. I don’t think writing is cathartic, but it is a way to figure ourselves out and work through experiences. I'm curious what you studied.

I started undergrad thinking that I would study poetry, then I took [an] intro to nonfiction class, and my professor pulled me into his office about six weeks into the course and said, "Where are you getting your MFA?” And I said, "I don't know what that is.”

So, he told me that these Master of Fine Arts programs existed, and I could get in somewhere fully funded. He wanted me to focus on nonfiction essays. At the time I was still writing about my sexual assault and so my plan was to leave undergrad, apply to MFA programs, [and] go write a memoir about being sexually assaulted.

And did you do that in your MFA?

No. I moved to West Virginia, and immediately got whomped over the head with anorexia. I think a lot of teenage girls struggle with eating in some capacity, but I had no formalized eating disorder. I was very overweight, in fact. I was like two hundred and sixty-five pounds when I went to West Virginia and it was like setting foot in the state unlocked something in me.

That first semester I wrote about sexual assault a bit, but I ended up losing about ninety pounds that semester. And at that point I was really like locked into anorexia. When you’re in that state of mind, which is called semi-starvation neurosis, it's very hard to write or think about anything other than food. So, my content shifted to reflect where I was at mentally.

I wrote quite frequently and I never slacked on any coursework. During my MFA I [wrote] an essay that was published in the New York Times – about having an eating disorder on a Chili's date. But I literally had to time it. Like, Ok I'm gonna have one hundred calories in my body, and then I have the hour after that to write and then my brain power is gone. It was a complicated place to be in.

Writing essays was something I was doing to complete my thesis, but in my free time I was writing poetry because the sort of flighty snippets came to me easier. And I found the looseness of thought and the jumps that you can make in poems to be more reflective of the way that my brain was actually working.

I can relate to that. I got my MFA in nonfiction as well and was completely overwhelmed with my life at the time and wrote poetry instead for the same reasons. It felt easier to go into these moments of feeling and play around, versus [write] a structured essay.

Were you writing a full memoir, or were you doing essays?

I was writing essays but I was overthinking [them]. Plus, perfectionism and the stress and worry I imposed on myself left me unable to finish any essays. I got in my own way completely. Writing poetry in my other classes was really fun and freeing.

I'm the exact same way as you. I was truly writing the essays because I was in nonfiction. But I found the work of logistics in an essay almost baffling. I felt weighed down by the idea of time passing in a logical manner and found the freedom of poetry [and] the lack of logic required really, really refreshing.

Was Window Person part of what you wrote along with Twentysomething? And did you know you had two books?

No, I wrote Twentysomething first. That was done my third year in the MFA. But because of some publication changes it came out after Window Person.

Window Person is more focused. I think they're in conversation with one another, but you can definitely see I’m more of a hopeful person in Window Person towards the end. Twentysomething was difficult. It's reflective of a pretty dark time, walking constantly in West Virginia. That's basically where I wrote it, in my head as I was walking.

How did you come up with the format of the Twentysomething?

The book moves chronologically, so part one is my second year in grad school, and then in “Circling,” I'm home for summer, and then the final year, things were getting far worse before they were getting better.

In the poem “Graveyard in April” in Twentysomething, there’s this line, “Must Google how much hair loss is too much.” Were you walking and writing these lines down?

Yeah, I was literally Googling things like that all the time. Like, How much hair loss is too much? Fingers are numb, anorexia question mark. I developed a really dark sense of humor about the whole thing.

An MFA program is a strange place to be when you are suffering so openly and so visibly. Everyone in the program knew that I had anorexia because I was writing about it, and because I went from such a large body at the time to such a small body by the time I graduated. It was sort of an open secret. And I was trying to make people more comfortable with it by joking about it sometimes.

When they would invite me out to go get drinks or go get food after workshop I would be like, Oh you know, that's not really my thing. Or, Yeah, sure if you want to hear me puke afterwards. You know, horrible jokes that are trying to be like, Hey, it's funny! It's okay! We can laugh about this! You don't have to be worried! And that certainly translates into my work, and [the] ways that I was comforting myself too. Because it’s scary to feel your body breaking down and trying to make sense of that can feel a little bit ridiculous.

I like what you said about your anorexia being an open secret. It seems to me sometimes poetry can work that way too. As a poet who writes about personal experiences, how do you navigate existing in the world outside your art – as someone with a job, a family, a life? Do you ever feel the tension between those two versions of yourself?

I definitely think that's how it feels. I always say that my dating life is complicated because people Google me and the first thing they find is, Oh, she took laxatives on a first date at Chili's and it's in the New York Times.

I would say at this point I've sort of accepted that being a writer is being known in some capacity. There are still parts of my life that are private, especially concerning home and family. But I've accepted that people are going to know a lot about me. My primary concern is protecting the privacy of people around me.

In [the poem] “Circling,” there was a lot of debate about whether even the amount of detail I gave about the hot masc. from high school I was sleeping with was too much. Two friends thought, Oh, Megan, this might be kind of weird, what if her parents read it? And I thought, my parents read my work. They know I have sex with women. I’m not outing her or anything. But to other people it's crazy to even bring that up publicly.

I try to respect privacy by avoiding names and overly personal details when I can. [It’s also] my life and I'm owed an ability to write about it.

You have this other side, an internet persona. Your tweets are so funny and often go viral. When did you blow up on the internet?

Hilariously, during my MFA the HBO show Succession came out and I was a huge fan. I really locked in and hyper-fixated on Kendall Roy. I was projecting in many ways. I was like, I am the anorexic Kendall Roy. Insanity, total weird behavior because my brain was not working correctly.

I ended up running a very famous Succession fan account called Meg Succession Text Posts. I got up to twenty-seven or twenty-eight thousand followers by the finale. At the time my main Twitter had four or five thousand [followers], but there was some crossover between friends I made on the Succession account, so I got up to probably six thousand followers [on my main account]. Then, post-grad school I was back home living with my parents (who were fully aware of anorexia in my life at that point), so I felt comfortable tweeting about it. My parents are wonderful, incredible supports. I had primarily kept the anorexia secret because I didn't want to worry them. But by the time I graduated, I was in such poor health that everyone knew what was going on, and I needed help very badly. Once they were aware, I started to tweet more about anorexia and recovery. Trying to be funny about it, trying to be sincere sometimes, and that's when it started to blow up with more people.

I don't want to speak for the people who follow me, but there's a lack of discussion or representation amongst people who are in the phase of anorexia recovery that I'm in, which is to say, one foot in the disorder and one foot out. I feel like I live two steps forward, one step back, or one step forward, two steps back constantly. I'm doing better behaviorally, mentally, but physically I’m still not in great shape. And it is hard every day. But having the ability to fight is so much better than it was. It’s that in between of not really recovered, not really in danger thinking, Is my life going to be this bargaining phase forever? And how do I navigate that? I find there are a lot of people who are stuck in that bargaining phase. Or who return to that bargaining phase, if they're slipping into a little relapse, or they're trying to climb their way out. Trying to voice those thoughts has resonated with people.

How do you see your viral Twitter persona and your writer persona in conversation with each other? Do you feel like they're estranged siblings? Are they dating?

I would say my writer side is the shy sister and my Twitter side is the loud sister.

I have to fight the compulsion as a writer to write what is going to be the most viral. I don't want to knock Instagram poetry or name anyone specific, but there is an urge in me, and there are certainly poems in my past that I would classify as Instagram poetry. That you think as you’re writing it, I can put this in second person, or I could add in a quotation.

I love Joan Didion and Blue Nights is my bible. But there are other very recognizable quotes from Joan Didion and from Sylvia Plath that someone can project onto very easily. Sometimes when I'll write a poem like that, the primary interaction with it is people being like, This is so me. And it’s a poem onto which people can project. There’s this quote that's like, a poem isn't just a mirror, it's a door.

I think my Twitter self is often a mirror for people, which I'm totally happy with. But my writer self wants to be a door too. Not just a mirror.

In Twentysomething you use form so magically. In the poem, “March/Some Things You Never Really Get Over,” you include Plath’s lines, “Dying is an art like everything else,” “I do it exceptionally well.”  Was this one of those poems that you wrote at once?

It all poured out of me while I was walking at that park. I explained later in Window Person I had a dark sense of humor when I was sixteen when I was in cognitive behavioral therapy [and I used to put] Sylvia Plath quotes in my socks. I thought it would be funny if I died and a medical examiner were to roll down my socks and see Sylvia Plath quotes.

So when I think about that point in my life of feeling so out of control in my present that I was trying to predict my own future, and the only prediction I could come up with was death, brought me to this idea of some things you really never get over. And you're walking in that circle forever, you're always going to have Sylvia Plath quotes in your socks, even if they aren't really there.

How do you think Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion would approach the Internet? Do you think they would be on Twitter?

That is hilarious. I mean, of course, when you think about like famous female writers of a certain age on Twitter, your mind automatically goes to Joyce Carol Oates ripping people a new one every day.

YES! [laughs].

She’s a goddess.

How would you describe your work? And how have you seen it evolve?

When we were talking about catharsis earlier, and [how some people say] writing helps [them] feel better, I never feel that way about writing. Writing doesn't help me feel better about myself, but it helps me know myself, and poetry in particular helps me know my place in the world. I don't mean in terms of, like my lowly station in capitalism. But in terms of how I fit into the world that I've created, and how I relate to it. So, oftentimes I do end up writing a poem, at least an initial draft in one go, when I’m outside and walking. Or when I recently left a first date at a movie theater, I ended up writing a poem in my car right afterwards. And it'll be a moment where I am trying to figure out or know myself better and know myself in relationship to whatever situation I've just left and the poem typically emerges from that. The beauty of a poem, as opposed to an essay, is you don’t necessarily have to concern yourself with whether the reader is going to know you better. They might understand the mood that you've created, the sort of vibes that are being curated, but you are allowed the suggestion rather than the certainty in poetry. Whereas in an essay you have to show and tell constantly. Sometimes that can be hard. It sounds silly for me to say that showing and telling can be hard because my online persona is so vulnerable, being about my mental health pretty constantly, but some things are tender when they first happen, and I find poetry more suited to the tenderness of just happenings.

In all of the memoirs I've read that deal with mental health or addiction, you typically end with the narrator in some form of recovery, right? You have to be reassured that the narrator is going to be okay, and eventually they will reach the point of complete recovery, or at least on a bittersweet suggestion for complete recovery, and its possibility. And I just don't know if that's something that I can do in much of my nonfiction writing because I'm still in this bargaining phase of recovery where I feel that my disorder is a bit of a slippery slope and I'm constantly fighting relapse. So, it’s easier for me to write a poem wherein I don't have to reassure my reader that I'm going to be okay, because I don't know the answer.

Do you teach writing?

I teach undergrads writing and literature. I have a lot of freedom with my syllabi, so I divide it into nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In my nonfiction unit I am teaching Eula Biss, Time and Distance Overcome and The Pain Scale. [I teach] Saidiya Hartman and talk a lot about counter narratives, erasure and the archives. And then Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace.

When I do fiction, it's often the fall semester in October, so I do a spooky fiction unit. I trace the Original Fairy Tale “Blue Beard” and then “Fitcher's Bird” by the Brothers Grimm, Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. And then I do The Fall of the House of Usher and juxtapose Poe with Mike Flanagan. So, we watch some of that too and talk about genre comparison between the original fairy tales, which are horrifically subjugating of women, and the Angela Carter of it all in the 1970s. And then genre comparison between TV and Poe short story.

Poetry is the final unit [and] I think my incredible enthusiasm for poetry pays off, because even students who self-report not caring about writing and are pretty open with me [and say], I’m just doing this to get through it and then I’m done with writing classes, do find themselves interested in poetry.

Are there any contemporary writers that you’re really into?

Natalie Shapero, she’s absolutely great. Aria Aber too, she's so good. I love Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped. I’m often wary of celebrity memoirs, but Belle Burden’s Strangers is really good and worth reading.

What other books have shaped you as a person or writer?

Definitely Blue Nights by Joan Didion. I’m currently making my way through the New York Times top 100 books of this century. I'm on my twenty- sixth. I’m jumping around and not going in order. Some of them I really love, some of them I really don't. I just read Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. It was so beautiful, it was gorgeous. But Blue Nights, I return to all the time. I would say A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux. It's incredible [and] speaks to being sixteen and sexually assaulted and developing an eating disorder. When I read it, it's where something is a mirror and a door. Because you see yourself in it. But then the sense-making she does out of it is so different than the sense-making that I did out of my own experience.

I love Toni Morrison; she's probably my favorite writer of all time. I read Beloved and The Bluest Eye, every other year, at least. She's just incredible.