Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child
an interview with Mia Leonin
conducted by Therese Marie Konopelski
Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child is an intersectional poetic narrative, a book-length variant of the long poem that challenges the stylistic boundaries of adult fiction. It is anatomically complex, incorporating qualities of poetry, prose, and image-driven story books. Indeed, one might think of Leonin's Fable as an adult fairy-tale, with textures of dream-like magical realism and concessions to the blunt realities of life. We explore a Spanish-speaking sea-side village through the eyes of a ten year old, who searches for meaning in language, her neighborhood, and the figure of her unknown father. Her fresh, unassuming wonder about the world and its progressive maturation is an unidealized window into the childhood consciousness. The symbol of the winding Spanish tilde (~) guides us through Micaela's morally complex world, reflecting the lived experience of bending "highs and lows." Leonin tells a tale that defies resolution, forcing the reader to examine their notions of family, victimhood, and community. As a Peruvian-American, the context of Micaela's struggles inspired me to reflect on familiar problems that traverse the boundaries of Central and South American cultures. Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child provokes a bittersweet nostalgia of our past selves and/or that of our parents, a well of resilience and strength for the future.
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[Therese Konopelski]: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child is a unique poem-tale of a young girl’s life with her single
mother. I was reminded of what my own mother could have been like as a child, discovering the
nuances of the tilde in Lima, Peru. Who was the character of Micaela inspired by? Why is her
town and culture left unnamed?
[Mia Leonin]: Fable was a long time in the making. I was raised by a single mother and I didn’t know who my
father was or even that he was alive until I was sixteen. In my twenties, I started working on a
long poem that explored that parent-child relationship in a single-parent family. As a younger
writer, I was very drawn to persona and the dramatic monologue. Louise Gluck’s poems and her
ability to communicate psychological depth and complexity through such spare, even quiet
language made a huge impact. Later I discovered Ai whose use of persona was wide-ranging but
always emotionally bold and unapologetically visceral. No subject was too intimate or taboo for
Ai, and I think on some level, that gave me permission to write (albeit indirectly) about my
“illegitimacy.”
In very early drafts of Fable, I explored writing from the perspective of a single mother. Later, I imagined what life would be like for a father who doesn’t know his child. I created a life for him as a radio announcer with many lovers. I even wrote poems from the point of view of the lovers! Normally, the dramatic “I” would take me where I needed to go, but this poem was vexing. If it felt emotionally authentic, the structure didn’t hold up and vice versa. I would give up and then return to it.
In that time, I wrote two other books of poems and a memoir about my family story. In my 2016 book of poems Chance Born, I explore the lives of women and children who are “hidden in plain sight” – mothers and children living in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, a three-year old child from South Florida who died while the Department of Children and Family Services was investigating her family for “an unrelated incident,” and others. In writing these poems, the first- person persona no longer worked. It felt false and even unethical, especially in the case of the war poems. I experimented with the third person and that allowed me the latitude and vision I needed to write those poems. I think this technical lesson on point of view paved the way for Micaela’s character. At one point, I returned to the long poem and did an exercise where I imagined her world. I saw her walking to school with a magic stone in her pocket. I saw her mother shaving a man’s face and whistling. The shift to the third person was like the turn of the key that ignited the motor. It also made me realize that in my many previous drafts, I’d forgotten the most important, or at least the most vulnerable figure in the story: the child. That’s when I knew the book would be about Micaela’s world from her perspective. The limited third person led me into her world – the imaginary and magical, the mundane and hurtful.
I wanted her story to read as a fable, but I wanted the content to be as harsh as real life. Two films that deeply influenced me were Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves. Both films feature young girls as protagonists. Awful things happen to these children and because they are children, their agency is limited to their own resourcefulness and imagination. Many children are not spared harsh realities by virtue of being children. In the face of difficult times and even trauma, a child’s resourcefulness and her imagination can serve as vital coping mechanisms. Intervention and compassion from adults, say a teacher or grandparent, can make a huge difference in a child’s life; however, none of these are replacements for the security, stability, and loving care that is the basic human right of every child. In Fable I wanted all of these truths to co-exist.
[Therese Konopelski]: Why is her town and culture left unnamed?
[Mia Leonin]: In regards to setting, I have known a few cities by the sea intimately: Miami, of course, where I’ve lived for over twenty years. Havana, a city I’ve travelled to many times, and Lima, Peru where my daughter’s father is from. I also visited Barcelona while on the cusp of writing this book and it made a lasting impact. I could have pulled off setting this story in Miami, Havana, or Lima, but I think the city would have become too much of a character. I was committed to Micaela’s point of view. Children her age don’t construct identity based on place. They are immersed in place. I also wrote the Spanish as very panlingual. If you know Spanish, you’ll recognize South American, Caribbean, and Miami as linguistic influences. I didn’t want the personality of one country or culture to take over the story.
In very early drafts of Fable, I explored writing from the perspective of a single mother. Later, I imagined what life would be like for a father who doesn’t know his child. I created a life for him as a radio announcer with many lovers. I even wrote poems from the point of view of the lovers! Normally, the dramatic “I” would take me where I needed to go, but this poem was vexing. If it felt emotionally authentic, the structure didn’t hold up and vice versa. I would give up and then return to it.
In that time, I wrote two other books of poems and a memoir about my family story. In my 2016 book of poems Chance Born, I explore the lives of women and children who are “hidden in plain sight” – mothers and children living in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, a three-year old child from South Florida who died while the Department of Children and Family Services was investigating her family for “an unrelated incident,” and others. In writing these poems, the first- person persona no longer worked. It felt false and even unethical, especially in the case of the war poems. I experimented with the third person and that allowed me the latitude and vision I needed to write those poems. I think this technical lesson on point of view paved the way for Micaela’s character. At one point, I returned to the long poem and did an exercise where I imagined her world. I saw her walking to school with a magic stone in her pocket. I saw her mother shaving a man’s face and whistling. The shift to the third person was like the turn of the key that ignited the motor. It also made me realize that in my many previous drafts, I’d forgotten the most important, or at least the most vulnerable figure in the story: the child. That’s when I knew the book would be about Micaela’s world from her perspective. The limited third person led me into her world – the imaginary and magical, the mundane and hurtful.
I wanted her story to read as a fable, but I wanted the content to be as harsh as real life. Two films that deeply influenced me were Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves. Both films feature young girls as protagonists. Awful things happen to these children and because they are children, their agency is limited to their own resourcefulness and imagination. Many children are not spared harsh realities by virtue of being children. In the face of difficult times and even trauma, a child’s resourcefulness and her imagination can serve as vital coping mechanisms. Intervention and compassion from adults, say a teacher or grandparent, can make a huge difference in a child’s life; however, none of these are replacements for the security, stability, and loving care that is the basic human right of every child. In Fable I wanted all of these truths to co-exist.
[Therese Konopelski]: Why is her town and culture left unnamed?
[Mia Leonin]: In regards to setting, I have known a few cities by the sea intimately: Miami, of course, where I’ve lived for over twenty years. Havana, a city I’ve travelled to many times, and Lima, Peru where my daughter’s father is from. I also visited Barcelona while on the cusp of writing this book and it made a lasting impact. I could have pulled off setting this story in Miami, Havana, or Lima, but I think the city would have become too much of a character. I was committed to Micaela’s point of view. Children her age don’t construct identity based on place. They are immersed in place. I also wrote the Spanish as very panlingual. If you know Spanish, you’ll recognize South American, Caribbean, and Miami as linguistic influences. I didn’t want the personality of one country or culture to take over the story.
[TK]: What do you see as the relationship of prose, verse, and image in this poem? What vision did you have for the illustrations before they were commissioned? What inspired the unique aggregate narrative structure of Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child?
[ML]: I tried to write Micaela’s perspective in lines of poetry and the mother’s (or rather adult world) in
prose. I wanted the form to reflect the juxtaposition of the contradictions Micaela is living. By
the end of the book as the story reaches a crescendo, those lines blur. I paid close attention to the
imagery and sensual language of Micaela’s world. I had fun playing with the Ñ words. But I was
also aware that mother and daughter existed in a finite world and that there was a story to be told,
so I kept track of that as I wrote and edited.
Perhaps because movies were an inspiration and because the tilde became an important symbol, I always imagined the book with illustrations. This was also the case because I wanted it to have the feel of a children’s fable. However, I did not commission illustrations. I sent the text to an amazing visual artist, Nereida García Ferraz. Nereida has a deep, abiding love for books, but she is not a book illustrator. I sent her the text and she sent me the following image back. It’s pretty amazing because that first image now strikes me as a blue print for the entire book. It’s like she captured the unconscious of the book – the shadows, the dreams, the desires, hopes, and fears all in one image. We both knew we wanted to work on the book together and thus, a fruitful conversation began between me, the already existing text, Nereida, and her art.
Perhaps because movies were an inspiration and because the tilde became an important symbol, I always imagined the book with illustrations. This was also the case because I wanted it to have the feel of a children’s fable. However, I did not commission illustrations. I sent the text to an amazing visual artist, Nereida García Ferraz. Nereida has a deep, abiding love for books, but she is not a book illustrator. I sent her the text and she sent me the following image back. It’s pretty amazing because that first image now strikes me as a blue print for the entire book. It’s like she captured the unconscious of the book – the shadows, the dreams, the desires, hopes, and fears all in one image. We both knew we wanted to work on the book together and thus, a fruitful conversation began between me, the already existing text, Nereida, and her art.
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"First Micaela," the first draft of the "Fable" collaboration by Nereida Garcia Ferraz |
[ML]: Despite being resilient, animals and children are ultimately defenseless in the world of adults and
they should be protected. I think this book was my subconscious attempt to work through the
binary of vulnerability and resilience. One does not overwrite the other; yet, we are raised on the
myth of American individualism and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps survival tactics. I abhor
a hero’s tale because heroes are liars. The truth is that the individual is intimately connected to a
larger constellation of community, country, and consciousness and when we ignore this, we give
ourselves the license to ignore human suffering. When human suffering is ignored, cruelty
thrives.
It was utterly necessary to tell this story from Micaela’s point of view. Therefore, we get glimpses of her mother’s history and relationship to trauma. I tried to find a balance between giving enough information to reveal how trauma is passed down generationally, but I held enough back to keep the focus on Micaela’s experience. Within the first few pages of the book we see that Micaela’s mother is someone who demands center stage. She is a character who could easily overtake the book. I wrote a lot of back story for her so that I would know her better, but I used (or tried at least) the precision of poetry to say as much in as few lines as possible.
The white space in the poems allows time to breathe and digest the prose passages. For that reason, the prose passages reflect the adult world and the lines of poetry are like limbs of a tree where Micaela can crawl out and see glossy leaves and blue sky.
It was utterly necessary to tell this story from Micaela’s point of view. Therefore, we get glimpses of her mother’s history and relationship to trauma. I tried to find a balance between giving enough information to reveal how trauma is passed down generationally, but I held enough back to keep the focus on Micaela’s experience. Within the first few pages of the book we see that Micaela’s mother is someone who demands center stage. She is a character who could easily overtake the book. I wrote a lot of back story for her so that I would know her better, but I used (or tried at least) the precision of poetry to say as much in as few lines as possible.
The white space in the poems allows time to breathe and digest the prose passages. For that reason, the prose passages reflect the adult world and the lines of poetry are like limbs of a tree where Micaela can crawl out and see glossy leaves and blue sky.
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"Micaela con tildes," an illustration by Nereida Garcia Ferraz |
[TK]: Micaela wonders what food her father is. “Is he scrambled eggs or palomilla steak
smothered in sweet Vidalia onions?” How did you cultivate the child-like perspective the novel is
written in, complete with fantastical names such as Crab Man? Why is it written for adults?
What interested you about the fables of pack-saddle children?
[ML]: “Pack-saddle child” is a folk etymology I came across when I was researching “bastard,” a word
whose origins ironically are not fully known. Thus, the fable of such a child is made up. I was
raised in a small Midwestern town where the nuclear family was the dominant social structure.
Later when I moved to Miami, I met many people whose family structures had been disrupted by
war, immigration, economic hardship, political strife, etc. My telenovela story of not meeting my
biological father until I was nineteen was just another Miami story, which was comforting in a
sense. But even though it is common, it still leaves its mark. By the time I was working on the
version of Fable that was eventually published, I was more interested in how children deal with
traumatic events and I was primarily interested in telling this story in the magical, sensual
language of poetry. My intention is to tell this story to adults in order to stretch our empathy and
understanding. I wanted to remind myself and other adults what it is to be a child – the beauty,
the vulnerability, and the hurt.
When I decided that this was Micaela’s story and that I wanted the reader to experience the world through her eyes, I set some parameters. In addition to those I’ve already mentioned, I decided none of the adults would get a name unless they were kind to Micaela. The two women who befriend her are her teacher Señora López and the neighborhood bodega owner, Doña Nina. That led me to make up nicknames for the other characters like Crab Man.
When I decided that this was Micaela’s story and that I wanted the reader to experience the world through her eyes, I set some parameters. In addition to those I’ve already mentioned, I decided none of the adults would get a name unless they were kind to Micaela. The two women who befriend her are her teacher Señora López and the neighborhood bodega owner, Doña Nina. That led me to make up nicknames for the other characters like Crab Man.
[TK]: How does Micaela benefit differently from her two maternal figures, her mother and Señora
López? Where do you see Micaela in 10 years?
[ML]: Micaela’s future is a Rorschach inkblot test. I would like to imagine that she uses her
imagination to undergird her spirit and along the way she forms bonds and she builds the family
she will never have with her mother. Statistics say otherwise. Neglected and abused children are
more likely to suffer from addiction and mental health issues. The neighborhood boys in the
book, for example, are a microcosm of society. Ditto with Micaela and her mom. This is not just
one neglectful mother and her child. This is systemic poverty. This is a culture where schools are
the place where many children get their only hot meal, where teachers are often pressed into the
role of counselors, nurses, parents, and more with little or no support. This is a place where
sexual assault is silenced and the victims of sexual assault are left to carry their experiences in
the form of silence, shame, and in the case of Micaela’s mother, acting out. She relies on her
sexuality as a way to access male power.
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"Mother con tijeras," an illustration by Nereida Garcia Ferraz |
[TK]: Micaela’s mother is a rather interesting figure of female independence, maternal yet still a child herself in some ways. Why did you decide to have her not play a role in Micaela’s coping process in the book?
[ML]: Micaela doesn’t blame her mother because victims, and children in particular, don’t blame their
abusers nor do they tend to blame those who play a complicit role by looking the other way.
Victims blame themselves, and by “blame” I mean they absorb the shame and hurt that surrounds
the event and they keep it to themselves. In Micaela’s case, she just retreats further into her
fantasy world and starts to slip away.
[TK]:What do you believe is the impact of Micaela’s sexual assault on her psyche? She seems to
fixate more strongly on the tilde after this event. How does her journey to the gypsy caves help
her to reclaim her identity?
[ML]: The impact of the sexual assault is very damaging to Micaela, but she’s a child and even worse,
she’s the child of a neglectful parent. I think her mother’s neglect and their lack of economic
stability have as much of an effect on her as the assault, probably more. The tilde begins as a
flight of fancy and a way of entertaining herself at school, but as her already tenuous world
begins to unravel, the tilde becomes a character. This is another aspect of the fable form, or my
version at least. The tilde on top of the Ñ comes alive and leads Micaela on her search for
connections and cohesiveness in an increasingly chaotic existence.
Micaela is very imaginative and resilient. She survives poverty, neglect, and trauma as best she can; however, I don’t think her journey helps her reclaim her identity because she is a child and her identity has yet to form. I would say, however, that her path is altered by going to the gypsy caves. Because she is trapped by her situation, the act of setting out on a journey is as important as the journey itself. She does gain some strength and agency from her visit to the caves. Still, it became clear to me as I wrote that Micaela would not be rescued by the gypsy’s or anyone else for that matter. Micaela would not be rescued. She would survive. A rescue is a moment, an event. Survival lasts a lifetime.
Micaela is very imaginative and resilient. She survives poverty, neglect, and trauma as best she can; however, I don’t think her journey helps her reclaim her identity because she is a child and her identity has yet to form. I would say, however, that her path is altered by going to the gypsy caves. Because she is trapped by her situation, the act of setting out on a journey is as important as the journey itself. She does gain some strength and agency from her visit to the caves. Still, it became clear to me as I wrote that Micaela would not be rescued by the gypsy’s or anyone else for that matter. Micaela would not be rescued. She would survive. A rescue is a moment, an event. Survival lasts a lifetime.
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Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press), Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin has been awarded fellowships from the State of Florida Department of Cultural Affairs for her poetry and creative nonfiction, two Money for Women grants by the Barbara Deming Fund, and she has been a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts/Annenberg Institute on Theater and Musical Theater. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She received a special mention in the 2014 Pushcart Prize anthology. Leonin teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
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