Aurora Mattia

Aurora Mattia

Aurora Mattia

Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong, has lived in Brooklyn and elsewhere, and lives in Texas. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Renaissance Society’s exhibition Nine Lives, on her Onlyfans, and in RISD Museum’s exhibition any distance between us She is a frequent collaborator with photographer Elle Pérez; their portraits of her have appeared in the Carnegie Museum, the Whitney Biennial, Aperture magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Fifth Wound, is now available from Nightboat Books. Her second book, a story and essay collection called Unsex Me Here, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in Fall 2024. She is working on a novel about a tgirl country singer, set in Austin in 1974.

“A Chaos of Mythic Scraps,” an interview with Aurora Mattia

This interview was conducted via e-mail by Interview Editor Rich Duhamell. Of the process, they said, “The Fifth Wound is unlike any other piece of literature I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Aurora Mattia crafts a kaleidoscopic tapestry of longing with baroque prose and crisp grounding that places readers in both the now and in the grander scheme of love across the ages. It was an amazing experience to learn about her approach to language.” In this interview, Aurora Mattia talks about her process, the musician featured prominently within the work, and how intertwined art and sex work can be.

Superstition Review: The opening sentence to your novel introduces readers to a narrator with your same name and (now former) Twitter handle @silicone_angel. I have, unfortunately, arrived late to that party, and all that remains are a few screenshots of humorous tweets and the general notion that your Twitter was infamously popular. Because your work plays so closely with autofiction, are post-Twitter readers missing out on a contextualizing experience? Are you finding a new, belated angle to your work through the absence of that initial link back to your internet presence?

Aurora Mattia: Aurora is not my own name. It is the field in which I attempt to bind my particulars to my dreams. My dreams are a chaos of mythic scraps which, borne by generations of gossips and storytellers, by names and voices known and unknown, by will of Empire and resistance to Empire, have imprinted themselves on my mind. My dreams are the force that make it possible to remix my particulars according not to the melodic structure of some divine song, but, instead, to some of the wavelengths of deep time. Whatever riff expresses itself through me, expresses itself also through the rifts of hydrothermal heat vents at the bottom of the sea.

Put simply, “Aurora” was an attempt to capture some vibration of deep time in the resonant net of my own idiom.

Meanwhile @silicone_angel was the economic expression of the same. It was the attempt, through porn and persona and turn of phrase—bound up in the terrifying and transfixing medium of Twitter, which stole the pleasures of privacy while also enabling certain intimacies and inspirations—to make a living by means of dreaming. I was binding my particulars—my body, my daily interactions with strangers in public space, oblique references to my romances—to inherited myths (some ancient, some recent) in a more extemporaneous space and thereby gathering the money and passion necessary for writing. The passion of an audience energized the solitary act of writing. The money enabled it.

SR: In an interview with Poets & Writers, you cite the early “I am no longer the author of private letters for the eyes of one man” as the first line you wrote in The Fifth Wound. Knowing your words were intended for the many while often addressing just the one, how did you navigate the voyeuristic ‘you’ of Ezekiel and the ‘you’ of the general reader?

AM: I don’t really know how to answer you because so much of the book is consumed by the question. The book is the best answer I can give. But I do know that the foremost question in my mind when writing about Ezekiel, Noel and Velvet was how to reveal as few particulars as possible about the people who inspired them while still communicating the sense and substance of their presences, the imprint they’ve made on my mind.

Aurora is not my own name. And Ezekiel is only an expression of the mythosphere surrounding my memories of a former lover, the lover around whom my sense of meaning rearranged itself when I was twenty-two years old, and again when I was twenty-eight. So much of me is Ezekiel: not my ex-boyfriend himself, but the aftershocks—wave after wave after wave—of our brief and intense contact. So addressing Ezekiel is really a way of addressing the ghost of a fairy who haunts my mind, which is to say, it’s a way of addressing my mind, which is to say, addressing Ezekiel is inseparable, for me, from the act of writing.

SR: In that same interview, you talked about how rewriting older passages seemed to soften them under reflection. How do you think returning to this work again in the future may further complicate it?

AM: 

Aurora is not my own name. It’s not so much a shield as a scrim. The scrim is the field of my shadow-play, but with my own particulars in place of puppets, with my dreams in place of hinges for the limbs of the puppets, the articulations of the limbs. The dreams make their gestures possible, the particulars make the gestures visible. Without the dreams, the particulars would be rendered immobile; without the particulars, the dreams would be rendered invisible. The dreams are the force which reanimates the particulars. Language is the dream of the possibility of resurrection. The light is god. I hope the light is god, that god is the reason you can see.

The Fifth Wound, then—the physical book, I mean—is the archival record, like a video cassette, recorded over and over itself, not only a double or triple exposure but a proliferation, innumerable, of various performances of the same play, repeated day after day, in an empty room, at a desk, for no one, resulting in sentences, the sentences which accreted themselves into solidity with each recording of each performance, becoming, on the one hand, more final, but also, on the other hand, beginning to flicker with variations, that is, parentheticals, footnotes, et cetera, while so many other words and phrases faded and disappeared, until the tape nearly broke and I sent it to my publisher.

So this book, called The Fifth Wound, is the vulnerable and at the same time parthenogenic record of the movements of my mind stuttering, repeating and consuming itself. There are one thousand iterations of The Fifth Wound and there is only one.

To answer your question, all I can say is that the original tape is lost, and now there are only copies. Whatever I feel about it in the future cannot touch it. The Fifth Wound has already happened.

SR: There is an inverted quality to your storytelling: broken fingers and then a punched mailbox; Old Milk going from strange creature to pet snake; the blueberry-ness of suspicion and wretchedness comes from Ezekiel’s love for them. Can you talk a bit about the process of structuring these belated reveals?

AM: When it comes to trauma, often an audience is drawn to the spectacle of the event rather than to its chronic consequences, its sequela. But for the person who lives beyond the spectacle, the event itself is almost nothing, while the sequela is inescapable, because the sequela is never past—the sequela, invisible to others, is the perpetual present.

What haunts my mind is not the knifing but the pain in my eye. The pain is happening right now. The pain is happening every day. The knifing happened only once.

Put another way, a ghost story begins not with the reason for the ghost but with the ghost itself:

The house is haunted. We read to find out why.

Or so we think. This desire to know why—to experience the revelation of the cause—energizes our reading, but what really matters is having inhabited the mystery, having accumulated the residue of another mind, having witnessed the dilation of eternities within the space of instants.

“Possibility, which, when it unsettles us, we call uncertainty, is the precondition of meaning.”

SR: The Aurora of the narration is constantly surrounded by scraps of musings, snippets spilling from texts, social media captions, and manuscripts in overflowing drawers. The inclusion of translated Chinese poetry and entire passages written in Middle English was a fascinating narrative choice. What was your process in retrieving inspirations spread across mediums and the Internet in working on The Fifth Wound? How did you go about deciding what stories (like the original Little Mermaid and Odysseus) and external excerpts (like Eva Hayward and Peter S. Beagle) to include in quotes or references?

AM: I didn’t go seeking inspirations. Whatever is in the book was already in my mind. If something occurred to me while I was writing—a phrase from a poem or song, a fragment of myth or movie, an old text message or Instagram caption—rather than sublimating it into a monophonic ‘literary’ accent, I grafted it into the text. I wanted the text to teem. I wanted to allow the natural polyphony of my mind—referential, reverential—not only into the process of writing, but the experience of reading.

Rather than attempting to accomplish the monomaniacal illusion of originality, I wanted to make my book a dwelling-place, an oasis where voices parched and myriad could take shelter from the heat of time. I wanted to be the Clarissa Dalloway of my own private universe. I wanted Townes Van Zandt and Clarice Lispector to sit at the same dinner table. I wanted Catherine of Siena and Severo Sarduy to break bread. I wanted you to feel the lineage of my love and longing; I wanted you to know my kin. It’s a kind of autobiographical fanfiction, like the New Testament. Or as Hannah Szabó suggested in a recent review, The Fifth Wound is a scrapbook written in the form of a hymn: “Lord prepare me / to be a sanctuary.” Put simply, I’ve always been a bottom.

SR: In your novel, you leave in blacked out spaces where you originally wrote Townes Van Zandt’s lyrics to represent his estate’s refusal to grant permission to use them. The effect was unlike anything I’d seen before, a visible scar of an essential aspect excised, yet the piece continues to live on without it. The footnote summaries and exact citations of verses helped to inform, and I’m curious about how you might think a reader trusting the paraphrases and leaving the removed unknown changes the experience.

AM: Look, the book is basically Townes Van Zandt propaganda. If you read it and don’t listen to his music, I’ve failed.

Yes, he’s a minor character in my next novel and yes, it’s possible that he has an affair with a beautiful tgirl who happens to be a country singer. Yes, the book will take place in Austin in the 1970s, and yes, the old Soap Creek Saloon will finally get its due.

SR: In a similar vein, you encourage readers to reach out to the email silicone_angel69@hotmail.com for an excerpt of a thousand and one questions that you cut from this final draft. After a number of decades, it’ll be as useful as the recommended letter in a bottle to join the Siren band’s mailing list.  How does this impermanence feel in its futurity? Will these scraps eventually be lost forever, or are there plans for a Townes Van Zandt-esque estate to decide who gets at the Aurora Mattia Vault?

AM: That email address is really just an invitation to belief. It’s an invitation to defy the classic disclaimer: “All characters and other entities appearing here are fictious.”

SR: Recently, you released the short story “Ezekiel in the Snow” on your OnlyFans--a non-traditional move for a writer. You’ve talked to Lithub about how the suturing of your writing and your adult content not only achieves your artistic vision better than traditional publishing, but you’ve also been paid better through these means than from hosting your work elsewhere. With that, do you see yourself publishing another work the same route as The Fifth Wound or keeping future writing to the online world?

AM: In the fall of 2021, I released “Ezekiel in the Snow” as a digital edition designed and typeset by Hannah Marshall through my Onlyfans and via my Twitter. The story was free with a $10 monthly Onlyfans subscription or $15 if purchased separately. It sold really well; I made more money publishing that story myself than I had ever been paid for my work by a publisher, literary magazine or museum. I wasn’t doing anything revolutionary; sex workers have always been bringing their art into their work and their work into their art. Many of the most visionary artists alive today are or have been sex workers. In that case, I was specifically inspired by Rachel Rabbit White.

“Ezekiel in the Snow” will be published in my second book, a collection called Unsex Me Here, coming out from Coffee House Press in the fall of 2024.

I deleted my Twitter because Twitter is, for me, unbearable. That meant giving up most of my audience. For me it also meant giving up my Onlyfans and my porn career for now, because Twitter was the source of all my subscribers. I don’t know what I will do in the future. I was never interested in being a prophet.