Constraints and Denying Pleasure, but Never Pizza

Ice Queen Interviews Briar Ripley Page

Ice Queen: Okay, I would love to go ahead and just like dive right in here because I have so many things I want to talk about. I always start off with just tell me about the pieces that you chose and and what what the process was behind writing it. I'm particularly interested in "Midwest Oasis".

Briar: Well, that one actually is, I don't know, I think it's more straightforward insofar as it's kind of based on well, sort of like a collage of personal experiences, really, because I have taken a lot of Greyhound buses in my lifetime to visit, you know, friends or family or my first girlfriend years back when I was in college; she lived in South Dakota and I lived in Pennsylvania.

So I took a Greyhound bus to see her, and I didn't know they're just, they're very bleak. And especially if you're taking a really long Greyhound bus trip, it's just kind of punishing. You can't sleep very well and you end up feeling kind of like your soul is grimy as well as your skin after a while–and you always, you know, start off thinking it's not going to be that bad and it is That Bad™️.

So some of it was coming from that experience and how on these really long trips often, kind of the only good part–or the part that gives you some relief–is when the bus stops occasionally just in the middle of the night so everyone can get off and you know, the smokers can smoke and usually there's like a fast food place where you can buy a sandwich or fries or something if you want to and it just feels disproportionately special and relieving because the bus is so gross and so confining.

The other thing is just like, you know, thinking about how how stressful it is to go to see a sick family member (and I have never taken a Greyhound bus to see a sick family member), but the two scenarios, which, you know, I have personal experience with kind of combined in my head.

And I just wanted to communicate, like, a specific moment from a life rather than tell a story. 

Ice Queen: I loved the the juxtaposition, right, of the difference between these incredibly like fried fattening onion rings to the freshest strawberry probably in existence.

Briar: Oh yeah, I did put that parable in there. I think that's something like, I feel like you see this little story around a lot–I have kind of a new agey grandmother, and I think I probably heard it, you know, for the first time as a kid reading it in one of the books she kept around–but I guess that parable, I guess it is, sort of gets at the kind of experience that is having, you know, a respite from something really grueling and unpleasant and knowing you're going to have to get right back in there, but it's kind of more intensely pleasurable both because you're coming off of that experience and because you're going directly back to it.

Ice Queen: I loved that. Can you tell us about "Angel Food Strawberry Super Fight" (which is just an amazing, amazing title)? 

Briar: Okay, I wrote that in a– it's a very shitposty thing that's almost not a story, and I think I may have only sent it in because I don't write a lot of stuff that deals heavily with food; that was like one of the only things I had.

I don't know why it has superheroes in it because I don't actually like superheroes that much, but the emotional content is basically that I have OCD and I used to struggle a lot with disordered eating, you know, kind of mostly anorexia. I did binge and purge a couple of times, so the way those things combine in your head, or at least the way they did for me, is that I did have kind of, I guess, the typical anorexic fixation on weight and like wanting my body to look a certain way and wanting to keep my weight down very low, but I also developed this sort of kind of broad suspicion of excess or indulgence.

I would feel like if I indulged in anything sort of physically pleasurable, whether that be food or sex, or just like engaging in an activity that I personally find fun, that, that was kind of moral weakness and it was a bad thing somehow that would like corrupt my personality or my being in the world, I guess.

So I guess that story is kind of about voicing some of those attitudes towards food that come more from the pleasure-denying OCD side than the side where it's like a thing that's about weight and appearance. 

Ice Queen: Right. 

Briar: Yeah, I don't know if I explained that well; it's kind of complicated. [Laughs]

Ice Queen:  No, I think you did– I think you did. I definitely think this one was much more abstract, in a way than "Midwest Oasis"was, but it also absolutely wasn't, right? Like, I think everything that you just said could be gathered from this piece, and I think it was incredibly well done to be done in under 500 words.

It was just also–both of your pieces to me were so visceral in the way that they talk about food in a way that I think no other piece submitted to the magazine thus far has been, right? It's [note: aka the vibe✨] been leaning much more into the mentioning food, than it being about food; while yours are not about food either, it is so much more involved in every aspect of it.

And I thought that they were both just really good. I got really excited when I read them.

Briar: [Sounding happy in tiny font and also slightly put on the spot] Thank you. 

Ice Queen: The next question I have for you: tell us about the recipe that you chose and what made you want to showcase that? 

Briar: So this is something that my partner taught me to make and I got very excited because... okay, so my cooking skills are very limited and most of them involve making the type of food you make when you're 11 years old and your mom is working late, so you have to make your own dinner, and this just fit right in to that cooking repertoire. It's kind of comfort food, and it's a little gross, and it's very, very easy.

I just also appreciate it because it's something my partner shared with me and, they're actually a really good cook, but they're like an intuitive cooker; I've never seen them use a recipe, but a couple times I have said like, how do you make this? I'd like to know how to make this, and they've kind of indulged me in coming up with a set of instructions. 

Ice Queen: Does your family cook a lot–or, you know, what is your favorite family, or personal, recipe? 

Briar: So, well... I remember once–this is how I'll introduce my family on cooking– once in elementary school, right, my class was having sort of an, I think it was actually called like the ~e t h n i c f o o d f a i r~ (which sounds a little weird by today's standards), but the idea was that every student would bring in a dish that was related to their family's cultural tradition of food, and my dad–I couldn't think of what to bring–my dad was joking that I should just show up like holding a potato [Both laugh], and you know, maybe like a bottle of beer or whiskey.

My family is largely Irish American, and our other points of origin don't seem to have been people who were particularly skilled chefs, either... let's put it that way. I mean, my parents, to their credit, always tried to make sure that we ate healthy as kids, and they did cook some, you know, my dad more than my mom actually, and he really likes to grill; but, you know, no one, at least no one in my immediate family, is like a really enthusiastic or inspired cook, I would say.

I guess part of what that means is just a lot of our traditions are sort of, like I said, in the line of like fast and easy food to make. Although my dad is excellent at grilling– he does good hamburgers. I bet a lot of people would say that about their dads. 

Ice Queen: I mean, I don't know! Some people have just been like, Oh, my family can't cook. They can't do anything. So that's a perfectly reasonable answer: I like my dad's hamburgers on the grill. There we go!

Pivoting a little bit... all of my questions, none of them really get into craft that much, they're almost all about food... so, let me know if that brings up anything for you and we can try to adjust them. 

Briar: Oh that's considerate; I'll be alright, I think. 

Ice Queen: Okay. So, what is your relationship to food in your writing? And then, what do you love about food in writing?

Briar: Well, like I said, I don't write a whole lot about food. I do think when I do write about it, it tends to be in a context where there are these sort of visceral sensory descriptions. I think... I think for me, it often comes up, like, in context where I do want to convey something specific about a character or what they're feeling through what they choose to eat and the way they're consuming it.

I actually... I'm very, like... I will almost never just throw in casual food mentions in my writing and where that becomes a problem is sometimes in narrative fiction where I'll just kind of write scene after scene after scene of stuff happening and then I'll be like, these people haven't really eaten in like 24 hours, and I should probably, I should probably throw in that they stopped at a Wendy's or something somewhere in there. [Both laugh]

But yeah, I think maybe because it is something that can make me feel a little uncomfortable to think about intensely, it either doesn't come up or it's like this, you know, this almost uncomfortably detailed thing where I'm trying to say something about a person's emotional state. 

Ice Queen: Right. 

Briar: Oh, and as for like what I like in writing, I do think it's really cool whenever I read something where it's clear that the author, unlike me, has this very strong, vivid connection between foods and home and family and, you know, the culture they come from, and it becomes symbolically laded in a less emotional way, or sensory way, I guess, and more in a way that's tied to ideas about what it is to belong to a community, and... I don't know, I just think that's cool because it's very different from where I'm coming from, but it just makes me think how neat it is, all these different ways we find to kind of like differentiate and express ourselves and pass that on to other people.

Ice Queen: Yeah, that was very well said! Do you watch a lot of TV or movies or do you play video games at all? 

Briar: I do! I watch a lot of movies and I've been watching more TV recently, I think, because TV episodes are just a little shorter, so it's something nice for my partner and I to do together in the evenings. It's less of a time commitment and it's kind of a fun, chill-out thing. Recently we've been watching the AMC Interview With a Vampire and that's really good. We've also been watching that old 90s show, Sliders, about people who travel between parallel earths and that's not good. [Laughs] It's not a good show but it's really funny; they use a lot of green screen.

Ice Queen: [Distracted slightly, writing down the bad show name on a notepad] Yeah, I'll have to check that one out. Okay! What would you say is your favorite food scene in TV and movies or video games?

Briar: Oh, gosh. You know, not to be too disgusting, but I feel like it's probably one of the many, many, somehow equally disgusting and appetizing scenes of food and cooking from the show Hannibal that was on NBC from like, I think it was like 2013 to 2015.

There are just so many beautiful scenes of like sizzling rare steaks in that, that are fraught because, as the viewer, you know that this is human meat, and that the people at this party are about to be unwittingly served a person. And that just, it's, I don't know... it's a really good source of tension, but it's also kind of like this very beautiful, lovingly shot, almost like a commercial for a restaurant or something.

Ice Queen: [Nodding] Right. 

Briar: Lots of, like I said, sizzling meat and chopping meat and, you know, arranging it in sort of this beautiful presentation with these like puddles of gravy and wreaths of vegetables surrounding it and so on. 

Ice Queen: I didn't watch the show, but I did watch I think most of the movie, Hannibal Rising ...? I think something like that.

Briar: Yeah, they–God, I admit, I did not watch a lot of the Silence of the Lambs sequels.

[Both laugh]

Ice Queen: Yeah. It was just like a trash thing that was on TV.

Briar:Yeah, I always forget like, I don't know, the author of that series wrote a bunch of books and like they switched the titles for some of the adaptations for no reason.

Ice Queen: Yeah. There was just a scene in that movie that was about French cooking, and serving the cheek of fish because it's the sweetest meat; so you would give your guests that– and then obviously that then becomes something that happens later on in a more gross form, but I do remember that food in general, was a very strong element throughout probably that entire series.

So it is interesting because it's a little bit like [Makes uncomfortable sound and scrunched face], but it is usually beautifully shot and it does I think bring up more questions for me about food than it does answer anything, right? And that is intriguing in a very horrifying way.

I think I know the answer to this question already [Laughs], but I'll ask it anyway: do you bake or cook a lot? And how slash when did you get into it? 

Briar: [Cheeky mini pause] Nope, I don't! [Both laugh] I, oh gosh.... so my brother and I, we got this lasagna recipe from, like, a friend of our grandmother's a while back, and we both learned to successfully make this one lasagna, and our sister has kind of roasted us for this being, like, the thing you whip out on a date to prove that you can actually cook something.

Ice Queen: The ONE thing. 

Briar: Yeah, the one lasagna. But yeah, I don't really cook a lot or bake. I feel like if I had to do one or the other, right, I can kind of hack baking a little more than cooking because it's really easy to find recipes that are not difficult to perform and also very, you know, explicit about like, you need this quantity of this, this quantity of this, this quantity of this mixed together, you know, put it on the oven for X amount of time.

It's a little bit more straightforward for someone who doesn't really know what they're doing. 

Ice Queen: Yes. No, I agree, but a lot of people find it flipped!

Briar: Really?

Ice Queen: Because baking is so precise that you can mess it up if you do this thing wrong, whereas cooking you can, as long as you don't really, really fuck it up, it's usually something that's going to come out.

Briar: That's interesting! If I just have like the most excruciatingly detailed instructions in the world, I feel a lot more confident about a task and sort of able to proceed with it. 

Ice Queen: So constraints are a helpful thing. So, form poetry is just the next step! 

Briar: Oh yeah! I was crazy about formal poetry in high school, and we would get English assignments and they would just be like: write a poem; so, you know, no real guidelines and you would think it could be completed easily, but for some reason I felt like... and it wasn't a showing off thing, and I wasn't normally even a good student, this is just what made me feel secure.

I would be like, I have to write a Sestina about, I would pick some very specific topic based on just what I've been reading lately or whatever, like lizards or something, you know, and I would have to write a sestina on that theme.

And, again, no one was asking me to do this [laughs], but I just think that kind of poetry does come a little more naturally and fluidly to me.

Ice Queen: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, they feel like it doesn't, but constraints often help a lot of people– I mean, it's almost impossible not to get it done if it's telling you how to do it, right? Obviously, it doesn't tell you what the subject has to be, or at least not all of them do, but you know if it has a recipe there, it should be something that's easy to follow.

And yet a lot of people in both find it difficult. So these next questions, I only have two questions left and then I'll be out of your hair. Okay, so what is your favorite food– and, for this, I'm going to qualify it in the sense that if you had to eat this food for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Briar: Food I have to eat for the rest of my life... Honestly, it would probably just be like pizza with a bunch of veggie toppings. I really don't think I could get sick of good pizza. 

Ice Queen: I mean, yeah, it's got pretty much everything.

Briar: There's maybe other stuff I like a little more, but that also tends to be stuff where it's maybe kind of like... for example, I really like a lot of weird sweets and cocktails and stuff while I'm having them, but I think I would get sick of them if I were having them every single day. 

Ice Queen: [Nodding] Yes.

Briar: I  don't think I'd get sick of pizza. 

Ice Queen: That's a good answer. It has the benefit of having just a little bit of everything in there. It's like the entire food pyramid. 

Briar: Exactly! You're kind of cheating because there's like five foods on there. 

Ice Queen: Right, but I mean, it's fine! So this next question is almost the opposite. [Ashamed] So I lied. There's, two more questions. This is a part of that question: What is a food that you have tried so, so hard to like and you just don't– you can't like it?

Briar: Man, let me think... Oh, here's one! So, in the UK, I've learned they're really into making these cakes. They have different kinds for different holidays where the cake is just compressed raisins and other dried fruit, and that's like the whole thing. If you've ever seen a picture of like a Christmas cake or a Christmas pudding, that's what that is.

It's just compressed raisins; and [very careful tone here at this part, but also clearly joking] I want to respect the culture that I've married into–I don't know why, I'm not sure the British deserve my respect [both laugh]– but like, you know, I am married to one, so...

But these things are just gross to me. I don't hate raisins or anything, but when you're having a dessert, that's just kind of this congealed lump of sticky raisins and, you know, a couple of other dry fruits thrown in there for good measure, it's gross.

Yeah, I don't enjoy it, and I'm not sure if I'm ever going to enjoy it, unfortunately. 

Ice Queen: Yeah, no, that makes sense. That sounds, all disrespect to the British, gross, that sounds gross. 

Briar: Yeah, it's not good. 

Ice Queen: So this is my final question: What are some of your favorite literary magazines, both to read and to submit to?

Briar: Ooh beestung is really good; I've been in there twice now. I also, you know, read it straight through every time it comes out, which I mean... I'll be honest, there are many literary magazines that I like, but I tend to just go for if I see a name I recognize, or if I see a title that looks really interesting and I'm not reading everything they put in there, but I do that with beestung. It's just, you know, high caliber all around.

I also tend to enjoy ANMLY. Sarah Clark, who edits beestung, they are also an editor there, so, you know, no wonder it's good!

And, um, what else? I've enjoyed a lot of what I've seen at Stone of Madness–that's another good one online.

There's also Twin Pies, which is not Twin Peaks fanfiction, which was what I thought at first. It's more just flash fiction that I guess has kind of like a broadly Lynchian vibe, and they illustrate each piece of flash fiction with a screen grab from Twin Peaks, which is kind of a cool conceit, but also a lot of stuff that is just well done, I think in general. And as you would expect for the idea of it being Lynchian material it tends to be literary and nothing really overtly fantastical, but there's kind of an eerie or dissociated vibe to it.

Ice Queen: It goes back to constraints, right? Like if you know, you have to do it in a certain style then you can surprise yourself and your audience in new ways. 

Briar: Yeah, exactly. 

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Briar Ripley Page is a writer and reader who loves genre-bending work and striking metaphors. Originally from the U.S., they moved to London to live with their partner. Briar is the author of several books, most recently the collection Lupus in Fabula. You can find Briar and their work online at briarripleypage.xyz.

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Erin Armstrong has an MFA from CU-Boulder and is the editor-in-chief of Ice Queen Magazine. Her works are published in The Citron Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Banango Street, New World Writing and elsewhere.