Jasmine Dreame Wagner, "Le Cochon"

It’s December 12. Jasmine Dreame Wagner, an American writer and interdisciplinary artist, once received a stuffed unicorn from Tim Curry. (This one is true!)

How would you describe your story?

JASMINE DREAME WAGNER: “Le Cochon” is a story about a drag queen and the perfume executive who loves her so deeply that he sponsors a permanent wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute to honor her wig collection as a collective masterpiece before he passes on.

It’s a short narrative about family and legacy, an alternative history that honors the wig as an ahistorical object on the level of an ancient sacred amulet or a weapon or shield from antiquity, one with ritualistic transformative powers that must be preserved for the greater good. 

The story also explores how the labor of sisterhood, whether queer or hetero, by choice or by blood, is essential in honoring what femmes have contributed to popular culture. Whether through art or fashion, television or film, popular culture draws profits from depictions of femme queerness while often denying credit and historical legacy to the original innovators whose influence is ubiquitous. In the story, not only love and capital make a legacy possible, but the legacy as a history is attended to and facilitated by a wider family—a sister and lovers and adopted children—as well as a supportive institution. The story is also about the ancient queer tradition of creating a media spectacle.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

JDW: I wrote a first draft of “Le Cochon” while traveling to research another book. I wrote it by hand as a series of character sketches and it became a story through the act of transcription, which for me, is also an act of translation, literally translating my messy handwritten notebooks into typewritten documents. Everything I write, I write by hand. It slows the process down, helps ease the way for a deeper level of understanding. I like to connect my writing to my body. I own many notebooks. I’m afraid the notebooks might take over my house. 

As for writing short stories in comparison to other work: short fiction helps me understand what I’m reaching for in the context of larger creative projects. They’re the products of my fantasy life, my busy mind, my picking at big-“H” History and my own experience, and sorting the details out. They operate like transitional objects in that they originate in my childhood and make themselves known as safety blankets before I release them to the air. They operate in the same way that writing essays or interviewing other artists and writers helps me recognize what and how I think, how writing poems helps me discern what I feel, who I love, where to throw my lifebuoys and my anchors. Short forms in general allow me to shuffle forward in sprints, try things out, sometimes fail, sometimes succeed. Short forms are great for experimenting, for inviting failure, because that’s where the good stuff surfaces. Short forms also tend to accumulate. They spin into larger ideas, bigger plans. I trust that process. 

What kind of research went into this story?

JDW: Two-thirds of the story is set in the 1970s and one-third is set in an alternative 2020, so I was actually researching the former period when I wrote the first draft at an artist residency outside of Detroit, pre-pandemic. As I mentioned before, I’d been working on a larger narrative project that takes place over the course of the mid/late twentieth century. I’d been visiting historical places and studying photographs of performers and interiors of nightclubs and bathhouses of the 1970s, including the Continental Baths in New York City, in which a portion of this story takes place. I was looking at George Dudley and Meryl Meisler and Diane Arbus documentary photographs of New York City queer and uptown life as well as Wilhelm Von Gloeden’s early twentieth-century portraits of young men climbing sharp rocks. And photographs of Egyptian pyramids. I was also drawing from my own memories of 1990s New York club life, dancing with friends at Limelight, Tunnel, and Save the Robots when I was a teenager, where I was first introduced to, and fell in love with, club kid and drag queen style. Amanda Lepore and Mistress Formika were two of our favorites. (And of course, Miss Piggy.) A family member passed from AIDS before I could meet them, and they were on my mind, too. When I was young, my father worked in the studio with Tim Curry, who once gave me a stuffed unicorn for my birthday—I still have it, so as I was looking at photographs and thinking about Rocky Horror and Legend, I was also petting the unicorn to channel kindred spirits. Channeling is research, too. 

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

JDW: Writing fiction is an act of radical empathy. Reading it even more so. While a novel can offer an extended landscape that allows you to immerse yourself in a world for a generous amount of time, a short story can offer a brief glimpse that can hit quickly and leave you changed, like lightning or a flash flood or a streetlight going out as you walk under it. 

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

JDW: Like most artists and writers, I do my best to keep a website and a few social media platforms. Here are the basics—basically, I’m @jasminedreame everywhere you go—

http://www.songsaboutghosts.com

https://twitter.com/jasminedreame

https://www.instagram.com/jasminedreame

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

JDW: Oh, too many gifts to mention. I’m a very lucky person. For the purpose of this interview, I’ll say it’s the wig my mother bought me from Patricia Field’s wig shop when I was a teenager. I wore it while clubbing with friends. What freedom there is in transforming yourself—that is a gift. 

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