Anna Camilleri is the co-editor of Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity, and author of I Am a Red Dress: Incantations on a Grandmother, a Mother, and a Daughter. Her latest anthology is Red Light: Superheroes, Saints and Sluts. I want to be her when I grow up.

Below is Anna’s interview with Curve.

Why did you see a need for a book like Brazen Femme?
There aren’t a whole lot of books on femme, and Chloe, my co-editor, and I wanted to contribute a work that would centralize the femme experience — not femme as a hyphen or addendum to any other experience or identity. Beyond need, and we do feel there is a need for Brazen Femme, we entered the project from a place of desire and curiosity. For all our ideas, we didn’t know what we would find.

There are a lot of words in this book that traditionally make women wince: “whore,” “bitch,” “slut,” “cunt.” Did you anticipate the fact that it might make women uncomfortable to read these incendiary words?
We didn’t assume that there would be one singular audience for the book. We hoped that the book would reflect a breadth of femme experiences and that it would also open up room for more femme cultural production. You might be thinking, that’s very nice and all, but did you think some folks would get pissed off? In a word, sure, but that comes with the territory. If my art were driven by a desire to make folks feel comfortable, I’d stop making art. The art that’s stayed with me the longest — and that’s really moved me — is also the work that’s rocked me.

How did you find so many great women writers and artists to contribute?
We put out a call for submissions and we also specifically invited some folks to contribute.

What group or groups of people would you like to reach through this book?
Certainly anyone who identifies as femme, and anyone who is interested in issues of gender and sexuality, whether they are femme or not.

If you could give your book to one celebrity, who would it be and why?
Dolly Parton. I’d love to have a conversation with her.

If you had to pick just one, who would be your favorite femme icon?
Impossible! I can’t pick just one femme icon, partly because femme is subjective — someone who I interpret as femme may not identify as femme, and besides, where would I start?

What’s the significance of the red dress?
My mother had an expression about a red dress that I heard at least a hundred times when I was a kid — that’s my starting point in the book. In imagining a woman in a red dress, the women in my family created an icon of an unencumbered self. In my life, and in the book, I pick up the thread of the woman in the red dress in several ways: as the woman in/of my dreams who embodies a spirit of justice. The title of the book can be read (and is intended) in two ways: I Am a Red Dress as “red dress” and as “redress.”

The subtitle of the book is “Incantations on a Grandmother, a Mother, and a Daughter.” “Incantations” carries a metaphysical connotation, and you speak of your family’s “poverty of spirit.” I couldn’t help but read the book as addressing a void. Can you expand on this a little?
When I speak about my family’s “poverty of spirit,” I’m talking about the impact of violence on my life and on my family. It’s hard to talk about this stuff briefly without simplifying, which I don’t want to do because it isn’t simple. Our culture characterizes “incidences” of violence as isolated, when in fact most violence takes place inside of homes, inside of families where at least some family members, and others, have full knowledge of what’s happening. Because the violence in my family has been generational (passed down and passed down, as it often is), the void that’s created, but that’s not supposed to be talked about, and that often isn’t talked about, is like a hole in history, in the stories of individual families and in our whole culture.

Surviving abuse is something a disturbing percentage of women are forced to face. Was it difficult to write this book, or did you embrace the opportunity to express yourself?
I Am a Red Dress was and wasn’t difficult to write. Getting into the story was painful, which made the writing labor-intensive at the start. There’s an expression — I don’t know who to credit it to — about getting out of your own way … when I stopped trying to interrupt the story, it rolled out, and I’m glad I let it.

I was interested to read your inclusion of the three types of woman: maiden, mother, and crone. Do you think your book breaks down the ideological separation between these three phases, or reinforces them?
I don’t think my book breaks down or reinforces those archetypes; I didn’t set out to do either one. In relation to my mother and my grandmother, I’m the daughter, so I’m literally the maiden, but that’s only one aspect of the story. On a figurative level, which I think of as more important, each of us embodies the mother, maiden and crone regardless of age or sexual orientation.