In the Nō with Willa C. Richards
Milwaukee-native Willa C. Richards is the author of The Comfort of Monsters, and our next guest on Community Curated. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers.
Ahead of the episode, we talk with Willa about setting her debut novel in the midst of Jeffery Dahmer, Milwaukee's influence on her path as a writer, and parallels she sees between the missing persons cases of thirty years ago and those of today.
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Nick Drain: Why was it important for you kind of being someone from Milwaukee to set, um, a story here and then why was it so important for you to tell this story specifically with maybe your first story about Milwaukee?
Willa C. Richards: I really wanted my first novel to be set in Milwaukee. Growing up, I would often see the Midwest portrayed as either Chicago or corn fields — it's kind of like those two extremes. I didn't see a lot of portrayals of the city. You could watch TV and film and sort of get the idea that like the middle of America doesn't exist, so it was really important to me to portray the city. I love Milwaukee. It has a lot of problems to be sure, I don't think there's an American city that doesn't, but I think it's also a really unique city. It has a really rich history and a lot of unique character, so for me that's just a rich setting for a book in general. As well as the fact that I, I just really loved the place. So, I think that was kind of a no-brainer.
The fact that I ended up setting it in 1991 came as I was drafting the book; It wasn't something that I knew right away. I didn't know that it was going to be set in '91. My marketing and publicity people have called it the Dahmer summer because he was murdering people from the seventies through ’91. I was wanting to write a book about a missing persons case, and I was thinking a lot about, you know, the reasons that some of these cases go cold so fast. One of the things that occurred to me really quickly was that 'smaller cases' get subsumed by larger ones — whether it is media attention or law enforcement resources and then those smaller ones don't get the attention that they need to get solved.
So, I was just thinking a lot about what was the biggest criminal investigation in Milwaukee's history, and that was the Dahmer crimes.I started sort of thinking about layering my fictional story on top of this real one and that produced a lot of sparks for me. Once I dug into the research and sort of like looking at that era, it was so rich. It encapsulated all of these issues that I was already interested in exploring in the fictional version — relationship between law enforcement and media, media and the community, and community and law enforcement.
What was your research process in writing the book like?
It was a really long process. This book probably took me five years to write. The research was kind of a dark and lonely journey at times, but it also was really invigorating and it really pushed me to keep going with the project, and everything I learned just made me want to write the book even more.
Once I sat down and was like: 'okay, this is where I'm going to set the book, this is the era', I just knew I had a lot of work to do, and I wanted to try to be really organized and deliberate. There's so much sensational material about crimes and I wanted to get beyond that stuff and beyond the pop culture narrative of what happened. People that know about [the case] know the gore, the cannibalism, right? I wanted to just get beyond that stuff and get to the basic facts of the case. My first thing was just figuring out: what happened, when, who were the main players, who is involved. Beyond this guy, but like who was his lawyer, all of these sort of things.
After that, I just was really interested in learning about what people were saying about these crimes, like what sort of discourses were popping up in and around the crimes themselves. I went back to the Milwaukee Journal — now the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — that sort of broke the case. They were a great resource, but they also did a lot of what we call victim-blaming today. They would release the victims' criminal records, they would sort of use this like racist and classist language to describe the neighborhoods, so I tried to find counterweights to that. I looked at some of the gay newspapers at the time. Particularly, The Wisconsin Light, was doing a lot of reporting from within the community, like hearing from the leaders of the communities that were most effected, and that stuff was a really good counterweight. I was just trying to get a sense of what people were saying, and then sort of, what did it mean beyond what they were saying? What was going on there?
There's an aspect of the intersections of race and of queerness in the way Dahmer history unfolded and the way that it continues to unfold. In reading your essay [Fictionalizing a Dark Chapter in the History of Milwaukee Policing], I was floored by a lot of the things that were happening in the Milwaukee police department at the time. Obviously it's not the focal point of the story that you're telling, but how does the book respond to that? How is it that you sought to respond to that without making the story center around it?
That was such a complicated writing problem for me. When I sat down to, write the book, it was really about the sisters, and the narrator who has a very, very close relationship with her sister. Her sister goes missing and it's — it's sort of the fallout. For me, the emotional heartbeat of the book is the fallout for her dealing with that. Like, what does long-term grief look like when you have no answers for so long? Really cheery stuff [laughs]. But that background material – I think they really inflected one another in interesting ways, and that was sort of my goal. I didn't want to use it to have shock value or to draw readers in. I wanted to use it to point out all the different ways that institutional failures are so connected.
We all move through these institutions. It's inescapable that we're moving through the same institutions in a lot of ways, and these failures have ramifications that go beyond just one family or one community. I think that was one of the larger scope things that I really wanted to show was the ways that — in this particular story — police ineptitude runs the gamut; it can affect everyone. That was important to me.
"The emotional heartbeat of the book is the fallout for her dealing with that. Like, what does long-term grief look like when you have no answers for so long?"
Did that influence your decision to make the driving characters sisters, or did that come from a more personal place?
I think that was from a personal place. I think just having such a big family and being really interested in sisterhood and what that looks like as you grow. But I will say, from a thematic point of view, I was also very interested in believability; and especially believability as it interfaces with law enforcement, and why so many women's stories seem so automatically suspect to law enforcement. I think that's an example where that's a theme that I was sort of working with specifically with my narrator, who is sort of dismissed by the lead detective on the case. I juxtapose that with a very famous story in Milwaukee that happened with Glenda Cleveland, who is the woman who called the police on Dahmer. She said this is a dangerous situation for this child [Konerak Sinthasomphone] that's involved, and she and her daughters were not believed by the police. They were, you know, dismissed essentially. I think that was definitely a thematic element of the book that was important to me, why so often are women's stories like dismissed or seen as suspect automatically instead of given the opposite sort of treatment.
A young Willa with members of her family. Courtesy of Willa C. Richards
That was kind of my immediate thought when I learned that like the characters were sisters. When I read that, I was like, "oh, this makes total sense, this is so incredibly believable that this might play out in this way". I thought: how do you position a character in a situation where maybe they don't have access to the institutional resources that should be helping them in this situation because of who they are, but then also give them such a driving force about why, without those resources they're still going to act. Making them sisters seemed like a really, really brilliant way to position the story.
Yeah — and there's so many of those stories. What's really sad is when I was doing a lot of the missing person research, there are a lot of sisters out there that are still like fighting and they're still trying to be heard. You hear these stories and they just like map right onto one another; of them saying like 'her intimate partner — whether it's boyfriend, ex boyfriend, whatever — is a problem. Can you look into him into him?' And they'll be like, 'yeah, we'll see. I think she's probably fine' but missing these really crucial familial keys. Who knows this missing person better than their family? So often it seems like that they're dismissed at these sort of like really crucial moments.
What parallels might you see between the current Gabby Petitio case and the kind of the story that you are telling, or the time of the story that you're telling?
This is just such a fraught situation in general. It's been challenging for me not to binge all of the stories, and I'll admit I read a fair amount of them more than I'm proud of. Obviously this is a tragedy. It sounds like now two young people have lost their lives, and so that is just a tragedy. There's that to contend with on its own and on its own terms.
In a larger sort of societal scale, it kind of feels like a litmus test for the media in a way of like, here's this case, how are they going to respond? In a lot of ways, the response has been a bonkers media circus which is what we've seen in a lot of other situations. I think the Dahmer case is a perfect example where the city of Milwaukee became a media circus. The national and even international attention that that case got was, in some ways, very bad for the city and bad for the case. They harassed witnesses, they stole documents, they were harassing families.
I think you're seeing a similar thing with this case too. What I think is interesting this time is it does seem like there are these gestures towards acknowledging "missing white woman syndrome". Now we know that we're giving disproportionate attention to this case, so you'll see that they'll put little links to stories about the disproportionate violence that's inflicted on indigenous people or indigenous women, specifically. I mean, maybe that's something, you know. I think it just shows so starkly the disproportionate attention that, you know, this case gets, but that isn't to say that it doesn't deserve attention. I think in some ways it shows like where the media's values still lie and what they think our consumption habits are. I mean, with the [Milwaukee] journal at the time of the Dahmer case, that was the record high circulation for the Milwaukee journal when the case hit. They were a struggling newspaper, they were sinking like many newspapers at the time, and that case helped save them. It's, it's really, really messy.
We're all complicit in our consumption habits, and I think part of it is doing the step that they're taking now, sort of acknowledging where our own biases in coverage and how we contribute to those biases. I think that's really important, but I don't know what the answers are. I think it's shown that we're not there. We're definitely not there yet. I think there's a big difference too, between reporting on something and becoming obsessed with something, and it definitely seems like in the same way that the Dahmer story unfolded, this became an obsession for the media. I don't think that's very healthy at all.
I think the obsession over her case has been problematic. But I do think one part that's important, and that I wish was discussed a little bit more is something I highlight in my book, is the fact that intimate partner violence is one of the most dangerous things for women in America. I point out in my book that the majority of murdered women are murdered by an intimate partner, former partner, someone they knew, a man that they knew. A lot of times in the US, we focus on these like random acts of violence you know — whatever random serial rapists, or, you're assaulted by someone random when you're out, and then we have a harder time talking about the fact that the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own relationship.
I think this case is a good example of how with the social media angle of like, "look how shiny this person's life is" there's so much going on that's not in the pictures. I think it would be great if we could help one another to see these things more clearly, and to see the signs of these things more clearly, and have this space where it's okay also to talk about them.
"I think there's a big difference too, between reporting on something and becoming obsessed with something"
I think a novel like this coming at this time is really valuable in addressing that space. To come back to your upbringing in Milwaukee, how do you feel that Milwaukee influenced the kind of writer that you are today or influenced your path, even becoming a writer?
It's been an interesting journey for me because I have gotten some questions like, "oh, well you say, you love Milwaukee, but then you write this book and it's, you know, shining light on one of the darkest histories. And like...
Criticism or critique is an act of love — it definitely can be.
Yeah. I was raised by two former hippies, so for me, criticism is like the only form of patriotism I really feel comfortable with, you know? One of the ways I've contended with that is like talking a lot about how valuable, like growing up where I did and the education I had was for me as a writer. I was born in the city of Milwaukee. I went to school in Wauwatosa and then in Brookfield, and my education was excellent. When I was a kid growing up I went to the symphonies, I went to plays, we went to the museums, it was really important to have those art resources specifically. My parents were both professors at UWM, so I spent a lot of time on the east side and I was just like always invigorated by the lakefront and Brady street and all of these areas. Those were big creative sources of inspiration for me.
There are two big things in terms of art that I think were really important to me. When I was in elementary school, I had this like opportunity to go and spend the day at the Milwaukee art museum. All I had to do was like pick one piece of art and then produce a piece of writing based on that piece of art. So I just got to spend the whole day wandering around the museum by myself. I just holed up in this random space and just wrote for the whole day — and it was, it was amazing. It wasn't like "ok now we're going to critique your writing and we're going to workshop it", it was just to produce some writing.
That experience was really valuable to me. It was work, but it was one of those like process oriented experiments that was so valuable to me as a very young writer. And I was like, "wow, this is so fun" you know? I think that's just like so important for young artists to have that experience.
I was also in the Milwaukee symphony orchestra starting from when I was really little. It was a really challenging experience, but it was really awesome. I think there's a lot of fluidity between art forms, and it taught me a lot of discipline that I was then able transfer into writing. That was a really formative experience for me too.
It really sounds like those childhood experiences really laid a foundation. I mean, amongst a myriad of other things that you mentioned, but those two kinds of childhood experiences really hand in hand and kind of setting the stage. Yeah.
Yeah
That's amazing.
Tune in to Community Curated on Tuesday, November 30th to continue this conversation with Willa C. Richards and Cree Myles, and purchase The Comfort of Monsters here.
