Heather Bowlan on Her Poems
These three poems are part of my collection Highlights & Blackouts. The project presents poems alongside erasures completed years after their initial writing, exploring how poetry is shaped by perspective and context. It also includes music, images, and videos by myself and a wider circle of artists and friends.
I wrote the initial poem because I've been obsessed with The Shining, book and movie, since I first encountered both when I was 14. It was actually after that horrible TV adaptation with the guy from Wings playing Jack Torrance. I knew it was not very good, but I was also hypnotized and terrified and couldn't stop watching. That story resonated with me HARD and it still does. I've read the book and seen the movie so many times and have thought and talked so much about the themes that emerge for me: how family trauma manifests, how the setting evokes my waxing/waning sense of isolation living within multiple systems of oppression.
And of course, I was drawn to, and horrified by, the lady in the bathtub in Room 217 (book) / 237 (movie). There's so much about her that's problematic and powerful, in both versions. So after my first time seeing the movie in a theater about 10 years ago, I decided to finally write a poem about her. And that was a revealing process—to articulate to myself what makes her so fascinating and scary in general and to me specifically. Also, to make what I wrote accessible or even interesting to someone *not* totally immersed in the world of this story.
Coming back to this poem as part of the larger H&B project allowed me to do that again—partly because it was less important to me that people knew this was inspired by a character in The Shining. Instead, I wondered what it might be like to be a ghost like this one, to have memory shift and lose linearity perhaps, to explore my own experience navigating sexuality and desire and rage. So the two erasures of "Ghost Crone | Body Horror" gave me the chance to reimagine the original poem through these different lenses.