by Will Corwin

The recipient of a 2023 Whiting Award in Poetry and Drama, Milo Wippermann (previously Emma Wippermann) has updated the story of Joan of Arc for the age of social media in their riveting debut book, Joan of Arkansas (Ugly Duckling Presse, $20). Formally, the book is an inventive hybrid, mixing playwrighting, poetry, and fiction into a book-length narrative that carries all the weight of the mythic figure it interrogates. Thematically, Wippermann does not shy away from unpacking Joan’s own failings, especially vis-a-vis warmongering and power; they also explore Joan’s story from the fertile ground of a trans interpretation (the book is currently a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Prize in LGBTQ+ Drama) and as a way to investigate contemporary social dilemmas, from the machinations of internet discourse and political propaganda to the climate crisis.

Will Corwin: What’s fascinating about using the story of Joan of Arc as a playwriting project is that the trial exists as a transcript already. There are a bunch of artistic precedents as well: the 1923 play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and plenty more in the century since. How much were you thinking about this canon as you wrote Joan of Arkansas?

Milo Wippermann: I’d add to that list Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929-31) and the 1953 play The Lark by Jean Anouilh. The Lark was a critical text for me both because of its form and because Anouilh played with the image of the dove, a big part of Joan’s mythology; apparently, as Joan was being burned at the stake, soldiers saw a dove emerge from the flames and fly to the sky. Anouilh turned it into a lark, and rewrote Joan’s story as a bleak, postwar comedy.

So thinking about the genealogy of texts, it felt preposterous to write yet another play about Joan of Arc—and I learned a play came out in the UK a couple of years ago that is also about a trans Joan of Arc. But my feeling was, well, the Joan that we need right now is trans, and they would also be talking about war and climate change. Then while I was mashing up historical representations of Joan, I realized I wanted to mash them up with Greta Thunberg—both are figures that lack a certain nuance, just because of how visibility in the social sphere works. It took a lot of research, which at a certain point just had to stop—I felt I needed to focus on “my” Joan. That said, much of the work’s structure and moves were borrowed from other writers; the important ones are listed in the acknowledgements in the back of the book.

WC: Social media comes up often in Joan of Arkansas—for example, you constantly refer to Joan’s hand as a selfie stick. How do you see social media as a vehicle of spiritual dissemination? Do you see it as something that’s capable of that?

MW: Well, no. But I was interested in the idea of them going viral. Medieval Joan became famous by word of mouth, and I liked the contemporary parallel.

Unrelatedly, I should also point out that the historical Joan obviously used she/her pronouns, while in my book, Joan is a they/them. I think most of the engagement with the book has focused on climate change and the social media elements, but it’s very much also about trans identity. I recently saw an entry about Joan of Arkansas in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas online—it’s somehow catalogued there!—and there was a close reading of the text and thoughtful summaries of the different components, but it totally omitted anything about gender. Perhaps it’s interesting that someone could read this book and go past that—I did want it to be a bit of a Trojan horse in that way—but to omit talking about it entirely is a little weird.

WC: You also play with the pronouns of God: Joan has a sneaky way of addressing this by using neutral pronouns for God, arguing to the priest that “they” is accurate because the angels are plural.

MW: It’s playing with the idea of the Trinity, because Catholicism is kind of a polytheistic religion. The idea of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and all the saints, and the various angels and the devil—it’s a very rich world of many characters and aspects, but the doctrine is there’s only one God. I liked the idea of a nonbinary god that uses they/them, or rather They/Them pronouns—in the last section of the book, Joan asks Adrienne if it is sinful for them to use the same pronouns as God, and Adrienne says only if you capitalize them.

But to return to social media: for the plot, it seemed like a good way to convey what happened to the historical Joan. There were prophecies going around at that time that a peasant girl would save France, and as soon as Joan started to do anything, these stories proliferated: Bards sang about her and her battles, and she became really famous, a true phenomenon—but in a medieval way, through song and myth. There’s also a funny interaction that she had with another mystic—Joan was like, this lady’s a quack, she’s not the real deal—so there was that kind of competition as well. Our social media landscape isn’t that much different, except instead of bards and storytellers, we’re all myth-making our own selves. It’s like Don Quixote in that way. And then: Did Joan become famous for spreading spirituality or truth? No. Joan was famous for winning battles, for warmongering. Also: If teenage Joan was able to gain access to power and to crown Charles VII king of France because of the storytelling technologies of the fifteenth century, how would that happen today? Obviously with social media—so that was my entry point.

WC: How do you think social media has affected poetry?

MW: Not well—I think some people write poems now that look good in a square. It just seems like a shame to think in that way and to cater to that kind of reduced attention span. I feel like a bit of a Luddite, but I think social media and its algorithms are doing what capitalism wants them to do, and I am interested in working outside of that. But then, for instance, Instagram is flooded with the poems of Palestinian writers, and that is really cool; it’s beautiful that people are sharing these poems. When the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer was killed in December of 2023, his poetry was rightfully all over Instagram, but there was also a video circulating with an AI version of his voice reading his work, because someone trained AI to mimic his voice from different speeches that he had given—and I find that to be atrocious. Israel is using AI to bomb Gaza, and now AI is animating Refaat Alareer? I think things like ChatGPT and algorithmic social media are ways of habituating artists and writers to war-making technologies. There is money behind it because people are interested in war and domination.

I’ve also noticed that some writers are starting to use AI uncritically, but we can’t use this kind of technology uncritically because it is currently killing people. There’s no separation, and using it to write poems doesn’t make it any less evil. I wanted to use social media in the book and have it not seem innocent.

WC: Your Joan is positioned against Charles VII, the governor of Arkansas, who is clearly evil. They then go viral, and have 200 million followers—I think Taylor Swift probably has at least that many, if not more—it seems so of our time, yet it’s this idea of wielding influence in the same way that Joan of Arc did six centuries ago.

MW: Totally. And then what, Joan was still killed? She was still killed. Joan crowned Charles VII king in 1429, and he then betrayed her and condoned the English putting her on trial, because he was sick of her. In my book, all the followers stand by and watch as Charles VII, governor of Arkansas, reneges on every single promise to end oil drilling and give reparations, and Joan is institutionalized. People think you can wield actual power through social media, fame, and influence, as if you’re actually engaging in political action if you repost something, but it’s a false kind of power—notoriety isn’t power. Or at least not the kind that lasts.

WC: In Joan of Arkansas you call climate change “The Warmth.” What was the idea behind that?

MW: I was really influenced by Daniel Sherrell’s book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Throughout the book, instead of using the term climate change, he calls it “the problem.” I thought it was a brilliant way to engage this thing that defeats all language. Language is constantly being used against itself—it’s hard to speak if one’s language is constantly taken and then mutilated or made to mean other things. In the early months of the pandemic, for instance, a lot of anti-maskers were saying “I can’t breathe” to complain about mask restrictions, and that was right after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. They’re co-opting that language for masks? How do you even say anything after that? With climate change, I feel people hear that phrase and zone out immediately. The framing is wrong.

WC: It’s euphemistic.

MW: The climate always changes. Right now, I’m reading a book called Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen, and it goes through the history of North America, starting with the Bering Strait. People came to this continent through a series of climate changes; “climate change” means too much and too little. In writing Joan of Arkansas I wanted to find language that would feel visceral—Sherrell used “the problem,” but I wanted it to feel even more bodily—hence “The Warmth.” Finding new language is important, especially if language keeps being co-opted or euphemized. Really, that’s the job of writers: to invent more and more language. There should be so much language that it can’t all be used against us.

WC: I was recently reading your poem “The Fall.” Do you have a specific interest in discussing religion or Catholicism or sacred texts?

MW: That’s a really old poem! I wrote that in college. I think our country is deeply religious and not spiritual—we live in a fundamentalist society. The religion I was most indoctrinated into, and thus am well versed in, is Catholicism (I went to Catholic school for eight years), but in future projects, I would like to veer away from Catholicism and into fundamentalist Christian movements. These stories have been used against us for so long, but I believe they can also be reclaimed and retold. They have to be looked at anew because they are part of our collective consciousness. And a lot of it is really beautiful. I find Catholicism particularly weird and sexy and creepy—it’s bodily, there’s cannibalism . . .

WC: And the fetishization of pain . . .

MW: Totally. It’s a really carnal religion that has been sanitized over and over again in different ways. Also just aesthetically, I’m interested in it. In the book, the character “Mom of Joan” is not super into Joan’s religiosity, but she figures if Joan has to choose something, go Catholic—if you’re gonna go Christian, go hard or go home.

WC: What other poets do you look to for inspiration, or just in general?

MW: When I started writing poems, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, and Adrienne Rich were all important to me. More recently, Douglas Kearney and Don Mee Choi, and also poets who are in my social circles: Asiya Wadud is brilliant.

WC: What are you working on next?

MW: I’m halfway through a novel. Joan of Arkansas was, in a lot of ways, a study on how to write plot, because previously I’d only written poems that were a page long at most. So I’m working on a novel about climate change and queerness and a love affair between two siblings. I want to have enough juicy stuff in it that people will stay for the climate grief. I’m also working on another play, or rather, an actual play this time. I’m kind of surprised at how much I loved writing in that form.

After the experience of a recent nine-actor reading of Joan of Arkansas, I’m never going to write the same way again. The playscript I’m working on now is of a very different scale. I think there will be three characters, and one of them is a hotshot firefighter (I can’t get away from fire and climate apparently). “Hotshot” is an actual term: there are teams of firefighters who travel across the country and fight the worst wildfires. In 2013, there was a tragedy in which nineteen people from one of these hotshot crews died in a fire; only one crew member escaped. Fires have gotten so hot that the technologies that are supposed to keep these people safe are not working. There are also the ethics of putting out fires: We should be doing more controlled burns. Anyway, I can talk about it for hours.

WC: You make Joan a firefighter at the end of Joan of Arkansas.

MW: Yeah, I’m obsessed. I’m almost like, do I really need to write another firefighter? But I think it’s a way of trying to make people care about it, because people mostly want to look away. On the subway the other day, I saw a poster advertising an exhibition of work from the 1970s to the present about environmental destruction, and I had a panic attack and had to get off the train a stop early. I can’t understand how everyone else seems fine. I kind of wish I could be fine too, but also not, because the house is on fire.