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Interview: Dantiel W. Moniz

In Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz populates the state of Florida with characters as distinct, flawed, and capable of beauty as the peninsula itself. Writing about fraught relationships of all sorts, set against the heat and humidity of North Florida, Moniz builds out complex emotional challenges—ensnaring characters in the grips of loss, deceit, indecision, violence, revenge—and each time forces us to see them as whole people, rendering a startling and affecting portrait of Black femininity that holds nothing back and demands our attention. The Florida Review asked Dantiel about getting honest about the human body, the rise of “Florida lit,” and what it means to write against national perception.

Milk Blood Heat was published in 2021 by Grove Atlantic.

Steven Archer for The Florida Review:

The first and last stories, “Milk Blood Heat” and “An Almanac of Bones,” feature friendships scrutinized by disapproving parents on the basis of difference, cultural and otherwise; the former others the white family, the latter othered by the white family, and both protagonists grapple with seeking in their friends’ families what they lack at home. Could you share a bit about what that dynamic means to you, from a cultural perspective? Did you mean for these stories to be inverses/ bookends?

Dantiel W. Moniz:

It makes so much sense that I write about grappling with whiteness in the ways these characters do in both of these stories, as I feel I’m still in the process of unlearning so many conditioned thoughts and habits that have rooted within me just by being alive in America. If you grow up anywhere in the world, and in the particular brand of it that this country produces, you are steeped in whiteness from birth, in every facet of life, explicitly and implicitly, and that invisibility can be one of the most dangerous parts. The ideology and systemic privilege of it (or the disadvantage of its lack), and the internalization of its supremacy, both in desire and repulsion. I think Sylvie (the protagonist of Almanac) falls a little more into this latter camp. While she absolutely uses Kit and her family as a measuring post in some ways, she also inherently understands that what she has, though viewed as lesser than, is powerfully her own, and having that normalization would actually be the lesser thing. I don’t think anyone’s work has to “deal” with the idea of whiteness (though I wish more white author’s works would), but right now, it’s still a project of mine. I want to make its effect on the lived world, the macro, micro, and everything in between, a little easier to see.

“An Almanac of Bones” was written before Milk Blood Heat was ever conceived of, so there wasn’t any conscious creation of echo, but definitely after having completed drafts of each of the stories that would make the collection, I noticed there was a lot of mirroring happening throughout, in these two pieces and beyond. I always knew I wanted Almanac to close out the book, but it was only due to both my agent and editor’s insight that I realized MBH should open it. I love cyclical stories, so I’m glad it worked out this way for the collection as a whole.

TFR:

You write about bodies in such a refreshing, fascinating way, leaning into honest renderings of the human body without resorting to the gross-out. I’m thinking specifically of “Thicker Than Water” and its exploration of scent—discharge smelling of egg, armpits of onion or celery. How important was this choice to you, especially with your women protagonists? How did you go about it from a craft angle?

DWM:

But bodies are gross sometimes! And I think if we were more honest about this, or at least more willing to admit this as human, we would all be better off. Women are conditioned to uphold the importance of being clean and sweet 24/7. It’s almost like I came into the world knowing I needed to be mindful of how I looked, how I smelled, even how I tasted; it’s an absurd pressure to put on a human body, which is generally unconcerned with anything other than its survival. And sometimes, those necessary functions are anything but pretty, the same way grief can be unpretty, anger, wanting. These rigid standards also make it harder to lean fully into pleasure. At the beginning of dating my husband, when we were 19 and 20, I remember him making this joke like, “Whenever you’re in the bathroom for a while, I’ll just tell myself you’re taking a long pee,” and I corrected him immediately, saying, “No, I’ll be taking a shit. Just like you do.” And though that was something I might not have ever said in previous relationships, I’m glad I did, because it’s so important to be able to take something for its fullness. It’s the only way to really love someone. It’s the same for my work. I have to let the characters be full in order to be real, and I especially wanted to honor that for the women and girls who people my collection. From a craft perspective, I’m thinking less about “how not to gross out my reader” and more how I think of crafting sentences and images in general: how does this sound, what’s the rhythm of this, and does it hit on the larger idea I hope to convey?

TFR:

So many of these stories feature moments of consumption as catalyst, catharsis, or climax—the blood rite in the title story, the octopus in “Feast,” the snails in “The Hearts of Our Enemies,” the bone fragment in “Thicker Than Water,” milk from a distant mother in “An Almanac of Bones.” Could you touch on how this motif found its way into your work? What draws you to write about eating, feeding others, being fed, especially when it comes to ingesting weird, weaponized, or non-food items?

DWM:

This is a beautiful question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked this before. So much of my writing comes from an instinctive place. It’s often hard for me to see what’s coming up until I have it all in front of me, so I’m not sure, in its creation, why this element came into the work. But this question makes me realize, I am interested in how we nourish our bodies, or starve them. What we put into ourselves and what becomes us. With Feast, there was definitely this Phoenix choice, of wanting rebirth, a new opportunity to start fresh, and often we can’t have that if we’re clinging onto a damaged foundation. This motif kind of reminds me of the Tower card, which can be scary in a reading, but it really means transformation, if you’re willing to let go. With food, there’s also this element of connection; it can be a love language (which is why it’s so savage when it’s used as a means of revenge). Even the blood pact in MBH is about transformation. Let me become a little more you. Let us be the same. What we eat, who we feed, and what we desire in that feeding, can say a lot about a person or their world.

TFR:

While perhaps the most intense use of food and eating comes in “Exotics,” I wondered more in this case about how form and genre served the piece; it is the shortest piece in the collection, as well as its only speculative/ fabulist piece, and is arguably the most direct in its portrayal and exploration of the interaction of Black and brown people with excess, privilege, and sacrifice. What went into the inclusion of this piece in the collection? Could you talk about distilling one of the collection’s more subtle running threads in this way?

DWM:

Definitely one of the moments in my writing where I had to pause and think, Am I allowed to do this? Fun fact, there was actually another story in the book that I cut, that I think would have been described as speculative, and I wonder if it had stayed in, if people would have accepted Exotics as a necessary part of this book more readily. Probably not though—I’ve witnessed that people thrill to be snobby about mediums they perceive as genre. I think what lends this piece a lot of its speculative coloring is that I’m doing directly what I’m doing more subtly in every other story in this book—examining capitalism, race, class, consumption, how we cannibalize youth, and our complicity in these systems—which makes it feel surreal. I think people often don’t want to look at these things in their own lives and neighborhoods, so it makes it particularly unpleasant to have to in this way. For me, this story belongs in this collection. It’s right at home.

TFR:

The stories in your collection feel distinctly Floridian, and yet often get away with not name-dropping the specific areas in which they take place. What aspects of the Florida landscape, culture, and experience felt most important in capturing such an authentic portrait of life in the northern part of the state?

DWM:

I am a person who situates herself through landmark and memorization. I very rarely know street names and my sense of direction is…not the greatest. Mostly because I’m focused on other things and when I’m really present where I’m at, more ephemeral elements come to me. Like noticing the color and quality of light or how tree bark feels under my palm (if you have ever walked somewhere with me, you know how often I stop for trees). So being super specific about names and buildings or even particular cities wasn’t a priority for me. I was most interested in capturing the quality of heat of my state, its presence and aliveness, and how it enacts on the characters. That type of omnipresence becomes a mood.

TFR:

On a related note, so many of these characters come to life as vivid, well-realized, believable members of assorted Black and Hispanic demographics without being explicitly tethered to one background or another, even when one could hazard a guess using markers like the fish dreams in “Necessary Bodies” or the refrain of “por la sangre” in “Thicker Than Water.” Was this ambiguity a conscious choice? Did you find yourself writing with specific groups in mind, even if they were ultimately unnamed?

DWM:

In my work, I’m writing mostly around Blackness and its intersections. I was born a writer, it’s natural to me, but it took me a very long time to begin writing stories about characters that shared aspects of my identity. And once I understood I could do that, it opened up so much for me. I had been reading books all my life that characterized certain people only by their exclusion from whiteness, which itself was allowed to remain invisible. “The girl walked into the room” vs “The Black girl walked into the room,” and that being the main point of distinction visually or otherwise, like once you say that one thing, you should be able to see her. And I suppose readers could, if they had in their mind some catchall for Blackness. Even when I didn’t have the vocabulary for why, that used to upset me. So in my work, I don’t feel I have to be explicit in that way. My characters’ Blackness is not the biggest thing about them, though it does shape and direct their experiences.

TFR:

Last Spring, Milk Blood Heat was taught as part of a graduate course on Southern, Appalachian, and Florida literature at UCF, alongside the work of writers such as Steven Dunn, Jesmyn Ward, Leah Hampton, and Carter Sickels. What does “Florida literature” mean to you, as part of, or removed from, “the South”? How do you see your work in conversation with this emerging literary canon, and how might you hope to see that canon expand?

DWM:

This breadth of writers is so interesting, especially when you consider that each of the regions that make up what people consider “The South” is diverse and face the challenges that come with their particular national perceptions. Like, what Leah has to deal with in people’s discrimination against Appalachia, or Jesmyn Ward writing about Mississippi, is different than what I deal with in the perception of Florida, but they all stem from the same place—ignorance or indifference about the intentional repression or resource-stealing/shuttering from these places. What I’m excited for in the expansion of the canon of Floridian literature is the same thing I’m interested in for my human characters—a chance to explore its wholeness. To allow stories of people there to be as common as stories of people wandering around New York or other bigger, better regarded coastal cities. There are people trying to thrive even in the chaos of that place, and those people and their stories matter, regardless of its governance.

TFR:

Beauty and hostility appear in equal measure throughout Milk Blood Heat, in your portrayals of girls, women, mothers, siblings, and marriages, certainly, but also in your portrayal of Florida is a whole. Kids die at pool parties and nearly drown at the beach. Aquariums and museums full of nature and discovery are host to historical horrors, Klan activity, fiery destruction, black holes. Massive diversity and divisive politics; abundant wildlife, dyed water, pollution. With Florida being so often the butt of the joke, a shorthand for all things backwards and dangerous, did you feel at all compelled to temper or reclaim Florida’s image through your writing? Did any part of this book come out of a desire to engage with national perception?

DWM:

Absolutely. I think this question and the last are connected. And yes, I wanted to reclaim and to assert, but not to paint some idealized picture of Florida, but to show it for what it is, honestly, its dark and its light. I didn’t grow up with the perception that my state was literary or that any writing of artistic merit might come from where I was from. I grew up thinking I might never leave my city, let alone my state, but what that means is, everything I am now started as seed in that place, even though I wished to, and did eventually, leave. And what I and other artists, thinkers, and creators there have to say is valuable. I think its especially critical now, in light of all the legislation that’s being put in place to stop people from doing just that—from learning, feeling, thinking and most of all, connecting. That scares the people in power. So I hope, in even a small way, my work might encourage someone who might not be encouraged otherwise because they’d been overlooked.

TFR:

I was delighted to read, in your previous interviews, what a big influence film and television are in your approach to writing. What are you watching these days? Do you think film and TV are given a fair shake in literary or academic spaces?

DWM:

So here’s a fun thing I learned recently about symptoms of anxiety—you have a higher tendency to re-watch instead of starting something new. It makes a lot of sense to me on that level, the comfort of the familiar, but also for me, there’s the chance to analyze the same slant differently now that I know the story; even through the expected I usually come away with something new. Some always rewatches for me are Mad Men, Insecure, Veep, The Florida Project, and right now I’m rewatching Castlevania during flights. But I have been watching new shows and films too. Bones and All, both seasons of White Lotus, season 2 of Russian Doll, the latest of The Crown. These works offered exactly that slice of human emotional fragility and darkness that I come to the page for. In the summer of 2021, after stumbling upon Season 20 of Survivor and never having seen a single episode before, I started streaming from season 1 and now I’m on Season 41. Another thing I’ve learned is that I don’t really believe in this idea of trash tv. Like the Real Housewives of Atlanta is not supposed to be like Sharp Objects, although they both revolve around how women position themselves in power within their communities and families using socialized tools. I’ve learned so much about performance, conditioning, and gaze from reality TV, so I think it’s less about what you consume but how you consume and metabolize it.

To that point, I think more literary and academic spaces are making the explicit connection between these art mediums, and there’s definitely more attention paid to the writing that goes into image-making because there’s such an overlap between literature and adaptation. I’m actually teaching an undergraduate course on image this semester, teaching two books (We the Animals and The Virgin Suicides) and their film counterparts.

TFR:

Is there one piece of writing advice—something you hold dear, or perhaps tell your students—that you might share with us here?

DWM:

The writer Naomi Jackson once told me, “If someone can’t see where you’re going, they can’t help you get there.” Write for yourself and remember to protect that beginning space that’s just you and the work. It’s so important to get intentional about what the work is and what you hope to move toward before a community of writers can be useful to you. Be open to critique (this is so important) but remember you only have to take what resonates. And the best way to recognize that resonance goes back to understanding your intentionality for the work. One more thing—remember to play in your writing, remember you like this.