Making a Monster: A Craft Essay

To accompany our fall 2025 issue (22.2), we have curated a craft folio on horror, the uncanny, and/or the strange, after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is CD Eskilson’s piece.

What do we mean when we call something a monster? The word itself is likely to have come into English through the Latin word monstrare, meaning “to demonstrate.” On an etymological level, then, the monster in a movie or book is meant to reveal something to us. Bram Stoker’s bloodsucking Count Dracula highlights contemporary fears about an increasingly egalitarian Britain at odds with a fading aristocracy. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the cannibal Leatherface presents a sick parody of the rigid gender performance demanded by the American family. From the gothic novel to the gory slasher, our most infamous monsters literally demonstrate some deeper truth that challenges our dominant narratives.

This power that monsters wield as symbols against societal expectations explains why they often speak to folks who feel othered or marginalized. As a kid trying to navigate a complex relationship with my body and my understanding of gender, I saw kinship in stories of the creature haunting the swamp, the quiet street, the mausoleum. I was mesmerized seeing Lon Chaney Jr. stalk through the gray night of The Wolf Man (1941) on the VHS tape our family had, and I found solace in his lonely howl. Later, growing up as a queer and transgender person, I found books and movies about monsters to be a lifeline—a means of affirming and understanding myself beyond more sanitized or orderly representations of LGBTQ life.

I further explore this fascination with monsters and their potential in my poetry collection Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025). Popular representations of horror icons and mythic beasts become conduits for discussions of gender, queerness, and mental illness. By evoking these figures to explore personal themes, I also hope to ask broader questions about the consequences of these depictions. Monstrosity has been applied to dehumanize and vilify any perceived other based on race, gender, ability, and other sociocultural factors. My writing of the book coincided with the growing vilification of transgender people in politics and media over the last several years, in which commentators and public officials feel emboldened enough to call trans children demons.

This environment shaped the book’s interest in claiming and recontextualizing monstrosity as a way of taking power back. In the hybrid essay “The Monstrosity: Notes Towards A Frankenpo” from the searing collection Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019), poet Kenji Liu highlights the task given to writers at a moment of multiple catastrophes: “A monstrous presence is needed to respond to monstrous times.” We have been watching a horror show of extreme violence. We all live within the wreckage of the kaiju who reign supreme.

In writing Scream / Queen, I found that poetry offers a unique opportunity to reinvent and repurpose monster narratives for my own radical ends. Within the space of a poem, the monster becomes powerful and political: It can come to represent complex experiences of otherness, trauma, identity, self-love, and desire. Poems can write against, as well as through, the tropes and values embodied by our favorite creatures, to reach a poetics of self-determination and liberation.

By letting monsters stalk into our poems, we might provide a space where we can become witnesses or recorders of the crises before us. In Scream / Queen, I found that writing through the voice of fraught on-screen depictions gave me a voice to respond to harmful discourse on the news and in media around transgender rights and queer desire. For instance, writing through the voice of a monstrous cultural avatar like The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) antagonist Buffalo Bill provided me with the opportunity to address both the source text’s transphobia and that in the present moment. Through adopting this persona, I let this character live outside of the movie’s caricature while finding a vessel for my own personal reflections on navigating anti-trans rhetoric. Making space for a misunderstood character to have a new life in my poems helped me to theorize about them as a place where we might be able to respond to injustice. Frightening personas like these can be a vessel for response that lets us write toward what might otherwise be an overwhelming past or present.

Allowing monsters the opportunity to reflect and comment on today helps us complicate the larger stories we tell about power, agency, and where harm has been done. The masterful persona poem “Llorona” from Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s La Movida (Nightboat Books, 2022) brings forth the mournful spirit from Central American folklore, La Llorona, to damn the region’s centuries of European and American colonization:

Trust me: This wail

is stronger than concrete, it’s

louder than rust. It

is crueler than your lash and

your god and will brand you deep

er than any pox.

It will turn back the moon five-

hundred-and-twenty-

nine years, it will slit your throat,

it will sink your ships, killer.

A monster’s signature characteristics make for a striking poetic voice that can lend writing urgency. Across jaggedly enjambed lines with a sob-like cadence, Luboviski-Acosta’s Llorona conjures the pain of both the past and present to direct vengeance back at the forces of violence. Her wail displays a power to indict as well as to undo the bloodshed—to imagine a response to oppressive systems. Let the monster speak in your poem—let it run wild in the moonlight and find its target. The monster, when given the chance, will sink its claws into those who have dealt the most harm.

As much as they might respond to the larger world around us, these creatures and spirits can tell us about ourselves too. While writing Scream / Queen, I found that holding up my own commonality with a figure like the Headless Horseman or a werewolf offered opportunities to honestly examine personal struggles with identity and desire. For instance, the horseman folktale’s metaphor of a haunting absence and unending search for wholeness felt analogous to my early feelings of dysphoria before I ever knew what it was called. Meanwhile, the stark symbolism of a shape-shifting carnivore became a portal for frankly addressing queer desire as well as the state of euphoria found through gender transition. Crafting poems that addressed these figures allowed me to place myself in conversation with their stories and ultimately feel less alone navigating such complex emotions. Recast in a ghastly reflection or with glimmering scales, the truth might be written more easily.

When reality’s subjects seem too difficult to plainly utter, we can let the monsters guide our work. Throughout his highly lyrical chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City, 2020), Marlin M. Jenkins indexes a cast of Pokémon (shorthand for pocket monsters) who become conduits for dissecting intergenerational trauma, anti-Black racism, and gender expectations. Each creature’s innate qualities take on a new meaning as Jenkins reckons with childhood memory. Here’s an example from “Pokédex Entry #1: Bulbasaur”:

Root wrapped around spine,

            pre-flower, vine under bud,

what do we call what we carry

            on and in our backs,

                        what burns under our skin

            and ties itself to our nerves

and endings? I was born

            with bad blood and the makings

of napped hair and crackled skin

and all the things the doctor

                        makes me list . . .

The title’s vegetative teal monster guides the speaker’s examination of family history. The characteristic bloom on Bulbasaur’s back offers a way of conceptualizing the weight of bearing a legacy, while its tendrils aid the speaker in acknowledging the tangled lineage of illness and pain. The Pokémon also offers a dynamic shape to the poem itself as it trellises across the page, untamed and candid. Let yourself speak through the monster as you write your poem—let the beast lend you its fangs, its cutting howl.

In an interview with Out Magazine in 1995, horror writer Clive Barker highlights the tendency in much horror fiction to return its characters to the status quo, to bring life back to how it was before the monster got loose. Of his own writing, Barker notes: “Over and over again, I’ve created monsters who come from the outside and who call out to somebody to join them in the sanctum.” We as poets aspire to a similar monstrous mission in our work: to connect and bring about some revelation in our readers. To leave them changed in some way.

In Scream / Queen, I ultimately wanted to craft a relationship to language based around possibility. In the face of mounting violence against queer and trans people, it felt so vital to show readers that we all possess the agency to craft the selves that we want to become. To craft a poetics rooted in the potential for change, I found my writing kept returning to one of my earliest obsessions. Maybe we come away from a good jump scare knowing something new about ourselves because an unsettling encounter with a creature scandalizes our preconceived notions. Maybe monsters always endure so they can tell us something about ourselves. To craft poems that lean into the liberation that’s possible through language, we must try to leave space for the monsters to wander in. To let them call to us and speak, or howl, or wail. We must let all manner of creatures find freedom in our lines if we ever want to find it for ourselves.

Prompts:

Try bringing a monster into this monstrous world. Think about how your favorite creature from a movie or myth might react to the last headline you saw. What qualities of theirs might form their position on a nightly pundit’s talking points? Are they impacted by tariffs? Does pollution run afoul of their swamp or mountain cave?

Try to find common ground with a slasher or cryptid. Brainstorm defining characteristics about your favorite creature, both internally and externally. What makes them unique? Now, consider what qualities of theirs you can relate to. Also, which can you not relate to, and why? What exists between the gulf in your experiences?

Read more from Issue 22.2.