Who are our cultural gods, and how do we question them? How do we manage when our personal histories and cultural histories intersect? How do real people become myths, and how do we extricate these myths from the tangible violences they may have committed during their lives? I was lucky enough to sit down and talk with poet Sara Moore Wagner about her book, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the Blue Lynx prize from Lynx House press. We talked about about Annie Oakley, gun history, feminism, colonialism, obsession, persona, and so much more, and I am very excited to share our wonderful conversation with you today.

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JO: This book focuses on the life of Annie Oakley. How long have you carried an interest in Oakley as a figure, and what drew your poet’s eye to write about her in our present moment? Did she appear in the poems suddenly, or did you know you needed to be writing about her before approaching the page?

SMW: My interest in Annie started in 2020, around the beginning of the pandemic. I had two very personal books I was sending around (now published as Swan Wife and Hillbilly Madonna). Between the soul-searching/life-mining work of those, and the whole world shutting down and having to homeschool my three children, I (like everyone else!) felt chaotic and in survival mode. I didn’t want to stop writing, but I didn’t want to look inward or mine my own life as much. This made me turn outward. As someone who loves persona and research, I thought it might be interesting to focus my attention on a single historical figure. I’ve done this before with works of literature. I wrote a whole series on the Inferno, one on the book of Job, but nothing ever really stuck. My deep dives have usually always been exercises to get me out of a mental block of one kind or another.

While looking for someone to spark my curiosity, I was thinking about who I could get close enough to to possibly fall into obsession. Annie Oakley was a favorite of my mother, who was also a champion sharpshooter. Annie’s birthplace, grave, and museum are also about forty-five minutes north of mine, in Greenville, OH. I told my friend, fellow poet and bestie Christen Noel Kauffman, who I was also in a COVID parenting pod with, that we should meet to write in Greenville, which I discovered was halfway between our houses (she lives in Richmond Indiana and I live north of Cincinnati).

To make a long story short, something grabbed me there, in that strange city, in that strange museum. I wrote furiously on Annie’s grave while Christen laid on other plots in the cemetery. I returned many times and started reading every book I could on her life, and the lives of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull, who formed a strange triumvirate with Annie. I had a goal of writing 100 poems about her, and I think I went past that.

As someone who loves and studies folklore, I think that was the element, beyond the woo-woo magic of her possibly possessing me, that made me want to draw her into the present moment, which made me see her lineage. Annie Oakley was our first American superstar. In every way, she and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show carried the myth of America across the world. That myth was hinged on the absolute worship and admiration of the gun.

So to answer your questions in a more concise way, she both appeared suddenly and compelled me to keep writing for years.

What about a historical subject makes them viable, or ideal, as a study of persona? Sometimes, I think, looking into the past can be fraught when dealing with questions of identity, and political history; but, of course, those subjects are already/always present in our work anyway. But how does being located so centrally in the past change your approach to challenging topics?

I think a poet especially, because we are not in the business of simply telling or describing, has to be careful about using real people for persona. For me, it was easier to write about Annie Oakley because she is, now, mostly myth. Others (Irving Berlin, to name one) have made her a caricature. Annie Get Your Gun resembles the historical Annie Oakley very little. This made me wonder who WAS Annie Oakley, one of the very first people to appear in a moving picture. I still don’t really know. Even she carefully curated her story. She changed her birth year several times. She only appears on two censuses. Because Annie is more character than real person now, it was easy for me to take liberties and “set the record straight.” The body of Annie Oakley is just pure representation of those more challenging topics: race, gender, politics, America. It was in many ways easier for me to funnel through her to avoid falling into diatribes or polemics, though I did fall into that more than usual, just due to the subject.

These poems balance persona and the personal; there are poems written from the point of view of Annie Oakley, and poems set in the current day that ring much more immediately present. How did history and personal immediacy intertwine in this collection? What did taking on Oakley’s persona teach you about writing — and/or about being in the world?

While I started writing about Annie to avoid talking about myself, I grew to find that to be impossible. There was something in me that could not stop drinking from that deep well of Annie’s life. Eventually, the poems shifted to that personal connection. I was raised by people who love guns. My father, especially, was a charismatic man with many guns he perched in every corner of his house. When he died in 2022 of COVID-19, his friends descended on his house and took most of his guns. Who knows where they are now. I was going through all of this while writing this book. My mother, also, was on a personal journey to understand more about the double murder of her mother and grandmother by her step-grandfather. The police officer who worked the case had just published a book, Violence in the Valley, without her permission, containing photographs. My mom was 14 during this murder. She was in the house, and she ran from the shooter, saving her sisters. There were bullet holes in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs which proved he had shot at her as she ran. I had known this story, but not the entirety of it. Seeing the pictures, knowing how my mother became a sharpshooter, it just all coalesced for me into one thing, which was American culture, but was also deeply personal. The origin of my family’s values and of American right wing “family values” can be found in the company of Annie Oakley. To me, my father was Buffalo Bill, my mother was Annie.

I guess writing all this through Annie taught me even more about the overlaps of history, the dramatic leaps and things that seem far apart, but exist on top of each other. In Annie’s lifetime, the Wright Brothers (and sister!), also from the same area of Ohio, were signing contracts with the US government for their new “flying machine.” Everything is connected in our small tapestry of “American History.” There’s so little we still understand because it’s all myth.

There are so many personal details about Oakley’s life, quotations, little moments in each poem. What did your research look like before and during writing this collection? What advice would you have for poets who want to deeply explore persona in a project like this?

Those quotes come from Annie Oakley’s “Autobiography,” a collection of her public writings, writings she did for newspapers, compiled and sold exclusively by the Garst Museum, which houses the Annie Oakley center. This museum is in Greenville, OH and is, frankly, amazing. Not only are there many books compiled by the excellent researchers there, there are also genuine artifacts. It is a wonderful place for obsession. It was particularly helpful to me because I found, to my dismay, most of the books on Annie Oakley were written for children or “dime store” type novels. She’s become an inspirational cliché for young people because she was so squeaky clean. She actually fought the newspapers, sinking all her money into lawsuits, just to keep her reputation so spotless. A woman who looked like Annie had been arrested for stealing a man’s pants to buy cocaine. Of course, the papers sensationalized it and said it was her. She would not have that.

I had to reckon, then, with what she said about herself, her deep control over that (often fabricated narrative), how others fictionalized or simplified her, her presence in the more complex books written about Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull (all listed in the reference section at the end of my book), all of it. That would be my advice, read as many different things as you can, then trust your intuition and imagination. Go down rabbit holes. The poet Frank X. Walker, who also writes historical persona, has called this “MRI+E” (Memory, Research, Imagination and Empathy). I love that, and after I heard about his approach from a colleague, I thought — that’s exactly what I do! You must use the tools available to you as a poet but add in as much research as you possibly can.

This is relatively on the longer end for a poetry collection — a little over 100 pages. How did you balance elements of change and surprise alongside the driving focus (Oakley) of the collection?

I originally had so much more! As I mentioned, I wrote maybe over 100 poems just on Annie Oakley and the Wild West Show. I then had to comb through those poems to cut out what was boring or redundant. Reading through my poems also sparked more poems and ideas about emerging themes, like gender presentation, trauma, the lineage of guns in America, Indigenous Americans, which were just present in her story. I wanted to keep her life chronological but use moments to focus in on the larger American myths present in those moments. For me, her young marriage (although, again, her birthdate changed, so there are people who dispute her age) brings up the concept of marriage and gender. Joining the Wild West Show and being renamed by Sitting Bull pulls up the genocide of the first people in this country. She was that driving force, and she naturally pulled up roots. When I laid out and pruned back her story, I saw those places I could braid in the present clearly.

The gun is, of course, a vital image in this book. What was it like writing so constantly about a weapon, one with such violent political connotations in our present day (Could you talk about writing the chorus of voices and shifting perspectives in “Aim High” ?), one which has often been a tool of colonialism; but a weapon that also brought, for Oakley, survival, self-reliance, and safety?

Because of my family history, the gun has been such a central figure in my life, one which I forget is not central in the lives of other people. My husband, for instance, was horrified to see all the guns laid out at my dad’s house. My grandmother, his mother, has a gun she sleeps with. When I bought her a security system and told her the cops would be there in 15 minutes, should it go off, she told me she’d shoot the intruders first. I think this history, coupled with me being so liberal (I hate guns, to be clear), naturally leads to this chorus of voices of people in my family trying to call me dumb or talk me out of my opinions on gun laws. “Guns don’t kill people, Sara,” or “It’s about gun SAFETY,” or “none of this would be happening if they actually TAUGHT kids about guns.” It’s just something I’ve had to deal with at basically every family event.

I also do acknowledge the complicated truth of Annie and my dad’s mother (Mema), of my mother. My Mema lives alone in a very dangerous neighborhood in Columbus. Men regularly knock on her windows. She’s been told that police won’t go into her neighborhood (hence the expensive and necessary security system). I see why she needs her gun in America now. I also see why Annie needed it, why she thought all women should have a gun. Annie, as a child, was “adopted” for a time by an abusive family she called the wolves. In Andromeda Romano-Lax’s novel Annie and the Wolves she dives into this time in a sci-fi way, imagining what might happen if Annie could bring a gun back there, to that time she was completely helpless. Annie was relatively alone in a large company of men with guns. When she first took up the gun, it was to feed her family. For her, for my mother and Mema, the gun was about survival.

I also know that police having guns, men having guns, people in power having guns (like Buffalo Bill, called Buffalo for his role in extinguishing, for sport, the buffalo from America, or the Romanian communist leader Ceausescu, who shot all the grizzly bears in Romania singlehandedly, for fun), the simplicity of acquiring automatic weapons and ridiculous firearms and ammunition is the problem. Guns formed our country, pushing the original people into pockets and corners, and now, we have mass shootings daily. Women and minorities, powerless people, wouldn’t need guns if we had better laws. It’s all complicated, and my chorus poems like “Aim High” attempt to capture some of that noise of this country.

I would love to talk about how your book holds the violence of men and colonialism. I’m especially entranced by “First Myth of the Wild West”, the short quote in section IV “General Sherman / said ‘Give them / Whiskey. / Kills them / like flies” versus the slow unraveling image of Buffalo Bill scalping an Indigenous fighter (56). When does your instinct feel to lean into an image versus to let its briefness speak — what does each mode offer us in terms of understanding the types of violences often referred to as “unspeakable”?

This was very complicated for me. When researching Annie, I came across a large amount of research on Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota chief and radical leader in resisting US policies, but also a friend to Buffalo Bill, a member of the Wild West Show, and the one to call Annie Oakley “Little Sure Shot”), and on the Greenville Treaty (Annie’s hometown!) in which large portions of land were ceded to the US Government in return for money which was never paid. There are no federally recognized Reservations in Ohio, and there haven’t been since the 1830 Indian Removal Act. This is the real story of the “Wild West” as it relates to Annie Oakley, who was not like Buffalo Bill or Sitting Bull, Annie was never actually a part of the story of westward expansion.

It was difficult for me to focus at this part of my research. The facts of the life of Sitting Bull, the Indian Wars, the broken treaties honestly made me want to give up on Annie. I realized she, being born in Greenville, having been called “daughter” by Sitting Bull (who was instrumental in the Ghost Dance Movement, who was later shot in the face by police at Standing Rock), she was either very dumb or very cruel. All of this made me feel silly to write about Annie Oakley. I couldn’t leave this history out, but I also know it’s not my story to write through persona, like I did with Annie, and I didn’t want to misrepresent or appropriate. I used direct quotation for Sitting Bull, often, and I wanted to pull in quotes to capture the reality of the white approach, to contrast the “daughter” element pushed by the Wild West Show.

There are times I wanted to lean into an image to show the utter hypocrisy of people like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. Buffalo Bill did, every night, pantomime scalping in the Wild West Show. He also did carry around a scalp he claimed to have gotten from the American Indian who scalped Custer. He also did allow Indigenous Americans in his company to practice their traditions at a time this was against the law in America. He gave them a safe space, in a way, which accounts for his closeness (until the end of his life) to Sitting Bull.

For a time, this country glorified and excused all sorts of acts, took these acts to Europe on a “world tour,” to show what we had conquered. Leaning into that pantomime was very difficult for me, but it felt necessary to show just how weird and gross that was on so many levels. I couldn’t leave it out, but I’m still not entirely sure how to talk about it.

I feel like people are often intimidated by persona because they see it as restrictive. What about this project allowed for generative possibilities when coming to the page?

It was precisely all those holes in the story, and her mythologizing. I would suggest, if you want to focus on one person, a real person, finding someone who has achieved that god-like level of fame. We should always interrogate or question our gods. From the first poem, I tried to make it clear that I was going to approach Annie like a first god, I was going to tear her apart for what she stood for. That was the most generative approach of all.

Thank you again!

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Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot (winner of the 2022 Blue Lynx Prize, forthcoming from Lynx House press in 2024), Swan Wife (winner of the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors Prize) and Hillbilly Madonna (2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript prize winner).

James O’Leary is a trans poet from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for the Best New Poets, Best of the Net, & Pushcart Prize anthologies, & has appeared in such journals as Frontier, Protean, Booth, Foglifter, & more. James holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for ANMLY, and is currently working on their first full-length poetry manuscript. For a time, James tried the name Willow James Claire. They live in southern California.

Poetic Conversations: Interrogating Our Gods ~ An Interview with Sara Moore Wagner was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.