An Interview with Eleni Stecopoulos, Author of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing

Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing—by Eleni Stecopoulos, out now from Nightboat—intervenes in our cultural, historical, and political narratives around healing, which Stecopoulos imagines as a “collective orchestration.” The work combines cultural criticism, collaborative research, and poetic practice, all set in the context of our contemporary moment—one wherein life is commanded, consumed, made collateral.

In our conversation below we discuss the project’s origins and inspirations, from antiquity to the present; language as “neither defense nor apology”; and the distinction between the chronic and the acute, which Stecopoulos troubles to ask, “How do people create spaces of solidarity and care that cultivate the potential for change during perceived impasse?” The answers abound.

—Dante Silva


Dante Silva: I see Dreaming in the Fault Zone as an act of poiesis, unending experiment. You craft a continuum of artists, activists, physicians, and spiritual seekers—from antiquity to the present—all of whose work resonates. 

As a reader, I’m appreciative of the sustained research here, and all the intimacies it allows for. What led you to that research? How did the project come into itself?

Eleni Stecopoulos: I had written a previous book on literature, medicine, and healing (Visceral Poetics), which grew out of scholarship on Antonin Artaud and the American writer Paul Metcalf, interwoven with a fragmentary memoir of a health crisis amid the backdrop of the forever wars. Dreaming in the Fault Zone began with the desire to continue rethinking the therapeutic potential of, and claims for, poetry and other art, but instead via an exploration of writing, movement and dance, performance, visual art and design, by living people—including a number of my contemporaries. I also wanted to keep exploring the poetics of medicine: I wanted to learn more about the ways health practitioners and healers use words, sound, and imagery. I read these scenes of diagnosis and treatment as texts, as performances. I continued to be fascinated by the vastly different ways practitioners listen, describe, interpret, receive, mediate, predict.

The first impetus for Dreaming came from my role as lead artist on a collaborative project with the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where I curated a series of public programs which featured talks and performances by people from different fields and cultural affiliations. So the book began in response to live events and conversations on art, medicine, healing, embodiment, somatic practice. Some of the earliest pieces of writing in Dreaming began as introductions that I gave and as responses to what transpired when we gathered together to listen, think, move, and experiment together in a public setting. The book began as a communal document, trying to make something that could do justice to these collaborations. 

While I’d begun the project with an interest in individual healing and medical intervention, both the “medical” and “individual” were quickly unsettled by the directions the series took and by the upheavals and crises of the late aughts and 2010s. What a “poetics of healing” could be evolved, for instance, with the influence of disability scholars’ and activists’ challenges to notions of healing and cure. It evolved due to my increasing preoccupation with the medicalization of difference and the deployment of rhetorics of healing, rehabilitation, and patienthood by nationalist and fascist figures. The book became about questions of healing in many different senses—collective, political, ecological—and therefore it would have to include the full range of hope, aspiration, desire for change, ambivalence, frustration, distrust, resistance, that went along with seeking healing and with being subjected to insidious discourses of healing.

As I continued to work on Dreaming, the writing on live events and art—which I’d always sought to make both documentary and lyrical—became entwined with numerous other scenes, histories, and research interests: study of the literature of ancient medicine and dream incubation in the Mediterranean; a fascination with sacred and therapeutic landscapes; years of reading ethnographies of medicine and of thinking about literature in relation to ethnography; listening to others’ narratives and writing my own about encounters with traditional, shamanic, holistic, or heterodox healers; debates in the medical humanities; what I’d learned early on from French feminist philosophers about the suppression of women’s knowledge and the persecution of women that the institutionalization of medicine demanded.

In the end I also wrote a fair amount on my Greek roots and upbringing in the diaspora, which surprised me; the book isn’t a memoir and began quite firmly as a curation of responses to others. But my interest in therapeutic landscapes in Greece led me back to both personal and family history, and early experiences became relevant when I wanted to write the trajectory of how I came to study language that functions as medicine—and what, in turn, that had to do with literature as social treatment and score for a different future. I decided to include a narrative of how my experiences in the Greek diaspora lay at the root of what I would come to understand: that “any medicine is always an ethnomedicine,” including so-called modern medicine. 

The “healing” in question also implied “healing medicine,” to quote my late mentor, the anthropologist Barbara Tedlock (who had participated in our series in San Francisco). I hoped to write something that might speak to the ways biomedicine has little to offer those who seek healing, how it often fails those with chronic conditions and contests the reality of those conditions, how it has excluded so many ways of being and knowing as illegitimate or pathological.

Dante Silva: The image on the cover is the Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros. The site was both a “cult center” and a place for medical practice, an architecture of private and public healing.

What’s your relationship to the site? How do you imagine a “New Asklepieion”?

Eleni Stecopoulos: I’ve been to the archaeological site of Epidauros as a tourist and to attend the Athens Epidaurus Festival in summer, to watch the performance of an ancient drama in the theater, with the sublime acoustics of its limestone seats (the cover image is an aerial shot of the theater). I’ve been there in winter, as well, when Epidauros was brilliantly green from the rains. In 2018, I spent several days writing onsite, observing and listening. I have no special relationship to the site other than as a student of the Asklepian literature and of continuing research on the monuments and enkoimesis (ritual sleep for the purpose of incubating dreams) in the Asklepieion, the clinic dedicated to Apollo and his son Asklepios, the divine physician. While my tourist self in Greece is always bound up with the uncanny experience of being a Greek American said to be “returning” to the country from where my grandparents and mother emigrated, and where my father lived as a child, I’ve never entertained the fantasy of imagining distant ancestors as suppliants or spectators in the theater, participating in the incubation cults I write about. Traces and translations of some aspects of the Asklepieia, like hanging votives of healed body parts, or sacred direction received in a dream, are certainly apparent in modern Greek Orthodox life, and that’s interesting enough. So for me that’s part of a larger and more complex landscape of both continuities and breaks, syncretism, and negotiations of heritage in the present. In an elemental sense, Epidauros—as one of the most renowned archaeological sites in the world, as a heritage site, with its revival of dramas staged in antiquity—indicates a vastly different relationship between place and time than I have ever known living in the U.S. And while it has always been essential for me to think about a nation’s uses of the past, in my writing on Epidauros I focus more on time in illness and healing—on duration, on prophecy and prediction, on “time travel” of various kinds. And on the ways that a sense of impasse while living with a chronic condition may relate to impasse on a social or political scale. 

How I imagine a “new Asklepieion”: This book is my answer! Which is to say, within it you’ll find numerous imaginings of what a clinic that might heal body and soul (soma and psyche), based in attendance and rest, and/or dreams, poetry, stillness, might be today. Or where we might find that, or how we might create that. So you’ll read about poet and builder Robert Kocik’s architectural designs for a Prosody Building, inspired in part by the abaton (sacred dormitory) and theater at Epidauros. You’ll read about the revitalized clinic that physician Robert Gottesman imagines. About the initiatives of those in the medical humanities who seek to practice medicine as an art and radically change patients’ experience of clinical practice. 

The “new Asklepieion” may not look anything like a temple to a divinity; it might not resemble a spa or even function as a medical clinic, but it might, like the old ones, be made from “soft-handed craft” (Pindar), from the efficacy of words and gentle touch and the cultivation of body and soul through the treatments of art. It may not consist of architecture in a conventional sense, but offer a form, a practice. A collective effort.

A new Asklepieion is about trying something, making an attempt, an experiment, just as those who made the pilgrimage in antiquity did so because they had not been cured by conventional medicine. And it is also about empathy, about doing something for someone else, just as those too ill or weak to make the pilgrimage could still receive healing when someone made the journey on their behalf and slept in their place. The new Asklepieion, like the old, is based in attendance and  accompaniment. It offered me a way of traveling through certain questions and their relationship to change: What might creative experiments illuminate about attempts to heal? How do people create spaces of solidarity and care that cultivate the potential for change during perceived impasse? What might chronic illness teach us about healing even in impasse?

Dante Silva: You write of language as alive; not “defense nor apology” but as an active part of material and affective relations. Could you expand on those relations?

Eleni Stecopoulos: There’s a tension in Dreaming between language as a function—the utility or efficacy of language—and poetry’s defiance of language being instrumentalized—“neither defense nor apology.” Of course I’m interested in how poetry might be therapeutic, and so I write that I have competing desires. Often rhetoric and poetry are contrasted—rhetoric seen as purpose-driven, getting something done—but the Sophists knew better, because all language has visceral effects on readers/listeners. Language both embodies and treats our conditions. It can be both placebo and nocebo. I wanted to examine both the salutary and deleterious effects of language, or language as the pharmakon, which is a drug, poison and remedy at once. But the problem then becomes: If language is harmful, who determines that? And what should be done about it? Perhaps it should be censored, banned for the common good. We might even wish to stop it, like the speech of fascists, like stochastic terrorism. We might think that’s a good thing. But banning language we perceive as dangerous sets a precedent that ultimately hurts those who don’t have power. So a desire for the utility of language can put us in danger of a fundamentalism, and of course we live in fundamentalist times, when censorship and repression have skyrocketed in terrifying ways, beyond canceling public figures for their speech. Journalists and poets are assassinated for exposing crimes on a vast scale. Students are arrested, punished, or expelled for protesting their government’s sponsorship and enabling of genocide by an apartheid state.

Language is not separate from embodiment; it’s always situated and social. Living language, as Toni Morrison wrote, is dynamic. It’s the adaptability and innovation of oral tradition, of literature. Living language is a sign of our thriving and an instrument for it. Dead language is corporate speak and the police and the dead yet lethal metaphors of authoritarians and orthodox academic jargon and art institutions that would rather close down a show and silence the artists than receive their critique. And so, while I write about the healing of language, there remains the question of whether language can actually be damaged, whether it needs healing. And I’m of various minds about this. Because the same words have infinite meanings and are always being remade. It’s fundamentalists and fascists who try to lock down words and deploy them as weapons. So I have the arguments with myself in the book. 

Dante Silva: The poetics of healing becomes all the more salient in the pandemic, a planetary sickening. How does plague—ancient and modern—become part of those poetics? How did the pandemic shift your approach to the work?

Eleni Stecopoulos: Writing on plague wasn’t new to me: Antonin Artaud of course wrote a famous essay called “Theater and the Plague,” and he understood that a plague doesn’t come from the outside, despite the desire to attribute it to a pathogen or foreign source or scapegoat; it’s a reactivation of something that has lain dormant or been concealed in that society. And that’s a way to think about sickness too, not as invasion but susceptibility. The plague is a social miasma but one that leads to new forms. It’s always sociopathy; it erupts in opportunistic infections. Today we might say that a pandemic is always syndemic. As we saw with COVID-19, the plague clarifies the sickness of society and which bodies will be sacrificed, whose sacrifice society will sanction.

Early on in 2020 I felt that, like those suppliants in the dormitory one couldn’t enter unless initiated, I was in the dark. Like all of us, yes, I mean that I was living in uncertainty, but I also mean that I related to the incubants I was writing about, being in the dark in the sense that I sat with the restriction and isolation and grief for the world for a very long time. There was a cult where suppliants literally climbed down into a hole; I sort of felt like I was in a hole for essentially three years, and I was writing the book during that time. And I lived in a kind of lockdown far longer than the local authorities decreed. 

Being at home during COVID allowed me to go deeper into writing, into my meditations on those ancient scenes, to inhabit them almost like a way out or alternate reality, to “time travel” through writing. And to see how everywhere and in all times, people have to try things when they want to heal, whether it’s surgery or travel to a medical detective or an appeal to ancestors or descending into a hole to meet the god.

This time, this era, and my writing practice during it gave the book its form, something which had been in great flux for years before that.

I was also extremely angry, and I worked out my anger in the writing. I was enraged not just by those who denied that COVID-19 was real and by Christian nationalist and libertarian cruelty but by the betrayals of physicians who became irrational and succumbed to conspiracy theories. I’d long been skeptical about some so-called integrative or holistic practitioners’ claims and techniques, and “conspirituality” as everyone knows it now wasn’t new to me (I wrote about the confluence of alternative medicine, holism, paranoia, and pronoia in Visceral Poetics). But now the antagonism between Western and holistic or heterodox medicine, the facile invocation of “natural healing,” could lead to a lethal outcome. I had to take a hard look at the way I’d previously been willing to look past some of the performative nonsense of certain practitioners because I’d believed they also had valuable knowledge that could help me. I write in several places about thumos, which in Modern Greek means “anger,” but is an ancient and complex word with many, shifting meanings, including spiritedness and mental energy and motivation and desire. Thumos is also the root of the modern words for “remember” and “victim.” Grappling with thumos became a way to work out my rage and grief at the apathy and toxic self-interest characteristic of my country, which have contributed to over 1.2 million deaths we rarely hear about anymore.

During the height of the pandemic, writing on ordinary struggles of life also began to enter the book, like memories of our community organizing to help a friend with cancer, or how I’d taught multilingual students in a United States that was incarcerating and scapegoating immigrants. Small, ordinary moments entered in: feeding a friend, hanging out on the street in San Francisco.

Whereas before I’d felt almost burdened by a sense of responsibility to write well about people’s work and do justice to it, now those past collaborations and gatherings became my lifeblood. It was as if in remembering so that I could write these encounters, I was creating company for myself in my isolation, reminding myself of a social life in art that I’d once had and hoped to again. That these things could be possible again, that making art together in person would come again, even though there was no sign yet. Writing gave me purpose and kept me connected to my community, to friends—fellow poets, artists, mentors—who were both living and dead.

And I hoped more consciously that my book might also offer some sort of accompaniment to readers, in the way that I’d felt accompanied by all the people I write about—their art, their beauty, their ingenuity for survival. And this feeling helped me to not feel sick with anger at the injustice and lies. Maybe something I was writing could help a reader feel they weren’t alone. I wrote a sort of manifesto on sensitivity and I did it for others—but also for myself, to remind myself when ableism and hate, and the internalization of them, flare up.

I’ll also say this: When the National Theatre of Greece staged The Persians at Epidauros in July 2020 and livestreamed it to the world, it did feel like a triumph. Just as at ancient Epidauros, the suppliants’ attendance in the theater acted as a precursor to seeing the god in a dream, now this performance itself, soon after the lifting of the lockdown, seemed like a seed to sustain the dream of human endeavor, of art as therapeia. A dream that might show a way out. That took place while still in the dark.