“This pamphlet is my stigmata:” An Interview with Lesbian Poet and Artist Danielle Wilde about “Saint Joan of BFD”

Wilde during her performance of the “Saint Joan of BFD” sonnet cycle. Photo by Amy Xu. 

By EMMA CIESLIK February 18, 2025

This past February 8th, Yorkshire lesbian poet Danielle Wilde performed her sonnet cycle  “Saint Joan of BFD” (Wild Pansy Press, 2025) at Holy Trinity Church in Islington, London. The event, hosted by the Florence Trust and The Writers’ Room, featured Wilde alongside artist and curator Hang Zhang. In the early hours of the evening, The Writers’ Room welcomed visitors into Danielle’s Open Studio where they could see her collection of teen magazines from the 1990s. She used some visuals from these same magazines in her pamphlet “Saint Joan of BFD,” which juxtapose content marketed to young school girls and the teenage Lady of Orleans. 

Visitors were also able to view a deconstructed version of this pamphlet, told through the 14 Stations of the Cross, hung underneath gilded paintings of Jesus’s crucifixion, and speak with the artist, who came to collage as a visual form of poetry. Raised in the Catholic school system, Wilde spoke about growing up as a lesbian--and connecting with crossdressing, queer icon St. Joan of Arc, and as the sun fell, performed her sonnet cycle standing on a scaffold  decorated with a cross as large as she is, lit in bright blue lights. 

Standing amid the rafters of Holy Trinity, her words and collages echoed centuries-old explorations and struggles of faith, queerness, and womanhood. After the event, I sat down with Wilde for an interview about her own journey and what St. Joan has in common with Catholic school girls, especially queer ones, in 1990s England. The interview explored her working class upbringing, queer hauntology from her previous pamphlet Deep North (FEM Press, 2024), growing up amid Section 28, and patriarchal violence throughout Catholic histories. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Emma Cieslik: When did you first start creating art and specifically pamphlets?

Danielle Wilde: I’ve always written poetry. It’s not something that was really in our home or in our house. I’m from a very working class background. None of my family are like book people, but they were very keen on my education. My granddad taught me to read really young and my grandma had a library card, so books were a really important part of my private life I was the first person in my family to go to university. I actually work for the NHS. I’m an Occupational Therapist, but I always written for myself and my own pleasure and written because I have a lot of stuff that I want to get out on my page, and then through a series of just mad coincidences, a few years ago, my writing appeared on the desk of Caleb Femi. 

He really encouraged me, and I’ve never had someone give me the permission to really value my art and even dare to call myself a poet or a writer.  That was never an avenue available to someone like me. I performed with him a bunch of times at various poetry shows, and then last year, I sort of went out on my own a little bit and made my first pamphlets in response to having so many people come up to me wanting to read the set I just performed. 

Cieslik: You mentioned earlier your previous pamphlet “Deep North,” exploring this queer hauntology of the North. What inspired the shift to “St. Joan of BFD?”

Wilde: Well, I kind of see it as part of the same aesthetic. I coined the term “queer hauntology” to describe not just the haunted landscape of the North and Yorkshire specifically--haunted by the spectres of social and economic decline, which is so palpable in the North of England but the additional supenature of being a queer person in that environment.

By the time I came out in 2001, there was this cultural consensus that it’s no longer acceptable to completely cast somebody out and so there was this veneer of acceptability in the Northern towns, in Bradford and Hull where I was from, so I thought I had been accepted, but actually, the promise of a “normal life” was utterly and tragically inaccessible to me. I was haunted by that, and I was the haunting of that, so Deep North was about my realization that the place where I am from was not really capable of holding me in my fullness. 

I would say that Deep North probably covers my twenties. “St. Joan of BFD” covers my school years, and I guess I’m trying to investigate how much of this queer hauntology arises from  the land, the community, how much is found in what we’re served in terms of the culture and the cultural artifacts and that ranges from everything from the Bible through to these awful 90s teen magazines, what was on television, who was in the charts, livestock plumped for  the world of compulsory heterosexuality in which we all grew up. 

St Joan of Arc Catholic Church and School  a collage from “St. Joan of BFD.” Photo by Danielle Wilde. 

Cieslik: How is “St. Joan of BFD ” and is St. Joan connected to your own personal experiences in your school years as a lesbian? Were you raised in these Catholic spaces?

Wilde: My parents were not religious at all, but my mom’s side of the family are Italian, and so they are religious, and I was educated in the Catholic school system, and I think it really kind of freaked my family out because I was really into it. I was really obsessed with the whole aesthetics of it. I loved the discordant, melancholic organ music, smokey incense, Latin chanting, but I think what became a problem for me is the notion of suffering as something holy and venerable. I think as somebody who grew up very different and who had quite a difficult childhood, I found a home in the Church, but unfortunately in that place, I felt like I could only access it if I leaned into my own suffering and it fostered a kind of righteous masochism that really harmed me.

Interestingly within Catholic schooling, I knew I was a lesbian from the age of 8 or 9. I never--and a lot of people I speak to who had similar experiences don’t relate to this at all, I actually never had any kind of problem accommodating my own sexuality within my own belief system because I read the scriptures. I went to school in the era of Section 28, so we got all the Fire and Brimstone, Sodom and Gomorrah, and on the surface, I don’t think it bothered me. Read the New Testament--Jesus was not a conservative. He loved the freaks and the geeks.

Cieslik: What you said resonates with me so deeply, and I think it is what I loved about this pamphlet. I was raised in this very purity culture-type environment of the early 2000s, where this self policing and this exaltation of suffering manifested in really harmful ways for me. I’m really grateful you shared it in this pamphlet. 

Wilde: Yes, this pamphlet is like my stigmata. 

Cieslik: I am also deeply connected with St. Joan as someone raised in the system who knew I was inherently different but didn’t have the wording for what it looked like. Why does your pamphlet focus on her? What drew you to St. Joan and situated in St. Joan in Bradford?

Wilde: From a class point of view I loved the fact that this peasant, this illiterate teenager, literally rocked the foundations of the institutions in which she found herself.  She is the most documented peasant in history, utterly peerless for her time but I wasnt interested in the facts, I was interested in her legend, the mythology of Joan of Arc.  The same Church that canonised her (not until 1920) burned her at the stake! So I’m interested in how a person’s memory becomes appropriated/regenerated after the fact and how that serves the individuals/ institutions that engage in this rewriting of history. 

I applied that to myself as this young queer person and the way that I was treated and the way that people received me It’s none of my business what people think of me, but I’m interested politically in what the memory of me looks like andhow it has been sanitised/appropriated to reconcile it within the narrative of these heterosexual females. 

Graveyard Girls, a collage from “St. Joan of BFD.” Photo by Danielle Wilde.

Cieslik: I return to the idea of memory making--thinking critically about St. Joan and your own experiences as a Catholic schoolgirl. You describe this violence committed by the Catholic Church against Joan during her life, in her death and after, how is the violence committed against her similar or the same committed against that of queer young women but also Catholic schoolgirls as a whole?

Wilde: my work is concerned with what is considered canonical and what is not, and  the reason the Church flipped about Joan is that the story she was telling, was not her story to tell it wasn’t in their books, and what I was saying as a queer person, in fact I wasn’t saying it, I was just embodying it, I was non-canonical and oppressed for that reason. 

When Joan went into battle, she didn’t carry a sword. She rode out onto the field holding onlyher banner. What I find really sad is that people think of Joan of Arc and they think she’s this warrior, this soldier.  No,she went there as a mascot. She was a symbol even then. I resonate with that. I’ve been a symbol. I am a symbol to some people, and it’s a prison. The saddest part of the Joan of Arc story is that after all of her victories, King Charles VII just had her living in his court as one of his curiosities. That is why she went out on that mission where she knew she was going to get captured. She chose death rather than being someone’s token. 

Diet Coke, a collage from “St. Joan of BFD .” Photo by Danielle Wilde. 

Similarly, in the 1990s, the  teen cultural landscape was dominated by magazines that were marketed at 13 year olds that used to contain features like sex positions of the fortnight. It had extremely sexualized content. Even the boyband culture, it’s the pipeline of schoolgirl to wife to mother and that is what we were being presented with. In the midst of all of that, I have never received as much sexual attention from men as I did as a child in my school uniform.  Gross 

Cieslik: What led you to utilize sonnets and collage as your storytelling mediums? Why include these pieces of 90s ephemera alongside Catholic material culture?

Wilde: I’ve never written sonnets before, but when I look at sonnets, there’s a violence to them. It’s a visceral technology because it’s so constrained, so constricted. The form really reflects what I’m trying to say about the Catholic schooling system, which is that you get all this life and you try to squeeze it down into a square. So there’s something political about that andI think poetry is a form of collage. I think it’s about taking images that don’t always rub alongside one another and placing them in the page with someone to find a new image. 

After I left Bradford, I went off the rails and was in the Punk scene in Hull, where collage was a key aesthetic (Crass, Gee Vaucher)   Collage is democratic, DIY, it’s made to look good photocopied. I’ve written acollection of poetry called North Sea Scrolls, in which  I’ve rewritten the whole Bible, and I started making this collage work to go with that because the family bible we had was “illuminated”; between every book  you’d find a beautiful gold leaf image. I wanted to have physical imagery throughout my poetry.

Bradford Riots , a collage from “St. Joan of BFD.” Photo by Danielle Wilde. 

Although “St. Joan of BFD” was a one-night performance this past Saturday, people can purchase copies of the pamphlet through Wild Pansy Press.  WM