This week, Chisel’s newest contributing writer A. A. Kostas interviews Deer Girl, a rising star of Substack’s poetry and fiction scene. With permission from Deer Girl, we’ve sprinkled some samples of poetry throughout this dialogue so readers can get a sense of her work for themselves.
Deer Girl (aka Holly Quilter) is one of Substack’s great success stories, a pseudonymous English poet and fiction writer with a loyal following who consistently shares haunting, elegiac pieces which leave me with the feeling of being plunged into another person’s dream – evocative, moving and yet gossamer thin, impossible to fully pin down. Her power is particularly tied to her capacity for paying attention, as well as her ability to splice moments and memories into particular frames, and arrange them for our consideration. The fact that she has been doing this week after week for the past 18 months indicates that she is either an incredibly inventive fantasist, or has a remarkably clear gift of attention. Her debut novella, Ice Flower, is now available for pre-order from Sigel Literary Press.
I’ve often caught myself wondering how exactly Deer Girl approaches her particular way of writing. What follows is our written back and forth over the past few weeks, a dialogue on ideas instead of a standard interview – call it a “text-based podcast.”
CHISEL (A. A. KOSTAS): Let’s get right into it. I’ve been reading your work since you joined Substack in early 2025, and I feel your obsessiveness come through every piece you write. There are so many particular details that you pluck out, individual people and places and a lot of specificity about nature and the weather. I mean, just to take a recent example, here are two sections from your poem “Starcross”:
II
Snow day, milk-teeth cold.
Exeter’s rooftops falling away.
At Dawlish we scrunched bread into our parka pockets and headed to the river. We counted the black swans, crumbs in our palms. One came too close. My sister’s hand caught my sleeve and tugged me back. Our heads sank towards each other on the train home. Station announcements broke through our dreams. Starcross, Starcross.
and:
IV
The fast train to Paddington passes.
(The swans don’t stir.)
Black feet churn the current that wants to take them backwards. Below, a woman is made of river. She breaks and gathers, breaks and gathers. Her sequins catch in the current and the swans move through her.
Black feet, and a whole life, underneath.
This poem feels very “Deer Girl” to me, as it gives us a sense of what is going on but retains that dreamlike state of noticing particulars without fully revealing the entire story.
So I guess what I’m calling “obsessiveness” might not be quite the right word ... Your focus on particulars is not really a form of neuroticism, but more something like the “radical attention” Julia Bell has written about in her book Radical Attention. Is that how you see your work and yourself?
DEER GIRL: Your introduction is very generous, and I’m glad this isn’t a podcast because I would be feeling too awkward to speak. I’m too British for compliments!
I think that it’s difficult to answer this question without mentioning illness. Before I developed ME/CFS, I seemed to absorb a lot of details whilst wishing I could notice less. I have always automatically absorbed atmosphere – which was painful sometimes as I would notice when somebody was sad or struggling, but pretending to be happy. I remember paying attention to things as if one day I would write about them, and then telling myself that this was stupid. Sometimes it actually took my attention off the task at hand! I’d focus on the texture of my manager’s face, and the expression of his eyes, rather than listening to what he was actually asking me to do ...
After illness, I lost the ability to pay attention completely. I couldn’t open my eyes and I couldn’t focus on a single object – the effort of it made my brain feel like it was burning. I was trained as a speech and language therapist and I’d studied biology – I tried to approach my situation like a puzzle. I knew attention underpinned comprehension and expressive language. Neurons that fire together, wire together – the brain grows and learns from what we repeatedly do. I tried to practise it here. I knew that if I wanted to speak again, to engage in conversation again, I needed to work on my attention.
So, for me, “radical attention” (I just looked up Bell’s definition: “to pay attention to detail, and give your deliberate attention to what is in front of you”) was a necessity. I studied the light shade for 30 seconds, at first, and then gradually increased the time and moved to other objects. After a few years of doing this, I was able to write again. I hadn’t realised that doing this would serve the writing, but I found that it did. I had seen a whole world in a light shade. I found that everything I put my attention on had acquired more depth and beauty because I was truly looking now.
So, I’d partly agree with you. I don’t think it’s neuroticism, and I recognise something of myself in Julia Bell’s description but, for me, “radical attention” was essential for healing. The fact that it helped my writing was a wonderful byproduct. I didn’t write very well before I was ill. Technically, I could write (Tessa Hadley told me I could write an elegant sentence). But I couldn’t write freely, because everything felt locked inside; I was too much of a perfectionist. Illness stripped that away too. As the character Lee says in East of Eden, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” I don’t always pay attention perfectly to my surroundings these days (the darn iPhone!), but I try.
“America”
Pyjamas under coats. Night driving,
heads tipped together, hair
curling where we’d slept.
Herring spine sky. Oiled light, gutted.
A dawn that would chill water.
We slept through it.
We had never left the low fences.
Sliced white bread. Two girls
tearing round in shopping trolleys.
Strange-tongued signposts,
vowels thorned and clicking.
CHISEL: That’s really interesting, and while I wouldn’t wish an illness like this on anyone, I am grateful you found a way to use the limitations of being so physically debilitated to serve your writing, and I do want to come back to the distinction between neuroticism, obsessiveness and attention later.
But first, if we can accept Bell’s definition of “radical attention” – which certainly feels “radical” in the age of mass distraction – what do you make of three other famous quotes about attention that get trotted out a lot: Mary Oliver’s “attention is the beginning of devotion”; and Simone Weil’s two interrelated quotes – “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer”? Do these resonate with you in your writing and in your life? Or do they mysticise attention too much?
DG: Yes, they all feel true to some extent. I don’t necessarily find that they mysticise attention too much, because I’ve always felt that ordinary life itself is inexplicable and extraordinary. Perhaps the language makes it sound supernatural, but I think it could also be that attention creates space for the mystery of ordinary existence to come forward. Though I prefer snails to grasshoppers. I could look at a snail for days.
I really love Iris Murdoch’s idea of unselfing, and of the “just and loving gaze.” She states that focusing our attention in this way helps ease the “fat, relentless ego.” Sometimes I think it’s appropriate that we all carry around “i” phones in our pockets, because technology has encouraged us to focus on ourselves; the i has become a capital I.
I believe that attention can be a form of love. In the first few months of training as a speech and language therapist, I would try and fill the silent gaps with conversation. I was working with people who were very ill. My lecturer said, “let the silence happen and pay attention.” Every week I would visit a man with aphasia and he would use a timer to brew his tea – at first it was the longest four minutes of my life. Brewing tea in silence. But without the disruption of chatter, I could watch the water change colour; see his eyes light up around the four-minute mark. I had forgotten myself. I was seeing him.
CHISEL: That’s really lovely, and yes I remember when you wrote about Murdoch’s “unselfing” and I was totally captured by the idea. I think I’m always searching for ways to get out of my head, out of my intensely egotistical thoughts which tend to centre around me and my feelings. So whether that’s by way of religious or spiritual practices or just actually looking at someone or something and giving yourself over to what you are beholding, I think it’s incredibly healthy. Especially, as you say, in our age of the supreme “I.”
Returning to the idea of obsessiveness vs. attentiveness: a few months ago, Sherry Ning wrote a soaring essay for Chisel praising the concept of obsession, claiming:
“Obsession, though commonly associated with the tortured artist or the fanatic, is actually the precondition for all craft.”
In essence, Ning argues that the very modern concept of having “balance” is too lukewarm for the actual greatness an artist should be striving for, and she lists Kafka, Picasso, Bourdain and Beethoven (notably, all men) as examples. This proved to be rather controversial, with some concerned this approach glorifies unhealthy behaviours by the artist who gives into their obsession.
What do you think? Your writing – in terms of its intense focus on particular moments and places, and in terms of the sheer volume of work that you share – seems to have an undercurrent of obsessiveness. Or is it important to draw a distinction between becoming obsessed with something and simply paying attention to it?
DG: I think I have to answer this honestly, and I don’t like the answer. I’ve always been someone who hates anything having control over me. At university I started smoking roll-up cigarettes (this was around the time I started reading Simone de Beauvoir – I thought I was very French and existential!). I’d smoke half a cigarette every other day, and when I found that I was enjoying it too much, I quit. I quit sugar cold turkey and my body shook for days. I like my mind to feel free. But sometimes I find myself obsessed with writing; sometimes it feels like my body takes over and writes without my consent.
And this is something I have to be mindful of, because I have a chronic illness so it’s important for me to be in my body and to take care of my body. Last night I was resting and an image came to me, and I had found a way into a story that I had been trying to tell for years. I had to write it down. I still think that this was an act of love; the people the story was based on had been so forgotten by the world. I had been looking for a way to tell their story for a long time, without making my own experience the centre of it. But it was an obsessive act, too, because I pushed past the limits of my own body to create it. Afterwards, it felt like coming out of a trance.
Whether or not obsession is also an act of “radical attention” and ego reduction depends on the object and purpose of the obsession. If you are primarily obsessed with writing because you want to make it as a writer, then that probably isn’t an act of unselfing.
Ning states that obsession will “tip your life out of balance in the most chaotic yet exuberant way possible,” but I find what might be true for able-bodied people is not always true for those who live with chronic illness. Obsession can leave me in pain and unable to function. So I try to manage it. I do need to meditate and drink eight glasses of mineral water. I let submission opportunities slide by. I interrogate myself to check my motives. But the obsessive urges come like waves, and I still give in to those. And the thing is I know, on a very fundamental level, that I will give in to them because writing – unlike sugar and smoking – feels too sacred to me to give up.
I see the tree, the hands.
My father carrying me across the wet grass,
who doesn’t do that anymore,
my mother peeling the pear in one motion,
who still sometimes peels pears that way.
CHISEL: I appreciate the honesty, and I think I basically agree with where you’re coming from. The reality for most of us is there are other priorities which we have to negotiate when it comes to trying to create something great.
But what you mentioned just there, about writing feeling “too sacred” to give up, is an interesting one to me. I do see how you treat the act of writing as something devotional and mysterious, something holy to be approached with due reverence. Why does writing feel so important to you in this way? I have recently been openly asking for people to tell me why they write instead of opting for a different form of communication. You and I could be making podcasts or videos, and probably find a larger audience that way. So why writing and reading?
DG: I love the process of imagination involved in writing. Even if I’m writing about something heavy, like grief, it’s a playful experience too – I’m juxtaposing images, choosing words, circling ideas. Devotion can take the form of play.
I think writing can be playful and obsessive at the same time. Look at how obsessive children can be over their games. We were immersed in them; outside ourselves. When I look at your art poems, in particular, there’s something hugely playful about them, and I wonder whether the process is pleasure or painstaking, or both.
The process of imagination is what I love about reading, too. You’re given something by a writer, but you have to meet them halfway. You participate in creating the images and the experiences. Of course videos and podcasts can also be hugely playful, but they require a kind of social performance that hinders my imaginative absorption. Writing allows me to step out of the way. If I were on a video or a podcast, I would be the centre of attention, having an experience in real time. Writing allows me to step back from experience, to play with it, rearrange it, and make meaning from it.
I also think I gravitated to writing in particular partly because of the encouragement I received from teachers, even when I was 6 years old, lugging a plaster of Paris deer hoof print around, and writing rambling stories about roe deer (hence the nickname). I remember something Tessa Hadley said to me when she was handing back an essay that had been marked blind. She told me she’d been shocked when she discovered who had written it: “I had not imagined it was you. You said nothing all term. You were like a ghost.” So, to answer your question more directly – writing just feels like my natural medium. I don’t think I would make a very good video presenter – not unless someone wants to watch an hour of silence. That said, I was always free and easy with performing when I could have a costume and play a character. Let me hide myself and I will show you who I am.
“Voyeur”
I had a white bear named Snow. I’d never seen snow. When I was five years old, I woke up to white glass and a hill of ice in the background. I slipped down it in my patent school shoes. Mum dropped her leather jacket over my shoulders, and on the walk home, I gazed at my new shape in the shop windows. I took Snow outside to see the snow. His fur turned arctic. I held him to my chest and flooded him back to mammal warmth.
CHISEL: I like this reminder that true play is obsessive, that there isn’t an aloofness to play, just as there isn’t an aloofness to truly paying attention to the people and world around us. You have helped tie a few key things together for me regarding attention, devotion, play and obsession within the sphere of poetry and writing more generally.
Anything else you’d like to add?
DG: Only to say thank you for having me, and for asking such interesting questions – I was so glued to the screen that it completely destroyed my attention span ...
