Modifying the Badger

Transforming a badger into a raccoon demands a Dremel tool and at least two types of saws. For my second class at Prey Taxidermy—the studio in downtown Los Angeles run by the taxidermist and former Disney employee Allis Markham—I’d signed up for the Sunday workshop called Mammal Shoulder Mounts. Because my creature’s hide belonged to an older male raccoon—a boar—I needed to modify a cast polyurethane badger form to fit the skin, since a standard raccoon form would be too small for my imposing specimen. The goal of the course was to “focus on the intricacies of mammal faces” and involved the arrangement of skinned and tanned hides over commercial taxidermy forms to create busts known as “shoulder mounts.” I’d chosen a raccoon instead of a coyote since the grizzled canines reminded me of underfed German shepherds. I admired a previously mounted raccoon hanging on the wall near the studio’s sink for its subversive whimsy: it was as if someone considered the scrappy mammal a noble trophy, a hunter’s graceful whitetail stag. Instead, the animal, peering down from a wooden wall plaque through its black bandit’s mask, challenged viewers to contemplate the artfulness of California roadkill or the charm of garbage can invaders exterminated by Salt Lake City’s Animal Services.

Tim Bovard, the head taxidermist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was guest teaching the mammal course at Allis’s studio. He asked the eight students to draw numbers from a bowl so we could take turns picking our hides. (Upon registration online, we’d been asked to check a box marked “Coyote” or “Raccoon” to reserve our preferred species.) Similarly to my first taxidermy course at Prey, a weekend workshop called Birds 101, in which only one of ten students was male, the participants in Mammal Shoulder Mounts were all women: an amateur boxer in her twenties who specialized in anthropomorphic mice, a middle-aged hippie with a brass peace sign belt buckle, a mother and daughter duo from Montana, a blue-haired thirtysomething, a wisecracking Southerner, a quiet San Francisco barista, and a woman with tattooed arms and what appeared to be collagen-injected lips and huge silicone boobs I kept accidentally staring at (she’d gotten the only available bobcat). Tim passed a bowl around the room, and I drew a folded slip of paper marked with the number one, which meant I got first dibs on the raccoon hides. The pelts resembled a stash of hand puppets from someone’s nightmare: eyeless raccoons and coyotes with scabrous lids, slack mouths, and lips like the jagged hems of gnawed-on leather gloves. Because Tim had mentioned that the person who chose the large boar raccoon would need to modify a badger form to fit the skin, I immediately seized the hole-filled hide, its yellowed fur streaked with white. I liked the idea of my animal being a shapeshifter.

A few months ago, my former poetry mentor Lee visited my husband David and me in Venice, California. We’d invited him to give a reading at our university in celebration of his new book. After Lee finished his last poem and the audience clapped, students began raising their hands. One woman asked Lee’s advice for writers who have difficultly writing about themselves. “That’s a rare problem!” Lee joked from the podium, removing his teal-rimmed reading glasses and then pushing them back up his nose. “There is no one self,” he continued, now serious. “We’re always inventing ourselves in poems, so to write about the self is to write about multiple selves. The self is malleable.”

For years Lee dissuaded me from writing autobiographically. He encouraged me to model my work after that of his favorite contemporary poet, Norman Dubie, a writer who often assumes the voices of historical figures or invented characters in the form of the dramatic monologue. Dubie might speak through the mask of an escaped slave, a young woman in a leper colony, or an insomniac racecar driver. The reason why Lee asks young poets to...