Helena Pantsis (she/they) explains how their surrealist writing in Mother Salad exposes and embodies the crushing pressure on women to ‘mother’. UWA Publishing intern Naomi Becker interviews Helena about her use of horror to capture life's fears, such as mortality, aging, and purpose. Helena also responds by sharing vulnerable insights into how the short-fiction collection was partly inspired by her witnessing initially non-conforming women give in to societal pressures. This discussion addresses her masterful use of absurdism to explore the stigmatised struggles women experience.
Naomi Becker: I understand that several of the stories appeared in past literary magazines and journals, and most others were created for this immersive novel. What inspired you to craft this particular collection? What is the story behind the title choice, Mother Salad?
Helena Pantsis: I’m at a point in my life where it feels like there is a fork in the road and two paths to consider—the one ‘less mother’ and the one more so. This theme had started to emerge in much of my work, particularly as the women around me, even the most independent and non-conformist types once upon a time, all began to merge into one. They asked about the same things (dating, marriage, children) and sought out those things themselves. They all became mothers, and not even literally, in the sense of birthing or raising children, but in the sense that they accepted their forced fates as nurturers, carers, feeders, cleaners, incubators, therapists, etc. etc. It irked me, the way they let parts of themselves be eaten by their loved ones, deconstructed and torn up. So when I noticed the type of works that I was creating, I thought: maybe there’s something more to this, something I want to explore, and so I began to plan for a self-contained collection.
In terms of the title, as you’ll probably be aware from the collection, I have a real fascination with devouring and being devoured, and I also really wanted to portray woman as something that is pieced apart and tossed about, particularly in the role of mother. I thought that Mother Salad had an interesting ring to it—though, frankly, I struggle with titling my works and wasn’t sure it would stick. People tended to react positively to it though, intrigued by it, so I figured it was fitting for the work it set out to describe.
Naomi: Many of these stories explore the messiness, struggles, and societal pressures of mother-child dynamics. What inspired you to dissect the underbelly of close and estranged mother-child dynamics?
Helena: Mainly because I started to really feel those pressures weighing down on me. As many other girls can likely relate to, motherhood has been pushed on me since I was a child, forced to step into the position through the games I played, with the friends I made, and even as a sibling. It wasn’t until I got older and realised the difference between the way my male counterparts were treated and raised that I began to force a shift within myself and those around me. I got angry, and I’ve been angered by it every time I’ve seen it since.
It also comes from my own metamorphosis as of late, rising out of young adulthood into myself, becoming my own mother as she becomes hers—in ways we find pride in and also in ways we want to defy. It’s such a pivotal relationship in my life that it just began to seep into everything I wrote and I wanted to see how that developed.
Naomi: Your stories have a baseline of mundane, contemporary life, then you ignite them with surrealism, absurdity and/or horror. What draws you to that combination of the mundane and the surreal in this context? What are your strategies when blurring the boundary between the two worlds?
Helena: I think that the mundane is kind of the most horrific thing of all. Really, nothing scares me more than the prospect of time passing, and the body aging, and the people I love dying, and the loss of my own ambition over time. I use surrealism to almost, in my own mind, make the horrors less horrific. It would be such a relief to see the physical manifestations of grief and stress in an animal transformation or in the body unspooling or in the devouring of one’s own young. In this way, absurdism becomes a bit of a catharsis, a bit of distance too, to allow us to immerse ourselves in the core of a story without being bogged down by the overt constant death, isolation, and self-destruction that we are so familiar with in our own lives.
Speculative fiction is also just a fantastic means of making tangible the feelings that can be so complicated to share in the scope of the known world. Often I will associate a feeling with an act that a story builds around, and it just feels organic to take that experience beyond its realistic ending point, to see where it could go in a world with unknown limits. In terms of process, I don’t write like it’s a different world; I simply write what I know, and then what I don’t. It’s rare that a story will unfold in a way that doesn’t fit its own narrative.
Naomi: Fractured identities and relationships are most often represented by deconstructing human anatomy. Could you explain the creative process and the main reasons for this method?
Helena: My own experiences with grief and conflict tend to manifest very somatically. I am constantly falling apart in different ways—in my gut, skin, ovaries, hands, shoulders—and I have lived with a lot of anxiety my whole life. It feels so real to me to parallel the frantic, disintegrating identity of womanhood with literal unravelling. It is so visceral. And that’s what I want my works to be, something that crawls along your skin as you read, something that puts a pit in your gut or itches the undersides of your feet.
I really believe that there are parts of ourselves and the people we interact with that are embedded within us, physically. Sometimes you can feel your stomach churn when you talk about an ex, or your heart throbbing when you consider someone you love. The mind and the body are intrinsically intertwined, so an unspooling mind can’t help but tear its own body up with it. When I write I’m trying to conjure up descriptions that bring those feelings back to me when I return to the work as a reader. In a way it’s an attempt to make the reader an active participant in the piece, not just a bystander.
Naomi: There is a universal experience where the mother doesn’t want the child to grow up, and the child yearns to grow. Last Birthday, The uncovers an angle without confrontation or complications. What led you to this version that lacks direct confrontation? How did you reach the message that lack of growth causes rot?
Helena: This is a major anxiety I have always had, this idea of inevitable growth and change contrasted with the refusal to transform, the overwhelming fear of becoming something else. Since I was a kid, I was hyperaware of my parents being older than my friends’ parents, and I feared their death before I really understood what that even meant. I wanted to stay young for them, so they could be young too. Last Birthday, The explores these feelings, of inheriting that anxiety of aging—because it isn’t a malicious act, to want a child to stay a child, but even if nothing changes, nothing can stay the same.
You don’t hear as much about it, but one of the ways I consume stories is through video games, by playing myself or by watching others play on YouTube. I was watching a playthrough of Amanda the Adventurer, about a girl whose body and mind are trapped and transported into a Dora the Explorer-type VHS show, while her body is held in a chamber elsewhere. Interacting with the viewer, she asks if they think everything rots, revealing then that she “feels [herself] rotting … but it feels far away”. The line stuck with me, particularly coming from a child’s voice, spawning the basis for this narrative. The inevitability of it was the most haunting part, and I wanted to explore the rot rather than that fighting of time that so many other stories detail so well.
Naomi: Other concepts remastered are life, death and the in-between (undead), with the cryogenically frozen mother, artificial boy, zombie daughter, and the rotting daughter. How did you connect elements of the in-between and social relationships?
Helena: Mother Salad, even from its title, seeks to learn what it is to be in-between. It’s at the core of every story, I think, the pull in separate directions; the want versus the need, the obligation versus the longing, the facade versus the reality. I feel it’s very emblematic of womanhood, to never quite be a single, whole thing, and also of being a child, always a baby in your parent’s eyes while desperately trying to become yourself. In our connections with others we are constantly trying to be our best versions, or the version we think the other person wants, or a version of ourselves that matches what we feel to be true inside. It’s an impossible balance to achieve, to be real and be what is expected, and when you let yourself get caught up in it, you turn out zombie, or robot, or frozen in the end.
Naomi: Scenes in every short story are uniquely captivating with their vigour and spirit. What are your strategies for constructing these immersive scenes? How did you develop your unique writing style?
Helena: Short stories are one of those forms that are made for capturing voice, I feel. And that’s exactly how I write them, to be read aloud, told in the way I would tell them if we were sitting together, one-on-one. One thing I do feel I have achieved in my work is refining my voice to something very specific—whether people enjoy it or are drawn to it is another thing, but at the end of the day I think if you read my work somewhere, you’ll be able to know it was from me.
I developed the style, as we all do, from finding what I liked to read, refusing to finish the books that offered me nothing, and through endless hours of writing. By deconstructing what it is I enjoy about my own work and others’, I have been able to decide what I want to pursue and what I want to repeat. It basically took me learning the rules of writing and then throwing it all out to suit my craft. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely important to have all the fundamentals, but if you let those rules restrict you it makes the art a chore. I want writing to always feel fun, like a challenge, that’s why I play with genre and form and style; I think creativity thrives when it is treated with the same rules as play.
About the author
Helena Pantsis (she/they) is a writer, editor and aspiring artist based in Victoria. Their work strives to break boundaries and embraces a deeply experimental side of speculative fiction. Former co-editor at the literary journal, Going Down Swinging, Helena has published several works of humour and horror, including her novel, Glutt (2024), and multiple poems, comics, and micro fictions in literary magazines, such as New Delta Review, Cordite Poetry Review and Abandon Journal.
About the Interviewer
Naomi Becker is an upcoming postgraduate from Curtin University, finishing her Master’s in Publishing and Professional Writing. A former member of Elephant Page Publishing, she is an aspiring editor and writer.