Mary Mackey and I belong to a San Francisco Bay Area women authors’ collective known as WOMBA, and I’ve had the pleasure of doing a reading from our novels together. She’s authored 13 novels and 6 poetry collections, and is the recipient of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. I’m delighted to host her here just as her first novel, Immersion, has been brought back into print after 38 years. She has some lovely thoughts on the intersection of poetry and the novel that I think will be inspiring for both poets and fiction writers. Enjoy! – Meg
In the spring of 1972, Alta Gerrey’s legendary Shameless Hussy Press published my first novel, Immersion, which turns out to have been the first novel published by a Second Wave feminist press, and possibly the first eco-feminist novel ever published. Right now I’m celebrating the re-publication of Immersion which has just been released as an e-book and in hard copy after being out of print for 38 years.
Immersion is a poetic novel; in fact, you might say it was not only my first novel; it was also my first published collection of prose poems. It’s short—only 130 pages—set in the tropics and written in a style filled with images of the rainforests of Costa Rica before they were logged for lumber and charcoal. Unlike my collections of poetry, Immersion has a plot, one that involves passion, adultery, and murder in a remote jungle field station, but it’s not a mystery novel in the ordinary sense of the word. In it, I explored the theme of the spiritual and physical union of all living things by contrasting the attitude of Mark, a tropical biologist who treats the animals of the forest as specimens to be killed and stuffed, with the attitude of Kirsten his wife who feels as if she is shedding her physical body and becoming one with the plants and animals that surround her.
In the following excerpt from Immersion, the rainforest itself becomes a living being or, as I would later describe it, a great Goddess who brings forth all life: The air, cooling slightly, becomes dense, solvent, partially opaque . . . . Caught in the shadow of the forest, the cabin blends into the trees—a dark, flat rectangle that dilates slowly, filling the spaces between the trunks. . . . On the other side of the hill (invisible, unobserved), the river rises above its banks; fused with the bridge, it forms an elemental bond, a single, organic particle. Earth, air, water. The final synthesis takes place in total darkness, silently, by degrees.
It’s not surprising that Immersion is a poetic novel. I had been writing poetry for a good ten years before I got up the courage to write a novel. But having once having had a taste of novel writing, I was hooked. Over the years, I wrote twelve more novels, many of which centered around the theme of the union of all living things and the Earth as a living being. The most well-known of these is The Year The Horses Came, the first book in a trilogy of novels which recreates the Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe using a straightforward, style and a plot filled with adventure, love, and magic. But even in The Year The Horses Came, I couldn’t resist poetry. Each chapter of the novel begins with a poem supposedly written by poets who lived 6000 years ago, but which were actually written by me as I sat at my computer staring out the window at my lemon tree.
For years after the publication of Immersion, I wrote novels almost exclusively, and many of them did quite well, making The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists and bringing me mail from readers all over the world. I’ve always enjoyed telling a good story, and I loved the scope that novels offered me, but always in the back of my mind the word “poetry” kept repeating itself like the name of a place where you had once found love and were happy.
In 2000, I decided it was time to listen to that voice. By that time, almost everyone had forgotten that I had once been a poet, and I wasn’t sure if I still knew how to create something less than 350 pages long. Fortunately, it turned out that writing poetry is like tying your shoes: you never forget how to do it.
During a residency at a writers’ colony, I was able to retool my poetry-writing skills which had become rusty over the years. Every day, I wrote a poem. As you might expect, some weren’t very good; but gradually I found my voice again, and the poems became better. A few even came out whole, written in one sitting as if they had been waiting for years to be committed to the page.
After that, I didn’t stop writing novels, but during those times when my novels were being edited or—since I always write poetry by hand—on those occasions when I went on vacations without taking my computer, I kept on writing poems. In 2006, Marsh Hawk press published these new poems in Breaking The Fever, the first collection of my poetry to appear in twenty years.
Since the spring of 2000, I have never stopped writing poetry. I love the intoxication, the beauty, the mystery of it. I love how poetry centers me and brings me in touch with the deepest parts of my imagination and creativity.
In 2011, March Hawk published Sugar Zone which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. As I proofread the manuscript of Sugar Zone, I realized that I had come full circle. Here in these poems were the same tropical rainforests I had described in Immersion, the same feeling of the Earth as a great living being, the same theme of the oneness of all living things. Here too were the same fears that I had dealt with so many years ago in my first novel only now those fears had names: extinction, climate change, the destruction of the rainforest, mourning for the loss of the beauty of wild places.
As I moved through Sugar Zone poem by poem, changing a word here and a comma there, I had a moment of quiet revelation. It became clear to me that I had never given up hoping we could save those great tropical forests I had first seen so many years ago, and that fueled by this hope, I had never stopped writing about them. – Mary
