An Interview with Marly Youmans
Fairy Tales, Form, Thin Places, Inspiration, and Seren of the Wildwood
The following interview was conducted via email over the first few days of September, 2024.
Marly Youmans has written novels about the Civil War, Puritan New England, an orphanage in Depression-era Georgia, and the sword-and-sorcery pioneer Robert Howard (of Conan and Solomon Kane fame). She has written Lovecraftian short stories, lyric poetry, and a verse novel, Thaliad, about children trying to renew society after an apocalyptic event. Her most recent book publication is Seren of the Wildwood, a verse tale published by Wiseblood Books and, like many of her works, strikingly illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. In it, a malign entity lures a young woman away from her grief-haunted home into an enchanted wood, where she first suffers tragedy and then seeks healing. Youmans’s range as a writer is truly remarkable, but there are also threads running throughout her body of work: immersive evocations of place, archetypal imagery, coming-of-age and quest narratives, liminal spaces, the fantastic. Kelly Cherry once said, “Marly Youmans is brilliant, perhaps a genius.” I agree. It is an honor to interview her for New Verse Review.
Steven Knepper for NVR: Thank you, Marly, for serving as a New Verse Review advisory editor and for agreeing to this interview. Thanks, too, for the remarkable work you’ve shared with readers over the years. Most of my questions will focus on your book-length verse tale Seren of the Wildwood. I’d like to start with a couple of questions, though, about your formation as a reader and a writer.
Could you tell us about a couple of books, stories, or poems that you read as a child that have had a lasting influence on you? Do you see their influence showing up in your writing?
Marly Youmans: My mother was an academic librarian and my father an analytical chemist who wrote poetry and fiction, and so libraries were a constant in my life. I wasn’t allowed the bookish equivalent of processed food when it came to books, and the child-me was a crazily obsessive reader, the kind who reads in the tub and under the covers with a flashlight and under a desk at school.
When four or five, I was given hardcovers of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass by friends of my parents. I would reread them whenever I ran out of library books—I suppose they were read to me at first—and I’m not sure they seemed so very different from my life in lush, magical Louisiana. I have seen traces of them in my stories and poems. (The Book of the Red King, for example…) I’ve long delighted in fairy and folk tales and myths, and early on owned an over-sized The Snow Queen and Other Tales, a Golden Book collection of tales translated by Marie Ponsot and illustrated by Adrienne Segur (her pretty heroes and heroines must have been eating arsenic to gain such snowy complexions!) And yes, I’ve seen their mark on my fiction and poems as well; interestingly, Terri Windling has talked about the many women writers who owned and loved those books as children and think them an influence. Another book that was a constant reread was Untermeyer’s The Golden Treasury of Poetry, a pleasantly fat anthology with many good poems (Dickinson, Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Coleridge, Millay, Blake, Bishop, Vaughan, Herbert, Swenson, Tennyson, etc.) and Joan Walsh Anglund illustrations.
I have to credit my mother with introducing me to many writers—George MacDonald was a favorite—and when we moved to North Carolina, I spent every afternoon after school browsing the stacks at Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library. Browsing seems to be a lost art in our digital days, but I remember the thrill of discovering books like Hudson’s Far Away and Long Ago or the poems of Randall Jarrell or Mooney’s work with the Cherokee, who lived in the Qualla Boundary a few miles away from us. The librarians of that era conspired with my passion to read and even let me rummage through archival materials, now off-limits to teenage girls, from that weird, important figure, Horace Kephart.
NVR: You studied writing and literature in some storied English departments, including at Hollins University (just down Interstate 81 from me on the north side of Roanoke, Virginia), Brown University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Who were some of your writing mentors and what were the most important lessons you learned from them?
MY: At Hollins (Hollins College back then), I had—as many did, over the years—a big, adoring admiration for R. H. W. Dillard. He simply made many events and ideas appear vividly present and was a teacher of seemingly boundless energies, enthusiasm, humor, and knowledge. He made students feel more alive, and that is a matchless thing for a young writer. I remember feeling ridiculously happy when Annie Dillard wrote in my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that I was Richard’s favorite student. Ah, youth…
I went on to grad school at a rather young age, as I started college at 17 and then graduated a year early, and I would have gotten more out of the experience had I waited. Or perhaps I might not have gone at all. One stray thing sticks out at me from my two years at Brown: poet Michael Harper told me that I had a rare aptitude for formal structures and rhyme. That remark didn’t sink in as important for some years, alas.
The most influential person for me at Chapel Hill was the late and frankly great Louis D. Rubin, Jr., chaired professor, productive writer, and founder of Algonquin Books. I never took a class with him, but I hung out in his office to chat, and later I was in his NEH summer seminar and also visited with him many times at his house on Gimghoul. He was the very best sort of Southern pipe-smoking curmudgeon. One day, he asked to see a poetry manuscript, and then promptly sent it off to LSU with a letter—that became my first poetry book, Claire.
More than any particular lessons learned, I think that what was important to me was that Richard and Louis, two writers I admired and respected, valued what I had made thus far and had expectations of what I would make in the future. Having people of that sort tell me what they thought of my young work: those are gifts and encouragements that I have never forgotten. It doesn’t matter how old we grow in the craft, we still cherish the favor of those we deem wise. One of the few things we are sure (thanks, Venerable Bede!) about the first poet writing in English whose name is known—the Anglo-Saxon cowherd, Cædmon—is that Abbess Saint Hild (or Hilda) listened to his words, recognized the art in him, and emboldened him to make and sing in the vernacular. Such attentions inspire and hearten. The best thing about too much school for me was being forced to read a good many books I might not have found and read otherwise. I will admit to having rejected a raft of rules and suggestions about writing from college and grad school, but that’s important too—tilting against what we’re told is the way to do something is often how we develop new skills and ideas. While many professors had a crack at shaping my mind, I would especially point to Richard and Louis, and also to a superb high school teacher in Cullowhee, North Carolina, Nancy Potts Coward, who had a strongly expressed faith in my abilities and in what she saw as the inevitable coming-to-be of my books.
NVR: You mentioned earlier a childhood delight in fairy tales. Seren of the Wildwood is, among other things, a fairy tale. It also reflects on them. At one point, after Seren has been brutally deceived by an evil denizen of the Wildwood, she encounters one of its more beneficent inhabitants—Cavan, based on St. Kevin if I am not mistaken. He gives her food and a place of safe rest. He tells her about the wood, how she might navigate it, and where she might find fuller help than he can give. But he also tells her “of the secrets hid in fairy tales.” You conclude the Cavan section with these lines:
Regret And gladness blend as one At times—who can forget, When fairy tales are done, Their magic alphabet?
Perhaps this is one of the “secrets” that Seren has learned from Cavan’s fairy tales, that even though she has been severely wronged and has suffered, that there is still the prospect of gladness returning to her own life’s tale. But these lines also read like a reflection on the work as a whole. I’m not asking you to murder in order to dissect, but can you give us some hints at how the magic alphabet of fairy tales helped you write Seren of the Wildwood?
MY: Fairy tales have resonant mystery, and they tend to have a subterranean relationship with biblical stories and traditional hagiography—sometimes explicitly, as in the pattern that joins “Allerleirauh” (a Grimm’s tale) to the life of Saint Dymphna (7th century), a shape in which a king loses a beautiful wife to death and will only marry another woman if she is just as beautiful as the first wife. But the only one who fulfills that wish is his own daughter. Likewise, patterns bind many fairy tales together—animal bridegrooms, otherworldly journeys, animal servants, upward climbs, etc. A small example: in a “Cinderella” variant, a hazel tree (connected to magical and sacred things, and like all trees a reacher toward heaven with roots in earth) on the grave of a dead mother tosses down a succession of beautiful dresses for three nights, and finds an echo in the story of Allerleirauh, another girl who has also lost her mother and obtains a series of dresses, one like the sun and one like the moon and one like a night of stars. In both stories, the dresses mount upward in extravagance and beauty, just as the girls who wear them mount upward out of gray, tattered lives shadowed by death, and into a brighter and higher realm where they marry royalty. A human being who begins in a condition of death and poverty and lack of love from the living rises through more and more beautiful stages to the highest place, a state of royalty and union that promises the abundance of new life: that’s an applicable pattern of spiritual as well as physical transformation.
Of course poets don’t think, well, I’ll use X pattern here and Y there; they’re making out of words, and ideally a spiritual force we often call the muse is alive and stirring in that creation. Looking back at Seren, I see patterns and motifs that can be found in fairy tales or in scripture and tradition: the fey creatures that hear the complaint from the father of “Hans My Hedgehog;” transformations that begin after a death; the scaling upward toward a realm that is not ours but a region set “east of the sun”; a “beanstalk” climb; a fall; water immersion; a demonic lure; guides, some trustworthy and some not; a giant; an arduous journey that ends with a gift; earthly paradise; redemption of some past state. In these patterns, we reach something primordial, potent, and laced with mystery. Like the essence of divinity or a gripping dream-vision, this state is not going to be fully plumbed or dissected. The making that is needed for such a poem as Seren is for the instrument—the unobtrusive poet—to conform herself to the idea of the thing so that it can come into being. Then, no matter how many patterns are drawn from the well of the past, the poem can become a living thing. That, at least, is the hopeful dream of what may be.
And yes, with Cavan I was thinking to some degree of Saint Kevin. Clive Hicks-Jenkins, the illuminator of Seren (and many of my books), has been drawn by the Kevin-and-the-blackbird story for years, and has done many paintings and prints of the saint holding the bird’s nest. So in a way it is a kind of homage to Clive and our long friendship.
NVR: You mentioned the muse. Do you have any go-to ways of trying to coax inspiration?
MY: The main problem any contemporary person (including me) has with inspiration seems to be that we are all living in a too manic, too materialistic, too sentimental, too pleasure-mad, too political, too digital world, often dragged this way and that by concerns that are not essential. We often think we don’t have time to be still and know, to reach any elevation of being. So I can’t claim any special powers or tricks to avoid distraction—I’m living in the same frenetic world as others—but I do find that being still is the beginning for me.
NVR: Seren is written in a fascinating form. It has 61 sections. Each section contains twenty-one blank verse lines followed by a concluding “bob and wheel” with an ababa rhyme scheme. I included a block quotation of one of these in my previous question. How did you settle on this form? What were some of the affordances and challenges of writing in it?
MY: I can’t give myself credit for long mulling over form; it immediately seemed right to use a more modern version of the Gawain and the Green Knight form (made from “fits” of alliterative verse plus bob-and-wheel.) In part that was probably because the idea in my head seemed kindred to Gawain. And I have loved the poem since I first read it in a medieval literature class when I was 18. (My longtime illuminator Clive once gave me a copy of an Armitage translation, and later illustrated another Armitage edition for Faber and Faber. He collaborated with Penfold Press to make a series of fourteen large Gawain screen prints; just inside my front door in Cooperstown is “The Armouring of Gawain,” displaying the knight, castle, and the inner surface of his shield with Mary and the Christ Child.)
Affordances and challenges? I liked the short breather from blank verse the bob-and-wheel gave, and how it could serve different functions, acting as commentary, speech, contemplation, smaller observation, definition, and so on. The rhyming lines are meant to serve as a kind of graceful chapter-closure, casting a smidge of more formal light. The demands of context and possible rhyme sounds meant that they tended to write themselves. It’s hard to claim challenges in the writing of Seren because I felt such pleasure in making the poem—that’s not at all to say it couldn’t be improved, but for me it was a rich experience. The one thing I dithered over was the closure, as I wanted a bumpy, quick re-entry into this thing we call normal life. I kept questioning whether it needed one more chapter, and when Joshua Hren read the poem for Wiseblood Books, he promptly made exactly that comment—that it needed another one. So that was helpful to me, as my judgment there was wobbly.
NVR: The setting of Seren blends times and places and mythologies. Many of your works with fantasy elements, though, are set in American locales you know well. This past winter, my daughter and I read your enchanting—and, in places, satisfyingly scary!—young adult novel The Curse of the Raven Mocker, which is set in the wilderness of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains and draws on both Appalachian settler lore and Cherokee mythology. Your novel Glimmerglass concerns strange and gothic happenings in and around your current hometown of Cooperstown, New York. Your earlier verse narrative Thaliad arrives at Cooperstown as well. Do any such real-world thin places influence the Wildwood?
MY: A good many places I’ve lived feel quite magical to me. My memories of Gramercy and Baton Rouge are colorful and strange—moon vines growing into the live-oaks, crazy little crawfish villages under the house, anole lizards swinging from my earlobes, exuberant life everywhere! The mountains of North Carolina remain equally enchanting, especially in the morning when clouds rise out of the valleys. (Glad you and your daughter liked that story with its mix of Cherokee myth and settler lore!) And despite the baseball tourists, Cooperstown is notably strange—castle in the lake, Norman tower in the woods, complete confusion between what is “real” and what was Fenimore Cooper’s invention, a wild number of ghosts, a faux Indian mound, an almost-island in the lake, ruined mansions, and more.
The Seren landscape is more kindred to the Blue Ridge with its mountains and waterfalls than most places, though I’m always conscious that Cooperstown and Cullowhee are points on the same long mountain chain of the Appalachians. The river where Seren bathes on agates probably goes back to a lovely afternoon at Agate Beach in Oregon. And I suppose there are glimpses of various scenes where I found clarity, illumination, harmony, and the magnetic, beautiful call of perfection: places where we detect the eternal realities.
We mortals contain thin places, both in memory and in the nature of our closeness to what is not of this world—to death’s door, to the unexplained, to the supernatural. Although I am not particularly interested in modern ideas of self-expression and individualism in art and have no wish to exhibit myself, I know that burning behind the story of the girl Seren is my own childhood, the death of my sister, and the ways loss may damage the life of a family. So that’s a metaphysical thin place in Seren, just for me. But who isn’t wandering in a Wildwood, meeting up with those who help and those who hurt, having our lives abruptly overturned, reaching for ways that will shape and add meaning to our years, and catching glimpses of perfections that call to us from our thin places?
NVR: I wanted to ask you about your narrative poem “Saint Thief,” which appears in the inaugural issue of New Verse Review. It is a remarkable achievement, to my mind, something of a parable and something of a theological puzzle but definitely a good story. I was honored that you shared it with NVR. Can you tell us anything about its genesis?
MY: Oddly, it’s not the only poem I’ve written that involves relic-hawking, though the other is about a stylite and a merchant. Where do those thoughts about bits of saints come from? Perhaps part is from becoming Orthodox and being conscious of whose relics are on the altar, and part is from wandering around chambers with astonishing collections of relics, as in the Domschatz treasury in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I was intrigued by accounts of retrieved bodies of the saints, with bone-hunting after revelation, and also with the sale of relics by unscrupulous people.
Relics are a curious start to a narrative and bring up many questions about prayer, the importance of the body, and transformation. If I rambled around the world and collected twelve baskets of fragments from the true cross, how would I know what was genuine, and what would it mean when a piece was or was not genuine? Or, say, if the wrong bones were collected but heartfelt prayers were made in their presence, what would that mean? Prayer is so very strange; we can pray for the dead, for the living, for events past or yet to be. We can even pray for ourselves in childhood, lost to us in time. So I had many curious thoughts about relics before I ever wrote “Saint Thief.”
As this is the only blank verse poem I’ve written that spent some time as a short story before I changed it into a poem, I could say that the making of the poem involved transformation. And metamorphosis suits the narrative of “Saint Thief,” with its various transformations. (Naturally, every well-made poem is a kind of transformation from something we can call an idea into a body of words, and it is also a transformation of the maker—that is, she is becoming more herself.)
NVR: Who is a contemporary poet you admire and think deserves to be better known?
MY: Sally Thomas
NVR: She is a wonderful poet. I am looking forward to her new collection next spring. Do you have any new works under way?
MY: As I was derailed by my mother’s death in February and then some illness, and because the year’s shape includes a great deal of travel scheduled in and out of the country (Georgia, Montreal, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Barcelona, North Carolina twice), I have been writing shorter poems, mostly between one and four pages long. Now and then I daydream about a novel, which I may write or may leave to float in airiness. Next year will also be busy, but I would like to make a long narrative, either a novel or another long poem.