Just for WOW, Ashley Harris interviews Mary Alice Dixon, the author of Snakeberry Mamas, Words from the Wild, a debut poetry collection set in the wilds of an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant.
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| Credit: ChrisChavira, Lem Lynch Photography |
----- Interview by Ashley Harris
WOW: Mary Alice, I simply adored Snakeberry Mamas, savoring it to the very last page. Even the handy glossary at the back was exquisitely rendered. And I’m so honored to be able to interview you today! As someone who grew up in North Carolina, I appreciated the references to familiar things, such as Appalachia, Blue Ridge “hollers” and the region’s famous “smoky clouds.” But you truly opened my eyes to a host of other elements new to me such “snake berries” and “Job’s Tears.” And then there were place names such as “Bald Butt Mountain” and “Witcher River.” The chance to revisit the land I thought I knew through your eyes kept me captivated throughout your book’s pages.
Mary Alice: Ashley, how wonderful to be in conversation with you! First, let me say how deeply I admire you and your extraordinary body of work. In Waiting for the Wood Thrush, every one of your poems radiates an affinity with nature. What an honor to have you, the wisest of women, read my own poetry. Thank you!
WOW: What kind words, Mary Alice! The opening quote of your book, by Isadora Duncan that says: “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you” is a fabulous introduction. And after reading this lovely collection, I sense that you had an extraordinary childhood, one that forever connected you to the earth. For all the future poets out there, take us back to it and describe a typical day for you under the age of 6.
Mary Alice: I want to share with you a day I remember as both typical and atypical. Let me explain.
When I was five, I spent a weekend with my Granny Sharps’ extended family in West Virginia. It was my first time overnight without my parents. Mom and Dad put my baby sister and me in the back seat of our two-tone Pontiac and drove us from Allegheny County, PA to the Sharps’ farmhouse outside Fairmont, WV. Granny was back in Pennsylvania, but I felt her spirit when we visited her kin.
The Sharps’ homeplace was a hardscrabble farm. It included a cow pasture, a barn with a scratchy hayloft where I was supposed to sleep, a stinky outhouse with Sears & Roebuck catalogs for toilet paper, and a lot of love.
I was giddy with excitement as my parents and sister headed back to Pennsylvania, leaving me with the relatives. I felt quite grown-up, even if I did not relish that wooden outhouse or the “honey wagon” the menfolk used to clean out the crap.
Anyway, great-aunts, great-uncles, second and third cousins, my mother’s mother’s family, gathered in the summer twilight shelling snap peas on the big front porch with its sky-blue ceiling. (Blue to keep the haints away.) I sat on the porch steps, watched lightning bugs, and drank a cup of warm milk, fresh from Hannah the brown-and-white cow. I listened to the grown-ups spin yarns about Red Delicious apples and kernels of corn made into the prayer beads they called Job’s Tears. (Both of which made their way into Snakeberry Mamas poems.) I sensed myself a part of something old and good.
At home in Pennsylvania, we lived in a WPA (federal Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that employed people during the Great Depression) bungalow with coal outcroppings in the yard and a huge dark coal cellar under the house. I often amused myself hunting for diamonds that, my Dad told me, came from coal. When I went to West Virginia, I found diamonds in family stories. So my stay in West Virginia was atypical because I was briefly without my parents, my baby sister, and my Granny. But it was also typical because I heard tall tales and felt a heap of family love.
WOW: And there is indeed a heap of family love in Snakeberry Mamas. Most people who want to preserve the history of their family either create a scrapbook or join a genealogical society. When did you first envision the stories of Granny Delilah and your family as a poetry collection?
Mary Alice: What a great question! After my beloved mother died she came to me in a series of six dreams. In each one she cupped my chin with her hands, saying, “Tell everyone I love them.” Then she would point to her own mother, my Granny Delilah, standing arms akimbo, smiling in the distance.
At that time, 2004, I was working as an advocate for abused children, battered parents, and adults alleged incompetent—people, like all of us, in desperate need of love. Hearing their stories of hurt taught me that preserving stories, including those of my mother and my mother’s mother, can be a form of love.
Anyway, based on my genealogical research I made a detailed family tree (yes, another tree!) I called Remembering. This project reignited my passion for Granny’s tall tales of the West Virginia hollers where, in 1880, she was born.
In the 1950s Granny lived with my parents and me in the coal country of western Pennsylvania. She was a blind seamstress who saw with her hands. She also collected buttons in tin cans. These cans, she told me, reminded her of Appalachian caves.
Curled up in her lap on our porch glider, Granny would brush my hair while I played with her buttons. The buttons made of old bones were the best—yellowed, scratched with histories I could only imagine. As we rocked in the glider, Granny told me stories of bones and bloodroots. She sewed fairy tales with words, weaving myth and magic, plants and people, into my hair and head.
Granny’s love for her Applachian traditions inspired me to write and include a Glossary of Plants, Creatures, & Folklore Customs in Snakeberry Mamas. The entries are micro-fictions that tell the secret history of owl women, the meaning of witchberries, the use of cardamon in regneration rituals. And more.
Writing that keeps alive my family myths and lore is a way of inviting readers to become kin. The poems that I have plucked from the maternal line of my family’s past are are my inheritance of tall tales, incomplete, contradictory, and real. These are ways of telling love.
WOW: Snakeberry Mamas could be a master class in how to incorporate all five senses into our writing! Each poem is a garden of sensory delights, particularly two of my favorites: “Snakeberry Mama’s Communion with Orange” and “Wild Nutmeg Sparks Revolution.” How did you get so good at collecting your sensory impressions?
Mary Alice: OMG, Ashley, you are so kind and your question is amazingly intuitive.
Here’s the scoop: I was born with synthesthesia.
I see colors in numbers, sometimes hear perfumes, and often taste deer musk from memories in breezes. When I was a child I thought everybody knew that the number five dresses in brown corduroy, seven in navy blue, and a story book about a gingerbread house smells like molasses and brown sugar.
Only in college, memorizing dates for art history exams by observing the color codes dancing in my head, did I discover my way of seeing and sensing is a quirk not everyone shares. I also discovered this “quirk” is a neurological condition involving twisted cognitive pathways. Maybe my Granny, seeing with her hands, shared something similar.
So in answer to your question, I have to say I don’t collect sensory impressions as much as inhabit them. Mostly this is a gift. For example, after retina surgery, the feel of the sun on my closed eyelids tasted like an orange. From that came “Snakeberry Mama’s Communion with Orange.”
My poem “Wild Nutmeg Sparks a Revolution” was inspired by my sense that the sharp voice of nutmeg, which I love, is a voice calling for a green revolution.
But occasionally my synesthesia overwhelms me. Like when I wear a certain long-sleeved red wool sweater, my skin starts to smell, to me anyway, like spoiled salmon. I’m still waiting for a poem to come out of that doozy. As my Granny used to say, “lemons to lemonade.”
WOW: In my book, the best poets are the quirkiest and you have found a perfect way to harness your synthesthesia for the good. I couldn’t help but notice your book’s larger theme of female empowerment, which was apparent in poems such as “Woman Seizing Power” but also elsewhere, such as the inventively titled “Britches with Balls & Yellow-Pleated Parasols: Suffragette’s Recipe.” Were you channeling the voice of Granny Delilah here?
Mary Alice: Oh, Lordy, speaking of witches and bitches, thank you for seeing this in my work and for asking this question. As you might gather, I come from a line of strong women and the folks who love them.
Granny was born Delilah Sharps. She liked her last name, Sharps, said it kept the men around her on their toes. But she hated the name Delilah. Said Delilah was that Old Testament “hussy” who did Samson in. Further, Granny said, while she herself wasn’t above doing such things as the O.T. hussy did, she refused to advertize it with her name. Made adults call her Dee.
One of Granny’s sisters was Cecil, the woman who appears in “Britches with Balls.” And, let me tell you, my Great-Aunt Cecil was a pistol. I adored visiting her in West Virginia where she kept a garden and several husbands; the the garden was perennial; the husbands were sequential. Even her name—Cecil, not Cecilia—defied gender norms of the day.
WOW: Amen to your beloved Granny! As someone who loves the great variety of the English language, my heart delighted at expressions such as “chalices my skin,” “burlap laugh,” “tulip blood,” and “cinnamon songs.” What advice would you give to beginning writers on how to make their own writing leap from the page?
Mary Alice: I adore this question, Ashley, because when I lead Grief Writing and Self-Compassion Workshops I suggest participants try two specific exercises to get their writerly juices flowing.
The first exercise is what I call the “Rip and Tear Scavanger Hunt.” It goes like this. Flip through the pages of thrifted magazines and piles of junk mail. Find random images that speak to you. Rip and tear. Paste and overlay. Make a collage. When you finish, give your collage a title. Then jot down five images you see in your collage. Oh wow, you just wrote the first draft of a list poem or the outline of a story!
The second exercise is what I call the “Happiness Snack.” Here’s what you do. Give yourself, say, five minutes every day. All by yourself. Find something that makes you happy. Maybe a moment of listening to church bells. Maybe a fresh tomato sandwich. Whatever works for you. Just make it delicious. Oh, yippee, you just fed your inner artist! Then, without worrying about calories (!), write down the recipe for your snack. Embellish with time and salt. And maybe some sass.
Me? One of my collages, an amateurish piece with crazy images of feathers and Farmer’s Almanac bird illustrations, I titled “Words of Hope.” The collage was a mess (not a bad thing in a collage, btw) but it led to my poem,“I Spoke Feathers.” Which is in Snakeberry Mamas as well as in a Poetry in Plain Sight Poster hung by the NC Poetry Society in public places throughout North Carolina where I now live.
My personal favorite “Happiness Snack” is what I call “Pet a Tree.” It goes like this. I touch a tree trunk, listening to its bark. Then translate the bark into words. Guess which poem came from one of those translations! Hint: it includes a woman with a birch wood broom burned as a witch who shapeshifts into a bitch. Yep, you got it! It’s my poem “Woman Seizing Power,” the poem that won me my first Pushcart Prize nomination.
WOW: Mary Alice, what terrific poetry (and story!) starters! I love all of these, particularly “Happiness Snack.” That would be as good for the soul as it would be for the writing! And spending time time with a tree – listening to its bark – that is just brilliant. I know I speak for all the poets and writers at WOW when I say that we can’t wait to put these prompts into practice pronto. Thank you so much for such kind and thoughtful responses to my questions – you have been a true joy to interview!
Mary Alice: Ten thousand thanks, Ashley. This has been super fun! You ask THE BEST questions. From the land of granny magic, I just know Delilah Sharps is sending you endless hugs and happiness. I know she thanks you, as do I, for the generosity of your words and heart.
