An Interview Between Friends
With Elizabeth Metzger, poet, teacher, poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and my roommate my first year at Brown. Our conversations haven’t changed that much from those early days cozied up in our dorm room talking about Emily Dickinson and wild mountains and love and troubadours and poetic metre.
ELIZABETH
Is there a myth that most speaks to your origins as a writer, or your journey? If so, what makes your version of it distinct?
SYLVIA
It’s a fairytale that comes to my mind. Beauty and the Beast actually, which is technically a literary fairytale written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740 (as La Belle et la Bête), inspired by centuries-old traditions of Animal-Bridegroom folktales across Europe, including the Greek Psyche and Eros.
Disney would have brought this story to me first of course, but I don’t have much memory of that encounter. What I do remember is the experience of finding this story again later, at 9 or 10, in wonderful novelistic retellings. I was so affected by them that I asked my parents to give me a red rose in a pot as my graduation gift after elementary school. I planted it in the backyard and watched it grow up the shed wall. It represented true love to me. The wildness of it, which I could sense even at age ten. The utter devotion, the almost terrifying depth of that shade of red. The sacrifice and nobility of love like that—the kind that can break curses, that carries the reddest of roses, that moves with ease between truest animal body and widest soul.
I was an absolute sucker for love stories way back then. I still am.
By that age I already absolutely saw myself as a writer. I’d decided writing was my path at about age eight, having no idea of course what I really meant, just knowing that I had to do it. So I think Beauty and the Beast has always arrested me both aesthetically and emotionally because very early on it married two disparate experiences of longing in me— my longing to somehow enter into the animal world, and my longing to know the kind of love that dissolves all boundaries.
As I remember it, my first passion was big cats. I had glossy books with pictures of every species. At the foot of my bed an enormous stuffed lion and a mother cheetah with her cubs watched over me every night. When I was five I dressed as a cheetah for Halloween. My grandmother sewed my costume— a kind of cheetah jumpsuit— and I was crazy about it. My mother found me a cheetah mask somewhere, and we put kohl around my eyes, like those lines cheetahs have. I was ecstatic.
But I also remember having this shocking realization that no matter what I did, I was never actually going to be a cheetah in this lifetime. Never. I can still feel it. The searing longing to know what it would be to have a cheetah’s body, to elongate while chasing an antelope, to run and run and feel my spotted coat bristling under the sun. But human Sylvia was never going to live that. It made my heart feel like it was splitting.
Soon after that I became obsessed with stories where human beings had the power to shapeshift into animals, or to speak with them. To communicate between worlds. To communicate with the world itself, beyond just human speech.
So, a story like Beauty and the Beast hit straight home. At first it didn’t have an adult erotic component of course, just the eros of childhood, the eros I suppose of human longing; but there is of also that undercurrent, and it keeps the story alive in new ways as an adult.
I write to shapeshift. I write to speak to animals, and marry them. I write because I am a romantic and need more love stories, of every variety. I write to actually learn how to inhabit this Earth. I write to learn new languages. I write to listen to God. I write to not be afraid of being here. I write to see my own interior. I write to see in the dark, and then make light.
All of this is also why I studied animal tracking so intensely in my twenties. It is another a script, another language, that informs my work to this day.
ELIZABETH
You’ve lived in several different places, and I know that place and the natural world, even geological time, is so important to your work. What is one aspect of where you are from, and also where you live now, that has influenced your perspective?
SYLVIA
I was born in San Francisco but grew up a little north, at the base of Mt. Tamalpais. Growing up in California gave me wildness. A mountain with animals that could swallow me if they wanted to. Animals who kept their own secrets and their own power. A mountain with trees so tall and broad they immediately taught me things about the beginning of the world, about time, about mycelium. California also provoked an acute sense of ancestral displacement— a longing, a restlessness, an understanding of the violent meeting of cultures and how the origin-ground of my ancestors was really far away. It gave me an attention to layers beneath layers that are held in landscapes, and of conquerors writing history. An attention to the profound discomfort of being from the bloodlines that had done the displacing and conquering, but carrying a longing for a sense of home in a place earned by generations of attention to the earth’s language, not violence.
I think I’m always reaching through time because of this. I’m oriented toward bones in the ground. I’m also crazy about places where mountains meet the ocean, because I grew up inside the dreamscape of that encounter and really, there’s nothing more gorgeous to me than that, with the smell of sagebrush and the live oak trunks and acorn woodpeckers cackling away as they gather nuts.
Living in England currently has brought me into encounter with the ancestry of the language I was born into, which carries a profound magic for me as a writer. And also, my motherline runs from New England right back to Yorkshire, so there’s a particular uterine potency in the island of Britain for me. The last time one of my mothers lived there was in 1636, when she left with her husband and children across the Atlantic from Hull. Her name was Jane. England shows me what Jane knew in all her cells. Plants, smells, stones, the temperature and taste and river waters. Its bronzes and blues and greens. And yet, England shows me also my perennial in between-ness. How I’m hungry for mountain lion country and a California sun and the jasmine blooming in spring on the suburban streets where I grew up, and yet I’m also hungry for the moors of Yorkshire where Jane’s grandmother grew up, and how when I dream there I see women wearing jet beads as old as the Neolithic, and beyond.
ELIZABETH
What is your favorite metaphor for the imagination or creative process? And what rituals have helped you access it?
SYLVIA
A number came to my mind. Spinning thread. Weaving. But really, there’s so much fire in my work for me, so I think of fire as the first metaphor. How when I was sixteen I saw a man make fire by friction with a slim straight spindle of wood (often mullein or elderberry or willow) rubbed expertly against another piece of wood with very swift, strong movements, until an ember suddenly slipped out. He caught the ember with devastating tenderness in a bundle of dry lichen and milkweed silk and cattail—the tinderbundle—and blew it steadily and expertly into a flame.
He was one of the guides on a wilderness fast in Death Valley that I took part in both at age 16 and age 17. After I watched him create an ember this way, crouched over the spindle and the fireboard (a little flat piece of wood) on a little plateau overlooking the harsh red canyons of the desert, not only was I madly in love with him, I was also spiritually transfixed by the process of witnessing a fire’s emergence like that. It was one of those moments that sort of rearranges everything around you, and in you.
I remember the fire cupped there for a moment in his hands, flaring up and bright, before he moved it to the firepit and the bed of kindling waiting for it there, to blow it further to life. I really didn’t know that anyone could still do that kind of thing in the world I came from. It absolutely knocked the breath out of me, and also felt so shockingly familiar. 30,000 years familiar.
So, this fire-making and then fire-tending process comes to the forefront of my mind when I think about metaphors for creativity. The steady, tiring, precise friction and pressure and proper tools and skill needed to create that totally miraculous ember. The trust too, the faith in your body and in the fire inside you and in the miracle of its possibility. The way it takes your breath away every time the ember actually pops through: born. It’s got a sexual power to it too—fire making as well as the creative process for me as a writer. It takes a lot of life-force. Intense presence and pressure and attention, and then also that sudden surrender to bliss, to nectar, to the soaring flame.
It’s an obvious metaphor I guess—sparks of creativity and all that. But the whole life cycle of fire—I want to call it a gestational cycle actually—feels relevant to me metaphorically. You have to look after the fire once you create its first spark. You feed the fire, you stoke it, you damp it a bit, you keep checking on it. This is like writing to me, like the life of an artist, both in my daily rhythms and in the rhythms over the span of my life thus far. It feels like a Vestal occupation— like the Vestal Virgins who kept the fires lit at the heart of ancient Rome. I feel charged, like them, to keep this fire well inside myself. My creative work is a fire I don’t let go out. It’s a fire that can’t go out, really, but at the same time it’s my job to be in service to it. To always be orienting toward that fire. Toward my need for kindling, for special pieces of resin and aromatic boughs and big logs and proper ventilation and all that.
As for rituals, literally writing beside the fire always takes me straight in. I’m mesmerized by embers. I love watching the fire when it’s burnt all the way down and the embers are dancing, full of worlds. I’ve been watching them since I was a girl. When I was little I’d pull up my chair practically inside the fire, and read and read and read, until there was just a pile of embers. I associate their iridescence and their soft shifting sounds and the smell of woodsmoke with all the worlds I entered as a young reader.
But of course, it’s not always possible or practical to light a fire in the morning. What I can do every day, and do, is light a candle while I write. Beeswax, for the scent and alchemy of that scent. Sometimes I burn a candle the entire time, blowing it out and lighting it again through the day as I come back to the desk. Other times I light one once in the morning, and that light marks the vestal awareness I carry toward my work for the rest of the day.
The flame reminds me of what it is I’m really doing, and why. And it helps me keep doing it.
ELIZABETH
I think of so much of your work as tracking experiences of transformation, and I want to ask you about what works have transformed you. But I keep thinking about a teacher I had who divided poems into the ones that make you think "come here, yes, it's just like that" and the ones that make you think "come here, you've never felt this way before." Is there a work of art that makes you feel most at home or understood in? And, conversely, is there a work of art that makes you feel the least familiar, but in a productive way?
SYLVIA
Two different poets are coming to my mind at the same time to answer the first, about the works that have made me feel “yes, it’s just like this.” I’m thinking of both the Cretan-born poet Odysseus Elytis who wrote the famous Axion Esti, evoking in it the essence of his country, its landscapes and history and myth and cosmology, in a way that took the breath out of me. His language isn’t easy at all; it’s heavily symbolic, it’s muscular and magical and full of scent and herb and lament, and yet that way of using language felt so instantly familiar.
Dylan Thomas’ poetry has done the same thing to me. The relief of reading “In Country Sleep” as a teenage girl with its hallucinatory fairytale love-sung green and black and woodland eros, was an enormous homecoming. I mean— “Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays./ Sanctum sanctorum the animal eye of the wood.” Doesn’t get better. His radio play “Under Milkwood” had a similar effect. They made me feel so much less alone in what I loved, and why, and what I found most beautiful in language.
There are so many other books, novels especially, that I might answer this question with too—Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu; Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. Colette’s Green Wheat. But I’ll restrain myself.
As for the second part, about a work of art that makes me feel estranged and unfamiliar, yet productively, magnetically so, the one that comes first to my mind is Naomi Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen. It was written in 1931 and is a brilliant work of historical fiction set over two thousand years ago on the Black Sea. It tells the elaborate love story of Erif Der and Tarrik, who both have important ceremonial roles amongst their people, and how their understanding of old magic is challenged by encounters with Greek philosphers, and even time spent living in Sparta. There were parts of this book that were hard for me as a modern reader to stomach, but Mitchison seems to have gotten so much within the consciousness of her Iron Agea characters that I couldn’t put it down. I was transfixed by the strangeness of the world she painted and the language she used to do so, and how although I was disoriented and sometimes put off by the main characters, still Mitchison kept me in, somehow speaking directly out of the spirit of another time.
Oh gosh—I also may have to slip in Gary Snyder’s epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End for the way he makes geological time and the tectonic earth speak, and also Louise Erdrich’s poem Captivity, for its devastatingly beautiful telling of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity by the Wampanoag tribe in 1676. In deft, luminous stanzas she juxtaposes Puritan New England and Rowlandson’s days among the Wampanoag. Erdrich gorgeously conveys the woman’s utter disorientation, and then how her disorientation becomes a hunger beyond her capacity to fathom. Ok and also, all of Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife. The way women become antelopes and then turn back to women in this book— shook me right through.
ELIZABETH
What is the oldest thing you love? What is the newest thing you love? What do you long to know? What do you love about not knowing?
SYLVIA
The oldest thing I love—this Earth, lit and circled by Sun and Moon. Their perennial movements together, every single one of which directly affects us right to the bone and into the soul.
The newest thing I love—Runa, my little adopted Cretan hound mutt. My love for her is immense. She was made most recently of all the things I love, in her mama-dog’s belly, but I’m sure I’ve known her forever.
I long to know— what I will only know when I’m pregnant, and when I have given birth to my children, and am a mother. I also long to know, with total fluency, a very ancient language like Greek (working on that one). I’d also love it if somehow Linear A, the language of Bronze Age Crete, were to be miraculously deciphered via some yet un-discovered Rosetta stone. For me, that would be like seeing the creation of fire right before my eyes at age 16, anew.
What I love most about not knowing is —it reminds me that God knows, and this returns me to a state of absolute awe. It puts me straight back into my heart. It reminds me how small I am. It reminds me that I am being woven, not really doing the weaving. I love that. Not knowing keeps this world numinous to me, and as vast as it actually is. We reside within an exquisite and unknowable and immensely loving consciousness. Earth meeting Sky meeting Cosmos. Maybe I can go lay down in the sun with Runa instead of knowing, and watch birds, and flowers opening and closing, and the bees in the oak tree, and not know my way right into radiant peace.
