Carmen Maria Machado wrote of Maryse Meijer’s Northwood, which comes out this week, “This strange and beautiful novella has everything I want: formal play, myths and fairy tales, the politics of art-making, the all-obliterating power and complexity of desire, a cabin in the woods,” and, indeed, it does. This deft synthesis of poetry, prose, horror, and then some, forces us to examine all the little broken pieces of our culture, of ourselves, and to ask what kind of art can be made with these.
Caroline Hagood: How did you come to the merger of different forms and genres that is Northwood?
Maryse Meijer: From the start there was something about this story that didn’t lend itself to straight narration; I didn’t want to mess around with all the usual connective tissue of traditional narrative fiction. I was reading a lot of poetry at the time and I wanted to borrow some of the flexibility and playfulness of the form, knowing I needed more than one voice, more than one point in time, to spread into. I didn’t think about genre or how it would all fit together; I shamelessly plundered every trope and image and voice that would help me tell the story I wanted to tell. I let it go wherever it wanted to go; it taught me how to write it as I went along.
CH: What were you reading or watching as you wrote this?
MM: Anne Carson, Anne Sexton, and Ted Hughes shaped my approach to Northwood—as did Las von Trier’s Antichrist, the best work about woods I’ve ever encountered. I was also looking obsessively at Tracey Emin’s drawings; her work is the inspiration for the drawings described by the narrator in Northwood. And I’m never not looking at the paintings of Nicola Samori, an Italian painter whose luminous images of human figures constantly threatened by darkness and disintegration sum up everything I’ve ever wanted to do as a writer.
CH: You reimagine the cabin in the woods trope here. What are your thoughts on this much-visited psychological space, and how did you want to look at it differently in this work?
MM: The space of the woods, literal and metaphorical, is inhuman—indifferent to human desires, needs, wishes, codes. The woods are full of all forms of life that don’t need us, that defy us, that threaten us. Our desire to conquer nature—our own or anyone or anything else’s—is constantly upended here; we feel our insignificance, our lack of control, our mortality, when we find ourselves outside of civilization.
Romantic stories insist on the primacy of human love, of its eternal, exalted nature; lovers, we are constantly told, should, and do, conquer all. But the woods are anti-romantic. That’s partly what makes them so scary. So this idea of a cabin, a kind of human stake in the wild, surrounded by—overwhelmed by—the rest of nature, seems like a perfect place to put a pair of lovers whose own romance is always on the edge of destruction, obliteration, death. The relationship is amoral the way that nature is amoral, following its own design, its own will, so to speak. And the cabin offers no protection; it is constantly penetrated, mentally and emotionally and physically, by whatever the woods represent to the narrator. She’s not safe in the woods, but she does find joy and beauty there, along with all the rest. If the woods were merely terrifying, we would never bother to approach them at all; but the woods offer extremes of experience that we can’t find anywhere else. It’s where stuff happens. And the woods are both inside and outside of us, both a part of who we are as well as something quite alien—an irresistibly rich site of experience and wonder.
CH: Your speaker veers between being vulnerable and fiercely self-assured. What goes into writing a woman character, especially one who has been wounded, but who’s not defined by that wound?
MM: For the first couple of years I was writing Northwood from the perspective of a woman who was only a lover—she was not yet an artist, she had no family, no work, no home, she was barely present on the page at all except as a wound. And the book just didn’t work in those drafts, because I was only writing about her in terms of weakness—she had no strengths, no ties to the world outside of the woods. And because of that I don’t think the woods, or the relationship, felt real; there wasn’t a total person behind it. When my editor asked for a little more “moss,” as she so delightfully put it, I realized that I had been resisting discovering the narrator’s strengths; that I had wanted to punish her, in a way, for the moments in which she was weak by refusing her a richer context. And it’s that context which makes her vulnerability sensible and real. But to get there I had to recognize that the reason my book wasn’t working for so long was because I was unconsciously both humiliating my narrator and humiliated by her—she made me really uncomfortable. And once I let her have a little room, an identity outside of romance, I let her be human. She became a person. My own internalization of misogyny affected the way I was writing about this woman, and I had to confront that before I could do justice to her story.
CH: You play with mythology and fairytale in an innovative way here. How do these, along with the trappings of horror, etc., help you approach the unspeakable territory of the telling of trauma?
MM: I think most deep experiences are beyond logos—not only trauma, but any extreme of feeling. No art can really approximate life—nor should it, since life approximates itself pretty well already. But fragmented, hybrid narratives expose the limits of, and the gaps inherent in, language—and that’s what’s so fun about playing with them. There’s an immediacy as well as a disorientation in this mash-up of genre and images and stories. Hybrid texts point to the violence of all narratives—the omissions, distortions, magnifications, and obsessions that are unavoidable when we try to describe experience through language. Language can only marginally represent, and yet we demand that it represent everything, to be, objectively, true. Language isn’t whole, just as memory isn’t whole, just as an experience is inherently fragmented. Allowing other voices, other perspectives, other elements to intervene in the narrative both deepens and flattens the story by declaring, bluntly, that the narrative is partly just a repetition of other stories, other voices, other people’s ideas. The story isn’t only speaking to itself, but it also is having a really hard time speaking at all in any meaningful way. It’s always wanting to break down, hence all the gaps, all the jumping around. I don’t think violence is unspeakable; I think speaking is another form of violence. And there are certain ways, as a writer, I can better expose the violence in language itself, and I tried to use as many tools as I could to do so while still writing a fairly traditional, comprehensible story.
CH: Carmen Maria Machado (and others before her, such as Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson) have found fertile ground for creative expression of a particularly female-identified experience in horror stories and fairytales. How do you see your work as fitting in (or not) with this tradition?
MM: I was on a panel with Carmen Machado a year ago when someone asked her why she was attracted to horror stories. She said something along the lines of how being a woman under patriarchy is always a horror story—which rang immediately, absolutely true to me. Misogyny permeates our culture; it is omnipresent. I don’t set out to write feminist stories; they are feminist because I am feminist, and they address aspects of misogyny because I live in a misogynist society. My work is unavoidably shaped by the political reality in which they appear, and that reality is inherently horrific; it belongs to the extremes of genre, which is why the categories of fairy tale, horror, myth, etc. appeal to so many writers. These tropes magnify what is all around us, showing us how grotesque and fantastic and extreme reality actually is. I never think of my work in terms of metaphor; for me, it’s all quite literal. I don’t see anything I write as an exaggeration or alteration of the real. The woods are real; they’re where we are.