Eady sees many parallels between writing and music, and often references jazz, blues, and dance in his poems. “Poetry is a mysterious, slightly threatening thing for many people. Like opera, they think of it as a foreign language, something that’s only for a few people who have the training to understand it.” His unfussy voice goes a long way to defuse such worries. “I made a conscious choice to write clearly, to be intelligent but also accessible,” he says.
Strikingly varied in format, Eady’s poems often invoke personal experience, from befuddled home ownership (“Lucky House”) to mourning a difficult father (“You Don’t Miss Your Water”). “It’s autobiography, but it’s also fiction. What happened is a jumping-off point,” he says. “I use my parents and neighbors a lot as source material—they’re stories you don’t often hear about African-Americans. My language comes from them.”
Eady was named after his father and grandfather. “Cornelius is a name you grow into. When I was a kid, I hated it,” he says, imitating a schoolteacher calling roll: “Bob, Jim, Cornelius. Now I love it. It sounds like a poet’s name.”
Thirteen years ago, Eady and Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, an annual retreat for African-American poets. The weeklong workshops foment a sense of community and an exploration of “African-American voice” that embraces everything from hip-hop to MFA programs. Eady says, “People can get in each other’s hair—‘You’re not political enough!’ They’re eating each other’s young. At Cave Canem, it’s a seven-day truce.”
The workshop’s logo, an unchained black dog, appears on a license plate over the door of the cottage where Eady writes and they share living space. Micklem works in the smaller cottage, surrounded by ’40s board games, vintage prints, and research books. Though her trilogy takes place in an imagined world, it has taproots in numerous cultures. Micklem’s website describes Firethorn’s society: “It’s a patriarchy in which the role of the warrior is exalted, and it has a rigid caste system maintained by violence and the threat of violence. Firethorn is a woman among soldiers, a camp follower. She’s at the bottom of the heap, being female and low caste.”
Micklem sees caste as a metaphor for race (“It’s another way to write about how we divide ourselves”), basing her mud/blood distinctions on Jim Crow laws. Wildfire invents an even more stratified culture, with an untouchable caste whose members must cover their faces in public. “It was actually very hard for me, from my privileged background as a modern American, to write the correct amount of deference,” she says. Firethorn frequently chafes in her role as “sheath” (wartime lover) to highborn Sire Galan, whose behavior toward her is likewise complex. “I think being inconsistent is important,” says Micklem. “He’s not a great romantic hero. He’s very self-centered. I tried to make him accurate to what a man raised in that period, as a warrior, would be.”
What period? Micklem smiles. “There’s a lot of Middle Ages, but it’s so not Christian.”
Indeed. She’s created a fascinatingly intricate cosmology of 12 gods, each with three avatars (male, female, and elemental) arrayed in a circular compass. Firethorn consults the gods by throwing a pair of fingerbones, I-Ching style, and interpreting where they land. Micklem fashioned a model divining compass on a circle of suede, buying two human fingerbones online and coloring them in the manner of Firethorn’s two mentors. Whenever her heroine cast the bones in the story, the author cast too. She was struck by the patterns. “I expected more random results, but certain signs really would recur. I can see how divination is powerful. I really don’t believe in God—I’m an atheist—but I do believe in belief.”
Though Micklem describes her purview as “no dragons, no elves,” Firethorn does leave her body in a memorable battle scene. “I wanted to write a pretty realistic book, except for magic. What is true in our real world is so bizarre, and so totally underestimated by those of us who grew up in science-based cultures,” she says. “People can fly, in shamanic traditions. What is a trance—is it really happening? Does a curse really work? It’s a matter of how you see cause and effect. Magic is a way of giving agency to ourselves.”
Along with magic and shamanism, Micklem has researched anthropology, childbirth, warfare in all eras, tournaments, armor and weaponry, textiles, prostitution, herbalism, hallucinogens, aphasia, brain damage, and lightning. “I’m afraid of writing historical novels because you have to get everything right,” she says, deadpanning, “I’m not writing about what I know.”
