Ashley Mayne lives on the edge of a deadwater marsh once known as Hell's Acres. Near Millerton, the valley was legally part of Massachusetts until the 1850s, but it was cut off by the Berkshires, and New York lawmen had no jurisdiction there. "So it was kind of a hideout for horse thieves and brawlers," she says, sounding pleased.
Indeed, the characters who populate Mayne's extraordinary novels Tiger (Dr. Cicero Books, 2015) and Mankiller (Dr. Cicero Books, 2014) might be right at home in such company. A recent Bard graduate, Mayne writes about edgy, sometimes predatory outsiders in fierce, glowing prose. From Mankiller: "Fire lives inside of wood; every tree, every house, is fire in its dormant state, fire sleeping, waiting to be awakened. It's all there in the grain."
Mayne opens the door of her cobalt-blue farmhouse barefoot, in cutoff jeans and layered tank tops. Sun-browned and lithe, with a waist-length curtain of hair and glints of silver jewelry, she looks startlingly young. The home she shares with farmer and painter Chris Regan and Louka, the foxy feist-terrier mix she calls "my familiar," overflows with creative and outdoor accoutrements: paintings and musical instruments, a manual typewriter, hiking boots, antlers and jawbones, a cast-iron crowfoot, a sickle, old skis. There's a red tribal rug airing out on a clothesline, and faded Tibetan prayer flags hang over a door flanked by bee balm and catmint.
It's a sweltering day, and Mayne goes to the fridge for a pitcher of home-brewed iced mint tea. When she sits down to talk about writing, it's clear that for her, it's a verb of motion.
Regan's Sky Farm produces organic salad greens, and Mayne calls herself its "road warrior." During the growing season, she logs hundreds of miles daily in the delivery van, bringing mesclun mixes to local restaurants and farmers markets. These long solitary drives, she says, are "great thinking time."
When farm work slows down in the winter, long drives give way to long hikes with Louka. "Hiking is something I do really passionately," she asserts. "It's harder to worry when you're in motion. It's good for constructive thoughts, as opposed to cannibal thoughts that aren't helpful."
"I'm riven with doubt in most aspects of my life. I'm a worrier. There's practically nothing I don't second-guess. But once I get to the writing desk, it's all right. It's a magic circle. You sit down there and sort of drop into something else."
Talk to Mayne for awhile, and you might feel a little bewitched. Her eyes are pale green and her gaze asymmetrical, so she seems to be simultaneously looking you right in the eye and focused on something beyond.
She grew up in Austin, Texas, where her family has lived for generations. Her mother is a speech pathologist, her father a software engineer. Mayne didn't start reading until she was eight or nine. "When you learn to read so late, you bypass the traditional books for children. I started right in with Alexandre Dumas." She started writing during what she calls "a turbulent time in my childhood. I felt very lost. So I wrote. Things a nine-year-old would come up with, like pirate adventures."
As a teenager, she started acting. At 18, she moved east to join Walking the Dog, an avant-garde touring ensemble now based in Columbia County. She worked with them for four years before applying to Bard. "I've always had mentor-like relationships with other artists, and Bard is all about that," she says. "My playwriting mentor was Caridad Svich. I spent two semesters taking classes with her, and her sensibility—fearless, brutal, vivid, tender—cracked something open in me."
Mayne didn't start writing prose until her senior year, when she made an intuitive leap from the theatre department to the Written Arts building, pouring her heart out to novelist Mary Caponegro. "She read my plays and thought I could write prose," Mayne recalls gratefully. The first thing she started was Tiger.
It's hard to imagine a more ambitious first project. The novel's main characters are a fallen Jesuit priest named Ochoa and his former student, Tony Luna. Their stories unfold over decades and continents as the narrative leapfrogs from Ochoa's senescence to his brutal Basque childhood and stint as a missionary in an Indian village stalked by a Sundarban tiger. Tony first appears as a chilly, rich Brooklyn photographer obsessed with a feral young woman he meets on the street. Their pasts intersect at a church-run Connecticut boarding school where Ochoa and troubled teenager Tony shared a forbidden-fruit sexual bond.
Write what you know? Mayne laughs. Her method seems to be "write what you don't know, and then do the research." Like a character actor, she says, "I'm more comfortable in different heads. People more similar to me are more difficult, and more dangerous. Maybe at some point I'll write a searing expose of my personal experiences, but that's not what interests me now. It's so much about the challenge, the reach, the distance. That's where the magic happens—where the cracks appear and let things in."
Though more than one tiger prowls through the book, other predator/prey images appear throughout. "The Jesuit symbol is the wolf—I love that fact. And the widespread Christian symbol for the faithful is sheep. I mean, come on!"
Much of Tiger is narrated by Ochoa, but Mayne wrote her first draft entirely from Tony's perspective. "Ochoa made an appearance as a frightening entity from his past, more of a symbol than a person," she says. "He's the monster of our time. We don't have wild animals running around anymore; we fear people. Pedophilia is one of the last taboos we have."
The novel's seed was planted by a stray conversation Mayne overheard on a MetroNorth train, "two teenage girls talking, too loudly, about a tiger that lived in the Lincoln Tunnel." Though she realized it was an urban legend, like alligators in the sewers, Mayne was "struck by idea of something wild living on the outskirts of a great world city." Researching urban tigers, she found a man who'd been arrested for keeping a bestiary in his Harlem apartment, and other animal hoarders.
"At any given time, there are a lot more tigers in New York than we know," she says. "Why do you feel this compulsion to keep something in a small space that could hurt you—and sometimes does? Something so fierce and wild and bold, that doesn't have the right environment to call its own... How can you not write about that?"
Another seed was an encounter she had at 17. "It was my first time in New York," she recalls. "I was supposed to meet someone and couldn't find him. It was raining; I was lost. I was standing in an alcove outside a deli, soaking wet, looking like a bedraggled waif. This man came up and asked if I was all right, and could he buy me dinner. I yelled 'No!' and ran away." She describes the man as "a snappy dresser, obviously rich—I have this weird memory of him wearing a fur coat, but that may not be true. Like a very pleasant wolf." The wolf became Tony Luna, approaching a runaway and asking to photograph her.
Was the first-time novelist daunted by describing sights she's never seen? "I really struggled with the idea of whether or not I should visit all these international places," Mayne says. But she prefers to imagine locations, especially for scenes that take place in other time periods. "I can't go to India in the '70s," she says, adding, "I wanted my characters to view these places as alien worlds, that they would float like oil on water and never really be part of that landscape, would be eternal tourists, or eternal missionaries. Eternal colonists. I think the book is very much about different kinds of colonialism, seeing things the way you want to see them rather than as they are, imposing your desires on a place or a person."
Mayne's advisor at Bard, poet Robert Kelly, gave her manuscript to novelist and playwright Carey Harrison. After reading it on a plane to L.A., Harrison sent it to Dr. Cicero's publisher Maximiliano Reyes, who acquired it along with Mankiller, a taut, sexy fever-dream of a novella set in Mayne's native Texas. Harrison became Mayne's editor, a process he downplays as "holding a genius' hand."
Mayne uses the same word for Harrison. "He's a fucking genius. He really is a magus. He made me take myself seriously. And he really understands the mystical element of writing, the hunter/gatherer aspect."
She's started another new novel, much of it written in a black locust grove she calls "my summer office." The conversation circles back to the natural world and the cycle of seasons. "Fall and winter turn the landscape so evocative. It's an inward-turning time," Mayne says. "It's all about noticing."
Stepping outside, she surveys the sun-gilded marsh, watching birds flit through backlit reeds. It's a vista she savors. "You don't know where in the world you are. It doesn't look like the Hudson Valley. It's exotic, like a savanna."
There might be tigers.
Ashley Mayne will appear in conversation with Carey Harrison on 11/7 at 4pm at the Golden Notebook, Woodstock.
