The Constant Gardener

Michele Slung's Literary Perennials

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, March 29, 2007

What do gardening, murder, women’s erotica, and Christmas past have in common? A most uncommon editor.
Woodstock-based Michele Slung has edited some 20 anthologies on these subjects and more. She’s also the author of Momilies: As My Mother Used to Say, a cheerful compendium of maternal wisdom that has sold over a million copies, and other humor books including The Absent-Minded Professor’s Memory Book. She’s written books for National Geographic (Living with Cannibals & Other Tales of Women’s Adventures and Cat Shots), and fine-tuned a first novel by a Muslim academic (The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf) and the memoirs of a professional submissive (The Pleasure’s All Mine).
It’s a surprisingly broad range of interests, but surprise is Slung’s stock-in-trade. Her anthologies combine gems by little-known authors with offbeat selections by bigger names. One doesn’t expect to find Stephen King in a gardening anthology, any more than one looks for Virpginia Woolf and A.A. Milne in a collection of crime fiction. Yet there they are, in The Garden of Reading and Murder & Other Acts of Literature, respectively. And while A Treasury of Old-Fashioned Christmas Stories does feature the requisite work by O. Henry, it isn’t that well-roasted chestnut The Gift of the Magi but its Wild Western cousin, Christmas by Injunction.
From the unusual suspects in her police lineup of authors to the brief teaser quotes beneath every title in The Victoria Reader, Slung’s individualistic touch is everywhere. Who else, for example, would name two collections of erotic writing by women (Slow Hand and Fever) after lyrics made famous by the Pointer Sisters and Peggy Lee?

“All I ever wanted to do was read,” Slung declares, curling up in an armchair near her woodstove, one of many spots in her farmhouse that seems tailor-made for that pursuit. There are stacks of books everywhere, even marching up stair treads. Slung cites a feature she heard on NPR, dividing the world into filers and pilers. “I knew I was a piler,” she laughs, though an editor’s sense of order informs her carefully chosen decor: Oriental rugs, vintage tins, antique quilts. One collection takes center stage at the top of the stairs: a full set of original Oz books.
“Oz books basically dominated my childhood needs,” Slung says. “Every birthday or Christmas, I got an Oz book.” L. Frank Baum also helped cure her nail-biting habit: For every nail she let grow, she earned a new journey to Oz.