Cornelius Eady and Sarah Micklem have a busy address book. There’s their tiny apartment in New York’s West Village; South Bend, Indiana, where Eady commutes to run Notre Dame’s creative writing program; and twin cottages on a hilltop near Cairo, New York. Side by side, compatible but self-contained, the cottages offer an apt metaphor for the marriage of two working writers.
Eady’s seven books of poetry include Lamont Prize-winner Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, Brutal Imagination, and Pulitzer finalist The Gathering of My Name; he’s also an Obie Award-winning playwright. His latest book, Hardheaded Weather, opens with twin epigraphs from Ezra Pound (“Make it new”) and James Brown (“Make it funky”). Eady does both, and he makes it his own.
Micklem is a fantasy novelist whose earthy, remarkable debut Firethorn earned glowing reviews and a Locus Award nomination. Wildfire, the second volume of her trilogy about a headstrong woman amid warring clans, will be published this month.
Today is the couple’s 31st anniversary, and they’re unwinding at their upstate getaway. “When we get up here, we immediately slow down,” Eady says. “It’s the porch effect.” After a realtor showed them the vacant cottages in 2001, they returned several times before making a bid. “We’d bring coffee and sit on the porch,” says Micklem. Eady adds, “We were afraid the sheriff would show up and say, ‘Who are you?’” There’s a subcutaneous tension in his laughter, recalling his poem “Recycling,” in which “a middle-aged black and white couple” get the once-over at a Catskill dump: “Anyone with eyes can tell / We’re a story that couldn’t have / Originated around these parts.”
A big man with a world-warming smile, Eady sports waist-length dreads bundled into a ponytail, elegantly long nails, and horn-rimmed glasses. He’s wearing a blue workshirt, dark trousers, and slippers. Micklem is dressed almost identically–a fact that amuses them both when they notice—but her sandy hair is a foot shorter than her husband’s. She’s clear-eyed, quick, and light, self-effacing but quietly confident. In conversation, they listen respectfully, trading licks back and forth like a jazz duet.
They met in a ’70s-era free school in Rochester, Eady’s hometown. Micklem was born in Virginia; her family moved several times before settling in upstate New York. A restless student who “hated high school,” she savored the chance to mainline sci-fi novels in place of conventional classes. Eady transferred midyear and spent his time writing poems and songs, playing drums and guitar with a short-lived rock band. Micklem also wrote songs; Eady calls her the group’s “hidden genius.”
After high school, Micklem started writing a science fiction novel that opened, like Firethorn, with a young woman living alone in the woods. Having assayed a three-day vision quest in the Adirondacks at 16, she rented a cabin 10 miles from the nearest town, with no car. Eady would visit, bringing groceries and Stevie Wonder tapes. “He was my lifeline,” she says. “That was probably when I fell in love with him–I just didn’t realize it at the time.” (Eady was dating someone else, which “helped put up the wall in my mind.”)
The summer after her first year at Princeton, Micklem’s former bandmate came for a visit and, she says simply, “It shifted.” They married soon after. Eady’s writing career was the first to take off, though he’s also supported himself with a series of teaching jobs. Micklem found full-time work as a graphic designer, but even when she wasn’t actively writing, Firethorn’s world was marinating inside her head. “For a long time, this was a hobby, a world-building hobby,” she says. “I’d think of weird things on long drives—what are their books like? I want them to have writing, but not like ours. What do their maps look like?”
At a writers’ conference, Eady met workshop leader Abigail Thomas and knew he’d found the right midwife for his wife’s book. “The big reason I finished was Abby,” Micklem concurs. “I learned to go in, go deeper, look around.”
Though she’s always her husband’s first reader, Micklem doesn’t always share her work in progress. “I don’t read everything Sarah’s doing, but I hear about it all the time,” Eady says, and she laughs. “Mostly whining,” she says. She admires his equanimity. “Cornelius doesn’t agonize over process, he doesn’t complain when he’s not writing, it’s all fine. He doesn’t seem to envy other people.” But, Micklem says, “He’s a binge writer. He goes at it and stays at it, he forgets to eat.”
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.”
Eady says one of his joys in reading Micklem’s manuscripts is discovering why she’s been reading the books that pile up in their various homes. Micklem radiates pride as she recalls hearing him read “Gratitude” for the first time; their writers’ retreat for two seems just as supportive as Cave Canem. As they stand in the driveway between their two cottages, discussing which restaurant to choose for an anniversary dinner en route to New York, it’s tempting to conjure the last lines of Eady’s poem “The White Couch”: “All this moving, he says. / Ah! He says. / This is living. / This is life.”
This article appears in July 2009.
