The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

Maggie Black, a poet and journalist, inherits a house in the mountains near Tucson from fellow poet David Cooper. Though they had corresponded for years, they had never met in person, and Maggie is as surprised that he left her his house as she is by the circumstances of his death: David Cooper is found drowned on a river bed that has been dried for years.

Maggie goes to the desert with the intention of writing Cooper’s biography. She didn’t have his permission while he was alive, but she realizes that the fact that he left her his house and everything within it is his way of giving her his okay once he’s gone. While going through his papers, and talking to those who knew him, she begins to realize that the beings Cooper wrote about in his collection of poems The Wood Wife, and that his lover Anna Naverra painted, may not be strictly imaginary. And meanwhile, the desert, a land she never thought she’d love, begins to enter her bones.

The Wood Wife is a wonderful novel about poetry and painting and art in general, about mythology and folklore, about loneliness and friendship and love, and above all about land, our relationship with it, how it shapes who we are.

Whenever I travel, I find myself paying attention to the relationship between landscape and stories. And I say when I travel not because this is not the case in my homeland, but because sometimes it’s hard to truly see what’s been around us our whole lives. In places that are new to me, though, I always see how geography has shaped stories, myths, folklore. One of my favourite things about The Wood Wife was the way it explores the relationship between landscape and art. What Cooper wrote about, what Anna Naverra painted, was both universal and very specific: a product of those mountains, that desert, their wildlife. And of course, a product of their lore. And you know, I never thought I’d want to visit the desert, but reading this book made me want to. Every landscape gives rise to its kind of stories. Every landscape has its kind of beauty.

I also loved all the art references: to Borges and Pablo Neruda, to Brian Froud, to Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, with whom Cooper corresponded. Most of all I loved that they weren’t just thrown in – they’re in the story because they belong in the story, because The Wood Wife is very much about art and creativity. But not at all in an inaccessible or insular way.

Finally, I loved how the novel uses Native American folklore, particularly Coyote stories, with a bit of English folklore thrown in. Again, these stories are explored in both their universality and their specificity, which is the specificity of the landscape where they belong. I loved all the animals in the story too: coyotes, of course, but also owls, stags, bobcats, and the adorable Thumber, about whom I read with Terri Windling’s lovely art in mind.

And because coyotes are cool, I leave you with a link: The Daily Coyote.

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(Let me know if I missed yours!)