Q and A with Marly Youmans, Author of Charis In The World Of Wonders

Marly Youmans is an award-winning author who penned the novels, Catherwood, The Wolf Pit, Glimmerglass, Maze of Blood and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Her latest novel, CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS, takes readers along for the perilous journey as they root for Charis’ success amongst difficult odds. We’re delighted to feature this interview with Marly!

Where did the inspiration for CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS originate?

Behind the Fenimore Museum in Cooperstown is a little stone and grass amphitheater sloping down toward Otsego Lake, and on fair summer evenings the Glimmerglobe theater troupe puts on plays there. It’s a romantic scene; eagles float above the lake, or geese and ducks bob by in the distance. The grass deepens its greens, and then the sky turns to cobalt as twilight falls and the moon and stars emerge above the trees. Back in summer 2016, Glimmerglobe staged Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the outdoor theatre. My eldest son was Marshal Herrick of Salem, my husband played Goodman Putnam, and my daughter made T-shirts for the production. So perhaps that’s what had me thinking about the 1690’s and the uneasy time leading up to the outbreak of witchcraft accusations and trials. 

Charis’s adventure involves massacre, escapes and flight, romance, dangers of childbirth, and the darkness of witchery and betrayal. Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1690’s could be excessively changeable and lively, and fear of attack from French or native tribes was common. The godly, as Puritans called themselves, practiced a kind of self-scrutiny that often led to a fever-pitch intensity of feeling. 

I’ve always liked the era’s writers and poets—particularly Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet in the New World, and Thomas Traherne, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and others in the Old. Long ago I studied early American writings, and I feel comfortable wandering about in the seventeenth century. In the summer of 2016, my husband and I rambled over Cape Cod and visited what is now North Andover (the Andover of the book) to see the remains of the town and the graveyard where Anne Bradstreet is buried. I was already taking notes for a book by then. Later on I was an alternate fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, and so managed to take a peep at all sorts of curious items that are impossible to find in my rural area—tiny fat books about the goldsmith’s art, tattered accounts of Andover and Haverhill, early cookbooks, and more.

Back in 1996, I published another book set in the seventeenth century, Catherwood (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.) It dealt with a different portion of the English migration to America, although there is a bit of Puritan life close to the end, when Catherwood reaches Westfield, where poet Edward Taylor was minister. Perhaps some day I’ll write a third novel set in the seventeenth century and have a trilogy, as my husband has suggested..

Is the main character, Charis, based on a real person in that time period?

Seldom do I use “a real person” as the basis of a character. I did once, as a sort of experiment, write a novel (Maze of Blood) based on the curious life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, and set myself the task of ending in joy despite the fact that the main character kills himself near the start of the book. And A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage used certain curious facts about my paternal family in south Georgia; my grandfather sired 22 legitimate children, plus two mixed raced children with his neighbor. When she died, the two boys were brought up in the family, and one of them was my grandfather’s favorite brother. Pip, the main character in the book, has character traits drawn from my family as well.

Most of the time I find that characters appear as if from the aether, and over time I  know them better and better. Charis was one of those. I think she has some of the soulfulness and child-sight that appears in seventeenth-century writers like Traherne or Taylor. She also has the toughness exhibited in what’s called the Indian captivity narrative. An account like the famous one by Mistress Mary Rowlandson blends terrible trial and grief with faith and a dogged strength.

Charis’s nature probably also owes something to her name with its links to grace, kindness, and life; aren’t we all influenced by our names? A Charis was one of the Charities from Greek mythologies, goddesses who were tied to ideas of fertility, creativity, beauty, grace, joy, and nature. All of these might describe our Charis, even nature—a dangerous and fearsome element to Puritans, especially at night. But Charis must confront and overcome fears of night and nature. Another thread that must have been suggestive for me is that the Greek goddess known as Charis was married to Hephaestus, the wonderworking metalsmith, just as the young Puritan woman known as Charis is connected to a smith.

The book contains a passage into a kind of underworld and a rise from it, and that may have been influenced by the idea of the  Charites as well. The goddesses were tied to the Eleusinian Mysteries, centered around three mythic events: the abduction of Persephone from her mother, Demeter; Demeter’s search for the daughter; and the emergence of Persephone from the underworld and reunion with her mother in spring. It might just be possible to claim something parallel—not strictly parallel, but significant—in Charis’s losses, flight, and her surprising adventure under the ground.

Why did you set the story in 17th century New England?

My love of the writings of the time—and maybe even my love of Hawthorne’s mode of Romanticism and fascination with Puritans—probably set my feet in that direction. (Hawthorne’s “little graves in the garden” from “Young Goodman Brown” point to the historical Elizabeth Emmerson, whose story seems a cautionary tale to Charis.)

I tend to consider time as a kind of place that I can reach and know, rather than as an inaccessible and ethereal medium. And I don’t care for two sorts of novels set in the past: those that give us contemporary-minded people in fancy dress; and those that reveal a writer who felt compelled to cram all his research into the story. I prefer a vision of the past where we see glimpses of the surrounding reality, as we would see in a novel about our own time, and where we meet minds holding beliefs that don’t always match our own.

However, I have sometimes joked that Charis in the World of Wonders is my attempt to understand Yankees…

 

Follow Marly on Twitter https://twitter.com/marlyyoumans

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CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS

“When I swung over that windowsill, everything changed for me. We are meant to go in and out of doors in civilized style, but my mother bade me climb into woodsy wildness and a darkness flushed with crimson light and torches …”

Clambering into the branches of a tree, a young woman flees flaming arrows and massacre. She will need to struggle for survival: to scour the wilderness for shelter, to strive and seek for a new family and a setting where she can belong. Her unmarked way is costly and hard.

For Charis, the world outside the window of home is a maze of hazards. And even if she survives the wilds, it is no simple matter to discover and nest among her own kind—the godly, those called Puritans by others. She may be tugged by her desires for companionship, may even stumble into an intense love for a man, and may be made to try the strength of female heroism in ways no longer familiar to women in our century.

Streams of darkness run through the seventeenth-century villages of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Occult fears have a way of creeping into the mind. What young woman can be safe from the dangers of wilderness when its shadowy thickets spring up so easily in the soil of human hearts? Much will oppose Charis’ longings for renewal and peace; she must pursue and discover the hero’s path to a larger, more vivid life.

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Category: Interviews, On Writing