Gretl Claggett: Your latest book, The Paper Garden: An Artist {Begins Her Life’s Work} at 72, is a bold, risky, tour-de-force that defies categorization—released at a time when publishing is playing it safe. Tell us about the genesis of this book, your extensive research, and how you came to intertwine your personal story with the biography of your protagonist, Mrs. Delany, who lived from 1700-1788.

Molly Peacock: I first saw Mrs. Delany’s extraordinary collages in 1986 at the Morgan Library in New York City, was entranced, but passed on buying the expensive British catalog. Seventeen years later, bored in the lobby of the British Museum while my husband was making a phone call, I wandered into the gift shop. There, in 2003, on the last table at the end of the shop, was the book I couldn’t afford in 1986. I bought it, read it avidly, re-attached to those incredible botanical collages made of hundreds of dots and squiggles of brilliantly colored paper on deep black backgrounds, and immediately wanted to write something about this amazing work.

Why? I didn’t exactly know. Writing is thinking, and it took me five years to find out. I didn’t set out to write The Paper Garden, I set out to write an essay for PoemMemoirStory, a small literary journal that requested a piece when I was acting in a one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge. Why not pour out some thoughts on this 18th century woman who, I realized, had become a role model for me? PMS journal said that I had to include memoir in the essay, so, because I have that constant compare-and-contrast mechanism going on in my head, I wrote a compare and contrast essay about Mrs. Delany and—my mother, Mrs. Peacock. Mrs. Delany started her life’s work, the invention of a new art form which art history books will tell you was created by Picasso and Matisse—hah!—at the very same age in her life at which my mother died.  This was the needle in the heart that drew me forward into the biography.

I needed a role model for my artistic life as I aged. And my mother couldn’t provide that.

Enter my husband, Professor Michael Groden, a textual scholar. I’ve watched Mike do tireless research on obscure subjects all my life. We’ve known each other since high school (though we didn’t marry till we were 45). Because he is a prominent scholar of the works of James Joyce, our travels to England and Ireland had brought us to many places where Mrs. Delany had been. Casually, I had delved into these spots, never quite knowing why, but drawn deeply anyway. So I was unconsciously researching, taking the most casual of notes, if any, just absorbing, in the way poets do, the material of her life.  All this was way, way back in my unconscious mind.

At the same time my valiant husband encouraged me, my essay for PMS, titled “Passion Flowers in Winter,” was making its way into the world. The wildness of the comparison between an 18th century aristocrat and my Rosie-the-riveter 20th century mom appealed to David Foster Wallace, who chose the essay for Best American Essays 2007. This gave me the courage to apply to the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center, then directed by Nancy Milford. I’m so grateful that I was awarded one of the first fellowships at the center. That year managed to turn me into a nascent biographer.

I spent 365 days seized by fear. What was I doing??? How could I turn myself as a poet into a researcher and biographer, but not lose the impulse of the poet? Would I ever attach to fact as I had to metaphor? Was one exclusive of the other? I began to wonder if somehow I could use that essay as a kind of matchbook-sized maquette for the giant, block-long sculpture that would become the biography. Well, the biography plus. I began to understand that the book was an attempt to answer the question of how a woman could invent an art form in her eighth decade. If I could track every instance of creativity in Mary Delany’s life (and I could, because she left six volumes of letters), perhaps I could come up with a map for how this happened. The book I wanted to write wouldn’t be a straight biography. It would circle around the question of creativity. And because I had no credentials as a researcher, an art historian or a botanist, but I did have credentials as a poet and a person involved with creativity and inspiration for decades, I would have to enter this book as an artist myself. I found myself putting my whole heart into this book, and discovering something else important: Mrs. Delany started her 985 miraculous collages in mourning after the death of her husband. I was continually worried that my husband, whom I adore, would die. (He’s a happy, healthy cancer survivor, but still, I worried.) All of these vectors created a tremendous electricity.

Enter the circle of scholars. There was a Mary Delany zeitgeist at the time, where scholars of 18th century garden design, paper-making, botany, court life, textiles and dress all converged in contributing to a Delany exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. As I contacted these scholars, with my husband’s encouragement, I was quite nervous, but they were all uniformly generous to me. Suddenly I had art historians and a botanist I could rely on for all my most pedestrian questions.

Enter structure. In the fall of 2008 my agent encouraged me to write a book proposal. In the essay, I layered the imaginative material between the factual material like raspberry cream between the tiers of torte. Could I do that in a whole book? Whenever I despaired, I turned to the images. The collages themselves! What if I used the images to structure the biography? But would a publisher ever agree to the expense? I chose six images at first, and worked a proposal around the idea of biography, memoir, history, botany and images. Whew.

Enter the economy. The market in 2008 was so terrible in the US that publishers were both entranced and afraid of this risky idea. But an editor in Canada, Susan Renouf, who had worked with illustrated books, understood how it might be accomplished, and McClelland and Stewart bought the proposal with a typically low advance, BUT with a request that I include 34 images! I was overjoyed. I had an anchor. And a woman behind me. Well, quite a few women, actually, including Kathleen Anderson my agent, my therapist (who was hearing all about my agonies) and Mary Delany’s great-great-great-great-great-great niece, Ruth Hayden, who had befriended me. The structure of using a flower to begin each chapter as a threshold into a period of Delany’s life was born. There are thirteen chapters, with details and supplemental images throughout.

Enter the world. My agent just couldn’t sell this book in the current climate. But then Scribe books in Australia made a small offer. And when McClelland and Stewart was able to produce the fabulously sensuous design, a young American editor at Bloomsbury Books went to bat for the book. After the Canadian book was produced, Bloomsbury UK came into the picture. The Paper Garden was ultimately published in all four countries and Ireland.

Doug Pepper, the publisher of McClelland and Stewart, calls The Paper Garden the anti-e-book, because as an object it’s so beautiful and deliciously tactile. (However, it IS an e-book, and it looks fantastic on an i-pad.) I actually think that the stunning object is the future of the book-in-the-hand. You should see the paperback!

GC: Let’s talk about sex—something you do fearlessly in much of your work, including The Paper Garden. Everyone wants to write about sex, it seems, but few do it well. Why is it so tough? Do you think male and female authors are held to different standards when writing about sex? Regarding gender roles, a lot has changed since Mrs. Delany’s time … but has anything stayed the same? How can women—especially women writers—lead the way to further change?

MP: The secret to writing about sex, Aunt Molly says, is chiaroscuro. Keep part of the description in shadow, then shine a sudden and direct light on it. It’s just like romance. So much of romance is unspoken, and then there’s a sudden welling and expression.  You just can’t keep the light steady on it—it’s too much like porn if you do that. If you can turn a metaphor, it really helps. But if you can’t, the craft philosophy of light and shadow won’t fail you. In The Paper Garden I wanted to get at a mature woman’s adult sexuality through the flowers. Occasionally I used a shocking word among all the sensuous words. “They all come out of darkness,” I say about the remarkable portraits of flowers she called her Ladies, “intense and vaginal, bright on their black backgrounds, as if, had she possessed one, she had shined a flashlight on 985 flowers’ cunts.”

GC: Mrs. Delany, the protagonist of The Paper Garden, created a new art form and began her life’s work at 72. But before that, she’d reinvented herself a number of times. With your latest book, you’ve also reinvented yourself and created a new genre. So what’s next for you?

MP: I’ve just finished a book of fables in verse called AlphabeTique: the Lives of the Letters, and I have another book of poems going. I’ll be collecting my essays on poetry for The University of Michigan Press poetry series, and going forward on my next book of nonfiction, The Secret Gardeners, all about the lives of 19th-century women botanical illustrators.

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www.mollypeacock.org

www.peacockpapergarden.com

Molly Peacock, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72 (McClelland and Stewart, October 2010, in Canada; Scribe Publications, October 2010, in Australia; Bloomsbury USA, April 2011, in the US; Bloomsbury, July 2011, in the UK) and six books of poetry, including The Second Blush (W.W. Norton and Company, June 2008, in the US and McClelland and Stewart, March 2009, in Canada) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Company in the US and UK and Penguin Canada, 2002). Among her other works are a memoir called Paradise, Piece By Piece and How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle (1998, 1999; both published by Riverhead Penguin in the US and McClelland and Stewart in Canada). She is the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (Graywolf Press) and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses (W.W. Norton, 1996).

Former Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets' Corner (Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York) and former President of the Poetry Society of America, Peacock is one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on subways and buses throughout North America. Currently she is on the faculty of the Spalding University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program. She also serves as Series Editor of the The Best Canadian Poetry in English, published each year by Tightrope Books in Toronto.