A mysterious magic threads through novelist Eowyn Ivey’s well-wrought novels, each set near a fictional Wolverine River in what is otherwise the Alaska where Ivey grew up and where she lives. The books, each of them rich in landscape, are fascinated with the outer edges of humanness or, perhaps more precisely, with the liminal space where human desires meet wilderness and the unknown. In her first novel, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Snow Child, inspired by a Russian fairy tale, Ivey explores the lives of a couple who cannot have children but who meet a child who bears an uncanny resemblance to the snow girl they built together. Her second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, is based on a real-life 1885 expedition into the interior of Alaska but involves blurred boundaries between men and animals. And in her dark yet tender and strikingly immersive third novel, Black Woods, Blue Sky, she tells the story of a six-year-old girl, Emaleen, whose young single mother, Birdie, gets involved with Arthur, an odd, reclusive man who lives most of the time in a remote part of the state while he is visiting his adoptive father, Warren, a lawman in the area.
Birdie is struggling, a waitress at a roadside bar. “It wasn’t the coke that tripped her up, though, as much as the drinking. It was as if she had been granted a superpower—the ability to down tequila like it was water.” Early on, she leaves Emaleen home alone one night—yet it’s a testament to Ivey’s skill that even in these scenes of irresponsibility, Birdie is drawn with deep empathy. We understand her longing to be in the wild. When Emaleen realizes that her mother isn’t at home that night, she goes to search for Birdie in the woods, an act that foreshadows later scenes in the book. It’s Arthur who returns Emaleen to Birdie, and from there begins a friendship and then a romantic relationship. Emaleen, not Birdie, realizes that something is strange and different about Arthur as the courtship grows more serious, and it’s primarily her emotions as a child—her wonder and her delight and her terror—that clue us into how to feel when Birdie decides that they will move into Arthur’s home in a remote area of wilderness.
Ivey speaks to me from her home office in Alaska. Behind her is a tall bookshelf and a map of the world that used to belong to her mother. She explains that she partly wrote the novel not here, but in what used to be her two children’s playhouse up the hill from the house, a place that became her “writing shack,” equipped only with a little woodstove. She says that hiking up the hill with her laptop “felt like I was kind of leaving all the baggage of my life behind for a little bit, and that enabled me to really get the writing done.”
During the pandemic, while she was working on Black Woods, Blue Sky, she became a primary caregiver for her divorced mother and father, both of whom had developed cancer and whose dynamic inspired Birdie and Arthur. Emaleen, Ivey explains, is the most autobiographical character she’s ever written. “I was very much afraid of my father growing up,” she says. “I loved him dearly, but he could also be very terrifying.… It was just a huge cognitive dissonance. You know, I couldn’t make sense of it as a child.” Her deepest fear as a child was that her father would kill her mother, and in writing this novel, she explored that fear. “What I didn’t know is what was going to be the resolution with Arthur,” Ivey says.
Ivey tells me that she sees Birdie as someone who “seeks thrills out and doesn’t maybe recognize the danger in those thrills,” whereas her own mother was responsible. The specifics of Birdie and Arthur are quite different from those of her parents, she goes on to say, but consistent with the fictional characters’ love for the remote interior of Alaska, her parents raised her to have a great appreciation for wilderness and plant life.
Ivey’s parents passed away while she was still working on the novel. It was devastating to lose her parents, she says, reflecting, “Perhaps it freed me up to write the story.” It gave her “more of an honest way to write directly into those fears without worrying about hurting them in some way.”
The novel, told in turns from the point of view of Birdie, Emaleen, and Warren, who sees the world as “a complex interchange of suffering,” goes on to explore the consequences of Arthur’s secret. Ivey explains, “I think it’s been the story that I’ve been kind of living with my whole life, like trying to figure out, in some way, how to talk about aspects of my childhood growing up, and it was just a long process to get there.” She put together an approach for the story in 2016, after she started looking at fairy tales she’d collected over the years, stories like “Beauty and the Beast,” “East of the Sun West of the Moon,” and “The Brown Bear of Norway.”
Some of the primal appeal of the novel does come from its liberal use of folkloric material, but what keeps a reader turning pages is memorably sketched characters and the strikingly beautiful evocation of a real Alaska, notwithstanding the fictionalization of certain places and the use of magical motifs. Even the smallest gestures are described with care. At one point, Arthur brings Birdie a piece of tundra, and a startlingly precise, close-up description follows: “In the mossy clump, several little mushrooms had survived the upheaval, as well as a scattering of grayish-white caribou lichen. It was easy to think tundra was nothing, like rolled out greenish-brown carpet, but up close it was a hundred miniature lives in a square foot, intertwined and delicate.”
Ivey’s prose is supported by palpably deep research, not only into plants but also into other elements of the story. In one “adventure” that would inform the book’s events, she and her husband were flown into a remote area of the Talkeetna Mountains and dropped off. They hiked for about 20 miles through the mountains to get back to their car parked on the highway. “I had spent a lot of time in the wilderness,” she says. “But I’d never done that kind of a hike out—where you’re basically working backwards, you know, coming from the middle of nowhere, trying to get back to the highway.”
And for another aspect of the novel, Ivey spent time thinking about what it would be like to be a bear. She explains that for Alaskans, telling bear stories is commonplace. However, as part of working up Black Woods, Blue Sky, she also took an “intense” trip to Kodiak Island with friends who were hunting guides at a brown bear camp. For about two weeks, they stayed in a small tent and perched on a hillside watching bears all day long. “We would see things like, oh, here comes a big boar walking up towards a sow with a cub, and the sow getting defensive and chasing the boar away,” Ivey says. But she also watched them “being lazy and fishing,” and explains, “They have their different mannerisms of how they fish for salmon.”
At night, the guides would tell stories about what they’d observed; she says that the guides feel “there’s quite a bit of emotional depth there among the bears that’s very fascinating.” She noted that it was hard to process the overwhelm of that experience, but “later on, as I’m writing, it starts to kind of trickle in.” The thoughtful rendering of bear psychology and physicality gives the book an imaginative heft.
Asked about why her work has been invested in humans at the outer edge of their humanness, Ivey says, “I am very interested in this arbitrary threshold that we’ve put up that says that we’re different from these other living creatures, and we’re separate from them, and then, therefore, maybe we don’t need them, and that’s not true. We all are intertwined.”•
Join us on April 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Ishmael Reed will sit down with special guest Justin Desmangles and CBC host John Freeman to discuss Mumbo Jumbo. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
