TGBC: The slime mold YELLOW feels like such an unexpected and original choice for a central symbol. You’ve mentioned finding a New York Times article about a real slime mold discovered in 1973 as the spark. What was it about that creature that made you think, “this is the one”?
Amy Pence: I first read about the physarum polycephalum (the many-headed slime) in a meditation book, and only after doing some initial warm-up writing did I track down the original New York Times article. The topic was the nature of consciousness and the errant way we’ve been thinking about it: what makes us think that consciousness is limited to the human brain? The slime mold’s somewhat mundane “discovery,” a re-discovery is what I think now, in a suburban backyard by a Texas housewife also piqued my interest, as did the year 1973. I was 12 then, and so I remembered how many of the events that year in the US, the Vietnam POWs arriving home, the Watergate hearings, and the launch of Skylab, resonated with me. The more I entered Eliza’s (Z’s) point of view, the more I understood her growing awareness of both the chaotic upheavals in the world around her and the dissonance she felt in her own body as she was leaving girlhood behind. The organism she names YELLOW becomes a “they,” not a he or a she, but a genderless, fluid creature that instills a sense of connection to something bigger than herself. That it is a one-celled organism, of course, becomes evocative in the book.
TGBC: Z’s sense of oneness with YELLOW as a child, and the way that feeling fades as she grows up, resonates with something a lot of readers will recognize. Was there a specific moment or experience from your own life that you were reaching for in those passages?
Amy Pence: Yes, I think that many children do experience a oneness that is often broken by the intrusion of the world in some way. As a mother, I often felt like I was watching my daughter’s development as both a coming into her own and a growing away from some larger sense of self. But that’s just my observation. What I treasure about creating characters is that I did not have a similar experience to Z’s. Instead, as a child, I had a recurrent dream of being trapped in a cube of mirrors, and not understanding the body I was wearing. As a young adult, I considered the dream as my feeling of isolation and not recognizing myself in my parents. Now I understand the dream as how the ego was settling in and how trapped I felt by all my own projections, and how the body felt too concrete to contain what I really am.
TGBC: YELLOW spans more than fifty years of American life, from Watergate and Skylab to Hurricane Katrina and the pandemic. How did you decide which historical moments mattered to Z’s story, and which ones to leave out?
Amy Pence: What I loved about writing YELLOW was its magic. Rather than making any conscious decisions, I simply followed Z’s path, imagining as fully as I could where she would be, what she would encounter, and what her daily sensuous life would be like. What would she see, feel, and desire? The timelines that I started the book with seemed relevant to how Z would experience herself in the world, so I included illustrations that would show her jottings. My thanks to the young artist Teah Charkawi for those! Of course, since Z lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans, I understood that it was inevitable that she and her brother Clem would be present when Hurricane Katrina hit. I like Robert Olen Butler’s craft book From Where You Dream because it became how I approached YELLOW each time I sat down to write. I simply followed Z’s trajectory and, in this case, I wasn’t thrown off course.
TGBC: You’ve described this book as speculative feminist fiction, and you bring up Jung’s collective unconscious as a framework. For readers who might not be familiar with Jungian ideas, how would you explain what drew you to that lens?
Amy Pence: Only after writing YELLOW could I look back at how much I owe to the matriarchy of women writers who influenced me and enable contemporary writers to use speculative tropes to explore the hard truths of what it means to be female. I think of speculative novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved that used a monster, an androgyne, and a ghost to examine patriarchal entitlement that assumes ultimate power, even mothering power, as well as ownership over women’s bodies and identities. I think Jung’s collective unconscious, the inherited layer of the human psyche shared by all of us and consisting of universal myths and symbols or archetypes, definitely comes into play with these and other influential books. In terms of YELLOW, I’d rather others analyze how the Jungian lens may work, but a good friend and early reader of the book made a point that I really love: YELLOW aims to make the collective consciousness manifest.
TGBC: The chapters are short, even spare, with the sensibility of a poet. Was that always the plan, or did the book teach you what form it needed?
Amy Pence: The answer is definitely B! I began the book thinking the chapters would be very short. Many of the chapters were initially poems, so I thought it may be a hybrid like my book Incandescent about the poet Emily Dickinson, but as the book moved on and after getting some feedback from my partner, I realized that the entire book should be in prose, and of course, some chapters got longer and longer. YELLOW was definitely teaching me what it needed as I was writing.
TGBC: Z survives real trauma in this novel alongside the more mystical elements. How did you approach holding those two very different registers in the same story?
Amy Pence: To me, these facts about life, enduring trauma and finding our way to meaning, go hand in hand. I’m not sure that I could change the registers, so if they co-exist in our daily lives then I did my best to honor our human condition through Z’s story.
TGBC: You grew up in the French Quarter of New Orleans with a jazz musician stepfather, then moved to Las Vegas. That’s such a specific and unusual combination of places to be shaped by. How do you think that upbringing shows up in your writing?
Amy Pence: I left New Orleans when I was 10, and we lived in various apartments on Royal, Bourbon, Barracks and Decatur, as well as for a short time in Metairie. Downstairs from us on Decatur Street was a bar and coffee shop called The Sphinx, smelling of clove cigarettes (and perhaps other scents!), with local musicians jamming, and art on the crumbling walls. One of my memories was going to a hippie wedding in an abandoned warehouse space, lit by torches, assuming that’s what life would be like for me when I became a teenager. Then we moved to Las Vegas with a very different ethos, but the entertainment and casinos also had some weird artistic pull for me. By the time I was a teenager, disco and yuppies had replaced anything soulful! Probably the mystical secret courtyards, and the realities of life behind facades, and sensuous lifestyles shaped my subjects, language, and style.
TGBC: You’ve been writing and publishing poetry for decades, and YELLOW is your debut novel at 65. What finally made this the story that crossed you over into fiction?
Amy Pence: I spent 10 years trying to finish a book that had Las Vegas and a showgirl mom/daughter relationship at its center, but I understand now that it was my practice novel. I learned a lot about dialogue and depicting action, but I was too close to the characters. When YELLOW started arriving on the page, I finally felt ready to follow the characters. My wish is that younger writers will know that they have more time than they think! And that all mistakes and false starts are just preparation.
TGBC: The origin story of this book is remarkable. A tree fell on your cottage during Hurricane Irma, knocked you unconscious, and in those moments you started composing. What do you think it is about extremity that opens something up creatively?
Amy Pence: It didn’t quite happen that way. I was briefly unconscious after a beam from the treefall struck my back and head, and I slipped out into the storm with a more meaningful understanding of life, a curiosity about death and consciousness, but also some hard times ahead of me to get out of post-natural disaster depression. My poetry book, We Travel Towards It, published by Serving House Books last year, goes deeper into that personal journey as well as how climate change affects so many. As a result, YELLOW didn’t arrive immediately. I’m lucky that I had insurance and was able to make my way back into my reconstructed cottage nine months later. Not everyone is as fortunate, which I tried to capture in the section on Hurricane Katrina in YELLOW. My novel arrived three years after the treefall and coincided with meeting my partner, with whom I could go back to explore New Orleans as well as share all my thoughts about this crazy thing we call life. Extremity definitely opened up a window of exploration for me: what I know for sure is that without the treefall incident, I would not have had the more expanded awareness that I needed to write YELLOW.
TGBC: You write longhand in composition notebooks, and you even photographed every page of your notes for YELLOW out of fear of losing them. What is it about that physical process that still works for you?
Amy Pence: That is how YELLOW came into being, and I do misplace things all the time, so I was a bit fearful about losing the manuscript of the book! But my process also involved reading each chapter aloud to my partner and talking through what was happening for the characters and much of the deeper subjects in the book. It’s an important step, having someone to cheer you on and hearing how you can make the prose read more smoothly. The novel I’m working on consists of pages of notes in a composition book, but this time, it’s emerging straight onto the laptop.
TGBC: You’ve taught poetry and writing for years, at Emory and elsewhere. When you sit down with a reader who thinks they don’t connect with poetry, what do you tell them?
Amy Pence: I tell them that they haven’t found the right kind of poetry for them. There are so many poets publishing so many varieties of poems. When I taught adjunct classes at Emory, an assignment was for students to find a poet and explore how that poet best matched their taste and style and what specific methods they could learn from them. There’s something for everyone, and readers can find poets easily on the internet (The Poetry Foundation or poets.org, for example) or by going to an open mic at a bookstore or coffee shop. It also may mean that they’re not yet ready for poetry. I find that as we mature, poetry appeals to readers that were put off by English classes in high school, for example. Or the truth may be that their taste is elsewhere, I’ve never watched an entire opera, so no harm, no foul.
TGBC: Community comes up a lot when people talk about what reading gives them. What has the response to YELLOW taught you about what readers are really looking for right now?
Amy Pence: Book clubs like The Gloss rock because so many ideas and imaginations are finding their audiences and, like the days of the salons, readers are sharing books and important fresh perspectives. For instance, books like Percival Everett’s James, his rewriting of Twain’s Huck Finn through Jim’s eyes, are crucial for our times to enact alternative views of history, demonstrate this nation’s engrained white supremacy, and more generally engender the compassion we need in these times. I also love how independent bookstores are thriving and that many bookstores have banned smart phones in favor of silent reading. I’m most excited that YELLOW’s readers say they’ve never read anything like it before. YELLOW is a genre-bender; it’s not just speculative fiction or a coming of age story, but also pulls in historical events, biographies, science, philosophy, sexuality, trauma recovery, the role of art, and there’s romance. Life has many layers, and I think we’re accustomed to all the layers because we encounter so much in our daily lives, and so books can be just as textural!