Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes award-winning author and poet Mary Mackey, a
longtime member of the WELL, to discuss her new book THE GODDESS OF
BURNING HAIR, a complete collection of her goddess poems spanning
more than fifty years. From the book description: "Lyrical, tender,
fierce, brilliantly written, sometimes prophetic, and informed by
both lived knowledge and scholarship, these poems bring alive a
world both ancient and not yet born, as Mackey calls on us to
embrace the many ways the Earth, our Great Mother, speaks through
us."
  

    
Mary became a writer by running high fevers; visiting the ruins of
the neolithic, goddess-worshiping cultures of Old Europe; tramping
through tropical jungles; being swarmed by army ants, and reading.
Her novels and poems have been praised by by Marija Gimbutas, Marge
Piercy, Jane Hirshfield, Maxine Hong Kingston, Annie Finch, Judy
Grahn, Cristina Biaggi, Vicki Noble, Starhawk, Wendell Berry, Thomas
Moore, Rafael Jesús González, and Pat Conroy for their beauty,
precision, gripping plots, originality, and extraordinary range. She
is the author of 10 collections of  poetry collections, including
SUGAR ZONE, winner of a PEN Award; and THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR
DREAMS, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a
Small Press; as well as 14 novels, including The  New York Times
bestseller A GRAND PASSION and the Earthsong Series, four novels
about the Goddess-worshiping people of Old Europe. In December 2026
and January 2027 Open Road Media will reissue the Earthsong Series
novels in new editions in both paper and electronic form. THE
GODDESS OF BURNING HAIR, the first complete collection of Mackey's
goddess poems, is being published by Women's Spirituality Studies
Press this month.
  

    
Leading the discussion with Mary is Sean Marlon Newcombe. An alumnus
of Princeton University, Sean was the creator and co-founder of The
Artemis Women In Action Film Festival and Artemis Motion Pictures,
the world's first festival and production company to focus on and
celebrate female action heroes, stuntwomen, female athletes and
women warriors. He has a background in film finance and is a trained
musician, Shakespearean actor and student of martial arts.
  

    
Welcome, Mary and Sean!
  

    

Thank you, Jon. I'm happy to be here. Hello, everyone.
  

    

I've been on the WELL for over 30 years, and I'm looking forward to
sharing not only thoughts about my new collection of poetry "The
Goddess of Burning Hair," but also some thoughts about my lifetime
love of writing.
  

    
Mary, why don't we start with the latter. How and when did your love
of writing emerge?
  

    

My love of writing emerged before I could read. Put another way, my
love of storytelling goes back almost as far as I can remember. My
father or mother read to me almost every night: "Winnie the Pooh,"
"When We Were Very Young," Fairy Tales, all 40 Oz books (some of
them so old, they had the original illustrations), even stories from
an old "McGuffy's Reader" that my father had used when he was a boy.


And then there were the stories my Kentucky relatives told as we sat
o the porch in the evenings rocking in the porch swing and listening
to the crickets. There was never the slightest mention of sex, but
everything else was considered suitable for a five-year-old to hear:
stories of a boy who was orphaned because "he was sitting in front
of the fire with his family, and a whirlwind blew him into the
fireplace and everyone else away." Stories of crimes that I thought
were recent, but which I later learned dated from the late 1700's.
Then there was the story of the little boy who hid from his Daddy in
a wheat field and got bailed ("chopped him into 4 neat pieces").
Stories of a great-great uncle who drowned in the Platte river
during the Colorado Goldrush, great-great grandmothers who drove
geese to market across the Ohio River when it froze (in the 1840's).

From my relatives and the stories my parents read to me, I learned
about how to tell a good story, how to craft a narrative, how to
make a story so exciting that your listeners or readers would beg
you to go on. Add to this that I learned at a very early age that I
was related to Mark Twain through my father's mother's family, and
how could I not have loved telling stories and learning how to write
them down?

I wrote my first "book" of poetry when I was six or seven (dedicated
to mt Mommy and Daddy), my fist novel when I was ten (science
fiction--about a band of brave children who go to Saturn). I even
learned before I was in the First Grade, that if I told a good story
to my friends and stopped at an exciting point, I could get them to
give me candy to go on.
  

    
Why did you choose the title "The Goddess of Burning Hair"?
  

    

The poem "The Goddess of Burning Hair" appeared in my previous
collection, which was called "In This Burning World: Poems of Love
and Apocalypse," published by Marsh Hawk Press in May 2025. Notice
that it is "The Goddess *of* Burning Hair" not "The Goddess "with"
Burning Hair. 

The goddess in this poem is the goddess (spirit) of the Amazon, and
she is witnessing millions of acres of trees--which are the "hair"
of the Earth--burning. 

I often get titles for my books from poems that appeared in earlier
books, but in this case I thought the title was especially
appropriate, because in a number of the poems in this new
collection, I used the voices of goddesses--traditional or
imagined--to allow the Earth, our Great Mother, to speak directly to
us. 
  

    
Which goddesses resonate with you and why?
  

    
Goddesses from every culture, country, and religion resonate with
me. I've long been fascinated by how, for hundreds of thousands of
years, human beings have created goddesses. 

In the last four decades or so, I've been particularly interested
in Afro-Brazilian goddesses, particularly Iemanjá, goddess of the
Ocean, the Sea, and Motherhood and the creator of all living things;
and Yansã, goddess of wind, lightning, and storms. 

Brought to Brazil by the Yoruba people of West Africa during the
North Atlantic slave trade, these two goddesses were worshiped
secretly by the enslaved people of Brazil for over four hundred
years, and are now worshiped openly in Brazil by some 2.5 million
people. In other words, in them and in the other female deities of
the Afro-Brazilian religion Condomblé, we can witness a living,
contemporary instance of goddess worship that survived centuries of
persecution.
  

    
Please speak about the influence Marija Gimbutas on your work.
  

    
Pardon the interruption, but here's some essential information about
this discussion...

This conversation is publicly accessible, meaning anyone can read
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-BURNI-page01.html>.

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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
October 5. Thanks for being part of it!
  

    
Thank you, 
  

    

Sean had just asked me to speak about the influence of Marija
Gimbutas on my work. That's a great question.
  

    

In 1981, inspired by Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman and the
time I had spent in the 1960s living in the jungles of Costa Rica, I
decided to write The Last Warrior Queen, a novel about the
Goddess-worshipping cultures of ancient Sumer. Ever since, I have
been fascinated by the idea that--far from being an insensate ball
of rock--the Earth is a sacred, living being, a Great Mother:
female by necessity, since she brings forth all life from her womb.

I had occasionally been writing poems in the voices of goddesses as
far back as 1972.  Many had strong environmental and ecological
themes like the poem "Cytheria" (Aphrodite). Published in 1981,
"Cytheira" gave a voice to the Ocean, in her name urged us to
stop polluting the seas with oil and chemicals. 
  

    
So in 1990, when John Loudon, the executive editor of
HarperSanFrancisco, called me up and said that he'd read my novel
"The Last Warrior Queen" and would I be interested in looking over
the manuscript of a book they were about to publish and if I liked
it, write a novel based on it, I immediately said "yes," because
it's not often a writer received an invitation from an editor of a
major publishing house to write a novel. 

The manuscript turned out to be The Civilization of the Goddess, by
a UCLA Professor of Anthropology named Marija Gimbutas. I had never
heard of Marija Gimbutas but as soon as I read it, I knew that this
was exactly what I had been wanting to write about.
  

    
That encounter with Marija Gimbutas's description of the
Earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Europe 6000 years
ago, meticulously researched with credible archaeological data and
brilliantly presented, changed my writing and in many ways my life. 

I immediately began to outline a novel about what Gimbutas had
postulated: that in the fifth millennium, sky-worshiping nomads from
the steppes had invaded a Europe consisting of small communities
that, for thousands of years, had worshiped the Earth as a Great
Mother who brought forth all life. The result was the first novel of
my Earthsong Series: The Year The Horses Came.

But ideas for novels weren't the only thing Marija Gimbutas's
theories gave me. Her work also deeply influenced my poetry thanks
to the ecological, environmental, and social changes she describe
that were brought about by that invasion. I came to believe that the
Earth could be seen--not just as property to be bought, sold, and
fought over--but as a sacred trust. And that belief that the Earth
is a living being, entrusted to us to preserve became the
inspiration for the many of the goddess poems in The Goddess of
Burning Hair. 
  

    
These poems span more than fifty years. When you brought them
together, what conversation did you discover between your younger
and older selves?
  

    

That's a great question. The answer is that I didn't find a lot of
difference between the poems I wrote in 1972 and the poems I wrote
in 2025 and am still writing. In fact, I think you'd find it
difficult to know which poems were written when if it were not for
the Notes at the back of the book.

By 1972, I had already driven the Inter- American Highway from
Michigan to Costa Rica several times. I'd lived in remote jungle
field stations as an unpaid research assistant to some of the first
people who were getting doctoral degrees in what was starting to be
called "ecology" (a term so unusual at the time that it was often
misspelled "ekology).  I had written a Comparative Literature
doctoral dissertation on the influence of the Darwinian Revolution
on the 19th century novel (English, French, Spanish, and Russian)
centered around William Henry Hudson, the Anglo-Argentine
ornithologist and novelist who wrote "Green Mansions," which is set
in the rainforests of south-western Venezuela. More importantly, In
1966 I had witnessed the great trees of the Cloud Forests of Costa
Rica being chopped down and turned into charcoal. Something that
made me fear not only for the forests of the Earth, but for our own
survival on a planet were in the process of changing so radically.

In addition, by 1972, due to my beliefs in Civil Rights and the
equality of all people, I had already been involved in the earliest
years of the emerging movement for the equality of women (then known
as "Women's Liberation," now known as "Second-Wave Feminism), and
had met women who were talking about and writing about, and even
making films about goddesses.

So from the late sixties until 2025, I have been writing poems
giving voice to the Earth through the voices of goddesses, some of
which I invented; and also thinking about those moment when we feel
the power of the Divine enter us, moments when we mortals become
transformed into something greater and more powerful, and the Earth
speaks through us.
  

    
Mary and people in the Well know, but some not in Well people
wouldn't, I've been in awe of Mary's novels and poems for decades
now--and your life, full of thoughtfulness, openness, and wild
adventures.  I wonder if the fever-state that brought you to poetry
isn't somehow a mirror of the way you've lived your 'outer' life--
wide open to the whole range of experiences inner and outer, and a
feeling of what I'll call both kinship and solidarity especially
with women all over the world and throughout time.. you've
channelled such a big range of the human and, as in this book, from
feeling existence through realms beyond human. 

I wonder, would it be ok with your publisher for you to put one or
two examples of poems into this conversation, so people might see
them? (The lovely thing about poems is they're short enough to do
that, unlike novels. We can see the whole thing in a few inches of
space and not all that many moments of time.)
  

    
Thank you, Jane. And putting poems in here is a great idea. I doubt
Women's Spirituality Studies Press will object, but I'll ask
them right now. Do you have any suggestions for poems for me to
post?
  

    
On that note, Mary, could you tell us about Women's Spirituality
Studies Press, the press that published your poems?
  

    
poems to post & talk about:

> In the Face of Fear We Dance

> The Dark Mother Gives Three Gifts

they both mention Aba, Shallah & Nashah
  

    

My late friend and colleague Mara Keller left the money from her
estate to found Women's Spirituality Studies Press (WSSP). In late
2025, WSSP asked me to assemble a collection of my poems about
goddesses taken from my nine previous collections of poetry plus The
Earthsong Series, my four novels about the Goddess-worshiping,
Earth-centered cultures of Neolithic Europe 6000 years ago. I
thought this was an excellent idea, so I went through all those
books, found goddess poems, and the result is "The Goddess of
Burning Hair."

"The Goddess of Burning Hair" is the first book WSSP has
published, but several more are on the way in the near future
including a reprint of Charlene Spretnak's "Lost Goddess of
Early Greece," Annie Finch's "Little Book of Goddess Poems,"
and Carol P. Crist's "A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the
Goddess."


You can find a lot of of information about WSSP at:
https://wsspress.org/ 
(Please note you just search for WSSP, you'll get the Washington
State Sheep Producers--which is no doubt a great group, but probably
not much for poetry and goddesses).

I think WSSP describes its mission better than I can: "Women's
Spirituality Studies Press (WSSP) is a non-profit publishing house
dedicated to advancing the understanding of Women's Spirituality
across cultures and eras. Our mission is to publish peer-reviewed,
insightful books and also to serve as an inclusive platform
providing resources and connections for scholars and practitioners.
By offering rigorous peer review and comprehensive publishing
support, WSSP nurtures scholarship and writings that honor the
multiplicity of women's spiritual lives. Together we strive to
foster an inclusive community that demonstrates the importance and
value of this academic field while expanding the global conversation
on Women's Spirituality."

"Women's Spirituality invites us to remember what has been
forgotten, to reclaim what has been silenced, and to reimagine what
is possible."
 -- Mara Lynn Keller, Founder of WSSP