Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, dodging machine-gun fire, and reading. She is the author of 8 poetry collections, including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award, and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of a Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press. Her poetry has been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Al Young, Rafael Jesús González, and Maxine Hong Kingston for its beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. She is also the author of 14 novels including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion. Her new book Creativity: Where Poems Begin looks at the origins of inspiration, told in a way that encourages other writers to find their own unique path to the place where inspiration begins.
One afternoon as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and recovering from a near-brush with heatstroke, an idea for a short story popped into my head: What if a teenager in, say, the year 2039 started railing against … Continue reading →