Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
August 1 LITM: Ricky Ray
Ricky Ray is a poet, essayist and eco-mystic who lives with his wife and his old brown dog in the old green hills of New England. He is the author of four books of poetry, including The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020). He lectures on poetry, animism, and integral ecology, and he serves on the advisory board of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard.
The Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Ricky Ray: I wish there was one I could relay. Dogs and the woods were my best teachers. Dogs live poems, forests are poems unfolding, and learning from them how to live poetry, how to hear and feel the poetry in Mother Earth herself, was the best gift of insight I ever received. It rooted me in the poetry that happens before, during and after words. It taught me how to pay better attention and it made me want to be a better person and it made the poems better and it was the awareness that kept me at least somewhat sane when the storms of poetry—so much rejection and failure!—beleaguered and set me on edge.
Actually, now that a particular memory has coughed itself up from beneath an inch of dust, perhaps there is one insight from a human teacher, a playwright, I can relay. On one of my earliest attempts he scribbled, “your gift is to not let up.” I was earnest, devoted, still am—can you tell?
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Ray: Interesting question. I think it’s the times when a package arrives completely empty. Gutted. Lost. Or stolen? The times when the intentions of the sender meet some redirection in their fate and land elsewhere. Where? It’s at these times that I am reminded of the uncertainties of even so simple a thing as receiving a package. I am sad, mad, annoyed with existence. But then I begin to marvel at what happened to the contents. At the life of the person who might have stolen them, and what the contents meant to them and whether they ever considered my life on the other end. Or I marvel at the contents lost somewhere, maybe to one day be found, maybe thrown in the dumpster to arrive at the dump and patiently await their place of invisibility in the geological record—a sad fate, except that I think of them from time to time, and send my regards.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Ray: The whole damn thing. I mean really. It’s hard to go wrong. But if you need a place to start, start in one of the lands of poetry. Or, if you find yourself in need of specific trailheads, try this poem, “Convergent Evolution” by Kenzie Allen, whose lyrical mindheart keenly understands that the body and the land are strands of DNA singing the same song, as are the ways a wife and husband grow around, and into—having in some sense always been—each other. Or try this poem in the form of an essay, “The Statue” by Alina Stefanescu, whose mountainous mind peels back generations of quiet to reveal the stories in the heavy shadows inheritance threads like ancient ache through the lineage of human heartbreak, nodding to the specific music a place ties to the souls it makes, and honoring the soul’s longing to rest in those tones.
August 15 LITM: Maggie Nye
Maggie Nye is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate at FSU in Tallahassee, where she lives with her rabbit, Grimoire. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans School Writer in Residence program. The Curators (Curbstone Press, 2024), her first novel, grew out of a story published in Pleiades. She is presently hard at work on a second one: a strange, radical retelling of the Medusa myth.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Maggie Nye: My first meaningful, independent forays into reading were all fantasy. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series were the first books I can remember triggering the stirrings of a fan fiction impulse, which is really just the writer’s impulse, though there is something specifically generous and inviting about keeping it the realm of fan fiction. It means world-sharing, idea-sharing, gracious borrowing, and needful adaptation. After Le Guin, there was Harry Potter, of course, the Lord of the Rings series, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and a long, guilty fixation with the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series.
My favorite recent read is Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, which has been translated from its original Spanish by Sarah Booker. If you’re attracted to perverse impulses, to horror and its delights, and to the intensity and ritual of adolescence, I urge you to read this book. And if you have read this book and you love it, well then, I urge you to read my book.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Nye: When I was an infant, my father wrote a letter to my future self. I was a new human, he was newly the father of a daughter. We were getting acquainted. In this letter, he wrote to me about how, on the day of my birth, he played the best golf game of his life. Thus, he foresaw for me a life as a pro golfer or, failing that, my baby furtiveness (apparently I was very quiet compared to my brother) convinced him I would make an excellent intelligence agent. Needless to say, I quickly became neither of these things. I can’t even putt-putt. What’s the insight here? I think, perhaps, that nothing so determines how a person will (not) turn out as telling them how they will.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Nye: My debut, The Curators, is a magic-inflected historical fiction set in 1915 Atlanta. It’s a tale of obsession, devotion, and the pursuit of truth—at any cost. I should say, also, that it’s narrated by a girl gang and that there’s golem.
I am neither a typical writer nor reader of historical fiction, but sometimes an image or a voice grabs on to you and refuses to be done with you until you’ve written a novel, and then what can you do? I hope readers find beauty and curiosity in the pages of my book, but more than that, I hope they find the impulse to interrogate their fondest beliefs and devotions, their lionizations, the stories they construct their lives around, and the ones they disseminate.
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Author photographs courtesy of Ricky Ray and Maggie Nye
