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An Interview with Elizabeth Cunningham on her new novel Bright Dark Madonna
The character I came to know as Maeve first appeared in 1990 as a line drawing of a naked woman sitting in a kitchen at 3:15 pm in the afternoon (the time of my birth, I later realized). She told me her name was Madge. My medium was magic marker and she quickly took on color, bright color, choosing fiery neon orange for her hair. Very soon she was sitting (naked of course) in a plush red chair, eating chocolate, and commenting on life. She was always very verbal even in visual form. I was delighted with her arrival in my life and invited her to be a character in my next novel. By that point in my writing career, I was used to rejections from agents and publishers, but now I had to face rejection from a fictional character as she turned down proposal after proposal until I asked, “How would you like to be in a novel about the Celtic Mary Magdalen?” She said, “That’s the one!”
One, however, was clearly not enough. Her story begins at the beginning with her birth on an island in the Celtic Otherworld, and, three novels later, it is not done yet, though I believe the fourth novel, now in progress, will see her safely—or more likely recklessly—back to the Celtic Otherworld from whence she came. 2009 marks eighteen years of actively writing Maeve’s story, long enough to raise a child, longer than many marriages or other endeavors endure. Maeve is now a little older than I am. I am not Maeve, but I have dedicated my life to writing her story from her point of view. In answer to your question what it’s like: I often feel that I have lived two lives and have two sets of memories. I am happiest when I am living more than one life. During the times when I have to take a break to work on the business end of writing, I get a little stir crazy. Whether this is pathological or not, I would not care to say. It works for me.
Q: All of The Maeve Chronicles are thoroughly researched. Can you tell us about the research for this book? How does travel affect the way you write?
I always begin research by reading, usually months of reading before I begin writing. For this book, I had to read The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Saint Paul, parts of the Bible I have not spent much time on before. It was a very different experience from reading the Gospels over and over, which I loved doing, as I loved reading books about Jesus. The rest of the New Testament was more difficult for me; it is the really the story of the founding of the Church, of how the life and teachings of a charismatic leader are turned into the doctrines of an institution—a story that has repeated itself in many world religions. To understand the world of the first century and the early church, I read the work of scholars like Bruce Chilton and A.N Wilson, both of whom have written excellent books on the life of St. Paul.
Over the course of eighteen years of writing, I have taken a number of trips for onsite research, and every one of them has influenced the story, sometimes even radically shaping the plot. The new locations in Bright Dark Madonna are Turkey and Southern France. I made a pilgrimage to Magdalen country in France just before I began the writing. I have been alone inside La Grotte de Marie Madeleine and I’ve stood face to face with Sara la Kali, patron Saint of the Gypsies. Although I wanted to go to Turkey, the distance and expense seemed daunting. Then one day while I was working on a scene in Bright Dark Madonna, I became stuck, I can’t remember why now. But I do know that I came unstuck when I found myself writing about a dream in which Maeve stands before the statue of Saint Sara, just as I did. The sensual power of that memory, surfacing spontaneously in the writing, persuaded me that some of the story lay waiting for me in Ephesus, so I raised the funds and went. Due to a family emergency, I had only three days there, but they packed a wallop. I went alone to the ruins of the Temple of Artemis and watched a stork take flight from the last remaining pillar. Though I expected to be left cold by the House of the Virgin Mary, a crowded tourist site, I found myself utterly undone. The union of person, place, and legend became an unexpected theme in the novel. Also, few books will ever tell you that the dry hills above the house of Mary are full of tiny pieces of mica that shine in the sun. All these experiences and details enrich the story.
Q: Your depiction of the Virgin Mary is in some ways even more unconventional than Maeve as Mary Magdalen. How did you come to see her this way?
The Virgin Mary, aka Ma, took me by surprise in her very first scene in The Passion of Mary Magdalen. I never had a particular connection with the Virgin Mary before. My father was Low Church Episcopalian, the opposite end of the spectrum from Anglo-Catholics. We did not venerate the Virgin Mary or any of the other saints. All I knew about her was that she was obedient, virtuous, long-suffering and so held little interest for me. But I did not set out to upset conventions. I often write in an exploratory way and let characters reveal themselves, rather than making decisions about them ahead of time. And Ma did just that. She is at once otherworldly and autocratic, difficult and bold—and far from being obedient, she celebrates the meaning of her name Miriam as bitter rebellion. Many people view the Virgin Mary as a tamed version of the older goddesses, given a place by the Church because they couldn’t eradicate her. In Bright Dark Madonna Ma, anything but tame, has a wonderful time anticipating her role as the new goddess of the Western world. She, more than Maeve, becomes the queen of anachronism.
Q: In Bright Dark Madonna, Maeve bears a daughter by Jesus, and yet she and her daughter both resist the idea of a sacred bloodline—a subject to which many recent books, fiction and nonfiction, have been devoted. Why?
As I mentioned before, when I researched The Passion of Mary Magdalen I read and re-read the Gospels. Though the Gospel of Matthew traces Jesus’s lineage through Joseph back to Abraham, Jesus himself repeatedly challenged people’s allegiance to blood ties. Who is my mother, who is my brother? he asked. Answer: the one that does the will of my Father in heaven—who is also our father. He had no patience with those who pleaded filial duty as an excuse for not joining him. He urged his followers to love neighbors and enemies and to break bread with the socially unacceptable. Founding a sacred or royal dynasty on earth doesn’t seem to have entered Jesus’s mind.
Maeve comes from a culture in which lineage was of the utmost importance. One of the tasks of the druids was to memorize the genealogies of the tribes and keep them straight. She proudly, like several Roman emperors, traces descent from the gods. But when she is sold into prostitution into Rome, she discovers her lineage means less than nothing. She survives and wins her freedom through forging deep bonds with fellow slaves and with an enemy who becomes her friend and benefactress. With other outcasts, she founds a community that welcomes the stranger.
As I write, we have just inaugurated a president of radically mixed race, who is seeking to bring people of all different backgrounds—political, religious, racial, cultural—to a common table. To me this is gospel, good news. And as recent genealogical studies have shown, we are all more related than we thought. If there are descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalen walking among us, they are no more or less divine or human than the rest of us, and no more or less accountable to the common good. I wanted to write about Maeve as a mother, not to exalt her as the mother of a sacred bloodline but because the experience of raising—and almost losing—a beloved child makes her more vulnerable and human, more like us.
Q: Many have argued, based on evidence in some of the Gnostic gospels, that Mary Magdalen was a rival leader in the early church, and that perhaps Jesus would have preferred her to Peter as his successor. Yet the story begins with Maeve’s failure to make an impact. She remains ambivalent about proselytizing to the end. Why did you make this choice? What is your own relationship with the church?
Maeve and I certainly had to confront a dilemma in Bright Dark Madonna. How could she become a leader in the Jesus movement when, as depicted in The Passion of Mary Magdalen, she was never a follower, never a convert? Yet how can she not want to tell his story, her story, their story? The joy of being a novelist is that you can live the question, or love the question, as the poet Rilke expressed it, and that may be more important than answering it. And Maeve does live the question in Bright Dark Madonna.
Happily, for Maeve and for me, there is Mary of Bethany who far more than Maeve fits the profile found in a number of the Gnostic gospels, a Mary who is a rival to Peter, who is putting forth a different understanding of Jesus’s teachings, who is fiercely committed to defending the role of women in the Jesus movement. Maeve loves Mary B, though she can’t live up to her expectations, and so do I.
After I wrote The Return of the Goddess, a novel set in the Episcopal Church that explores the pagan underpinnings of Christianity, I got a fan letter from an Episcopal woman who assumed that I, like she, was working to reform the church. When she found out I had left, she felt abandoned and betrayed. How could I not stay and fight to bring the divine feminine into the church? I can understand her point of view, and I appreciate those, like this woman and like Mary B, who struggle to form and reform the institutional church. But I might say, as Mae West said of marriage, “The church is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”
When I left the Episcopal Church, I became a Quaker for many years, seeking a less institutional religious community, but I found I could not submit to corporate discernment in matters of belief. Now I am part of a community that celebrates together but has no institutional structure or doctrinal requirements. It will have a much shorter lifespan because of that, and as Maeve says of Temple Magdalen, no one will remember it. That’s all right with me.
Q: What was it like to take on Paul of Tarsus as a character, a man who may have had more of an impact on the history of the Western world than any other?
I was quite frankly nervous about it. Many people hate him, while others revere him. As a novelist I didn’t want to paint him or myself into a corner. Bruce Chilton’s book Rabbi Paul, was immensely helpful to me, because his view of Paul is so balanced; he neither condemns nor defends him but is fascinated by him. After I got over being afraid, I found Paul easier to work with than I expected. He is a character in every sense. And he has a lot to say for himself—some of it the most beautiful, powerful poetry, which is why it makes up so much of the liturgy. Some of his writing is so tortured and convoluted that I wanted to say to him, “you need to make an appointment with me—for counseling.” One notable thing about Paul is that though his life makes a great picaresque story, he himself is not a storyteller, unlike Jesus, but a preacher. As a preacher’s daughter, I sometimes found it hard to listen to him. The up side of his excessive verbiage was that I had to write next to no dialogue for him. No matter what was going on in a scene, I could open the Epistles and there was Paul holding forth. Of course, he helped immeasurably to drive the plot. But I won’t reveal how here.
Q: Sarah, as the daughter of Maeve and Jesus, is as unconventional as the other characters. There is even a suggestion that she is a lesbian. If she is, why not make it explicit?
Unlike Maeve, who is outspoken and out there in every way, Sarah is a very private person who resists being labeled in any conventional way. Though her daughter is baffling to her, Maeve learns to respect her separateness and insists that she cannot tell Sarah’s story, only her own. Also, it is my sense today that many younger people don’t want labels and definitions but prefer to be more fluid. I hope people will understand this choice on my part. Neither Maeve nor I is troubled about Sarah’s sexuality or in denial of it, just respectful of her privacy.
Q: In the other two books Maeve’s sexuality and her passion for Jesus have been front and center. Was it difficult for you to do without that focus?
Yes and no. No, in that the story certainly doesn’t lack for focus. Protecting Sarah, raising Sarah, losing Sarah, finding Sarah is clearly Maeve’s focus. But she does struggle with loneliness and loss—not just of Jesus but of her own strong and joyful sexuality. She makes one disastrous attempt at taking a lover and one has one love affair of extraordinary sweetness. But before she finds this lover, she must remember and reconnect with her inherent sexuality. That’s important. For whether Maeve, or any of us, has a partner, Eros is the life force, and our sexuality can become sensual and diffuse, can be as simple as sitting in the spring sun. It’s a matter of being present in our bodies. That’s something that Maeve learns.
Q: At one time you thought of The Maeve Chronicles as a trilogy. Bright Dark Madonna ends on a cliffhanger. Is there more of Maeve’s story in the works?
Yes, I am at work on a fourth (and I believe final) Maeve chronicle about her return to Britain—which happens to coincide with Queen Boudica’s rebellion, and brings to fruition a seed planted in Magdalen Rising. I had originally planned to include the Boudica story in the third novel, but there was so much more story than I realized, I finally decided I could not cram Boudica between the same covers as Paul.
I am now pleased with the choice and the symmetry it creates for The Maeve Chronicles. Bright Dark Madonna takes place in the Celtic Otherworld and Anglesey. The Passion of Mary Magdalen and Bright Dark Madonna take place in the historical and Biblical realms, and the fourth novel will bring Maeve back to the British Isles just as Britain enters the world of history.
