Mary Mackey on Dorothy Bryant’s Novel Killing Wonder

On some occasions you can tell, not just a book by its cover, but a great deal about the author who wrote that book. No cover does this more brilliantly than the one Dorothy Bryant decided to use for her mystery novel Killing Wonder.

Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017)

Composed of a collage of photographs taken in 1981 by photographers Felicia Liu and Jane Sherr and designed by Dorothy’s husband Bob Bryant, the cover of Dorothy’s novel contains candid images of many of the important women writers of Northern California at the time, who were attending a party Dorothy threw to celebrate the completion of the “final final draft” of Killing Wonder.

Mary Mackey’s key to the front cover of Killing Wonder

I suspect that younger readers looking at that cover today will primarily see faces of writers whom they may have read about, faces that perhaps seem as distant to them as a portrait of George Sand once seemed to the young women of my generation. But I see a circle of friends, colleagues, and sister writers who helped one another, encouraged one another, supported one another, met scores of times in person over the years, and cooperated more than they competed. Those writers were:

Sandy Bouchet, Patricia Bullitt, Kim Chernin, Susan Efros, Susan Griffin, Annie Hersey, Pat Holt, Karen Jacobs, Jessica Mitford (nicknamed “Decca”), Mary Jane Moffat, Diana O’Hehir, Tillie Olsen, Charlotte Painter, Nancy Schimmel, Jennifer Stone, Celeste West, J.J. Wilson, and of course, Dorothy herself.

Mary Mackey’s key to the back cover of Killing Wonder

Dorothy is there with short hair and an ever-ready smile. I’m also there, in a skirt and blouse and huge, lemur-like glasses looking happy to be in the company of other women writers, famous and not famous, published and not published, who really believed that when one of us succeeded all of us succeeded.

Dorothy was an integral part of that community. She lived in it, prospered in it, and was always ready to help women writers who were struggling to get their work published in a literary world that was still primarily dominated by men who often expressed open contempt for women who wrote, sometimes openly stating that women’s poetry was only suited for greeting cards and proclaiming that the only really important novels were robust, masculine, and Hemingwayesque.

It was Dorothy who suggested San Francisco Chronicle Book Review editor Pat Holt review Susan Griffin’s work; Dorothy who introduced me to Alta Gerrey, the founder of Shameless Hussy Press, who published my first novel Immersion when no one in New York knew what to do with a poetic account of a young woman struggling for intellectual, spiritual, personal, and sexual liberation in the jungles of Costa Rica.

 

Dorothy was not the center of our community. No one was the center. But Dorothy was more conscious than most of us of the importance of this small group of women writers. I think she saw us as we had not yet seen ourselves. She understood that we were like the writers in Paris in the 20s: working together, influencing each other’s writing, demonstrating almost without knowing it that sisterhood was indeed powerful. And so she wrote Killing Wonder, a novel that was in many ways not like us, and yet mirrored us 32 times on its cover.

Mary Mackey became a writer by tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of nine poetry collections and 14 novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry