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Abalone Moon
Phyllis Holliday: an interview
by Velene Campbell
Which writers have most influenced your work?
Isak Dinesen and Dylan Thomas. When I was little, a parade of fairy tales. Oscar Wilde and Hans Christian Andersen impressed me as authors, while Snow White and Puss in Boots were first spoken like the stories told in my family. Then, whatever I found in libraries in eastern Washington, northern Idaho and Bend, Oregon libraries. E. Nesbit, Baum’s Oz books, Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Whitman, Wordsworth. In Freshman English I heard rather than read Dylan Thomas, and long before the movie, “Out of Africa,” I discovered Isak Dinesen.
How did these influences manifest themselves in your work?
Just how a Welsh bard and a Danish teller of tales gave me what I needed is as mysterious as the source of why I wanted to write in the first place. I was bookish, an only child, living in the scary times of World War II, I had an idea of what kind of poetry and stories I wanted to write, but not how to write them. There I was in a land of mountains, forests, cowboys, Indians and ghost towns, the high desert, coyotes, jackrabbits, just a magical and beautiful land, and hearing stories of an old west that never got into the movies. That and a fondness for “fairy lands forlorn,” a number of people and events I thought, oooh, I have to save that and when I am older, I can write all this. Discovering Thomas was akin to meeting a magician who is showing how to cast spells, except I had to do it in my own voice. I was older and at another part of life when I discovered Dinesen , “Winter’s Tales,” and I thought, this is adult and for the first time I can see how to write fairy tales for adults.
In your work there is certainly that quality of the magical. Could you talk about the importance that this has in your work?
As a child I went through some dark time. Reading fairy tales sustained me. Older, I became fascinated with everything from the ancient and sacred to folklore and fiction. It turned out I could not write any sort of fiction and darned few poems without this influence. I would write about the magical no matter what, but now, are all in dark times again and instead of skulking in the gloomy library stacks and old musty book stores, I can find magic in How To Books, in Feminist bookstores, whole shelves of fantasy. Every now and then the zeitgeist matches one of my obsessions and this…beginning with Tolkien, LeGuin, Peter Beagle and every book in New Age and Ocult bookstores reflects my originally secret love of enchantment.
What are the major themes in your work?
For major themes? I can’t say what theme comes until it is written. I would guess the major theme of "Mona Lisa and the Cat” is the way in which a lack of one kind leads to an abundance of another; that we can never know the truth of anyone. One of my attractions to Dinesen is her faith in music, poetry, all arts as a redeeming force and that the artist can never know how he or she touches or in what way. Thus art has a spirit like a living thing that transcends death and the abyss. I see what I have written afterwards. While writing I am just following an interesting person or in long works, a lot of them, like a peeping Thomasina, a stalker, a mind reader. As a poet I would say theme is rhapsodic, ecstatic, rapturous but without that sort of language, using images, quirky scenes, sly things, bats, bugs, lovers going in the wrong direction, snow, heartbeats, horses.
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