Books Terri Windling Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife Continues to Inspire The novel is a living conversation between art and poetry, the past and the present, nature and community… By Alex Dueben | Published on May 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Wood Wife. When first published, Terri Windling was a familiar name to many as an editor at Ace and Tor, the editor and co-editor of seemingly countless anthologies and books, the creator and editor of the Borderland shared universe. She’s had a long career as a writer of books for children, a critic and scholar, and artist. Windling has lectured at Oxford University, founded Endicott Studio, co-edited the Journal of Mythic Arts from 1987-2008, contributed to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, collaborated with Brian and Wendy Froud on multiple projects. Her career has been so vast and varied that writing a debut novel that was awarded the Mythopoeic Award, and has since been republished as part of the Tor Essentials series, might be seen as just one among many impressive accomplishments, depending on how you first encountered her work. And yet The Wood Wife is what I think of when I think of Windling. It’s the story of Maggie Black, a poet turned journalist, who inherits the estate of the reclusive poet Davis Cooper, her friend and former mentor with whom she’s been corresponding for decades. Middle-aged, divorced, and no longer at home in Los Angeles, Black intends to put Cooper’s affairs in order and finally start the biography of Cooper that she’s wanted to write for years. But she soon finds herself falling in love the with the desert, fascinated by a younger man who lives nearby, and coming face to face with the wild spirits who are tied to the mysterious deaths of Cooper and his wife. Buy the Book The Wood Wife Terri Windling Buy Book The Wood Wife Terri Windling Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleIndieBoundTarget Many of the threads, themes, and prevailing interests that wind through Windling’s career can be glimpsed in the text, which weaves together surrealism and the supernatural, magical realism and mythic lore. Fantasy is a living tradition, and Windling’s debut novel is the work of one who has spent years immersed in the genre; it exists in conversation with the anthologies she’s edited, but also with writers from the past and contemporaries working in a similar vein, including Mary Stewart and Patricia A. McKillip, Peter S. Beagle and Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner and Charles de Lint. I think of all art as a conversation between practitioners and critics and readers and scholars, and so while Windling is not primarily known as a novelist, she has always been in constant conversation with those people and those ideas. In the same way that launching a series of anthologies of fairy tale retellings, or putting different writers with vastly different styles and approaches side by side in a collection of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, writing The Wood Wife is a way of continuing that conversation. The book had its origins in a planned series of novellas based on the artwork of Brian Froud before, as Windling writes in the Author’s Note “the original tale shape-shifted and became the novel herein.” The magic of Froud’s work is in the book and his influence is in the text, but this is a story first and foremost about the desert. This is a novel of landscape, and Windling cites many of her inspirations in her Author’s Note, including Edward Abbey and Charles Bowden. I keep thinking of Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Snyder and so many other naturalists as ultimately being more central to the book than Froud. When I read the book in the late 1990s, I had never been to the desert, and while I’ve never visited Tucson or the Rincon Mountains, where the book is set, I’ve since spent time in other deserts, in the U.S. and the Middle East. I’ve seen the desert in bloom, watched the sun set and stars rise, seen the light change over the course of the day in ways that are startling. This constantly changing light in the desert is something that people have long written about and depicted in art, and this experience is a key part of the novel. Shape-changing is a theme of the book, and the desert-dwelling creatures who live in the mountains are changing shape. Every desert is different, though. In the mythology of the book there is a universal shape to the world beyond what most people see or understand, but the creatures are unique to the desert landscape. Their forms shift and transition, remaining fluid, and there’s a sense in the novel that humans have a tendency to try to shape forces and ideas into solid forms, personalizing and anthropomorphizing them in ways that limit them, and limit our own understanding. Yet there are rules and patterns that recur in the natural and supernatural spaces in this book and elsewhere. Ritual and imitation. Offerings and sacrifices. Blood and death. There is always a cost to knowledge and experience. An amorality that is chilling, and yet, it is part of the essence of the natural world. Like any good book, The Wood Wife is about many things, and one of them is middle age. I know that many find it a depressing term, but speaking as one on the far side of forty, I feel comfortable using it. This is a book that doesn’t see this period of life as something to grieve, but as an opportunity for reinvention and transformation. This is a book about change and Maggie is at the heart of it. Her exact age is never given, but I think of Maggie as somewhere between 35 and 45. Not old, but no longer young. Running away from the past—her ex and a Los Angeles that no longer feels like home—as much as running towards the future. Again, very middle-aged. Maggie—who was Eat, Pray, Loving her heart out before it was fashionable—takes the work of inheriting Cooper’s estate seriously, and is ready start work in earnest on the biography that she’d first approached him about years ago, though he’d demurred at the time. She wants to go through his unpublished work, and the paintings of his late wife. She also wants to understand him better. Over the years Cooper had become something of a mentor to her, but always kept Maggie at a remove. Writing the biography of him is a project that will both bring her closer to him and benefit her own career at the same time. It’s a freelancer mindset. Maggie is many things, and is known for her articles and her essays, but when asked who she is, she struggles to answer. Ultimately, though, she replies, “I still feel like a poet—that’s just how the world looks to me.” This is a book about poetry. The novel opens with an epigraph from Goethe: “Who wants to understand the poem / Must go to the land of poetry.” For Maggie, being in the desert helps her to rethink and comprehend Cooper’s poetry in a new way. He wrote about a landscape, and as she understands the place, she understands his work differently. But that is not the land of poetry. This is a book about art and artists and craftsmen and creation. A book infused with art and literature, poems within the text that shaped the characters, who rattle off lines from memory that they know in their bones. As a teenager discovering this book, that was what I wanted. To live a life infused with art and literature and meaning. Though Windling was also careful to note—not that I noticed back then—that money is always a concern. While the book exalts poetry, it never suggests that other art is inferior. (Though it clearly has opinions about magazine articles.) There are painters and paper makers, book binders and musicians, there is dancing and food—all these creative forms that express joy and what it means to be human. At one point Maggie attends a concert only to the find the band’s name is “Big Bad Bayou Rattler Boys,” asking “What kind of a name is that?” “There are musicians out of four different bands jamming together tonight. Bayou Brew is a Cajun band. Diamondback Rattlers are Tex-Mex, mostly. Big Bad Wolf plays Celtic punk and the Momba Rhomba Boys are reggae,” her neighbor Dora explains. In the same way that the band represents a jubilant fusion of musical styles and traditions, the book similarly embraces all of these different arts and the people who make them. These expressions of creativity and joy that Windling loves and sees as part of the human landscape—as important and vital to document as her descriptions of the saguaros and the sunsets. More so, because so many of the characters don’t see themselves as artists, or see what they do as important. Maggie insists otherwise, affirming the power of creativity against characters’ protests that their work has no value. I suspect these protestations echo sentiments that Windling herself has likely heard people express about their work and what they do, over the years. It is a beautifully felt and deeply understood vision of life that is both cosmopolitan and very specific to this patch of the Sonoran desert where a British expatriate poet like Cooper—a figure who brings to mind D.H. Lawrence or Malcolm Lowry or other Europeans who fled to the Americas—settled and married a Mexican painter, who drew from the surrealist tradition to depict the desert landscape and these visions. There’s a very long tradition of artists who were making art about the desert and the fantastic and surreal leading up to the present day, and though they are fictional, Windling clearly thinks of those artists and those traditions as just as much a part of the artistic conversation. I’m making the novel sound far more academic than it is. These elements are embedded in the text, just as the thoughtful critiques and reappraisals of fairy tales were at the heart of Snow White, Blood Red and other books in that anthology series. Windling knows that she could write an essay, but she wanted to tell a story. Just as the story comes first, art is not simply a metaphor in the novel. It a part of living, an extension of life and a reaction to life and the land. Windling has a point to make about art and artists…about those who prioritize art over life. Maggie does respect her ex-husband despite his many flaws because she knows that he is talented, but on reading an article about him and his band Estampie, she observes: There was no hint of the Nigel she knew…in the Times version of Nigel’s history, Estampie was the labor of one brilliant man. Never mind the group, much less the network of people who stood behind the group, who had formed the safety net beneath the highwire rope of success Nigel walked. It wasn’t Nigel’s fault really; this was the mold their culture fit heroes in. The independent man, the solitary cowboy striding into town at high noon. This is one of Windling’s triumphs, to emphasize the ecosystem that exists around and behind every writer and artist. One cannot help but think that it is because she spent so many years as an editor, a vital but largely invisible presence. Goethe’s land of poetry takes many shapes, and one of them is a network of teachers and mentors and friends and neighbors and supporters. One does not emerge from nothing. Art is not the work of solitary geniuses, but of a community. In piecing together the story of Davis and Anna, how their lives play out against the aged and ancient backdrop of the mountains and the landscape, the events can feel somewhat distant, taking place in the past. It’s something I think Windling recognized, because she also gives us the current-day story of two of Maggie’s neighbors, Dora and Juan. Maggie gets to know them and we see their push and pull of art and ambition, of relationships changing shape. The pain and anger when a possessed Juan burns not just his own paintings but Dora’s work as well. Windling wants us to feel that pain and violence. She wants it to hurt. This may be a faerie story, of sorts, but that doesn’t mean it’s something to regard at a safe remove. After all, Windling is the woman whose work on fairy tale retellings helped remind us that these stories were never sweet and simplistic children’s tales, but far darker and more complex. Reminding us that even if the worst is averted, the lessons they teach us are never bloodless or without cost. These stories are as savage as nature. I think about that in the context of The Wood Wife. That the human world—the physical, social, spiritual world that we have built up in urban and rural places—as being a small fraction of this larger, vaster world. That we are all subject to nature. That’s true whether we are talking about this novel and these characters, or the vastness of cosmic horror, or the way Gabriel García Márquez wrote about “the crystalline miracle” that is ice. (Which, in the desert, really can seem like magic.) Rereading the book now, I want Windling to write more. I know that she’s a busy woman who has written many stories and created paintings and poems—including one involving Tat, one of the minor characters in the novel—but I remain a little sad that this is her only novel for adults. I don’t think I realized how little I knew about Windling until I sat down to write this article, discovering one dead link after another, but I don’t think that really matters. Rereading the book, I was reminded of my younger self crushing on Maggie. Or rather, vividly remembering both wanting Maggie and wanting to be Maggie. Some of that was shallow…I recall the description of when they went out dancing: “Maggie took off her black suit jacket and threw it back to the table. Underneath she wore a man’s sleeveless undershirt–cooler, and rather sexy, Dora thought.” Maggie effortlessly pushing past gendered expectations in so many ways that reminded me of more than one poet I have fallen for. But it wasn’t completely shallow. One of the letters she exchanged with Cooper early in their correspondence read, “You interest me greatly, Marguerita Black.” Isn’t that what we all hoped for from our encounters with our elders? To find someone who sees something in us, and takes an interest in our work, inviting us into the conversation. In thinking about the book, I keep coming back to “Dammas”—a word that is central to the novel and its shape and meaning, though it’s never given a proper definition in the course of the text. “Beauty. Motion. That-Which-Moves,” as one character describes it. Or as another said, “what my Dineh relatives would call hohzo: walking in beauty. That is how a man should live his life. If he doesn’t, he sickens and dies.” As the characters talked about this and “the spiral path,” this cyclical vision of time, I kept picturing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a massive rock sculpture built into the Great Salt Lake. It reflects how I think of Windling’s novel—as simultaneously part of the landscape and something human that overlays it. As a Boy Scout I was taught to take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints. The Wood Wife, like so many works of art that are about and have been defined by a place leave far more, and yet do not impose themselves upon the land. It doesn’t seek “to turn it into New Jersey,” as one character in the book complains about cookie-cutter housing developments, but like the constructed borders, of cities, counties, countries, which lay upon the land like fictions, these stories exist in a way that offers the possibility to either see and understand a landscape on a deeper level, or to obscure it. This is a book that pushes against easy, facile descriptions of art and gender, mythology and culture. Not that these ideas are meaningless, but people and nature are far too complex to be summed up in binaries or neatly divided by borders. The natural world has its own rhythms and meanings, which we are subject to. In Windling’s hands, the only thing more magical and dangerous than the supernatural is the physical landscape and the forces of nature—just as the only thing more magical and uncertain and powerful than art is the heart.[end-mark] The post Terri Windling’s <i>The Wood Wife</i> Continues to Inspire appeared first on Reactor.