Maggie Nye’s debut, The Curators (Curbstone Books 2024), mixes magical realism with history. Set in Atlanta during the summer of 1915, The Curators follows a group of young girls–known as the Felicitous Five–as they create and deal with a golem in the aftermath of Mary Phagan’s murder and Leo Frank’s lynching. Nye’s novel boldly and authentically looks at desire, hunger, and friendship. It’s the kind of book that you don’t soon forget.
It was a treat to be able to talk with Nye about, among other things, historical inspiration, magical realism, and hunger.
Bradley Sides: Before we dive inside The Curators, I have to ask about the Leo Frank trial. When did you first hear about it?
Maggie Nye: I first encountered the trial while reading Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. It’s just a kind of cautionary footnote in Roth’s book, but it was shocking to me (though it shouldn’t have been; what I don’t know is endless) that there was this whole significant event in American history I’d never heard of.
BS: Did you know from pretty early on that you had to write about it?
Maggie Nye
MN: I did, I did! Well, not as a novel—not initially, anyhow. The book started as a short story called “We Made a Golem” (which was ultimately published by Pleiades in a special myth and fairytale folio). And the short story, I had to write because of one very strange historical detail that got stuck in my craw, and when writing the short story didn’t dislodge it, well, I wrote a novel.
That detail is a misspelling, actually, that summoned into my imagination a figure called the “Night Witch.” I’ll explain: discovered beside Mary Phagan’s body was a set of two hand-written notes, dubbed the “murder notes” by the press of the day. They described the narrative of Phagan’s assault in past tense, as though Mary’s corpse, discovered in the basement of the pencil factory where she worked, could pen an accusation against its murderer. In these “murder notes,” appears the tantalizing phrase “Play like the night witch did it…” In the context of the rest of the notes, this phrase suggests that the true murderer will lie (play) and say the night witch did it, but we, readers of the murder notes, should not let him fool us. In any case, “night witch” was interpreted by detectives as a misspelling of “night watch” as in night watchman. Indeed, Phagan’s body was discovered by the night watchman.
But I just thought “night witch” was way too good to let go of. And it turns out my narrators thought so too. The Night Witch plays a central role in their collective imaginations.
Bradley Sides
BS: I’m always fascinated by the meshing of fiction with historical events. Did you find the history to be limiting in any ways as your book unfolded? Or did having that historical frame help the story develop?
MN: Limiting? Not at all! There was so much that was fascinating to me about the period: the start of the first World War; the premier of the seminal white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation; the U.S. occupation of Haiti; the very first Mother’s Day (thanks, Woodrow Wilson!). Obviously, I was able to include very little of this, but it would have been so easy for me to spiral off into any one of these historical happenings. And as for the Frank/Phagan tragedy itself, there’s enough that’s strange and upsetting there to write a dozen more books.
BS: And you take this fiction further by adding magical realism to the story. I loved it. For me, it works so well having this added layer. What made the magic appealing to you as you were deciding to tell this story?
MN: I don’t know that I’ve ever written a single story that didn’t have magic coursing through it. It’s just part of who I am as a writer. And it seemed obvious to me that a group of girls who could hatch a Night Witch from their collective heads could also animate a golem—in fact, they would need to. They’re adolescent girls, which is to say powerless. They had to call on something larger than themselves to assert control over the annals of history. And though I wish I’d invented the genre, there are plenty of remarkable books that combine history with magic: Kindred, Lincoln in the Bardo, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Buried Giant, to name just a few favorites.
BS: One of my favorite aspects of The Curators is how it uses the collective POV for much of its telling. Did you ever think about making it one of the Felicitous Five’s story? Or did you always know that it belonged to them all?
MN: Like The Curators, “We Made a Golem” is narrated by a collective. They weren’t individuated or named when I wrote the short story, but I was sunk so deep into their voice that I just couldn’t stop writing it. That voice really overtook me, thanks in no small part to Justin Torres’s We the Animals, which I must have read half a dozen times as I wrote my first draft. Eventually, I added a third-person perspective for a single viewpoint character within the collective—Ana Wulff (in whose attic the golem lives)—but it was so difficult to wrench myself out of that collective voice. I even find myself slipping into it with my current WIP!
But more to the second part of the questions: I do think it’s through Ana that we see the burden of creation. She recons the most clearly with the consequences (and potentialities) of their collective choices, but it could never be only her story. Just as the story of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan was complicated and memorialized in ways that implicate all facets of society, so is The Curators is a story of collective action, obsession, and complicity.
BS: The novel’s opening passage begins like this: “We used to sit for hours in our clubhouse with our ears to each other’s stomachs, listening to how loud our hunger could grow, until we convinced ourselves there were monsters inside us. This was in the very beginning, before anything had really happened. Before we had Mary Phagan and her murder, before we had Leo Frank and the brutal business of his fame, before we had brutal business of our own–we had only us and our huge hunger. In the end, the worst part was how it never stopped, not really. We used to call ourselves the Felicitous Five. We don’t go by that name anymore.” It’s a clear announcement that the book will explore desire and hunger. What about this story drew you to these themes?
MN: I think the collective viewpoint is fundamentally one of desire. Any time that collective appears—and especially with adolescents—it’s a way of amplifying what is latent. The collective has more bodies, more wants, more grubby hands and sticky mouths. And for the girls in this collective, that desire is for control, knowledge, and power, of course—which they are denied. But it’s also budding sexual desire. For Frank, yes, because he’s a (semi)appropriate object of their desire, but also, I think, for Mary and for each other. They live in a repressive society, one where heterosexuality is the only acceptable model, and virginity is paramount for unmarried women. Women are evaluated by their perceived “virtue,” and nothing could be less desirable to the girls in this novel than virtue.
BS: If it’s okay, I’d love to close our conversation by asking a reflective question about you and your process. What did you learn about yourself throughout the process of writing The Curators?
MN: Oooh, asking the tough questions!
I think I learned, or I’m learning, to be kinder to my characters. The ending of my book is still a little dark, but my original ending was infinitely bleaker. An early reader asked me some version of the question Why are you doing this to them? Do you really think they deserve this? And the reader was right: they didn’t. Everyone deserves a chance at redemption—even the path to that redemption is dim and uncertain.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about The Curators, Bradley!
BS: Thank you, Maggie! And congratulations on the release of The Curators!
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