Please tell us a little about yourself and your work.  

I have a degree in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley. I edited and wrote for a trends magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area, was contributing editor to Mondo 2000 magazine, and have written for the Boston Herald and Associated Press. I wrote features on artists, primarily, for the trends magazine. I wrote on security intelligence issues for AP.  

What was your editing process like? 

I title the sections or chapters early on, soon after I’ve completed and read over the first draft. I use a different-colored marker pen for each section or chapter as I work on expanding, doing more research for, and editing one section at a time. 

Darkness Melting involved much less editing and revision, but writing about Sylvia Plath was ultimately as hard or harder than writing How the Beatles Knew. It was a completely different book than the Beatles book. I tip my hat to any biographer who’s written about Plath, because the topic is just so dark at times.  

How did you develop your subject? 

Darkness Melting came about because I was writing a book on mid-century creativity research connected to academic institutions. I had an entire chapter on poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, because I could see they were doing their own creativity research— trying hypnosis, Jungian associative exercises, and so on—in order to “receive” poems. That chapter became so long that I broke it off into a separate book, and then I took on the challenge to actually see if Plath’s search for inspiration was a subtext of her poetry, particularly her famous Ariel poems. So I analyzed all her Ariel poems in order—mostly late at night, which seemed to be the best time to do this. 

In my reading, the Ariel poems told a story of the quest, in metaphor. I found a plausible key to what the poems’ metaphors meant to Plath, what the hidden narrative was, and why she was able to write the poems so rapidly. I had cracked what [New Yorker critic] Janet Malcolm called “Plath’s code of atrocity,” which had not really been done until that point. I explain the meanings of her mysterious metaphors and imagery, and how she developed them.   

How did you research your book?  

Details of the activities [Plath and Hughes] did on their “quest,” as I call it, are in Plath’s letters and diaries, in Hughes’ biography, as well as in other sources. I also researched the couple’s creative models that inspired their search, including W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and The White Goddess by Robert Graves. Darkness Melting is much shorter than the Beatles book, but it’s concentrated, half of it being analyses of Plath’s poems. The book has about 160 reference notes, while the Beatles book has over 600. 

How did you create/acquire the cover art?  

I had an idea for the cover of little glowing lights emerging from darkness, like the lights were little “ideas” Plath had hoped would come. I told the book design firm that the colors underneath the dark veil would be those of nondefinition, of being in a state of indeterminacy. They emailed back that they completely understood the concept, and I was so happy they did.  

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.