Mary McMyne Books in Order

Mary McMyne writes historical fantasy and poetry about the stories that linger after the ending. Her work keeps returning to fairy tales, folklore, old books, and the women pushed to the edge of familiar legends. Instead of treating those figures as scenery, she asks what they wanted, what they feared, and what their versions of the story might sound like.

McMyne has said she began writing as a child, the kind of kid who carried a notebook and wrote longhand fantasy novels. She also loved theatre and drawing, and spent family road trips writing poems about St. George and the Dragon. After the deaths of her parents, writing became a way to work through loss and to figure out who she was without them.

The notebook never really left her side.

She studied writing in college and later earned an MFA from New York University. Long before her novels arrived, her poems, essays, and short fiction appeared in magazines and journals. Her 2014 poetry chapbook, Wolf Skin, revisits Grimm tales through people who are usually misunderstood, including the huntsman, the witch, and women caught inside somebody else's moral lesson.

That interest in alternate viewpoints became the through line of her fiction. The Book of Gothel, published in 2022, imagines the life of the woman linked to the Rapunzel story. The novel follows Haelewise through twelfth-century Germany, mixing folklore, magic, and real historical figures rather than keeping the fairy tale safely inside a tower.

The book grew from a particular stretch of life. McMyne started it after moving to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, in 2011, while teaching creative writing and raising a young daughter. Reading fairy tales aloud and spending time in the dark woods of the Eastern Upper Peninsula sharpened her wish to write women who could make choices and steer their own lives. A research trip to Germany later took her through museums and the Black Forest.

Folklore, for McMyne, is not fixed in place.

Her second novel, A Rose by Any Other Name, came out in 2024 and shifts the setting to Elizabethan England. It gives a voice to Rose Rushe, McMyne's imagined Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, as she navigates witchcraft accusations, astrology, friendship, love, and the risks of wanting an independent life. Readers drawn to McMyne's books often come for familiar touchstones, Rapunzel or Shakespeare, then find stories more concerned with hidden histories and complicated women than tidy answers.

Her path to publishing also had its share of waiting. She wrote The Book of Gothel during nights and weekends around university work, and it was the third novel she had completed as an adult. Her earlier work had already brought honors including the Elgin Chapbook Award for Wolf Skin, as well as a Faulkner-Wisdom Prize, a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, and a research grant for The Book of Gothel.

McMyne is an Associate Professor of Fiction at Kennesaw State University and serves as poetry editor for Enchanted Living. She lives in Atlanta with her family and border collie. Between teaching, editing, poems, and novels, she remains interested in the old question at the center of her work: who gets to tell the tale?