Even if you don’t know the name Mary Oliver, you probably know her words. Her poem “The Summer Day” ends with her most famous line – and, arguably, one of the most well known of any poet: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver was a celebrated American poet, winning a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award throughout her storied career (she passed away in 2019). She took inspiration from poets like Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, writing prolifically about the natural world around her. But while we know her words, Oliver liked her privacy. A new documentary, “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World,” takes a closer look at the poet’s personal life.
Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts for much of her life with her partner of over 40 years, the photographer Mary Malone Cook. The film centers around her relationship with Cook, but also touches on the critical response to her work, her difficult childhood (a 2011 interview where Oliver reveals she was sexually abused as a child plays a pivotal role), her life in Provincetown, and her connection with nature.
Over the course of the documentary, filmmaker Sasha Waters explores Oliver’s personal life – in all its beauty and darkness – with great tenderness, talking to people who knew her, poets who admire her, and everyday people who find solace in her work.
“Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World” will have a screening in Atlanta on Aug. 23 at the Plaza Theatre, presented by Long Story Books, before premiering on PBS on Aug. 25. Ahead of the screening at The Plaza, I spoke to Waters about her journey making the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s funny, I had never really heard of Mary Oliver by name, but I had obviously heard the poems, so that was my relationship with her coming into it.
Sasha Waters: Very, very common.
What was your relationship to Mary Oliver and her poetry before deciding to make this documentary, and why did you choose to go with this project?
Waters: Mary Oliver is someone who has been important to me for a really long time. The first poem I can remember hearing, actually – not reading, but hearing – was a poem called “When Death Comes,” which we use in the film around Mary’s own passing. It was on a show called “The Writer’s Almanac,” which was a short daily broadcast on public radio in the 1990s and 2000s by Garrison Keillor, where he would come on and talk about moments from literary history – sort of on this day in literary history – and read a poem every day. That was the way I feel like a lot of people my age or my generation got introduced to a lot of poems and poets. Like before poetry podcasts or seeing things on social media, you would hear these different poems every day on “The Writer’s Almanac.”
I remember hearing that poem and just being like, stopped in my tracks by it. That was how I first became interested in her. And I’ve been a big fan of other poets – Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost – even before that. So she was sort of in that tradition for me as well.
Having had that central relationship to her, and then diving into a project like this where you learn more and it’s a big research initiative – how has your relationship evolved, or what have you learned about her that has changed your relationship?
Waters: I learned so much. I mean, one of the things I love about documentary is the research and writing process. It’s funny, because there are different kinds of documentaries. I’m very drawn, as a viewer and a fan of documentary, to immersive storytelling, where you just get thrown into a situation with people and characters, and things are unfolding on screen in real time.
I love that kind of filmmaking. I love that kind of film as a viewer, but I don’t necessarily make those kinds of films, I think because I am really drawn to research and archives and blowing dust off of boxes. So I got the chance to do that with Mary Oliver. Her archives are now at the Library of Congress, but before they were deposited with her, they were with her biographer who lives in Connecticut. In between Lindsay [Whalen], who’s in the film, having the 40 Mary Oliver boxes and them being deposited at the Library of Congress, I had the opportunity to go through them in Washington D.C. They were in the office of her literary executor, so I got to go through her personal photo albums, her correspondence, and really get a sense of who she was to her friends – particularly through the correspondence. And also, who she was to her fans. Because a lot of her fan mail is there as well. So that was just a really exciting opportunity, to get a sense of who she was. Also through the books that she read as well.
That feels like a ton of access right off the bat. Is that a normal thing for you as a documentarian? What’s that process usually like?
Waters: Yes and no. I think once you kind of have an agreement with the estate, the access is granted. But it is unusual – for an archive of that size, it’s unusual to have access to it before it’s actually in the archives. The good part of that was, I was just in this office surrounded by boxes that I could go through. I was careful to not take things out [laughs], and keep everything in order. But the thing that was hard – like, if something is at the Library of Congress, it’s already been processed and cataloged, and there’s a digital key, so you can search. Now, I could just kind of go to the Library of Congress website and find her correspondence with the poet James Wright. But going through it myself, [laughs] I just had to find it.
When you’re making a documentary, I’m curious about the process of finding the storyline. How did you, for this particular documentary, go about finding the throughline that you wanted to follow through Mary’s life? And structuring the film in that way.
Waters: Well, it’s so interesting with biography, because I think the default mode that I used, and that many people use, is to tell the life story chronologically. In this film and in the last biography I did for American Masters, I tried to be really open in the beginning and remind myself, this is the way it’s often done, but we don’t have to do it this way. We could play with the structure. In fact, we thought about at one point opening the film with the poem “When Death Comes,” instead of using it where we use it, which is when we’re telling the story of Mary’s passing. Because “When Death Comes,” it’s a poem about death, but it’s actually really also a poem about being alive and about being a younger person and saying this is the kind of life I want to live.
So we tried to be open, but at the end of the day, I think you have to have a really good reason to tell a biography out of order. There are reasons to keep it chronological. That said, when you’re trying to tell a life story in 80 to 90 minutes, you do have to make choices about what’s important and how to structure things. We decided – Meghan [Sims] and I, my co-editor – pretty early on, the love story with Molly was super important. Molly was part of her life for 40 years, so we can’t just have them meet and fall in love, and then we don’t hear about Molly again. We wanted to keep coming back to Molly, also because Molly was an artist in her own right. She helped create this world for Mary that allowed Mary to get her work done. She protected her once she did become more celebrated, protected her and allowed her to have this privacy, and was also just her companion until she couldn’t travel anymore. So having the Molly story was important.
I think also the relationship with her critics was important. This idea that she’s really ignored by the critical establishment – by people kind of teaching in academic university poetry or creative writing programs – and how that shifts and changes over time. Then the third arc that we talked about a lot was Mary’s own relationship to what I would call the politics of her own voice. This idea that she’s writing for much of her career from a kind of “art for art’s sake” point of view. But later in her life, I think she does begin to realize that the world, the natural world that she grew up in, is vanishing, and she is thinking more actively about trying to be, not a political poet, but thinking about her role in the culture and how she can use her voice to amplify some of the things she’s concerned about. She’s not an environmental poet, but she is someone who cares deeply about the natural world and the environment. I think she allows herself to step into that role in the last 10 to 15 years of her life.
I asked about the structure because one thing I found really interesting is – not knowing much about her and starting with the early parts of her life, there are references to her parents and a difficult home life, and then at the end you get her interview with Maria Shriver – which I read you had trouble finding the audio for, which I’d love to talk about. But I thought that was a very interesting way to frame the film, because that revelation about the sexual abuse she suffered opened up a lot of things for me that were questions at the beginning of the documentary.
Waters: We didn’t want to spend a lot of time on her childhood. I mean, it’s important to know that she decides that she’s going to become a poet at a very early age, that she goes into the woods and she’s spending a lot of time in the woods reading poetry. She did have this very troubled, dark childhood. We wanted to suggest that in the beginning, almost as a kind of literary foreshadowing, like you might experience in a novel – make people wonder, what’s going on here? It seems a little uncomfortable. It seems a little dark. So that when we came back to it, hopefully you feel like, okay – now that makes sense.
It was also a challenge, though, because Mary, although she didn’t begin to speak publicly about her experiences until she was in her 70s, she did start to reckon with them in her private life – with her friends, in her poetry – when she was in her 40s. So in the poetry that she’s writing in the 1980s, that’s in the books “American Primitive” or “Dream Work,” where she’s starting to become more well-known as a poet – there’s some very dark work in there, where she’s really starting to grapple with her childhood. But we didn’t want to address it in the film until she talked about it publicly, until it became part of her public life, because it does seem important that she made that decision, I think, because she knew that it would help people.
It’s interesting talking about that in connection with the critical response to her – because you’re talking about these much darker poems that she’s taking on at the time. It’s interesting with the critical response, because there seems to be a dismissiveness of the subject matter – like the natural world, or to put a term on it, “hippie-ness,” of her work. The documentary touches on this and different poets speak to it. But I’m curious if you have thoughts as to why she might have been kind of disregarded in that way?
Waters: I mean, I think in part because she’s a woman. I think in part because she is outside of the literary establishment. I mean, she lived in New York briefly, but she’s not really connected to the New York literary world. She’s in the Northeast, so I think Boston is important to that world as well, particularly in poetry. But she’s not really connected to Boston. She’s not really connected to academic poetry programs where people might be writing and publishing from this critical standpoint. I think that this idea of writing about the natural world – I mean, I think like any other field, subjects and styles fall in and out of fashion. And I think Mary wasn’t really thinking about what is in fashion now or what is trendy now. She’s just responding from her heart to the work that she loves, and then also just to the world around her and what she wants to write about and what she wants to respond to. I think she’s not thinking about being popular with critics. I think she really, genuinely cares about reaching readers and finding readers wherever she might find them. She’s publishing in the New York Times, she’s publishing in the Chicago Tribune, and she’s publishing in Virginia Quarterly, or she’s publishing in some academic or creative writing journals. But she’s also publishing in The Bark, which is a dog magazine. And Yoga International, which is a yoga magazine. So she’s finding readers wherever she can, because that’s what she cares about.
And bringing up the Provincetown of it all, that being such an art town. I just saw the new Anthony Bourdain movie.
Waters: I’m dying to see that movie. I live in Richmond, Virginia, and it’s not playing here yet. I can’t wait to see it!
It’s really good.
Waters: I was in Provincetown – I think it was around this time last year when they were filming it. It was so exciting and crazy. It was impossible to find parking. But aside from that, it was great!
It’s interesting to me – Provincetown in general, there’s just a whole host of artists – whether that’s Bourdain, or John Waters, who is in this documentary – I love him, that must have been a hoot to get to talk to him. Kind of jumping off of that, obviously there’s a celebrity aspect to this question. But Stephen Colbert having this connection to her, or Lucy Dacus – I’m curious how you reached out to all of those people and how they got involved through their love of Mary Oliver.
Waters: It was different in the case of each person, but we knew that we wanted – aside from obviously filming with people who knew her personally, like John Waters, like some of the poets in the film, like her biographer. In terms of the celebrity people that we included, we wanted to connect with people who were authentically Mary Oliver fans. So, in the case of Helena Bonham Carter, in the course of my research, I found a TikTok that Helena Bonham Carter made where she was reading “Wild Geese.” In the case of Stephen Colbert, one night on his show about a year and a half ago, he told a guest that he sent the poem “The Summer Day” to his children every day on the first day of summer, and that was when we were in production. Like, 10 people who knew I was working on this film texted me, “Oh my god, Stephen Colbert just talked about Mary Oliver!”
In the case of Steve Buscemi, he’s not a big poetry guy, which he said to me when we did the interview. But Lindsey Whalen, Mary’s biographer, told me that she had seen him more than once at Mary Oliver readings in New York. So she knew that he was familiar with her work, and I thought that was interesting. I wanted to include people who might be kind of a surprise – like you wouldn’t expect to see them.
Lucy Dacus is from Richmond, which is where I live now. I can’t remember how I knew that she liked Mary Oliver, but we connected through Richmond people here because we know people in common.
Yeah, I’ve heard her in particular talk about art mediums before, and I just love the way she talks about art.
Waters: I just saw her new music video for “Planting Tomatoes,” which she directed. She came here and did a premiere, projected really big in the theater. She’s such a great filmmaker in her own right. It’s a really cool video.
I’ll have to check it out. I know you had trouble finding the audio of the Maria Shriver interview where Mary first talks about her experience with sexual abuse, and went on this long journey to get it. Was that the most challenging aspect of this documentary, or were there other big challenges that arose through the making of it?
Waters: That was the big one. On the one hand, we really didn’t think we were going to find it at a certain point. On the other hand, we had no solution to this problem. We really didn’t! We had this print interview. So we knew what was said in this conversation, and we were like – this audio has to exist. But it’s also from 15 years ago, and no one can find it. It’s not in the archives at Harpo Productions. It’s not in the archives at Maria Shriver’s media company. So we were just like, this is crazy. We felt like it had to exist, but it doesn’t. What do we do if we can’t find it? Because we don’t think we’re going to find it. [Laughs] We just were on this spiral. We were desperate. It was this sense of desperation, where at the end of the interview with Maria Shriver, I just said, “Oh my gosh! I don’t know what to do about this. Like, what should I do?” And she was like, “Oh, I bet that guy has it.”
I was like, “Wait. What?!” She was so casual. She was like, “I bet that guy has it.” I was like, “No. No way!” Then my cinematographer said, “Oh, I bet that guy has it.” And I was like, “Don’t even say it! Don’t even say it. I don’t want to get my hopes up.” Then, by the end of the day, we found it. It was just a huge relief. I mean, like I said, we just did not know what we were gonna do. It’s such an important part of the story.
How long did this process take as a whole, and how far into it were you when you finally found that?
Waters: Far. I mean, it was months and months and months, because we knew from early on we needed to tell that part of the story. At one point, I had this idea that maybe I would have a voiceover from Eve Ensler, reading as Mary. So when I interviewed Eve Ensler in September of 2024, I just filmed her reading as if she were Mary. Even though we got the footage, we were like – this is going to be extremely confusing.
I just was trying to think about – like, do we animate this section? But then there are no other sections of the film that are animated, so that would be weird. That was in September of 2024, when we were shooting interviews. I knew it was a problem. We didn’t film that interview with Maria until June of 2025. We were supposed to film with her in January 2025, but it was postponed because of the [L.A.] wildfires. So the Maria interview, I think it was the very last interview we filmed.
Okay, so down to the wire.
Waters: I know, it’s such an important interview. And then, you know, we had another six months of editing. Or actually, it wasn’t really six months of editing. It was more like four and a half to five months editing.
I’d be curious to hear about that editing process. Is there anything you really wanted to get in there that didn’t quite make it, or how did the editing process shake out over those months?
Waters: Oh yeah. [Laughs] There was a lot! Meghan and I – Meghan was my co-editor, and she was working in Chicago. I was working in Richmond. We were never in the same room together, which is really hard, while we were editing. We were both working out different parts of the film at different times, and then sending things back and forth, and working remotely, and having these marathon, three-hour-long telephone calls while we were watching things together. That was a new process for me. It would have been preferable to be working in the same physical location, but I think it worked out really well.
I mean, we would say constantly, “Oh my God, there’s a four-hour Pee-wee Herman movie. There’s a five-hour Billy Joel movie.” Mary Oliver wrote 30 books. There are all these incredible poems. Why can’t we make the five-hour version … so we can really get into it? And then, all these other people who we wanted to interview, who we just at a certain point were like, we cannot film any more interviews because the film is crowded as is. We can’t get everything in.
Having spent so much time with her work, do you have a favorite poem? Like, has that changed kind of over the course of spending so much time?
Waters: “When Death Comes” remains one of my favorite poems. It’s hard to pick just one. I do feel like I’ve learned about so many poems. One of the things that’s been really great is, there are poems that I know or thought I knew that I experienced in a whole new way through talking to other poets about them.
This is an outtake that I posted on social media, that’s going to be on the DVD. It’s not in the film. The poet Frank Gaspar read this poem called “Bone Poem.” I had read that poem, but I don’t know – for some reason, it didn’t really land with me or didn’t resonate with me until Frank read it, and then just started talking about it. I was like, oh wow – this poem is really amazing. So that experience of talking to these other poets, who are not Mary Oliver, but who are thinking really deeply about poetry or who teach poetry, and just learning from them, I think has been really, really wonderful.
This story has been updated to include the sponsor of the Aug. 23 screening of “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.”
