Interview with Colleen J. McElroy
Poet, fiction writer, editor, memoir author
Award-winning author and poet, Colleen J. McElroy, discusses her travels as a writer and her new work.
Colleen J. McElroy’s most recent publications are A Long Way from St. Louie (travel memoirs), Driving Under the Cardboard Pines (fiction), Travelling Music (poems), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar, (field notes and translations of Malagasy poems and stories). Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, she also has received two Fulbright Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a DuPont Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, Arabic, French, German, Malay, and Serbo-Croatian.
Sharyn Skeeter: How did you make the transition from speech pathologist to writer?
Colleen J. McElroy: I’ve always been a storyteller. I grew up among women who were storytellers. So, for me, the seeds of narrative voice were already there. I lived in a community where kids would hang out and make up songs. However, I hated poetry classes in high school. I took acting classes in college.
Skeeter: In A Long Way from St. Louie [Coffee House Press] you write about some of your many travels. As an African-American woman, how has extensive traveling influenced your writing?
McElroy: Travelling has been eye-opening. Going on lecture tours in other countries has forced me to memorize my poems. Poetry is treated differently in other countries where 1,000 people can turn out for a reading. Even if I don’t understand a poem that I hear in a different language, I can understand the rhythm of the language and feel the impact of the poem. Travelling has helped me gain a sharper sense of detail. By seeing a place I can understand its nuances in a way that I could not from only doing research. I don’t have to imagine how a place would be.
Skeeter: Have you used African-American and/or African folklore in your short stories or poetry?
McElroy: In my next book of poetry, Sleeping with the Moon, I include a poem, “The Moon in the Dragon’s Mouth,” with folklore that I made up. This is my second book of love poems. The first was Lie and Say You Love Me. This new book will include poems on erotic love as well as love of planet and family. The University of Illinois Press will publish the collection next fall.
Skeeter: Have you considered writing a novel?
McElroy: I’ve been working on a novel that I started in the 1980s. I’ve kept putting it aside. There are three versions of it. Now that I’m retired from teaching, I’ll have time to finish writing it.
Skeeter: What are you working on now?
McElroy: A new memoir, “Travelling with White People,” and a poetry collection, “Diseases of the Earth”—and the novel.
Next week, in Part 2, Colleen J. McElroy gives advice to new writers who want to get published in literary magazines.
