Out of St. Louie into the World Unbound: An Interview with Colleen J. McElroy
2008; Saint Louis University; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoJLH: First, Dr. McElroy, let me thank you for agreeing to grant this interview. Please know that I truly appreciate your time and the opportunity to talk with you. May I begin by asking you what motivated you to become a writer? CJM: During the '60s, when there was a certain so-called of black awareness, I attended a number of poetry readings where people read poems about being black in America, poems that to me were naive. I say resurgence out of deference to the Harlem Renaissance, a period where writers were more direct in writing about the black experience, and yet naive, because those white poets had no frame of reference to describe that experience. I knew I could do better. Frequently, people ask me, Well, how did you suddenly become a poet? I don't think I suddenly became a poet. I grew up in a family of strong storytellers--I learned to tell stories. I refer to my mother as queen of the metaphor. She can offer a metaphor for most anything in a second--usually when she's talking about somebody--and certainly she inaugurated me into Shakespeare early on, quoting him for everything from straightforward questions of what's that? to answers about the meaning of life in general. I grew up during World War II, when the men in my family were in the military, and I was surrounded by women. My mother had several sisters and they were all storytellers. I grew up in a hurry with those women, ready or not. Then, in high school and college, I studied drama and speech pathology, both of which required a certain degree of storytelling. As a speech pathologist, I used stories to help people access the way that they spoke before damage to their neurological systems. So, I was already accustomed to storytelling. All of that helped shape me as a poet, but I wouldn't say it was a sudden decision. JLH: In several of your essays, you reference early influences in your development as a writer, including the storytelling you heard in your grandmother's house. Would you talk a little more about that influence? CJM: As I said, my mother had several sisters and they were all storytellers. They would gather at my grandmother's house--sometimes having dinner and sometimes just to come over to see how she was doing--and I would hide under the dining-room table and listen to them until they caught me and made sure I was out of the room. Some evenings, my grandfather would come home from work and read to me, but after he died in the mid-'40s, I was likely to go into the attic and listen to records on my grandmother's wind-up Victrola. These were records from at least a decade earlier, and I mimicked conversations. So I spent a lot of time alone, and the storytelling became a part of me, both the way I was educated as well as the way I was amused. Most of my early poems were narratives, and I still prefer narrative poetry. JLH: Was that also when you developed your fascination with language? CJM: I'm sure it was. In a way, I listened to two levels of English: my grandmother's homespun stories, passed to her from her mother, and my mother's acquired stories, culled from what she'd studied in college. Make that three levels--all of the 78-rpm recordings and the radio shows I listened to--I learned to listen, rather than watch the world unfold as this generation does with television and the media. I practiced a lot of sounds from other languages in front of that mirror when I was doing nonsense syllables, but I think the real fascination was the power that language held when those women talked, and when they could hold such a court because they were so skilled at unraveling or weaving a story. That was fascinating to me. So I spent a lot of time listening, and I think that listening helped me understand the importance of language. And my grandfather read me stories about people in far away places; my grandfather had a library of books, most of which my favorite aunt, Jennie, inherited. …
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