Colleen J. McElroy
Flame - Fall / Winter 2009

Colleen J. McElroy, writer and folklorist, was born in 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a B.S. and M.S. from Kansas State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, where she is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing. Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, she also has received a Fulbright Creative Writing Fellowship to Yugoslavia and a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Madagascar; a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for poetry, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for fiction; a Jesse Ball Dupont Distinguished Black Scholar Residency in Virginia; and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to the Bellagio Center in Italy.  She recently joined the faculty of Cave Canem.

            McElroy’s collections of poetry include: Sleeping with the Moon (2007),  What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), Bone Flames( 1987), Queen of the Ebony Isles (1984),, Lie and Say You Love Me (1981), Winters Without Snow (1979, and Music from Home (1976),  She has published two short story collections: Jesus and Fat Tuesday (1988), and Driving Under the Cardboard Pines (1990); and two non-fiction volumes: A Long Way From St. Louie (1997), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (1999).  McElroy received the Before Columbus American Book Award for the poetry collection, Queen of the Ebony Isles(Wesleyan University Press), a Pushcart Prize for poetry, and a Washington State Governor's Distinguished Artist Award for Jesus and Fat Tuesday and Other Stories(Creative Arts Book Company). In 2001.  Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (University of Washington Press) was selected as a finalist in the PEN Research-based Creative Nonfiction category, and her poem, "Mae West Chats It Up With Bessie Smith," was included in Best American Poetry. Her work has also appeared in O Magazine the Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and numerous other anthologies and literary magazines.          

              The Village Voice reviewed her work as “exciting…sumptuous and scary.”  Marge Piercy described her poetry as “…tight, tough, and lovely” while Joyce Carol Oates described her fiction as “…the mythopoetics of inner city tragedy,” and Cathy Coleman, The New York Times, said “[she]…renders details with such intensity that scenes and situations transcend boundaries and resonate with universal meaning.” The Chicago Tribune called A Long Way from St. Louie “a far ranging book with womanly-wise observations and far ranging interpretations.” And Kirkus Review noted that Over the Lip of the World was “set to advantage by the kind of poised writing that makes one slow down, read carefully, savor.” Yusef Komunyakaa described her most recent work, Sleeping with the Moon as containing ”revelations [that] unfold one after the other, enlarging this needful journey, each poem caught in its profound imagery and poignant singing, until we become suspended in a music that  enlightens, McElroy has lectured on poetry and American literature throughout the world, and her research into poetry and oral tradition has taken her to Europe, Central and South America, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, Africa, Japan, Australia, China, Tibet, and Jordan.  Her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, Greek, French, German, Malay, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, and Malagasy.  She lives in Seattle, Washington. 

Travel, Writing, and Film with Colleen J. McElroy

Interview by Amanda Johnston
June 2009 - Greensburg, PA

AJ: I’m really interested in your travels and how your poetry and writing has been affected by it.  

CJM: Well, I think it allows me to see, to get a different perspective on the world and how people relate to each other. By staying inside the United States, you begin to think that whatever concepts there are about relationships between people are universal, and they’re not; they’re much more complex than that.  I think in some ways the U.S. tends to simplify male, female, black, white, ethnicities, young, old. All of these things tend to be quite simple and people talk about the line between as if there is some invisible line, and there isn’t. And that’s what you learn quite quickly when you’re traveling, that just about everything is up for grabs except breathing. (laughs)  

AJ: You mentioned briefly in your recent reading about being overseas in an elevator and the attendant questioning your nationality because you are Black. That he wasn’t accustomed to seeing Black American travelers. Can you talk more about that experience?  

CJM: What I didn’t say was that his complexion was probably darker than mine, but he considers himself Cambodian – enough said. In this country you’re Black, and people don’t say, "So what is your ancestry?" When I have those kinds of encounters when I’m traveling, I have to delve a little bit deeper than I’m American or I’m Black or I’m female. You have to put all of those things together to realize what that means. The young man was shocked because what I did was shatter his perceptions of what America was or is. It had never occurred to him that would be a possibility for me. He saw me as a dark-skinned foreigner, but the foreignness was not Americaness, because they had seen Americans come in and the majority of them had been white Americans unless there is a group of Black Americans. Groups of Black Americans have a way of impacting another culture. But when you’re a female traveling alone, people will jump to all kinds of conclusions.  

AJ: Such as?  

Well, I’ve been asked, "How does your man/your husband let you do these things by yourself, or what is it that you do?" I mean the suspicion is that I have some sort of altruistic motive for being by myself. That I’m lost and that I don’t really know what I’m doing. That I need some kind of protection. You don’t find that with a certain kind of white female. The younger white females are thought about as being loose, ready for anything, receptive. Their dangers are in another direction. The older are the stereotypical English female traveler who, in literature, tends to be bulkier and strides like a man and does things in a very masculine way. That female traveler doesn’t encounter the same things as a young white female traveler or a black female traveling alone, because they expect that person, the English female traveler – and I just use that because it’s a stereotype, could be German, French, whatever – has a lot of knowledge at her disposal. And so sometimes I get the comment: "You’re so intelligent."  

AJ: And that’s not just a racial thing; that’s an American thing. Is that what you’re saying?  

CJM: It’s a female thing. If you start talking about Americans, they don’t really expect a lot, except money. A lot of money. (laughs) And they expect that Americans will want to appropriate in a monetary way. They do recognize that Europeans colonize, but the American appropriation is different than colonization. It has the same effect, mind you, but Europeans didn’t come in with Coca Cola. Americans come in with Coca Cola, McDonald's, blue jeans, cigarettes – lots of cigarettes – and so it’s a different kind of dynamic.  

AJ: So when you are traveling and writing in these countries, in Cambodia recently, do you find yourself wanting to immerse yourself in the culture and try to write from within out, or is it through that American lens?

CJM: It’s from my own lens. I never try to write from within. I’m never going to be from within. I’m barely within most American cultures. There’s a Madagascar proverb that says “Enjoy yourself to the fullest, but remain the perfect stranger.” And there’s a lot of weight on both perfect and stranger. So what I try to do is absorb as much as I can, but understand that I’m always on the outside looking in. I need to be comfortable with change, but I don’t want to assimilate. I don’t want to assimilate into white American culture much less into somebody else’s culture from another country. I want to let the people in that particular region know that I am aware of the difference and that I appreciate how much they are willing to show me. When I first started doing research I came at it as an American. I can’t say that I write while I travel, but I certainly take a lot of notes and record. So I’d go into a village and say “Take me to your storyteller…” essentially, and then I would say, “I’ll be here at two ’o clock, and I would like to record these kinds of stories blah blah blah.” And these people looked at me like I had lost my mind. (laughs)

I had to learn how to listen and how to observe. America is such a visually oriented, media-driven culture that we forget how to listen. We pick up one thing out of the whole swatch of words and say that’s what this is all about. And when we pick it up it usually has more to do with the person who is receiving it than the person who sent it. Some listeners want to pick out what is important to them and nothing else. They will ignore everything else, because that’s all they’re really interested in. I want to say it’s American culture, but it’s not. I think it’s a lot of Western cultures, too. I think that cultures that are not Western cultures are more curious about Western cultures than Western cultures are curious about those other cultures. Other cultures know the secondary clues, that you don’t judge everyone in the same way. This happened last night [at a Cave Canem reading] when someone wanted to know something about the people in the crowd, and the question was “Are you friends or family?” And what I wanted to say was that color does not bind us to each other. It only makes us visually similar. But that would have been too long, and the person would not have understood and been like “I’m only asking a simple question,” not understanding the hidden implications under that. That we can be in the same crowd and but not necessarily acquainted and certainly not related. Color does not make this a bonding. The bonding comes from other things. And it happens repeatedly. When I was in Cuba, it was raining off and on all afternoon, and I have asthma, but most people don’t notice it, and if they do, they say, “Are you alright?” because they take the coughing and the wheezing as you are ill. Well, I am, but not in that contagious, critical way.  It’s an ongoing condition that you live with and lots of people have it. I was standing in Havana with a white friend. When you get to Cuba, you see immediately that eighty percent of the people you see in Cuba are the Afro-Cuban, where as the televised population is Spanish-Cuban, which is a big difference. It’s almost as if you’ve gone into a country that is African origin rather than one that is of European origin. And this woman came up, and before she identified herself, she said in Spanish, “You have asthma,” and I said, “Yes,” and she wanted to take me to the clinic because they have socialized medicine so I could get some medicine. And then she started to explain that she was a healer, and we got into this conversation, and I had to use my Spanish, which is the worst of all my languages. And the white woman I was with said, “It’s remarkable people just come up to you and start talking, and she didn’t say anything to me.” But what I knew was the recognition was one first of color and secondly, “This woman may need my help,” because she was a healer and she just didn’t see my friend. Which is the reverse of what happens when I am in the U.S. The white person is seen, but I am invisible. I’m a necessary appendage, but I don’t necessary have to be reckoned with.

AJ: I have a similar experience. My mother is white, and my father is black. I live five minutes from my mother, and we go everywhere all the time, and I’m always acknowledged second. And sometimes only acknowledged with her prompting like before when I went looking at vehicles and the sales man comes out and starts in with her until she says, “No, my daughter is looking.” And not just me, but me and my kids.

CJM: And I’m sure she had to state more than once. Because they didn’t hear that other part. That other part just glossed over, and that part didn’t include my daughter. And if it did, they were, like, “Where is she? I don’t see her.” I call that being wallpapered. We already had Invisible Man, and that’s a different concept than being wallpapered. Invisible Man couldn’t go places. We can go places, but we become background. And I’m constantly wallpapered. I was with a friend when I had to go buy a car, and my friend is white, and we went to this one car lot, and the guy came out and started talking to her, and she said, “No, I’m not buying the car,” because she knew what was happening. And the guy goes back inside, and out comes a black woman in a wheelchair, and my friend and I both recognized that she was gay. And we started laughing. So OK, what do we get? We get black, handicapped and lesbian. Does he think he’s covered all the bases? (laughs)  

AJ: He said, I can’t help you. Not even won’t. He felt he couldn’t physically help you buy a car.

CJM: Obviously I did not buy a car from there. And I can get the reverse quite easily when I’m out of the country. Usually the first question after “Where are you from?” is “What is your religion?” followed by “Are you married?” It’s a very different hierarchy of relating to people.

AJ: ’Cause here it’s, like, “What do you do?” You have to do something.  

CJM: And they don’t mean “What do you do to pass the time?” What do you do to earn money? And that eventually gets there, but it’s not in the top five. And, you know, it comes out in the conversation. And again they are surprised when I say, “Well, I’m a professor,” and professors are held in such high esteem in other parts of the world. Then they become reverent. “Just tell me what to do to help you.” With the exception of men. It’s a whole new ballgame. Especially for European men. They can’t quite understand why I am what I am when they are what they are. And one man said to me “If I had been born in America I would be very rich by now.” And I said, “I bet you would. You’ve got all the credentials. You’re tall, you’re white, and you’re male. What else do you need?”  

But I like the idea of exploring other cultures. I don’t really write when I’m traveling. I take notes and just sort of let them sit in a journal, and they come out in different ways. Sometimes, years later when I hadn’t even thought about it, but suddenly I’ll think I haven’t written anything about that.  

AJ: I know you are involved in the film scene in Seattle. Can you talk a little about the relation between film and creative writing?  

CJM: I can’t remember the name of the film, but there was action. Bang, bang, bang. I talk about doing that in a poem. That a line can’t just be, “and then I went down the street and saw a man,” that’s not bang bang bang. “Down the street a man was sitting” – that’s bang, bang, bang. It’s the percussion of the line. In film the percussion comes in different ways. In American films, it comes very quickly. There moments in an hour span of time you might have fifty percussion hits. If it’s a foreign film, you might have four because time is used a different way. In a foreign film, a day is drawn out in the film. In an American film, a day is maybe the first five minutes of the film, and then it’s the next day. I love that way of slowing down time. That is the first thing I had to learn to do when I started research. Because I told you, I came in with my notebook. I said, “Give me your storytellers. I got my camera, got my recorder, and I want stories about ...” (Laughs)

I remember being in Yugoslavia, and I had this big chart that I made up, and I said, “Here is what I want to do for the next two weeks.” And they said, “This is wonderful. Did you do it yourself? This is just wonderful.” And then they folded it very carefully and said, “What can we do for you today?” So I learned to have patience. And you have to learn to do this when you are watching films. I don’t mean movies. Movies are really something you can put a quarter in the slot, watch it and walk away from it. But a film is something that is almost interactive. Your mood changes as the film changes. Especially films coming out of countries you wouldn't expect. There was a film from the Bahamas the acting was wonderful. It was produced and directed from the Bahamas. You don’t get many entries from places like the Bahamas. So I’m hoping that will pick up, and we will see more entries from that area. I know that certainly that happened with a number of other countries, Mongolia, for example. Four or five years ago, it was The Story of the Weeping Camel, which everyone just loved, and now there are regular films out of Mongolia. But the notion of being involved in the film industry, not necessarily filmmaking, but certainly viewing films and grouping them together in some sort of cohesive manner and serving the needs or the trends of the audience is a complicated one. In many ways it’s like writing. When you write, you don’t have your audience there. So you have to make some decisions about how will this play to Schenectady as opposed to New Orleans. And I try to encourage writers to never write anything that’s going to play to their friends. They know you, they love you, they will forgive you. (laughs) You need to play to people who have never seen you.

AJ: What’s the name of the film festival there?

CJM: The Seattle International Film Festival, and this was the 35^th. I’ve been going for at least 30 years.

AJ: Do you attend, or do you do other things?

CJM: I attend, but I’m also an ambassador. So I introduce films and talk about films.

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