Out of St. Louie into the world unbound: an interview with Colleen J. McElroy.(Interview)

JLH: 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 resurgence 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. I grew up with those books and how they could make me "see" stories take shape through words. By the time I became a speech pathologist and I worked with people who had been neurologically impaired, I really became aware of how important language was and how impatient people are when they can't find the words they want. Everyone expects you to be able to talk, to "spit it out," so to speak. It is that connection we have between the word, the spoken word, and the self.