"An Accumulation of Things Happening": An Interview with Deborah Richards

Deborah Richards. Photo by Kamili Okweni Feelings.

This interview was conducted by telephone on July 14, 2004, between College Station, Texas, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Deborah Richards lives.

ROWELL: I have no doubt that, on first encountering your work, the uninitiated reader will find your poetry startling. Why? Visually and structurally, it is very different from what they know as poetry. Some of your poems remind one of charts or graphs. The structure of some of your poems force us to read the world with letters and words presented in ways we are not generally used to seeing them, and we are forced therefore to read the world in very new ways. Where does such a conceptualization of poetry come from? I have so many questions to ask you. What is your background? How did you come to write?

RICHARDS: I came to writing by reading. I read a lot, but I but I wouldn't say I read the classics for pleasure. I was reading books by Agatha Christie and books by children's author named Enid Blyton, which were children's adventure stories. They are a little like the Nancy Drew mysteries you have here in the United States. But I think the most significant book that made me realize the possibilities of writing was Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. That's when I first remember coming into contact with an African-American writer. Of course, there were other black writers who were writing at the time, but I didn't come across them in my high school or college education. It something about Morrison's rich language that I found (and still find) highly seductive—particularly when she personifies the natural world. In Tar Baby, she describes the butterflies observing Jadine's behavior, and these strange witnesses encourage the reader to view Jadine in a slightly skewed way. In The Bluest Eye, I like the inclusion of other voices within the book—the personal accounts, the children's story, the change in point of view.

I read more fiction than I did poetry, so it's interesting that I now write poetry. I saw myself writing a novel, or short stories, or a play. Poetry was something that was done privately. However, I am influenced and interested in other arts, such as dance, theater, and visual arts. I'm stimulated by visual arts in particular. I love the way one learns how to read a picture or artwork by reading more of the same. Travel has also been a major influence on my work. At it's most basic, I write when I travel via journals or in the letters I hope to send before I return home. I don't often send the letters I write, though!

ROWELL: You mentioned The Bluest Eye. Will you say more about how that book affected you? You referred to its richness of language. What do you think that book offered you as a writer?

RICHARDS: I suppose the thing about The Bluest Eye was that it was the first time I recognized that the black woman is given space to speak and to observe her world. We read the classics at my high school—Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Jack London, even—but we never read any black authors. So it was the title itself, The Bluest Eye, that caught my eye and made me pick up the book off the shelf. In this case, it was the content that was compelling. I could identify with Pecola Breedlove, who is isolated from her environment. Though I grew up in London, and a lot of black people live in London now, when I was going to school I was usually the only black girl in the class. So I learned quite early that beauty does not look like me and there was nothing I could do about it. When Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes...