An Interview with Allison Joseph
- An Interview with Allison Joseph
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Allison Joseph
I’m curious: it seems like you have lived all over the place. I noticed from reading your CV that you were born in England and lived awhile in Canada. Were your parents Caribbean?
Yes, they are. My mother was from Jamaica, and my father was born on an island called Carriacou, but he grew up in Grenada. They met and married in England, and then they moved from England when I was too small to even see England. I was three or four years old. Then we moved to Toronto and then to the Bronx, New York.
So you are pretty much a New Yorker?
I grew up in New York for the most part. When people ask me where I’m from, I always say New York. And they always say, “You don’t sound like it.” As if there is supposed to be a certain sound.
Do you find a sense of place informs the kind of work that you do?
It does, it really does. I find myself haunted by places that I’ve been, places that I remember. Not necessarily geographic locations, but the houses that I’ve lived in. The apartments, the houses, the relatives’ houses, things like that. Things that are really tangible . . . I can remember the texture of the carpet. I can’t remember the name of the street, but I can remember the texture of the carpet and the way the light looked as it came through the windows. Small things like that.
When did you begin composing poetry seriously?
I wrote as a teenager. I went to a high school that was really great—Bronx High School of Science. You wouldn’t expect to find budding poets there, but a lot of my friends wrote poems. I guess I got serious when I decided to go to Kenyon College. It’s a school with a literary reputation, and I wanted to go because of that reputation. Little did I know that reputation was pretty exclusively white and male. I discovered that a little later.
Well, I think that is pretty typical of the poetry world in general. [End Page 461]
True, true.
Did you find it a friendly atmosphere when you were at Kenyon College?
To this day I wonder, well, should I have done that? Because it was an incredible culture shock to go from the most diverse city in the world—and the diversity of my high school where you had kids from every neighborhood and every socioeconomic class in the city—to go to the middle of Ohio where you could, my senior year, count the number of black people enrolled on two hands. To this day, I still question the wisdom of doing that. It was kind of a love-hate relationship because, on one hand, I was given a scholarship and given the freedom to do what I wanted as a student. There really wasn’t that much pressure on me to conform to a certain major. I kind of took the classes that I wanted and made a major out of that. There were some professors that to this day are my good friends . . . And the students I went to school with, I kept a few of them as close friends.
That’s a lot to ask for actually. Plenty of people go to college and don’t come away with close relationships at all.
A lot of people sleepwalk through college. Now that I teach, I see that. I see that people are willing to settle for very little from their college education. They are actually peeved if you ask them to think or produce or invent.
What are you teaching?
I teach mostly creative writing. In the past I have taught both fiction writing and poetry writing, but here at Southern Illinois University I teach primarily poetry writing.
So, have you done much fiction writing?
No, not at all.
But you understand the principles...
