Interview With Rebecca McClanahan

Essayist, poet, and short story writer Rebecca McClanahan is the author of three volumes of poetry and a recent book of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings (2002), a book thatthe Georgia Review praised for its "imagistic prose." Of The Riddle Song, its reviewer wrote, "McClanahan writes about the ways that lives intertwine, quilt-like, if you will, in ways that are the stuff of song-like celebration." Her many essays have appeared in literary journals like Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Boulevard, Quarterly West, and Georgia Review. The essay "Book Marks" was selected for The Best American Essays 2001 and for the new college edition of The Best American Essays. "The Van Angels" was awarded the Carter Prize from Shenandoah for the best essay of 2002. McClanahan recently received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also published two writing texts, Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively (1999) and Write Your Heart Out (2000), both commissioned and published by Book Digest.

Rebecca McClanahan was born in Lafayette, Indiana, a few miles from the farm of her maternal grandparents, the home place to which she returned for visits during her childhood and adult years. One of six children whose father was a Marine Corps pilot, McClanahan lived in several states as a child, and then during her teenage years the family settled in California, where she attended high school and graduated from California State University at Fullerton. For several years thereafter she supported herself with odd jobs, "some odder than others," including church organist, proofreader, schoolteacher, secretary, part-time actress, Avon lady, and even "one of those unfortunate souls condemned to stand behind the return counter at the Sears catalog store." During those years she wrote poems, stories, and essays but it was not until she was given a graduate assistantship at the University of South Carolina that she began to publish poems and stories. She earned her Masters and Ph.D. degrees from South Carolina, then moved in 1978 to North Carolina, where she served as the director of Poetry-in-the-Schools for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools until 1995, when she and her husband, Donald Devet, moved to New York City. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University (Charlotte, North Carolina) and also teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Rebecca McClanahan was interviewed for Fourth Genre in December 2002 at her apartment in New York City.

O'Hara: In the essay "Book Marks," you call yourself a "hungry reader." Talk about your life as a reader in relation to your life as a writer.

McClanahan: I'm not an organized reader. I tried that once, making lists of the books I must read or the books that people talk about at dinner parties. I gave up on that. No, it's like standing in front of the refrigerator and asking, "Now, what looks good, what am I really hungry for?" I'm always reading poetry and fiction and nonfiction all at once. Those are my three food groups. I read poems early in the morning: my meditation time. Right now I'm reading Nancy Zafris's book The Metal Shredders, which is very funny. I'm rereading some Neruda and rereading Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer to remind myself how serious it can be when we use other peoples' lives in our work. I read out of hunger for connections and facts.

O'Hara: In the essay "Composting: Notes from a Writer's Journal," you say, "I love facts," and that passion for information about places, people, and things is apparent in essays like "The Klan of the Grandmother" in which you undertake historical research to understand your grandmother's possible involvement with the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. How can research serve the writer of creative nonfiction?

McClanahan: A fact...