An Interview with Audrey Petty

Audrey Petty

This conversation, between Diane Paylor and Audrey Petty, took place at The Pink Teacup Restaurant in Greenwich Village on October 8, 1995.

DIANE PAYLOR:

Why don’t we start off with some personal history. Tell me who Audrey Petty is? Where are you from? Where have you been?

AUDREY PETTY:

I was born in Chicago in 1967. I grew up on the South Side of the city, and then I went on to Knox College, a very small school of about 1,000 students in Western Illinois.

PAYLOR:

Why Knox College?

PETTY:

You know, I’m not sure. As a senior in high school, I wasn’t thinking much about my future. I applied to schools pretty haphazardly. Fortunately, I was accepted at Knox. I wasn’t a very serious student in high school. Knox has a writing program; that’s where I started writing fiction and poetry.

PAYLOR:

You had never written before?

PETTY:

I had written some poetry; I started when I was around seven or eight years old.

PAYLOR:

What kind of poems?

PETTY:

Very maudlin, melodramatic poems. Very self-pitying, self-centered pieces.

PAYLOR:

Can you remember one?

PETTY:

I don’t know if I could. [Laughing] I know I have them somewhere. I kept them in journals, but after writing them for a few years and getting a hard time from my older sister, I stopped writing and didn’t pick up again until I was in college. I took a poetry course at Knox with Robin Behn, and from there I decided I wanted to try to write fiction. So I started my sophomore year and worked with Robin Metz for two years before I went to France.

PAYLOR:

Do you consider yourself a lifelong writer?

PETTY:

Yes. Writing has always provided me with a place to go emotionally. I don’t go there enough, but from an early age I found something really satisfying in being able to write and in the solitude that comes along with writing.

PAYLOR:

Tell me a little about your childhood.

PETTY:

Well, I’m one of three girls. No brothers.

PAYLOR:

Are you the baby?

PETTY:

I’m the middle child. My mother is a music teacher, and my father is a chemist who works for the FDA.

PAYLOR:

Still in Chicago?

PETTY:

Still in Chicago, still on the South Side.

PAYLOR:

Atypical or typical “Negro experience”?

PETTY:

Well, I guess I’d say it was a typical middle class “Negro upbringing,” or at least it felt typical to me. I was like a lot of people I knew; my childhood felt pretty normal.

PAYLOR:

Tell me a little more about your experiences with writing in college.

PETTY:

College was the first time I shared my work with other people, and I got some positive response back. That was the first step in my beginning to take myself seriously as a writer. I’m still in that process, but that’s when it began, with my first two professors reading my work and spurring me on to continue.

PAYLOR:

I’m interested in your writing voice and how this voice is being cultivated. How is it descriptive of your life and experience?

PETTY:

I think my writing voice has developed through reading other writers’ works. As a child, I really didn’t read. I liked to watch T.V. a whole lot. My mother’s a reader, my sisters are readers, but that was never very important to me growing up. I think that once I started writing in college—by that point I was a French major—I was reading a lot of literature, and I studied in France my senior year. All of that had an impact, studying a foreign language. I hope that experience made me more sensitive to language and to the idea that each word has a certain weight and consequence. I think my voice has developed through studying language and also reading writers whose work I admire.

PAYLOR:

Who, for example?

PETTY:

For one, I love Toni Morrison...