In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

22 An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Cynthia Hogue Cynthia Hogue: i want to start with your origin tale. How did you start writing ? Why? Harryette Mullen: you could say there are several origins. There’s the origin of writing, which for me goes far back, since i could hold a pencil. i’ve been writing to entertain myself and writing rhymes, stories, and cartoons as gifts to other people . . . making booklets for friends, and greeting cards for family members with little rhymed verses in them that i would illustrate. i always had a notebook as a child and i would sketch in it and write in it. This started because my mother was always working. she was the breadwinner. she taught at an elementary school and she would often have to go to meetings and she had other jobs as well. so we always knew we had to be quiet and entertain ourselves. My sister and i read a lot and we both scribbled and drew a little bit. it was a way of keeping us out of trouble. The first time i had a poem published was in high school and it just happened because the english teacher made everyone write a poem. That was our assignment. she submitted the poems to a local poetry contest and my poem was chosen as the winner. it was published in the local newspaper. so that was my first published poem. a s an undergraduate i continued to write for my own amusement and also i went to poetry readings. There were lots of a frican and a frican a merican poets coming to visit the University of t exas and i tried to go to as many readings as possible. some of my friends were writers too. so i just kept writing. Then one of my friends insisted that i had to do more with my poetry. He was a poet and knew that i was writing, but i wasn’t attempting to publish my work, wasn’t participating in readings. i was at an open reading one night and he asked me, “a re you going to read your work?” i said, “i didn’t bring anything,” and he said, “We’re going to go home. i’m going to sign you up on the list and by the time you go home 234 Chapter 22 and get your stuἀ it’ll be close to your turn.” That was the first time i read in public and after that, i really started to think i could face an audience and see myself as a poet; i had been writing forever but not thinking that what i wrote was poetry or that i was a poet, but writing and drawing and reading all went together. They were all part of the same activity. CH: i want to turn to the evolution of your work. How would you describe that first collection, Tree Tall Woman? HM: The poets i was reading and hearing influenced the book. i was definitely influenced by the Black a rts movement, the idea that there was a black culture and that you could write from the position of being within a black culture. a t the time, my idea about black culture was very specific to being southern, eating certain foods, and having certain religious beliefs. i have a broader sense of what blackness is, what a fricanness is, or what a collection of cultures might be, whereas before, i think my idea of blackness was somewhat provincial. o r definitely, it was regional. CH: “r egional,” meaning monologic? HM: part of what people were doing with the Black a rts movement was, in a sense, to construct a positive image of black culture, because blackness had signified negation, lack, deprivation, and absence of culture. so people took all of the things that had been pejorative and stigmatized and made them very positive, so that chitterlings, which was the garbage that people threw away from the hog, became the essence of soul food. Words were turned around in their meaning and all the things that were thought of as being pejorative aspects of blackness became the things to be praised. so, that project had created a space for me to write. i didn’t have to carry out that project because it had already been done; i didn’t have to say “i’m black and black is beautiful.” a ctually, by the time i was...

Share