Ringing His Being: An Overview of Michael McFee's Career

FEATURED AUTHOR—MICHAEL McFEE Ringing His Being: An Overview of Michael McFee's Career Tara Powell Michael McFee's journey as a poet, editor, and teacher has taken him from a small working class suburb in the mountains of North Carolina to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the state's populous Piedmont region. As is true of the work of another Asheville native, Thomas Wolfe, Michael McFee's semiautobiographical creative gaze reaches back to Appalachia with both wonder and loss. Unlike Wolfe, McFee's canvas is a world of specifics that is more real than romantic. Witty, sensual, always vivid and often heartbreaking, McFee's writing gives form to the details of the lives of the people he has known—details that call his readers back to themselves with the smell of Pert and honeysuckle, touch of ash and body, sound of snore or hands washing, and daffodils plucked from what he calls "the deep late winter of this underworld" (in "To My Father on the Anniversary of His Death" in Earthly). McFee's elegies look in present objects to memory anywhere, leading readers to the earth of his remembered Appalachia and back again to their own lives. Michael Alan McFee was born in Asheville on June 4, 1954, to William Howard McFee, a postal clerk, and Lucy Farmer McFee. Michael and his older sister Leslie grew up in nearbyArden, which the adult McFee dubs an "Appalachian suburb" ("Unsent Letter to Robert Morgan" in the 2003 Iron Mountain Review). They went to public schools there and were raised in the Southern Baptist Church, though McFee would later become an Episcopalian. His childhood in Arden, his family's spiritual and physical roots in the mountains, and his frequent evocation of the region in his creative work have earned him attention as an Appalachian writer. In McFee's 1998 Appalchian Heritage essay, "Back Home," he describes his urge to capture the mountains in language, arguing that perhaps "the mountains speak to a poet in a way the Piedmont can't, constantly teasing him into metaphor." Indeed, the search for the right language to describe his homeplace runs through McFee's work from the "plain air" of the horizon in his first book to his embrace of his Appalachian heritage in his recent essays. He ponders, in another version of "Back Home." "Is it possible to have two homes, two heartfelt places that can ring my whole being like a bell?" The answer seems to be affirmative, as McFee's adult home has long been the North Carolina Piedmont. He left Arden in 1972 for North Carolina State University in Raleigh, intending to become an architect. But after two years, McFee found himself gravitating to UNC-Chapel Hill, its English Department, and especially poetry. Expecting merely an easy "A" in James Seay's poetry course, McFee found instead a new outlet for his interest in form. Stumbling upon the work of North Carolina poet A. R. Ammons, and soon afterward Fred Chappell, Jim Wayne Miller, and especially Robert Morgan, McFee was inspired to begin writing about his own sense of place. He explains in an interview with Michael Chitwood that Morgan's poetry "open[edj up the possibility of writing about the place I came from, letting that place become my subject matter, discovering a native landscape and characters and language" (Iron Mountain Review). Committing himself to the architecture of words, then, McFee completed his B.A. at Chapel Hill in English with Highest Honors in Creative Writing in 1976. In 1978, he received an M.A. in English there with a thesis on Ammons' use of form in his long poems. Also in 1978, McFee married Belinda Pickett, with whom he would have a son, Philip, in 1984. McFee continued to work on his poems in graduate school, and they soon began appearing in literary journals such as South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, and Ploughshares. He won a "Discovery"/The Nation Award in 1980 and a 1981-1982 Pushcart Prize. Also in 1980, he became Book Editor for The Spectator, and in 1982 began reviewing books for WUNC-FM. Over the next dozen years...