Melanie Quezada: You have just graduated from your MFA in Fiction. What is your advice to students entering the field?
Colleen Mayo: My advice to students who want to pursue writing is: do it! Treat yourself and your writing with respect. This means be disciplined, curious, supportive of yourself and others. Writing sounds and looks and feels many different ways. Try to expose yourself to a wide variety of work. If what you write is totally different from anything else, that’s probably a very good thing. Also, celebrate and participate in writing communities, MFA or otherwise.
MQ: When did you know that writing was for you?
CM: I have no idea! Always? Always.
MQ: If you had a time machine and could meet any author living or dead, who would they be and why?
CM: Well even the fantasy of meeting these people makes me so nervous… I know I’d just explode or drool or be an absolute nincompoop, but the three names that first come to mind are: Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, and George Saunders. Also, Anthony Bourdain.
MQ: How many hours a day do you write?
CM: I try to write 75 or so minutes every morning before I go to work. It’s tough for me to make big headway with just an hourish, so I like to work for 2 or 3 hours during the weekend.
MQ: Do you believe in writer’s block? What do you recommend for those who have it?
CM: I don’t believe in it for me… because I know I use it as an excuse. I’ll tell myself I have writer’s block because it’s easier than going to sit in the chair and actually deal with something that’s stumping or frustrating me about a story. I usually write myself into stories and characters, which is not a quick process, so for me “writer’s block” usually means I haven’t done enough work yet. All of this is a way of saying that I recommend we all write through our block. Butt in chair. That’s the only way to do it.
MQ: What are you working on now? What do you hope to work on in the future?
CM: I’m working on revising a story collection and getting back into a novel! Two very different projects in different stages, which is fun. My 2019 goal is to finish the damn novel. I’d also like to get to work on some essay ideas knocking around my head but…I try not to get too excited about ideas. We all have ideas, you know? They’re not worth much without the words on paper.
Colleen Mayo’s writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Sun Magazine, The Rumpus and others. She was a 2017 winner of the FSU Creative Writing Spotlight Award for Nonfiction. Born in Texas, Colleen now lives in Tallahassee where she recently graduated with her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University.
About the Interviewer:
Melanie Quezada is a Creative Writing major at Ringling College of Art and Design. She currently resides in Sarasota, Florida. She is getting her bachelor’s in Creative Writing.
Long before you made a habit of hating me, your mother proposed. We were at a steak place. I wore a suit. Her, a red dress— my favorite color on her. She kept swirling her finger along the rim of her wineglass as if it might sing. My head about flew to the ceiling when she popped the question. She said she loved how I made her feel. It all sounds so corny until it’s directed at you.
“Like I have nothing to hide,” she said.
“Oh Dawn, me too, me too” I whispered. If the boys back in Little Rock could have heard me coo like that, they’d have doubled over. I’m not known for being an emotional guy.
Still, your mother’s finger, around and around. Back then, the flesh off her pinkie was rougher than
the callus on my big toe. I never minded it. I’ve got rough hands as well, made thick from working the machines at Remington thirteen hours a day. I believe all good hands should tell a story.
Then she looked up at me, nothing but eyelashes and trust. I knew then what it feels like to be so happy that your heart aches. The both of us sensed this was some kind of moment, a picture we’d forever return to in our minds.
“When should we do it?” I asked.
She leaned her fork over my plate and shoveled up a heap of garlic mashed potatoes—Dawn’s appetite back! I’d trade in three years just to see her go to town on a basket of fries and onion rings.
“After I talk to Sally,” she said.
“For now, we’ll move in together.”
She touched my leg underneath the tabletop. I paid the bill quickly. My stuff was at y’all’s place by the end of the week. You weren’t thrilled, but you seemed to get over it. I was once a simple man, easy to live with.
Quickly, Dawn got me into the jewelry business. I started crafting metal baubles that sold well at all the fairs. We’d work the Central Texas circuit clean from December to June, then we’d pack up our camper and take you out on adventures the whole summer long. Moab, Yellowstone, White Sands—it was downright glamorous. This pattern for six years. We’d joke about my life before and after Dawn, B.D. and A.D., which we all thought was pretty cute.
B.D., I worked as a Preventative Maintenance Specialist out at Remington in Lonoke, Arkansas. I was good and we had a decent crew, but one slip-up is enough to bring the whole assembly line to a halt and—rip—a limb or worse can be lost in two seconds. It’s quite stressful. I don’t have to tell you that. The lot of us used to head down to this joint Smokey’s once or twice a week to drink it out and share stories. Some of the men could get competitive about the gore, which I never liked.
I had this coworker named Christian. We were both on shift when a bad batch got cased. The explosion made national news. Two guys dead, five banged up badly. Christian lost his left eyebrow hair, yet, to hear him talk about it, you’d think he survived Afghanistan. Sitting at Smokey’s night after night while Christian reenacted our dead buddies’ faces melting off didn’t go down well. I’m a vet myself. I started to feel a bit offended. I’ve surprised myself much more than the night I crashed a pool stick against Christian’s head. Let me be clear: I wasn’t surprised, but I wasn’t proud either. I woke up the next morning, called in sick, and b-lined it for Texas. The goal was Houston, then in Austin I really did surprise myself.
You were fifteen the summer she started misplacing shit— normal things at first, like keys and receipts, the sort of stuff you chalk up to a bad night’s sleep. Meanwhile, you’d turned difficult, all slouch and sarcasm. But we made it Jackson Hole in time for snow. When you saw it all, you looked back at your mother and me as if we’d given you a great gift. I felt for a moment what it would have been to see you as a child. You cartwheeled around the white hills, pausing to lick the wet off your hands and smile at us with a disbelieving, magical grin. You ran up and pulled us both into a hug, pressed your cold fingers against the back of my neck while Dawn kissed my check. Life had become something I’d never even known I wanted. But I wanted it, you need to know that.
Names started to get funny shortly after your sixteenth birthday. She’d call you ‘Susan’, or me ‘Barry’, or sometimes her mind would go somewhere else entirely and she’d talk to me like I was her father or ex-husband. Then her temper started to flare up something evil. That’s when we really started to worry. She’d ask me to pass the salt, then throw a knife at my head if it didn’t come fast enough. Your English teacher called the cops after she ate three fingers of chalk and turned over a chair over during their parent- teacher meeting. I couldn’t trust her at the booth alone for fear she might lose it at a customer.
It was sometime during this period when I left. I was gone one and half days. I’d driven back to Arkansas, parked myself up at that familiar corner in Smokey’s to throw back more beers than
my stomach remembered how to handle. It’d been nearly a decade; no one outright recognized me. I knew some—Christian, yes, and a few others—and I shut my eyes to listen to them share their stories, which hadn’t changed a beat from the gore and other talk. I left a good tip.
I swear, every exit called to me— from I-30 to I-35—and maybe if I’d been soberer I might have turned around back to Arkansas. I hope you never make a habit out of the stuff, but sometimes drink does give you courage.
When the diagnosis finally came, your mother was stoic. She sat in front of the doctor and nodded at the charts. “Yes,” she said softly. Her eyes stayed locked on the series of lines and numbers while her thumb stroked the back of my hand. “Yes,” she repeated with a terrible, patient smile, “this makes sense.”
We told you. You didn’t cry. You did nothing. You walked away.
I guess you could call the time it is now A.A.D.: After, After Dawn. She’s still physically here, of course, and sometimes the film of this sickness slips from her eyes and she looks up at me from her bed at Eastwatch with a near-sane intensity like are you fucking kidding me, Gary? This is how it turns out? I lovehate these moments. It’d be easier without them. I’ve let myself imagine what it might have been to like to grow old with her rather than grow old taking care of her, what a fantasy, what a useless mindfuck.
And, yes, I’ve let myself imagine what it might have been like never to have met you both. Never to have these bills, this commitment, this terrible dearth of love from a daughter who shares none of my blood, from a woman who doesn’t remember my name.
Sometimes I wish I’d actually made her my wife, you my daughter. It wouldn’t have made a damn of difference.
Colleen Mayo’s writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Sun Magazine, The Rumpus and others. She was a 2017 winner of the FSU Creative Writing Spotlight Award for Nonfiction. Born in Texas, Colleen now lives in Tallahassee where she recently graduated with her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University.
The Visiting Writers Forum (www.visitingwritersforum.com) at Ringling College of Art and Design has been a way for young writers like myself to hear from seasoned writing professionals such as Pulitzer-winner Robert Olen Butler and Cuban-American poet Virgil Suarez, among others. Children’s book superstar Jane Yolen kicked off the spring 2018 series, but before she took the main event, she joined me for a quick chat.
Sydney Nicole: 300+ published books is an impressive number. What’s your motivation to keep writing?
Jane Yolen: Well, possibly because at almost eighty, I don’t know anything else. I love to write. I love to find out what I’m thinking and the way I can find out what I’m thinking is to write. I also come from a family of writers. My father was a writer. My brother’s a writer, my mother was a failed writer – she sold only one short story in her entire life. But she made crossword puzzles and my great-grandfather in a small shtetl – which is a Jewish community in the old country – had an inn and he use to tell stories around the fire to people. So we are a long line of liars.
SN: Your picture book Stranded Whale deals with death. How important is it to incorporate serious topics into children’s books?
JY: I do some lightweight stuff and I do some funny stuff like Commander Toad in Space and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? But I also do serious things in picture book form. I’ve also written three Holocaust novels – my latest comes out this year – so I write everything. It’s the story that I want to tell that dictates in which sub-genre it’s going to be and how dark it’s going to be; how light it’s going be. If I start writing something in bouncing rhyme, I’m sure not going to make it into a Holocaust novel. So there are limits to the number of changes you can make in something. But when I’m writing, in the beginning, I’m not always sure what it’s going be. Sometimes I am, but most of the time I try to get my ideas down and see where they take me.
SN: A few of your books have made it onto banned books lists. What advice do you have for writers who want to write for a younger audience, but fear they may be banned?
JY: If it’s banned, you’ll sell more copies. You’ll get a lot of press and people will want to see what they’re missing. But I think if there’s a serious issue that you want to write about, you write about it. If you want to write about it because you think it’s going to make money? That’s a bad reason. You want to write with your heart. Not with your pocketbook.
SN: How has today’s current climate affected your writing?
JY: I’ve been thinking about writing a Women’s March picture book, though I have a friend who’s doing it, so I probably won’t. But I’ve been certainly writing poems about that. I think that if you look at my body of work, you’ll find a lot of feminist stuff. In fact, a book of mine that just came out last week is about the women and girls in the Hebrew Bible, a feminist take on their stories. It liberates them out of the men’s stories and lets them live on their own. So I’m always thinking of women topics.
SN: So we can expect to see more of that in your work?
JY: Yes, absolutely.
SN: I’m writing a musical about the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s going to be about a black girl who is adopted, both her parents are white and her dad is a cop and how she perceives race in today’s history.
JY: Interesting, good take. I wrote a musical – two musicals for kids. One was performed in Boston and performed again in Massachusetts. And the other one was performed in North Hampton, Massachusetts and it is that kind of cooperative venture that picture books are too.
SN: How are picture books cooperative?
JY: Your first cooperation is not only between an author and his or her words. Instead of how is that story? You say to the story, “Come on, cooperate with me.” But then you’re cooperating with an editor, then you’re cooperating with the illustrator. Then you’re cooperating with a copy editor. You’re cooperating with all the promotion people 10 who want to sell your book to teachers and librarians who want to know what you really meant in your book. Most arts are cooperative – even though we think of ourselves as this lone wolf sitting there day in and day out putting down these magnificent words on the page. But in the end—like the musical—it’s very cooperative.
SN: I’m also working with a documentary group as the writer. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the documentary film 13th, about mass incarceration in the U.S. A local elementary school showed it to a bunch of fifth graders and the students wrote spoken word poetry based off what they saw. Our goal is to capture both how they felt about the subject matter and their experience with writing poetry.
JY: So where do you want to go? Do you want to do all these things or do you want to narrow it and go after one?
SN: I kind of like everything, but right now I’m more focused on screenwriting. I’m taking a lot of screenwriting class because I like film and television, but I also want to write a musical and I like books. I’m a little all over the place.
JY: Don’t think of it as being all over the place. Think of it as being easily bored, so you want to follow your passion and never narrow yourself because you don’t know right now what you are capable of. I still don’t know now what I can’t do. I want to be able to write anything I want. Maybe excluding porn. Who knew forty years ago that I could write graphic novels – which I have. Who knew fifty years ago that I could write fiction? I thought I was a nonfiction writer and a picture book writer and suddenly I became a fiction writer as well. Who knew I could write musicals? Who knew I could write movie scripts? All of those things I did because I didn’t tell myself I couldn’t. If somebody says, “Can you do this?” my answer is always, “Yes, I can.” Maybe I can’t, but I have to find that out for myself. Don’t narrow yourself before you know what you can’t do. Let every moment be a can-do instead of a can’t-do.
About the Author:
Jane Yolen is an author of children’s books, fantasy, and science fiction, including Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? She is also a poet, a teacher of writing and literature, and a reviewer of children’s literature.
About the Interviewer:
Sydney Nichole was born in Columbus, Ohio where she originally went to school for engineering. Instead of doing her engineering homework she found herself writing stories. Switching paths, she found herself at Ringling College of Art + Design for Creative Writing focusing on screenwriting. In her free time, she likes to do puzzles and pretend that she’s a late-night TV Show host.
At the Molotov Cocktail, we serve Irish Car Bombs all day, and our napkins are rags soaked in kerosene. Disasters unspool on our high-definition televisions in surround sound – floods, riots, mass shootings. Take your pick. This Throwback Thursday, watch Watts explode into flames at the bar. Follow us on Facebook to discover more vintage disasters and other special offers. Leave a comment on our Instagram if you have a suggestion for a disaster you’d like to see. You can be anyone here- lady killer, femme fatale, innocent bystander. No one is a victim here. This place only has so much room, and we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
About the Author:
Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwater Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia Press). Her poetry collection, Flamethrower, will be published by Latte Press in 2019. A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit.
