Welcome to
Writers4Higher
This issue, Writers4Higher features
Glenda Bailey-Mershon
Hi, Glenda. Welcome to the
Writers4Higher family!
1.
Tell me about yourself. Your
book(s), your life, your inspiration.
Some days I feel like a snake, most of me
behind, and that part is my ancestors. One day, I will shed my skin and be
clothed anew, and that new skin will be my descendants. This is how I was
taught to think of myself, as the culmination of my ancestors' existence, as my
children and their children will be the culmination of mine. Everything I do is
out of respect for one and for the benefit of the other. It is a life in which
I am never quite alone. Completely myself, but also a product of our past and a
worker for the future.
It took me a long time to understand that
many people see themselves as only themselves, not as some creature dragging
centuries of predecessors behind. It took me a longer time to understand that I
was fortunate in this way. Any other life would seem lonely to me. I can't say
how it would be for others.
I grew up in the Deep South in a family that
had roots from many parts of the world. As a child, I found this quite confusing.
My elders talked about people born generations ago as if they had just left the
room. And those people belonged to some mysterious groupings that were hard to
grasp. Indian, but not that kind of Indian, was the way some past family
members were described. And I was constantly told I looked like this one or
that, held my fork like that great aunt, loved pepper like my
great-grandfather, had a rebellious streak like a great-great-great-great
grandmother so many times removed that she was born around the same time as the
United States. When I asked questions, not much was explained.
So mostly I made up things in my head. I
loved Peter Pan because he never had to enter any adult conversations, unless
he was eavesdropping while planning a mischievous raid. Jo in Little Women was my best friend because
we shared a determination to learn everything we weren't supposed to know.
Emily Dickinson stopped me cold with her books like frigates and lines that set
the world into rhythm. That was the world I lived in. Every Saturday, my father
took me to the library and I set in with a vengeance to read everything those
brick walls held.
School was a problem. I loved it because I
could ask all the questions I wanted and generally got an answer. My parents
were distrustful of it, didn’t want to set foot inside, because neither of them
had much schooling and both felt uncomfortable talking to teachers and
principals. So school was mine and mine alone. But if I needed help there, I
was on my own.
What an irony that all these many years
later, I look at my work and see how much of it is an extended conversation
with people far in my past. How my great-grandmothers whispered to me about the
life of Evangeline, the Romani woman whose mystery is at the heart of Eve's Garden, my first novel. How my own
attempts to explain to my son that one can be oneself and still the culmination
of people from continents and centuries away informs the long poem,
"Answering Spring at Red Clay," in my chapbook, sa-co-ni-ge/blue smoke: Poems from the Southern Appalachians. And a
conversation with my father, attired as usual in grease-stained overalls, about
a Gold Coast art opening intrigued me enough to form the basis for another
chapbook of poems, Bird Talk.
It all comes together in a way that I know is
uniquely me, but which is inspired so frequently by them. O longo drom, the long road we have traveled together, winds
from the Silk Road to here, where I sit in Charlotte in my mint-walled study,
looking at a poster about Caroline Herschel, the astronomer, by Judy Chicago
while I try to make sense of the musical words winding through my head.
2.
Where do you see your
writing taking you in the future?
Everything is always going in several directions
with me. I'm working on a poetry collection and two novels while also finishing
up some short stories that I hope will make a collection. At least, if the
question were, "What are you working on?", that would be the answer.
Instead, let me try answering what you asked, which I think requires more introspection
on a late Sunday night when everyone else, including the dog, is asleep.
My writing is a dialogue not only with
ancestors and great-great-great grandchildren, but with writers whose work I
admire. I'm reading young writers like Paul Yoon and Rebecca Lee and thinking
about how tradition and change are constants that keep us seesawing, but maybe
that's a good thing, a way to keep the pendulum swinging hard enough to discover
new territory.
I'm constantly re-reading masters like Jane
Austen and Edith Wharton and Ursula LeGuin who ask us all, what really matters
in life? What will last when we're all stardust in some future star field?
In the meantime, I'm trying to just master
the language, one paragraph at a time.
So I'm writing a very contemporary novel on
the subject of greed, about a young woman with a closet full of expensive
trinkets she doesn’t even like, whose inheritance is a labyrinth of past
intrigues. What does she really deserve, that's what she wants to know.
A much more light-hearted work is set in a
bookstore and florist on Chicago's Northwest Side, a sort of oddball romance
between damaged people.
I like writing about partnerships, how
unlikely pairings rescue each other, because that has certainly been true in my
life. Help comes so often from unexpected quarters.
3.
How do you use your
talents/time to help others?
When my family made no sense to me, I turned
to the civil rights movement to understand what Americans mean by race. That
movement taught me that you either step over the line for people who aren't
like you, or you turn your head and stick with what you know. There really
isn’t much room for in-between when the chips are down. The ground is covered
with chips right now, it seems to me.
Feminists helped me grow up, and that is
another debt I will always try to pay. Writers give me new worlds every day,
and I owe them some attention, too.
I'm uncomfortable talking about what I do. My
parents taught me to be of service and I hope I am. Mostly, when all works
well, we get the community and the world we work for.
One community that I do enjoy is Jane's
Stories Press Foundation, for whom I've edited four volumes of work by women
writers, the last, Jane's Stories IV:
Bridges and Borders, by women in conflict around the world. And I'm working
with a new nonprofit, the Foundation for Romani Education and Equality, which
will provide tutoring and educational opportunities for Romani youth and also
serve as a cultural foundation.
Would you like to find Glenda?
Check out the links to
this talented author:
Web page: www.glendabaileymershon.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gbaileymershon
Blog: http://weaversknot.me
Amazon Author's Page: http://tinyurl.com/mb7ej7a
Rhett
DeVane
Fiction
with a Southern Twist
+96RGB.jpg)
