Walking across the floor: a conversation with Colleen J. McElroy

American Visions, April-May, 1995 by Charlotte Watson Sherman

Words are illusive stuff. They are the clay of writing, the muscle, the orchestra of sounds and palettes of colors. Words hold a wellspring of ambiguity, music and emotion. Each word is like a crystal, faceted to reveal its various shades and tones of meaning. If you look at the crystal through only one angle, the level of nuance is restricted to that facet alone. But turn the crystal slightly and your perspective changes.

--From "The Writer as Artist: Writing in the Realm of the imagination," a speech delivered by Colleen J. McElroy at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference in 1994

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison are two of the bestknown writers in the world. They are unique, but they do not stand alone. With them stand a legion of yet-to-be-recognized African-American writers. Though many are aware that Wilson and novelist Charles Johnson make their homes in Seattle, fewer people know about the presence of another respected writer whose quiet reputation does not cause her literary light to shine any less brilliantly. Colleen J. McElroy's influence extends beyond the walls of academia; she mentors young writers in Seattle, as well as across the country,

She does not define success by dollars in her bank account or by photographs of her face splashed across the pages of magazines. She finds success in a much simpler and less anguishing manner: in becoming a member of a community of writers and remaining true to her literary vision and unique way of using the music of language.

McElroy, whose ideas appear below, is the author of a textbook on language development, as well as 11 books of poetry and prose, including Driving Under the Cardboard Pines and Other Stories (Creative Arts Books Co., 1989), Jesus and Fat Tuesday and Other Stories (Creative Arts Book Co., 1987) and What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1988 (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She co-wrote a play, In the Wild Gardens of the Loup Garou, with Ishmael Reed, and she was the first black female full professor at the University of Washington, where she currently teaches in the English department, alongside Charles Jobnson. Her work has been widely anthologized, and she bas traveled to Southeast Asia, Europe, South America, Africa and Japan.-- C.W.S.

When I first started writing, I was in my mid-30s and had not been educated about the ways in which writers produce work. I didn't yet know that in the same way the painter uses colors on the palette to create images in terms of space and perspective and in the same way the dancer uses the movements of the body as a way of creating images, the writer has to use language to create images.

I had been a dancer and knew that dancing takes practice. You have to be constantly aware of your body and how it fits space. Dancing is so immediate. In order to do that dance, you have to practice the movements. When you get all the movements together, you do that dance. And that dance is done.

I didn't know how writers did that dance. In those days, like many of my students today, I thought that the words just appeared on the page. That was how the dance came. I didn't register that it came to me because I'd had brilliant dance masters who had drilled movement into me and made me consider how I displaced air when I moved. But I didn't know that about writers.

Now I use some of the same principles I learned in dance to teach writing. One of my favorite examples is the dance master who told the new company of young dancers I had joined to walk across the floor. And we walked across the floor. He shook his head; said, "No, I want you to walk across the floor." And so we walked across the floor.

We spent all afternoon walking across the floor, and the man kept saying, "Walk across the floor!" It took us until the next day to understand that he meant our movement had to be a metaphor for walking across the floor. He didn't want us to just walk across the floor. Anybody could walk across the floor. But when a dancer walks across the floor, it's both image and rhythm. An artist interprets the world both literally and metaphorically.

So I use this now when I talk to my writing students: Writing is walking across the floor. It is not something that just comes to you. But I didn't know that at first. I thought that by having a manuscript, I had a body of work. I was still walking across the floor. I'd just get up and walk across the floor, get up and write a poem.

I didn't understand that whole sense of considering what each movement meant, what each image would do to the poem. And at that time, I didn't have to look for subjects. I didn't have to weigh the importance of one subject over the other, because I had so many subjects I wanted to write about.

After writing for a number of years, I began to consider how one subject was more significant, more evocative for me at the time, than another. And to look for the texture of my writing. By texture, I mean the way in which I use the music of language--what distinguishes my particular and peculiar ways of putting words together.