- [Announcer] A production of South Carolina ETV.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues ) - Hello from Sumter.

I'm Patti Just.

Our guest on this program is poet Nikky Finney, who teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

A native of Conway, South Carolina she's the author of "On Wings of Gauze," a collection of poems published by William Morrow.

In addition, she's published numerous poems, short stories, and essays in a variety of journals and magazines.

Ms.

Finney, welcome to our program and thanks for your time.

- Oh, thanks for inviting me.

- Your earliest writing came in the form of diaries, I think you started about age 10.

- Yeah, 10, mm-hmm.

My parents were civil rights believers and workers.

And when I saw them participating in their way, I thought that I would participate in the way that I could participate.

And loving writing and words for a long time, I decided to keep a journal about what I saw them going through and what I saw my community folk going through, and so that was my way of putting my hand in the pot as well.

- Do you think that, at that age where you were especially creative, or were you just really jotting down the ideas?

- I don't think I was especially creative.

I think I was finding my way to mix my voice in.

I was very quiet and very shy as a child, and so it was my way of expressing myself.

And I think children do that through a variety of ways, and picking up a pencil happened to be my own way.

I can remember my parents pushing me to do things like reading and writing, going to the store.

We could just go to the store to buy a set of pencils, and that was very special to me.

So I think they saw that I had a special affinity for writing at a very early age.

- Your mother says that rather than giving you the keys to the car, they gave you books.

Is that true?

- Very true.

Very true.

My brothers were given the keys to the car, and I think that is a Southern thing where girls are raised differently from boys.

Maybe not just Southern.

Maybe that's all over the country, but especially in the South because that's where I grew up.

My brothers had a lot more freedom than I did as a little girl growing up here in Sumter.

So I was always in... Always had a book and always... If I wanted to do something, given a book or given something like that to do, which I didn't like then, but I'm very grateful that they did that now.

- What were the kinds of things that you read?

- Well, initially, I read such books like "The Hardy Boys" or "Nancy Drew Mysteries," or I think Judy Pulaski books about the South and young folks' books.

As I grew older, I began to question why I never saw African American characters or African American authors on the shelves of the library, like the Carnegie and other places.

And that was a huge impetus in wanting to write, and it's very dear to me now, and been coming back home and doing a show like this so that brown-faced children in the community know that there are brown-faced writers out there writing books and doing characters in their image.

That's very important to me.

- What was missing?

Was it the passion?

Was it the experience of African Americans?

- Yes, all of that.

The culturalisms that are, I think very particular.

All of that.

I read stories and participated in what was happening, but couldn't relate.

There wasn't a connection that I felt.

I used my eyes to read, and I closed the book, and it was over.

When I discovered books by African American authors, my heart was beating fast or I had goose pimples, and so I was involved.

I was connected in a way, and I realized there was a very big difference in the two.

- So was that early experience enough to let you know that that's what you would do as a career?

- Absolutely.

I can remember, in school when we'd have these career tests where they would say, "Well, choose one, two, three things.

You could put nurse in one or you could put a physician in another."

I put writer at the top and didn't fill in the other two because I was so clear in my mind that this was what I would do, that this was why I was here.

And it never changed throughout my whole primary education here in Sumter.

And even when I went away to college, I was clear in my head that this is what I wanted to do.

- When you looked to colleges, you chose Talladega?

- Had never heard of it.

And Mrs.

Anna McDonald, who was a guidance counselor at the Haynsworth Street Campus, I'll never forget the day I sat in her office and was thoroughly confused about where to go to school.

I had looked at Hampton, and Fisk, and Howard, other historically black schools, and something about those didn't fit with her about me.

And she said, "I have a place that I think you'll like.

I think that you'll fit in there."

She knew my spirit and suggested Talladega, and I had never heard of it, wrote off for some information, loved the brochure.

My dad and I drove down one Sunday, and I said, "This is it."

This was the place.

They had huge oak trees that I knew I could sit under and do some writing.

It was a very quiet campus, a very small school of about a thousand students, very personal.

John McCray, who is also a native of South Carolina, was the admissions director.

So he took me under his arm and I blossomed there.

And Talladega is also one of the reasons that I have continued to write to this day.

- Then you went on to school in Atlanta?

- Mm-hmm.

I went on to school in Atlanta to study a master's degree in African American Studies and worked under the tutelage of Richard Long, who is a noted cultural historian, and David Dorsey and others.

- Well, how long was it after that till the first book came along?

- It was three or four years after that.

The book came out when I was 26, 27.

I was a member of a writing workshop in Atlanta, of which the well-known and noted writer, Toni Cade Bambara, was the lead person.

She convened this workshop.

And I joined as someone who had just moved to town.

And this was my first opportunity really to unlock the trunk where all my work was, and share it.

And that was scary, but it was something that I knew I had to do if I was gonna be serious about this craft of writing.

So I did that and got so much encouragement from her and from the other members of the group to send it out to New York and other places, and that's what I did.

And at the same time, I had met Nikki Giovanni at Talladega, and she too had said, "This is good stuff.

You have a future in this, send it out, send me a copy, and I'm gonna pass it around."

And the combination of all that, William Morrow had me under contract within a year, and it was totally unexpected.

There's no way to tell you how that affected my belief in myself and how I knew that this is what I was gonna do.

- How do you know if one of your poems is good?

- Well, good is a relative term.

I like to say that it works.

My intention at the beginning is, are those goals met?

But good is a word that I really don't use.

I like to hear people's reaction in the audience when I'm reading.

I was singing my reading here the other night that it was mighty quiet.

I couldn't hear if you were enjoying it or hated it.

I liked to hear the sounds, and then they began making sounds like yes or amen, I heard a few times.

And that's some feedback that writers like to get sometimes.

So if I've covered the bases in what I'm trying to say and if someone comes up to me, basically it's a reaction from other folks too that I know that my message has gotten across.

- Well, it certainly had to be great feedback for you, getting that call from William Morrow saying that they would publish the book.

What about the title on "Wings of Gauze?"

What was the inspiration for it?

- On "Wings Made of Gauze"?

- Mm-hmm.

There's a title poem at the back of the book that speaks of a woman.

It's part fantasy as also part reality.

The poem is part fairytale and part reality.

And I can't tell you where titles come from or where even the words from poems come from.

I sometimes feel like a lightning rod standing out in the middle of a field and you just get struck sometimes.

And that's usually how I know a poem is coming.

There's no other sign that really lets me know that our work is getting ready to be born.

- Would you like to read that one?

- Sure.

"She lived not in a shoe, but on wings made of gauze.

And when she left on midnight rides, she wrapped herself in moonbeams to help light the way.

Her life before had been tied to clothes lines, to shoestrings of all sizes of different hues.

And after her life, no one cried 'cause no one knew how deeply her hands ached.

And now when she's remembered, it's for the warm beer she guzzled from tattered war canteens, and talk is still how carelessly but gracefully she flings them from the sky.

In the evenings, if the light is right, quickly may you lift your eyes and see her riding by silhouetted by the moon.

She rides boldly with no hands, as if life had no more boundaries, as if living held no more cautions.

And in the mornings, if you walk quickly before the others arrive, you may find one of her tattered canteens scattered about the underbrush.

And if you lift it gently to your lips, you'll find she didn't drink it all.

She never does.

She's left some for you, who've always been afraid of heights and never had the courage to fly."

That poem came from my love of African American history, and one of the mighty role players in African American history was Harriet Tubman.

And I was always impressed that as many opportunities as she had to get away on the Underground Railroad and get to Canada and not look back on a hard, horrible life, she came back into the country and into the South many times and grabbed somebody else's hand to say, "Come on, it's time for you to go now."

So she put her own life in jeopardy just for the sake of getting other people out of the horrible institution of slavery.

- As you read that, are you taken back to the time when you wrote the poem?

- Not at that moment, but sometimes when I look back through old work, I do remember either struggling with a line or struggling with a concept for a long time.

And when I first started writing, I never kept the different revisions because poetry and all creative writing, the revision process is a very important process.

But now I keep the first form, and the second, and the 10th, and the 15th.

So I like to see the creation of the work itself and the crafting of it.

In my classes now, I show my students because sometimes they think that they can spurt out 12 lines and the poem is done.

And I say, "No, absolutely not.

This is a crafting process."

And I'll show them the crafting process that I do as a writer, and it makes a difference when they can say, "Oh, I see where this poem came from and where it ended up."

- So you think the rewrites are very important?

- Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

That's where the poem is not born, but where it's made.

- I like the dedication of the book.

You're thanking the people who helped you with it, and you go back to all the people who pointed to your hands.

- Yes, yes, it was... And if I think about it, there's a long line.

They're are a long line of people who always said, "Nurture this, take care of your gift."

And that's how I've always treated it, as something that was given to me that I was put here to do basically.

And the line stretches back very far to primary years here in Sumter and started here.

- Let's hear something else from the book, if you will.

You seem to write too a lot about women.

- I think that one of the reasons I write is to give voice to folks who traditionally and historically have not had a voice or the voice that they've had has not been particularly adhered to or listened to.

So women play a predominant role in my work, and the women in my family have had a profound impact on upon me.

So I like to think that I'm giving them voice.

This is a poem about my family basically, and it's called "Groceries," and the image of whenever my father and mother came in from the grocery store, you knew to get up and go out and get the groceries out of the car.

It was just a known thing.

Mama said, "Be assertive, girl, and do things before people tell you."

And I always did, and she began to smile at me, and I began to smile back at me and bask in the sight and smell of her easiness.

'Cause through the years, mama grown hard and away from youth and away from me, but I reached for her, and she reached back, and forgot about being young, and eased into her fourth decade.

And I forgot rebelling and remembered the warmth of unexpected kisses, and began helping her carry grocery bags, brothers carry identities, and my father carry us all.

- Very nice.

Your parents are very strong and you're very strong.

Are there other writers in your family?

- Yes, my... And somebody that I really don't speak of a lot, so this is a good opportunity to bring her name, kind of give it air.

My Aunt Nanny in Virginia, Cumberland, who is one of the oldest living relatives in our family on my father's side, is an incredible writer and particularly began her writing life in journalism.

And I had a great uncle in the same part of the country in the 1800s who owned a newspaper.

And so the realm of journal writing was very predominant in my family for many generations.

I don't know of any other creative writers, and I think this is a new turn for us as a family.

- What about your travels?

You've traveled far and wide with your work all around the United States, and then to Kenya, and to the Ivory Coast.

Can you talk about that a little bit and how that shaped your work some?

- A week before the book was to come out, I attended the UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Kenya.

And many friends thought that that was an incredible time also to introduce the book to other parts of the world.

So there were many writers at that conference, and three or four of us got together and had a reading in what they call the Peace Tent in Kenya.

And it must have been attended by 500 women from around the world, many of them African women.

And we made some connections, and that was a very powerful... In fact, on the way to Kenya, we stopped in New York to catch the plane and William Morrow Federal Express the books to me there and I got them at the airport, so that was very... I was nervously awaiting 'cause I hadn't seen the book yet.

So on the way across the world, I got to open the book for the first time and see it, and so that was good.

- What about the decision to start teaching then?

Was that a natural for you?

- No, absolutely not.

I have resisted being in academia because I think sometimes academia eats up artists and eats up their creativity.

And so I've always protected... I've never taken a creative writing course.

I had wonderful English teachers here in Sumter that taught me all of the excellent ways to put words together in a sentence.

I know all the rules and regulations, and at some point they say, "When you do know those, then you can break the rules and make your own way of talking."

So I've never taken a creative writing class.

I never wanted to because I've seen so many writers go through that process and come out different.

So in protecting that, I also didn't wanna get in academia and ruin any other students' opportunities.

But there's a way of teaching creative writing that I think you nurture, and you pull out, and bring out things, and you don't have to squash creativity or a student's individual voice.

So I resisted for many years, and the thing that pulled me in was the opportunity it gave me to write.

Teaching two classes a week gives me five other days sometimes to do my own work.

And I've been working since I was 14 in a number of jobs.

And they all were like 10 hours a day.

And once you do that, you get home, you're tired.

You don't really feel like working on a novel or working on a volume of short stories.

So this gave me the opportunity to do some work, make a living, but also focus seven or eight hours a day on my work itself.

And as a result of that, a lot of work has come out.

And what I did in two years, my first two years at the University of Kentucky I had been trying to do for seven in California, working at a typical kind of nine to five job.

- Well, in a way, did the students keep you fresh by constantly hearing new ideas?

- Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

That's a part of it.

And I tell them in the first days of class that, yes, I'm standing as instructor, but I'm also a student in this class.

And the arena of that classroom is open for discussion, and open for dispute of something I say and the exchange of ideas.

And I hope that I always remain a student because it does allow you to be a sponge and to absorb ideas from all around.

- You share your life sort of between Kentucky and California.

You also live in Oakland, California.

- Right.

Actually, two weeks ago I left Oakland with the moving van and moved to Kentucky after they had been trying to get me to do that for three years.

I wasn't sure that I was ready to make that huge commitment of moving across country, but I did.

Because before that, I was spending my academic year in Kentucky and living in the summer in California, but that's hard.

So I've moved.

I've left my apartment in California, and now I'm full-time in Kentucky, winter and summer.

And that will give me more opportunity to get back here to Sumter and be with family and friends more often than twice a year.

- We've got a couple new works in the works, the "Rice" collection of poetry.

Tell us about that.

- For the past couple of years, I've been collecting new poems.

And at the same time, actually, "Rice" began when I started working on the novel.

And this collection of poems is very different from the first collection.

Much longer works.

I think they take more risk.

I think they go deeper into my own psyche as well as what I see around me.

And there's been seven or eight years in between.

So there's been a long time.

I'm older I've experienced more.

The poems are very different.

Right now it's about 110 pages and 20 pages of verse.

- Could we hear something?

- Sure.

This is called "Irons at Her Feet."

And it's about winters in Newberry, South Carolina that my mother experienced.

"Irons at her feet."

From the coals of her bedroom fired place onto the tip of my grandmother's December winter stick, for fifteen years hot irons traveled into waiting flannel wraps and were shuttled up under covers and in between quilts where three babies lay shivering in country quarter nighttime air.

Hot irons wrapped and pushed up close to frosting toes.

Irons instead of lip kisses is what she remembers.

Irons instead of caramel-colored fingers that should have swaddled shoulders like it swaddled hose and quilting needles and spongy cow tits.

Every time I am back home, I tip into her room, tip again into her cheek.

And in her half sleep, my mother reads her winters aloud to me.

Her persimmon whispers are deliriously sweet to this only daughter's ear.

"When you are home," she says, "the irons come back.

Every night I know the warm is coming."

- Very nice.

Do you have one more?

- I use history a lot in my work.

It's very important to me to bring history back alive.

And I was reading the newspaper in Lexington about... The caption said "July 17, '99, Judge Samuel McDowell in Lexington, Kentucky set free a slave named Mary, who sued her owner, claiming she was entitled to her freedom.

McDowell's order contained verbatim a letter from Mary's owner relinquishing ownership of the slave, saying she wasn't worth the cost of contesting the suit."

So this poem is entitled "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" I wonder who she thought she was, wonder how it wasn't raped away, a long winding memory spoken just as fresh as a constitutional amendment.

Any slave who made a nuisance of himself to the local authorities later made a figure of himself to the Congress.

Nuisance Mary, Contrary Mary, ranking that busy man like that, I thought only queens got entitled, thought only royalty could approximate then declare their net worth on the spot.

Wonder who she thought she was, skin to eye talking to him like that.

Wonder what she knew she was guaranteed.

Wonder how she figured up the total sum of her parts and didn't bother with the division.

Wonder, wonder, wonderful.

- Is that Mary's spirit and some of Nikky's as well?

- I think so.

I liked that story.

I liked the fact that someone would do that, a black woman would do that in the 1700s.

And I think that destroys some of the stereotypes that abound about Africans being submissive and slavery taking the spirit and fight out of my folks.

So I like that story very much.

- Now, the new novel, "While Others Played and Chased the Sun."

- Based in... The story is fiction.

It's based in South Carolina along the... I'm very partial to the Sea Islands and to the coast of the state, my home state.

I was born there and I have an affinity for the ocean and for live oak trees and moss.

And so that's the setting for the story of a black family back in the 1950s.

And some intergenerational secrets that are kept from some children who find out some certain things about themselves throughout the story.

And folks ask, is it autobiographical?

And I don't think it is, but I'm sure there's a lot of myself in it.

- Now, it's a lot different writing, I'm sure, than the poetry.

- A novel is the most jealous thing that you can ever work on.

It doesn't want you to go to the movies or teach a class or have a life at all.

Poetry, I can write on the train or the bus or walking, jotting it down on a piece of paper towel or something.

But a novel requires you sitting and I think it will test you to see whether you're very serious about attempting this form and this style of writing.

Actually, I worked on a novel in my head for about five years, the story itself, taking luminous notes and boxes and boxes of notes on characters, but it only took a year to get 500 pages of work done out of me.

And so that's when I was convinced that you must have the time to do the work.

It's not enough just to do it an hour or two hours a day.

It has to be like you're going to work every day.

- Now you're just waiting with your fingers crossed.

- Yes, we are... Part of going back to Kentucky, which has been so supportive of my work, is to, at the same time, locate an agent in a publishing company.

We've been sending it out and getting some good responses.

So, hopefully, in the next several months, we'll have some news and can come back to Sumter and do a nice book party.

And I can thank folks who have been so supportive in the proper way.

- What is your goal, Nikky?

What would you like to see happen with your career?

- I just wanna keep writing.

I wanna keep publishing.

I wanna come back to South Carolina and do some things.

I haven't been able to do that yet.

And I'd like to work with some organizations or some folks here.

And I really am committed to coming back and being a part of my home state.

And so that was one reason to move to Kentucky, to be in a closer proximity to South Carolina.

And basically, I hope the stories keep coming through me and that I'm healthy and honest enough to keep putting them out in the way that I have.

- Is all the support that you've had been very helpful to you so far?

- Oh, absolutely.

No one does anything in this life alone and the shoulders that I have stood on and the hands that have held me up I never forget.

It's very important to me to be able to cite the folks and give people hugs and say, "This is the reason that I've been able to continue."

- All right, well, Nikky Finney, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you.

- From Sumter.

I'm Patti Just.

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