Interview With Shelly Taylor

Bill Wetzel interviews poet Shelly Taylor over at OpEd news. Before the interview, though, he divulges a great deal of biographical information on Taylor. For instance,

Shelly Taylor was born in the small town of Alma, Georgia (also the hometown of author Harry Crews, as she later notes in our interview) where she lived until the age of four, before moving with her family to nearby Douglas, specifically, Bridgetown, an unincorporated farm area outside of the city. It was here where she grew up, a self-described: "country girl, redneck girl" who was heavily influenced by her grandmother, Norma Jean Taylor.

Of her relationship with her "Granny" she says: "I was hers" and "she thought I'd be a famous writer." She describes Granny Taylor as a great storyteller, a "mystical personality", who loved to read and who called her by the nickname: "Black-Eyed Heifer" as a term of endearment. That nickname, of course, is the name of her first collection of poetry. The cover of her book is derived from a picture of her grandmother from 1952 and the dedication inside reads: "For Granny".

Also dominant in her life was the sport of rodeo, something she competed in from the ages of 11 to 23 and culminated when she won a Georgia state championship in barrel racing. For her, rodeo was a family legacy, her mother and other female relatives barrel raced as well, she still misses it and plans to start competing again as soon as possible.

And a little taste from the interview itself:

Um, everything is subconscious & I allow everything, whatever is on my mind, to come in. I wonder what Sherwin thinks of his work being called "promiscuous" because I pretty much think sex & not whatever so & so at the Pen Open Book Award thinks it is. Basically that kind of overreaching is mostly boring to me, honestly speaking. Everything is anything & anybody's going to call it this & that & who really cares. In a book-length collection of course your ass is going to be all over the place--you're going to be talking about wanting some soup on pg 13 & you are going to think about George Clinton round pg 62 & if you don't allow all that is your life to come into the poems then why even bother? The different landscapes came in because I was living in Georgia, Maine, Arizona, and NYC when writing the book--that's nature; people move around a lot I suppose & all of that better come into the work. The voicing of the poems hopefully unites the disjunction of the constant shifting landscape. That was my intention anyway. Now, there is promiscuity in Heifer however, if we are talking about the word in its denotative meaning which I can't seem to divorce myself from--but all that's human nature. Every book must have a little promiscuity.

My granny, Norma Jean, always told me I would be a writer--I mean from a very, very young age, I was going to write books. I'm pretty sure that's how I got into this whole unpractical mess that's ultimately fitting. When she was diagnosed with ALS, it was "hurry up you got to write me that book before I'm dead.' Such fatalistic tact granny I was a teenager & when she passed I was twenty & frantic cause now I had to write this book for her & had never even taken a creative writing class in my life, though when people asked what I was going to be I always said a writer. Funny. I didn't pursue writing till I was twenty-one & definitely because of her. I had to write her that book & I had to focus on it with everything I had & I had to get it done (I said by thirty years old I'd do it) & do it right. For her. It is her book. The whole thing, years, was manic feeling. To answer the last bit of your question, yes my family influences the writing & all I do. I definitely have relied/do rely on my mama for emotional support in the writing process as she's got a kind of wisdom about her most people don't know.

Read the interview in its entirety here.