Interview with Mitchell Douglas
by Alan Yegerlehner, English Major
Please join us for the Spring 2022 English Department Faculty Reading featuring Mitchell Douglas and Kyle Minor on Wednesday, March 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Taylor Hall 104. Or join us online at https://iu.zoom.us/j/81035093156?pwd=bjY4bnh2Y2VvNklhVlpwYXNIMFg5QT09. This event is a part of English Week 2022 at IUPUI. All are welcome.
Mitchell Douglas was born in Louisville and earned his MFA from IU Bloomington. He moved to Indianapolis in 2006 and enjoys Indy’s artistic and cultural attractions such as the IMA (Newfields), Children’s Museum, Mass Ave, and Broad Ripple. Mitchell Douglas was also one of only 35 recipients of the 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship grants. He took the time to answer a few questions for us before the upcoming English Department Faculty Reading.
Did you have a book or movie as a child that you obsessed over?
Star Wars (episodes IV, V, and VI). Seeing the movies and standing in line for tickets to sold-out shows was major bonding time for my dad and I.
What’s your creative process like? Music or silence, middle of the day or dead of night, handwritten or typed, coffee or tea?
I write a lot when I should be sleeping. A lot of poems start on my phone, in the middle of grocery aisles—in the middle of life.
What’s a recent book or film that you’ve loved?
Victoria Chang’s Obit is amazing. It’s the book of poems I can’t stop recommending. She pushes metaphor to its limits in surprising ways.
What have you been working on lately? What’s been inspiring you?
I am in the middle of three writing projects that I can’t wait to share (and that I won’t jinx by talking about). I am constantly inspired by music and visual art and visit museums often.
Ten words or fewer: best advice for any writer starting out?
Read often, write often, revise. Repeat.
Professor Mitchell Douglas is an Associate Professor of English at IUPUI, a Cave Canem graduate, and a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. His poetry has been published in Callaloo, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books), Crab Orchard Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. He is the author of award-winning works such as dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. He is a self-professed comic book geek and tattoo enthusiast and enjoys composing musical beats.
Interview with Kyle Minor
by Alan Yegerlehner, English Major
Please join us for the Spring 2022 English Department Faculty Reading featuring Mitchell Douglas and Kyle Minor on Wednesday, March 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Taylor Hall 104. Or join us online at https://iu.zoom.us/j/81035093156?pwd=bjY4bnh2Y2VvNklhVlpwYXNIMFg5QT09. This event is a part of English Week 2022 at IUPUI. All are welcome.
Kyle Minor earned his MFA from Ohio State University and is an avid photographer in his free time. He is a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Religious and American Culture at IUPUI, and is currently working on The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, his most recent novel that is set in Florida and Haiti. He took the time to answer a few questions for us before the upcoming English Department Faculty Reading.
Did you have a book or movie as a child that you obsessed over?
The Chronicles of Narnia. And Disney’s Robin Hood. But, more importantly, as an adult: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One’s education is incomplete without Faulkner and Shakespeare, and also: Toni Morrison, Beowulf, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat, Chinua Achebe, Yiyun Li . . . (The list is long.) Literature is that which carries the complications and contradictions of adult life, including those which are not praiseworthy, and is therefore not disposable, an idea which is currently out of fashion but which prevails over time.
What’s your creative process like? Music or silence, middle of the day or dead of night, handwritten or typed, coffee or tea?
Dread, procrastination, fear, and pain. Writing, for me, is not usually a lot of fun, except when I’m working in collaboration with someone else, in which case it can often be great fun.
What’s a recent book or film that you’ve loved?
Wadjda, by Haifaa al-Mansour (watch her film in conversation with Vittorio di Sica’s neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thieves.) And Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which tells a story so conveniently mythic that it would not be believable if it were a work of fiction.
What have you been working on lately? What’s been inspiring you?
I’ve been working on a screenplay about American political life in the early ’80’s, and a book of essays about people who have disappeared, or have been disappeared, from public life. I don’t believe in inspiration. I believe in emotional sobriety and hard work.
Ten words or fewer: best advice for any writer starting out?
Cultivate a non-writing expertise, to nourish your writing, pay your bills, and buy yourself some freedom.
Professor Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award. His work appears in magazines and websites including Esquire, The Atlantic, Salon, Iowa Review, and the New York Times Book Review, and three volumes of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Series. He is an Associate Professor of English, Director of the GMCHL Documentary Film Project, and Director of the Creative Writing program at IUPUI.
