try to be as unprepared for these interviews as possible so the first question I asked Donelle was the first one that came to mind: “Have you ever been interviewed before?”  She thought for a moment and said she had, during her days as a bluegrass performer.  Well, that was all she and I needed. 

I listened as she told me about how much music meant to her, and how sheused to play the piano, the guitar, and that sweet instrument, the mandolin, and how she got from being a music education major in college to an English Prof. She loves bluegrass, she said, especially a tune called “Billy and the Low Grounds.”  And when she mentioned it didn’t have any words we talked about writing lyrics, and then writing poems.

I told Donelle that I admired her poems, the ones I’d read on the Internet, and she talked for a while about how it’s hard to find time to do any poetry writing when you’ve just come to a new place.  There are always so many things to see to and get settled before you can find the time to write. We talked some more about her poetry and how she used to read her poems as part of a performance art group, and then a student came to her office door and I knew it was time for me to leave.  

As I was going, Donelle gave me a book of her poems.  I didn’t read them right away, but I read them that night, and all I can say is I hope she finds time to do some more. You can find one of her poems online at http://spokenword.to/oasis/ruwe_d.html.

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Chris Wixson

hen I came into Chris’s office, the floor was awash with boxes of books that he was reviewing for the Composition Committee, but they didn’t stand in the way of our visit.  We talked at first about his recent activities at the MMLA conference in Minneapolis.  He did some directing up there and presented a paper on Sarah Kane and Patrick Marber, two contemporary British playwrights.  I wasn’t familiar with either so I asked Chris about them.  He told me about Kane’s Blasted, a play filled with rape, violence, cannibalism, sodomy, and various acts of mayhem and pain.
 
Teaching contemporary American literature this semester with its own mayhem and pain, I asked him how his students take to texts that are so hard to take, so hard to look at.  He talked about how he prepares students beforehand, tells them how one of the functions of art is to sensitize us to terrible things in ways the media generally doesn’t.  I found myself nodding and agreeing.  Yes, that’s what art should do.

I figured that people would think that he and I were too serious, so I asked him if he likes Broadway musical comedies (he doesn’t much) and this led to a discussion of music in general, what he likes to listen to (Early Jazz, Billie Holliday, Big Band), and the trombone he used to play and why he stopped playing.  The last makes a good story.

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Marty Scott

 always like to know where people come from so I asked Marty how he got here to Charleston.  I knew about Houston and Iowa City but I wanted to hear about the places before that.  And he told me about starting out in Cheney, Pennsylvania, and the orchard country of south Jersey, and how he never visited New York as a child and only sometimes visited Philadelphia.  His people were never much for visiting big cities but he went for his BA to Wheaton College and afterwards lived and worked in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.  I was a Chicago boy myself, and asked him about the city.  He rolled off street names like Euclid, Harlem, and Lake, and it was an honest pleasure to hear that simple poetry of place. 

And that’s when I looked to the wall behind Marty and saw posters of Johnny Cash, Blind Willie Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Son House.  We talked about the songs Marty likes and the songs he’s written.  I looked around hoping to see one of his guitars leaning against a wall but there wasn’t one, so I didn’t ask him to play but I asked him if he could give me a song he wrote.  He leaned back, thought for a minute, and said, “Well, there’s ‘Hard Redemption.’”  There’s a fine title, I thought. 

I wished I had asked him to sing the song.

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Thanks to http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity for Jack Webb photo.