Interview with memoirist Colin Dayan

My special guest today is Colin Dayan to chat with me about her memoir, Animal Quintet: A Southern Memoir.

Bio:
Born in Atlanta but escaping North at 16, Colin Dayan returned to the South. In 2004, she accepted a chair as Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.  She published her first book, a translation of and introduction to René Depestre’s A Rainbow for the Christian West, while still a student.  Since then her interests have ranged over literature, law, politics, and prose fiction. Her publications include Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction; Haiti, History, and the Gods; The Story of Cruel and Unusual; The Law is a White Dog; With Dogs at the Edge of Life; and, most recently, two memoirs:  In the Belly of Her Ghost and Animal Quintet. Her writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times. Elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, she has also held a Guggenheim fellowship in law, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Davis Center for Historical Study and the Program in Law and Public Affairs, both at Princeton.

What do you enjoy most about writing short stories?
Although some readers think of my memoirs as short stories, they are prose essays that merge with personal remembrance.

Can you give us a little insight into a few of your essays – perhaps some of your favorites?
“The Blue Room in Florence,” published over twenty years ago by Sandy McClatchy in the Yale Review, is a story and chronicle of my visits to the Death House and executions in the Arizona State Prison in Florence, Arizona.  Later, I turned to writing about my dogs in With Dogs at the Edge of Life.  But my article in the Southwest Review called “The Dogs” is my favorite piece, along with “Visceral Identities,” which I’ve given/performed in a few places, as well as published in Manifold Press.

What genre are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
I’m most inspired to write either memoir or political essays.

What exciting story are you working on next?
Working on a novel now, called Crickets at Midnight, about the South in the 1960s.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Must begin early in the morning, around 7 a.m. or the writing won’t happen at all in the way I want.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
As a child I wanted to be a dancer.

Thanks for being here today, Colin.