Core Memories: MARY-ALICE DANIEL
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Mary-Alice Daniel.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, was released as the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize in March 2023. Four months earlier, Ecco/HarperCollins published her first book of prose, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. An alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, she served as the inaugural Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. A Cave Canem Fellow, she holds the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. You can find her on Instagram at @drmaryalicedaniel, on Twitter at @MaryAlicePoetry, on Goodreads, and at www.maryalicedaniel.com.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
In October, I had an uncanny experience in grief as I realized the single entity that could possibly help me process the passing of Louise Glück was Louise Glück. My first poetry teacher as a floundering freshman at 17, she gave me this advice: “Write only what only you can write.” One of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been granted, a terse sentence. An imperative I have since followed. When I think about singular ways I process language, my sole ‘superpower’ is awkwardness, the opposite of agility. The same awkwardness inhabiting every immigrant, tripping off tips of the tongue. Perhaps my impulse to imprint words on paper stems from the fact that words in my mouth feel like stones in my slipper. I came to understand that if I learnt to wield their weight, I might mold something new out of my multinational, multilingual mode. I make sense of—to manipulate—my second language. Family lore; faith healing; fake news—equally weighted, worthy sources within my work. I scavenge logics and vernaculars from unlike objects and texts through time. Language: carnal article, articulate animal. The incarnate emulsion from which crawls the most curious, luxurious creations.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
I have never tried to write “good” poetry, and it shows. I do not worry about what makes a poem good; I wonder about what makes it Mine. Instead, I tend to take risks. It’s the mood and humor in odder registers of speech that I seek to recast. My first language, Hausa, is one lingua franca of West Africa: sand-faring Hausa herdsmen dominated dialects as they did desert. I obsessively consult the Oxford English Dictionary to find a fitting phrase and comprehend its contours. My second language is my favorite. Watch what English will do—slip. I think of etymology as the study of secrets in sonics. The dissection of English expression. I fix steady feet upon unstable soundscapes. While Mass for Shut-Ins was a convocation of poetries of night, my second book starts letting in light. Lucipetal. Lucid. Lux. Lumen. Human. Omen.
Are there any new projects you’re working on?
In two new books of poetry and prose, I turn to face the phenomenon of my thorny family tree. Line by line, I lay bare the religious, racial, and social subtleties in dynasties as dimensional as me. My second volume of verse is underway, excessive, instinctively titled: Random Acts of Kindness. In my progressing nonfiction manuscript, A Recently Broken Curse Is Fragile, writing is a web. I begin mapping a global mythos of Nigeria, accounting its kinetic kin and communities. I pursue twin paths—the ways ‘Nigeria’ moves around the world; and the manner I move as a Nigerian. My book is an expedition into the prismatic lands and legendry infusing Nigerian ethnicity. I chronicle subcultures spun from a motherland of moving parts. I follow its exiles, expats, émigrés—owing so much to people inside the margins of its map, I encompass those of us who fell off it.