By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
At the end of the acknowledgements in her novel “Memphis,” author Tara Stringfellow lists the restaurants where she worked on the book. There are spots in Cuba, Italy, Spain, several U.S. cities before winding up where her heart lies, Memphis — The Cozy Corner, Local on the Square, and Porch and Parlor. Stringfellow has deep roots in the city, and maintains a home there.
For now though she’s living in Bowling Green where she’s serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry. As she noted in an Instagram post, the first Distinguished Visiting Professor was James Baldwin.
As writers they both create vivid portraits of life in America as viewed through the lens of being Black. For Stringfellow, that lens was shaped in Memphis.
Stringfellow, though, spent her first seven years in Okinawa where her father, a Marine was stationed.
“I wouldn’t be who I am without the Marines Corps. The Marine Corps shaped and molded my entire life and still does. My father right now is at the Pentagon working to secure this country’s freedom.”
The Marines provided her with “a beautiful and gorgeous childhood everywhere I lived.”
Of the novel, she said: “All of it is made up. All of it is my creation, but based on my mom’s family history in Memphis and how we got there. My childhood growing up in Memphis is critical.”
The novel tells the story of three generations of the North Family, spanning from the mid-20th century to the dawn of the 21st. It deals with both joys and hard truths.
Stringfellow crafted the novel as a rebuttal to the Trump slogan “Make American Great Again.” She knew the night the results of the 2016 election came in that she had to write a rebuttal.
“‘Memphis’ is my direct response to MAGA. I knew Black women, especially black southern women, had always made this country great.”
Stringfellow sees Trump’s return to office as a continuation of the nation’s legacy of racism. “White people in this country do not surprise me. I can’t even count how many ancestors of mine have been strung up from a tree and people would picnic underneath and take photos. So nothing will surprise me.”
The book is political satire that reflects the country’s neglect of its Black citizens. Domestic and gang violence emerges from untreated trauma and neglect, services withheld from children and veterans.
Stringfellow, however, did not start out as a fiction writer.
“I was born a poet,” she said.
When she was 3, her father, instead of reading a usual fairy tales, read his children Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
“I fell in love,” she said.
He taught her to read and write, giving her a leg up on her schooling. She published her first poem at 10, and enrolled in Northwestern University when she was 17. She studied to be a lawyer.
“I knew I would go into law at a very young age,” she said. “I’m first attorney in my family,” Stringfellow said. “That’s a point of pride. No one in my family had yet done that because of slavery and Jim Crow laws in the South. My mother and father were the first in my family to attend college, not for the lack of trying, and I was the first in my family to attend graduate school.”
She no longer practices law. She makes more money as a writer of the best selling “Memphis” and her first book of poetry “Magic Enuff” with another novel in the works.
“Going to law school teaches you to write,” she said. “It teaches you to write well. Give me 15 minutes and I can write you an Elizabethan sonnet in perfect iambic pentameter, or I can write you a perfect memorandum of law.”
The novel “Memphis” has its roots in the poem, “Origins,” included in “Magic Enuff.”
Reginald Gibbons, one of her writing professors at Northwestern where she earned her Master’s of Fine Arts in Writing, read the poem and told her “this should be a novel.”
“That was the birth of ‘Memphis,’” Stringfellow said.
The novel became part of her thesis. She was the first writer to earn an MFA in both Poetry and Fiction from Northwestern.
Stringfellow finished the book in Spain where she had a teaching job and lived among the Roma.
After the election she lived in Italy, where she now spends summers. She’s also spent time in Cuba. But she always comes back to Memphis.
During COVID her grandmother had to sell her home after Stringfellow’s uncle died. Her grandmother, now 96, could no longer live there alone. Still that Douglas neighborhood is home, Stringfellow said. “Memphis” is a portrait of that home, the neighborhood, and the people who inhabit it.
Joan, one of the youngest characters, is a visual artist. Stringfellow said she wanted the character to be able to wander the neighborhood and connect with the residents through her art.
Her family, she said is “incredibly proud” of the book. That includes her parents, siblings cousins.
“Again, who knows how many ancestors before me wanted to be a writer, a poet. So their love and pride comes from 400 years of being told in this country that we should not have access to literature.”
At BGSU she is nurturing a new generation of writers.
“I grade them on how hungry they are, how passionate they are, how willing they are to edit and revise their work and then put themselves out there,” she said. “I require all my students to submit their poetry to literary journals and publishing houses.”
With their brevity, poetry allows the writer to pen “a critical response to something in the culture in a few weeks. … I think poems should be out there in the world. They should be published and read by a larger audiences. That is the point — to reflect the times we find ourselves in.”
