This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Tara M. Stringfellow, whose poetry collection, Magic Enuff, is out today from Dial Press. In these intimate lyrics, Stringfellow charts a familial, emotional, and intellectual lineage through the Black South. In this landscape of hellfire and catfish, wild lavender and “velvet gloves,” men “fail you more than the Lord” but women provide “magic enuff” to keep the speakers of these poems moving through challenging times. Absent fathers, abusive boyfriends, and racist violence bear down on the voices of these poems, sparking grief and sorrow processed in sharp lyrics. Yet the brightness of the world—its tender relationships, nature, and works of art—provide solace. Bleak moments give way to images of triumph, such as a dance amid an ex’s boxes in “The Day of My Divorce” and a “climb” up a high shelf to find the “last bottle of bourbon” after receiving bittersweet news in “A Sonnet.” Poet Warsan Shire praises Magic Enuff: “A gorgeous collection exploring the bond and beauty of Black womanhood.” The author of Memphis (Dial Press, 2022), which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Tara M. Stringfellow has published poems in Apogee, Minerva Rising, Women’s Arts Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s MFA program in both poetry and prose and lives in Memphis.
Tara M. Stringfellow, author of Magic Enuff. (Credit: Josh Looney Photography)
1. How long did it take you to write Magic Enuff?
Fifteen years. Some of the poems in the collection, like “I Couldn’t Find This in the Bible” or “That One Time My College Boyfriend Hit Me,” have taken me many, many years to craft, to edit, to make into the poems they are now. I wrote most of these poems while studying for my MFA at Northwestern University—I graduated in 2017—and a good chunk was written in the past year. So this collection is my life’s work.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I got the book deal, I was also diagnosed with both lupus and Sjogren’s disease. These autoimmune diseases affect my writing ability—with brain fog, trouble recalling memories, crippling arthritis in my hands. Using the tools of any poet became so challenging for me. Luckily my publisher, Dial Press, has been instrumental in my recovery. They pushed back deadlines. They allowed me to heal and to edit at my own pace. I have a great team at Dial and also a great team of doctors who listen to me. And I think that is a true blessing.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Every summer I sojourn in Italy and write my books. I finished Memphis in Florence in 2019. I wrote many of these poems while sitting on the beach in Scilla, Italy. When I’m not in Italy, I’m in Memphis, where I wake up early most mornings to walk my hound, Huckleberry, then sit with a cappuccino and push out a poem. When I’m on deadline, I’ll write over the weekend. But I always take Sundays off—even the good Lord took a day off—and that helps me to reset and recharge. But I’m a morning writer. Hand me a cappuccino and a cigarette, and I’ll write you anything.
4. What are you reading right now?
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. This is my first time reading Patchett, and I feel rather foolish for allowing this much time in my life to have passed before it was filled with her prose. Patchett is a genius. There’s no other way to phrase it. Her prose—so unflinching, so stark, so necessary—has become a balm for this old poet’s soul.
5. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
Since most of these poems are narrative, in that they tell a story, I approached the organization of the collection the same way I’d approach a novel: What do I want my reader to feel next? I don’t write for plot the same way I write for pathos. What emotion or feeling am I trying to invoke here and what feeling should come next? That’s how I organized these. If one poem broke your heart, my next poem should uplift you.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, yes, yes. I’m not of the camp that believes any person out there can write and can tell a story. No. It has taken me years to be able to craft a story or a poem—years and years of training. Sure, I had a knack for it, even at a very young age. But forming my thoughts on paper to tell a story is craft, and I believe that craft is best learned by pairing with other writers to learn their ways. I wouldn’t have this collection had I not studied under Chris Abani, Reginald Gibbons, Ed Roberson, Rachel Webster, and Rebecca Makkai.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Magic Enuff?
That I’ve still got it! I hadn’t written a poem in some time; I had just finished the international book tour for Memphis when I signed this poetry book deal. I was rather nervous about being able to rise to the occasion; I was anxious that I had forgotten how to write poetry. I did not. It all came back. And it was lovely and refreshing to be back in the medium that started it all for me: poetry, my first love.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Magic Enuff, what would you say?
I’d say, “Tara, Lord knows this world, this country, has not been good to you or your kind for quite some time. You will lose your reproductive rights in Tennessee. Your state will most likely ban all the books you ever write. Write anyway. Write your best. You were put here on this earth to tell good Black, Southern stories. Don’t you dare put down that pen. Don’t you dare let Memphis down. You got folk out here who love you. Write for them. Write for every single Black little girl in North Memphis, in this nation, who is told she is not worthy. That’s a lie. You know that’s a lie. And your writing is proof that our lives, our Black lives, matter so very much.”
9. What forms of work, other than writing, did you have to do to complete this book?
I went out and saw the world. I got divorced from a man who did not thrill me, and I became utterly, abjectly poor. I left my career as an attorney in Chicago and moved into a one-bedroom apartment filled with mice, all so I could go back to school, at thirty, for my MFA. I took lovers in Cuba, in Spain, in Italy. I got my heart broken in Memphis. I learned Spanish. I got a dog—my Huckleberry, a Tennessee Treeing Walker Coonhound—who brings me unbridled joy. I surround myself with cherished friends who uplift me. I moved back home to Memphis where I sit on my porch most evenings and listen to Al Green and Bessie Smith. I took up running; I stopped drinking. I go to bed at a decent time. I go to mass when I can. I pray. I pray all the time. And if there’s crème brûlée on the menu, I order it.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Keep writing. I know it’s not the most helpful. But in some ways, it is. If you love this craft, if you want to add to it in whatever small way you can, then keep writing.
