She's Definitely A Southern Writer

Author of UTTERANCE: A MUSEOLOGY OF KIN talks about her Southern roots.

For Immediate Release:

ATLANTA - Getting Cherryl Floyd-Miller to sit still for more than 30 minutes seems nearly impossible.

And how could she sit still?

She wears many hats: This summer, she completed a one-year directing internship with Actors Express Theatre; she just had the world premiere of her play Settling Sophia with New World Stage Theatre in North Carolina; shes a co-organizer for INTERVALS, a new poetry series in Atlanta; her debut poetry collection UTTERANCE: A MUSEOLOGY OF KIN, was released in September by Sadorian Publications; and she teaches creative writing courses at the Spruill Center for the Arts.

Yet she still manages to finish writing projects, like Utterance. She started this collection twelve years ago, just before the birth of her first child. Floyd-Miller began writing the poems when she lived in Indianapolis as a tribute to a favorite aunt who had died.

"Because I was so close to my due date, I couldnt travel for the funeral, so I decided to write a poem for her. Over the next few weeks, that one poem became many poems," she said.

She kept workshopping the pieces with friends and writers until 1995. The collection was called She Kneels at the Wailing Wall" then, but its name changed after she moved to North Carolina and added more poems.

The nature of family seems to have influenced much of the work in UTTERANCE.

"One of the most controversial things that I always say is that families are highly conspiratorial. What I mean by that is when it comes to most things, especially the truth, the family unit as a whole decides what will be spoken and unspoken, what will be regarded as the truth and what will be disregarded," she said.

Although she doesn't name names, she says she used her own family as the model for UTTERANCE.

"In my own family, we have a habit of keeping secrets. We dont talk about the things that we need to talk to each other about. Its almost as if we prefer the pain to the confrontation. And we all do it without ever agreeing to do it," she says.

Much of what appears here is also filled with Southern culture.

"Absolutely, I am a Southern writer," Floyd-Miller says. "The South is filled with both traditions that I wish I could change and traditions that Im extremely proud of."

Much of her work deals with characters or themes from the Southern tradition – foods, folklore, colloquialisms, genteel manner(isms), race/class systems, small towns. She says that even the way she pursues writing is very grounded in the approaches by writers who are also from the Southern tradition.

"William Faulkner, Flannery OConnor, Lee Smith, Dori Sanders, Tina McElroy Ansa, Kathryn Stripling Byer ... these are people who are gifted in the art of storytelling," she says.

There is something about the South that just keeps her rooted. A native of Roanoke Rapids, N.C., she says there is much to be learned from this soil.

"I recently was talking to Scott Pardue, whose theatre produced my first play, and he quoted something to me that was most profound and sticks with me: The South is the conscience of the nation. I believe that," she says.

Floyd-Miller has appeared on "The Oprah Show" on the "Heart of a Woman" Book Club segment with Dr. Maya Angelou, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the "North Carolina Literary Review," "Crab Orchard Review," and "The Open City." Her work has also been anthologized in "Beyond the Frontier," "Proverbs for the People," and Tavis Smiley's "Keeping the Faith."

The "Utterance" collection was a 2001 semi-finalist for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and a 2002 finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.

She will be touring with "Utterance" in Durham, N.C., Milwaukee, Birmingham, Indianapolis, and Atlanta.

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