October 29, 2007
Lyon College News Bureau

An award-winning poet on Tuesday told a capacity audience at Lyon College that writers should dig into the work of the authors they admire to see what gives it power.

As part of Lyon College’s Contemporary Writers Series, poet Jo McDougall presented her lecture, “Who Are Your Kin? Influences and the Writing Life,” in Bevens Music Room Tuesday.

The author of five books of poetry, most recently, “Dirt” and “Satisfied with Havoc,” McDougall is currently completing a prose memoir, “Daddy’s Money.”

Among her awards are an Academy of American Poets prize, a DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writing award, and the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence.

Lyon’s Writer-in-Residence Andrea Hollander Budy, also an acclaimed poet, introduced McDougall, who in turn acknowledged Budy’s influence on her life and her work during their more than 20 years as friends.

McDougall said aspiring writers should make a list of their three favorite authors – their literary “kin.”

“Analyze their words and see what works,” she said. “Then do the same thing to your own workÉ If something jumps out at you, look at it and ask yourself where it came from.”

McDougall’s three choices were poet and University of Arkansas professor emeritus Miller Williams, Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor. From Williams she learned the value of a lean, spare style. From Dickinson she learned how to “look deeply into the abyss of grief and loneliness.” And O’Connor taught her the value of examining the common, the ordinary, and the “ugly.”

“There’s a mystery, a romance to determining who you influences are,” McDougall said.

Though O’Connor had a well-known aversion to colleges and didn’t like teaching in a formal setting, she nonetheless tutored young writers in whom she saw promise. One of those young writers was Miller Williams, who in turn taught McDougall during her time at the University of Arkansas.

McDougall grew up on a rice farm in the Arkansas Delta, near DeWitt and currently lives in Kansas City, Mo. Her husband also came from an agrarian background. When they went to the University of Arkansas, they majored in home economics and agriculture, since they expected to spend the rest of their lives as rice farmers.

But in her forties, McDougall returned to the university to get an MFA.

Since that time she has taught Creative Writing at Northeast Louisiana University, Pittsburgh State University at Pittsburgh, Kan., Hendrix College in Conway, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has held three McDowell Colony Fellowships.

The Arkansas Repertory Theatre produced, “Towns Facing Railroads,” a dramatic presentation of her work, and some of her poems were adapted for the film “Emerson County Shaping Dream.” Individual poems appear in Garrison Keillor’s “Good Poems for Hard Times,” Ted Kooser’s  “American Life in Poetry,” and such journals as the  Hudson Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Midwest Quarterly, and New Letters.

Before she retired, McDougall directed the creative writing program at Pittsburg State University.

After a writer determines who his or her “literary kin” are, they must examine where they are from, “McDougall said.

“I am from the South,” she said. “I’m a Southerner and I always will be. How about you?”

Roots determine who you are and what you write about, she added.

“It’s okay to celebrate your place, no matter how absurd, crazy or strange, if those things are what you’re attracted to.”

Later that evening, McDougall and Budy teamed up to read samples of their poetry.

Budy introduced McDougall by saying she, “is an expert at choosing exactly the right words to deliver the perfect message at precisely the right moment.”

She read three of McDougall’s poems, something she’s, “been doing since 1987.”

“In a Jo McDougall poem, it is often not what is stated, but what is implied that matters,” she said.

When McDougall took center stage she read some of her poetry and an excerpt from her new memoir, “Daddy’s Money.”

She closed with her poem, "When the Buck or Two Steakhouse Changed Hands," from her book, “The Woman In The Next Booth.”

“I will close with a poem about change because, although it happens, I am against it,” McDougall said. “You don’t have to like it.”

For more information on the Contemporary Writers Series, contact Budy at ahbudy@lyon.edu.

Andrea Hollander Budy (left), Lyon's Writer-in-Residence,
with visiting writer Jo McDougall

Jo McDougall reads from her work in Bevens Music Room.

Photos by Lauren Adams