Five Easy Questions: Michael McColly, Conclusion

We've spent the last week with Michael McColly, a yoga teacher, journalist and writing teacher who just finished a new memoir about his journey from Chicago to Africa as an AIDS activist.

"I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for the yoga community in Chicago." McColly once wrote, explaining the spiritual roots of his writing.

On Thursday June 1st, 2006 at 7pm, Michael McColly will be reading at Blue Stockings in New York City, exploring his connection with yoga and writing.

For all these reasons, I picked McColly for my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
Besides working as a journalist, you are a writing teacher. What is the most important piece of advice you give to your writing students? How do you think the Internet will affect fledgling writers? What can writers do to prepare for these changes?

Michael McColly:
Yes, I teach creative nonfiction. I encourage students to link their personal essays with political and social issues. I want them to go outside of themselves in order to understand what is going on inside themselves. I'm very interested in ethnographic writing and reporting.

In other words, I want students to absorb and observe a world, a group of people in order to write about how these people are living and changing and surviving in Chicago.

There so many subcultures out there, so many stories, so many interpretations of contemporary life. I also try to get students to see that when they interview and observe and engage themselves with this type of documentary/ethnographic writing they themselves must take their writing up to another level.

They must write with more clarity and purpose, more sensitivity and compassion because they are writing about other people's lives.

This is so important for young writers who tend to want to focus only on themselves and the concerns of their limited world. Writers and artists must be able to observe and listen from the margins in order to see what's going on in the center of not only themselves but the world in which they live.

» Five Easy Questions: Jim Munroe, Part One from ThePublishingSpot
"You have a lifetime of conditioning to fight, which will keep telling you that you are wasting your time putting hundreds of hours into something you may never get paid for," wrote Jim Munroe in this dazzling essay about... [Read More]

» Other People's LIves from ThePublishingSpot
"There are so many subcultures out there, so many stories, so many interpretations of contemporary life." writing teacher Michael McColly told us last week."[My students] must write with more clarity and purpose, more sensitivity and co... [Read More]

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