"The result is a revelation," wrote New Yorker journalist William Finnegan after reading The After Death Room, Michael McColly's memoir about his life as an AIDS activist and yoga instructor. "An epic twenty-first-century canvas on which the themes of courage, ingenuity, solidarity, and justice stand out just as boldly as those of cruel indifference and stark despair."
McColly has traveled the globe for years, working with non-profits in Africa and building support networks for AIDS victims. He is HIV positive, and uses his personal experience as an anchor for countless articles about poverty and activism.
McColly recently finished his new memoir, and I picked him 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:
Could you briefly describe the life journey you took to make this book, from your days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal until you made a deal with Soft Skull? Are there any lessons a young writer can learn from your example?
Michael McColly:
Well, you know, I'm 48 and I was in the Peace Corps 25 ago. When I went back to my village in 2002, it was like I'd come back to earth after being dead. It feels like another lifetime...
They have stayed with me all these years and when I returned to see them I realized how profoundly they'd shaped my life. I went to the PC in 1981. I went to explore the world, to try to learn something about the world beyond America, and to escape from myself and my fears of my sexuality. I don't think I'm alone in this secret reason PCVs head far from home.
This story is part of my memoir about the AIDS pandemic. My memoir is a blend of the personal and political and the spiritual. In some ways I feel I've been writing this book ever since I picked up a pen in that Senegalese village near the Gambia River and tried to explain what I was seeing and feeling as I sat in this wholly other world. I became a writer in that village, writing hundreds of letters to anyone and everyone who would write me back.
I was lonely and I was fascinated by both Senegalese culture and what was going on psychologically and spiritually inside. I wrote another memoir before this one and also performed a one person show about the Peace Corps experience.
It saved me when I first learned I was HIV positive. I persevered. To write you have to sacrifice; you have to go far beyond who you are to see into what it means to create a world for others to enter.
I submitted my nonfiction proposal or my agent did to like 45 editors until Softskull had the guts to take an a memoir about the AIDS pandemic.
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» Five Easy Questions: Michael McColly, Part One from ThePublishingSpot
"The result is a revelation," wrote New Yorker journalist William Finnegan after reading The After Death Room, Michael McColly's memoir about his life as an AIDS activist and yoga instructor. "An epic twenty-first-century canvas on which... [Read More]
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