Then You'll be Straight
An Interview
with author Margaret Price

The evolution of “Then You’ll Be Straight,” Margaret Price’s essay about race and self-consciousness in a historically black women’s college, presented constant challenges that are fresh in the mind of any creative nonfiction writer or reader.

“Writing nonfiction for me involves a constant process of double-checking myself and making sure I'm being humble enough. It's easy to write a short story with a narrator who is very much like oneself except without the embarrassing flaws; it's even more tempting to do that when writing nonfiction. One issue I find quite discouraging is the recent fracas in the publishing industry about fictional books that have been published as memoirs. I should say at the outset that, while there is a lot to be said about the territory where ‘creative’ meets ‘nonfiction,’ deliberate misrepresentation does not fall anywhere within that territory.”

A responsibility to the truth, or the nonfictional quality of a work, marked Price’s writing and rewriting of this essay. “Then You’ll Be Straight” is told from her point of view, while focusing heavily on the actions and reactions of her students and colleagues at Spelman College. The interaction between these two parts of the essay proved to be a problem.

“The most difficult part, I think, was examining the unconscious racism and ignorance of my own white privilege that I carry with me.For example, an early draft stated that people "stared" at me as I walked across campus. My friend and colleague Opal marked that word and wrote in the margin, ‘Do they really?’ That was quite humbling, because even though the point of that passage was to explore my own (hyper)consciousness about the visual figure I cut at Spelman, by using that word choice I'd unconsciously rendered that hyperconsciousness--enacted it, in a sense--rather than recognized it. And, upon reflection, I realized that people don't stare at me at Spelman; rather, I felt stared at when I first arrived. I had to find a word that conveyed my feeling of being stared at without misrepresenting how the people around me behaved.

“Revising the essay involved a lot of moments like that. If I were Nicholson Baker, I might have used footnotes to create a meta-essay about the evolution of my language, not only in my first year at Spelman, but also as I wrote the essay itself.”

Just as the essay follows the gradual change of Price’s language, so did her original experience gradually take shape as an essay. “During my first year at Spelman, I was new to the South, new to being a professor, new to the school, living alone for the first time in 8 years, and generally inundated with unfamiliar experiences. Every night I would go home and write and write in my journal about all these new, staggering data. After a while, all those notes started becoming something I thought might have some sort of point.” Price’s seemingly scientific process, among other elements of her writing, stem from her experience as both a creative and academic writer.

“In addition to being an essayist, I'm a qualitative researcher, and I love the way creative nonfiction allows me to bring my knowledge and experience as a researcher onto the page in a more lyrical or narrative way than I do in my academic writing. I'm on the lyrical side as an academic writer, and on the academic side as a ‘creative’ writer, and this is where I like it. Having the genre "creative nonfiction" available to name, study and teach makes me feel as if a home is being built around me in the place where I've always been living and writing.”

To young writers, Price offers her own tips: “Seek out advice on writing, discard that which doesn't feel right, and hang on to that which does. (For example, I read tons of ‘trash,’ which a lot of writers will tell you not to do. I also watch a lot of really bad TV.)

Read a lot, and some of it should be stuff that challenges or scares or impresses you.

Keep a file of nice things that people have said or written about your work. Or just about you in general. I am of the belief that very few writers hear too many nice things about their writing.

Believe in your own vision. Even if it seems boring and stupid, begin from the assumption that someone eventually might want to listen to your boring, stupid voice, and just go for it. You'll realize later that you aren't boring and stupid. (No one is, by the way. Sometimes our writing sounds like it, that's all.)”

—Sarah McAbee
with Ranga Atapattu and Mary Seymour