An Interview with Quincy Troupe

On Writing From the Heart:
An Interview with Quincy Troupe


QT: I’m currently reading Garcia Marquez’s memoir, [the] first part of his trilogy, Living to Tell the Tale. He’s the great Colombian novelist, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch - Nobel prize-winning author. He is one of my favorite novelists of all time. I’m reading that and I’m about to start reading, after that, Beloved by Toni Morrison. I’m reading Pablo Neruda again, the great Chilean poet, [who] also won a Nobel Prize. My preferences run to Latin American novelists and poets for the most part. I don’t know why because I’m from St. Louis, Missouri. But my preferences in poets and novelists for the most part run to Latin American writers. They’re the ones that kind of fulfill whatever it is that I need in a writer, poet or novelist. They fulfill a magical, mysterious way to use language and metaphor and image and the fact that they are not so corporate as many American writers are. I find these days a lot of American writers, both black and white, young and old: corporate. And their sensibility . . .
 
QBR: And that "corporate" translates to commercial?
 
QT: Commercial. You know, (writer) Ishmael Reed and I were talking about this and we were talking about how we didn’t go into writing to make money. We went into writing because we needed to write to find a way to express ourselves. So the way to do that, for me, is in writing. And at one time it was basketball, but then it was writing.
 
QBR: How did you make that transition? How did you become aware of that transition from basketball to writing?
 
QT: Well I hurt my knee playing basketball when I was living in France. I was a great basketball player at one time. And I hurt my knee playing over there and hurt it two or three times, and I just realized I couldn’t play anymore. I could play but I would not be the player that I was. And I started writing in France, when I hurt my knee. I’d always been a voracious reader since I was little in St. Louis. My mother turned me onto books and poetry and all that, so I’ve always been a voracious reader. And so I read everything, everything I could get my hands on, novels, poems, everything. From the time I was eight, nine, I read everything. But I never thought I would be a writer, it wasn’t something I had in my head that I would be a writer. 

   But once I started writing what I realized is that what it took for me to be a great basketball player; discipline, focus . . . were very important to writing. You had to focus, you had to be disciplined. When I would play basketball I would get up in the morning and I would run four miles and I disciplined my body to become an instrument. So when I was on the court playing with someone it would not be my body that failed me. It would not be my body that failed me nor would it be my will that failed me. It would be that perhaps the other person was better than me, it wasn’t the case very often, but sometimes you can be up [against] somebody that’s better than you on that given day, you know? 

   So writing, for me, is not me against you it’s me against myself. But as a writer I want to be able to construct and to write anything that comes into my imagination. I want to be able to put that down on paper.
 
QBR: So what prompt your imaginings?
 
QT: Everything. Books, music, taking a walk. I was in Guadeloupe and I looked up in the sky and I saw the moon in the sky and it was like a lemon wedge. And I wrote a poem ‘The Moon Is A Lemon Wedge Over Guadeloupe’, so then I started to deal with that. The lemon wedge also is like a slice of lemon in a drink. So anything can trigger my imagination, anything, anything. A book, or a phrase, or walking in the street, driving, flying over something. Something I read, something somebody says, something I pick up when I’m walking on the street because I’m always listening to what people are saying. Just anything can trigger my [imagination]. What I see.
 
QBR: Let’s go into a moment. Can you open a moment when you know that something is done?
 
QT: I never know that it’s done. I just never really know. I kind of  think the closest thing that comes for me to when I know the process is over, is what W.H. Auden, the great English poet, said awhile back. And he said, “A poem is never finished, it’s just abandoned.” And that’s so for me after a certain point. I rewrite about fifteen, sixteen times. You look at this one, this is the second draft. Now this is probably going to go through a lot of more drafts. This one is a first draft, but these go through a lot of drafts. Typically, they go through fifteen, sixteen drafts. Typically. So I get it like I want it. I get to the place where I want it to be. A lot of people say, “your pieces are so, so spontaneous”. But it’s not that its spontaneous, I try to keep that in it, that spontaneity in the piece, especially poetry, or fiction, or prose or whatever. I try to keep that element of spontaneity and that feeling of spontaneity, I want it to feel like that.                     READ MORE...