About Chella Courington

I was born and raised in North Alabama, eighty miles from Birmingham. Growing up in a small Alabama town in the sixties, I was nurtured in a conservative Southern bubble. Few people of color lived in our town. Jim Crow held sway. The only enlightenment came through the arts (books, movies, music, and television) and a neighbor who lived three doors down. Mary was a liberal woman who fit in because she came from a notable political family. Our conversations made me question the conventional wisdom of my upbringing. The real turning point occurred when a high-school friend from Atlanta invited me to a concert at Morehouse College, a Historic Black College. It was my first experience of being a minority. A young, barefoot Joan Baez wearing a muumuu and carrying a guitar walked on stage and began singing songs of love and struggle and hopefulness. At the end of the night, she asked the audience to stand, loop arms, and sing “We Shall Overcome.” I felt something shift inside.

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But it took a while to shake the sand off my shoes, and I’m still shaking after all these years of teaching and searching for a just society. After I earned my undergraduate degree in English, I worked in television and newspaper several years which made me further aware of the narrowness of how I was raised. I returned to university for a graduate degree. During my time there, I taught writing at The Maximum-Security Prison for Men in Columbia, South Carolina—an institution so old that the marks of Sherman’s cannonballs were still on the walls. Those dents represented the South’s stubborn refusal to move beyond its past. With my doctorate, I taught briefly in Illinois before returning to teach in Montgomery, Alabama at a Methodist college. There I realized I had become a stranger in my own land, facing criticism from my colleagues at the “Liberal” Arts school for introducing more women writers and writers of color in my classes. These crimes were the result of using the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.

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Fifteen years later, I moved to California. Perhaps I left to find a place where I belonged, though my accent identified me as a transplant and led some folks to assume I shared most Southern beliefs. Over time I realized that I had created the space and distance to examine and understand my history. And it was here, living by the Pacific Ocean, that I began to write poetry and eventually prose more seriously. My first poetry chapbook was Southern Girl Gone Wrong. Fifteen chapbooks and a novella later, I wrote my first novel about the past, Janet Hall—a story of love and death in a small North Alabama town.

I was not a prodigy. I didn’t write my first poem at six or read King Lear at seven. What I did do, however, was write good sentences. They made sense to me. Their construction and the rules of grammar with its many exceptions seemed natural and logical. I moved to creative writing in a very ordinary manner. My seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Smith, shiny black hair worn in a braid, asked the class to write a poem. I don’t remember whether we’d been reading poetry or she’d been reading it to us, but now it was our time to try our hand at composing. Later she chose to read aloud what she thought the most impressive. About all I remember of this event is that the chosen piece wasn’t mine. Thinking I’d lost favor with my favorite teacher, I was heartbroken. My poetic beginning was about being the “chosen,” not about feeling compelled to express myself. 

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When I was a junior, I had a turnabout. My English teacher read aloud the opening of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and asked us to respond in a short essay. I felt the poem’s hopelessness and spiritual emptiness speak to me, an angst-ridden seventeen-year-old who sensed life was a collection of shards and shadows. Eliot’s words inspired me, and I kept writing consistently through the rest of high school and college. Then stretches of time passed without my writing a word that wasn’t part of my job at the newspaper or television station.

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When I started graduate school at the original USC, University of South Carolina, I studied under James Dickey, Poet Laureate of the United States. I was a good enough reader to understand that my work was passable, but not great, and I took the academic route, a Ph.D. in Literature and taught at a small college in Montgomery, Alabama. There, I wrote journal articles, book reviews, literary criticism, and pedagogical papers. While still in Montgomery, I turned one night to my partner and told him, “I want to publish a poem about James Dickey.” 

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Subsequently, I moved to California to teach in Santa Barbara and the next summer participated in a six-week writing workshop, the South Coast Writing Project (SCWriP). With the inspiration of those mentors and colleagues, I published my first poem. Since that time, writing has become a way of life. My poetry and prose have been published in chapbooks, journals, anthologies, a novella, and a novel.

Even before I succeeded in publishing my work, I wrote on first waking and before turning off the lights at night. Virginia Woolf says, “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for the ages or only for hours, nobody can say” (A Room of One’s Own). I’ve been fortunate that people want to read “what [I] wish to write.”