Camille T. Dungy on Being a Renaissance Man

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Camille T. Dungy about her new collection, America, A Love Story.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So how do you think you got the way you are? What influenced your creativity and maybe some of your need for constraints in your writing? Take us back to little Camille.

Camille T. Dungy: So many people ask that question. I mean in my personal life. That’s so funny. I actually like science a lot. On a different life journey, I would have been a doctor. I mean, I can say that without a doubt that that would have been the path that I would have taken, were it not for reading and writing poetry and introduction to creative writing in the same semester that I was taking organic chemistry and molecular biology in college. So, the poetry classes – I just loved my poetry classes. I did not just love, particularly organic chemistry class, that was not that was not my most beloved class in college. And I just decided that I wanted to go where my passion was, and I leaned towards the poetry. But there is so much about science that I admire and have absorbed through my life. So, the order and the taxonomy. How do things go together? And why do they go together, and how do they grow? And the inquiry at the heart of true science and the methods and practices by which you investigate those inquiries, those are things that I’ve been trained in and that I love. And so, I think that some of the ways in which my writing practice often actually might feel scientific in that way is just the fact that there is part of me that cares about beauty and magic and sparkle and order and rigor and scientific investigation. You know, in another moment in human history, that wouldn’t be strange, right? It was about the 1850s where they became two different camps, science and art. Until then, you did all things – men – men were scientists and poets and painters. It wasn’t a separation in the same way that it has become. And so maybe I am more of a Renaissance man.

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Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story. She has also written the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry; 100 Best African American Poems; Best American Essays; The 1619 Project; All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis; and other publications.