Mary McColley Poet Profile by Jeff Kaliss
It was still Ramadan when Mary McColley and I Zoom-chatted early in this April. During this period, sacred to Muslims, cafes and restaurants were closed during the day, sustaining silence in the city of Nablus, one of the oldest in the world, about 30 miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. But there was eager chatter from morning to afternoon in the private school where Mary had been teaching English as a second language to fourth graders.
“Palestinians in general put a lot of emphasis on education,” says Mary. “In high school, a lot of them apply for scholarships in the US, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Turkey, Egypt. So English is their common language passport to go abroad, because [in Palestine] professional and academic opportunities are severely limited.”
Travel within the occupied West Bank is also “very, very, very difficult” for Mary and her fellow faculty, as well as for students and their families. “There’s aren’t really busses or trains running, and there are military checkpoints in between the city and the villages,” some of which continue to suffer Israeli settler violence. “A lot of my students have to cross a checkpoint to get to school, and they can be stopped arbitrarily by Israeli soldiers and have to sit waiting for hours till whenever they feel like opening up.”
But at the end of her workday, Mary can walk to a bazaar to buy food for her teacher roommates. On a solitary stroll towards one of the adjoining arid mountains, she might find the sort of prompts for poetry which she’s been seeking ever since she was a kid herself, back in the State of Maine. “I find that I really need to be out and about, seeing and noticing every detail, almost like a journalist,” Mary tells me. “It accumulates in a mass, in my head. And then, whenever I can, on my phone or on paper, I have to write it down. If that means I stop by the side of the road, so be it, or if I can hide myself in a more socially acceptable spot, that works too. I have to hammer it, like a metalsmith, into shape. In a lot of ways, I feel like a shard of glass, or a prism, where I want the place, or the experience, to pass through me and refract into a variety of words, colors, phrases, imagery, that paint a picture for other people.”
In Nablus, “there are maybe ten or twenty people who aren’t Palestinians, and that makes the pool of potential acquaintances very small.” Although Mary studied Arabic for three years in college and admires such Palestinian poets as Mahmoud Darwish, “there’s not a poetry scene [in Nablus], so to have that connection to other people who care about language in the same way I do has been really crucial.” She finds that connection online weekly with the Ireland-based Lime Square Poets Zoom open mic, which is where I found Mary a year or so ago, while she was still working an ESL job in Thailand.
Although I’m fifty-some years her elder, I also have in common with Mary a bringing up in Maine and an abiding inspiration from that place, apparent in her seascape poetic tribute to her home county of York, and in “The Blue Waves Tear Apart”, prompted by her visit to Thunder Hole in Acadia National Park, five miles south of my hometown of Bar Harbor. Mary grew up in a timber frame house built by her engineer father on a 20-acre spread of pine, oak, and maple, where “in the fall, the trees are crimson and orange and umber, the world’s aflame. And in the winter, it seemed the snow would reach the tops of the trees, and it hurts to breathe, it’s bone-chilling. So I was just surrounded by lot of intense nature. It’s kind of a hard-scrabble environment, and the people are very independent.”
But Mary’s parents, though they were both “very STEM and didn’t do poetry”, fostered a warm creative environment for their daughter, as did the public school teachers in the nearby town of South Berwick. Mary started scribbling poetry when she was about seven and “I got my first rejection letter [from a magazine] when I was nine. I paraded it around the house, telling my mom, ‘I’m a real writer now, because I got rejected!’ And it’s still right there on my wall, as it has been, everywhere I’ve lived.”
Only a year later, the pre-pubescent poet got published for the first time in Cricket magazine, and by twelve she won a statewide writing contest with The Telling Room, a Portland, Maine-based non-profit, and started attending a poetry camp at the University of New Hampshire, which “blew my mind, because that was one of the first times I was surrounded by other people who liked to write.” After graduating high school, Mary “wasn’t sure I wanted to go to college, so I took a gap year and worked in a lobster company in Maine’s southernmost seaside town of Kittery.
It turned out to be more attractive for Mary to attend college at the American University of Paris than in the States, since she was offered a generous scholarship there and had been studying French since the seventh grade. “I took a couple of classes in Baudelaire and Rimbaud, very focused on form and the rich use of language. I think speaking two languages made me very aware of what every single word and syllable are doing. And every language brings out a different facet of who you are. I think I’m much funnier and wittier in French than I am in English, because in Paris a lot of social standing is based on witty repartee.”
Mary completed a degree in History and Society, with a double minor in French and Middle Eastern Islamic Studies, with a focus on issues of migration. A planned study abroad in Egypt was thwarted by COVID, so she “spent a month backpacking around Croatia and staying at cheap hostels for five euros a night, and I thought, what am I gonna do with myself? That’s when I decided to do an online TEFL [teaching English as a foreign language] course and get my certification. I worked for the French civil service, with a lot of asylum seekers and refugees. I’m really interested in conflicts that push people towards migration.
“Right around Christmas of ‘21, my visa for France expired, so I sent out about sixty job applications all over Europe, but an American trying to work in Europe really doesn’t work. So I said, now is my time to do something really random, and I took a teaching job in Thailand. Then I crashed on a friend’s couch in Paris and went back to Maine to work for a bit, and then thought, I’ve studied Arabic and written papers on Palestine, but I need to validate that knowledge and gain some practical experience, so I might as well go to Palestine. I didn’t anticipate that a war was going to break out, or that a genocide would be happening about an hour away from me.”
Geopolitics aside, Mary was quite clearly opposed to “this notion that the Middle East is just a violent region, that it will always be that way, when in fact there are very clear causes, a lot of nuances and layers of history, and when you unpack it, it’s not so easy to write off people or cultures that way. My poetry is always about where I am, and right now, I’m in the middle of a war zone, so I write about war. I’ve written political poems, but while I’m in Palestine, I can’t share them or publish them. I’ll have to wait until I leave,” and in the meantime share them online at Lime Square, and with us here on the Mill Valley Literary Review.
It’s not entirely by chance that the two poems from Palestine you see here share the presence of cats. “There are a lot of street cats here,” Mary points out, “and right before the war started, at the beginning of October, a cat came into out school and had her litter in a cardboard box in the teachers room. So my roommates and I were, oh, we’ll just take them home for a week or two. And that turned into about six months. They were very lovable.” Several of the kittens got international exposure via Mary’s webcam during her Lime Square readings.
Interestingly, Mary’s reading online reading voice assumes an almost feline howl which, delivering her charged imagistic prosody, is compellingly alluring. “I was always a painfully shy and soft-spoken kid,” she maintains. “When I got to Paris, I got really connected with this underground poetry group. I started off whispering poems, but as I gained confidence, I started hearing how people coming from different languages had different rhythms — some were songwriters, some rappers, with different cadences, twisting their words into drama — and possibilities opened up. I’d never heard somebody turn poetry into magic like that. Slowly, I realized my voice could do the magic thing, too, not just putting words on a page, but knowing these words have to be pronounced and emphasized in a certain way. I think I’m a lot stronger and more confident as a writer than I am as a human being in my day-to-day life. So when I have a chance to embody the poem, everything else falls away.”
By the time Mary’s stay in Palestine ends this June, she’ll be hearing back from French schools she’s applied to for a master’s program in journalism, not in creative writing. “My grandfather told me once, keep your passion separate from your livelihood,” she explains, “so I’ve always looked for other jobs.” But at the age of 24, she’s already generated over three hundred poems which she has yet to assemble in what will be a powerful, artful collection. “It’s really the way I perceive the world,” she admits, “and I don’t think I could exist without poetry.”
By Jeff Kaliss, Poetry Editor. For the San Francisco Chronicle and the Marin Independent Journal Jeff reviewed diverse genres from comedy to jazz and rock and theater to opera. He has made numerous performances both as a reader, and in collaboration with jazz artists. Jeff is author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone, available soon in a newly revised edition.
