Writing Home: A Conversation with Dr. Taylor Byas, PhD
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (Soft Skull Press, 2023) by Dr. Taylor Byas is the debut full-length poetry collection inspired and shaped by the 1978 classic The Wiz. In this collection, Dr. Byas applies The Wiz as a scaffold for navigating Black girlhood interrupted, romantic and familial relationships, and the concept of home, whether near or far. Winner of the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Award, the Maya Angelou Book Award, and a National Bestseller, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times subverts dominant, often misinformed perceptions of Chicago through storytelling, memory excavation, and the musicality of every day Black life.
Made up of seven sections, all borrowing scenes or song titles from soundtracks in The Wiz, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes the reader on a journey through Chicago’s architecture, liquor stores, Sunday service, and the yard, past the river and back, reminding us that home is always in our hearts no matter where we go—all we’ve got to do is believe. I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Byas over Zoom about The Wiz and other forms of media, the alchemy of poetic form, and navigating the cross-pollinated relationship between poet and scholar. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ashia Ajani: Cinema and music make an appearance a lot in I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. As someone who explores/is bearing witness to these different mediums, and also as a writer, can you talk more about your personal relationship to The Wiz and how it shaped the collection?
Taylor Byas: The Wiz was always this shared experience in my family; we have those staple movies in our household that we’re always kind of quoting and referring to, movies that we’ve watched over and over again that have become bonding experiences for us as a family. I think there are certain forms of media that I consumed that symbolize home for me. The Wiz was definitely one of those things. I think this was also a movie that I saw a lot of myself in around the time that I was writing this book. I wasn’t really writing about Chicago until I left Chicago, and a story about a woman who gets forcefully removed from home and has to go on this wild and crazy journey to find her way back, who realizes that she had the power to do so all along, really reflected my own experience.
In the later phases of this book, The Wiz kind of became a way for me to more clearly navigate my way through the story that the book was trying to tell. So it was really cool how the movie itself became a way for me to think about the organization and the structure of the book as well, because I think the book was speaking to what happens in The Wiz. As someone thinking about film—Kill Bill, Beyonce’s “Hold Up” music video—especially as a Black woman, I think it’s always a practice of trying to find a reflection. The presence of reflection or the lack of reflection always prompts some sort of response.
AA: Could you speak more about how either the movie or writing this collection has influenced your perspective on home, the various ways that you reach towards home?
TB: I spent most of my life in Chicago—it wasn’t until college that I moved away. So for the past ten years, I’ve been, for the most part, away from home. But for the longest time I thought Chicago was always going to be the place that I returned to. Most of my family is still there, so in a lot of ways it does feel like a home base. The distance gave me perspective of home, forced me to recognize how I have to create home elsewhere, and how ultimately that was, I think, healthier for me and more conducive to self-love work and prioritizing myself.
One of the things that’s also at the foundation of this collection is the fact that my dad’s an alcoholic, and the ways that shifted my family dynamic. One of the biggest ways was, as the eldest child, how I had to become a mother to my siblings and a kind of parent to my parents. I think finally being away from home and reflecting on the role of the nuclear family unit helped me to put in perspective how harmful that [parenting] role was for myself and how I have to reconfigure something new outside of that; that configuration only works if I am at a distance.
In the movie, Dorothy realizes, Oh, I had the power to just click my heels and go home the entire time. I think something similar happened to me, where I didn’t necessarily physically return to Chicago and move back home, but the realization of, Oh, home is where I am and it always has been. It has to be from this point on—it doesn’t mean I don’t love seeing my family and they don’t mean a lot to me, but home is where I am and that’s how it has to be for my own sanity.
AA: How are you writing about these various forms of mothering, especially those imposed on Black women?
TB: You never realize how early it starts until you’re forced to analyze it in some way. As I revisit these poems, one of the things that strikes me is the childlike awareness that’s so sharp and so developed, like in “Tender-Headed,” where there’s that final observation of, I don’t know who’s you’re braiding my hair for, “for the pastor’s approval / or God’s.”
I think about the young Black girl and all the ways she has to be aware of how things work at such an early age, which I think gives way to this mothering over time in the ways that we have to take care of other people because we are trained to be the most socially aware, the most emotionally aware, etc. And maybe there’s a particularity to Chicago just because of the nature of Chicago itself. I know there’s a narrative around Chicago that is potentially harmful, but there were very present dangers in the area that I grew up in that, as a result, shaped how I move through the world.
AA: There’s a line in “South Side (V),” part of the crown of sonnets grounding the collection: “it’s sensory, / the act of remembering, of making memory.” How did it feel to go back in time and do that memory work throughout this collection?
TB: I think it started a little earlier than when I started writing these poems. I wrote an essay about my dad’s alcoholism where I’d done some research on Chicago: observing the neighborhoods, where my dad used to work, the street view on Google Maps looking at my old school, my old house. And I was very deep in our old photo albums. I think it started there; the work for that essay carried on into some poems, poems that would then become this book.
Memory is strange because I have a lot of gaps in my memory now, which is something that often makes me very uncomfortable, but I sort of like never knowing what will unearth something. You have to turn memory over; it feels like archeology. That process feels very sensory to me: It reminds me of physically digging something up, dusting it off, and having to polish it. Maybe the active polishing is the writing that we do, right? That’s how we polish or how we get it to clarify itself. A lot of this book was digging up these memories and polishing them in the act of writing these poems.
It is such a personal, often sacred practice of digging up really personal things and rediscovering them too. Which was very emotional, even painful at times. But it’s also really empowering to rediscover parts of yourself, and then to have the agency to write the story in the way that you experienced it, especially knowing that there are multiple versions of a story.
AA: Most folks who are familiar with your work know that you are the form queen, the form icon. There are these obvious connections between doing that memory work and form because form allows you to channel it in a different way, such as in the “Southside” crown of sonnets or “The Mercy Hour: A Burning Haibun.” Would you speak about what form does for you not only as a poet but a scholar?
TB: You know, I used to think that writers were in control of the poems but they continue to humble us. Poems continue to tell us what they need, and form in particular became a way for me to figure out what a poem needs early on in the writing process. If there’s an issue in a poem that I was stuck on or needed to work through, I’m probably going to turn to a pantoum because the repeating form forces you to transform the thing and keep transforming to work through something to an endpoint. Form shows me the shape of a thing that is often shapeless and all over the place, and the form is going to give me a path to organizing it.
But also, as a scholar, there’s this long lineage of Black women using form that feels like a necessary disruption of a canon; a subversion of what form used to be. We had to write in form to kind of prove that we were masters [of poetry]. But now it feels so fun and so empowering to not only feel like I can master different poetic forms but to also populate them with language that is ours, with stories that are ours. One of the few things that people have said to me about the book was that the language is so accessible, and I think that is a huge compliment. There’s something so rewarding in that too, in filling these traditional forms that typically have been populated with high falutin’ language and written by these white men and putting slang and our language in there. When thinking about a literary canon, I’m thinking about the literary ancestors that I want to honor with a formal work that I do, so form liberates me in all of those ways.
AA: How does it feel to be the recipient of the Maya Angelou Book Award?
TB: You know, I can’t even lie, when I saw the shortlist for the award, I saw that I was in the same category as Terrance Hayes and I was like, This was fun, shout out to me for making it this far! I really had no clue that they would call me and tell me that I had won the award. It was just the biggest affirmation that Chicago matters, that the everyday stories of Black girls and Black women matter. That felt like confirmation that I’m not doing all this work for nothing, and that someone else sees the value and that someone else sees all the hard work that I’ve done. I think it was one of the things that I needed to start me back into writing again. This was one of the biggest, most unexpected affirmations that could have come, and it came at just the right time.
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (@taylorbyas3) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Acquisitions Poetry Editor for Variant Literature, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a 2023-24 National Book Critics Emerging Fellow. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contest, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and her second full-length Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in 2025. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, published with Texas Review Press in December 2023, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology forthcoming from HarperCollins. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
Ashia Ajani (they/she) (@ashiainbloom) is a sunshower hailing from Denver, CO, (unceded Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe land), now living in Oakland (unceded Ohlone land). A lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole, and others. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, & Lithub. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and a Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF MoAD. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), is out now.