{"id":32607,"date":"2013-07-28T23:36:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-28T23:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=32607"},"modified":"2013-07-28T23:36:16","modified_gmt":"2013-07-28T23:36:16","slug":"an-interview-with-lise-funderburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=32607","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Lise Funderburg"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Interview with Lise Funderburg<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hot Metal Bridge: published by Writing MFA students at the University of Pittsburgh<\/a>
\nSpring 2009<\/a> (All The Way Down)<\/p>\n

Interview by Liberty Hultberg<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lise Funderburg<\/a> is the author of <\/em>Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity<\/a> (1994) and the memoir <\/em>Pig Candy<\/a> (2008), which has been described as part memoir, part travelogue, and part social history, about race, mortality, filial duty\u2026and barbecue. She has written numerous articles for publications including <\/em>O Magazine, Self Magazine. She is a creative writing instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and resides in Philadelphia.<\/em><\/p>\n

HMB:<\/strong> What prompted you to write Pig Candy<\/em>? At what point did you know this needed to be a book?<\/p>\n

LF:<\/strong> My dad got sick and almost died. I was in my late thirties, and I realized, suddenly, that he wasn\u2019t going to be around forever. He recovered fully from that incident, but I realized there were things about my father that I just didn\u2019t know because he\u2019d been a very close-to-the-vest kind of person growing up. I wanted to figure out who he was; he was a curious combination of disparate elements. He was hardworking and reliable and charming and funny and unpredictable and cantankerous and mean and abusive. He was a very strict father, but in some ways he didn\u2019t care about formalities at all. So who was this man and what made him tick?<\/p>\n

I thought: Here\u2019s this guy who\u2019s so different from me demographically. He\u2019s a man born in the twenties right before the Great Depression<\/a> into the Jim Crow<\/a> South in Monticello<\/a>, a rural Georgia town. He grew up Black, and I grew up a mixed race girl in the integrated North in an urban environment during Civil Rights. There\u2019s so much about what shaped his life that I don\u2019t know anything about and how will I find this out? So I started to interview him. I was already a journalist, so I had this idea that maybe it was a book, but I didn\u2019t really know what form the book was going to take. I interviewed him on safe subjects, which were his jobs; he was such a hardworking person that I thought this was something he\u2019ll talk to me about, and it wouldn\u2019t have the goopy, unpleasant (to him) qualities of emotion…<\/p>\n

<\/em>Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Interview with Lise Funderburg Hot Metal Bridge: published by Writing MFA students at the University of Pittsburgh Spring 2009 (All The Way Down) Interview by Liberty Hultberg Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity (1994) and the memoir Pig Candy (2008), which has been described […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,8,20],"tags":[15308,3101,1757],"class_list":["post-32607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-hot-metal-bridge","tag-liberty-hultberg","tag-lise-funderburg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}