This piece first appeared in our March 2021 Magazine
Kerry Madden-Lunsford is an Associate Professor in the English Department and director of the creative writing program at UAB.
Madden-Lunsford said she credits growing up as the daughter of a football coach and frequently moving for her development as a writer.
“I had to reinvent myself in each new place. My father would say ‘You won’t remember these people. So you want to stay in the same town your whole life, what kind of life is that?’” she said.
Madden-Lunsford said out of defiance she would vow to remember people she encountered and began writing letters to friends. Having a fourth grade teacher who saw something special in her and told her she was a good writer also helped.
“That was the first time a teacher had said anything like that. They usually said ‘Aren’t you a nice tall girl’ and ‘Don’t you listen well,” Madden-Lunsford said.
“Meeting other women writers, supporting women writers, telling women’s stories, we just have to keep telling more and more. That’s been a joy for me as a writer.”
Kerry Madden-Lunsford
“Meeting other women writers, supporting women writers, telling women’s stories, we just have to keep telling more and more. That’s been a joy for me as a writer.”
Madden-Lunsford said books were also a big part of her life.
“Books saved me because I could see the characters and my life was so much about football because we had to go to the games and I was not a jock and I was not a cheerleader, so the novels showed me another way to be,” Madden-Lunsford said.
With her own work, Madden-Lunsford said she draws inspiration from being a mother of three children, seasons, and stories about family members.
“To tell their story is to keep them alive and so having to say goodbye so much, I hung on and remembered and now it’s coming out in stories,” she said.
Madden-Lunsford said one of her favorite projects has been writing a picture book, Ernestine’s Milky Way, about her friend Ernestine.
“I met a woman named Ernestine. She was deeply a mountain woman. She was bossy and funny and then she told me about her job as a little girl to carry milk. I thought that would make a great picture book, and that has led me to write more picture books,” Madden-Lunsford said.
She said she also enjoys telling women’s and girls’ stories.
“All my novels have been about girls wanting adventure and more than what their families told them they could have,” she said. “Meeting other women writers, supporting women writers, telling women’s stories, we just have to keep telling more and more. That’s been a joy for me as a writer.”
Madden-Lunsford said she did not set out to be a professor and instead just wanted to write stories. Working on a biography of Harper Lee brought her to Alabama, before being hired at UAB.
“I feel like my students are my colleagues and we’re all in it together,” she said. “It means that my writing community got so much bigger and my friendships got deeper. It’s so exciting to see new work come out into the world that began in a workshop.”
She said huge challenge for her has been her son’s addiction.
“Other families are going through this. I think we need to talk about it more because sometimes it is like a shameful secret. It’s important to learn to cope and realize that we deserve lives too,” Madden-Lunsford said.
She is currently writing a children’s novel on the topic from a little boy’s point of view.
“It’s writing the pain through the silence.Let’s talk about this and make something good come out of this grief,” she said.
Madden-Lunsford said although it is difficult she tries to live in the moment instead of planning for the future.
“If you are always in the past or always in the future, you can’t be right here.” Madden Lunsford said.
