Q&A: tyrese coleman

by Melody Tootoonchi

If you want to catch Tyrese Coleman, you’d better already be running. In addition to being a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she keeps busy as a wife, a mother, an attorney, a writing instructor at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, and an associate editor at Smokelong Quarterly. But once you get a hold of her, as I was fortunate enough to do, she will captivate you in conversation just as she does in her writing. Tyrese is a mix of honesty and edge, conveying the hard truths of life in her writing while still maintaining a level of lightheartedness. Her work features topics such as motherhood, familial relationships and their strains, voices from the not-so-heard, and the navigation of different stages of life. Her fiction can be found in [PANK], Queen Mob’s Tea House, the Tahoma Literary Review, and Hobart, while her nonfiction can be found in Buzzfeed, mater mea, Literary Hub, Washingtonian Magazine, and The Rumpus.

Her contribution to Grace in Darkness, a flash piece entitled “Uncle Pug,” first appeared in the journal 1:1000 and gives a glimpse into the life of Pug, an old man with one leg who makes his way to the family house with a resounding “huff-plat, huff-plat,” and it raises the question of how much we should believe tall tales we may hear from our elders. “Uncle Pug” shows Tyrese’s affinity for character voice, inspiration from real life moments or people, and the parallels that can be drawn between life and art—all of which (and more) I had the opportunity to discuss with her.  

First, I’m interested in where you draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. I’ve seen that a lot of your stories are inspired by real life people or events (like “Uncle Pug” being inspired by your real Uncle Pug, for instance). Since some of your fiction is so heavily influenced by real aspects of your life, how do you decide what should be presented to the public as a fictional story or as a nonfiction piece? Is it a matter of how you process the real-life aspects as you write?

​I don't really make conscious decisions about where to draw the line. Some stories may be entirely based on real life occurrences (like “How to Sit”) and others may only contain a few facts that I always thought were funny or interesting, such as how my Uncle Pug loved The Golden Girls. It depends on the piece and how it unfolds during the writing process.

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I’ve also noticed that pop culture elements act as a driving force for a lot of your work. In “Uncle Pug,” we get that love of The Golden Girls, there’s an Al Green song mentioned in “How to Sit,” you have an entire Buzzfeed article on Outlander, and “They Reminisce Over You” is emotionally energized with Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth’s “T.R.O.Y.” How much does pop culture influence your creativity? 

I think stories that do not involve some aspect of pop culture are unrealistic. I've always hated the advice not to include cultural references in stories because it dates the story. I am not afraid of my work feeling dated. We all read Jane Austen and other classical writers who reference the way of their contemporary world, and no one says that they can’t understand or read such works because they don’t reflect current society. If we don't include references to pop culture, we risk not giving our characters full, well-rounded worlds and lives.

On the topic of characterization, you’ve said that you consider voice to be more important than plot in a story, and I was wondering if you could expand on that and tell me why that is.

I think it depends on the length of the story. Obviously if it’s a longer story, plot is going to be pretty important. However, I think voice, especially in flash fiction or flash memoir, is more important than plot because it makes your work stand out against everyone else’s. Sometimes people get bogged down with details and plot, and it doesn’t sound as interesting as you may think when you’re writing it. But if you’re able to make your voice really pop, then your work feels different than all the other 8 million people who are out there writing.
I personally appreciate really good voice in a story, as long as it’s not too confusing. Sometimes people confuse style and voice and want to do too much, so you have to be careful that your voice isn’t distracting from everything else working in the piece.

I totally agree, and that’s something that I picked up on in your work—that the voice stands out a lot. I’ve also noticed that you tend to write stories from the perspective of young people—people who are finding themselves or who think that they already know who they are—and oftentimes their stories are interwoven with the stories of older family members. Why do you tend to choose this perspective?

Thank you! It’s funny because I think I’m starting to head out of that kind of writing, away from that kind of story. But previously it was part of me examining myself and my history. You had a question about autobiographical writing, and a lot of those stories are because I wanted to explore my own life in a lot of ways. So they’re probably pieces that have some aspect of true life wrapped in somewhere, or rather a true event. But I think that’s where we all start off. When we’re trying to examine ourselves we start off thinking about our childhoods. I think it’s a natural theme or a natural kind of subject matter. But most of the things I’ve written recently that haven’t been published yet are from other perspectives.

Can you talk about some of those perspectives?

They are mostly from people who are around my age—in their thirties or forties—talking about life or regrets, and these aren’t necessarily autobiographical. It’s more like I just want to explore different topics.

You’ve said that “Uncle Pug” is one of your favorite pieces that you’ve written and that it’s inspired by your real life Uncle Pug, so I was just wondering what makes this story so dear to you. Is it that connection to your uncle?

I just always liked it because there were a bunch of little things that I thought were fun to write about it, like The Golden Girls. But I think part of the reason why I enjoyed it was because the process itself was so fun and interesting.
I found this journal, 1:1000, that does stories based on image prompts. You pick from their image bank and you write a story that’s 1,000 words or less to that image. And once they accept your piece, their editing process is a workshop. So it’s not so much like, “Here’s your edits. Can you fix this?” It’s more like, “What do you think of this? What do you think of that?” All the editors collaborate with your piece. I think I was able to pull out this really unique thing about this character, and going through that process, seeing their thoughts in real time, also helped me learn how to tighten my work. This was before I was working for any journal or doing a lot of publishing—it was one of the very first pieces I ever published—so having gone through that process also helped me in the future—in working in the future.

In the story “Uncle Pug,” setting seems to play a large role.  It’s what shows the sort of physical separation between Uncle Pug and the rest of the family in the house, and it also shows the lengths he goes to in order to get to them. Was the setting an important part of your imagining the story?

That actually comes from the image that was associated with the piece. It showed a small, really rundown, white house with a dilapidated look. It looked like an old house in the south.
My uncle used to live in a teeny-tiny shack like that. He had one leg and would walk every day from his shack to our house, and that’s where he spent a lot of his time: at our house. But he would go back and forth. When I saw the image, that’s what it reminded me of.

Now that we’re getting closer to the character of Uncle Pug himself, I was wondering how you would define him. I got the sense that he’s almost a man of illusion, because he does live in the rundown shack but always wears those crisp, ironed clothes and never mentions the stench of his “piss-and-shit pot” that he has to walk past every day, and he’s always telling those tall tales of his past. How much does illusion or image play into his character?

When I was writing this, in my mind I was actually thinking Uncle Pug was gay, and that he’s saying these things to impress his niece’s boyfriend. But really that’s not who he is. There are still a lot of interesting things about his life. It’s just not who he really is. He’s sort of living in a fantasy, because he’s old and hasn’t really done anything with his life, and he’d rather think of himself as this man who could be with Blanche, or maybe not necessarily with Blanche but with anyone. What he wants is to be more than what he is. He’d rather romanticize how he lost his leg than talk about the truth. And he can be that way around his niece’s boyfriend, but the rest of the family isn’t as naïve because they actually have to take care of him.

That actually gave this whole new light to the story that’s very interesting, because one of my favorite parts was when he was talking about Blanche and telling all these crazy stories. There were a lot of parallels between the scene happening in The Golden Girls episode and the scene happening in the story—themes like dignity, loneliness, and pretending.


Yeah, I think in that episode—it’s a real episode of The Golden Girls, by the way—Blanche is also under the impression that she’s something she’s not. And both Blanche and Uncle Pug think that other people are falling for this illusion, to use your word, that they’re trying to put out there, but people aren’t actually falling for it, which is another parallel between the two of them.