DiAnne Malone is a writer and the founder of Who’s That Lady Blog. She is also a published author, college professor, and administrator. DiAnne first fell in love with words at the age of three and became an avid reader from that point on. Writing for her came later, and she published her first poem while in middle school. Writing what she terms bad poetry led her to dismiss writing by the time she got to college. But in graduate school, she picked up writing once again, and by the time she had obtained her MFA in Creative Nonfiction, she had published a few pieces of nonfiction in literary journals across the United States. She has collaborated on several book projects including, 7 Women 7 Words: A Collection of Inspirational Essays. On this project, 7 women wrote personal essays on the words: HER, SHOES, IMAGE, ANGER, HIM, HELP, SEXY. In this interview, DiAnne shares with us her exciting experiences of collaborating on this book project. As you read, be inspired to live a life full of meaning.
Dianne, please tell us a little about yourself. Who is DiAnne Malone?
Okay. I am originally from Louisiana, so that makes me a die-hard southern girl. I always tell people, I love the south and all its flaws; I will never leave the south, I can’t see myself leaving the south at all. So, all of that, everything that encompasses is, I think, a bit of what makes me who I am. I am a mother of three; I have an 18-year-old son at LSU, Louisiana State University, a fourteen-year-old, and a nine-year-old daughter. I also teach, my degrees are in writing and English, so I teach a lot of English courses, grammar, literature, but my terminal degree is in creative non-fiction, so l love writing essays and I guess that’s kind of the beginning of who I am as a writer. I didn’t know I would end up here when I was ten or 11 years old, but they say children who experience trauma and stuff earlier on in their life tend to have an artistic bent, and I guess in a way that may be, and that’s what makes me a little bit of who I am as well. I didn’t have, I wouldn’t say, significant trauma, but my mum died when I was seven, so I was raised by my grandmother for a little while, but she died as well, so I was raised by my aunt. So, it was a lot of dark times in my early childhood, but I had a really good family, which kind of breached the gap for me. So, when people ask me if I had a horrible childhood, I can’t say that I did, but there was a lot of pain there and some feeling of abandonment that my family really helped me get over. I am married, I have been married for twenty years, my husband is from Memphis, which is how I ended up here in Memphis Tennessee, and I have been in Memphis since 2006, I think, and I have made it my home.
Let’s talk about your writing journey. I understand that you fell in love with words at the age of three. When and how did your writing journey begin?
Okay. So, they tell me I was reading at three, and also writing at three; I remember reading, but I don’t remember writing at three. I do remember, like maybe about 7 or 8, writing a little bit, but I don’t think it was anything intentional I just think it was like a lot of 7-year-olds or eight-year-olds surprised by pencil and paper and so they use a lot of it. But I think my real writing began probably when I was in sixth grade, and that’s when I wrote my first poem, and that poem was published in a magazine. And I wrote a lot of bad poetry after that, and I wasn’t like a story writer until I got to grad school, and I was finishing up my masters in American literature, and my certificate in African American literature. I took a course in creative writing, and the teacher told me, you need to be writing; you are a writer, and I said, okay. And I started experimenting first with just non-fiction stories in my life and then kind of moving on to short stories and fiction and just kind of exploring it. I have always been the kind of person who likes to try something just to say I’ve tried it, I don’t want to live life with those types of regrets, so I tried writing, and fortunately I loved it. Because I was already an avid reader, you have to be an avid reader to be a good writer, it just kind of fuelled that passion for writing, and I have just been doing it ever since; either teaching it or doing it, and I’m enjoying it so much.
DiAnne, I see that you are the founder of Who’s That Lady Blog. Please tell us, when and how did this start, and what is the vision?
That started with a speech, like I was doing a speech for women’s day, and I guess the topic for that speech was, Who’s that lady? And I guess what I was trying to channel was, I think when women walk into a room, they should bring that essence with them, people should turn around and say, who is that? There should be something in you that exudes, that calls people to pay attention, and it shouldn’t be something that you contrive, it should be something about who you are. And you don’t want the who’s that lady to be like, ugh, who’s that ugh. You want it to be like intrigue and mystery, like oh, who’s that? And so that’s kind of how I crafted that speech, like, what is it about you that makes people turn around and pay attention? How is your light shining? Or is it? Because if it is not, that’s a whole other problem. So, when I finished that speech, someone came up to me and said, you need to write about that, and I was like, okay. And I was like, well, I need a platform and so that’s how the blog came to be. I had never done a blog. I knew nothing about setting up a blog, I just got in there, and I said, I’m going to try this, and I started writing and got an audience of maybe about a hundred and fifty people initially, and it gradually moved up to two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred people just paying attention to it, responding, commenting, asking me to write about certain things, and I said, wow! I needed to call in people to help, to write with me, and I asked them to write in their area of expertise. And that’s just kind of how who’s that lady was born. And I have been off the blog, either writing projects or if my kids need some type of special attention I’ll come off for a minute, six months, three months, I’ve been off a year before, but I always try to come back, I always keep it in circulation. I keep the site up because you can always revisit, and there are about seven hundred blogs on there right now, I believe. So, there’s always something to come back to, and I often go back and read it myself when I need encouragement in certain stages of my life.
That’s wonderful. So, what impact has the blog had so far?
Well, that’s hard to measure. I think, that when I am off the blog, and I get like fourteen emails in a month saying, when are you coming back? Obviously that’s impacting someone, but also too I have had people, and I guess I have been kind of leery about it too, but I’ve had people from different states say things like, our women’s group is really enjoying your blog, and you’ve done a lot of things with it, could you come and talk to us about that? Sometimes, I will, if it is close, and it’s near, and I feel safe. If it is too far, I do get a little nervous because I’m like, oh gosh I don’t know who this is or what they’re doing. But at the same time, what I think is interesting too is men who read the blog and actually follow it. It is really interesting, about four or five weeks ago, a young man in-boxed me on Facebook and said, so I’m interested in being a part of this blog. And I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a male perspective on certain things? I’ve asked my husband to share his perspective, and he is not as committed because this is not his thing, but he does have wonderful things to say. And so the impact is more far-reaching than I think because sometimes when I’m off the blog, I think that nobody cares about this, that this has run its course, but by the time I get to that thought, somebody comes up and says, when are you going to come back on the blog or I read this at work, and I was in tears. And that is kind of how I try to gauge what the blog has achieved. So, there’s definitely a community of women out there that need each other and need the encouragement and are really plugged in to what the blog is trying to do.
So, would you say it has achieved the purpose for which you initially created it?
I think more so, yes. I think it has definitely expanded past what I thought. I was just trying something; I had no idea that it would grow the way that it did.
Let’s talk about, 7 Women 7 Words: A Collection of Inspirational Essays, this is a book that you recently co-authored. What is this book about, and how did the idea come about?
Okay. Again, this is a blog spinoff. My sister and I like to try projects, and she asked me at the end of the year, what are we going to do now? So, what I’ve always wanted to do is do a book based on a blog and I had at that time, twelve writers, twelve women who wrote for me on the blog, and I sent out a call and I said, I want to do this book of inspirational essays, and I want to do it with you guys because I know you. Now mind you, some of the women on the blog had never met, and several of them I’d never seen before in my life, but they reached out to me, or I had taught them in an online class because I teach a lot, and my students come from all over the country, and they were like can I stay connected after the class? And I was like, yes, sure, and they started writing. So, I sent out a call, and seven women responded, and I think that seven is such a wonderful number, it’s the number of completion, and I feel like it was a divine number. And so, when they responded to the call, I sat down with my sister and we came up with fifty words that women would want to hear more about. We dwindled it down to twenty, and finally we dwindled it down to ten. We took those ten words and sent them to the seven women and said, each one of you write about a seven hundred word essay on these ten words and then we got together before the book was to be published, we had a writer’s retreat. All weekend, all we did was workshop, and correct it, edit it, proofread, and cry. We got into arguments, we made up again, we ate, and then we wrote some more. And what came out of it were the seven best essays, per woman, around the same seven words. And it’s always interesting to see how people view one word in so many different ways. And so, I collected all of those, and I went back and laid the book out, and designed the cover, and that’s how it came to be. So, it was just something I wanted to do, connect this women and kind of prove that when you get seven women in a room, it doesn’t have to be chaos, and spitefulness, and pettiness, and drama, like it could be.
How did the women feel about sharing their stories and being part of this project?
I think initially, they were very excited, but then when we got to workshop, I put my teaching hat on, and I got to digging deeper into these essays. And I was saying, that’s not it, you’re not being vulnerable, tell us the truth, we want to hear it all, if you’re going to withhold yourself from the page, you may not be the person who needs to be a part of this project because we want honesty, we want transparency, what is underneath this? And I think that gave a lot of the women trepidation, and they felt, I think, stripped, as if I was ripping off bandages, opening old wounds. And I think that’s the point where you realise maybe there’s something not healed here, and if I can look at it on the page and just call it what it is, give it a name, and then deal with that under that name, then I’ve done some really great work for myself and for my audience. So, I feel like after the workshop, when they sat down, and they looked at their thesis, and just how much it spoke to them, I think there was thankfulness there. Because they realised, so this was what was in me? And I didn’t know, and this was healing, and I’m not embarrassed to share this with you, and I’m not embarrassed to let other people see my soul just absolutely naked about this thing. And in that way, I think in that way, it was transformative for the women. We got to know each other better, there was just so many things we had to discuss, and just kind of tease out during that time because if they didn’t grow, something wasn’t right, and I believe that they all grew, we all grew with this project.
So obviously, the book has had an impact on the writers first and foremost, but what impact has it had on the readers?
I think it depends. We have two sets of readers; we have a set of readers who are actually writers, and they kind of honed in more on the writing, right? And then we had this other set of women who were just women who wanted to hear true stories, transformative stories. And I think for the readers, especially when we did our first book signing and people just kept coming, which we were just completely surprised by because book signings are usually not like that, people don’t show up, you have all this food left. But they kept coming, and they were asking questions, and a lot of those questions were about, how did you get along? How did you work with seven women, seven personalities, at different ages and stages in life? How did they get along? And so, I think what the book does for our readers, specifically our women readers – the ones who were just reading for encouragement – it just says well, this can happen, seven women can get along. And it was kind of symbiotic because the writers too felt more confident about their relationship with other women, and more comfortable about themselves as writers, because the readers who were from a literary background were complimenting the women so much on just the nice writing that was in the book. Because my name was at the top I couldn’t produce a bad product, so I needed them to give me their best work, and they rose to the challenge so well that even people with a background in literature were like, this is some good writing. So it affected them in ways that I did not expect, for people to say, do they have any training in writing or creative non-fiction formal training? And for me to be able to say, no, and these women holding their own with these words, I think that has set wonderment in the readers and confidence in the writers, and that’s really something that you can’t really measure. It’s just something that’s there, and you feel it.
What did you find most challenging about the entire process of the book project, and what was most rewarding?
The thing that I found most challenging is really the simplest thing ever. As soon as we did this whole photoshoot thing, many of the women were dissatisfied with their pictures. Oh, there’s a glare on me, I don’t like that my arms are out. I am trying to design a cover that gives a really good impression of who we are and how we stand, and we were all like, I don’t like my hair, my make-up was not done well, and that was to me most challenging, like, are you serious? We have gotten this far, and we’re hung up on pictures? And it wasn’t just them; it was me too. I think we were just nitpicking at things. So, I found that challenging. And again, I will have to say, not challenging for me, but I think for the writers, just the whole workshopping process was challenging. And again, getting things in on time, I was like, you all know we have to have this in on time for me to do this. And we all lead busy lives, and I think I was late on one of mine actually. But just having to keep saying, like this is important too, we started this, we’ll finish it, those things are challenging, because you still want to be able to maintain positive friendships and relationships with these women when it’s over, and so to have to lay down the hammer on certain things, and they’re looking at me like, lady… I think that was challenging, as well. But the most rewarding part is when one of the writers, she was excited that she had a book in her hand that she had written, and her name was in print. I think for her that was one of the greatest gifts to have as a writer, to say I wrote this, and this is me here on the cover, and this is my bio in the back. I think being a part of that, was rewarding for me. I mean, I think to see these women who never even dreamed of being writers, or being in a book, or writing anything, to see that happen for them, and how it influenced how they moved in the world from that point on, that was extremely rewarding.
This sounds like a great book, where can people get it to buy?
It is on Amazon; it is in kindle format and print format; I like the visual of the print book, but it’s on amazon.com, and you can Goggle it, 7 Women 7 Stories, and it should pop right up. And people in town know that they can get it from us.
What words of inspiration do you have for the women listening?
I have one daughter, and this is something I tell her every morning when she gets out of the car. I tell her you are beautiful, brave, strong, and powerful. I tell her that every morning when she gets out of the car. And she says, and you are too. She’s nine. So, I think that’s kind of like the mantra I have, that’s been my mantra ever since she was five years old, and I feel like that’s a very womanist mantra as well. I feel that women are beautiful, brave, strong, and powerful, and I think that that falls into what it means for Who’s That Lady. I feel like many times women misplace who they are, like either they misplace it in the way that they look, or how much of their body they show and all of this, but there is something, like when women walk in the room, everybody is supposed to pause, everybody is supposed to look at them like wow, and there’s a space in life where you have to find what it is about you that makes people pause. And if you find out that it is something negative or something that you’re faking, and you just can’t keep up, that’s not the thing. You have to find the real thing because once you do, it builds your confidence, and you don’t feel like you have to walk with your head down when you walk around. And get some help if you can’t find that thing or get some help if you’re experiencing some trauma in your life that’s pushing down who you really are as a woman; like go through some therapy, work that out. Because I think women need to feel what it’s like to walk in and stand tall with her shoulders back and know that this space that I am in, I can command it if I want to. That bravery, that power, that beauty, all of that strength of a woman, that’s in every single woman should be allowed to come out, and it should be allowed to accept change and throw light everywhere. Where you come in and all of a sudden, the light gets bright, the room just lights up, that’s what I want for every single woman. And there’s a way to get it, and there’s no one pill you can swallow to make that happen, you just have to be really dogged about finding out what that is and I think once you do, there’s absolutely nothing that will hold you back from walking completely and totally in your purpose for every single day.
How can people contact you?
I can be contacted via email; I have two emails that I use; the one that pops up on my phone is diannelmalone@icloud.com, and then the email affiliated with my blog is dianne@diannemalone.com. I can be reached at either of those email addresses.
