Poet Mildred Kiconco Barya Aims to be Present… in the Present
By Meg Hale Brunton
Writer, poet and Associate Professor Mildred Kiconco Barya says she first started thinking like a writer as a child, growing up on a farm in the village of Kabale, Uganda. She would observe the interactions between the cows and goats and make up stories about their relationships to entertain herself. Later, she started writing letters about her life to an imaginary penpal and hiding them under her pillow. “I wanted to describe my world and also was curious about other people’s worlds,” Mildred says, looking back on her childhood.
Over the years, Mildred has developed a love for a variety of writing styles and techniques. In 2008, she was awarded the Pan African Literary Forum prize for Africana Fiction. No matter what style she writes in, Mildred feels that her poetry is at the core of it. “If I trace my progress, poetry has always been there,” Mildred says. “I think the wellspring of creativity, of everything I write, whether they take the form of fiction or nonfiction, they are all coming from the poetry.”
Mildred attended Makerere University in Uganda and earned her Bachelor’s degree in Literature and Mass Communication. After graduating, she landed a job as a journalist with the Monitor Newspaper in Kampala. She also began volunteering with the Ugandan Women’s Writers Association, FEMRITE, which helped her grow as a writer. “You have to try to experiment and innovate in order to get outside what you know to make the work interesting,” Mildred says of writing. “Each piece is asking me to do something new and I like that challenge because it keeps me engaged and curious.” In 1998, Mildred published her first short story in FEMRITE’s Uganda Women’s Writing Anthology. She went on to publish her first book of poetry, Men Love Chocolates but They Don’t Say in 2002.
Though she learned a lot from her four years with the newspaper, Mildred says she could feel herself tiring of the formulaic nature of the journalistic writing style.This was not the case with creative writing, which she says was like a bottomless well of potential. Mildred decided to leave journalism and return to school, where she got her Master’s degree in Organizational Psychology.
Photo Credit: Todd Crawford
From there, Mildred got a job as a Human Resources Consultant, which she says combined her love of creative problem solving and studying human behavior. “I just wanted to know people,” Mildred recalls. “I realized that a lot of what happened in organizations made sense to me if I put a creative lens to it.” She hoped that the job would mesh well with her writing schedule. While Mildred did find time to publish her second collection of poems, The Price of Memory: After the Tsunami in 2006, she found that her job left her with little time and energy to write creatively.
Mildred was then presented with an opportunity to participate in a nine-month fellowship in Senegal under the mentorship of a writer she admired, Ayi Kwei Armah. After completing the fellowship, she was approached by one of the founders of the TrustAfrica Foundation, who offered her a position as an organizational writer in residence. She took it and moved to Dakar. While there, she also published her third book of poetry, Give Me Room to Move My Feet.
In 2009, Mildred moved to New York state to attend the MFA program at Syracuse University. As part of the curriculum, she was required to teach, which she was surprised to find she really enjoyed. “Teaching is what I had ignored, but what I needed all along,” she explains, citing that both of her parents were teachers. Following that, Mildred got her PhD in Denver, Colorado and went on to become a professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at UNC Asheville in 2016. Not only does teaching offer a symbiotic relationship with writing, Mildred also finds that reading her students’ works makes her a better editor of her own works.
Mildred has also discovered an unexpected love of creative nonfiction. In April, she published her fourth collection of poems, The Animals of My Earth School. In the next few years, she plans to release her first collection of creative nonfiction. “I feel like fiction has that magical element that just transported me to these worlds that I was exploring,” she explains. “With nonfiction, I’m super alert, super awake, and I think it’s because I am watching my life and thinking through all the lives of the people I’ve known.”
For her new book, Mildred has been writing mainly about her past, growing up in Uganda and living in the diaspora, which she remains deeply connected to. Despite this connection, Mildred says it is paramount for her to be rooted in the present moment. “I feel like when I was growing up, I was so much in the future. I was imagining what my life would be like beyond the mountains of my hometown. It’s finally dawned on me that the future came. This is the future for me,” she says. “Aim to be in the present always and the future will take care of itself. What’s in the future that can be better than this moment right now?”
To learn more about Mildred Barya or her works, visit her website: https://mildredbarya.com/