Episode 22: Anticipating Spring with Poet Michael McFee

Poet Michael McFee talks about his anticipation of winter ending and spring beginning when he strolls through Coker Arboretum on the UNC–Chapel Hill campus. The harbinger of spring is the First Breath of Spring, also known as Lonicera fragrantissima, or winter honeysuckle—also known as “a gorgeous weed.” Michael talks about his years of visiting the arboretum, “the Central Park” of Chapel Hill, and the importance of paying attention, which is at the heart of all writing.

Michael McFee earned his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) from UNC–Chapel Hill. He left graduate school to work a variety of jobs—editorial assistant, librarian, and freelance journalist among them—while he completed his first book. After it was published, he taught part-time at N.C. State University and  UNC–Greensboro. In the late 1980s, McFee was poet-in-residence at Cornell University, and also at Lawrence University. He began teaching at UNC–Chapel Hill in 1990, where he is now Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program. In 2018, McFee was awarded the North Carolina Award for literature, the state's highest civilian honor.

Much of McFee's work deals with his native North Carolina mountains. His book of poems Earthly (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was co-winner of the Roanoake-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, and was an honorable mention for the Poets' Prize; his next collection, Shinemaster (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association. He also wrote a book of one-line poems, The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press, 2007); That Was Oasis (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012); We Were Once Here (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017); and A Long Time to Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022).