Angela Woodward

Angela Woodward is the author of the novel Ink (2023), part of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose series. Her other books include the novels Natural Wonders (winner of the Fiction Collective Two Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize) and End of the Fire Cult, and the collections Origins and Other Stories and The Human Mind. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in many literary journals including Kenyon Review, Agni, Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s won a Pushcart Prize for short fiction and grants and awards from the Illinois Arts Council, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, The Writers Center, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and others. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I grew up as a classical violinist, and for much of my life I played music as well as wrote. The two arts seemed like different aspects of the same creative or aesthetic impulse. One of my teachers used to describe the sound he thought I should aim for with the violin as “noble,” and it was always just beyond me to get there. With my writing, I felt like I could produce a more pliable palette of emotions. My sense of narrative structure and of the rhythm of a sentence definitely harks back to my musical training. There’s a lot more variance in musical structure than what I think gets taught to writers as narrative tension, or the arc of a story. That always seems foreign and abstract to me, but I can feel the way a story needs to go more like how a sonata unfolds, the contrasts, the surprise, the use of repetition to bring a feeling back with a variation.

One piece that helped me understand what I was doing with my writing was a Stravinsky piece called Eight Orchestral Miniatures. I was rehearsing the piece in a community orchestra at the same time I was writing my first book, The Human Mind, and something about it was really penetrating me. Each of the slivers of music has an exquisite mood, and it lasts just a few minutes. Then it’s on to the next miniature, which is completely different. I translated this for myself as “Get in. Get out. Get on with it.” Meaning there’s no need to belabor the image or the scene or the chapter. Just create the impression you came to create, and then do a different one.

Also, listening to musicians improvise always opens doors for me, hearing how much the structure can wander and go astray, and then come back to something that sounds like home. I heard the jazz guitarist Julian Lage play recently and actually screamed—along with a lot of dudes standing next to me—when after a hypnotic fifteen minutes or so, he picked up the melody that had started in what seemed now the distant past. You can’t really map that structure, but it was thrilling.

What period of history do you wish you knew more about?

I could go back to the great Meso-American civilizations. I’ve always been intrigued by the fallen or vanished cities of the Maya, though I know almost nothing about them. This is just an idle interest. Closer to home I’m drawn to the 1930s for a couple reasons. It’s almost within living history for my family. I was told my grandmother bred and sold Persian kittens to keep afloat during the Depression. A lot of the writing from that decade is much more explicitly political than I think we even realize is possible today. We’ve kind of buried the labor history and the strife of that era. To see writers of that time, like Meridel Le Sueur, bring their politics into their fiction so seamlessly probably strikes an American reader now as very foreign.

Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?

I’m pretty merciless in letting something go after a few pages. If someone I trust has made a strong recommendation, I’ll hold on longer. But there’s enough out there to read without forcing myself through something that’s not for me.

Is there another profession you would like to try?

My dream job is to work in a plant nursery a few days a week, moving hoses around a humid greenhouse.

What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?

Being a writer is the quiet, daily, thankless work of sitting down at the desk and at least looking over the words of a work in progress. It’s very inner work, for me usually done in the dark of the early morning. Though others might eventually read what I write, the drive to create starts as fulfillment for myself alone. Being an author is that outer work of conveying the book or whatever to the world. I always think the reader knows far more about my stuff than I do, but I try to see my author self as a good ambassador. The author’s job is to open the door for the reader, usher the reader to the book. Often that’s when I’m really startled and gratified, when the author meets a reader who sees something in the book that the writer didn’t know was there.