By Tara Williams
Angela Morales will join us in the summer of 2018 for The Normal School’s Summer Nonfiction Workshop and Publishing Institute, July 16-29, on the Fresno State campus.
In her award-winning collection of memoir essays The Girls in My Town, Angela Morales navigates coming of age in Los Angeles as part of a Mexican-American family. In this interview, the journey continues, from the wild moors of England to life in Los Angeles as a writer, mother, wife, and English professor.
Tara Williams: If I were your fairy godmother, and I gave you a credit card with no limit that was good for one weekend only, with the conditions being you could go anywhere and do anything for that weekend with two other writers of your choice (past or present, living or dead), where would you go, and who would you take with you?
Angela Morales: Where to begin…? First, I’d narrow down my choices to spending time with dead writers as opposed to living writers because, A. I’d want to take advantage of the magic, and B. My list of living writers is too long.
That said, I’m taking my credit card and heading to Yorkshire to the home of Charlotte Brontë. She and I will embark on an all-day walk across the moors, and maybe Anne and Emily would join us? After the chilly walk, we’d cozy up by the fire and eat scones with jam, and the sisters would reveal to me all their storytelling secrets.
TW: Okay, I have to ask: why the Brontës? And I have to qualify that by confessing my expectations of romance were hopelessly distorted by reading the Brontës in my adolescence. Recently I watched a new movie adaptation of Wuthering Heights and found myself thinking, Oh my God, Heathcliff was a sociopath! That explains so much!
AM: Why the Brontës? Well, I have always admired Charlotte Brontë because she wrote her novels in the first person, with a narrator’s voice that I’m almost positive was her own voice, with novels that are very much autobiographical. Her voice is clear, steady, and stubborn. She is realistic and very no-nonsense, but quietly passionate, and I feel that, in this way, we are kindred spirits.
TW: Your credit card isn’t maxed out yet.
AM: Then I’d take the train back to London and find a good happy hour in some pub and buy drinks for Chinua Achebe, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, the Romantic Poets, E.B. White, John Muir, Chris Hitchens, and Flannery O’Connor. Oh wait… I’m only allowed two writers, so I’ll have to stick with the Brontës, I suppose, even though, technically that’s three.
TW: As your fairy godmother, I say if you go to the pub with the Brontës, you’re still technically in compliance with the conditions. And if let me know the name of the London pub where you'll be, I could kind of happen by…
AM: Any English pub will do… the smaller the better, anywhere for a nice brown ale and a baked potato.
TW: I noticed River Teeth, in their write-up for your Literary Nonfiction Prize award, described your “escape” from your parents’ appliance store, wording that also appears on the back-cover copy of the book itself, and it occurs to me to wonder if you feel you have “escaped” the influences of your earlier life. What does writing about your childhood do to the way you remember it?
AM: I’m pretty sure that I will never escape the influences of my early life, nor do I want to escape or deny or forget about those influences, even the painful ones. I’ve always felt that writing about childhood helps me to understand it better and to make order out of chaos. Maybe I’m a bit of a control freak, but I like to take the pieces of my life, or the memories, and tell the stories in a way that’s as true to memory and fact as possible, but to paint the picture of those stories in a way that finds the beauty and the meaning within them. When I write about a childhood memory, I feel like I’ve dragged it out of a burning house, cleaned off the ashes, dressed it up in its best outfit, and pushed it back out into the world, hoping that someone else will love it as much as I do.
TW: That’s a powerful image. Is there anything you can’t or won’t write about?
AM: If an idea or story appears to me and if it feels important, I hope I would be brave enough not to banish it or suppress it, no matter how embarrassing or personal. Thus far, I haven’t come across any topics that make me feel like I’ve hit that brick wall. In nonfiction, however, writers must always consider the ethics of writing about other people and how those people are portrayed. I think if your intentions are pure (meaning, that you don’t aim to destroy anybody) you can write about living people with respect and goodwill, even if it’s a difficult topic.
TW: In the intro to your book The Girls in My Town, you mention your essays growing from recollected images, such as that of your grandmother dying, which you elaborate on in “Nine Days of Ruth.” It reminded me so much of being with my own grandmother, as a mother myself, during her last days, reading aloud to her from her favorite Psalms. Do you have any further thoughts on the role of faith in parenting, in making sense of life and death?
AM: I am not a religious person, though I find much meaning and comfort in being in the wilderness and living in the world. It’s been very important for me to make sure that my children experience solitude and a kind of “nothingness” when they must “unplug” and sit in the deserts of Death Valley or maybe play on a deserted beach on the Channel Islands for days at time. I believe in God, but I think God is everywhere and that the best I can do for my children is to help them to be more mindful of the world around them. As seagulls are squawking overhead and all around us, we might find a dead seagull and notice how the seagull’s body is being eaten by flies and how the ocean waves are pulling it back to the sea. If my children can contemplate that fact of life and death right before their eyes, I think that reality is more valuable than anything I might say to them. Now that my children are a little older, we can talk about how life is really one big mystery and all we can do is search for meaningful ways to understand it.
TW: It looks as if you have so many events coming up in 2018! You’ll be with us here in Fresno for CSU Summer Arts, you’ll be with River Teeth in June, you have a steady schedule of readings and appearances. How does that busy schedule affect your writing? How do you keep it all balanced?
AM: I’m so excited and honored to participate in all these upcoming events! I’ve felt so grateful for all the positive feedback I’ve gotten on my book over the past year, and I’m still trying figure out how to schedule my life so that I have time to write. I teach full-time at a community college, so I’ve learned, over the past decade, if I want to make time to write, I must claim that writing time, no matter what. I’m trying to think of writing time the way you’d think of exercise—it’s an hour or two that you must take to be a healthier person, whether that means getting up before dawn or staying up into the witching hours. My husband, Patrick, my accomplice, has helped me to sneak away to the library or get back to my office late at night. Last month, I was lucky enough to visit Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate New York, for an entire month. I got a ton of work done while I was there, and Patrick made sure that the kids got fed and the dogs got walked. So many people are helping me to keep writing, and for this, I’m so lucky. So far, so good.
Angela Morales, a graduate of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program, is the author of The Girls in My Town, a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays 2013, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, The Southwest Review, The Los Angeles Review, Arts and Letters, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, Hobart, River Teeth, Under the Sun, and Puerto del Sol, and The Indianola Review. She is the winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, 2014, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. Currently she teaches composition and creative writing at Glendale Community College and is working on her second collection of essays. She lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband Patrick and their two children, Mira and Leo.
Tara Williams is an MFA candidate in Fresno State’s Creative Writing Fiction program. She has previously published interviews with Bich Minh Nguyen, Leonard Peltier, Julia Butterfly, and former WIBF world champion boxer Lucia Rijker.