About Angela
I grew up in Greensboro, N.C., in a family of writers. My first stories were made up for my younger brother (tales which he passed on to his children) and I kept writing all through school. At Duke University, I had the good fortune to study with the great writing teacher William Blackburn, who gave me excellent criticism and much encouragement. When I read my first story aloud, he led the class in applause. I went on to work with some fine teachers at the University of N.C. at Greensboro, where I received an M.F.A. But it wasn't until I was in my thirties that I was seized by material that felt like mine alone. I began to write a novel—encouraged by writer Doris Betts—that became Felice (Random House 1982). Felice is set in Nova Scotia and was inspired by my grandmother's growing up there, an orphan in a convent. My second novel, Forms of Shelter (Ticknor & Fields, 1991) is about a girl growing up in a charged family atmosphere. She takes refuge from the increasingly difficult circumstances of her life in a treehouse that her stepfather has built for her. My third novel, Plum Wine, was published by the University of Wisconsin in Spring 2006. It is set in Japan, where I lived for a year—my first job—teaching English. I'd been wanting to write about Japan ever since that time, but it took years of experience to have the technical ability and courage to write this book. The main character, an American woman, is bequeathed papers wrapped around plum wine bottles by Michi-san, her surrogate Japanese mother. She and her translator—with whom she falls in love—find narratives by Michi and her mother. World War II, and particularly the bombing of Hiroshima, are at the heart of the papers; in the novel, war and its effects are shown through the lens of an intimate love relationship.
I am at work on a fourth novel, Butterfly’s Child, for which I won a North Carolina Artists Fellowship in 2003. I have also published short stories and personal essays in literary magazines and anthologies, such as Shenandoah, The Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, and Blackbird (this one is on line). I am particularly interested in the short-short story form, and have won a couple of awards for short-shorts from STORY Magazine and Writer’s Digest.
Since 1986, I have been teaching creative writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. I love teaching as much as writing, and it will always be part of my life. Many of us in the South who are writing teachers are passing on what we have learned from our teachers; maybe that’s why the region is so full of writers.
Every novel and story has come from a passionate need to write it. Plum Wine was inspired in part by a visit to Hiroshima and by conversations with people who lived through the bombing. At the time I couldn’t imagine myself writing fiction about the atomic bombing, but I found that Hiroshima became the central element of this novel. My work in progress has to do with racial prejudice, which I found deeply disturbing as I was growing up in the South. I am aware in this new novel that I am translating my concerns about race to the particular problems experienced by Japanese Americans in the early 20th century. Some of my work has autobiographical seeds and even when I’m purely making things up the material comes from my essence. Often I’m inspired by a cluster of images or an idea that haunts me. Language—at the word and sentence level—matters a lot to me. My objective is to write about emotion nailed down in the most precise language I can find.
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