operating as a composer: Angela Woodward on Musicality, Collision, and reading about puppies

Angela Woodward’s latest novel Ink is available now from University Press of Kentucky. Woodward is the author of the novels Natural Wonders, winner of the Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, and End of the Fire Cult. Her other works include Origins and Other Stories, winner of the Collagist Magazine prose chapbook competition, and the collection The Human Mind. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web collection. Her work has won statewide awards from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and the Illinois Arts Council. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

On February 2nd, 2023, Angela Woodward joined The Interlochen Review editors Elizabeth Keller, Greer Engle-Roe, Kaydance Rice, and Tyler Penfold for a conversation about her short stories and her new novel Ink.

ELIZABETH KELLER: Thinking about Ink, did you start the book wanting to write about the history of ink?

ANGELA WOODWARD: What I’d been working with for the longest time is the transcriptions from the detainees at Abu Ghraib, and I was like “How am I getting at that?”

There’s this story I have from 2015 or 2016 called “New Technologies of Reading,” where I was using stuff that came from the New York Times. It wasn’t the direct transcriptions, but it was what had been quoted in the newspaper and I was like, “there’s something really powerful here, this is something I’m gonna follow.”

Then I have two other short stories, neither of which I’m very happy with. They were very dark, and again they were using the story of Abu Ghraib without the direct quotations, but looking at those I’m like, “I’m not getting where I want to get with this.” It was really frustrating, knowing I was close to something but not hitting it. I had a bunch of random stuff that was a little bit encyclopedic. One of them was called “Animal Locomotion,” and it’s similar to Ink where it’s just listing a lot of stuff, but it had the idea of women running out of the room when they encountered some of this material. Then there was one called “Ink” that was really about six of the ink chapters in here and then there was a third piece that went with that that was actually about eating insects. Then I was like, “how do these things go together? I have no idea.” The “Ink” one just seemed the most potent, and then I was like, “well, there’s ink, so there’s blood, so there’s urine, so there’s soap.” That conglomeration I was fiddling with for a long time, and then I got this idea that there was this other narrative about the typists and I was like “Oh! There’s this very human story and this very abstract story of the liquids,” and then I was like “No, this is Ink.”

I was able to break up those ink chapters apart and write more of it but organize the whole book through the ink. So just as I kept at it, it all came together. And ink is the strongest element and the most coherent and the one that’s the title of the book and all that, but it took a lot to figure out that I could use that to get at what I was really trying to say, which was about the detainee abuse.

GREER ENGLE-ROE: What made you want to insert yourself into the story as the author, or is this character even a representation of you? You ended the story with the author’s perspective of going out onto the lake, what made you want to end there? I sort of felt that Sylvia’s part was the narrative, what made you want to end with the writer?

AW: It’s really odd that a book about torture and it’s the most audience-centric book that I’ve ever written. I’m really thinking about who is going to read this, and why, and how they’re going to feel about it. People flinch away from this material, they don’t want to hear it, and I’m like, “I want to get you there.”

I thought, what makes something approachable? And I think in creative writing circles, you hear a lot about relatability and then your teachers will say we should be able to have empathy for any character. And the Ink material is like, “why am I reading about ink?” So there has to be this, not necessarily friendly, but human narrator here.

And one of my models for this is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, if you guys have read that extraordinary book. She won every poetry prize there is for this book, which isn’t poetry, it’s essays. So you know, it’s like, “how did she get everyone to go for this?” It’s really brutal material but it’s also this humanizing thing. She’s eating breakfast in the car. I really went after what Claudia Rankine had done. I’m going to make sure that this narrator is guiding you through this whole labyrinth of material that has really dark stuff in it.

There’s the narrator, who’s a person that you can follow, and there’s the two women, and that’s the more melodramatic part of it. I want that story there because I want you to follow it, and I want you to be interested and say, “What’s going to happen?” There’s a crime committed, and we feel for this child, but I really want you to come out and say, “What is it to be a witness to a crime? And what is a crime? And how do you confront it?” So their story is another device I’m using to get you into the bigger socio-political story.

So Sylvia doesn’t really have an answer. She needs the job, and she’s going to keep on typing. It’s the narrator who is the one who’s been constructing all this. I wanted it to end on her throwing up her hands and confronting the lake, which she’s seen in one way throughout the entire book and at the end of it she’s like, “Oh my god, the water is sparkling, it’s moving, it’s all these deceitful things I didn’t think it was.” That’s her realization, and that’s how it made sense to me. You might read it differently, but that’s what I was aiming for.

GER: Ink starts with this fragment of brutality that is itself transcribed from an interview. Gradually we begin to see more of these fragments throughout the story. How did you go about balancing how much to reveal in the details of what happened to the detainees of Abu Ghraib?

AW: You know, I had these transcriptions, which are a public record. You can find them unless the Washington Post has taken them down. They were all there, and the URL is in the back of the book, so that was publicly available. And I have the names of the men, though I didn’t record the names.

But my thing is that I can’t tell their story. I’m not the person who can say, “Oh my god, this is what these men suffered!” They’re saying that, and all I can do is say, “This is how we take that in.” So I was very careful not to edit their statements in any way, where I put them in I was really careful. I just took sentences out of them, but these are their exact words as conveyed in English. They had a thing where numbers under ten are as numerals, and copy editors are like, “No, you can’t do it that way! We have to spell them out!” Every time I had any of this excerpted, I had to say, “Don’t touch those,” because that was the least I could do to honor their words.

One way we’re repelled from violence is it’s too rough. We don’t want to think about it — it had nothing to do with us, we want to get away with it. And on the other hand, there’s a kind of trauma porn where you’re just making a spectacle out of something that’s awful, and you’re still not processing it honestly. That’s what I’m trying to do with this book, is to get people to honestly look at what this is, authentically feel it, and authentically see where they are in the world that includes this. So that’s a fine balance.

EK: A lot of your works, Ink especially, but also short stories like “Flinching,” explore ideas of bearing witness, and processing other people's tragedies. Is it a conscious choice to return to these themes? How do you view your role as the author in bearing witness and documenting other stories?

AW: “Flinching” is one of the rehearsals for this book, and actually one that I’m not that happy with. Since 2015, everything I was doing was trying to get closer to what I ended up doing here, which I’m very happy with. I feel like bearing witness has been a part of my work for a long time, but perhaps I’m the only one who sees it.

In a way, a lot of my work is fantastical. My earlier novel, End of the Fire Cult, is about a couple who’s separating, and they each have an imaginary country, and almost the entire novel happens in each of their countries. There’s a couple scenes in their apartment, but mostly it's all in this imaginary world. There, I’m dealing with the escapism of fantasy, and I think it's really important that people have that escape. That being said, if you stay there, what are you neglecting in the real world? I think that’s something that I’ve pushed at in everything that I’ve done that’s touching on fantasies. I like to ask, “what are you using these for? What is this setting itself up against?” As the author I want to say, “I’m giving you this fantasy and I’m showing you these people involved in the fantasy but I want the relationship to the real world to still be seen.” For me, it’s a different sense of bearing witness. In Ink, I got a lot closer to our geopolitics, which I don’t think I’ve touched on that much in my other writings. But to me, it's not surprising. I know I was aiming for this for a long time.

GER: In your short story, “Waves that Sink Small Craft,” I find there is a strong connection to Ink in the use of repetition. Have you always been drawn to language being used in a cyclical way, that one line of phrase can come back again and again? Was there a particular author or piece that inspired you with this technique?

AW: I feel it's my musicality that repetition connects with. In music, the theme comes back. I think I’m operating as a composer in a lot of ways. In that piece especially—I’m so glad you brought that up, “Waves that Sink Small Crafts” was one of the funnest pieces I’ve ever written. I used an N+4 dictionary, where you put in a word, and it gives you one four down in the dictionary. So there’s these weird random substitutions in the piece, and it's about a musician who's kind of randomizing things too. For me, it's a very musical form to deal with the repetition, and to artfully make that what holds something together.

As a writer I’m not that interested in traditional narrative, as a reader I am—there’s a lot of stuff I love that’s very narrative. I love detective fiction for example, and that’s totally plot-driven. But I couldn’t write that to save my life, it's just not in me. Repetition is what I understand, and language is what I’m interested in, and the words are my music. So I’m really coming at it as a composer.

EK: In a lot of your work, you take obsessions like ink, or coat hooks, and use research to frame the narrative. Then there’s also your essay “More Death: On Mushroom Hunting,” and the novels of Dasa Drndic, where the themes in her work tie really beautifully into your life. Do you find topics to research, and the emotional narratives that they fit into first? Or do you have that emotional beat that you want to touch on, and then look for objects that fit in?

AW: I think that they kind of collide. I’m always looking for that inspiration and hoping that something will hit me. I did have a house where I had to put some new hooks in, so there’s some reality there. I did not go as crazy on hooks as the narrator of the story does, but all those hooks actually exist. All of that stuff is real, and that’s really enchanting to me. It’s stuff that you couldn’t make up. With that you can kind of embroider the emotion that comes with it. The obsession is emphasized in the fiction, but that’s what I’m open to, and that’s what I’m hoping hits me. For the Dasa Drndic essay, I had that essay in my head for months, and I had tried to read this very dense book on European modernism and I couldn’t understand it. And then I was in the woods, looking for mushrooms, and somehow I was like “Oh, wow, that’s Dasa Drndic.” I had to write it. And then over three days I just got that all done. So for me, that essay was creating itself in my mind through the reading experience, the lived experience with the mushrooms, and then Bob dying next door. I thought, “there’s a coherence here.” As all of this stuff is hitting me, I knew I could write it. I think a lot of my stuff is like that, where stuff is building in my brain, and I know it's there, and I know the connections are there; I probably couldn’t speak them, but I knew I could write them if only I could get it down.

KAYDANCE RICE: A lot of your stories, like “One Hundred Years of Amagran Cinema,” take on this objective, or anthropological voice. I’m wondering how you approach that objectivity, and how that anthropological aspect influenced your perceptions?

AW: What I want in my language, I call it hardness. It’s not hard as in difficult, but like a hard surface, and that anthropological objectivity. That’s when I feel like I’ve really got something, and that’s what I’m going for. I really love the sheen of that, and kind of removing the personal from it. It’s as opposite as you can get from melodrama, or Bridgerton. The writers that I admire, can write stuff that’s really, really hard, and get the reader through a whole long thing, I’m like “whoa.” It's hard to get someone to pay attention through the whole thing, so that’s what I’m thinking about. I’m not thinking “what’s the friendliest thing I could write that people will understand and talk to me about?” Instead, I’m thinking, “what’s the lacquer box that I can create and still have people interested in it?” I’m going for that objectivity, that’s my goal. The downside is when you give someone something that’s that objective, they’re like, “well what’s the story?” And I’m like, “it's not really a story, it's how ink is made.” The drama of it is in the verbs. If you look at the first page of Ink, all of those verbs are really violent, like the ink being pushed into the capsules. That’s where you feel it. It’s really subtle. When you talk about ink being forced into a capsule, you’re taking that in in a different way. The objectivity is really what I’m aiming for, and the downside is just finding ways to make that connected so you could stand to read a lot of it, and where there’s something human, something that keeps us going.

TYLER PENFOLD: While there’s an incredible variety of topics your stories seem to center around, there seems to be a darker theme to all of them, like how in “A Begging Letter” a brother tricks this kid into drinking alcohol or a dying man having an affair in “A Story.” How do you feel about the interaction between these themes within these topics and how it transforms them?

AW: I think any literature that’s engaging is going to have a darkness to it. You don’t want to read about puppies, like, “the puppies were sleeping and they were so cute,” and I love puppies, but so what? We can watch puppies sleeping on YouTube but it’s not going to solve anything for us, so I think everything has to touch on death or conflict. That’s the engine, the wound is what keeps the writer and reader going.

I think there’s a lot of humor in those stories. I feel like there’s a lot of levity. “The Begging Letter” is a lot of lived experience but there’s a lot of humor in there too. I’m trying to get to a lot of levels, if you said everything was dark I would be like, “Oh, that’s really dreary,” and then I wouldn’t know what to do. It’s got to have those lyrical moments and it’s got to have something bright and happy alongside that darkness. Hitting a lot of those levels is really important, so that darkness is one of those levels but it’s not going to be everything. I don’t want you to perceive the story as gray, I want it to be purple and green and black, and how do you put that together? All of that should be flashing through it.

KR: In stories like “Spontaneous Translation,” we’re bouncing between these various moments of translation for the narrator throughout their life. How did you approach that and what effect did the frequent switching between these moments have on the project?

AW: You know, I talk about writing like a composer and there’s a lot of musicality there. I think the other thing I’m consciously striving towards is poetry. I’m not a poet but I’ll be reading a poem and it’ll go from the bird in the yard to her dad’s death and then to her husband's hands. Cut out the middle ground and go for these flashes. So for me the contrast between the moments and the thrill of moving from one to another without having to take the path to them is really exciting.

TP: About the shorter stories, especially in Origins, a lot of them end in unusual or particular places, or they end in places that are hard to make work very well for the reader. In “A Story,” it ends on an image of one of the main character’s family ship getting crushed in the ice and we go back to that from when we get the image earlier. Despite this, the endings work really well. What’s your approach to ending a short story?

AW: Often when I’m drafting something, I’m writing along and then stop for the day and I’m like, “what else has to happen?” and then I realize I’m done. And then that’s it for me because anything else I could do would belabor it. And that's often a surprise to me. I go back to the draft and I’d thought I was going to go back and refine it and edit it more and I’ll just realize it’s done. For me, it's that musicality. It’s already made that final chord, it’s a jarring one, not a resolving one, but I’m still hearing it, there’s a finality.

I think my instinct is very strong to stop where it needs to or it will be at the point where it needs to stop but it’s too abrupt. And then I’ll be like, “for the rhythm of this paragraph, I need to write two more sentences,” and it’ll take a month to write those two more sentences. I know they have to be there for the pacing of the whole piece but it still leaves you with that kind of jarring, “we’re done,” but I’ve paced it enough so there’s that little bit at the end. That’s what I’m hoping to pull off, that it sounds resolved but it sounds sudden at the same time.

KR: In pieces like “Like a Desolate Country” or “A Story,” the first-person narrator is introduced at the beginning before taking a step back for the majority of the piece. What informed that decision and how do you approach shifting the reader’s attention from character to character without feeling too jarring?

AW: In those really short pieces, I would say that “I” is pretty much a framing device. There’s an “I” so you get that there’s a speaker but everything else that happens is beyond that person. In a lot of cases, that “I” doesn’t really need to come back because it’s not about her or them or him. But we engage when you say “I got this letter,” we can instantly picture this humanity and this person and interchange before we get into the letter and all of the other people. But then the “I” that presented you the situation, we don’t really need them anymore. They can kind of just do their job and then get off stage.

TP: We’ve kind of touched on this a lot but your stories have a lot of absurd details contained in rather small stories. For example, in “The History of Matches” there are a lot of those details at play. What’s your motivation for those details and what’s your process is for keeping track and organizing those details keeping in the theme of the plot within associative logic?

AW: “A History of Matches” starts with the catsitting, then it’s the book, and then it’s a story about the history of matches with fire and people being poisoned by matches and all of this stuff. But it’s all one moment. I wrote that story in a morning. For me, it’s all just one piece, I start thinking about the history of matches and it’s all there. It’s really hard for me to work backwards from that and how do I make that cohere. It’s very inspirational and hits me as I can do something with matches. It’s not symbolic or thematic, it’s just matches and it’s so fascinating. Then to put that within this tiny relationship of the neighbors where nothing’s really dramatic, it’s just the perfect container for bursting out of this historical detail. I’m not making any of it up, it’s all matches. I put [the details] in my own language but I’m not making up what the history of matches is. For me, it’s this amazing raw material and I’ve just got to go with this. It’s all one inspiration, it’s me, matches, neighbor, let’s go.

KR: In your story “Symmetry,” how did the visual and artistic aspect of that piece influence that story for you and how did you approach that incorporation?

AW: I don’t know if that piece is a one-off. I feel like I messed around with that stuff a lot earlier, in my college years. I was at work one time and I saw those pictures of those feet and I was like “this is gold!” I sat down and wrote a textbook that’s all crystal structures using these feet. I just respond to this and I need to do something with it. It all happened quickly where I got the book, wrote the piece, and then I was done and moved to the next one. Not that I didn’t move to perfect it, but the inspiration was really sudden.

KR: Again on “Amagran Cinema,” I was interested in the characterization of a wide group of people and how you approached that?

AW: If I’m not going to be melodramatic and if I’m not going to be plot-driven, then I can fill in what you might expect in a narrative that’s actually about maybe two or three people, by giving you a whole bunch of people. There’s the whole bunch of people in the audience, there’s what happens in the movie, and then there’s the people outside the theater. If I’m going to invert the formula, if I’m not going to tell you how he met her and she met him and then their conflict — how am I going to make it human? There’s all these relationships, there's the boys and the girls, there’s the chemist, there’s the bakers and just thinking through the whole civilization that grows up inside and on the cinema.

TP: In a lot of your writing, you kind of steer away from the use of dialogue. Could you explain what leads you to use so little dialogue and how you make it work with your pieces?

AW: I’m probably bad at it. It’s just not where my skills are and it’s not where my interest is. It’s really hard to do because you can’t capture how people really talk, instead you have to capture something that’s plausible. I feel like what I’m doing with dialogue ends up kind of wooden. It's not where my strength is. There's dialogue in Ink during the Sylvia and Marina chapters and even my editor was like, “they say ‘Oh my god’ about nine times in the whole book, couldn’t you find something else to think of for them to say” and I’m like, “No, I can’t.” Since I’m not interested in trying to create a kind of traditional realist scenario, I'm just not practiced in it and I’m not going there.

EK: You touched a little bit on the idea of escapism through fantasy before, but especially in End Of The Fire Cult, what made you decide to tell the story of a marriage falling apart using two fictional countries? How did you approach the world-building for them? Did you have a favorite aspect of world-building for those?

AW: You know, it might seem really odd, but marriage actually seemed to me exactly like that, two imaginary countries. It’s exactly how it appeared to me. When I was going through the end of my own marriage I was like, “This is such a powerful experience, I have to write about it.” It was logical that this is the only way I can get at what's going on was through these representations.

It started with a student of mine from China who told me about this conflict between China and Korea about this holiday. He’s telling me this stuff with real ferociousness like, “It's our holiday! How dare they take our holiday on our mountain!” So I had the beginning piece and it was this strong vision for me–I just can't let it go until I work it through.

In End Of The Fire Cult, I’m playing off the masculine and feminine. The husband's country is a bit more didactic and militaristic and hard-nosed, and the wife’s country is always less organized and more spiritual and a little bit not on top of things the way the other is. So I would just give myself a topic like, “Okay, so what's the fire festival?” One is fire and then the other is a film festival and there's violent special effects in it. Each chapter added on and I think more like, “Wel, if I've already said that his country is more hard-nosed, then how are they hard-nosed about this topic?” and, “How would she take this topic?” Starting from that kernel each chapter kind of built out from that.

EK: In “Flinching,” you braid this very speculative narrative of a witch stealing the narrator's child with these more grounded accounts of news stories. How do you approach that braided aspect of realism and fantasy?

AW: I love fairy tales and in Origins a lot of my stories would find fairy tale aspects. That’s all I read when I was a kid. I had this whole huge collection of the yellow fairy book, the green fairy book, the blue fairy book, there’s a whole set of them with their amazing illustrations, and Arabian Nights, Norse mythology, Greek mythology. I loved all that stuff as a kid. I can kind of feel how I felt when I was reading stories on the floor on the heater in my childhood bedroom, just like what each story felt like. It’s very powerful, it’s never gone away. It’s already very connected to me. It's another part of my obsessions. I’m always gonna go back to the fairy tale elements. So that braiding is already there. I kind of see it as an emotional continuity. “Flinching” has the urban myth that starts where children are being used for satanic sacrifices, which isn’t real, but then this is a fairy tale. So how do those connect? There's a continuity between all those levels to me that I’m working with.

EK: Are other authors who have inspired your work, especially your more experimental forms or forms that focus on collage?

AW: Italo Calvino, the Italian writer, has been a big inspiration for me and he loves fairy tales and tarot cards. I look at his work over and over again and think, “How does he do that?” How does he get someone through the whole book without any of that melodrama, without dialogue, without character building. Just, “Here's a story, and this person goes in a door, and there's some straw, and then there's a woman, and there's a gas-guzzling car.” He just has such confidence in his storytelling, so I return to Italo Calvino a lot.

Talking about that hardness that I really admire, there’s a novel by Patrik Ouředník called Europeana, it’s stories from World War I and World War II. It’s very encyclopedic and very repetitive, but to me it’s like marshmallows. It's so inviting and fascinating. People love this book. It's kind of a cult classic, if you don't love it you don't love it and it's not for you, but for me it’s like if I could have written that, my God. Because there's a lot of characters in it but there's no character arc. It’s really engaging but also a textbook.

Daša Drndić who I wrote about in that essay you brought up–just incomparable and again someone who’s so brave in her writing that she's just going to spew all this stuff and just be like, “You'll follow it or you won’t,” and that's extraordinary braveness. We’re very market-driven in American literature and if you don't have that best seller stuff you're really outside of it. With Daša Drndić it’s like she doesn’t care, she's just going for the jugular.

Stylistically I would say I’m not like any of these writers, I'm not imitating them, but the example they set for me is their integrity and their courage. Their vision is really singular and they’re going for it and they're not stopping. There's a ton of other stuff that I really like and admire and some of that is really narrative. Mariana Enríquez, the short story writer, and I love detective fiction. It's so fulfilling and so interesting and the characters are so great. But for me I’m taking that in as a reader, and this stuff that I’ve mentioned first is what really takes me there as a writer.