I’m obviously a little biased when it comes to any Dzanc Books authors, but I do love this chapbook from Angela Woodward and was extremely happy to see it win the Collagist contest. Her novel from FC2 is also on my shelf awaiting a closer read.
EWN: Your short story collection, Origins and Other Stories, was published in 2016. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
Angela: The opening story, “One Hundred Years of Amagran Cinema,” was first published in 2001, in Quarter after Eight, a wonderful journal out of Ohio University that makes room for brief and unusual pieces. This story concerns a movie that lasts one hundred years. It tells the convoluted family history that makes up the movie, as well as the changes to the people in the audience as they sit tucked away in the theater for their whole lives. I was always thought it would make a kapow beginning to a collection. Finally it did.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
Angela: I entered the Collagist prose chapbook competition, and to my great surprise won that. I had been a finalist a few years earlier, with a different judge, so I thought I would try again. I wasn’t really looking to publish a collection, but it turned out I had the right amount of material. It was a whim.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?
Angela: I feel at my most inspired with short works. With a good short story, if the idea is very strong, I may have trouble getting the beginning down, but once the story is more or less framed, I write very quickly. I’ll have it in two or three days, plus the endless time to fiddle with it afterwards. I sit down to write every day, with a great deal of discipline and diligence. Short stories mostly escape that diligence, but take me by the throat and demand to be written. It’s hard to wait for that divine intervention, which is why I also plug away at longer things that can be done bit by bit. I feel most in tune with my muse when writing a short story.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
Angela: A very strong short story has more intensity than a novel. Some, like Lucia Berlin’s recent posthumous collection, have been so strong I can barely keep reading. So my reading is like my writing, much more sporadic for short stories because it’s a different flavor or resonance. I also really like, both as a reader and a writer, a kind of connected collection. Much of Calvino’s work is like that. Stanislaw Lem had a collection that was all stories told by machines, maybe. This sounds like a book I lost and am remembering wrong. But when there’s some kind of framing device that holds very disparate parts together, I am so happy.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
Angela: I’ve had a note on my desk since September that says, “Write story about decoy animals.” Maybe for short story month I can finally write that story about decoy animals.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Angela Woodward is the author of the novel Natural Wonders, winner of the Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Her other works include Origins and Other Stories, winner of the Collagist Magazine prose chapbook competition, the collection The Human Mind, and the novel End of the Fire Cult. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize (2016) and been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web collection (2010). Her work has won statewide awards from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and the Illinois Arts Council. The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland granted her an Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2011. She was a resident artist at the Bali Purnati Center for Arts in 2014. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Comments