Photo credit: Meryl Schenker
Donna Miscolta is Plume’s featured writer for September! I’ve never met Donna before, but I had the absolute pleasure to meet and talk with her on Zoom a few days ago when we chatted with her for our podcast. Stay tuned for that great talk at the beginning of September! We are so excited to share her work with you. Please enjoy the interview that follows to get to know more about her.
Plume: When did you know you were a writer?
Donna Miscolta: I think I knew fairly early in elementary school that I had a certain ability when it came to words. Creating sentences and organizing ideas were things I understood so much better than math or science, for instance. But it was an ability that I didn’t value enough. I didn’t know that I could be a writer. I had no clue how to become one. When the urge to write grew too insistent to ignore, I began taking classes at age 39. I secretly called myself a writer. Only after I had publications to my name did I say the word out loud, though I knew it had been true all along.
P: Where do you get your ideas?
DM: A lot of my ideas arise from my experience with or observations of people around me, often family, but also friends, acquaintances, and strangers. My novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced was inspired in part by my father’s immigration story which involved his leaving the Philippines by way of the U.S. Navy after World War II. That was the only factual part of the novel. Everything else was made up, which shows how little you need to grow a story or novel. Almost all the stories in Hola and Goodbye had as its seed an anecdote I’d heard or an object or phrase that reverberated with some significance. For instance, my grandmother grew roses and the image of a rose being plucked from a bush was what precipitated the story of the end of a friendship among four immigrant women. My newest book Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories is the work that draws most heavily from my personal experiences. Each story owes its existence to something, however insignificant, that happened to me. I used fiction to make meaning out of these little incidents, the memory of which, for whatever reason, stayed with me over the years. And maybe that was their reason for being. They were meant to be written about.
P: Where do you write?
DM: For most of my writing life, I’ve squeezed a writing desk into the bedroom. It’s not ideal, but I’ve managed so far. During my 30-year tenure as an employee in local government, I often wrote during my bus commute and lunch hours. On occasion, I’ve written in cafes. Maybe one day, I’ll have a dedicated writing space. But then maybe I’d be at a loss about what to do in such an unfamiliar thing.
P: Do you have any writing rituals?
DM: Aside from writing or trying to write every day, I don’t have any writing rituals unless you count procrastination. I think the reason why I haven’t developed any rituals is that when I started writing, the time available for me to write was so fragmented and abbreviated. I just wrote when I could wherever I could. Now that I’m retired from my day job and my children are grown, I spend several blocks of time throughout the day at my desk writing or, at least, trying to write past my procrastination.
P: How supportive is your local community for writers?
DM: I was lucky early on when I started writing to be welcomed into a community of Latinx writers. Writer Kathleen Alcala and theater artists Laura Esparza and Olga Sanchez Saltveit were among the founders of Los Norteños, a group of Latinx writers in Seattle and beyond. I also found community with the local alumna of Hedgebrook, the writing retreat for women on Whidbey Island, northwest of Seattle. The longest-lived writing group I was fortunate to belong to was formed as a result of a Hedgebrook alumnae event. Seattle is a great place to be a writer. It has great bookstores and a variety of reading series and classes to advance your craft and meet other writers. Meeting other writers in Seattle has been and continues to be a source of delight and inspiration.
P: What are some of your self-care practices?
DM: I start each day with physical exercise, which during this pandemic is a one-hour bike ride, preceded by some stretching, balancing poses, and lifting a few weights. While gyms are closed, I’m missing out on a more rigorous weight-training routine, and I know I’ve lost some muscle mass. While that is a minor, even trivial thing, it’s a loss of part of my physical self, which at age 67 can be a reminder of the diminishment that is aging and what lies beyond. So for me, pandemic self-care has focused on a daily routine that involves the completion of certain tasks, both writing and non-writing related. There’s a certain satisfaction as well as relief in the repetition of days and the things that are within our control. It helps deal with the unknown and the fear that is its partner.
P: What is your favorite book about writing?
DM: Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World is a collection of essays on writing fiction that I’ve read multiple times. What’s interesting to me about these essays is how often they refer to elements in a work in progress that come together in unexpected ways to surprise the writer as she tries to find her way to meaning and resolution. Boswell provides examples from specific works of other writers while also sharing experiences from his own life that illuminate the topic at hand, whether it be omniscience, point of view, or the less familiar element of how the architectural space called a spandrel has relevance to the scenes in a narrative. (You’ll have to read the essay for the explanation.)
A book that I’ve been reading lately as a result of recently embarking on my essay project is Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. I’m intrigued in particular by these words by Gornick regarding writing about one’s personal experiences:
“What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that, the power of a writing imagination is what is required.”
That challenge to my writing imagination excites me.
P: Who are your writing She-ros?
DM: I could name many but will highlight these four: Ana Castillo and Helena Maria Viramontes, and Seattle writers Gabriela Gutierrez y Muhs and Rebecca Brown
I first read Ana Castillo and Helena Maria Viramontes’s work in the 90s. What I found in their work I also saw in their public lives—compassion, intelligence, and humor. Gabriela Gutierrez y Muhs is a scholar, poet, essayist, and novelist who teaches at Seattle University. Prolific in both work and friendships, she is profoundly engaged with her community and in advancing the works of Latinx writers. Rebecca Brown, highly esteemed and beloved in Seattle and beyond to Europe and Japan, was one of my first writing teachers. Innovative in her writing and a captivating presenter of it, she is a thoroughly engaging and attentive presence in the classroom, on stage, and one-on-one.
P: Are you able to work during Coronavirus? And with the long-overdue demands for social change? Do you find the news distracting or invigorating?
DM: During the pandemic, I’ve been writing pieces related to Living Color and have set aside other writing for a while due to time constraints. I do feel that these days of coronavirus and the iniquities it has made stark have eclipsed everything else in terms of what requires our attention. I wouldn’t call the news distracting. But neither is the news invigorating. The news is necessary. We have to pay attention. But there’s so much to be angry and anxious about – racism, the denial of science, and a corrupt, inept, and lying administration that has done nothing to try to protect its citizens from a deadly virus. It feels like the world is falling apart. Though it can be hard to focus at times, words—writing them or reading those of others—do help to provide a sense of grounding and inspire belief that sense and justice will prevail.
P: What are you currently working on?
DM: I’ve set aside a novel I’d been revising to focus on pre-publication activities for Living Color. I hope to get back to it soon. It’s a novel that arose from one of the stories in Hola and Goodbye and deals with the themes of family, sisterhood, body image, and individual power.
Having explored identity, belonging, and family dynamics in my fiction, I am compelled now to investigate the sources of my fiction in personal essays about place, childhood, and family. Readers of my fiction will have insight into the question I am often asked: Is my fiction based on my life?
Donna Miscolta’s third book of fiction is Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories from Jaded Ibis Press published in September 2020. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press in 2016, won an Independent Publishers award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced from Signal 8 Press, 2011. Recent essays have appeared in Atticus Review, McSweeney’s, and Los Angeles Review. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from 4Culture, Artist Trust, Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jack Straw Foundation, and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. She has been awarded residencies at Anderson Center, Artsmith, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Mineral School, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Whiteley Center. Find her at donnamiscolta.com
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