Sunday Series: Margo Orlando Littell on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Margo Orlando Littell as she shares how a very old memory resurfaces years later as a catalyst for her novel, giving “logic to the illogical. Purpose to the purposeless.”


Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

On a hot August day in 1986, when I was ten years old, my grandmother’s across-the-street neighbor walked outside shirtless in the middle of the afternoon, pulled his belt from its loops, and slowly, casually, whipped the belt buckle at each of the windows in his wooden garage door. Shatter, pause. Shatter, pause. Shatter, pause. Shatter, pause. My entire family watched him from our porch. My grandmother, sitting next to me on the squeaky metal glider, tsked under her breath. When he was finished, he went back inside. No one called the police. Later, someone must have come out and swept up the broken glass, but by then we were on to other things—dinner or violin practicing or bedtime. That house was a badly maintained rental; domestic disturbances weren’t new. 

Thirty-three years later, the novel I just published, The Distance from Four Points, includes a scene directly drawn from this memory: a drunk, angry man old enough to know better shows up at his ex-girlfriend’s new apartment and shatters the windows with his belt. The event draws two old friends back together to clean up the mess—this mess, as well as the much larger, life-size messes in the story. Many abuses could have been rendered here; there are many ways to take revenge. But I instinctively summoned the truest, purest version of minor, petty, domestic strife I knew. I’d witnessed it, live and in color, when I was ten.

When I wrote this scene, this long-buried memory finally took on narrative heft. There was logic to the illogical. Purpose to the purposeless. Tension and investment where there had been only my distant, suburban disapproval. I took the memory out of cold storage and gave it life.

I can’t think of a better explanation for why I write. 

I often wonder why I do it. Writing is frustrating and rarely easy. It requires time that’s difficult to find, and attention that’s difficult to harness. It leads to self-doubt and self-criticism and imposter syndrome even when I’ve fulfilled the measures of success I’ve set for myself. I resent that feel-good adage—remember when you wanted what you currently have—and wish it were that easy to embrace contentment. 

But there are moments when I remember very well what draws me to the page, again and again. I write to set memories like the belt-smashing in stone, to bring them out of isolation in the deep subconscious and offer them around. Likewise the observations made in ordinary life: the melancholy glint of sun in late afternoon, the way the smiling neighbor’s eyes belie her deep unhappiness, the vase in the window full of silk flowers as faded as old photographs. The mind takes in more than it can note, but it all settles somewhere, and waits. As a writer, I see these things not as isolated images but as evidence of a larger story, and my response is to weave them together, find the whole from the parts. 

The translation isn’t exact, of course, and it’s definitely not synchronous. Months, years, decades can pass before an image or memory reemerges. When it does, it’s asking to be given purpose. As a writer, that’s what I do. I’m not suggesting that I can connect most or all of the images in my work to these stored-up memories. That kind of excavation isn’t the point, and probably isn’t even possible. Memories and memorable observations are slanted through the fictive window, and their shapes are bent and broken beyond recognition. Sometimes they shed familiar skin the moment they’re on the page. Sometimes they succumb to relentless, wholesale revision before they work as they need to. That’s the alchemy of writing fiction. The known becomes the unknown and then becomes known again in a different way. 

Borrowing a scene so directly—as I did with the belt-smashing memory from my childhood—isn’t generally what I do when I write, but when it happens, it makes me feel a satisfying continuity, year following year, experiences ending but simmering, waiting to feed the fictive fire. A moment that could have slipped away is now bound to the page, in service to a world I’ve built. I’ll have it forever.

This idea of saving memories and observations is in line with how I’ve always approached my life. Since childhood, I’ve kept a regular journal. For many years, I wrote daily entries, the habit as ingrained as brushing my teeth. Stacks of these journals fill boxes now. Along with these journals, in my bedroom I have a wooden chest filled with artifacts from my childhood—small toys, collectibles, and things I made. Evidence of my compulsion to preserve, protect, and venerate things that were—and are still—important to me. I don’t like to let things go.  

I write to give a home to my memories—accurate, slanted, shadowed, or otherwise. I write to give a home to lost moments. I write to capture the fleeting, the fleeing. The scrap of conversation overheard, the interaction heavy with unacknowledged meaning. I write to enliven old thoughts and worn ideas, like putting new paint in old rooms. All those buried bits—those are the stories. I write so they can have a chance to tell their tale.


MARGO ORLANDO LITTELL is the author of the novels The Distance from Four Points and Each Vagabond by Name, both published by the University of New Orleans Press. Each Vagabond by Name won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal, was longlisted for the 2017 Tournament of Books, and was named one of fifteen great Appalachian novels by Bustle. She has an MFA from Columbia, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, she now lives in New Jersey with her family. Find her online @margolittell.


Come hear Margo read from more of her beautiful work, her new novel
The Distance from Four Points (University of New Orleans Press),
this Friday, June 5, 2020, 6pm Central online with Hidden Timber Books.

This event is FREE but please REGISTER!

Searching for Missing Pieces: Guest Post by Myles Hopper

I met Myles Hopper when Lisa Rivero and I co-edited Family Stories from the Attic (Hidden Timber Books, 2017). Myles and I worked closely together on his essay, “Exodus Redux.” I came to know him as a writer with great introspection and dedication, one who strives not only to uncover the pieces of a story but to retell it in a way that builds meaning and insight, for the author as well as the reader. Today he shares excerpts from his forthcoming book, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now, which speaks to the power of writing and the art of the story.


The Color Red is a collection of stories that comprises a memoir, rather than a chronological autobiography, which isn’t how I remember my life, nor is it the way many other people remember theirs.

Pieces: Roll of film in a spiral across image from left to right.

The experience is like standing in an editing studio ankle-deep in old-fashioned, raw film footage, searching for missing pieces. Some can be found, and memories can be refreshed; others, alas, are lost, perhaps forever.

Nevertheless, the search has been productive. The result is this book, in which characters and events move back and forth in time, the same way memories present themselves in unexpected flashbacks and associations.

Preparing this collection has been a long process. A story of mine, first drafted in 1992, languished in a file folder for the next twenty-five years. Before it had been relegated to that folder, another author had encouraged me to write the rest of the stories I wanted to tell. I told him I probably wouldn’t­––actually, I told him I couldn’t––though writing was what I most wanted to do. To his “Why?” I said, “Because, I don’t know if I’m able to tell the truth, and if I don’t, none of this is worth writing about.”

“The truth about what?”

“About my relationships with members of my family, maybe my father, most of all. There was a great deal of love and caring, but there also was violence and rage, and I still have trouble dealing with the lifelong aftermath.”

“Then I guess you have a decision to make.”

Though it took many years, I made that decision to finish what I had begun. It has helped me to keep in mind Joan Didion’s final sentence in her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where she reflects upon how her interests as a writer run counter to those she writes about:  “…writers are always selling somebody out.” [emphasis hers]

I was determined to avoid writing only for myself, about myself. My purpose has been to write this book in a way that might provide readers an opportunity to gain new perspectives on some of their own life experiences, to discover something of value that might have eluded them, to gain a deeper understanding of themselves. 

These stories acknowledge childhood trauma, tragic losses, and confusing, sometimes violent relationships within a family; they also celebrate the love and reconciliation, acceptance, and forgiveness. The result can be transcendent.


Winter 2017

December came and went, and it was my seventy-fifth January birthday. On that day, I had already lived five years longer than the too-short lifespan of my father. Frequently, throughout the winter, my thoughts drifted to how difficult it had been for me to unravel our complicated relationship. I recalled the day when, in my mid-twenties, a half-century earlier, I had been regaling my therapist with stories of my father’s magnificence.

“So, your father can walk on water?”

“Huh?”

Thus, began the healing. It has been a slow, sometimes imperceptible, process until heart and mind could remain open to understanding life experiences in new ways. I needed to arrive at a place where my love and admiration of a father––gone now more than thirty years––weren’t expressed in order to camouflage my darker feelings. I have needed all of that time to cease repressing or denying what was painful and debilitating. Only then could I allow another reality to emerge and coexist. To heal has required embracing the “other” and transcending the limitations of being lost and drowning in the lonely “self.” To heal has required relegating certain memories, photographs, and spoken words to a place called “that was then,” and cradling close to the heart the ones that are called “and this is now.”

Pieces: sunlight and fog coming from upper right corner through canopy of trees

Now, when I think of the person I was then, I imagine him walking slowly on a path under a canopy of foliage, all veiled in a gray, pre-dawn fog. He isn’t aware of my presence close behind him. His unhurried steps slow until he comes to a halt, and I give the slightest of nods as I pass him. 

At the sharp bend in the path, I look back just as beams of sunlight penetrate the canopy. In the light and warmth, he begins to dissipate along with the night fog. I watch until I see only green leaves glistening at daybreak. 

Midsummer 2017

In late afternoon, I leave my writing behind and walk outside to the garden. The oversized terra-cotta pot has been back in its place since early spring, and now the white rosebush it contains is blooming, as is the rest of the garden. In the midst of this loveliness and tranquility, it takes only a few seconds for a perennial fantasy of mine also to be in full bloom. In it, my father is alive and I ask him to work with me in the garden––mine, not his. He welcomes the request, and I welcome his suggestions regarding the placement of new plants and the appropriate preparation of the soil.

At the end of the day, we sit on the patio, enjoy a glass of scotch, and admire our accomplishment:  Not only has the garden been improved, but we’ve spent the day working as father and son without an angry word between us.

It waits until our second glass for me to tell him how much I learned as a boy and as a man during those times when we had been able to work and play together in peace. Then, I tell him that I have provided my children the chance to experience a garden’s peaceful beauty, but never have demanded anything from them in return. I tell him that they, now adults, take pleasure in asking me which plants they should choose and how to care for them. They do this not because I am a gardener, but because I am their father.

I know he understands everything he has heard from me, because he gives one of his self-conscious laughs, more like a quiet clearing of the throat, revealing the depth of his emotions.

By the time I emerge from my fantasy, shadows have grown long and advanced across the patio and the garden and onto the lawn, but there is one more task to complete before dinner. I select the proper spade for transplanting a languishing rosebush, so it will receive the sun and nourishment it has been deprived of for too long. At the new site for the rose, I lift a handful of the loamy soil and inhale its clean, sweet aroma.

On this day, nothing eclipses my sense of well-being, not even as my foot presses on the shoulder of the spade, and I remember standing at the side of my father’s open grave and releasing a shovelful of earth onto his coffin.


Pieces: image of Myles Hopper

Myles Hopper is the author of the forthcoming collection of stories, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now––a memoir. As a cultural anthropologist, he taught in several universities in the United States and Canada, and consulted with nonprofits engaged in strategic planning and organizational development. Writing is now his full time pursuit, with the exception of occasional consultations with organizations whose mission he supports. He and his spouse are parents of two adult children and live in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

Through stories we transcend.

“It’s very important to transcend the places that hold us.”
~ Rubin Carter in “The Hurricane”


The air is weighted with disappointment, fear, anger. You walk around in a daze, watch ridiculous shows on TV, flare up in anger at the slightest setback. You could stay in that corner, grow silent, be polite. (But you have been polite long enough.) What holds you back from speaking your mind? What stops you from telling your story? It’s one thing, it’s a million. It’s the pounding of your heart in the face of a stranger, your arms frozen at your side. It’s the pull at the back of your head and the voice inside that says, whatever you write down will not be enough. It’s the fear of being vulnerable. Will they listen? Does it matter?

Yes. You are not alone. Our stories connect us. Those connections carry us forward. Speak up, in person or on the page. How else will we transcend?

transcend: girl jumping into water