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!