Interview by Rachel Swearingen
One of the many things I admire about Donna Miscolta’s writing is the tension bubbling beneath her deceptively quiet prose. Her new collection, Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, opens with the ironically titled story “Welcome to Kindergarten,” in which Angie Rubio joins a circle of new classmates at Charles W. Nimitz Elementary, a most “un-Hawaiian name.” Angie, a Navy brat, is both awkward and perceptive. Already she is learning to navigate her way through a world where names and appearances are loaded with unspoken meaning. She hopes to meet some actual Hawaiians, but the faces of her classmates are “pink, pale, or freckled,” while hers is “toast, well-done—not unlike the Hawaiians she expected to see.” Instead she meets the Gorski sisters from Wisconsin, who tell her their name is Polish and ask if she can “speak Mexican.”
Living Color begins with both a sense of bewilderment and a hint of defiance that develops over the next twelve stories, one for each of Angie’s school grades. It’s the 60s and early 70s, and Angie endures countless injustices, often silently or with droll humor. She develops into a budding writer, an observer who nonetheless gets pulled into the dramas of the people around her—classmates, siblings and parents, troubled boys who live in her neighborhood. The structure of the book allows for an increasingly vivid and complex portrait of not just Angie, but of an America that largely refuses to celebrate her talents, and that of girls like her. What makes Miscolta’s version of this classic coming-of-age tale so refreshing is the ease of her storytelling, the nuanced way she explores identity, and the scrappy sense of humor she gifts Angie. Readers, especially those of us who were once self-conscious and nerdy, will take great delight in her touching, and often hilarious, depictions of childhood.
Over email, we discussed her writing process, the impact of institutionalized racism, and her own childhood, among other things.
Donna, you capture girlhood so well. Angie Rubio doesn’t just come alive in these pages, she matures and changes, and works her way into the reader’s heart. How did Angie come about for you? When did you realize you had a book of interlinked stories?
I appreciate so much your remarks. It’s gratifying to know that Angie Rubio had this effect on you. Angie crept into my consciousness gradually, or maybe she’d been there for years and I awakened to her presence over time. Once I acknowledged her, she became the repository for many childhood memories ready to be exploited on the page. I had a kindergarten teacher who very much resembled Angie’s kindergarten teacher in Living Color. When I first tried writing about that experience, I did so in an essay, but found it unsatisfactory. A little later I was invited to participate in a themed reading, for which I wrote a story about a shy, awkward, on-the social-fringes girl who attends her first slumber party. I had fun with that story, exploring the calamities of girlhood, those minefields of social blunders, of clumsily trying to fit in to a situation only to suffer a worse humiliation. The story was well received at the reading, which along with the affinity I felt for Angie, led me to return to the essay I had written about kindergarten and rewrite it as fiction featuring Angie.
I’m not sure at what point I thought about a book of stories, but once I had written these first two, I knew I wanted to write more. I decided that each would cover a particular grade in Angie’s education, which were really lessons about life as a brown girl.
Thank you for saying that Angie works her way into the reader’s heart. I recently saw this George Saunders quote which I think is from his new book on stories: “That’s how characters get made: we export fragments of ourselves, then give those fragments pants and a hairstyle and a hometown and all that.” I think Angie was born of fragments of my heart.
How much of your own childhood did you draw upon for these stories? Did writing them change how you look at children now, or at relationships between children and adults?
I drew a lot from my own childhood, not only in terms of events, but also regarding thoughts, actions, and responses I attributed to Angie and the other characters in the book. I was a shy child and adolescent and not just awkward but awkward looking, which made me an observer in life rather than a participant. I never knew what to say or how to act in social situations, even within my own extended family, but I watched and studied those who did it with ease or apparent ease. Still, I couldn’t emulate them because of the simple fact that I wasn’t them. I was still shy, awkward me.
When I started writing these stories, my daughters were in elementary school. I would sometimes wonder what went on at school for them in terms of the social structure and where they found a place to fit. They were attractive children so that was an automatic pass in many circles. I used to say to them that being good-looking was an accident of nature, not an accomplishment they could take credit for and that what mattered more was being a nice person. But of course, looks are only part of the equation. There is still that particular quality that grants entry to the popular crowd. My younger daughter, who was probably eight at the time, made the observation that “we are not a popular family,” suggesting that popularity is a trait that gets passed on from parents to children. I took her words and put them in the story in which Angie’s sister Eva decries the downsides of genetics and its determination of everything from skin color to popularity. Of course, they don’t actually believe that popularity is genetic, but that it often comes with economic privilege and whiteness.
One of my daughters, who is now a parent herself, finds the stories in Living Color funny and sad, which was my intent. It’s interesting to me that she identifies with Angie. In reference to one of Angie’s many faux pas, she said, “That’s something I would’ve done.” That surprised me because I had somehow imagined that my children would navigate those pitfalls of childhood and adolescence better than I had, that their lives would be unaffected by the things I had experienced. It was a terrible misperception on my part.
As an adult, I found out from my mother that she had been bullied in school. My parents pretty much left us to our own resources when it came to school, whether regarding academics or social behaviors. So I guess my mother trusted or assumed that we would fare better than she had. Also, I think my parents had the attitude that school and all its incidental and intentional soul-wrecking was our business to deal with, which I can understand since they had five kids and were working to put food in our mouths and pay the mortgage. But I also think they hadn’t come to terms with the racism they’d experienced. How we actively equip children to talk about, understand, and respond to race and racism is important. Too often though, adults are still learning and processing these things for themselves.
In “Help,” Angie joins a group of girls chasing a boy around the playground. It isn’t until she accidentally tears his shirt that she realizes the object of the game is to chase, not to catch. I laughed out loud while reading the story. The playground is such an alien world for Angie. I’m fascinated by your clever use of both humor and pathos throughout the collection. Does humor come naturally for you?
I mentioned earlier that I was an observer from an early age. I come from a large extended family, and family gatherings could be raucous. There were a lot of people with loud voices and the gossip was rampant and it was as funny as it was cruel. I think that’s where I learned that humor and heartbreak were separated by a fine line. And that sometimes they were one and the same, for instance, when Angie rips the sleeve off the shirt of the boy on the playground. There is something funny about the ripping sound of a piece of clothing – the sound of it, the optics of it. It’s comic, the kind of thing we see in sitcoms. On the other hand, it’s an unmasking or a baring of something that we’re not supposed to see. On the surface it’s a bare arm, but what is exposed, what is taken away is a protection of our privacy, of ourselves, our physical person that covers what’s inside and knowable only with our consent.
Whether humor comes naturally to me is a good question. I’m not an especially funny person in social situations. I tend to be reserved. But I like to laugh and am quick to see the humor or the potential for humor in a situation. Before I started writing, I paid attention to how humor was used in stories. I remember reading Ana Castillo’s So Far from God and laughing out loud while riding the bus home from work. Jessica Hagedorn and Gish Jen are also authors whose works I appreciated for the humor that was integral to the drama of their narratives. One of my favorite writers when it comes to the use of humor to deepen a story and to further humanize and enhance the dimensionality of the characters is Antonya Nelson. I’m pretty sure I own every one of her books.
Angie Rubio reminds me a little of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Was this intentional? What did you most want the reader to understand about Angie’s journey as an artist?
Thanks for that comparison. I think it must’ve been a deeply subconscious intent when I created Angie’s journey as an artist. It took a reader other than me to see that part of the story emerge. When I was writing the stories, I was seeing each of them as a discrete moment or period in Angie’s life, and months would pass between writing the stories, so I wasn’t always looking at the overall picture. I wanted to look at what challenge each grade in school posed to Angie and how she responded to it because that was what most interested me – what happens in a particular moment of being and in the process of becoming. I think that keeping Angie’s core self in mind with each story helped create that trajectory of her development as an artist. She was introspective and observant and ached for expression. When writer Rosalie Morales Kearns wrote the book cover copy that said Living Color “traces Angie’s formation as a writer,” my thought was oh, wow, it does.
What I most wanted readers to understand about Angie was that whatever personal quirks, faults, or shortcomings she had, however much her shyness and awkwardness inhibited or thwarted her actions, the real source of many of the challenges and barriers she encountered, no matter how subtle, had to do with the color of her skin. While the racism she experienced was never physically violent and often not even overt, it’s this subtle, accepted, and institutionalized racism that can thwart lives, if not eventually lead to the kind of violence Angie witnessed on the news and read about in the paper.
Speaking of the news, one of the things that affected me most was how often Angie’s concerns are either misunderstood or dismissed by the people around her, often white classmates, teachers and parents. In “Current Events,” Angie has to give a report on something in the news. She chooses a story about Sam Cooke being arrested in Louisiana for trying to stay at a white hotel and is shut down by her teacher for writing about an entertainer. Can you tell us about the origins of this story?
While I wanted to reflect what was happening in the world at large in the microcosm that was Angie’s world of school and family, I don’t think there was one specific seed of origin for the Sam Cooke story. It was more a general sense of how children absorb information and opinions and how these affect the formation of their own feelings. While children may not be fully aware or understand the social and political events of the day, they’re exposed to it on the television, in the headlines of the newspaper that sits on the kitchen table, and in conversations they hear among adults. However incomplete the picture may be for them, I think they do develop a sense of good/bad and right/wrong which might be changed or clarified later when their information and understanding is deeper.
For Angie as a brown girl whose awareness of skin color and its implications arose early, her perception of injustice is heightened when she recognizes it in someone else’s life, especially if it’s someone famous whose accomplishments don’t save him from unjust treatment. Though she has not experienced this level of injustice, she understands the possibility exists. Sharing this incident in class for Angie is one way for her to protest the incident vicariously, to give others the opportunity to express outrage and to share in that outrage as a form of denunciation. But the teacher cuts her off, saying that news about celebrities is not worthy of their attention. Angie, ever obedient as well as humiliated for being told she had done the assignment wrong, is silenced. Children are often silenced by adults who construct rules and arbitrate adherence to them. This arbitration is often influenced by perceptions related to skin color and other prejudices.
Which character, aside from Angie, was the most fun or challenging to write? Why?
I enjoyed writing the character of Eva, Angie’s older sister. Often in families, the oldest child is given responsibilities and expectations that limit their ability to rebel. This is the case with Eva. Rather than push back against what she disagrees or feels uncomfortable with, she expresses her frustration in sarcasm while still toeing the line. I liked seeing how Eva and Angie engaged with each other and how their relationship shifted over time.
Judy was fun to write as well and a little challenging for me since there was this easy slippery slope toward stereotype. As Angie’s nemesis, Judy embodies the white privilege that elevates her in status as well as in her own mind. While Angie is intimidated by her, she’s also a bit fascinated by her as she tries to discern the code to access Judy’s world and to demystify the social structure. As Angie grows in her understanding of the world and of herself, she is more emboldened to question and confront the people and the ideas that impede her search for bigger spaces to exist in.
This is your third book. Was the process for writing it different than for your other two? Did you learn anything that might make constructing the next one easier for you?
The process for writing this book was definitely different than that for my previous two. With my first book When the de la Cruz Family Danced, which I started when I was first learning how to write fiction, I struggled with everything – structure, scene, character. It took trial and error, referencing craft books, and a little bit of relying on my gut to muddle my way through various drafts until I truly got a sense of the story, which structurally turned out to be a mostly linear narrative.
With my second book Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories I was more purposeful in its structure. I decided early on that I wanted to tell the stories of three generations of a family, so the structure was already determined. While the stories were connected, they still functioned separately so I didn’t have to track a continuous narrative line.
With Living Color, I think the process was similar to that of Hola and Goodbye except that I was dealing with the same protagonist for each story. There was always that question though that buzzed in my ear like a mosquito: Is it a novel or a collection of stories? I pretty much ignored the mosquito for as long as possible until I decided that having written them each as a separate story, collectively they would remain that way, at least in my mind. I’m fine if others refer to it as a novel. Sometimes those lines are squishy.
I’m revising a new novel now, the writing of which was a very different experience than any of my previous books. I started by just getting the story down using mainly exposition, with only a few scenes and dialogue interspersed in this stream of consciousness vomitus. Then I went back and wrote it in scene. The chapters are much shorter than they are in my first novel, more compressed or focused, maybe. I’m still working on structure and temporality. The other thing I’m trying is putting one character point of view in first person and the other in third person. That’s an okay thing to do, right?
This has been a long way to say that what I’ve learned about putting together a book is that each one is different. I think you learn something from each book that you write, but it’s not how to write the next one, not exactly. It does prepare you for the hard work and frustration and days of despair. It also makes you remember that you’ve made a book before and that you can do it again.
Jennifer Munro introduced me to your work years ago. I often think about all the wonderful writers I might have never read if not for another writer’s recommendation. Could you name one or two books you wish more people would read?
Here are two I recommend for the depth of feeling the prose awakens in the reader.
Allison Green’s The Ghosts Who Travel with Me came out in 2015 from Ooligan Press. It’s a lovely, evocative journey that follows the author’s road trip with her partner through Richard Brautigan’s Idaho stomping grounds while delving into her own ancestry, her coming-of-age, and her own reckoning with the sexism of a literary hero of her youth.
Sion Dayson is another Jaded Ibis Press author. Her book As a River came out in 2019, a year before mine did. It recently won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, a literary prize for debut novels set in the American South. Dayson is very good at creating mood with her prose. The poetic quality of Dayson’s book, which deals with race, family, and forgiveness, makes it all the more affecting.
Donna, thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions, and with such care. When the world opens up again, I hope you’ll come to Chicago to read from Living Color, or from your next book.
I would love that!
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Donna Miscolta’s third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2020. It was named to the 2020 Latino Books of the Year list by the Los Camadres and Friends National Latino Book Club. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (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), which poet Rick Barot called “intricate, tender, and elegantly written – a necessary novel for our times.” Recent essays appear in Los Angeles Review, McSweeney’s, pif, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. She has work forthcoming in Indomitable/Indomables: A multigenre Chicanx/Latinx Women’s Anthology.
