A Visit from Angela Flournoy

The author of The Wilderness talks to us about constraints & having fun in a novel.

Hi friends.

Angela Flournoy’s hot new novel, The Wilderness, was just published yesterday and it’s already a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction. Not to mention this well-deserved dream of a review she received this morning in the NYTBR from the very smart Niela Orr. She’s touring all over the place this fall so be sure to check her out. (I was excited to see she was coming to New Orleans for what looks to be a very cool event.)

I am lately (always) obsessed with sentences. I remember when I sat down to read Angela’s book I thought, “All right, let’s check out her sentences,” and then I was like, “OK, Angela, I see what you’re doing here.” Flawless. When I finished the book I kept returning to this one section of it that I loved the most, where she managed a world of information (and history, and culture) so deftly I gasped.

Here’s the section:

“The Washingtons had graduated from kitchens before Nakia's great-great was born, so why had she gravitated to this sweaty, often unglamorous work? Not even the work of poor-pay-but-respectable stages, genteel maître d's, and haughty chefs de cuisine, but regular old kitchen labor. The work of ugly shoes and baggy pants and no-degrees-necessary and stains no matter one's fastidiousness. Why work with one's hands—unless we're talking surgery or sculpture—when one didn't have to? Well, there were hands, and then there were hands. Hands for building houses, tapping trumpet keys, turning lathes, cradling newborns, hands that, with the cooperation of feet keeping time on a pedal below, guided fabric through the percussive needle of a machine, hands with greased fingertips that pulled kinks into cornrows, palmed basketballs, rubbed backs, sanded wood, broke bones. A tactile person, Nakia was destined to work in a field that required literal grasping, and she might have taken to many of these other hands' pursuits but for the adrenaline of cooking, the particular eroticism of shoulder brushing shoulder, language abutting language, hips bumping hip in a kitchen.”

I have already asked so much of Angela lately as she was one of this year’s 1000 Words contributors, but luckily she said yes again when I asked her to talk about this series of sentences.

Here’s Angela’s thoughts on it:

“I love a good constraint, as constraints can help me focus on the work without being overwhelmed by too many possibilities, or distracted by too many enticing narrative tangents. I placed many constraints on myself when writing The Wilderness—an overall page limit, a bunch of rules regarding POV (the novel has several POVs), and a set of guidelines regarding when information is revealed and how. Constraints I love, but restraint I am less enthusiastic about. I want to have fun in a novel, I want to try to do a thing on the page that serves a purpose, sure, but I enjoy when that thing isn’t explicitly purposeful. I find that when I let myself riff on an idea on the page it deepens both the world and its characters in ways that scenes often won’t and more direct styles of narration simply don’t. This section, about what hands can do, is one of those moments.

If you’ve been in a lot of workshops or maybe attended an MFA program, you might have heard feedback about these kinds of sections that encouraged you to cut them. ‘It took me out of the story,’ say, or the more general, ‘kill your darlings.’ My philosophy is to make my darlings as beautiful as possible and let them shine. A novel is the culmination of so much cutting, so much paring back, but if there are no moments when I can tell the writer was having fun, pushing themselves to make something truly beautiful, or even showing off—why not?—I feel cheated as a reader. Maybe this has to do with my love of jazz, or having grown up around so much hip-hop, but I don’t find any inherent value in minimalism. I want my writing to sing, and when the moment is right I want it to swing. This bit about hands is my attempt at the latter.

Writers who are very good at this, off the top of my head:

Toni Morrison (of course), Edward P. Jones, Paul Harding, William Faulkner, and Gayl Jones.”

Go buy Angela’s book. It’s great.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.