Angela Flournoy on the Cloud of Experience

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Angela Flournoy about her new novel, The Wilderness.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Sometimes you’d begin a section with a more narrative, lyrical paragraph or two, and at the end, it was much more condensed, more fluid. It had less interruptions. When you were writing about the future, it was more lyrical. I mean, you were still telling a story, you still had all the same characters, but it there’s something about the quality that you’re emitting changed.


Angela Flournoy: I love Toni Morrison. That’s just for everything. Well, the thing is that I love Toni Morrison. For this novel, when I thought about the sections and most of the non-chronological periods are in the like first two parts of the book, when they are younger, when it’s they’re still trying to figure out what everything that happens to them means, I wanted it to feel a little bit like a kind of like cloud of experience versus like this is the shape, like this is what this means these experiences. And as they get older, it’s more chronological, and there is more – not that we don’t live in a cloud of experience always –but you can insert more of a retrospective voice when you’re older, because you have some perspective on things in the world that might happen or could happen to you. And so, when I got to the moment that is sort of a big break in the book, if felt like the book had to change. If this was a book that was about everybody telling their sides, and us seeing everyone, here is a thing that sort of has ruptured this unit in a way. So, the way that I have approached it cannot be the way that it was approached before, because the novel needs to mimic what it feels like to be a part of this group, and now it feels very different. So, it had to be different.

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Angela Flournoy’s debut novel The Turner House was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Her new novel, The Wilderness, was long listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.  Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker among others.