Photo of Angie Romines courtesy of Patti Pittenger
NER’s Meera Vijayann talks with author Angie Romines about generational violence and the concept of “bad blood,” balancing multiple writing projects, reading for pleasure, and her essay “A Severing” from issue 44.4.
Meera Vijayann: In your essay “A Severing,” you turn around the narrative of family trauma and address a topic most writers stray away from: generational violence. Why did this specific act of violence committed over a century ago interest you?
Angie Romines: The hatchet story (which is my personal shorthand title for “A Severing”) wasn’t the first tale of generational violence that drew me in. The one that stuck in my craw and wouldn’t loosen itself was the story of Mary Jane “Fields” Bishop’s daughter, Susan Bishop, who was traded in marriage at the age of fourteen to a seventy-four-year-old man for an apple orchard—a story that I first explored in my piece, “Malus Domestica” which came out in the Rumpus in 2021. The story of Susan Bishop was just so compelling and horrifying to me. I really remember my time as a young teenager and how vulnerable I felt just existing in everyday spaces, so my ancestral empathy felt like it was working overtime as I pieced together that essay.
It took me a while longer to feel ready to tackle the life of my great-great grandmother, Mary Jane, partially because I am quite angry with her (as angry as you can be at a ghost) for what she did to her daughter and also because the violence she committed with her hatchet is pretty intense to think about. There’s just something really chilling about how she hit that woman, straight in the front of the chest. Not in the arm or the back of the head. She would’ve had to meet her eyes as she did it. That’s scary in its own right, but even scarier when I think about being related to such a person.
What drew me to this family story, other than the shock of it all, was the concept of “bad blood” and what it means to be a descendant of a murderer (possibly, since I wasn’t able to verify the story). And while it’s difficult to grapple with, I’m also in a position of advantage in that the violence ended with my parents. Both sides of my family have a history of generational violence and trauma that my parents just fully and thoroughly shut down through a combination of stubborn willpower and genuine joy in the family they built together. Because I was raised in such a safe and loving home and continue to build that legacy with my own children, I was able to move into the darkness of the past without the fear of drowning in it. There are too many lights waiting for me on the new-growth side of the family tree for me to lose my way.
MV: Epigenetics is a fascinating field of science, and you say that there was a “compulsive element” to your genealogical research. What was your process in writing this piece? What kind of challenges did you face?
AR: This piece would not have been possible without the help of my inattentive ADHD. The way my brain works, I can get wrapped up in research and get really frustrated with the time it takes to gather information instead of hitting my word count. Ancestry.com is a particular addictive problem for me, and I’m not the only one. I don’t know if anyone has studied why genealogical work can be so consuming, but the dopamine hits are there, for sure. It’s a similar feeling to getting a solid section of your puzzle finished. The complexity of investigating the clues the website offers you and cross-referencing primary source documents like census records and marriage licenses is just weirdly fun.
Along with getting a thrill out of the family history excavation, working in a braided form is really helpful for me as well because I can bail on a section if I start getting bored or annoyed with it. The epigenetics section, for example, involved collecting a ton of articles on the topic and pulling quotes to work with and eventually, I did get a case of “the screams.” I closed that document and reopened one of the narrative threads to work on that for a while. Much like actual braiding, things can get dicey. Some strands can get too thick, maybe the plait is crooked, sometimes you forget how both your hands and your own hair work and you just have to drop everything and start again. For each braided essay I craft like this, my leftovers documents are probably twice the length of the actual essay. It’s messy work, but that’s just how my brain wants me to write, so who am I to argue with that gelatinous mass?
MV: In the story about sweat bees, you make a remarkable point about the cruelties women like Mary Jane Bishop endure and inflict on others: “That she was a woman of calculations who did not mind the pain of others. And perhaps, more than that, she sought to bring pain.” Did you mean for readers to see that hardship often leads to an indifference to violence?
AR: That’s a tricky question. I think many times, we look at people who have done cruel things and our brains want to find a cause for the effect. If we can understand why this person acted this way, it takes away some of the fear of the unknown and also the fear of what you, yourself, might be capable of. The truth is that any of us is capable of violence, and sometimes there’s a clear cause-and-effect or mitigating circumstances, and sometimes it’s a choice that someone is making to bring harm to others. Generational violence is a familiar story in many families for a reason. Cruelty begets cruelty. But there is always a choice, even if some people have to work harder than others to make the good one.
MV: What have you been working on lately?
AR: I’ve got a bit of a high-low situation going on with my work. On the more literary side of the coin, “A Severing” is one piece in a collection I’m developing about the Kentucky women in my family tree. “Malus Domestica” is the first piece in the collection, “A Severing” is the second, and I now have a third piece, “Along Rough Ways” that is tentatively out on submission, though I might be tempted to continue to make some tweaks there. “Along Rough Ways” tells the story of my great-great-great grandmother (on my mother’s side, this time) who was an accidental midwife in rural Appalachia around the turn of the last century. Her astoundingly low infant mortality rate has led some to speculate that she might have also been a practicing hill witch.
Since this work digging into the past can feel a little soul-heavy at times, I like to split my time and also work on my historical romance novel that is set in Gilded Age Boston and in the Midwest during the Little House on the Prairie era. Since COVID, I’ve felt the need to read for sheer pleasure and enjoyment, so I’ve read a lot of mystery novels, fantasy, and romance (both historical and contemporary). Since my other work is so deeply rooted in place, specifically Appalachia America, I wanted to try my hand at writing a romance novel that is American through and through. A lot of historical romance is set in Regency or Victorian England, and while I’m a sucker for a duke getting swept off his feet by a sassy seamstress, American stories are where my heart is firmly placed.
MV: Tell us a bit about the writers who inspire you.
AR: I will pick up anything and everything that Laura McHugh puts down. In fact, I’m such a fan of her work that I’m holding off on reading the last of her novels that I haven’t yet read because I can’t bear the thought of running out of her work. She does such interesting work around girlhood, especially grown women returning to what they remember of their girlhood (and wondering if they can trust their own memories), and her work is so beautifully grounded in place. McHugh sticks to her side of the Mississippi, in farm country and the Ozarks, but I definitely feel a kinship with how she develops the setting in such a strong, ethereal way.
Another writer whose work isn’t like mine but I very much enjoy and admire is Louise Penny. On the recommendation of my son’s speech therapist, I picked up a huge armful of her books just before the library shut down because of COVID. I’ve now read and listened to each of her Armand Gamache murder mystery novels set in snowy Canada and will probably revisit them again many times over. They’re a little too gristly to qualify as cozy mysteries, but the attention to setting (the magical small town of Three Pines) and descriptive elements (the food!) still make the reader feel utterly at ease even as the blood hits the wall. Louise Penny has a remarkable ability to hit those craft elements like character development, sensory description, and just gorgeous lines of prose while also fulfilling the parameters of her genre. With my historical romance I’m plugging away at, I’m definitely going to be attempting to channel Louise Penny by using elevated craft elements while also just having a plain-old good time with the storytelling. While my Appalachian Gothic creative nonfiction work doesn’t reflect this, I’m a reader who highly values the enjoyment factor. At the end of the day, life is short and beautiful, and I want to have fun.
Meera Vijayann, a nonfiction reader for NER, is an essayist and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is currently working on her debut novel.
Angie Romines is a writer, teacher, and Dolly Parton enthusiast living in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, two sons, and emotionally needy rescue pup. She received her MFA from Ohio State University, where she now teaches in the English department. A recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, Angie has published her prose in the Rumpus, Image (Good Letters), the Columbia Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of essays that explores the dark histories of Kentucky women in her family tree.