Angela Pelster is well-recognized in the literary community for her work. On April 14, she published her collection of essays called “The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming.” This work talks about her personal life, and the thoughts of the world that come from expanding upon them. She spoke at Prairie Lights Bookstore on April 29.
The Daily Iowan: Where did your title first come from, and what does that mean to you?
Angela Pelster: It was a really hard book to title, because I didn’t really know what I was writing about when I started. I was putting all these different essays together, and then it came about once I had the final form. I realized I basically had written a memoir of essays, about change and evolution, and fire was a predominant force in many of the essays.
I kept trying out a lot of different things too. I called up a friend and we tried out different titles and I realized the evolution of fire kind of captured it perfectly because I talk a lot about the way humans became human, and what evolutionary things had to happen in order for that. Crisis is sort of this tipping point where things could go one way or another. The book talks a lot about tipping points and crises. Thanks to the collective thinking with my friends and my husband, we tried a lot of stuff out.
Is there a personal aspect that you’ve put into your collection of essays, and why did you decide to do that?
The whole thing is about my personal life, but when you first start writing, you have to make a decision whether or not you want to get personal in your essays. For me, I just write the thing that I feel like I need to understand and explore. Personal crisis alongside environmental crisis felt like a really interesting combination.
When you think about disasters happening in your life and you’re trying to rebuild after something hard has happened, you’re also looking at the state of the world. Is there going to be a future for us? It just made sense to combine the personal and environmental and think about place in the world, and individuality and how those things reflect and intersect, and inform one another.
Do you think writing a collection of essays is easier or harder than writing a typical book?
I think it’s the same. I think every book requires something different from you, a different level of vulnerability, and risk taking. If you’re writing anything good and anything worthwhile, it is asking for everything of yourself. It doesn’t really matter what it is. I’ve written fiction, prose poetry, written essays, nonfiction too, and they all ask for everything you’re got to give it. If you’re not ready to do that, then it’s not going to work, or it’s not going to be something that is the best that it can possibly be. I think every book requires all of you.
Which writers or artists have influenced your writing style and rhythm throughout?
Well, Annie Dillard, I started reading her before I went to grad school and I was like, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know that an essay could do all these things.” I didn’t know that you could write like that, and it was so exciting, And then this book specifically was inspired a lot by a writer named Gaia Vince. She wrote this book called “Transcendence” and it’s all about the evolution of culture, human culture, and it blew my mind, and that got me so excited to think about cultural evolution and how that’s tied to physical and social evolution. So that was really the starting point. Not on an entire literary level, but on an ideas level for this book.
Overall, I feel like some examples in my own life would be that I really enjoy going to art museums and watching films. At this point in my life, it’s other art forms that are really pushing me to think about what I’m doing differently. Other art forms are really exciting, like I just wrote my first screenplay and I’ve been wanting to for awhile, and I can’t wait to do and see what happens next.
At this point in my life expanding into other art forms is exciting, like being a brand new baby artist. It’s been more influential on my work than just trying to keep writing and doing the same thing I’ve done for a while. Exploring other art forms is a way of expanding yourself, and being new and bad at something. It’s humbling and I don’t think you can write well from a place of arrogance. I botched ravioli the first time I made it.
When you begin an essay how do you usually start it and how does that shape the entire piece?
It’s usually different for every essay. Usually it comes out of a need to explore something, an idea, or an uncertainty. I’m at the school of essay writing thanks to the University of Iowa’s nonfiction program, which really centers a question at the heart of every essay. It’s there to figure out how to explore a question, not answer it, but what does the question really mean? Where is this question going to take you if you follow it? Sometimes the thing I need to think about is a beautiful image.
Sometimes the question is an injustice, sometimes it’s a thing that happens to me, but it’s something I need to think about, and I can’t think about it unless I’m writing about it. I can’t move forward in my thinking unless I’m writing about the question. I just get stuck in sort of a really flat imaginative circle of thought. Thinking is the way that I sort of process these questions and ideas.
How much research do you typically do for your work?
Oh, there is tons of research. Especially because I’m writing about things I have no training in, such as archaeology, evolution, environment. I’m just a writer, a curious writer. Somebody told me once early in my writing life that the best thing you can be as a writer is curious. A teacher can’t help you learn how to be curious. It’s something you’ve got to take care of yourself. Teachers can help you with all other sorts of things, but curiosity has to already be there. I think that quote has just been really helpful. Curiosity leads me into places where I don’t know at all, and I want to know and have to do all the research to figure it all out.