ANGELA MORGAN CUTLER
About Angela Morgan Cutler
Angela lives in Cardiff with her two teenage sons and husband Ian. She worked for 10 years as a psychiatric nurse, trained as a fine artist and completed a Ph.D. in Critical & Creative Writing at Cardiff University. She has been running creative writing groups since 2000. Auschwitz is her first novel. For more about the author see www.angelamorgancutler.com
Praise for Angela Morgan Cutler:
'This remarkable novel ... Cutler's Auschwitz creates a category of its own ... Cutler's voice is undoubtedly a new voice of the post-Holocaust generations ... Her sophisticated and highly individual poetic style "shows the tracks of her labour" ... in an imaginative way and by doing so turns Cutler's debut into a superb novel on writing.' Scottish Review of Books
'Cutler does not preach or patronise, and her ability to deliver impressively poetic prose means that she never compromises the subject-matter. Her voice is refreshing, shocking and commanding, and represents an exciting departure for contemporary fiction.' New Welsh Review
‘Auschwitz stands like a tombstone for our civilisation. Angela Morgan Cutler has brilliantly infiltrated the borders of this landscape of desolation. Somehow she has found a voice that reflects the enormity of the horrors perpetuated there without being stifled by them. Unsentimental and richly worked … the words are more than mere messengers of thoughts and feelings – they glow with a life of their own … the whole package quite inimitable: the rarest quality in literature.’ Henry Woolf
‘Cutler writes like a British Hélène Cixous. Her invitation to visit with her the tourist attraction that modern-day Auschwitz has become is daring, shocking, profoundly moving – even, on occasion, funny. I loved its stylistic hybridity.’ Susan Sellers
‘When the story of the unspeakable has been told a thousand times, when the images of the unimaginable have been shown a thousand times, when the mind is numb - where do you go from there? You have to start anew. That is what Angela Morgan Cutler has done.’ Rex Bloomstein
An interview with Angela Morgan Cutler
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I first started writing when my two sons were born. I had
finished 4 years in Art College and being pregnant it was no longer possible
to hoist the heavy steel panels I was rusting and waxing into paintings. So
from somewhere – maybe a necessity to keep working – I began writing,
almost in secret, some afternoons while the babies slept for a couple of hours
either side of me. It was years before I showed anyone - apart from En that
is. And then there were long periods when I didn’t write and my paid
work took over again. I don’t know if I felt inspired, it just kind
of happened, came out in a great gush. It began as a more practical outlet
for my work and in the end became more challenging than painting, I don’t
know if that is true, but it felt like you could spend each day working with
language and it would always get the better of you, it would always escape
and this kept me returning - it’s a love hate relationship in many ways.
Thinking back, I was always writing as a child but I didn’t consider
this was writing. I wrote 20 page letters, kept journals.
I still don’t know if I think of myself as a writer – or if I
ever will. As a child, and for years after, I was immersed in making images.
But when I did make this shift from painting, I quickly realised that my writing
defied categorisation and could not be slotted into convenient genres. When
I found writers like Beckett, Cixous, Federman, Chawaf, Barthes, Deleuze,
writers who were exiled to or from France, or were connected to the French
language [even though I do not speak a word of French] I felt that I had found
a place of association – a language that was like a kind of remembering
somewhere inside me –a deep familiarity. Harold Pinter’s speech
in Old Times had had the same effect many years before - made something slip.
I didn’t know it at the time but hearing Kate’s final speech at
the end of that play changed everything. I had never heard language like it,
yet I knew it so completely. The same experience I’d had from the work
of artists like Beuys, Keifer and more recently, Sam Taylor Wood, Sophie Calle,
Eija- Liisa Ahtila. Well there are too many artists to mention - but I am
inspired by so many things, each day, just walking down the street, finding
a stray parrot in my tree. I grew up with a father who is a great story -
teller. I love European films and could watch them all day long. Particularly
Kieslowski and Bergman. Also, writing to Federman every day has been a completely
freeing mad adventure in words.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Auschwitz? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?
I don’t know about inspiration … that is a problematic word. You could say, I got nowhere with it, or at least that’s how it felt at times; that it began with my refusal, I kept asking: what am I doing putting my nose to this subject, what am I thinking of ... You could spend a life time in or with or on Auschwitz and get nowhere. But then, yes, where is there to get … I committed myself to it, maybe that’s all I can say. One day I turned to face it and said yes to it and somehow it got inside me, and remains there now. I tried to give myself over to it as honestly as I could, attempted to find words where there are none but where there must be words … To keep the doubt visible sounds a bit clichéd, but that was important for me. Alongside this, there was of course my being in writing with Raymond each day which also, in turn, made me reflect on the personal story in our families alongside all those huge universal questions of where now in this new century … It was this how to write about Auschwitz? – that kept returning. How to write about trauma someone said, Hell someone else said, I crossed both out, wiped out the words constantly erased but still, the questions became the engine and 300 plus pages on, the same how to … remains open. The book also lead us via Auschwitz and took us to Minsk, this was not planned in any way, I was writing and living it side by side … both character and author, this interested me too. When I showed some of the early pages to my father, he exclaimed, What do you know about Auschwitz ... Nothing I said. This nothing, but trying to write despite that and into that.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
My voice comes out of a sense of urgency to get something down. Sometimes it’s like a surge of energy that I know will only last for a while and if I don’t get it quickly down it will disperse. But it could so easily be another voice, another version. We are in voices all day and while we dream. Inside and outside. Voices sparking up in us, at us, contradicting, talking behind our backs, mimicking, laughing, imagining and lying, filling up the silence, the muteness, in this case, that I felt when we visited Auschwitz. The work normally begins with something that touches me as absurd, or something that stays, taboos, what is not allowed, nor understood. Mostly there’s resistance. An urgency and a huge resistance and fear that no voice will come, or that when it does that it will never shut up. As the late Spalding Gray said: If there is anything that terrifies me about death it’s that I’ll have to stop talking. But maybe I’ll have exhausted myself by then.
How and when do you write?
All the time in my head … in my dreams … in my notebooks. When it comes to turning up at the machine … I always write by wanting to and by not wanting to. Always after Woman’s Hour and finishing before the kids get home by 4 p.m.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I read about a dozen books at a time. I have book towers everywhere. I found W.G. Sebald’s wonderful novel Austerlitz as I finished Auschwitz. I am now reading his book: The Emigrants. I just finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Cixous’ Ex-Cities, Federman’s Carcasses and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. I am just starting Derrida’s On the Name and a beautiful huge book by Walter Benjamin that I can hardly lift up, The Arcade’s Project, which is a collection of fragments. I also just finished watching Kieslowski’s film/s Dekalog - The 10 Commandments; The Bridge, a film about all the people who threw themselves to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004; a wonderful Russian film Koktobel; and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, which is set in Glasgow.
