by Rebecca Childers

If ever stuck while playing a West Virginia University Creative Writing MFA version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, I have a tip for you. In 2008, our new MFA Fiction Faculty member, Glenn Taylor, published a story in the Hamilton Stone Review, the same edition featuring, then MFA Fiction candidate, Lori D’Angelo.

When Lori D’Angelo graduated from WVU’s MFA program in 2009, she left the department with lots of our favorite thing: stories. Be they about her desk that seemed to hold a miraculous amount of things, how she made everyone laugh until they cried at readings, her ability to write a novel in two weeks (during TA training!), or her firm and helpful comments in workshop, it is clear to those of us left behind that we missed out on something awesome. Yet, she still inspires us. Three years later, her work ethic and immense talent has only grown and blossomed recently landing her a prestigious grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation to aid her in the completion of a novel.

The Elizabeth George foundation awards grants to unpublished and emerging writers. Elizabeth George is an American author who writes mystery novels set in Great Britain. Lori, an Elizabeth George fan, applied for the grant from her foundation hoping to be able to gain some guaranteed time to work on her own novel, but didn’t expect to get it. She was pleasantly surprised. “The money is important and will be a huge source of help to me, but also important is the validation—the belief that my work is worth believing in and funding. That’s an amazing gift for any writer,” Lori said.

The novel Lori plans to dedicate this much deserved time to explores the impact of each decision a woman makes. After 16-year old Myra’s mother dies she makes a choice that sets off what Lori calls a “chain reaction of sorts.” This novel blossomed from an idea Lori had after the birth of her son, Ben, in 2010 (she is pictured above with him). She wanted to capture the process of someone coping with their own early death in the afterlife. But she couldn’t get the story to do what she wanted. “It seemed kind of lifeless, and then I realized something,” Lori said, “The energy in the novel, and my interest in it, was in the live characters rather than the dead ones. So I started again.” Her epiphany clearly led to a success. Some major themes of her new direction are mother figures, loss of mother figures, the choice to be or not be a mother and how that affects everything else in a woman’s life.

The ability to carefully wait and let her novel become what it is meant to be is a skill Lori believes she acquired after becoming a mother. She believes motherhood has made her more patient with her writing. “Babies and children don’t always do things on your timeline, and writing is like that too,” she said, “A story doesn’t always work when you want it to work. Sometimes, you have to just let it sit—be patient.” Another thing that has changed her work in recent years, is simply graduating from the MFA program. “When you’re in an MFA program, you’re often in direct competition with your peers for everything, and that can be really stressful, especially if you are a competitive person,” Lori said. “After the MFA, you now need to find a balance between your writing life and the rest of your life, while, in the MFA, your writing life often takes precedence over everything.”

The night I contacted Lori about this article she was attending a gun show for research for her fiction. As a writer, she believes in taking advantage of every resource possible. Lori attended the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop every year she attended WVU and appreciated getting feedback from a variety of voices not familiar with her previous work. Now, one way Lori is improving her writing post-MFA is by continuing to attend lots of conferences, both large and local. She began writing her novel while at the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference. “I picked that conference because the focus of the class I chose there was on novel writing, planning a novel, and setting a schedule so that you’d actually finish the novel,” Lori said. Another conference that helped her with her novel was the Book Passage Mystery Writers conference. Though she doesn’t write mystery novels, she said a lot of the advice applied to all writers. She was able to get feedback on her novel from an experienced agent, and listen to successful published writers talk about how they inspire themselves to continue to write. Lori has attended AWP twice. The best way to attend AWP, she thinks, is to know what you want to learn before you go. “This time, I wanted to specifically find out more information about what happens after a book is published, how one works with a publisher, and how not to use social media as an author,” Lori said. Small, local conferences can be just as helpful, Lori believes, and have much more affordable registration, travel, and lodging costs than larger more well-known conferences. She recently had a successful day at the Roanoke Regional Writers Conference. “When choosing conferences, I think it’s good to choose strategically and pick conferences that offer what you think you might need. What you might need isn’t always a workshop,” Lori said.

Lori is of course, continuously inspired but what she reads. She recently read Shari Goldhagen’s Family and Other Accidents, a story about two brothers. It is told from the perspective of the brothers, their girlfriends, eventual wives, and children. Lori found the characters impressive and the story engaging. She was also drawn in by the language. “Just amazingly well written sections that made you want to read them over and over again. In fact, I have gone back and re-read them,” she said. Lori is currently reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, a story of a retired schoolteacher who in interacting with her community comes to a deeper understanding of life and self. Lori is reading this book as slowly as possibly, because she does not want it to end.

For those of us inspired by Lori to apply for writing grants after graduation, she has kindly given us some advice. “Just do it,” she said, “Also, ask around.” Talking to people who have applied for similar things really helped her. She was able to read a cover letter for a grant that helped shaped her own. Also, she learned how to form a budget plan—something required for those who made it to the second round—by doing some smart googling. The most important part of the process, though, is having a specific project in mind. She said, “you need to be able to articulately explain what that project is and why it should be funded. I think you’re much more likely to get a grant or any type of funding if you say I want to write a novel about this thing in this place featuring these specific people rather than if you are less specific and say I want to write a novel about people dealing with loss.”

“Before I begin, I’d like to thank my dog Maggie, she couldn’t come tonight, but she inspires everything I do,” Lori said at her first Formal MFA reading as a first year at WVU. One last piece of advice from Lori? Get a pet. Lori has three. Maggie who is an Austrailian Cattle Dog, Harley the Beagle, and a wonderful cat named Felix. Lori said, “I think that my pets make me a better person. They also inspire and inform my work.”