Core Memories: Angela Peñaredondo
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Angela Peñaredondo.
Angela Peñaredondo is a queer Filipinx, interdisciplinary writer, and author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute), and Maroon (Jamii Publications). They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Bernardino and live in Los Angeles, California. You can find them on Instagram at @domainedenarwhal and at https://www.angelapenaredondo.com/.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
As a youngster, I found myself scouring comic bookstore bins with my brother. In superhero fiction-based comic books, I immersed myself in visual landscapes set during apocalyptic histories and amongst dystopian futures populated by hybrid mutant beings who possessed incredible powers. I was fascinated by their godlike qualities but also how deeply lonely they were and how much discrimination and violence they faced for being different. I found catharsis in pages that unfolded into alternative universes inhabited by weird, sensual characters who experienced immense struggle as well as triumph and vulnerability. Comics became fertile ground for my young and fiery imagination. They became fantastical alternative spaces that reflected in creative ways the complexities of the real world. Later on, when I was a teenager, although I could not articulate it to myself then, I was searching for my own path into dissent, and there in a local record store, as I flipped through stacks of used vinyl, I noticed that on a nearby table was a display of records and books dedicated to bebop jazz. There I came across a fresh copy of Viking’s The Portable Beat Reader edited by Ann Charters, the cover displaying a black and white photograph of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac appearing like post-rockabilly flaneurs slouching on a sofa in deep in conversation. It was in the anthologized writings by these white male, post-WWII era anti-conformist poets, where I witnessed an antithesis to the masculine norm— wildly creative, tender, sympathetic, reckless, and very American. I read and reread the entire anthology countless times, rolling its thick pages into itself, stuffing it into my backpack. From this entry point, I was able to discover other postmodern and metamodern writers and artists that challenged and expanded my hungry, restless, and at times defiant artistic yearnings of my youth.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
Those moments did impact my current work and artistic practices because eventually, I needed much more than the perspective and voices of cis white male poets, but I feel encountering these writers earlier on propelled me to profoundly seek a more diverse range of poets, writers, and artists nationally and globally. I desired a more personal and intimate point of departure, with this I mean finding creative voices of art that were too rebellious, resistant, transgressive, imbued avant-garde modalities but were from within my own people, my communities, birthed and nourished within marginalized spaces. I learned from (and continue to learn) writers of color, diasporic poets, queer and trans writers, activists, radical thinkers, and as Sara Ahmed coined so lovingly, feminist killjoys. From these inspirations, I was also very much influenced by how poetic language and form can embody and demonstrate how memory can feel fragmented, nonlinear, associative, cyclical, or tidal. Aesthetically and conceptually in my own work, I find myself writing from these perspectives, knowing the journey will continually be unpredictable, surprising, and far from direct or straightforward. It’s been a life practice to learn how to honor my own artistic intentions and visions, even if the road feels directionless.
Are there any new projects you’re working on?
Early this year, I released a new book, nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press). Nature felt but never apprehended synthesizes poetry, lyric prose, fragmented creative nonfiction, and visual art. The book voyages through the junctures of gender and environmental injustices, and its connections between histories of foreign invasions and intimacies of survivorhood.