What:

While my focus in graduate school was creative nonfiction, these days I am mostly writing fiction. I am currently working on two novels-in-stories.

My debut memoir, The Angle of Flickering Light, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press on April 6, 2021. It is available for preorder now. Many chapters within the book have been published as stand-alone pieces in literary journals and anthologies over a period of several years.

Why:

I have wanted to be a writer since third grade. It sounds cliché, but that’s when I remember losing myself to what was called “the writing process,” a process I learned in the classroom and quickly learned to love. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I constantly wrote in journals and crafted poems and stories, and as an adult, I repeatedly took workshops out of a local woman’s home. She encouraged me to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, and I entered the Stonecoast MFA Program (where I met Linda, and so many other fabulous writers!) at The University of Southern Maine in 2007, which is when I became serious about writing and publishing.

I actually applied to the MFA program as a fiction writer. I submitted a writing sample that I considered to be a short story. The mentor who called to tell me I had been accepted into the program said, “We think you should focus on a creative nonfiction (memoir) degree rather than fiction.” Since I was ecstatic to be accepted into the program, I simply agreed, without giving it much thought. But in retrospect, the writing sample I submitted was actually the beginning of my forthcoming memoir, The Angle of Flickering Light.

During those two years at Stonecoast, the book began to take shape. The memoir is about parental deception and infidelity; it explores what it means for a girl to run recklessly into womanhood, clinging to any version of love, making temporary homes for herself again and again, before finally discovering what it means to become rooted. And like so many memoir writers who have come before me, a part of me thought, what have I done? But I write to make sense of the human experience. I write to understand what has happened and why. And I write to connect with others. We all grow in and out of versions of ourselves, and I think it’s important to assess our choices, to look closely at the lives we have lived. I am always looking for the lesson. And oftentimes, writing is the only way I find it.

How:

When I begin a new piece, I start writing with a pencil in a spiral bound notebook. It’s where I can allow the piece to breathe and expand, and to figure out what it wants to be, at least in those early stages. If it’s spring or summer, I often do this on a camping chair in my back yard in southern Maine. But I believe it’s important to be able to write anywhere—on a train, in a doctor’s waiting room, in the parked car. I worked as a bartender and waited tables for many years, and I kept stacks of Post-it notes in my pockets to scribble down food and drink orders. During slower shifts, I used those Post-its to jot down scenes and to flesh out characters. And once I have a good amount of handwritten pages, I begin to type.

My process is somewhat messy. I often have no idea where a piece is going until I’ve been working on it for a while. Once I realize what I am writing about, I can return to it to revise and prune back, to illuminate the heart of the story. But however it happens, one element is always the same: writing is the place where I feel most at home.

Gina’s Bio:

Gina Troisi’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Fourth Genre, The Gettysburg Review, Fugue, Under the Sun, Flyway:Journal of Writing & Environment, and elsewhere. Her stories and essays have been recognized as finalists in several national contests, including the 2020 Iron Horse Literary Review Trifecta Award in Fiction, the 2018 New Letters Publication Award in Fiction, American Literary Review’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2018, and others. She has taught classes and workshops in both traditional and nontraditional settings, including writing workshops for female adult survivors of sexual assault. She lives in coastal Maine.

Connect with Gina:

Website
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

Book Info: Preorder The Angle of Flickering Light from Amazon

Preorder The Angle of Flickering Light from Bookshop.org

Praise for The Angle of Flickering Light:

“The psychological abuse Troisi endured as a child had my fists clenching in rage. It is almost a relief when she at last finds escape – in drugs, in codependent love, on the open road. But this is a story of powerful recovery in the truest sense of the word, the journey of a woman who reclaims a sense of home in the sanctity of the self.”
– Domenica Ruta, New York Times Best Selling Author of With or Without You

In prose both lucid and visceral, Gina Troisi chronicles her progress through a very harsh landscape, one marked by casual cultural horrors and punishing intimate ones, the effects of conceit, emotional numbness and addiction on the part of others—a parent, step-parent, lover—that can entangle a caring person in pointless love and profound confusion. The narrator is remarkably honest about what she suffered and learned but also how she kept a thread of herself alive. How she comes through is inspiring in the basic sense—spirit making her whole, spirit finding itself in words.
– Baron Wormser, author of Songs From a Voice and The Road Washes Out in the Spring

---

Thank you for visiting Linda’s blog.

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
Learn more about her picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Learn more about her poetry chapbook, Security