Core Memories: Amanda E. Scott
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 Amanda E. Scott.
Amanda E. Scott is a Latine writer currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Western Michigan University, where she also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Third Coast. She is also co-founder and Assistant Executive Editor of Porter House Review, and her writing appears in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, HAD, Juked, New South, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @alizscott.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
I grew up under the influence of my father, who is an avid reader, but also a visual artist and musician. So, I had a lot of latitude as a kid to explore and was always reading, dawdling in my journal, or outside. I feel fortunate to have had that chance to interact with the world and these ways of creating from an early age. I always wrote, but at some point in early college I remember coming across Diane Williams—particularly, Romancer Erector—and just being blown away by the idea that defamiliarization and alienation could be your primary tools for crafting stories. That these were means for disarming a reader. I’m not sure I’ve ever truly written into my own space of alienation, but in the work I’m most proud of, that impulse is there, in subject and language. There’s a sort of freedom in detaching from what’s been established or known and writers like her are a good reminder of that. I suppose I like being a little lost.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
As someone who primarily works in fiction and nonfiction—and tends to blur the line between the two—I’m generally drawn to writers that experiment with narrative and language in ways that make me feel a little untethered, which I like. Writers like Diane Williams, or someone like Julián Herbert and what he does in Tomb Song, inspire me to lean into abstraction, even obfuscation, when I can get away with it. So, when I suddenly find myself writing about a random old coffee shop I used to haunt in Houston or a piece that, at first, reads like a field guide for lakes, I know there’s something deeper under the surface. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t call attention to the body, which I find myself returning to as a subject in most of my writing, particularly as a portal to the sublime and subliminal.
Are there any new projects you’re working on?
I’m currently working on a collection of essays, which I have yet to title. But the word ‘mistress’ feels like an important catalyst for it. I became fascinated by the various meanings of that word and what taking up that role metaphorically, but also experientially, might offer us—this despite the often-negative connotations the term tends to conjure up. The closer you inspect its origins, the more you find it’s a word of empowerment, and it’s that reversal—or reclamation—that I’m interested in as a larger concept. Many of the pieces explore shared subjects like heritage, sexuality, and desire, and how we attend to the task of building and sustaining a self through converging struggles.