Margo Orlando Littell
I grew up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town where crumbling mansions are all that remain of the coal-and-coke wealth from the early twentieth century, when the town led the United States in millionaires per capita. Now, nearly half the population lives at or below the poverty level, and haunting, once-splendid buildings in the old downtown can be purchased for a song. After twenty years of living in New York City, Barcelona, Northern California, and New Jersey, I’m now living in Pittsburgh with my husband and two daughters. Southwestern Pennsylvania is the place that inspires almost all my fiction.
I started writing obsessively as soon as I learned to write, in a Cabbage Patch diary I filled with critical minutia. Thousands of journal pages followed, and then, eventually, poetry. I was serious about my efforts, and in high school I attended the Pennsylvania School for the Arts. It’s funny how bits from the far past sometimes resurface: a poem I heard during my poetry classes that summer--over twenty-five years ago now--wound up becoming the epigraph of my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name.
I began writing short stories at the University of Dayton and went on to receive an MFA from Columbia, where I taught undergraduate composition and wrote a collection of novellas. After a few years working as an editor in New York City, I sold nearly everything I owned, quit my job, and followed my boyfriend to Spain--and then to California and then back to Brooklyn. Somewhere in all that, we got married and had kids. Life took over for a while, freelance editing and professional resume writing and house buying and child rearing, but in 2011 I turned one of my novellas into a full-length novel that would become Each Vagabond by Name. In 2013, inspired by the decrepit properties on every block of my hometown, I began writing what would become, in 2020, The Distance from Four Points.
I’m driven to write about characters who are rooted to a place and who, even if they succeed at leaving, feel pulled toward home for one reason or another. I find inspiration in odd rummage-sale finds, visits to my hometown, and newspaper articles that give a glimpse of quiet struggles and preoccupations that are just to the side of the expected thing.
Author Photo: Kathryn Huang