An Interview with Angelino Donnachaidh

Angelino Donnachaidh is a Mexican-American father, author, and Japanese-English translator, and longtime resident of Osaka, Japan. His works include the middle grade historical fiction illustrated novella Tamiu: A Cat’s Tale (North Street Prize Winner), the YA post-cyberpunk AI heist adventure screenplay Brother, and an upcoming samurai scifi-fantasy action-thriller novel entitled The Mayhem Protocols.

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Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

There are so many I would feel a little dishonest or arbitrary picking a few to name-drop, and silly trying to list them all. I have been a voracious reader since elementary school, in addition to having always loved movies.

I think there was a pretty rich primordial narrative soup sloshing around in my head by the time I realized writing stories was something I could do too. I used to draw a lot, so my first dream in this regard was to write comic books.

Drawing unfortunately got squeezed into the background by other activities as I got older, but the drive to write — and to follow what writers in various mediums were doing to push the craft and its conversation forward — never really did.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I’ve had a lot of survival jobs, and I’ve changed jobs a lot even since getting more established, so I’ve been all over the place: retail, kitchen work, pizza delivery, school picture day photography, hotel night audit, elementary and junior high school teaching (ELA and social studies), language instruction (English as a second language and Japanese as a second language), international B2B sales, translation, media localization, interpreting, marketing, copy writing, travel coverage, and tour guidance.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

I wanted the character names in Tamiu to evoke a sense of the distant past, especially in the Middle East and its surrounding regions, so I tried to draw from languages like Sumerian, Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and Greek.

As I understand it, “Miu” means “Cat” (literally from the sound that cats make) and “Ta” is a feminine marker in Ancient Egyptian, so Tamiu really just means “Female Cat.”

Tamiu’s name is not actually grammatically correct, to my knowledge – I believe the “Ta” part is supposed to be a suffix, and the vowel should be dropped in this kind of compound. So properly speaking, it should be “Miut” (or “Mewt”), which incidentally I have since read was also a popular name for girls in Egypt at the time because of the culture’s fondness for cats. I just thought “Tamiu” sounded better than “Miut” to modern ears both in English and in Japanese, so I took the artistic liberty of being a little ungrammatical.

Actually, after publishing the book I came across an article about a royal pet cat from the 1300s BC in Egypt. Her name was Ta-Miu, and she was laid to rest in her own sarcophagus within the tomb of Crown Prince Thutmose. So maybe “Ta-Miu” is more grammatical in Egyptian than I thought.

Thutmose seems to have died rather young, and his cat Ta-Miu was important enough to him that she was mummified and entombed with him in full human pharaonic fashion. This struck me as a bittersweet and beautiful image — the innocence of a boy and his beloved cat frozen in time by tragedy.

I think there is a little coincidental resonance with the fictional Tamiu’s role in the budding relationship between humankind and catkind in the book. As a writer, the story of this real Ta-Miu was a really fun thing to stumble upon.

What part of publishing your book made it feel real for the first time?

Seeing it physically in people’s hands and on bookshelves was the first part. The second part was reading a review on Goodreads from someone I’d never met. The third part was the North Street Prize committee reaching out to me saying that the book was doing well with their judges and they wanted to see physical copies before making a final decision.

Somehow that email hit me even more than eventually winning that award did. Just knowing that strangers who make it their business to read and appraise books were reading my work and taking it seriously and seeing value in it. It was brand new. It felt like I was a real author.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

I’m always listening to music when I’m writing. During Tamiu, I was listening to a lot of Epic Mountain’s work for the science and education YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. I think I borrowed a lot of the soul and atmosphere and range of moods in the musical worlds they create — at least in my head I did.

I was also listening to lots of Dan Deacon, in particular the album America, which is really just an incredible album to write to. I tried to harness the drive and rhythm and scale of it for the book’s sweep and pacing. Lena Raine’s soundtrack for the video game Celeste was also in the mix, as were The Shanghai Restoration Project, Little Dragon, and Sufjan Stevens.

I’ve actually always fantasized about the idea of working with composers/musicians to release a book with a soundtrack album, probably because music is such a big part of my writing process. In my wildest dreams, I’d love to have a Tamiu soundtrack album with Dan Deacon, Lena Raine, The Shanghai Restoration Project, Little Dragon, Sufjan Stevens, and Epic Mountain all on it.

What’s one thing you hope sticks with readers after they finish your book?

I think the difficulty of putting these things into words accurately is one of the paradoxes of being a writer. After all, it took me exactly the whole length of the book to make its point, so anything else I say about it is either reductive or superfluous. I’ve also never really been a fan of authors explaining their books or issuing binding rulings on what they are supposed to mean outside of the text of the books themselves. As the author, I think the book itself is our chance to make our point.

I can talk about my feelings and thoughts while writing the book, though. Everything I say here is just about my thought process and feelings in writing Tamiu. It’s certainly not intended as any kind of definitive statement on the themes or meanings of the book.

I think I have a fascination with where things come from, or how they get to be the way they are. We take domestication for granted now because we’ve lived for millennia with just its results, but if you picture being an early human or even an early cat or dog or horse when these first contacts and relationships were being formed with no guarantees of how they were going to turn out, it really feels like something from fantasy fiction or space opera.

All of our pets, work animals, and food animals are living creatures with their own modes of understanding, navigating, communicating, and surviving the world. This means that consciously or not, as life forms interacting with the world, they also all implicitly have their own value systems – which to me seem like an emergent and partially instinctual phenomenon. I think that however different those animal value systems are from ours, however conscious or unconscious they may be, they probably get tested and strengthened or broken or modified by the demands of survival just like ours do.

Going down this path also made me think about how biology and history seem deterministic when viewed from a certain angle – and it’s an angle that we often look at them from. They seem to confine us to certain behaviors, outcomes, and ways of life. But the reality is that at they also give us the ability to make choices and to form novel relationships. The outcomes are always really much more up for grabs before they happen than we tend to feel after the fact.

When we imagine nature and our relationship with it, I think we can have a dangerous tendency to be dogmatic, reductive, and prescriptive. We think in terms of some kind of divine order, “the way things work.” There are predators, there are prey. There are the weak and the strong, the smart and the stupid, allies and enemies. And of course, because we’re humans and our peculiarities as a species have given us immense and multifarious powers that are in many ways unparalleled, we see ourselves standing atop it all, or maybe so far above it that we’re somehow outside of it. And supposedly none of it can be changed because it’s “natural.”

But when we really zoom in on the particulars of how things got to be the ways they are and study them, from the formation of the planet to the very beginnings of life to the history and state of the modern world, almost none of the particulars really seem to have been inevitable. Everything could have always gone a variety of other ways. The state of things at any given time is arbitrary, fragile, and subject to constant unpredictable change.

I had some of the work of Yuval Noah Harari and Jared Diamond in mind when writing Tamiu, so maybe I’ll just nod to a Harari quote on this point:

“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”

(Spoiler alert on a plot point in Tamiu below.)

That was why it was so important to me that Tamiu, as the first ever cat to encounter humans and be offered the bargain of domestication, would be nearly seduced by the bargain but ultimately reject it – while at the same time opening the door for other cats to follow in her footsteps but make a different choice than she did.

I think if we picture the first dog or the first cat to be domesticated, hindsight gives us a tendency to picture their fate as a fait accompli from the beginning. But it seems just as possible to me that there was a dog or a cat or even many dogs or cats who went, “Nah, not for me” and ran off. That feels more authentic to how pivotal changes in history play out. And I mean, even all of these thousands of years later, there are a great many even very pampered pets who love their humans yet still wouldn’t stay where they’re “supposed to be” without fences or walls to contain them.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Actually putting something out there and getting started on this whole public side of writing stories after so many years focused on only the private side of it.

What creative projects are you currently working on?

My next book, a samurai historically-inspired science fiction/fantasy action/thriller novel called The Mayhem Protocols.

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