Finding Home in Málaga: Meeting Donna Miscolta

The American novelist on leaving Seattle, living as an extranjera in Spain, and why the questions that matter most in fiction are always about belonging. By James Hartley.

Donna at home on her balcony in Málaga - photo by her husband James Cameron.

For Donna Miscolta, leaving Seattle for Málaga in 2023 started with rain. “My husband was weary of the damp winters,” she says. “I, too, was tiring of the grey, wet climate after forty-six years in Seattle.”

She imagined spending winters in Andalucía. Her husband had something rather more radical in mind. “He was envisioning a clean break.”

Leaving behind close friends and the generous writing community she had built over decades was not easy. “Once I realized that,” she recalls, “it took a few days for me to fully embrace the idea.” But once she did, there was no looking back. “Spain has provided the constant adventure and discovery I had long desired.”

For readers of The Madrid Review, Donna Miscolta may be a new name. In the United States, however, she has become recognised as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of identity, family and belonging. An American writer of Filipino and Mexican heritage, she has spent decades writing fiction rooted in a fictionalised version of National City, California, exploring the lives of people who often find themselves between cultures, between generations and between expectations.

‘Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories’ was published by Blair Books in 2016.

It is striking that, after crossing an ocean, the questions that have shaped her work remain exactly the same.

“I don’t think it’s changed the way I feel about such things,” she says of moving to Spain, “but it has changed the way I experience them.”

Her explanation is as thoughtful as it is revealing.

“When you feel not Filipino enough, not Mexican enough, not American enough and you constantly feel that the spaces you find yourself in are yours to occupy provisionally but not to fully claim, you have the persistent sense of outsiderliness in a place that by birth is your home.”

Living in Spain has not erased that feeling. Instead, it has clarified it.

“In Spain, the parameters are clear. I’m an extranjera in Spain. By definition, an outsider. I’m not Spanish. I wasn’t born here. I didn’t grow up here. I’m not trying to break down barriers here. I’m at home in my outsiderliness.”

Photo by Alex Guillén

Yet the story is more complicated than that. Spain’s history is inseparable from that of both the Philippines and Mexico, and Miscolta is acutely aware that the relationship carries both violence and cultural exchange. Colonialism left deep wounds, but it also created connections that continue to echo across continents.

“I call Spain, specifically Málaga, home because it’s where I live, it’s where I’m happy living. Also, there are traces of my heritage embedded here. One could even say, I come from here, which kind of turns that whole belonging thing on its head.”

It is an observation that feels entirely characteristic of her fiction, where identity is never fixed or simple, but always layered, contradictory and deeply human.

Although she now writes beside the Mediterranean, almost all of Miscolta’s fiction remains set in a place inspired by National City. “I think it’s less about a physical landscape or geographic place than a psychological one,” she says.

She describes growing up as “too shy to speak”, “both wanting and dreading to be seen”, constantly observing other people and wondering “what the secret was to being them.”

For many writers, place is geography. For Miscolta, it’s memory. National City became, she says, “the place where my self-consciousness, awkwardness, and inchoate dreams lived.” It was where she grew up “with four siblings, two parents, and a large extended family and then moved away with memories, observations, and anecdotes piled up to be plucked for dissection, inspiration, or fictionalization.”

Her path to publication was equally shaped by patience.

She wrote while working full-time and raising a family. The first draft of her first novel took three years. She discarded almost all of it and started again. The second version took another two years. Then came writing classes at night, conferences, craft books, stories, revisions, queries and rejection. Looking back, she sees none of it as wasted.

“What I learned was all of that—the writing, the rewriting; the classes and craft books and conferences in which I was seeking the secret to making a story work; the small successes and then the rejections that felt like the end of the world—was what it meant to be a writer. It’s a process and a pursuit.

“It means time and effort. And everything you write, good and bad, teaches you something about writing. And about yourself.”

There is something reassuring in hearing this from a writer with four books behind her. So much contemporary discussion of writing is dominated by publication, platforms and productivity. Miscolta’s emphasis is elsewhere. The work itself is the point.

Life in Málaga has not fundamentally altered her discipline, although it has changed the texture of her days. She still writes mostly at home, moving between kitchen, bedroom and balcony, with cafés reserved for reading drafts or making notes. She jokes that, despite her carefully structured routine, she spends plenty of time “daydreaming, scrolling, or texting.”

But inspiration is never far away.

“The fact that I can easily walk to a park, a museum, the movie theatre, or the beach when I want to shift my thinking is a constant source of pleasure.”

She has become fascinated by the city’s literary landscape, especially its streets named after writers, poets and artists. “The streets are lessons in history,” she says. “Every day I’m their student.”

One figure in particular has captured her imagination: José Rizal, the Filipino novelist, doctor and nationalist whose statue stands near Málaga’s port. “I always wonder whether passers-by stop to notice the statue. I wonder how many people know he was a Filipino doctor, poet, botanist, linguist, and an advocate for independence from Spain.”

She recounts Rizal’s studies in Madrid, his execution by a Spanish firing squad and Miguel de Unamuno’s later admiration for his work before quietly ending the story with an image worthy of one of her own short stories. “Sometimes, when I walk by the statue there are flowers laid across his arms.”

That instinct to notice what others pass by runs through all of Miscolta’s work. Her characters frequently occupy uncertain spaces between cultures, families and expectations. Why does she keep returning to those lives? “Maybe it’s been my particular obsession,” she says, “but I also think that it’s a not uncommon concern for many.”

“There are many ways and reasons a person might not feel they belong. It can be race, language, skin colour, religion, body type, gender—anything that sets one apart from others in a group.”

Then she offers perhaps the simplest definition of belonging one could hope to find.

“Belonging means feeling less alone in the world.”

Her forthcoming novel, Ofelia and Norma, brings many of the concerns that have occupied her throughout her career into sharp focus. It tells the story of twin sisters whose once unbreakable bond begins to fracture as they navigate family expectations, body image and a world that judges women by their appearance. As Ofelia and Norma are forced onto separate paths, each must confront trauma, loneliness and the struggle for self-acceptance before finding their way back to one another. Described by early readers as both emotionally powerful and formally ambitious, the novel explores sisterhood, resilience and the radical act of claiming space in a world that too often asks women—particularly large-bodied women—to make themselves smaller. It is a compassionate, unsentimental story that promises to introduce many more readers to Donna Miscolta's distinctive voice.

Asked what she hopes readers will discover in the new novel, Miscolta’s answer also serves as a quiet manifesto for fiction itself. “Whatever it is that makes us different, whether it’s something obviously physical or something not easily detectable, we each have a story of how we came to be at any particular point in our lives.”

“Taking time to learn that story of another person, even a fictional person, expands our ability to understand another human being.”

“I think that’s after all why we read and why some of us write.”

After spending time with Donna Miscolta’s work - and with Donna Miscolta herself - it is difficult to think of a better introduction.

Find out more about Donna here, at her website.