Why do you write?
Because I like to,
because I have to, like any other writer will tell you.
Is there a reason you
write short fiction?
I write short fiction
because I have twins. Two very young
children, they’re three years old. That
format allows me to work quickly, get things out and revise it in the time that
I have. I teach five classes and I try
to give my students as much attention as possible, however much time that
affords me. Stuff I write lately is a
lot of prose poems. Or rather, it could
be considered cross genre as prose poems and flash fiction and a lot of times
it’s genre-less. I do write longer short
stories and am working on a novel.
Is there a specific audience
for your novel?
That is a difficult
question for me, and it’s a question that’s very easy when I write non-fiction…there
is a very specific audience for my scholarly work although my work is not
really scholarly, it’s usually along the lines of the craft, of making fiction
or teaching of it through pedagogy. But
as far as my fiction goes, and my creative work, I don’t think that I have an
audience in mind. I wouldn’t say that its
young adult, but I wouldn’t not say that it’s young adult. I don’t think I do, do you have an audience
in mind when you write creative work? It’s something that’s important
to think about especially when you’re starting to market your work. When you are working with short works you
just look at the different journals that are out there, online or whatever, but
when you start marketing to somebody like an agent, or for a novel, that agent my want to know in your pre-letter “who
is your target audience?”
Is there something
your novel is capable of handling that your short fiction isn’t?
This is the first
really long work that I’ve done. One
thing that I’ve learned with this is that much more needs to be told to an
audience, to a reader, than in short fiction.
Short fiction has a lot of implication, you have only so much space to
work with, but with novels you can spend more time on description, with back
story, with exposition and stuff like that.
That I’m not used to, and usually when you revise you do a lot of
cutting away, but when I’m revising this novel I’m doing a lot of adding too,
just to fill it out a little more. It
reads right now, although it’s over two hundred pages, it reads like a two
hundred page plus short story in some aspects, so I’m working on that too. When I first starting writing it, the
professor that I started with when I was still in grad school, I asked him “does
this sound like a series of short stories or does this sound like a novel?” and
he said “this is a novel.” And he’s a
novelist so I respect what he says.
What about
content? What are you trying to achieve
with this novel? Is there a message?
I wish! That sounds
really important. The one thing that I
could think of to describe the novel is, very simply, is that there are three
protagonists, three women, and all three fall in love with other people. Those relationships are very taboo, one is
set in the thirties and is a homosexual relationship, one is set in the forties
and is an interracial relationship, and one is set in the sixties and is a May/December
relationship. The idea is that, even if
you were to be in that relationship, even if you’re in love, it’s okay if that
relationship ends. Even if it’s taboo,
even if you fought for it, if that relationship ends [it’s okay]. When I explain it right now it sounds very
chick-lit-ish. It sounds really
pretentious to call your own work literary but I think it’s more literary than
that. The exterior conflict is class,
there are class issues, there’s racism.
Your work seems to
deal with race very transparently.
The only time I
include things about race is if it’s important.
What I did with “What Plums Would Do” the reason I wrote that…as an exercise
that I gave myself…is how do you write about a culture outside of your own
without appropriating that culture? So I
thought it would be fun to write about another culture from the perspective of
someone outside of it. I had fun writing
that.
Your writing seems to
handle themes like race in very genuine ways, without making it the forefront
of the piece. Is there any intent to do that or a way you go about doing that?
No, I wish I was that
smart. Some advice I gave to a fellow
student at a writing workshop once, he was writing outside of his race. He was writing about black people, and I didn’t
know why I was not liking it. To me his
work sounded insincere, and he was a very good writer. This particular piece, I didn’t like it, and
I thought about it, and it was constantly thinking about being black. You said you were Latino, how often do you actually
go around thinking about being Latino?
Unless something happens that brings it to the forefront you just don’t
think about it. It’s part of your
identity, it exists, but no one goes around constantly thinking “I’m a woman, I’m
a woman, I’m a woman.” So I thought of
an analogy, if it leaks in your house and it rains, you think about it, but
unless it’s raining, you aren’t thinking about it.
So how do you go
about being sincere to someone-else’s race?
That’s a hard
question, I don’t know. I think just in
real life, if you’re going to accept others as who they are, you have to first
accept them as a person. If race comes
into the picture at all, deal with it as it comes, but you don’t have to deal
with race. It is the same with
dialect. Dropping verbs, certain words,
you don’t want to make it look like Mark Twain.
I like Mark Twain, and that was fine in the 1800’s but it’s not fine
today. If you can say someone is from
the south and talked with a Louisiana accent, you don’t even have to display
the accent, just hearing it is enough for the audience. If you do it well…I don’t know if I do it
well.
You mentioned poetry
earlier, is there something your poetry accomplishes that your other work
cannot?
No, I wish. I think it’s just because I can write really
short poems, it’s really because of the kids.
I’m not not going to write, you’re a writer, you have to write something
down, so what can do you with the time that you have. I was told this summer by a literary
consultant, a woman at Bread Loaf who makes it her business as well as being a
writer, telling you about your work, where it would be placed in magazines and which
journals you should submit to. She told
me that my fiction is very poetic, more poetic than prose. So, I started off as a poet, or I thought I
was a poet and then when I went to grad school I decided that I didn’t want to
write poetry because everyone was doing it.
So you went to short
fiction?
I was already writing
short fiction at that point but yeah.
So the novel is
really where you want to focus?
Right now, yeah. As a student you might be interested in this,
it’s easier to publish a novel than publishing short fiction. The reason why, is because people read
novels, students and writers read short fiction. This is going on the internet and that’s going
to be bad for me to say but really how many people do you know that read short
story collections that aren’t writers are students. They are starting to become more popular and
I don’t understand why they aren’t as popular as they are because you can read
them in a single sitting and with our attention spans it seems like short
stories would be more popular, even novellas.
But no, novels, people buy novels.
The first time I taught a lit class, I taught a lot of short stories and
my students were really annoyed with that.
They thought it was more difficult to access short stories than novels,
I guess I understand that too, because if you remember when we first started
talking, short stories are implications, you have to do a lot more work to get
into the story. Readers have to be a
little more imaginative. I know that
these are generalizations. One of the
things that Dr. Burns told me when I was a student here, she drew it on the
board, she said she didn’t like Hemingway and I don’t really like Hemingway
either, but she drew like these humps when we read “Hills Like White Elephants”
it’s a short piece, mostly dialogue. One
of the characters in the story looks at these hills and says “they look like
white elephants” because all you see are the top of the hills. And Dr. Burns said like in short stories, you’re
just seeing the top of the stories, the exposition you don’t see you just kind
of assume, and I thought that was a good analogy.
Is there any advice
you’d like to give new writers?
Read, and write. Musicians practice their instrument hours a
day, and when they learn songs they listen to variations of them over and over
again. I’m not saying to write for hours
every day, but even half an hour, fifteen minutes, practice. And read, read everything, read the back of a
cereal box, learn how language works and learn how other people are using it.
Does Facebook count?... :o)
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