Juan Felipe Unity Poem Fiesta

Juan Felipe Herrera is the author of several poetry collections, short stories, young adult literature, and children’s books. Among many of his works are the recent Notes on the Assemblage, Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, and The Upside Down Boy. He became the US poet laureate in 2015 for two years. His poems advocate for harmony and freedom in today’s ever diversifying world. His poetry particularly speaks to the working class, migrant workers, and the civil rights activists.

Among his many interests are photography, theatre, and performance poetry. He is also a performance poet and teaches performance within the community. He has created several performance ensembles.

He has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and has worked as chair of CSU Fresno’s Chicano and Latin American studies department. In the past, he has also served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

I interviewed Juan Felipe Herrera via phone on March 4, 2018.

Jennifer Mahoney: During your seminar at Antioch University in December 2017, you mentioned that a poem is “a mobile, a hanging architectural structure.” Will you tell me more about this?

Juan Felipe Herrera: The reader, all those things give the poem a new look, a motion in a way—how it moves and what it is for each reader, for each culture and place and time. If you look at it objectively, it’s a little structure. For me, I highly enjoy assembling the poem, building lines, moving words, creating spaces and pauses. It’s a structure, definitely. And I enjoy that quite a bit. The more mobile and the more fluid a poem is for me, the better, even though there is an architectural layer to it. 

 It’s connected to the notion of freedom of thought. And that’s a big thing right now, having freedom of thought. One group’s version of what is going on with another group’s version of what is going on, and if you don’t agree with the extreme right way of thinking then you are a free thinker.

JM: You’ve spoken about new coalitions, new symbols, refreshing symbols to nourish and expand the new Civil Rights movement. In what ways do you think writers, specifically, should rethink this movement?

JFH: We are going through such tremendous and intense changes. New symbol—the male symbol and the female symbol—those have been around for quite a while. It’s like art. Each new movement comes up with a whole new description of what is going on, for itself and what art is. So I think that’s something that is very high on the priority list, people interested in social change. We really do need to come up with a new sort of idea agreement—where we’re going and what we want and how we want it to be done, in what shape it’s going to be in. And how do we come together as diverse people and groups? And even if that is important at all. So we really have to kind of loosen our thoughts quite a bit and our historical narrative of thinking. Give ourselves a number of moments to imagine what is going on now and how we want to present ourselves. That’s where symbols come in. How we want to present ourselves globally and locally.

JM: In your piece, “Let Me Tell You What A Poem Brings,” the speaker mentions that a poem “is a way to attain a life without boundaries.” What ways does the poem break boundaries.

JFH: It’s kind of connected to the haiku in a way. The haiku, one of its great possibilities is that there is something literally and also something very deep in a haiku where you have to spring out of it and find something boundless. So that’s what I’m thinking about. That poem is boundlessness. Kind of like a number of days in your life where a particular day you have a very large expansive insight that you have never had before. It kind of comes out of nowhere, and it’s very big. And that’s what I’m kind of looking at…One day you actually crawl into this thing that you talked about whether it was freedom or love or unity. You really imagine it and you really feel it and you walk up to it as opposed to just saying it.

JM: You’ve spoken about Frederick Douglass at previous lectures. He is one of the many figures who inspire your work. He wanted to promote a new society. How might Frederick Douglass’s idea of freedom apply to the current situation in this country?

JFH: It’s connected to the notion of freedom of thought. And that’s a big thing right now, having freedom of thought.

One group’s version of what is going on with another group’s version of what is going on, and if you don’t agree with the extreme right way of thinking then you are a free thinker.

One of the worst things that can happen to us is be disconnected from each other. And to top it off, to be comfortable being disconnected—that’s even worse. So unity. It’s kind of intimate unity.

At large, I keep on thinking of the old school term that Milosz also used in the 40s when he speaks of Hitlerism and Stalinism. He mentioned very appropriately the term mass hypnosis. And people were being forced to learn a particular way of thinking…and if you didn’t follow, you were shot, banished, exiled. And Milosz was also interested in freedom of thought. So he mentioned the term mass hypnosis…from early psychoanalytic narratives of the early 20th century. And I think that’s what’s kind of going on all of a sudden too. Douglass was also concerned about freedom of thought because as a slave, with slavery, they were not allowed to read, not allowed to have books or mentors or teachers, not to talk about the world of writing or thinking or reading or speeches. So that was highly sanctioned. They were brutally punished because they wanted to read or follow the book. I found that to be alarming, of course, but I also found it to be alarming related to today. We’re kind of surface thinkers many a time. We just kind of read a little bit about this, a little bit about that. Or we’re just interested in the general news or we’re just interested in the movies—a cultural surface layer. We all have a good time. We go to Starbucks, we go to the movies, we come home, we talk, have a nice conversation. But it’s hard to take time out to really deepen our thinking of what on earth is going on right now. So freedom of thought, freedom of thinking is very critical.

JM: Speaking of media, because we are at a time where we need to be thoughtful, how can we practice thoughtfulness in today’s busy society with our everyday technology holding our attention?

Unity is a sweet word, but it’s quite a challenge. That’s my number one issue, how to have a new kind of unity, not this kind of unity where everybody is separate, cut off from each other. That’s not unity.

JFH: We have to stop. Corporate media has become highly, highly developed. I think about the Disney cartoons back in the 50s. They were like rudimentary compared to Disney cartoons today. The same is true to the advertisements today versus ten years ago. But corporate systems have built up a pretty deep and wide global reach and with extremely sophisticated material. They’re like short films. A commercial is a short film. It’s not just a commercial. It’s actually a dramatic film. So where does that leave you and me. Where do we have time to really think it over? So we have to be aware of that power as overtaking. It’s overtaking our way of being and our way of thinking. So we have to notice it and turn it off or find another path.

JM: You mentioned that what most brings you happiness is unity, to be one with everything and everyone. How can poetry bring readers and writers this fulfillment?

JFH: Poetry, art, meditative people, people who have discussions, teachers, classrooms. It’s going on all over the place. But it’s hard to notice once again, and we’re not in those classrooms. I remember seeing an experiment with animals, they show things here and there on tv. And this was a cat, abandoned. And all it had was a social relationship with a small piece of wood with a rug attached to it. What the cat ended up doing was rubbing itself against that carpet because it felt like it had a partner. Self-intimacy. One of the worst things that can happen to us is be disconnected from each other. And to top it off, to be comfortable being disconnected—that’s even worse. So unity. It’s kind of intimate unity. Not just kind of mechanical unity where we’re all in a theatre. I don’t know if there is unity there. We have to find out what unity is. We have to rediscover it. Groups being banned. Groups being deported. Sexual assault being ignored. Women’s experiences being ignored. High school students being massacred. And two or three days later, it’s off the agenda.

So unity is a sweet word, but it’s quite a challenge. That’s my number one issue, how to have a new kind of unity, not this kind of unity where everybody is separate, cut off from each other. That’s not unity. So that’s a good thing. And that does bring me happiness when I come together with friends and family.

JM: Do you think it is important for writers to listen to and have conversations with many people? If so, how has this idea contributed to your own writing?

JFH: We really are nourished by being in a pact of artists and people. At the heart of writing, for particularly poets, it’s going to be hard to notice your poetry if you just go at it by yourself. You select your own book that you want to read, and you write your own way, and you think it all out yourself in your bright poetry head. But poetry is a communal art…Being in a group of writers and poets and doing things together, and talking and going out, walking down the street and organizing events, going across country, and going to another nation together, and traveling around—one is more on the wilder traveling, anything goes world, meeting people. And the other side is kind of the writing world where you write. You may be on your own, mostly, but you will have heard people so you think differently than you do. You will have discovered new words that you know but you never thought of using them in that particular way. And you’ve just been inspired by having someone right next to you, and that itself gave you a whole lot of new energy or you work with a group of writers, and you say, ‘Hey, let’s do a poetry reading called the green elephants.’ And it’s completely amazing to you and you see people come. People applaud you or they give you feedback. You pass out your free poems. And that keeps you going as a writer, and it keeps you expanding as a writer, instead of just being the same way week after week. So, for a poet, poetry is a communal art, mostly.

Jennifer Mahoney is a Filipino writer in Houston. She is a graduate student at Antioch University where she studies poetry and fiction. She currently serves as an editor for Lunch Ticket. She has upcoming poetry in The Machinery.

Tony Lewis, Jr is a husband, father, son, author and activist. He works diligently, fighting for the rights of incarcerated men and women who have left family behind. But most importantly, he is fighting for the DCPS school system to offer aid to children who have an incarcerated parent. He also uses his voice to support inmates re-entering the community. His father is serving a life sentence in prison for his involvement in the DC drug trade during the 80s. Despite being the son of a Kingpin, Mr. Lewis has decided to use his voice advocating for social justice, in addition to changing the legacy and meaning behind the name “Tony Lewis.”

Mr. Lewis’s hard work and dedication has been featured on Elite Daily, CNN, BET, in the Washington Post, and most recently on The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 radio broadcast. He has also garnered awards such as the Steve Harvey/Ford Motor Company “Best Community Leader” award and the Presidential Call to Service award. His career accomplishments include his first book, Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2015), which he uses as a blueprint for children and young teens to use as a survival guide, aiding them through the difficult moments of losing a parent to incarceration. Mr. Lewis’s commitment to communities and social justice has been lifelong and continuing.

Tony Lewis, Jr. and I conducted our interview in person in early January 2018.

Shaneka Cook: In your book you talk a lot about your mother’s mental illness. Why do you think mental illness and depression are such taboo issues in our community when our community could benefit from honest discussion about this topic?

Tony Lewis: Yeah, that’s a great question. I was so transparent about my mother’s situation in hopes that I would in some way chip away at that stigma and it was very strategic. … It was very difficult for me to talk about it and be so transparent, but at the same time my hope is that it will help people, that it will free people to know that this is something that you could talk about, that this is not something that just the pastor can fix, right. You have to seek professional help and it’s OK to do that, and I’m even honest about me going to see a psychiatrist later on in the book. … So that comfortability came from a lifetime of dealing with my mother’s issues and being right there with her as she went through her battles.

You really have to look at the correlation between mass incarceration and the destabilization of communities, how many poor people were in Washington, how many people rented in Washington, how easy it was to displace folks and like you said, it’s capitalism and the agenda to quote on quote “redevelop Washington or improve Washington from the infrastructure standpoint and the development standpoint,” but nobody develops people.

Why is it stigma—­­I think in the black community it’s been something that’s just been swept under the rug. It’s gone undiagnosed. I think poverty and things of that nature play a part in it as well. It was something you were hushed about, or like I said, some people were told to go see [their] pastor and pray about it and not look at it as just a health issue and one that we can deal with. … This is just the shame that comes along with having a mentally ill relative or loved one. This is something we don’t understand, why a person is behaving the way that they are, acting the way that they are. I wanted Slugg to be a bridge for that, for our community, in mental health. I’ve heard that actually over the last two years that [Slugg] has been out, readers have talked about that. I’m glad that you touched on that, I didn’t want people to know my mother was like that, or my aunt or my cousin or my girlfriend was like that. So, I can only hope it can touch hearts and minds and souls to let people know that there’s no problem with having [mental health] issues. We’re all human and we go through things and we need to seek help, professional help.

SC: I believe mental illness runs in my family. I thought maybe something was wrong with me, and I too went to speak with a therapist. When I finished talking, the therapist informed me there was nothing wrong with me, and the entire time I talked about my relationship with my father. She suggested I start there, fixing the relationship I have with him. Like you said, they always say, go to church and pray, talk to the pastor. We have to really let people know there is nothing wrong with seeking help, and this behavior can be treated.

TL: That is so true and not to devalue the pastor, the priest, the rabbi, or the Imam or none of that, but at the same time if you break your leg that is not the first person you are going to go to see. So we have to look at a mental illness the same way. We just have to let people know that that it is OK and remove that shame.

SC: Ever since I read your book, Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration, there have been a few questions that have stuck with me. In the book, you describe your experience growing up with a father who had been very successful in the drug trade, who you then lost at age nine to incarceration. In your book, you talk a lot about spending time with your father. If he was released today, what would you do with him, just you and him alone? 

TL: I would probably just sit down and have dinner and talk, something we haven’t been able to do in terms of having dinner together. I would ride around the city. I would enjoy just riding with him around the city so he can see how much it’s changed and watch his reaction to that. Probably go to the movies, go bowling. I know you said just he and I, but [I would like] to have him accompany me to see what I do in the community. Just stuff like that; I would really be looking forward to spending time with him. We could just be sitting on a bench somewhere, it wouldn’t really matter.

SC: Slugg touches on so many issues in the Black community. You wrote about gentrification in your childhood neighborhood located in DC on Hanover Place. My grandparents once owned a home in DC in the H Street, NE area. Today that area has evolved and changed in ways that I can no longer recognize the old neighborhood. Despite our city changing, there is still homelessness, and unfortunately the poor are being driven out into Maryland and even Virginia. I believe gentrification is just another example of capitalism at its best. How do you feel about the issues of gentrification that are specific to the Black community in DC? 

TL: I think gentrification has to be looked at in the District of Columbia in a more intensive way than anywhere, any place in America, in terms of its impact, because you’ve never had a place in America that was this black, so the displacement of black people in the last twenty years in the District of Columbia has been so intense—the volume, the speed, neighborhoods of one hundred percent African American has almost turned into being one hundred percent white and you really have to think about that. How it happens, why it happens.

You really have to look at the correlation between mass incarceration and the destabilization of communities, how many poor people were in Washington, how many people rented in Washington, how easy it was to displace folks and like you said, it’s capitalism and the agenda to quote on quote “redevelop Washington or improve Washington from the infrastructure standpoint and the development standpoint,” but nobody develops people.

So you know DC once was Chocolate City, seventy-five, eighty percent black, now you look up, it’s forty-eight percent black, and that forty-eight percent, majority of them live in Wards 7 and 8. And so Wards 1 through 6 are only about eighteen percent black, and you see neighborhoods like mine where again, were once one hundred percent African American. I don’t even know what the overall demographics are, but I do know the overall white population has risen to forty, fifty percent in a ten-year span. Some of those numbers are unheard of anywhere else. To me that’s the biggest threat to black existence.

Our black people are vanishing. It’s particularly the native Washingtonian. You know, I’m gonna drill that down just a little bit more, it’s not just about Black people, I’m talking about people born here. That population has dwindled down, that population is now forty-eight percent. I don’t even know what that population is, if you just talked about purely native Washingtonian. You look around at jobs, you look around in the social scenes; you don’t run into native Washingtonians in Washington. Take a place like New York City, 8,000,000 people, the most cosmopolitan place probably in America and one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth, right. People from all over the world in New York City but you meet New Yorkers; do you understand what I’m saying? You will run into, will meet New Yorkers, everywhere you turn, you will meet them, someone born and raised New York City, but in DC, not so much. What happened here in the eighties, in the nineties, in the early 2000s, really laid the framework for gentrification to happen in this way and I do know that gentrification is happening in many major cities across the country, but none in the way it is happening here.

SC: Your mother didn’t participate in any of your father’s illegal activities, but she benefited from it and because of this she could have easily become Kemba Smith, the young lady who was sent to prison for conspiracy to participate in her boyfriend’s drug activities. Ms. Smith was aware her boyfriend did not have gainful employment and she chose to live off the proceeds from his drug crimes. Do you speak to young girls about the repercussion of having a drug dealer boyfriend?

TL: Yeah, yeah, I speak to women and young women a lot about the power of association and dealing with guys in the life, and not just from the threat of being involved from a law enforcement standpoint. But also, when you talk about the repercussions that could come from guys trying to rob their boyfriends or kidnapping the women, holding them as ransom or all of the above. That’s what comes along the way when you have a boyfriend that participates in that lifestyle. It’s just dangerous; it is not wise. I also talk a lot about them getting involved into illegal activity as well, whether it’s scamming or busting [stealing] or any other things, like fighting and assaults.

To me it’s super important that when people do return from incarceration, that we keep them here, that we keep them here in freedom, that we keep them here with their families because the children are only going to go as far as the adults go.

I work in reentry and women are selling drugs themselves. It has evolved from that time, in my mother’s era, the woman, she dated the drug dealer, but in my era and the eras younger than me, women have become the drug dealers. I just really talk to women about not getting involved in the criminal lifestyle, staying away from it, and don’t let love pull you in because when law enforcement comes into it, they don’t care. They’re going to take you to jail and sometimes women feel like they have more to lose. They are loosely involved, if involved at all, but they will use that leverage to get you to become an informant, so they put you in a situation whether, you know, either you’re going to help us send him to jail or you’re going to jail yourself. I am clear about that, with that to young women.

SC: There were times you escaped death and incarceration. I’m not sure if you are a spiritual person. Do you believe there was a higher power watching over you because there was a purpose for your life?

TL: I absolutely believe in divine intervention, that I was protected. That’s kind of my motivation, that is why I go so hard. I just feel like I was spared for a reason. I wrote Slugg trying to not only describe it but to kind of figure it out. I get asked that question a lot: “How did you get here?” I definitely feel like the Creator spared me and protected me in order for me to be an example for those coming from communities like mines.

SC: Have you considered writing a book with your father discussing how having an incarcerated parent affects the family?

TL: This was what Slugg was. I didn’t write it with him. Slugg for me was showing what happens in my life. The book is about me, but in so many ways is about us. What happens when the father goes to prison, how it destabilizes the mom and destabilizes that child, but then the bigger framework is when that’s happening all across the community, all across the city, all across the country. It’s showing how things devolve and what the collateral damage is of that person leaving his or her family and going to prison, the consequences that happen as a result of that incarceration. To me that was the real focus of this. But you know, this kind of really shows what happened in the age of mass incarceration when adults were removed from communities and as teenagers we were forced to make decisions and how the community and everything around it felt the brunt of that. And then you had a generation of people that was just lost. So, in some instances, I have thought about possibly writing a book about parental incarceration and its impact on the education system, and a lot of my advocacy has been around trying to have schools and teachers be more supportive of children with incarcerated parents. I feel like I might do something in that lane eventually.

SC: As a community leader, in the near future, do you have any plans on running for a political office such as mayor or city council? What do you think are some of the most important ways that those holding political office should advocate for our community?

I’d tell nine-year-old Tony to be strong, to make his parents proud. His faith is going to be tested, but he must hold on to it, be patient, show resolve, do what his parents taught him. 

TL: No! [laughter] And to answer that question about running for any political office, I am asked that question literally ten times a day. I get it, but I don’t have a political aspiration at this point. I never have. But I do like to be in close counsel with politicians and try to lobby and advocate on behalf of our people; so to your point, and the second part of the question as it relates to any responsibility for things they can do, they definitely have to create a policy and legislation that could empower folks, help people become a part of the process, remove barriers, address discrimination against people, particularly those returning from incarceration. I have tried to position myself as a person to influence them around that and to give guidance. Over the last few years we actually have had success in doing so. I’m not saying they see me as a threat, but as long as I can have an impact to the point where if they know I did run, I might take their job. I feel like they’re more inclined to work with me and help me out so I won’t run against them.

SC: The overwhelming mass incarceration of Black men and women in disadvantaged and poor communities has also imprisoned the lives of Black children. What are your thoughts on how mass incarceration has impacted the Black community?

TL: It has destabilized the black community. It has changed the dynamics of the family, what families look like. It really is something that has impacted us in measurable ways, and I don’t think people really even know just how deep this goes in the collateral damage that mass incarceration has caused in a black community, particularly its impact on children. It’s marginalized black children. One in seven black children have an incarcerated parent. That’s why I speak about the need for more mentoring or more counseling, more support, particularly via our educational system because the children are in school and not being supported enough around this issue.

To me it’s super important that when people do return from incarceration, that we keep them here, that we keep them here in freedom, that we keep them here with their families because the children are only going to go as far as the adults go. We have had this approach that we can say we can circumvent their parents and help them now. I don’t believe that, not if you want to impact a lot of people’s lives. You know, there always will be a shining star, like somebody who gets by, but we’re talking about numbers. We want to see most children make it, not some of them, so you have to have a plan that’s really aimed at helping the family and not just a child. Mass incarceration’s impact goes far beyond the person that is incarcerated and it may even hurt the family member, any children, even more because the person that is incarcerated is so vital to them. I hope this country can understand that.

SC: After all that you’ve been through and knowing what you know now, if you could travel back in time what would you tell nine-year-old Tony?

TL: I’d tell nine-year-old Tony to be strong, to make his parents proud. His faith is going to be tested, but he must hold on to it, be patient, show resolve, do what his parents taught him. That’s kind of what helped me get by. I never got outside of the values that my parents instilled in me early on in life, even when I no longer had them in my life the way that I had them prior to my father’s incarceration. But I also would tell him it’s gonna be hard bro. It’s gonna be extremely hard man, but you can do it though, you can pull through. As I think back, I’m still him in so many ways. I’m still that nine-year-old, just because I never got my parents back, you know what I’m saying? Like, that longing for that kind of thing, that don’t go away. Also, that’s been my motivation, because I know there are other nine-year-olds out here right now that’s just like him, and I gotta help them see their way through. I felt like Slugg was my contribution to them. I wanted that to be a blueprint—­here you are, hopefully everything that happened to me, or some of the things that happened to me, or that I saw and experienced, does not happen to you. But in the event that they do, here’s how you should handle it, here’s how I handled it, here is a blueprint or map I created out of some difficult situations. But nothing is impossible, no matter what happens, you can push through it.

Shaneka Jones Cook is currently preparing to graduate from Antioch University Los Angeles receiving her MFA in creative writing, with plans to go back to work on her associates degree in mortuary science. She is a former elementary school teacher who writes fiction, poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction, in addition to be a freelance writer. She’s been published in The Record (Trinity Washington University), and most recently Antioch University’s very own Lunch Ticket. She is currently working on a children’s book based on her two younger sons, and a collection of essays about mother/son relationships. She is the founder of the book and poetry club Chapter Chicks. She was an assistant editor for Amuse-Bouche, and on the fiction team, and was a guest interviewer for Lunch Ticket. She resides in Washington, DC with her daughter and three sons. When Shaneka’s not writing, she’s either watching the Syfy channel or binge-watching Hulu and Netflix.

During Antioch’s June 2016 residency, my mentor suggested I pick up a copy of Matt de la Peña’s Newbery Medal-winning picture book, Last Stop on Market Street, to explore the effective use of diversity in children’s literature. When I returned home to Arizona, I not only picked up a copy of de la Peña’s book, I became an immediate fan. Matt de la Peña’s gentle writing accomplishes what only the best children’s literature can—it taps into the collective sense of wonder that continues to exist just under the surface, long after we dare to grow up.

During the course of his highly acclaimed career, de la Peña has written six young adult novels: Ball Don’t Lie (2005), Mexican WhiteBoy (2008), We Were Here (2010), I Will Save You (2010), The Living (2013), and its sequel The Hunted (2015). His picture books include A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis (illustrated by Kadir Nelson, 2011), and Last Stop on Market Street (illustrated by Christian Robinson, 2015). Matt received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific, where he attended school on a full basketball scholarship. De la Peña currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and young daughter. He teaches creative writing and visits high schools and colleges throughout the country.

I had the good fortune of attending a lecture that de la Peña gave at Antioch’s December 2016 residency on exercising restraint when writing for young people. As he gave his presentation, it became quite apparent that de la Peña personifies the complex qualities of the diverse characters he writes about. He is an eloquent educator who thinks of himself as working-class. He is a quiet observer who speaks with a casual familiarity that makes you swear he lived just down the street where you grew up. He is at once a formidable ex-athlete and a gentle creative.

On an early March afternoon in 2017, I spoke with Matt de la Peña at his office at San Diego State University via Skype. We spent an hour discussing diversity, politics, craft, and daughters.

Kim Sabin: You have such an interesting personal background. Can we start with how you came to pursue your MFA and professional writing career?

Matt de la Peña: I went to undergrad at University of the Pacific on a basketball scholarship. I didn’t really see writing as any type of professional path, but I had really supportive professors in undergrad and I took a couple of creative writing classes. I ended up winning this school writing competition and it really was validating. I think my professors said, “Look… if you want to pursue writing, you could try to get an MFA.” I’d never heard of what that was, so they had to sit me down and tell me. Then I ended up leaving undergrad and working in a group home for a couple of years. My professors, without me knowing, had pulled together my work, and sent it out to a couple of MFA programs. They told me, “We did your manuscript, now you have to do the actual formal part, if you want to do this.” And so, I was like, “Sure!” So that’s how I ended up in an MFA program.

KS: You’ve labeled yourself as a “working-class writer”—both in regards to your family background and your approach to your daily writing practice. Can you share what you mean by this?

The way I look at it is—instead of working with cement, I’m working with words. But it’s the same kind of laborious, hard-worker, show-up-every-day kind of situation.

MDLP: There are some people who are just geniuses and they have incredible ideas and they wait for that moment of inspiration where it hits and they produce really quickly a really interesting quality of work. That’s a very small percentage of us, though. Most of us, if we are going to finish a piece, we have to sit down and do the hard work and clock in every day. It’s approaching writing not from inspiration, but more from the idea that it’s just like any other work. The way I look at it is—instead of working with cement, I’m working with words. But it’s the same kind of laborious, hard-worker, show-up-every-day kind of situation.

KS: I remember listening to another interview and you literally show up every day. You have an office you go to…

MDLP: I do. Right now, I’m actually sitting in an office at San Diego State because I’m teaching here a semester. But back home in Brooklyn, I have a writing studio and I have to go there every day.

KS: You didn’t self-identify as a “kidlit” author when you began your career. You studied straight fiction writing in your MFA program at San Diego State. Can you talk about how you fell into both the YA and children’s literature genre? How has your MFA background shaped your approach to children’s literature?

MDLP: That’s a good question. When I came out of my MFA program, children’s literature wasn’t as big of a thing as it is now. It wasn’t as commercially viable. These days, in the past two years in some cases, children’s literature is carrying the publisher, which has never happened before. I think we had Harry Potter, and then ultimately that led to Twilight and The Hunger Games. Those big-ticket, commercial ones opened up doors in the publishing industry and the industry started scooping up everything they could that had a young protagonist. My book got caught up in that wave—my first book. And then, if your first book does well, your publisher’s going to say, “Do that again, only different.” So, I found myself writing a second young adult novel. At that point YA was becoming a popular thing—not just the big commercial stuff, but even in a literary way. I started realizing that these were stories that were close to my heart. I love the coming-of-age stories. It ended up being a good fit.

The picture book part of the equation came later. It was my agent who talked me into it. He actually said, “There are parts of your first book that I’ve showed publishers and said, ‘Don’t you think that this language style could make for an interesting picture book?’ And a lot of them said, ‘If he has something… let’s do it!’” That led to my first picture book, which is about boxing, and then my second picture book. I feel like in both cases, I didn’t aim for children’s literature—YA or picture books—but it is, actually, a good fit.

KS: In an online interview with VOYA, you said, “I don’t believe in happy endings, but I do believe in hopeful endings.” Can you explain what you mean by that and how that applies to YA and children’s literature?

MDLP: Some people, when they think of kidlit, they think of some lesson or moral or “what’s the message?” of the book. That’s a bummer, because really good children’s literature doesn’t have a message so directly. When you’re starting to look for that happy ending, you’re also veering into the territory of the message—especially with YA. It’s very important to provide hope, but that’s just good storytelling. I don’t think it’s that different from adult fiction versus YA. In good storytelling there is an element of hope because that’s just the human existence. We look for hope. But the happy ending… It either feels too neat, and too aligned, or it feels too moral. Those are the things I try to duck. But for me, the hopeful ending, especially if it’s vaguely hopeful, it’s not fantastic… It’s really satisfying.

KS: Realistically hopeful?

MDLP: Exactly.

KS: You sit on the boards of both the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and We Need Diverse Books. Inclusion and diversity are hot topics in kidlit right now. Can you talk about why stories representing underrepresented demographics are so important in children’s literature?

MDLP: It’s very interesting. I meet so many young people who got caught up in a book or a series and they loved it at the time. Then they speak about it now and they realize, “Wow… I was really identifying with a story where I actually didn’t have a place within the story. I tried to shoehorn myself into it.” Now, we’re meeting people—young people—who are actually seeing themselves in books more. The biggest thing that I’m seeing, the way that I describe it is, it’s a whole other level when you actually identify with a main character who is an “other.” It’s really validating. You’re actually inside the book before you even read the story, and that’s important. I recently was at this school, and I’ve been asking kids, “Why is it important to see yourself in books?” This one kid, he didn’t say it eloquently, but I thought he said it the best. He said, “I love reading. I love reading stories that are fantastical. I love reading stories with wizards or fairies, but when I read a book with a character like me…” (He was a mixed kid) “…There’s just something extra for me.” There is that little something extra that needs to be spread around not just with mainstream readers but also with all readers.

KS: In 2012, your YA novel, Mexican WhiteBoy, was banned in Arizona. How did this come about? What did this experience mean to you and has it changed the way you approach your writing?

My book, Mexican WhiteBoy, was deemed “anti-white,” which is interesting because the main character is half-white. What happened is the kids were reading the Mexican WhiteBoy books and some people from the superintendent’s office came in and literally pulled the books out of the kids’ hands, put them in a box, and placed them in the basement.

MDLP: You write these books and you don’t really think about where they’re going to end up or what’s going to happen to them, and you work on the next one. Mexican WhiteBoy had been out for maybe a couple of years and little did I know there was this program in Arizona, Tucson specifically, called the “Mexican-American Studies” program—the MAS program. A group of educators said, “We have a struggling student body and it’s predominantly Mexican-American. Eighty-five percent. What if we, for extra motivation, had a curriculum that was focused on teaching books that featured characters that looked like them? History about their lives? Written by people whose last names they would identify with?” It was a really successful program.

One of the books in this curriculum was Mexican WhiteBoy. It got caught up in the political situation that was happening there. I think somebody in the program said, “Republicans hate Mexicans.” Which isn’t true, but it started this whole thing. The school board said, “Okay, there’s obviously something wrong in this program.” My book, Mexican WhiteBoy, was deemed “anti-white,” which is interesting because the main character is half-white. What happened is the kids were reading the Mexican WhiteBoy books and some people from the superintendent’s office came in and literally pulled the books out of the kids’ hands, put them in a box, and placed them in the basement. They were illegal to read in that school district. It was a huge bummer and it’s still in the courts, actually… seven years later. It was one of those weird experiences where you go, “Oh my gosh. The book when I finished it is no longer mine.” It’s used by different people for different purposes. One group was using it to inspire kids that looked like the main character or felt like the characters in the book. Then another group came along and used it as a political tool in the opposite way.

KS: It’s almost like you release it to the world and it becomes what someone needs it—or wants it—to become.

MDLP: That’s why when some writers try to take too much control over views or stuff like that, you’re not seeing it correctly. The truth is… It’s no longer yours. It’s actually an incredible honor to have your book used in these other ways. It means you made something that is a tool for others.

KS: You won the 2016 Newbery Medal for your picture book, Last Stop on Market Street. In your acceptance speech, you praised librarians and said, “In a time when some people want to build walls, you give young people the tools to tear them down.” Within the industry, librarians and teachers are referred to as “the gatekeepers.” What responsibility do these gatekeepers have within our new political climate in the United States? And do you think it is the role of children’s literature writers to plant the seeds of social justice within their young readers?

MDLP: That’s a good question. I’ve seen so many writers, myself included, who are starting to think, “What does it mean?” With what’s going on politically now and how we’re seeing a nationalistic view of the country and this ideology that’s like, “We need to keep ourselves safe and everybody else out.” A lot of people want to react directly against that. And again, this is where you start to enter into the pitfall, I should say. I read this article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, by [Haruki] Murakami, a novelist, and he said, “If your dog dies, and you want to write a story about your dog dying, there should be no dogs in the story.” That’s what we have to do. It’s there, but it’s super-subversive. Because if you hit it too head-on—I’d equate it to putting pop culture in your book—it time-stamps it. If you have Pepsi in your book, then, “That’s today.” You know what I mean? You have to find a way to do something universal but that is subversively providing another way of looking at the world. It’s funny because I just finished a picture book that’s coming out this fall. It’s called Love and it’s a reaction to all of this stuff. But there’s no politics in this book. It’s subversively about what’s happening, but if you read it thirty years from now, you could never actually locate where I was coming from.

KS: One of the bonuses of writing for young people has got to be school visits. I’d imagine that immediacy of interacting with young readers must be fulfilling. Can you talk about that experience?

MDLP: The bummer is you have to do them a lot. Sometimes, you find yourself doing too many of them and it’s really hard to keep up on your work—your writing—when you’re out in the schools. I’ve been trying to limit them, because if I limit them, they’re more powerful for me. My favorite thing is meeting readers who, seriously, don’t know what a Newbery is… They don’t care. And it’s just cool to get their authentic interaction about a book and a story and a character. I’ve been doing high school visits for years and years, but I’ve been doing more elementary school visits… and they are fascinating. Just the kids you meet and the things they say—they’re so authentic.

KS: Your picture book, Last Stop on Market Street, tells the story of young C.J. and his grandmother, Nana, taking a bus ride through their urban community. While C.J. laments for all of the things he wishes he had in his life, Nana gently reminds them of their good fortune. Why do you think this particular story struck such a nerve at this moment in American culture?

MDLP: Again, I have to be very honest here. If this book came out six years ago, it would’ve been a very small book, very quiet. Some people would have loved it and other people would’ve never heard of it. We were fortunate to get on Morning Edition on NPR and that introduced the book to a lot of new people. And then, of course, it wins an award and that’s ensures that it’s going to be introduced to many more readers and it’s going to be in every school.

There’s a new thing happening and it’s my personal approach to writing diversity right now, which is I’m trying to write characters that are diverse—which I always have been doing—but putting them in stories that have nothing, at least overtly, to do with diversity. This is the new diversity.

So, what about this book at this moment? There’s a new thing happening and it’s my personal approach to writing diversity right now, which is I’m trying to write characters that are diverse—which I always have been doing—but putting them in stories that have nothing, at least overtly, to do with diversity. This is the new diversity. It’s where it exists in the story, the main character is a non-traditional protagonist, but it’s not about that. It’s about something else. In this case, it’s about gratitude, but also subversively, it’s about seeing yourself as beautiful. It’s also timely, because there was this reaction that not enough books with diverse characters were getting recognition and so some committees, if you want to be honest, were like, “You know what? We’re going to do this. This is this story’s time.” You like to think that your book is just an incredible work and it’s rewarded for that. But it’s not just that. Every award selection is a political act. Again, my book was caught up in a political act and it’s something I have to acknowledge. Of course, it’s one of those things where it was good enough to be put in the place as a tool for this committee. You see what I’m saying?

KS: Christian Robinson was the illustrator for Last Stop on Market Street. My daughter is a senior in high school, but I can’t remember seeing a tattooed character in any of the children’s books we read together. This small detail felt groundbreaking to me. Was this something you and Christian discussed? Can you talk about what the collaborative process between the writer and illustrator on children’s books looks like?

MDLP: This is a very non-traditional relationship we have. Usually, the author and the illustrator are kept apart until the book comes out. The reason why they do that, of course, is to make sure the writer doesn’t take too much ownership of the story. Because in the best picture books, the illustrator actually is telling a slightly different story, in and out of the text. You know, those are the best illustrators. But, we have the same agent and we met before I was even done with the text. It was sold with Christian attached. We talked a few times. We switched a couple of things. One of the things he really wanted in the text after he read the initial draft… He said, “I would love to have an animal somewhere.” That was interesting, because it led me to think about the blind man with the dog, which kind of is one of my favorite parts of the book. So, that was one switch we did.

We also talked about this idea of just having diverse characters in a story that isn’t about diversity. I said, “Anything you can do visually to support that idea, you know, go for it.” We didn’t talk directly about the tattooed guy, but when I saw him, I was like, “Man, that’s it!” He found it. Originally, when I wrote the text, it was a Mexican kid. But I met his grandmother, who raised him, [as] I found out, and I thought, “I’ve got to use my resources here.” So I switched the characters to black and this led to, to me, one of the most important things, which is they’re sitting in the front of the bus… That’s an incredibly important moment in the book. Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s a callback to the Civil Rights movement. It’s weird how those little magical things made the book better than if we were kept apart.

KS: In an interview with YALSA you said, “I love the strange mix of innocence and sophistication in great picture books.” You’ve already discussed how you transitioned from writing YA novels to writing picture books. Do you use similar craft techniques when approaching both categories?

When I write a picture book, I look at it as a spoken-word poem.

MDLP: When I write a picture book, I look at it as a spoken-word poem. Before I ever wrote fiction, I used to write spoken-word poetry. It was so much based on rhythms and music. Before I even knew how to craft a story, I was doing that. So when I write a picture book, it’s about music—getting the story right, and then getting the music right. The biggest thing is making it all feel authentic. You have two audiences when you write a picture book. You have the adults and you have the child. You’re nodding to both, but erring on the side of the young person. It’s an interesting balancing act. Now, I’m not good at writing goofy. There’s some really great, amazing books that are silly and goofy that kids love. My daughter loves them. But I like to write picture books with weight and sadness. Those are my favorite picture books to read to my daughter and they are my favorite stuff to try to write. But I will tell you, she’s more likely at her age—she’s two-and-a-half—to reach for silly. But occasionally, she’s ready for the weighty book and we get into great discussions. I’d rather my book be pulled once a week as opposed to twice a night for that substantive conversation.

KS: What’s your favorite genre to read? What are you currently reading?

MDLP: I love gritty, sad, adult, literary fiction. I just read Underground Railroad [Colson Whitehead], which I thought was fantastic. My momentum is carrying me toward a lot of nonfiction, but a lot of social justice stuff. I just read Just Mercy [Bryan Stevenson], and Evicted [Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond], about the social justice system, which is even more important now. Cormac McCarthy is my favorite writer in the world and he’s super-dark and he writes these incredible, hacked sentences. I love Junot Diaz. I love the way he marries Spanish—and not always the language of Spanish—but just Spanish is in his sentences, even when they’re in English. It’s a slightly different rhythm to his sentences and he has a kind of street-sensibility. I love that. I read this book called Lab Girl recently [Hope Jahren], which is about a female scientist. By the way, I’m reading a lot of feminist stuff right now, because I have a daughter… I’d like to see the world through her eyes, you know? In terms of young people literature, I love Christopher Paul Curtis, who wrote Bud, Not Buddy. I love Markus Zusak, who wrote The Book Thief. I like realistic stuff. I struggle with fantasy. Not because I don’t appreciate it, but because the real world is so fascinating… I want to stay there.

KS: Can you share any projects that you’re currently working on?

MDLP: I have Love coming out in the fall. I did a picture book with Pixar for a movie that they have coming out called CoCo. That’s coming out in the fall. CoCo is about the Day of the Dead. It’s a Mexican kid who plays the guitar. I’m super-excited about that, because I’ve never done a tie-in and it was really cool because they gave me complete freedom to go away from the story with the main character. I got to see the movie already, so that was amazing. I also have a book called Carmela Full of Wishes, which is a picture book that will come out maybe January of next year. And then I have my YA… I have two projects. I have one called One of Those Likes Used to Love Me, which is an older YA. A nineteen-year-old character right about to go to college, super working-class kid—mixed-race. I’m also doing Superman, which is a pretty crazy project where four authors are doing superheroes—you know, DC [Comics] superheroes. Wonder Woman is coming out first, and then Batman, and Catwoman, and then I’m doing Superman. That will come out, I think, late 2018.

KS: Wow! And you’re teaching and you have a two-and-a-half year-old…

MDLP: That’s why I’m a year late on my YA.

KS: Matt de la Peña, thank you for your time.

MDLP: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Kim Sabin studies writing for young people in the MFA Creative Writing program at Antioch University Los Angeles. When she isn’t driving across the desert to study craft, she lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband and daughter. Kim is currently working on her first YA novel and blogs for Lunch Ticket. You can find her on Twitter @kimswrites.

In 2015, I bought Katrina Dodson’s translation of The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, even though I didn’t really know who Lispector was at the time. There was a buzz around this book. Every time I’d go in to Skylight Books (in Los Angeles), I’d see it on the bestseller shelf, and there was something about her eyes, which stared out from the book cover.

I read the collection in its entirety during a semester in my MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, in which I was concentrating on literary translation. It was harrowing, but I couldn’t stop. I’d read in public and then shut the book and stare at passersby, forlorn, like a ghost. I’d snap at people for no reason (embarrassing but true)—I learned I had to give myself time to adjust after reading Lispector, before entering the world of people. I wrote a critical paper about animals and identity in Lispector’s short fiction, but I couldn’t explain why she got under my skin, and still can’t, really.

Without Katrina Dodson, Clarice Lispector never could have gotten under my skin. Among other awards, Dodson won the 2016 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of The Complete Stories. Alongside the rest of the New Directions series of new Lispector translations, Dodson’s translation of these stories helped extend Lispector’s appeal beyond those who were interested in Brazilian literature, or Latin American works in translation. I met Dodson at the 2016 Conference of the American Literary Translators Association, where I heard her give talks in panels about the etiquette of sharing authors with fellow translators, and on translation as performance, where she talked about how absorbing herself in the distinctive work of an author as revered as Lispector sometimes felt like she was channeling “Clarice” (first name only, as she is known in Brazil).

In February 2017, I got the chance to talk to Dodson via Skype about Clarice Lispector, the book that kicked off her career in literary translation, and the life of a translator.

Lauren Kinney: How did you get started translating? Did you translate before you were in graduate school, and how did your academic studies shape your translation practice?

Katrina Dodson: My first experience with translating was taking Latin class as part of my PhD requirement in comparative literature [at University of California Berkeley]. You have to take a classical language. I’ve always been interested in languages, but with Latin, because it’s a dead language, most of what you do is translate the classics of Latin literature, so, speeches by Cicero, poetry by Catullus. I really enjoyed it, and I think, at that moment, I still hadn’t thought about it as opening up this line of translation. The first time I translated something closer to my literary interests was actually Clarice Lispector.

Coming through a comparative literature department, you’re always in dialogue with people who don’t speak the same languages that you do. In different seminars, when I had a professor who didn’t speak Portuguese, I would have to find a translation of the work that I was writing on. And so, it was a mix of being dissatisfied with some of the Clarice Lispector translations of stories I was reading and writing about, and then also just an attempt to understand her stories better. “The Egg and the Chicken” is one of my favorite stories, and I think it’s one of her most puzzling stories. I translated that, and I translated another short story called “Temptation,” about a red-haired girl that has this encounter with a red-haired dog. Those were just in notebooks. It wasn’t until I met a friend-of-a-friend who was a literary agent that I started thinking about translation more. He asked me to be a scout for books that were written in Portuguese by authors who would be interesting to translate into English.

Shortly after I met him, I went to Brazil that summer for research, and I went to a major literary festival in Paraty. It’s called FLIP, the Festa Literária Internacional Paraty. I went to a panel, and I heard two young authors, Emilio Fraia and Vanessa Barbara, read from their [collaborative] novel and talk about it. I just felt this shared humor and sensibility and thought, “Hey, you know, I’m doing this scouting for this person, but what if I also try to translate something myself.” I introduced myself to them, and that became the first thing that I translated for publication: the novel that they wrote together. That was in Two Lines. Do you know Two Lines?

LK: The press?

KD: Yeah, it’s the Center for the Art of Translation, and they have a yearly anthology of literature in translation. I actually sent the sample to McSweeney’s. They weren’t interested, but they sent it off to the editors of Two Lines, because we’re all in San Francisco. You start close to home with people you know. But Two Lines accepted that excerpt, and that got me started. Those two authors independently got their stories accepted into the Brazilian Granta, so when the English Granta decided to translate the Best of Young Brazilian Novelists issue (Granta 121), they asked me to translate the selections from those two authors, because they knew I had a relationship with them. That’s how it all started—it’s one thing that leads to another. Then I met Benjamin Moser while he happened to be in Rio. I was there on a Fulbright, and I had been interested in translating some Clarice Lispector, but some smaller, less-known pieces, like crônicas, for a small press. I didn’t know anything about rights at the time. We talked, and he liked me. Almost a year and a half later, he invited me to do The Complete Stories. That was after my work in Granta had come out, and we had a correspondence, so he had a sense of how I worked, and what our dynamic was together.

Short answer is: by accident.

LK: What is the difference between translating short and longer fiction?

Clarice Lispector has a very coherent voice. It’s a very strong voice. … But over the course of eighty-five stories, she’s doing different voices, different characters. Her style changes. That’s what made it a really breathless operation to do all of those stories in just two years’ time.

KD: The nice thing about translating a longer continuous work is you really have time to develop a voice and become immersed in the text. It’s a similar dynamic to working with the same author again. You already have a sense of their voice, and what your voice for them is in English. That was one of the big challenges of doing The Complete Stories: I had to start over again eighty-five times. Clarice Lispector has a very coherent voice. It’s a very strong voice. She has a strong sense of rhythm that has variations, but it’s still very recognizable as “her” over this forty-year career. But over the course of eighty-five stories, she’s doing different voices, different characters. Her style changes. That’s what made it a really breathless operation to do all of those stories in just two years’ time. But I think I got so much faster doing it, because when I translated the stories for Granta, one was eight pages and the other was slightly longer. It took me about a month to do each single story. [Laughs] There is a momentum that accumulates when you do a longer work, even when it’s separate stories.

Right now I am editing someone else’s translation of a poetry collection by a really great poet, Ana Cristina Cesar. She died in 1984, and this collection is from ’82. She committed suicide at the age of thirty or thirty-one. She’s a mix of Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, and a major reference point for all the young Brazilian poets writing today. And the other thing I’m doing is a novel, this experimental modernist novel from 1928 called Macunaíma. That’s a big challenge to do, but because it’s just one novel straight through, I’m able to take things that I’ve invented and worked out for one chapter and apply it across the book, in a way that was harder to do with the Lispector stories.

LK: What do you recommend to translators, beginners or otherwise, who are looking to develop their craft?

KD: I’d say, one, be really aware of your own tastes. I say, read widely, but be aware of what kinds of voices or stories or styles or writers appeal to you, and hone that. It’s important to be aware of what you do well. For me, I know I do humor really well, and I gravitate towards things that are a bit strange, a bit experimental, a bit, maybe, perverse, but also comic. For me, Clarice Lispector’s stories are what I most wanted to do. But I also have a good ear for rhythm, so I gravitate towards authors whose words you can feel in your body. Knowing what you respond to helps you know what to pursue and what to say no to, in terms of your work. I would also read and watch a lot of interviews or writing by other translators.

I didn’t do an MFA. I don’t think you need to do an MFA in translation, but I do think it’s a way to fast track your development and get an instant community. I had that through doing the doctorate, but not in translation, so I was teaching myself by reading a lot of essays about translation.

I also read and watched a lot of interviews when I had questions like: how taboo is it to look at a previous translation of the work that you’re also translating? Do other people do this? How far should you go? I watched a great panel at Columbia University. It was a panel on retranslating the classics with Edith Grossman, Wyatt Mason, who was doing a new translation of Montaigne, and the couple that does all the Russian classics, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. For me, it was really instructive to hear these very established translators talk about even just their workday and their approach. In that sense, you become more aware of your own process, and what works for you and what doesn’t. It’s just nice to hear from other translators what their challenges are on a practical, everyday level.

LK: In preparing to translate The Complete Stories, did you read previous translations beforehand?

KD: I was familiar with Clarice Lispector’s work and the criticism around her. I had studied her and been reading her since my early twenties, even before I went to graduate school. I had known her for already thirteen years, so I felt very comfortable with my knowledge of the range of her work. I had also taught some of her stories, and wrote about some of the translations, especially Elizabeth Bishop’s translations, because my dissertation was on Elizabeth Bishop. She published translations of three Lispector stories.

I was aware of the translations of the stories but I was careful not to go back and look at them until I had finished a polished draft. Even then, I went to look at places where I was having trouble to see what someone else did, when I was curious about the tone. It was almost like having a ghost editor—you see someone else’s suggestions for how to solve a translation problem. Almost always when it’s a situation that calls for creativity, no two people will think of the same solution, but oftentimes I would see something else, and it would give me an idea for a third solution that I thought was better. There were times when I would see [the other translators’] mistakes on simple things, or they would help me catch my mistakes. That’s one benefit of coming after—you can check in with other translations and do these little checks that an editor would do for you.

I did read all of the other translations in the same series from New Directions that I was joining. The Complete Stories was the sixth book to be translated in this new series, and I’d already read the others. I read The Hour of the Star and then the four novels that came out at the same time, and so that helped me get a sense of what the “Clarice house style” was, but at the same time it let me see what the distinct variations were among the translators, because whether you realize it or not, your voice and your use of language is your own, even if you try to neutralize it, or write outside of what you think is your own voice. There was a translator from Australia, one from England, one from Houston, one from Pennsylvania. We have all different kinds of regional, international Englishes, and that comes through in each person’s individual translation. (The constant is Benjamin Moser as editor.) It helped clear up some questions about, say, how literal or not to follow her punctuation or the idiosyncrasies of her voice. That’s a really unique situation in that I was not translating in a total vacuum—it’s a part of a series —so that was important for me to understand where this translation fit in with the others and how readers were going to put them all together to make this tessellated portrait of Clarice Lispector.

LK: That makes sense. I’ve also heard you talk about channeling Clarice Lispector as you translated her work, both to conjure her distinctive voice and also to feel, perhaps, less intimidated by the task. I was wondering if you feel the same sense of channeling an author when you’re translating someone who’s not Clarice Lispector, or if there are other translation metaphors that resonate with you in those cases?

KD: I think that it varies from author to author. It’s very different to translate a famous dead writer or poet than to be translating a living one, of course. I’d say that when you’re translating someone, it’s such an intimate relationship, and you’re thinking about them all the time, and what went through their head as they were writing and what their voice was like, and you feel that you’re trying to tap into the current of life that is in their work. I can say that right now, working on these other authors’ work, I have Ana Cristina Cesar in my head. I have lines of her poetry in my head all the time. I think about what kind of person she was. I have Mário de Andrade, who wrote Macunaíma—I’m thinking about him also all the time, and to what degree he was being ironic in places, or when he was having fun, or when he was kind of agonizing over pieces of his masterpiece novel. So you’re always kind of haunted.

But I do think that there was something particularly strong about the idea of this intimate communion with Clarice, as she’s known in Brazil. She’s known by her first name, so you can just call her Clarice. [Laughs.] The reason that it’s so much stronger with her is that she has a very intimate voice in her writing. It sounds like she’s whispering directly into your ear like a lover or sister or mother. In a lot of her writing, she has these moments that feel like she’s just thinking with you, or revealing these deep philosophical or spiritual truths that she’s come to.

[Lispector] had religion and spirituality all around her. On top of that, in Rio, you have also a strong current of Afro-Brazilian religions—she writes about Candomblé, which is sometimes called Macumba, in some of her stories. There’s a strong current of spirituality in her work, and she was interested in the occult. She went to a fortune-teller. She was interested in astrology.

I think of her as something of a mystic. She came from a Jewish family that escaped the pogroms in what’s now Ukraine, and grew up in a Jewish household in one of the most Catholic countries in the world. She had religion and spirituality all around her. On top of that, in Rio, you have also a strong current of Afro-Brazilian religions—she writes about Candomblé, which is sometimes called Macumba, in some of her stories. There’s a strong current of spirituality in her work, and she was interested in the occult. She went to a fortune-teller. She was interested in astrology. She’s always talking about magic and witches, and she was invited to the First World Congress of Sorcery in Bogotá in 1975.

Even if you were a person who had learned through academia or a more secular upbringing to be skeptical or wary of being overly mystical or judged for thinking that you’re communing with the dead, it’s just something that she brings out in you.

This was my first book-length translation. Going from academia and writing in a scholarly context where you have to ground everything you write in all kinds of research and footnotes and facts or, some kind of grounded subjectivity—for me it was liberating and an important creative awakening to be able to approach this work, which I knew very well, from the perspective of translation. Part of this ability to think about what it means to channel someone’s voice, or to feel an intimate relationship to this writer, freed me to be able to think about having a closer relationship to Clarice Lispector in her work without shutting down that line of thinking or feeling as irresponsible as I would as a scholar.

It was such an enriching experience to think about her work on a deep level and intuit what she was doing in her writing, to understand it in order to reproduce it, rather than to write about it in an analytical way, which ends up shutting doors or giving premature answers to these questions that she opened up.

Just one caveat to that is that I think people should be writing about her both inside and outside of academia. I’m excited to see what these new translations generate in terms of thinking about her work. It’s very fraught, especially for me personally, to try to write about her in a more analytical way, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth trying to understand her from many different angles. I’ve been invited to a Clarice Lispector academic conference at Columbia University. They’ve invited me to give a paper, so I’m thinking of it as an opportunity to think about her both from my experience translating her but also from a scholarly perspective at the same time.

LK: You’ve avoided doing that so far, since you’ve been translating her?

KD: The way I’ve written about her, for example in my translator’s note and in various lectures I’ve given at different universities, is somewhere in between. That’s exciting for me. Anytime we’re able to fuse our different areas of knowledge and training, it’s very satisfying. I don’t think of myself as just a translator or just a scholar; I also think of myself as a writer. It’s exciting to try to figure out how to think and write about Clarice Lispector on a deep level that draws on this intimate reading experience I’ve had of her through translation, but also takes into account things that other people have written about her—things about her role in Brazilian literature or in world literature.

For example, for this conference, I’m thinking about the role of voice in Clarice Lispector. In a practical sense, I thought about what made her voice so strong and coherent as I was translating in order to reproduce it. But I’ve also given papers about translation as performance and how in some ways, it’s like you’re interpreting a script, or you’re like a musician or a singer interpreting a score. These things are coming out of my own experience, but I’ve also been reading more in translation theory, and I’m looking to read more on other theorizing of voice in literature to expand and ground my thinking.

I’m writing an essay about the translation that’s based on this translation notebook I was keeping. I kept this journal for the whole two years, just writing down random Google searches, or interesting translation challenges that were coming up, or things that were going through my brain. That document is both very personal and a more analytical look at the practices of translation, and the things that I was noticing about Lispector’s work that I had never thought about before translating her. That essay and that book will be some hybrid of personal writing mixed with theory of translation, and it would be a book for people who are interested in understanding Lispector’s work more, and thinking about it on a different level.

LK: I love that idea of keeping a translation notebook. I might steal that idea. It seems very useful.

KD: It’s very useful. What language are you translating from?

LK: Spanish. I have done one semester of that so far. Antioch’s MFA program is low residency, so I had a mentor, and sent pages to him and then he’d give me notes. I have been struggling to imagine what it will be like when I don’t have someone to send things to and have a conversation.

KD: I’m a mentor now in the Mills MFA program, also low-res, so it’s a similar thing. My student translates Francophone literature. It’s such a solitary practice and there are so many little decisions and little trails of research that you do on so many different levels. There’s so much stuff going through your head that it’s nice to let it out somewhere without thinking about organization or the logic of what you’re writing.

I call it a notebook because it sounds good, but I just had a Word document open whenever I was translating, and it was just a dump. Something would come into my head, or something funny would happen. No one was accompanying me the whole time. When I laughed with myself, or wanted to remember something for later, I would write the date and then write down whatever observations were going through my head. I do think that it is a good way to become more aware of your process and what you’re doing.

For me, it’s a nice document of my development over this two-year project, because so much changed. It took me six months to translate the first two collections. (The stories come from nine different collections.) And then with everything else, I got faster and faster and faster and faster.

But I think there’s a lot of self-doubt in the beginning, a lot of fear and anxiety. I can even track in that journal the point when I felt like I really had it, and her voice had come together, and I had internalized a lot of decisions I was making based on various algorithms of dictionaries, internet searches, and this Excel spreadsheet of key words and how I was translating them. At a certain point, something switched and I had more clarity about what directions to take. In some ways that didn’t happen till I was going through the edits. I sent Benjamin Moser one collection as I was working on it, and he sent me back edits so I could see what direction he was going in, but then I just translated the whole entire thing and didn’t see his edits until the very end. It was in going through his edits and figuring out, okay, that’s a good idea, that sounds good to me. Okay, definitely no, that’s not the voice, definitely not this… It was great to respond on a gut level to the edits and feel what was automatically better, [what] streamlined things, and what didn’t work for me. It would make me dig for a new solution.

What you were saying about how you’re in dialogue with your mentor right now—I’ve actually never done a translation without being in dialogue with someone. Maybe Macunaíma, the one I’m doing now—but I always at least have an editor. The young authors also speak English and so we would talk about the text a lot. This poetry collection I’m editing, it’s with Brenda Hillman, the poet, and we’re working on it with another Brazilian poet, so the three of us are always in dialogue, and I always have a group of colleagues on the Portuguese side and on the English side whom I send questions to and where we have things going back and forth.

LK: I’ve been reading short fiction by Joy Williams lately, and she wrote a list of eight essential attributes of the short story, and number four is “An animal within to give its blessing.”

KD: Ha! I love that. [Laughs]

LK: And every single story of Joy Williams that I’ve read has an animal, even if it’s just mentioned in passing. Number five on Williams’s list is “Interior voices which are or become wildly erratically exterior.” Both of these things remind me of Lispector, although unlike Williams, Lispector’s characters seem to act out their inner worlds erratically without explaining them, necessarily. I think those two things are related in Lispector’s writing—the animals and the erratic human characters—something about beings who don’t communicate with words. I wanted to ask you about what you see the role of animal characters in her stories are.

KD: I love this question, and I want to get the reference! I’ve been meaning to read Joy Williams for a while now. Ever since The Visiting Privilege came out, people keep telling me that I would love her and I keep hearing people rave about her. You just pushed me over the edge, so I need to get that book today. [Laughs]

LK: That’s what I just read: [The Visiting Privilege].

KD: Which story is it from?

LK: This was a list she wrote to Lincoln Michel when he interviewed her for VICE, trying to explain where her stories come from.

KD: Those two things speak to a lot of what is powerful and so absorbing in Clarice Lispector’s writing, and especially in the stories. There are animals everywhere, and one of the things I love most about her is the way that she writes about animals. She gets their movements, the tilt of a head of this animal called the coati in “The Buffalo.” It’s so perfect.

I was actually just in the Amazon and I met one of these coatis. They’re like a cross between a fox and a possum and a raccoon. They’ve got this little long nose, so adorable. And it tilts its head in this quizzical way in that story, and it kills me. All the monkeys, the chickens. Her animals are both very animal and at the same time feel very human because she imbues them with so much personality—but stops short of completely anthropomorphizing them. It’s always a joke. In the story “A Chicken,” the chicken is almost like a woman. She’s almost human, but then all of a sudden, she’ll be apathetic and blinking, with her little button eyes, just like a chicken. Then they just eat her. There’s a lot of humor and affection, and also deep philosophical truths about the condition of being and living in the world, in the way Lispector depicts animals.

There’s some way in which she’s writing in a grammar, a style, and a logic that defy what we think of as logical or rational, but because her interior voice does become exterior and it’s so coherent and seductive, it draws the reader into its world, until the logic of that interior world surrounds you.

So much of her writing is trying to get beyond language and the way it shuts down understanding and feeling and experience. It’s one of the central conundrums in her work; she writes with this deep suspicion of language and what it shuts down, even as it is the medium that she’s chosen to work in. But that’s also why she’s always tripping up your reading with strange commas or new combinations of words, or words that seem like they’re just the wrong word in the situation, but that make you stop and think—I give some examples in my translator’s note. There’s some way in which she’s writing in a grammar, a style, and a logic that defy what we think of as logical or rational, but because her interior voice does become exterior and it’s so coherent and seductive, it draws the reader into its world, until the logic of that interior world surrounds you.

A story like “The Imitation of the Rose” is incredible. You’re really inside this woman’s head. It’s about a housewife, Laura, who has recently returned from a mental institution. You don’t know exactly what the nature of her episode or crisis was, but you can tell that everyone around her is walking on eggshells, and she’s got to drink her milk every day, and she’s trying to hold on to this sense of a banal self and her role as a housewife and a normal woman. She wears brown, and she’s not supposed to be special in any way. It’s such a strange story because if you try to explain the story, you say, “This is a story about mental illness, and it’s about a woman who had a mental breakdown, and she and her husband and everyone around her are trying to keep her on the straight and narrow, keep her part of sane society.” But if you’re inside the logic of the story and her head, there’s all this stuff about her trying not to be brilliant and shining and special and original, like there’s something about her that’s too bright and too much for the boring people around her. But they also read that as a sign of there being something wrong with her. It’s an incredible story.

Clarice Lispector used to be married to a diplomat. She had this whole life before they got divorced and she went back to Brazil in which she lived in Italy, Switzerland, and D.C. She had to be this conventional diplomat’s wife, and put roses in the finger bowls, shake hands, and have this plastered smile on her face. In one of her letters to her sisters, she talks about a woman in her circle who uses this adjective “original” to describe things that make her uncomfortable, like artists or ideas, and she’s always saying about Clarice, “She’s so original.”

[Laughter] It’s this suspicious adjective to use against people who are different, and so Clarice thinks, I try not to be original but I guess I’m just too “original” for this woman and these people. That’s something I think about in a story like that, one that has an incredible way of surrounding you and making you feel as if you’re losing your own mind and your grip on reality, just by being inside the mind of this woman.

LK: You mentioned understanding. There is a lot of talk these days about how fiction increases readers’ capacities for empathy, as a defense of literature, when it seems like the appetite for literature and people’s capacity for empathy is embattled. I thought about that as I was reading your translation of her stories. You said that Lispector’s writing is meant to disrupt understanding. Do you think we’re meant to empathize with her characters, and do you empathize with her characters?

KD: I get so tired out by the need to defend literature’s usefulness in terms of these measurable, moral and productive terms. Obviously this is important for humanity, thinking about our own interior experiences and how they bump up against other people’s interior and exterior experiences, so I always feel tired out by the weak position of literature and always having to defend it in this capitalist society, or usefulness-driven society.

That said, Clarice Lispector, even despite some of her more abstract or impenetrable work, also had a very deep feeling for her fellow humans, and that comes out most clearly in the [short] stories. It comes out throughout her novels, especially The Hour of the Star and its character, Macabéa. Both started out poor in the Northeast, which was part of Clarice Lispector’s history, but this character is from a totally different social and educational class than what Lispector ended up in. I think it’s all over her work, but what draws me to the [short] stories especially is that there’s a lot of humor and affection for human frailty and hypocrisy, human struggle and pain. There’s specifically a lot about women’s everyday lives, especially in Brazil in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, through the ’70s—a lot about the struggles women faced with having to live up to these ideals of what a “perfect woman” should be, and being defined as a mother, a wife, and not being able to realize her own potential as an individual. The ways that women are condescended to.

There’s a short story, which is more of a crônica, called “Mineirinho,” about an escaped convict in Rio who was shot down by the police in the ’60s—killed with thirteen shots, no trial, just killed—and his body was tossed in the forest in a different part of Rio than where he got shot down in the favelas. It made headlines in its time. I find that crônica brutal and so powerful because she’s asking, what does it mean to be safe in our apartments in the bourgeois neighborhood of Copacabana and witness someone who was gunned down? You feel her anguish—I think it’s what a lot of us are feeling now, and in the last few years of attention on problems of police brutality. You want to scream; no words will contain this combination of outrage. But you also feel guilt and impotence as a witness to these things, and as someone who might be less vulnerable than these other bodies. I don’t think that Lispector had an agenda to make people empathize with these other characters—she’s sometimes been accused of being apolitical. I think that she never really had a political or moral agenda that she wanted to put forth in her writing—you’re not meant to do anything but just read her work and be open to it—but I do think that it’s very clear that she had a deeply ingrained sense of justice and a sense of outrage to injustice. It comes out in so many subtle ways in her writing. Then, at other times, it will explode in a more overt way, like in “Mineirinho” or in The Hour of the Star.

There was just something else I wanted to say about animals and erratic characters. That’s an apt juxtaposition in that part of the humor, empathy, and wisdom in her stories comes from her understanding of all the ways that we act outside of the limits of what we’ve been taught by language, or “rational thought.” There are so many ways in which [her characters] act impulsively, or in these funny, petty ways, or lose sense of what they’re doing from a human, social point of view. That’s where the human and the animal, or the animal and the human, meet up: in these moments when a character, whether human-animal or animal-animal, is acting in these ways that make total sense in the context of the story and Lispector’s narration, but which, from a perspective of someone who’s thinking about the rules of society, seem totally erratic, insane, or out of the blue. But there are so many ways in which we act and we can’t explain. [Laughs] That is a great wisdom of Clarice Lispector’s writing. She understood on an intuitive level, and she was very interested in these outbursts of passion or impulse that happen in our daily lives that are unexplainable.

I do think that’s why we keep going back to her stories and her writing with the desire to explain them. A lot of readers understand her stories on an instinctive level, but find them hard to explain if you try to break them down.

She gave a famous TV interview in the year that she died: 1977. The interviewer asks her about the difficulty of some of her books, like The Passion According to G.H., and she says it’s not about intelligence, but about an inability to enter into the writing. She says there’s a teacher at this very prestigious private high school in Rio, who says he’s read The Passion According to G.H. four times and still can’t understand it. Meanwhile there’s an eighteen-year-old girl who says that it’s her bedside reading, and one of the most important books to her; she’s been able to enter into it on an instinctive level. That’s another reason that there are so many ways to enter into Lispector that are outside of a scholarly approach, or even a rationalized, analytical approach. There are many ways to enter into her writing without having to be able to explain everything that’s going on in her stories in a sentence-by-sentence level.

Lauren Kinney is a writer and musician in Los Angeles. She is a student of fiction and literary translation in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work can be found in Queen Mob’s, Drunk Monkeys, The Turnip Truck(s) and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @lauren_kinney.

I read Tara Ison’s first novel, A Child Out of Alcatraz, shortly after its publication in 1997. I’d spent a good chunk of my own adolescence in San Francisco living in Fort Mason while my father was stationed at Oakland Army Base, across the East Bay. At the time, Fort Mason was a smattering of standard-duplex base housing just steps away from the Marina. Whenever I needed room to breathe, I ran down the hill to the water, where the once-infamous Alcatraz prison loomed between San Francisco and Marin County. When my best friend gave me Ison’s novel, I was intrigued to read about everyday life long ago on that mysterious island during the decades that it served as a formidable prison. What I didn’t realize was that in reading it, I would find a little piece of myself—the experience of growing up female in a cloistered, patriarchal environment was not unlike my own experience growing up in a military family.

Since the late nineties, Tara Ison has asserted herself as a fierce feminist voice. In addition to A Child Out of Alcatraz, she has published two novels: The List (2011) and Rockaway (2013). Her latest short story collection, Ball (2015), challenges us to witness female characters breaking beyond convention, often placing themselves firmly within situations that move far beyond the comfortable. Likewise, her recently published essay collection, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies (2015), is an exploration of female identity through a cinematic lens both profoundly personal and political: a must-read for anyone who grew up searching for her reflection on the screen. Ison refuses to bow to the edict that women must be protected or sanctified. Instead, Ison’s women are free to act, think, and breathe on the page—to be fully human, to be flawed, to take up space, to occupy life in complicated ways. In her essay collection’s concluding piece, “How to be a Writer,” Tara Ison speaks to every woman who is struggling to find her purpose as writer in the current political climate when she asserts: “the writer’s job isn’t to save the world; it’s just to keep the faith, and write.”

As a fan of hers since her debut, I was thrilled to talk with Tara Ison about writing, feminism, and the female experience, particularly at a time when many women are experiencing new heights of fear and outrage, as well as the occasional spark of hope. I spoke with Ison by phone on February 17, 2017. Our conversation was, without a doubt, one of the sparks of my winter.

Melissa Benton Barker: I spent my high school years in San Francisco while my father was stationed at Oakland Army Base. My best friend and I read A Child Out of Alcatraz together shortly after it came out. The novel, which is about a girl whose father is a guard on Alcatraz, resonated with me because it was about a girl growing up within a patriarchal, authoritarian environment, and it reminded me of my experience growing up as a military brat. I felt like I was seeing this particular piece of my own experience represented in a book for the first time. In your acknowledgements, you wrote about your research process, including interviewing a man who grew up on Alcatraz, and who became hostile when you revealed that you were writing about a female protagonist, as if a girl’s story is not worth being written. How did you react to this?

Tara Ison: That was such an incredible moment for me, in that it clarified and focused and validated what I was trying to say. It hit me on a very visceral level. It hit me in my body—the dismissal of the female experience. But I didn’t fully appreciate or understand the power of what he was saying until a bit later. I couldn’t put it within the context of the larger dismissal of women’s experiences. I don’t know that I was able to tap into [my] anger about it. I can now. One thing I do remember feeling was gratitude that he was so open in his condescension and ignorance and arrogance in dismissing the female perspective. The mere casualness about it, his blatant casualness, his lack of shame in saying what he was saying, was a gift, because it really showed me in very clear words how prevalent that attitude still [was]. That was twenty years ago. Now we talk a lot about racism, bigotry, sexism and where is it hidden, when is it the soft bigotry and when is it in your face. There’s almost something to be said for when bigotry and prejudice is so in your face, because when it’s so open you can deal with it in an entirely different way. And you can confront and begin to appreciate the more subtle nuances of bigotry.

MBB: What drew you to writing the story of girls and women in this heightened patriarchal environment?

TI: I had always been interested in Alcatraz the way everybody is interested in Alcatraz. I had taken a tour of Alcatraz and somewhere in the tour there was one sentence about women and children, families of the prison staff who lived on the island. It was just one sentence, within this tour. It was this tossed-off comment, this passing reference and it was swallowed up by all of the other information about Alcatraz, the most threatening, foreboding place in the country. The violence, the brutality of the system, and the juxtaposition between [this and family life on Alcatraz] really stuck with me. I started researching [the lives of the families living on the island]. There was not a lot of information.

As I was researching the prison itself and how it was run, I began to see a parallel between the power structure of the prison—the triangle of warden, guard, inmate—and the classic nuclear family structure of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s of father, mother, child. They matched up in terms of the power dynamic, in terms of societal convention, the definition of roles, the definition of behavior, and I thought there was something there. In focusing on the story of a mother and daughter within this system, ideally I was revealing a larger dynamic that I wouldn’t necessarily feel qualified to discuss. I’m not a historian, I’m not a sociologist, but I could tell the story of this one woman and this one daughter and the juxtaposition of this female-centric experience set against this incredibly masculine, patriarchal structure.

I want to create a psychological or emotional aneurysm for my characters.

Something that I also wanted to be careful about was that it wasn’t as simple as the men were the villains and the women were the oppressed victims. I cared deeply about the father in the story, and I saw him almost every bit as much as a victim of the system as the women were. His need to fulfill what he felt was his role as a strong head of the family, the provider, the male presence, the patriarch—he didn’t know anything else. For him the definition of a man, a good husband, a good father, was something that he cared deeply about and he did the best he could with the model that he was given as well.

MBB: In your recent work, you represent the female experience in a way that pushes the reader beyond comfortable notions about feminine identity. Your 2015 short story collection, Ball, fearlessly portrays unexpected women: the vengeful, the shallow, the violent, the “crazy.” Would you talk about what drew you to the unexpected in these stories?

TI: The emotions that the women in these stories are experiencing to a large degree are the emotions that we all have. They are the darker angels of our nature. The pride, the fear, the anger, the jealousy, the insecurity. And I think to some degree we all experience those. We might be in denial about some of them, or we process them in healthy, very functional ways. I am interested in characters who get stuck in emotional turmoil that they can’t talk their way out of, they can’t process their way through. Very often they are unwilling to admit to themselves how deeply immersed they are in the dysfunctional dynamic or the disturbing emotions that they’re experiencing. I want to push them even one step further. I want to create a psychological or emotional aneurysm for my characters. I want to get them to the point where the pressure of either trying to deny the ugly emotions that they’re feeling or the pressure of just trying to restrain or redirect themselves fails until it tips them over the edge into a behavior or a coping mechanism that is not allowed. It’s beyond dysfunctional. Sometimes they get beyond disturbing, but it tips them over into a kind of darkness that isn’t allowed. It might be allowed in fiction. It’s certainly not allowed in real life. That moment is what interests me more than anything. It’s pushing the character just that one step further. I consider myself a realist writer, yet in some of the stories I slightly cross the line into fantastical or absurdist. I’m interested in that very fine line between what is real and what steps just slightly beyond that.

MBB: Do you consider the protagonists in “Ball” (who has an ultimately destructive relationship with her dog) or “Wig” (who is having an affair with her dying best friend’s husband) to be unsympathetic? What informed your choice to write through the lens of the unsympathetic character?

TI: The whole question of “unsympathetic” for writers is interesting in that we’re often told as a criticism that [our] characters are unsympathetic. The issue of whether [a character] is sympathetic: I don’t think that’s the right question to be asking. As a reader, I am not interested in sympathetic characters. I’m interested in characters I can relate to. I’m interested in characters I can understand. I don’t think I was ever consciously wondering—am I taking this character too far? Is this character unsympathetic? From that perspective, all of my characters are deeply unsympathetic. I can relate to all of the characters if not their ultimate behavior. I can relate to the darkness of some of their emotions. I always tell myself as a writer, as a woman, as a human being, if I can relate to that emotion, other people can relate to that emotion as well, and if I’m tapping into a kind of emotional/psychological/spiritual darkness, I don’t think I’m an outlier in identifying those dark places of the soul. I think that those exist within all of us, again, to varying degrees. And to varying degrees we deal, we process those darker aspects of our emotional life. So to me, my characters are just very human. Seriously flawed human, but very human. Even if I push them to behaviors that some might consider inhuman.

MBB: From a craft perspective, what techniques did you draw upon to allow the reader to relate to and/or see themselves in the flaws of these characters?

TI: For me, story always comes down to the question of what the character needs. There’s a Ken Kesey quote that anybody who’s ever had a class with me has heard me say a dozen times. It really gets to the core of storytelling. “Story is about somebody who needs something, and what he’s going to go through to get it.” That always brings me back to why I tell stories in the first place.

If the writer has a clear sense of what the character needs, then the story writes itself to some degree. A need is the fuel of the story.

If I look at “Ball,” if I look at “Wig,” if I look at any of the stories in the collection, the characters are consumed by a need for something. And the action that they take to get that need met becomes increasingly dysfunctional, dark, deranged, but I think that need is what defines us, what makes us human. If the writer has a clear sense of what the character needs, then the story writes itself to some degree. A need is the fuel of the story. Because we all have needs, that is what humanizes us. When I write a story or a novel, if I lose sight of what a character needs and what the obstacle to the need is, and what she is doing in order to overcome the obstacle, if I lose sight of that, I’ve wandered out of the story. And when I’m writing a story if I’m feeling lost or bored, or confused, adrift, I will stop and I will consciously ask myself those questions: What does my character need right now? What is the obstacle? What is it that my character is doing about it? [These questions] will always bring me back to the story in a way that allows the story to move forward and increase the narrative momentum.

MBB: Many of the stories in Ball are explicit in their depiction of female sexuality, which is an area that, unfortunately, remains relatively rare in literary fiction. It’s refreshing to read stories that include sexuality without centering the male perspective and male pleasure, while remaining explicit in their physicality. Sometimes women hesitate to write graphically about sexuality. Have you always felt comfortable doing so? If not, how did you arrive at this place?

TI: I have never felt comfortable writing about sex. I can’t imagine I ever will feel comfortable writing about sex. There are moments in those stories where I remember I sat there with my hands poised above the keyboard, unable to type out certain words or certain phrases, certain descriptions, because I was so incredibly uncomfortable with what I was doing. I was uncomfortable with the mechanics of it, because I have written many sentences of somebody getting dressed, or getting into a car, but I had very little experience in forming sentences drawing on explicit sexuality. From a mechanical perspective—what is the correct word to use, how to structure the sentence, how to avoid cliché—that was very difficult for me. I felt almost like I was having to create a new language for myself. Also, emotionally and psychologically, I felt very naked. I felt very exposed. I thought: are people going to attribute this kind of sexuality to me? If so, why should I care about that? Where do I end and the characters begin? But what I always tried to come back to in writing explicitly sexual scenes was the emotional context and the psychology. For my characters, sex is a means to an end, so it really does come back to what I was saying earlier, about what is it that the characters need in that particular moment and how they are using sex to try and get a need fulfilled. I think a little bit of explicit sexuality goes a long way. [I tried] to keep the balance of the explicitness of the sexual language, the sexual positioning, the description of sexual activity, with what is really fueling the scene. For me [the fuel of the scene] is rarely lust. It tends far more often to be a more vulnerable moment for the character, where the character is grappling with something very profound and sexuality is a way to work through it.

MBB: It’s helpful to hear that even as a seasoned writer you are still pushing through discomfort in your work.

TI: Yes, I’m working on a new story right now, and I’m really struggling. I want it to have a sexual dynamic. And it’s every bit as awkward for me as it has been with any story I’ve written in the past. I feel like I’ve never written about sex in my entire life. I don’t know how to do it. The struggle continues. The discomfort continues.

MBB: That’s probably what makes the writing so interesting. It seems like you went into a lot of cultural taboos with this book. I’m wondering if you received any pushback for choosing to write frankly about sexuality or about unsympathetic female characters? If so, how have you reacted to this?

TI: Absolutely. Not with every story. For example, the story “Bakery Girl,” which is one of the more sexually explicit, I was approached by a website called nerve.com that features very literary sexual writing. I knew that’s what they wanted, so I went into that story deliberately looking to explore a sexual dynamic in a relatively explicit way. I didn’t get any pushback on that one. But yes, for some of the other stories I’ve had editors who were hesitant, who questioned, do you really want to do this? The best example would be the story “Ball.” I had submitted the story to Tin House and I heard back from the editor: “Tara, I really like the story. I’m submitting it above me to the next level, and we’re curious, are you willing to change the ending?” This was my first published short story, by the way. I had a dark night of the soul. I emailed a former professor of mine from grad school who had read the story and I explained the situation and I said, “What do I do?” He wrote back and said, “Sometimes you really need to be open-minded and listen to your editor. The editor is very experienced, this is an outstanding journal, you want the story published, and sometimes it’s a good idea to do what the editor is asking you to do”—pause —“but not with this story.” And I thought, okay, I have permission to stick to my guts. I wrote the editor back this long, rambling, “I’m so sorry, I would really like to change the story because I’d hoped you’d accept it … but I cannot change the ending of the story.” And he wrote back and said, “No, no, no, I’m happy with the ending, but our senior editor is having a really hard time with it. I’ll keep trying.” It took about four months, and he wrote me back and said, “Okay, the story’s in.” I was very proud about that. Cut to many years later when the collection was being assembled, and my editor of the collection said, “The stories mostly have been published. There’s a little editing to do, but I do want to talk to you about the ending of the ‘Ball’ story.” He didn’t so much want me to change the ending, but he did want me to soften it a little bit. He wanted some revision to how I was phrasing a couple of things, and I said no. I wouldn’t change it. I changed other things. Revision can also be a very collaborative process. But you just have to listen to your gut as a writer, and that particular story was one that I’ve had to push back on, I’ve had to fight for, on more than one occasion. And it’s worked out. I’ve never regretted it. It’s probably one of my favorite stories.

MBB: In your 2015 collection of personal essays, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, you depict the tension you’ve experienced between being a “good girl” and taking on more subversive identities, such as, to quote the chapter headings: Lolita, slut, drunk, and Mrs. Robinson. How does this tension inform the choices you find yourself making as a writer?

The whole thing with being a good girl—don’t make waves, get along with people, don’t be too loud, don’t be difficult, be responsible—I think that those are some aspects of womanhood, of femininity, that I, along with so many women, have internalized as a way to move through the world.

TI: The whole thing with being a good girl—don’t make waves, get along with people, don’t be too loud, don’t be difficult, be responsible—I think that those are some aspects of womanhood, of femininity, that I, along with so many women, have internalized as a way to move through the world. It might be the reason I’m a writer, because a lot of pressure builds up when you feel you should always be a good girl and play by the rules. Writing, for me, is an escape valve. It allows me to access, explore, depict, express, and communicate things about my experience of the world where I’m not such a good girl. It’s at a safe distance. My name is on the cover, my name is on the story, but I am able to fall back on, Hey, it’s fiction, it’s just a story, it’s a character I’ve created. To some degree, every character is an aspect of myself working through something I might not have the courage or the strength to deal with in my own real life, but I force my character to deal with some of those things.

MBB: If writing is an escape valve where you can express things that are “unacceptable to express” as a woman in our culture, was writing nonfiction, publishing this book of personal essays, a different experience for you?

TI: Yeah, there’s no scrim. With fiction, I can say, Oh, I make things up, I make characters up. I think that was why I didn’t feel either capable or interested in writing a straight memoir. I was interested in looking at this actual conflict between the roles we feel compelled to play in real life and the roles that are presented to us through cinema. That took it a little bit out of myself. It gave me something else to talk about. It gave me another way to explore some of the role-playing we do in real life in a larger context. I love movies, so I was really happy to talk about movies. But by working through some of these questions of sexuality, addiction, mental health, faith, creativity, all of the themes of the book, and by working through those in relationship to my relationship to characters—Mrs. Robinson, Lolita, Lillian Hellman—I was able to talk about those cinematic role models and their struggles as a way to illustrate my own questioning of different roles. Yes, it’s closer to home than fiction because I don’t have the ability to say this isn’t really me, but I had company in doing it. If I’m trying to figure out my feelings about having a sexual relationship with a man seventeen years my junior, I wasn’t alone in that because I had Mrs. Robinson keeping me company on that journey.

MBB: In January 2016, you published an article on Salon entitled, “Too stupid to be c*nts”: The new normal of toxic male entitlement on campus,” which deals with your experience as a professor being confronted with casual linguistic misogyny from a male student. The essay speaks to the everyday use of derogatory language directed towards women and girls. How do you think this has impacted our culture? How, if at all, have your views on this changed since the essay was written?

TI: First of all, that was not my title for the essay and I’m not really happy with the title. I was unhappy with the subtitle about toxic masculinity on campus because I thought it was a click-bait title. I was unhappy with defining the essay before somebody might have a chance to read the essay. To me, an essay is an exploration, an essay is inquiry, and once you term something toxic masculinity, that’s making a statement and it shuts down some of the inquiry of the essay itself. That aside, in the essay I refer to a phrase that Toni Morrison uses: “disinterested violence.” That kind of casual disparagement. That term you used, “casual linguistic misogyny” [reminds me of] the guy we talked about earlier, the guy [I interviewed about] Alcatraz, who was so open in his condescension and disparagement of women. The misogyny has become so casual and acceptable. [In the essay], here is this kid walking across campus, speaking very loudly on his cell phone, and speaking about women in an incredibly ugly way, and what was most uncomfortable to me about that moment was that he wasn’t riled up. He wasn’t venting. He wasn’t angry, even. He was casual about it. There’s something very, very disturbing about that casualness. In the essay, I was thinking about how once that kind of attitude gets watered down to the point where it’s permeating casual speech, casual conversation, it spreads. I think it can spread very, very easily, more so than a single violent outburst of anger can. Because people will immediately put their guard up against a rant. But this wasn’t a rant. It gets into the bloodstream more easily that way, and spreads more easily that way. And I don’t see it going away any time soon in our culture. I think if anything it’s spreading. That’s what I was looking to explore in the essay. My feeling is that it hasn’t changed, certainly in the last year. If anything, I’ve become even more discouraged at the level of discourse and I think a lot of people are grappling with this right now. The level of discourse has been so degraded and has descended to a level of such ignorance and intolerance and thoughtlessness. It’s happening everywhere, and it’s very disturbing.

MBB: In your commencement speech at the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program in December 2016, you quoted Junot Diaz on the importance of providing human beings with a reflection of themselves, in order to prevent us from becoming monsters. [The quote is from Diaz’s speech at Bergen County Community College in Paramus, New Jersey: “If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”] In your opinion, how do readers benefit from seeing themselves reflected in literature? What do you see as the role of the writer in this particular political climate in the United States?

TI:  There is a responsibility of the artist to reflect back upon ourselves, upon society, upon the world. When it is reflected back to us it inspires a kind of self-reflection, self-inquiry, that I think [is] a more subtle way of getting human beings to confront ourselves. It’s why, even though I write nonfiction, I still primarily think of myself as a fiction writer. You can disguise the interrogation. If you’re holding up characters grappling with things, it allows the reader, invites the reader, to reflect upon their own experiences, attitudes, beliefs, needs, struggles, behavior, in a friendlier way than direct confrontation. I think that’s the power of fiction. Conversely, the flip side to the reflection is that fiction, literature, allows us access into another human being’s inner life, their consciousness, their perspective, in a very unique way. I joke with my students that the only way to get into someone else’s head more intimately than fiction is with an MRI or a CAT scan. We are allowed access into another person’s experience through fiction in a way that we will never be allowed even to understand our best friends, or our siblings, or our parents. There’s a greater intimacy that is allowed in fiction. By the very nature of spending some time in another being’s heart and soul, it creates a sense of empathy; [it creates the] ability to appreciate our shared humanity. In addition to reflecting back on ourselves and ideally triggering a kind of self-inquiry into our own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, it allows us to begin to understand the experience of other human beings.

MBB: As we wrap up our interview, do you have any last words of wisdom for emerging feminist writers?

TI: I feel that anything I want to say diminishes how hard it is. What I want to say is: Don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks or tells you. Be fearless. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. Tell your truth. Be strong. We need your voice. But that’s all easier said than done, and those sound to me like cheery slogans. There’s so much work to be done. I am terrified with every sentence I write. But we have to do it. And we have to keep telling women’s stories and being true to their experience.

Melissa Benton Barker is an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles. A Navy brat and native of nowhere, she currently lives in a small Midwestern town where she spends her time imagining stories, wandering in the woods, and raising children—sometimes simultaneously! Her work appears in Lunch Ticket, Smokelong Quarterly, and Literary Mama.