LitMinds Blog and Interviews

LitMinds was recently invited to interview the accomplished author Julia Alvarez.  Julia is on a hectic national tour for her new book Once Upon a Quinceañera, Coming of Age in the USA.  We spoke to Julia by phone about the changing face of American literature, her views about being a writer, and how she balances a life of action with a life of reflection.   Enjoy!

You started writing in the late 60’s and 70’s when Latino literature or writers were unheard of and literature which focused on the lives of non-white, non mainstream characters was considered of ethnic interest only.  What made you write about topics that very few people were interested in?

Well, you hit the nail on the head.  I have been lucky that in my lifetime there has been a  sea-change in American literature.  When I started writing in mid 60’s as a teenager, anything that was written by ethnics people, that were not of the mainstream, was considered sociology.  We were not part of American literature. 

[It was] African American writers who opened the canon.  There is a famous poem by Langston Hughes called "I, Too, Sing America" that talks about how he and other black writers were relegated to the kitchen of American literature; they were not allowed at the table.  But he says one day we will be at the big table.  It was very prophetic! 

And then Latino writers and Asian-American writers followed, the demographic started to grow, and then mainstream publishers realized what smaller, literary regional publishers already knew.   Around this time Bless me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya sold 300,000 copies and mainstream publishers said “Wow, what’s going on here?”

My first novel wasn’t published till I was 41 and I had already been writing for over 20 years.  It was just luck that in the mid 80’s we had this boom of multi-cultural writers like Gabriel García Márquez and all of a sudden Americans were discovering literature from south of their border.  [This in turn] might have made for some opening towards Latinos in this country.

Can you also shed some light on how you have picked the topics you have written about?

Well, I believe we are story tellers, we are all from tribes, and we tell stories of our tribes.  We hope literature is about different tribes coming together and all of our stories coming together make literature a bigger story.  I think in general we write about things that are our stories and things that move us and puzzle us and things we question and those are the things that come from our own experience.

If John Updike comes out with a new novel and it has a white male protagonist, nobody questions why he is writing about this.  No one says “Is this autobiographical?”  But when an ethnic person writes about people of her/ his ethnicity, people say “Is that about your family?” It’s as if the default characters and material of American literature has that old bias that it has to be about mainstream characters or you must be writing about your own experience.

How do you see American literature evolve in the future.  Already when we look at bestseller lists we regularly see books like Khaled Hosseini’s "Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" which are not about mainstream characters.  So, if we move forward another 10-20-30 years what is American literature going to look like?

As I mentioned, we all come local habitations and we have our little individual tribes and stories.  However we are all one human family and literature has always known that stories are about being one human being.  We are seeing all the diversity and variety of who we are and that’s going to happen more and more.  The world is flat!  You are in San Francisco and I am in Miami and I am reading Gao Xingjian’s Nobel prize winning book, a translation of course.  Stories are about being human and the different versions and varieties that comes from our specific culture make literature richer and we find out about all kinds of people.  More and more of that will happen as the world shrinks and we get more curious about people we are coming in contact with.  We are trying to understand who we all are and who we have to share this planet with.

Literature will reflect more and more those kind of combinations and diversities and because we are so mobile and because we are mixing with each other.  I met a Dominican who was married to a Japanese woman and they live in California!  Look at Barack Obama.  When would you have thought that an African American with a father from Africa and mother from mid-west could run for president.  Literature has never been about being a gated community and literature is always teaching us that we have to understand and become each other.

Let’s talk about your new book "Once Upon a Quinceañera."  How did the book change you?  And How did it change the way you view the Latino community in the US?

That’s a good question.  Every book you write changes you.  Even as a reader you enter a book and you go through very fine and imperceptible adjustments and then you come out a different person.  This is especially true of a book that really moves you.  And it happens even more strongly when you write it. "Once Upon a Quinceañera" is my first real non-fiction.  I wrote a non-fiction before but it was individual essays.  With this new book I learned new skills.  People think that because you are a writer you must write about things because you know things.  I write about things because I want to learn those things.  I had to learn new things about being a journalist, traveling, interviewing people, researching, gathering materials, all of that stuff – you do that when you are writing a novel but in a more informal way.  Here this is the material of the book.  This book was written on an invitation.  At first I thought “Oh my god, you got the wrong person for this book.”  I am not into Quinceañeras and all that girly girl stuff.  But then the editor was persistent and he sent me a DVD of a documentary that PBS did in Boston.  It was about a single mother throwing her daughter into a Quinceañera.  I saw it and got hooked.  I saw that by studying this tradition I could use it as a lens to see what was happening to the Latino community in the US.   Because what’s interesting is that we come here as Dominicans, Peruvians, Mexicans, Salvadorians, and suddenly we come here and we are Latinos.  We were never Latinos before!  We come here and are creating an amalgam and culture made up of all different traditions mixing, and growing, and changing, and evolving and that’s what’s rich about tradition and culture that they keep growing - that they are not packaged and dead things.  It was interesting for me to look at the Quinceañera and see through it what are some of the issues and some of the things that are happening to the Latino community.  Let’s face it I live in Vermont.  I wasn’t getting to see what was happening, this came to me as an opportunity to find out.

Who should read this book and why?

I think there are two types of people who I imagine would be interested in this book.  First is people in the Latino community - we are here and things are happening to us.  We need to reflect about what is happening and have conversation about what is happening.  We need to be talking about what traditions means to us and are they serving us and whether they need to be revised.  I don’t have a message.  I think it is about having a conversation and being aware.  And being consciente about what is happening to us.  

Another demographic that would find the book interesting is the rest of the culture.  We think that by 2050 one in four American women will be Hispanic.  So, we are talking about a major part of American population.  We already see a Latin-ization of American culture.  Girls that are not Latinos are having Quinceañeras.  The music is catching on, the food is catching on.  So, the general reader who might be curious about these new Americans and the people that are changing the United States of America, would find this book interesting as well.  Every immigrant group that has ever come before us has had an impact on what America.

We have a lot of new and emerging authors in the LitMinds community.  Like most new authors they are always interested in how to market their books, how to find their audience, how to make money by writing.  What advice can you share based on your years as a writer?

Maybe I am not the best person in this arena.  My first novel wasn’t published till I was 41.  I would say you should be doing this if this is your calling, if this is your passion.  Who doesn’t want affirmation and success.  Success means you have readers.  We are not writers till we have readers.  A book doesn’t come alive till we have readers.  I am not minimizing that.  But it is so uncertain, and who knows who gets rewarded in their lifetime and who doesn’t.  In hindsight we look at a certain painter or writer and we say my goodness this is a classic novel and this is great painter but maybe in their life they were not appreciated.  So, you have to have that passion where you feel that this is my calling, that this is what you need to do, whether rewards come or not.  Persistence works because you get some inherent pleasure – you need to do this to be alive – you need to do this to understand yourself.  It’s something you need to do like breathe, so you do it.  And yes, you have to figure out how to earn a living as a writer.  I became a teacher like many writers.  It’s only now in my life I am able to be a writer full time who teaches on the side.  If you are really committed to this because this what you feel you need to do then don’t let anyone talk you out of it. 

A lot of my young students ask me how can they get published.  I tell them to focus on the writing because when the writing is good enough it will find a publisher.  Publishers are a lot more open now in some ways to writers of different sorts.  People are constantly asking me “Should I go to an MFA program?”  I think you learn writing by writing!  There is something to be gained by having wonderful readers who are also writers who can also be your mentors.  You can get focused attention.  In some of the MFA programs you can be a Teaching Assistant and devote 1-2 years to your writing careers.  And many times the MFA thesis can end up being your first published book.  But it’s not the only way and not every writer benefits from that.  I go to a lot of conferences – I used to go as a young writer to them too.  Conferences can help because by lstening to writers talk about their craft you can get good tips on your writing, and not to minimize networking – you kind of learn the vocabulary of what I call the book business.  That’s the old fashioned way.  Now young writers are writing blogs and self-publishing – it’s maybe how literature is changing and will happen beyond my lifetime – I am not sure.

Main thing is this you write because you love to do it and you think this is your calling.  Nothing can substitute applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Last question - tell us about Café Alta Gracia?  How did you get involved with organic farming?  What’s the connection with the literary world?

Well, you know one of my heroes has always been Grace Paley.  What I love about her is she is a wonderful writer, very generous, very humane being, and she walks the talk.  She is very politically active.  There is a division between a life of action and life of reflection.  Writers are often interested in issues but they are academically involved, arm chair involved.  And sometimes in your life you walk into a situation and you are really challenged to get involved in terms of your own action.  What happened was that I was doing a writing assignment in the mountains of Dominican Republic for the Nature Conservancy.  They were putting together an anthology where they were asking different writers to visit different sites around the world and write short stories based on going there – so I went there and met a cooperative of small farmers who had banded together against the big agri-business plantations who were exploiting the land, planting hundred and hundred of acres of pineapples and there was no food for local people.  This group of local farmers was growing organic coffee under shade which was the traditional way to grow coffee before the big plantations discovered that if they could cut down all the trees they could plant more coffee and make more money but it destroys the land for future generations.  But these farmers didn’t even have money for pesticides.  So when I did the story I got really fired up.  And my husband grew up on a farm in Nebraska and he had seen the same thing happen there.  So when they asked us if we would get involved to tell their story and help bring their coffee to the US where they could get better prices and better market.  My first reaction was “We can’t do this we live in Vermont.”  But my husband said “How can we not help them?”  And that’s how we got involved in buying an abandoned farmland, reforesting it, planting coffee, pulling the community together and bringing it here – and now it’s going on 10 years. 

About the 4th year – we realized that were taking care of the land, but what about the people they couldn’t even read and write.  None of them - the kids, the parents, the grandparents.  Nobody knew how to read or write.  And that’s why they couldn’t access this market.  So, we started a school on the farm to teach them how to read and write.  I see this as part of a larger grass roots movement where active communities are trying to change the way the world works they are saving the world!