Tag: Author Interview

All We Have: A Conversation with Amy Stuber

Sad Grownups
Amy Stuber
Stillhouse Press
$16 (232 pages)
Publication Date: October 8, 2024

 

The seventeen stories in Amy Stuber’s debut collection, Sad Grownups, are filled with moments of beauty, dread, playfulness, and existential probing. With deft prose, Stuber captures these moods within the span of a single paragraph. The stories aim squarely at questioning the ways we live today. As she notes in the interview that follows, the collection’s title is a nod to one of the book’s major themes: how our society has an unfortunate tendency to create sad grownups.

Sad Grownups is out now.

 

TEGETHOFF: There are a lot of what might be called metafictional elements in these stories. Sometimes they arrive via second person, a “you” interjected that could be the reader, or possibly the writer herself. In other moments, the narrators seem to step back from the stories completely to comment on their progress. The first story in the collection, “Day Hike,” is a prime example of this, with the narrator letting the reader know that she is writing the story. Could you talk about the craft decisions that go into such moments?

 

STUBER: There’s a Bruce Springsteen song phrase from “Dancing in the Dark”: “I’m just tired and bored of myself.” That’s pretty much where I was when I started writing these stories. I had taken a break from fiction and done a ton of flash and had to lure myself back into stories by making them really different from what I had been doing. I may look back on them in a few years and think, Oh, god, these are gimmicky, why did I add that? But during the time I was writing them, I would finish a standard narrative and think, this needs something else, or I’d write a flash and think, this should be expanded and set beside or within another narrative.

 

“Day Hike” started as a flash, I think, about a writer feeling jealous of her friend’s life and accomplishments. But I was simultaneously writing another little thing about a couple going on vacation in Colorado, a place I went as a kid and where I still go once a year or so. The seed of that story was seeing a lot of strangers I passed on a hike I took looking miserable, like they’d rather be doing anything other than hiking, and then just thinking about the things we put ourselves through to feel productive and accomplished to ourselves or in the eyes of others. (I love hiking and walking, don’t get me wrong. But I’m increasingly annoyed by productivity culture, and that’s one of the things I think both threads of this story engage with.)

 

I did not strategically write a collection with metafictional elements, and I didn’t even realize I had until someone pointed it out to me. I was just trying to push myself with regard to what a story could be or do.

 

TEGETHOFF: Related to the first question, these metafictional moments seem to expose the artifice of narrative structure. It’s like you’re asking why these stories should be told in the first place. For instance, there’s this narrative passage from “Dead Animals”:

 

Was everything okay? Was everything going to be okay? Tell me this was pivotal. Tell me it mattered. Tell me Frida would be different and better, with a brain less full of noise and better suited to post-modernity.

 

What do you think these moments add? How do they modify or change a story?

 

STUBER: With “Dead Animals,” I wrote a fragment of a babysitter story about ten years ago. It was just a woman who was kind of a mess taking care of a kid who didn’t really need care and putting her increasingly in harm’s way. It was about three pages and never worked. I picked it up again in maybe 2019 and saw it from a totally different perspective, saw the woman’s backstory, saw how she was always questioning herself, her life choices, and I wanted to make that questioning piece into something outside the narrative, something that could almost be pulled away from the storyline. I wanted the story, all parts of it, to engage more directly with storytelling as a construct, and I hope doing so makes readers think more about building character and, ultimately, building self.

 

Generally, adding these other moments and elements is, I guess, somewhat for texture too: a break, a kind of chorus, something to distract or defuse for a second.

 

TEGETHOFF: Most of the women in these stories feel guarded but also seek some sort of validation for their existence. There’s Sage in “The Game,” for instance, who puts a piece of masking tape on her forehead to see if her husband or sons will notice, but they don’t. Elsewhere, men are more sinister, and the women seem creeped out or exhausted by their presence. Multiple women in Sad Grownups say they prefer the company of women over men. Could you talk about the world the women in this collection inhabit?

 

STUBER: Oh god. This is probably, embarrassingly, the story of my life, feeling guarded but seeking validation: The Introverted Attention Seeker, a memoir.

 

But with regard to the book, I think there’s a continuum here, from women who have decided to simply surround themselves with other women as a preference but also as protection (the mother in “People’s Parties”), to women who want men in their lives, and enjoy their company, but also feel frustrated by the behaviors of the men they interact with and with some of the manifestations of maleness in America (like Sage in “The Game”).

 

I think women have to be on guard. This country is often inhospitable to people who identify as women. Women are constantly being assessed in ways men rarely are for their performance and attitude and appearance, their moods monitored and commented on. We’re denied medical care and access. There are so many physical safety things women think about as a default that a lot of men rarely have to think about. But then we’re also often trained to seek validation—it’s a bad conundrum. So it’s just a reality that filtered into many of these stories.

 

I’m fifty-five and feel increasingly loosened from needing to care about men’s approval or disapproval, which is liberating, but that doesn’t change the fact that as a woman, I have less power and fewer rights.

 

TEGETHOFF: Many of the men in this collection are unpleasant. This characterization might go double for Adam Zanger, the protagonist of the final story, “The Last Summer.” Adam is a poetry professor—and not very good at poetry or teaching, from what I can tell—who has found out he’s dying. He’s lonely, perhaps angry he hasn’t accomplished more in his life. But we see some redemptive qualities in him, mainly as he learns about himself via two sorority girls. How does this story play off the others in the collection, especially in its depiction of men?

 

STUBER: Two-part answer. First, I think there are maybe two tiers of men in these stories. Some of the main characters who are men are a pretty equal mix of good and bad, which I think all people are, like the Adam Zanger character, who is a little isolated and maybe a little misanthropic, but who also sees beauty in poetry and the world and worries about things and wants things. Also like the main characters in the title story and the main character in “Dick Cheney Was Not My Father.” All kinds of fucked up people, but hopefully nuanced and with some, as you said, redemptive qualities.

 

But second part: Yes, a lot of the antagonists in the stories are men. I’ll be honest and say that while I’ve grown up with pretty solidly remarkable men in my family of origin and my current family, I have had a lot of negative experiences with men, ranging from assault to abuse, plus the more insidious sexism that infiltrates daily activities. I think that a number of our current ills can be connected to a kind of hyper-masculinity that’s infused our society and that is concerned more with greed and power than with taking care.

 

I realize that’s a generalization. There are a lot of women who’ve done or do terrible things. I’m extremely imperfect and have done my own bad things, so I’m not setting myself apart from this in any way. But I do think our country needs a shift away from an obsession with strength and toward a concern with caring for people and places and communities. Deemphasizing masculinity is one important way to do this—raising all children to have empathy and express emotion instead of encouraging some kind of inhuman toughness. I think the story “The Game” tries to engage with this, and same for the “Dick Cheney” story. This ties back, for me, to what I see as one of the book’s big themes: that American society, as it is now, is kind of set up to create sad grownups. It’s depressing, I realize, and hopefully I’m wrong.

 

TEGETHOFF: The climate crisis shows up throughout this collection. Characters are blunt about their anxieties and often fairly pessimistic about humanity’s chances. How did you approach this very real emergency we’re living in? Did you feel it was important to be direct about the crisis?

 

I have two teenagers. I see how kids carry the weight of this. Some people might say, “Well, every generation has its issues,” but I don’t think every generation’s issue is so unflinchingly dire. Yes, growing up with the threat of nuclear war was scary, but I think it was somehow less pervasive or maybe easier to compartmentalize. I definitely thought at times about war potentially happening when I was a kid, and I know that brought its own umbrella of fear. Climate crisis feels different. It’s coming at you all the time, from all sides. Fires here. Floods there. And with the recent Supreme Court decision that basically threw regulations out the window [Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, more commonly known as the Chevron case], it’s even more bleak, with corporations holding the bulk of responsibility but being unwilling to make choices that would (if money is all they care about) preserve their future earning power.

 

So I end up mentioning this in a lot of my writing because it’s always there. I would like to be more hopeful about it all, and every now and then I read about something, some technology, some company that cares, some government doing more, something that gives me hope that we may evade whatever worse version of disaster, but it’s hard to think that. I think the only way to move forward under these circumstances is to focus on small, joyful things each day, accumulating those things over a week and a month and a year.

 

TEGETHOFF: There’s this roving search for meaning among the characters in the collection. It almost feels paralytic at times. I’m thinking, for example, of this passage from “Dick Cheney Was Not My Father”:

 

I was one of those people, like so many people I knew, who didn’t have any absolutist sense of trajectory and what should be next. The things people my age knew seemed unessential and thin: how to play board games at big tables with friends while drinking whiskey and how to hibernate for days while binge watching almost anything; most of the rest of the life stuff, the grown-up stuff, we still somehow didn’t know.

 

Could you talk about how moments like this capture the dread of modern life?

 

STUBER: In “Dick Cheney,” the character is wrestling with how to make meaning in his life, when he’s not getting meaning from his job, and with how to be a different kind of man and father from the kind his father is and was. He finds many things in his life trivial, but he ultimately finds that he gets meaning from being a parent and from parenting in a way that allows his child, a boy, to be however he wants, something his own father very much did not do for him. So, yes, a lot of these stories reflect the dread of modern life. But I also think that each story intentionally gives the characters moments of escape or happiness or abandon. I think that’s all we have, really.

 

Amy Stuber has published fiction in New England Review, Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She’s a flash editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her debut collection, SAD GROWNUPS, comes out October 8 from Stillhouse Press.

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The Lives I Know: A Conversation with Pat Spears

Hotel Impala
Pat Spears
Twisted Road Publications
$19.95 (392 pages)
Publication Date: September 16, 2024

 

David James Poissant: Hotel Impala is a novel that tackles, unflinchingly, questions of homelessness and substandard housing in America. By following six years in the lives of the members of an unhoused family, you ask certain questions of the reader. When readers close this book, what do you hope their takeaways will be?

 

Pat Spears: Those of us who live in cities, large and small, see people with no fixed residence every day. All too often, we look away, so that we can maintain a physical and emotional distance between ourselves and them. But I wonder how often we pause to consider who they are—what their lives are like, how they got where they are, how they live, what hopes they have for themselves. It’s a question I’ve been considering from time to time since I was in graduate school and saw a family with a small child on the street one cold February night. I remember that it was February because my birthday was approaching, and I was thinking about getting out of the cold and finishing off the food from the care package my mom had sent. As I was leaving the campus, I saw them—a man and woman, my age or slightly older, and a child, maybe three or four, huddled together beneath a streetlight. The boy sat slumped on what appeared to be a cardboard suitcase, and I imagined him tired, cold, and hungry. He leaned against the woman I took to be his mother, and I tried to imagine what she might have said to comfort him. The light changed, and I drove away. I felt I should have stopped, although I had no idea what I might have said or done. Until that moment, I had understood homelessness only as a construct. Now it was real.

 

The image of the boy and his family has stayed with me all these years since. I want to believe that a random encounter, decades earlier, had planted a story seed, an emotional memory that has remained. Perhaps it is true that our hearts hold memories, waiting for our conscious minds to catch up.

 

What I want Hotel Impala to do is to help close the emotional distance between “us” and “them”—the housed and the unhoused. I want readers to feel their humanity: the pain and fear of life on the streets, but also the yearning for something better. Yes, Grace and Zoey were, at times, cold, hungry, and afraid. They also loved and were loved. They were curious and inventive and loyal. And they each dreamed of some bright future.

 

David James Poissant: This is a novel that couldn’t be told from one point of view, and the book thrills by accommodating so many characters’ viewpoints. As a writer, how do you move from viewpoint to viewpoint so gracefully?

 

Pat Spears: The character Leah is clearly not well, but she is frequently in denial. The core of the story is the chaos created by her erratic behavior and insistence that she is fine and that everyone else must see her as she sees herself—“live inside Mom’s twisted reality,” as twelve-year-old Grace puts it. Each character is part of the same dynamic, but everyone experiences the conflict between their loyalty to Leah and their own yearnings differently.

 

To make the point of view shift work, I chose to follow the chaos, examine the character whose yearning was most impacted in each scene, and show their individual responses.

 

The Leah character is different from anything I’ve written before. Getting inside Leah’s head was both challenging and terrifying. And of course, it was the fact that she is such an unreliable narrator that made the multiple points of view necessary.

 

Grace was interesting because she was both truth-teller and advocate for Leah’s and Daniel’s lies. The thing that defines Grace is her yearning for a “normal” mom—or at least one with a noble illness, like cancer, so she won’t have to feel ashamed.

 

The yearning of Daniel’s character is more toward self-preservation than any other character except Zoey, who just wants what she wants. The thing that drives Daniel is the fact that his love for Leah and his desire to protect his children could be—and is—derailed by his desire simply to survive Leah’s rages.

 

Josey, Ellie, Jordan, and Moses are at some distance from the chaos but are nevertheless drawn into it. Josey reacts with concern and handwringing, Ellie and Jordan each with their own version of helpful action, and Moses becomes the ultimate truth teller.

 

David James Poissant: In spite of the horrors throughout this novel, or maybe because of them, there is also a thread of occasional humor. I’m thinking in particular of the tampon conversation during which Daniel feels as though he’s “swallowed an entire hippo in one gulp” while trying to parse the meaning of Grace calling him “basic.” What’s your method for juggling tone in a book of this size?

 

Pat Spears: Leah’s “flare-ups,” the cycles of her illness, create the rhythm of the story. That rhythm made changes in mood and tone largely intuitive. There are places, particularly after the darker scenes, where it felt like the story needed to take a deep breath.

 

Much of the humor was in service of the story, of course, but it was also for me. This was not an easy book to write. I write for emotional connection between the reader and the characters. When what I’ve written makes me laugh or cry, I trust the writing.

 

The humor just comes naturally to me, having come from a tradition of front porch storytellers. My dad could tell a joke at the most improbable, and sometimes inappropriate, times, because that’s what Southern storytellers do. Dorothy Allison said it best, in an interview she did a few years ago. She said of Southern writers: “We can make you laugh and cry at the same time, which is my favorite thing. I work hard to do a kind of seduction in which you read sections that are very funny and charming, and then, two paragraphs later, it ain’t charming. It ain’t funny. It’s horrible. And to have both of those things happen at the same time, that’s life” (Garden & Gun, Nov. 22, 2019).

 

One of my favorite scenes in Hotel Impala that demonstrates that kind of desperate humor is the one where Leah has lied to a judge to get a restraining order against Daniel, so that he can no longer attend Grace’s basketball games. Grace makes up an elaborate lie to explain his absence and ponders the irony of the fact that her mother’s behavior seems to require no explanation.

 

“When Grace grew so tired of her family’s lies, she fantasized about a moment when she would grab the mic and give her own introduction: Welcome your Tiger’s leading scorer: at 5’11”, playing center forward, our very own Grace Killian! Daughter of an accused wife-beater and a loony mother! Wild cheering would explode from the fans.”

 

David James Poissant: From one South-haunted writer to another, place seems important to you. Another novel of yours, It’s Not Like I Knew Her, set in Florida and Alabama, is setting-specific, historically, but I wonder if you see Hotel Impala working in the same way? Seems like there are any number of cities down on their luck that could provide a setting for this novel. Is that choice intentional? Do you see this novel as more universal than your others, or is universality even a helpful construct in fiction?

 

Pat Spears: Yes, place has always been a critically important part of my writing—almost another character. When I started writing Hotel Impala, I struggled with place. I had set early versions of the novel in several different, specific places. But I gradually realized that my struggle with place was because I was not approaching it correctly.

 

In the beginning of the novel, Leah and her family appear to others to be somewhat settled, but that is an illusion. Through most of the story, they are transient. The decision to have them occupying an unspecified city was not so much to suggest that the story could have happened anywhere, although I think that is also true, but to suggest their being untethered—that they have no place.

 

I also wanted to suggest that Leah’s yearning did not involve a “place” in a real sense, a spot on the map, if you will. She’s following her yearning to be healed by the magical power of the whooping crane. Interestingly, Leah’s search for the whooping crane leads her back to my home, to the place I’ve always written into my stories, and connects her to an individual who has been in that place for generations. And a one-hundred-year-old alligator, also a native to that place. Then, while writing, the Moses character arrived unexpectedly and fully formed, and I knew him immediately at an emotional level.

 

I’m not sure what that means, but that’s where the story pulled me. Maybe it means that, in order to write that final scene, I needed grounding in something familiar.

 

David James Poissant: Ranking books is a risky business, but Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is definitely on my list of the ten most important American novels of the last fifty years. Hotel Impala opens with an epigraph from Allison’s novel, and your story “Pink Moon” appears in an anthology introduced by Allison. Can you speak to the influence that Allison has had on your work, over the years, or your ideas of what the novel form, at its best, can do?

 

Pat Spears: When I need more truth in my stories, I turn to Dorothy Allison. I have always loved it when she talks about the risk you take when you willingly make readers uncomfortable. Her novels, which in my view represent the very best of the novel form, pull readers in and hold them there. She leaves no space for the reader to get comfortable enough to wander off into their own fantasies, thereby becoming the storytellers themselves.

 

That’s the part of Allison’s work that I’ve tried to emulate: to create a narrative that draws the reader in and compels them to stay. One in which they see and hear and feel what my characters are seeing and hearing and feeling to the exclusion of everything else. Because that’s what novels have always done for me. They have allowed me to walk alongside someone I had never before imagined, much less known, and know them.

 

David James Poissant: Beyond Allison, which writers do you admire most, and what are your favorite novels or stories? Which books, if any, do you return to again and again?

 

Pat Spears: When I first began writing fiction, I wrote short stories. It was a decade or more before I even contemplated writing a novel. One of the best short stories I’ve ever read was “A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver. I’ve read it again and again, along with every other story he’s written. Carver was, of course, the grand master of the minimalist style and has had a significant influence on my own writing style.

 

As I began considering writing a novel, Annie Proulx became a favorite, with her mastery of both short stories and novels. In her novel Postcard, there are scenes that are as chilling and as brilliantly written as anything I’ve ever read.

 

As a writer, when I am struggling with dialogue, I turn to Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy allows one to appreciate the importance of what is not said as opposed to what is said. He was marvelous at infusing dialogue with subtext.

 

Rick Bragg is one of those writers for whom place is essential, and my favorite of his books, Ava’s Man, is probably the best example. As you read it, which I have done several times, it becomes clear that the story could not have happened anywhere else. Ron Rash’s stories have a similar connection to place.

 

Other favorites include Colson Whitehead and Louise Erdrich. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is set in a location that was practically in my backyard as I was growing up, and I know the setting and some of the history upon which it was based.

 

Finally, there were two books I referred to over and over as I prepared to write Hotel Impala: Madness by Marya Hornbacher and The Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott.

 

David James Poissant: Finally, if you could offer one craft tip or nugget of wisdom to the aspiring novelist, what would you say? What do you wish you’d learned earlier as a beginning writer?

 

Pat Spears: This is a difficult question to answer. Developing as a writer is, by its nature, an extremely personal process.

 

I will say that I wish I had been braver. I wish I had made the decision to walk away from my work and try my hand at writing much earlier.

 

The other thing I will say is how important it is for writers to find their own voice and to write their own truth. Reading other writers whom you admire, and with whom you connect, can help, but only as long as you use them as guides and don’t try to imitate them.

 

When someone asks me to elaborate on my propensity for writing deeply flawed characters, the question is often delivered with a certain hesitancy while the speaker searches for a kind way of asking why I choose fictional losers over rousing heroes. While I find no fault with straightforward heroes, I hold tight to my passion for writing characters that readers may resist but are nevertheless drawn to—not losers but characters and stories that reveal the astonishing lives of those teetering on the edge of human disaster and social acceptability.

 

I know these characters and their stories because they are my kin—with all their hard-earned wisdom, social warts, and sometimes-devastating consequences driven by ignorant pride. These are the lives I know to write.

 

Pat Spears is the author of three novels and numerous short stories. Her second novel, It’s Not Like I Knew Her, won the bronze medal for Foreword Review’s Book of the Year in LGBTQ Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Sinister Wisdom, Appalachian Heritage, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, and Seven Hills Review, and anthologies including Law and Disorder (Main Street Rag), Bridges and Borders (Jane’s Stories Press), Saints and Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2012, and Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology (Twisted Road Publications). She is a sixth generation Floridian and lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her partner, two dogs, and one rabbit.

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Finding the Final Sentence: A Conversation with Carolyn Forché

* This interview was conducted at the Miami Book Fair in Miami, Florida on November 19, 2023. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. The interview concerns the memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), a 2019 National Book Award Finalist.

 

Chelsea Alice: Something I love about your memoir What You Have Heard is True is how present we are in the moment with you as we’re reading. Could you talk about what that process was like for you to write in that way?

 

Carolyn Forché: I wrote four versions of this memoir. And the first two, I just completely had to tear apart and put away. They weren’t what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. And I realized, after I’d written the other two versions, that I wanted to bring the reader with me on the journey. So, I made a decision that I would never let the reader know more than I knew in any moment. I tried not to interrupt the dream of the experience by intervening and making commentaries from my present self. I tried to recreate my twenty-seven-year-old self and reenact the journey with Leonel [Goméz Vides] and everything that happened along the way. I included all of her confusions and guesswork and misgivings. I wanted the reader to feel what it was like to go through that particular transformation, that education.

 

It helps, when you’re writing a book-length work of prose, to make decisions that give you some boundaries about what you will and will not be doing. For example, that decision helped me enormously. And had to do with pacing. I decided not to write long, sustained narrative chapters. I decided to write almost prose poems and self-contained units of prose. I was then able to move them around, where they would appear, so that, for example, the book doesn’t begin with the doorbell ringing. The story begins with the doorbell ringing, but not the book. I include a scene from well into the experience as the beginning. Once you get through that, those first two pages, the doorbell rings, and you’re following the journey as it unfolds.

 

Chelsea Alice: How was it for you to revisit all of those memories?

 

Carolyn Forché: Those were the two most vivid years of my life because of the heightened emotion I was feeling while I was living them. I’ve learned since that memory registers more deeply and indelibly when the experience is accompanied by an intensity of feeling. I had that, but for years I put it off. I didn’t want to write the book. I knew I had to write it someday. I promised I would, but I always told myself I wasn’t ready. I just didn’t know enough yet. The war was still going on, and I wanted to be careful. I always had a reason. The real reason was that I knew I was going to have to relive the experience. And I knew that it was going to be hard to do that, especially after Leonel died. It was going to be painful.

 

I didn’t know anything about writing prose, and I didn’t know about structure. I loved writing sentences, and I would write sentences and polish them because I was a poet. I was used to polishing things and writing short things I could work with in an intense way. And this was a 400-page sustained work. For me, the process involved getting rid of the first braided narrative because it shouldn’t be braided. With the second narrative, I took out even more. Then I had to amplify and include things that weren’t yet there. By the fourth version, I tried to recreate myself as I was then and not as I am now. All of my impatience, my stupidities, and my petulance and arguing with him, all of that had to be there. I had to show my flaws because I did not yet know what I know now.

 

And I wanted to capture Leonel because he was a remarkable, intriguing, amazing, mysterious, terribly funny guy. He’s alive in that book. You really meet him as he was. And, for me, that is the book’s best accomplishment. Over the years, Salvadoran students, at universities at which I taught, would ask me to tell them what happened. Their parents had brought them to the United States and wouldn’t talk about it with them. Parents didn’t want to talk about the horrors of that time. I don’t blame them, but the kids wanted to know. So, the other reason to write this was to tell the Salvadoran students some of what their parents went through in those years.

 

Until I wrote the last sentence, I worried I wouldn’t be able to accomplish the portrait, you know, that the book wouldn’t be good enough and that I would never finish. I took a writing residency for two weeks, and I gave myself a deadline: finish the book in two weeks or put it in a box and admit I couldn’t write it. The second to the last day before I left, I found the last sentence.

 

Chelsea Alice: I’d like to ask about “The Colonel” because that was a poem that someone recommended I read before I went on a trip to Peru. I read it on my way down, and the poem resonated with me. On my way back, six days later, I reread it, and it was very different that time. The poem resonated with me in a more powerful way, having experienced Peru.

 

Carolyn Forché: I understand.

 

Chelsea Alice: I wondered when you wrote that poem in relation to these four different versions of the memoir.

 

Carolyn Forché: I finished that poem in 1978, decades before the memoir’s first version, before any version. I wrote the poem to capture the details of that evening because I thought, well, this will be for the prose book someday I will write. I intended it to be a paragraph. Then it got mixed up with my poetry manuscript. And a poetry mentor of mine told me I had to leave it in the poetry manuscript. So, this thing that I wrote to be prose wound up as a poem, accidentally. And it was published everywhere, that poem. I decided not to put it in the memoir because it already had a life of its own. But I put a little passage that alludes to the poem and has Leonel tell me something more about that night, so there’s something of the poem in the book, but not the poem itself.

 

Chelsea Alice: How has the completion of the memoir impacted your life now?

 

Carolyn Forché: It’s very interesting questions you’re asking because you consider the same things I think about it. You’re asking me what I would ask myself. I didn’t know how it was going to feel to finish the book, but, finishing, I felt lighter. The whole story was now outside of me, not inside of me, and I didn’t have to carry it around anymore. It has a life of its own in the world. It lives in a book, and the book will outlive me. It took fifteen years to write, and I was scared all the time that I wouldn’t be able to write it. I’d wake in the middle of the night thinking about it. It was an intense fifteen years.

 

I was relieved when it came out. And I didn’t anticipate that. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be relieved.

 

Chelsea Alice: Has the book been published in Spanish?

 

Carolyn Forché: Yes, there is a Spanish edition. It’s published by Swing Capitan [Capitán Swing Libros: Madrid, Spain]. It’s a beautiful translation. [The Spanish title is Lo que han oído es cierto.]

 

Chelsea Alice: I’m interested in translations in general. I like to interview translators when I can because the difference culturally and linguistically is beautiful, and I love to see that bridge. This is such an impactful memoir, and I’m curious as to what you think the cultural impact for readers will be here versus in El Salvador.

 

Carolyn Forché: Salvadorans who’ve read it have been wonderful. Those I’ve talked to feel that a part of their history is now out in the world. They’ve been very supportive of me writing this. They recognized that I wasn’t trying to be Salvadoran, and I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t. This is the account of a North American young woman encountering their culture. And I love so many people in this book. Those who are in the book were like, How did you remember all of this? Because when they read it, they remembered it, and they were happy.

 

In North America, I get different responses sometimes. They’re very nice, very good responses. Sometimes people say: “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you just have gone home right away when it got dangerous? Why did you stay there?” And I’m not going to be able to explain that. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving. I didn’t even want to leave when I left. I went kicking and screaming.

 

Everybody wants to be safe, as though that’s the most important thing. There are cultural gaps there. But that was the one question that North Americans had most often. That, and: “Why did you trust this guy? You didn’t even know him.” That was the other question.

 

Chelsea Alice: Taking a leap of faith is not a big part of American culture anymore.

 

Carolyn Forché: No, not anymore. People are skittish. They’re worried. And they regard other countries as dangerous.

 

Chelsea Alice: As dangerous and not their problem.

 

Carolyn Forché: Right. And when Americans travel, even to Western Europe, they’re scared. I’m much more scared in the United States than I am in most places. We have the guns and the mass killings and the craziness, which you don’t have in many other countries. You worry about pickpockets in Paris. You worry about machine guns in American cities.

 

Chelsea Alice: How was your experience different with the memoir versus everything else you’ve written?

 

Carolyn Forché: I’ve written since I was nine years old. I have lots of notebooks, lots of poetry. I’ve published five collections of poetry, and I’ve published plenty of essays. But the memoir was, of course, the most challenging, the most sustained, my first book-length prose work. And I’m writing a second that has nothing to do with this subject. This next one is about friendship and poetry, and a lot of it takes place in central Europe, where my family is from.

 

Chelsea Alice: And is this nonfiction?

 

Carolyn Forché: Yes. It’s nonfiction again. I would love to try a novel someday.

 

Chelsea Alice: I want to talk about your experience with the Spanish translation. How much of an active role did you take?

 

Carolyn Forché: None. I was surprised. When I’m translating the poetry especially, I get all kinds of questions from translators. With the memoir, they didn’t get in touch with me, and I worried about that because the translators were not Salvadoran.

 

Chelsea Alice: This was in Spain.

 

Carolyn Forché: Yes. I worried that they might not get the flavor of the culture, the special qualities of Salvadoran culture because, as you know, every country in Latin America is distinct, and all are distinct from Spain. So, I worried about that, and I wondered whether they would understand all of the terms. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. I opened the book, and it was my dream Spanish. They caught the tone, voice, everything. They were professional. They didn’t make any mistakes.

 

The book is now being translated into Mandarin in China. I can’t imagine how the Mandarin will be. I’m just hoping they find an equivalent way of conveying this memoir.

 

Chelsea Alice: I’m interested in the cultural reception in China as well.

 

Carolyn Forché: China’s changing now. I don’t know how it will be. I wonder how they’ll respond to it. It was a twelve-year civil war that was beginning as I left El Salvador. Twelve horrific years, but also twelve years in which people opposed a dictatorship collectively. And there was a lot that was very moving about that. What I was trying to show in my memoir is what led up to this civil war and why it was inevitable that they would take the action they took.

 

Chelsea Alice: When I was growing up, when they taught us about World War I or World War II, they said, “Oh, well, this world war started because someone shot someone else.” And it’s like, really?

 

Carolyn Forché: Right. No, no.

 

Chelsea Alice: There has to be more.

 

Carolyn Forché: They leave everything out. They like that. They like that assassination in the carriage, you know, they like that. But that’s not why wars start. That might be the last thing that happened before a formal declaration, but that isn’t why.

 

Wars are distinct. They’re not alike. They feel alike in their suffering. In a certain period, they feel alike in the kind of munitions that are involved. But they’re about failures, really, a series of accumulative selfishness, accumulative intransigence and stubbornness, and accumulative unwillingness to respond to the pain of others. I’m describing Salvador specifically.

 

A sense of uprising doesn’t come from nowhere. People don’t leave their countries, leave everything behind, the graves of their parents, everything, easily. They don’t make the decision to walk through Mexico to our border easily. This is their last resort, the last thing they can do.

 

People don’t take up arms against their government lightly either. It’s very dangerous. It’s a process. There are many factors, and it isn’t fun. It’s not. Imagine what it would take to do something like that, and you’ll understand how complicated it is to come to a decision like that, a grave, consequential decision. These things are complex, and they happen for a long time before they burst into our awareness. They don’t happen overnight, ever, though they seem to. We love to say, war broke out. It’s a strange expression, when you think about it, like describing the weather. That’s not what’s happening.

 

Chelsea Alice: In my experience growing up, any time we watched a film or read a book about the Cold War, the stress that you feel watching or reading those stories that you can’t quite pinpoint the reason for, that’s often due to the setting, the time period. Living through such times reminds me of your memoir and the years leading up to war.

 

Carolyn Forché: They’re stressful. You feel it. Right now, we’re in that kind of period. We’re in a period of foreboding. Something worse might happen, we suspect. And we don’t know what. But the future doesn’t look terribly bright.

 

Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World(Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History(1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us(1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.

She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance(Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.”  She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award.

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