Transcript of Valeria Luiselli in Conversation with Jennifer Acker '00, Editor-in-Chief of The Common
- I'm Kirun Kapur. I'm the director of the Creative Writing Program here at the college, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the eighth annual LitFest. A snowy, lovely LitFest. And to tonight's event, a conversation between Amherst's own Jennifer Acker, and one of this year's distinguished LitFest authors, Valeria Luiselli. Whether you are in Johnson Chapel or joining us via the live stream, it's wonderful to have you here. I know we're in for an extraordinary evening. It may be dark and cold outside, but I think the conversation will be bright and warm. It takes many folks all across the Amherst campus to make LitFest happen. From the President's office to The Common, to the Dickinson Museum, to the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and especially the special events staff. So many, many thanks to the whole LitFest committee and community for making this evening possible. You all can join the conversation by way of the index cards in the pew or on through the online form. You can write or type a question, and folks will collect them and pass them to Jen, who I know will work in as many of your questions as possible. So without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce Jennifer Acker. She's the author of the acclaimed novel, the "The Limits of the World" and the bestselling memoir "Fatigue." Her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared widely in such places as the Washington Post, Oprah Daily, the Yale Review, among many others. Here at Amherst, she's an integral part of our literary life. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine The Common, she oversees the publishing internship, and of course, she's the director of LitFest. Our guest tonight is the luminously inventive writer and artist, Valeria Luiselli. Born in Mexico City, she grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She's the author of five books, all of which challenge the boundaries of the terms fiction and non-fiction. These books include a series of experimental essays in "Sidewalks," the unclassifiable work of fiction "The Story of My Teeth," the innovatively constructed "Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay composed out of 40 Questions," and the expansive novel "Lost Children Archive." A novel within a novel which includes maps, inventories, songs, photographs, and more. Discussing "Lost Children Archive," the New York Times remarked, "The novel truly becomes novel again in her hands, electric, elastic, alluring and new." Luiselli is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Dublin literary award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Carnegie Medal, and an American Book Award, just to name a few. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among many other publications, and she's been translated into more than 20 languages. Luiselli's endeavors, however, are not limited to the page. Other projects include a ballet performed at Lincoln Center, a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London, and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. As the 2022, 2023 Harvard College visiting professor of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, she's been working with collaborators to develop "Echoes From The Borderlands," a sound piece that documents the histories of violence against land and bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands. But no matter what label we put on her medium, Luiselli's work celebrates the protective powers of storytelling, the centrality of the imagination to knowing and understanding, and the necessity of creating the fullest most plural archive of narratives for approaching the truth. Please welcome our authors.
- Thank you, Kirun. Thank you everyone for being here. And thank you to Valeria. She has been traveling for something like 36 hours and just got here 30 seconds ago, so we are very grateful, and just want to give you a really warm welcome and say how happy we are that you made it.
- Thank you so much. I'm also delighted to... Hi everybody, nice to see you. And indeed, I've been traveling for 36 hours from the tip of the Baja California peninsula via Atlanta, lost connection overnight, all with my toddler, which means that I've been talking either to Delta staff or to a toddler for 36 hours, so I'm so happy to be here talking to an adult and with adult faces.
- We'll carve out this adult conversation with you, with yeah, no toddlers to distract for at least an hour and 20 minutes. I wanted to begin with a couple of questions about place. As we heard in Kirun's introduction, it's a part of your biography, it's a very strong part of your work, you grew up in many places, and a lot of your work is really rooted in exploring places both private and public. So I wanted to ask a personal question about how you use the word home, yourself, and how your characters think about that word as well. Like, when you develop characters, is it important to you that they be from a particular place or not?
- It's a very difficult question to start with, but it's a very good question. I'm not exactly sure what I call home, but I think that it has always been through the process of writing a place that I am able to make myself at home in it to some degree. So it's strangely only really the places that I've written about that I feel somewhat deeply rooted in me as not only places, or not only spaces but places, right? And I've always, to a degree, in the homes I lived, in the apartments that I've rented for year or two in the cities that I've lived in for its months or maybe years made an effort to somewhat root in them through writing, right? I think there's something that's like literary memory, right? Like, when we have read about a city a lot, and maybe go there for the first time, there's a process of recognition, right? And it's in a way similar with writing, when you've written about a place you are more deeply rooted in it than when you have it, I think. Yeah, so what do I call home? I'm a combination of beds, bathroom mirrors, hotel rooms, cities, all of which maybe have come together in my imagination and formed some other literary space, right? And I think spaces like the US-Mexico borderlands and particular places in the borderlands are more alive in me than maybe cities where I've lived just because I've spent so much time inside them when I've written about them.
- And when you wrote about places, are there particular aspects of those places that you're trying to capture and are there research components as well as experiential components?
- Yeah, it's hard to answer that in a general way. It really depends on what place I'm thinking about, right? So for example, I recently wrote a long, long piece for this project that I'm working on right now, "Echoes From The Borderlands," and I wrote a piece about a copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. I don't know, some of you have been there, it seems, and that was a town that I had never gone to until maybe five or six years ago. And it was through speaking to people about how they see the town through asking, for example, a minor to describe the open pit copper mine, and kind of understanding how a minor looks at rocks or thinks about color in the concave space, sort of through people's eyes that I think I am able to situate myself in a new space. And I tend to never disconnect myself from the space in which I'm writing. I remember many, many years ago when I was writing what you've just called an experimental book of essays, and I thank you very much for that generous description of a book that I wrote between ages, 21 and 25, so it was indeed experimental 'cause I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was trying to teach myself both how to write and also how to write in Spanish because it is my mother tongue, yet I had never written in it. And it's a book about Mexico City, a city where I was born, but had never really lived until then. So I was trying, I think through that book to root in space very deeply, to go back to kind of your first question to. And I remember, I used to rent an apartment in the now very hip but not then, Colonia Roma, and it was perpetually in construction, everything around it. So there was always noise of machinery, and things being torn down, and a kind of feeling of the house shaking at times, not 'cause of earthquakes, but that too, but mostly sort of the kind of work going around the house. And at the beginning thought, there's just no way I will ever be able to write a book in this complete lack of silence. I didn't even have children yet. And so I thought, "Well, instead of trying to encapsulate myself against the noise of the world, let me just open the window physically and metaphorically and see what happens to my writing then," right? And I think it was a very good choice because what was coming in the next years were children and even noisier places and life just getting sort of fuller and more uncontainable. And it was a good choice from then on to decide to open the window because I would not have written anything, I think, if I had tried to write against the noise of everyday life.
- There's a lot of use of public spaces, I think, in that book of traveling through public spaces. And I think you wrote about public spaces such as streets and subway stations become inhabitable as I assigned to them some value and imprinted experience on them. And it reminded me of the Chinese-American geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, who thought that space becomes a place through the experience accrued in them. And is that how you think about this distinction between space and and place? Or how would you describe difference?
- Right. Definitely through experience lived, inhabited in a place, turns space into place, but I think reading does too, right? And not only, well, I mean, I'm saying this, and I realize, I'm saying it almost as if reading were kind of different from experience. And I would not draw that line so thickly, right? I think the experience that we experiences that we live through reading are often as alive in our memory as experiences lived outside the page, right? It depends, I guess, more than anything on the intensity with which they imprinted it themselves on us, right? And sometimes a reading experience can be so vibrant or so... Or come at the right moment that it imprints itself with equal power than a lived experience. And so what you read is from my novel "Faces In The Crowd" where the narrator comes to a new city and has no experiences in those streets and in those spaces and fields, the ultimate experience of foreignness. And tries to trick her own experience of foreignness by reading or memorizing bits and pieces of literature, poems, fragments in particular places, so that 125th Street stop sounds like or feels like Emily Dickinson or another particular corner reminds her of a poem by Wallace Stevens and so on and so forth, right? So if there is no experience, the question is, can literature come in to fill space and turn it into something of a home through the connection of words or stories or thought?
- So do you tend to remember where you've have read things? Like, do you have that sort of spatial association of meeting?
- Very much so. Very much so. I do, I remember sometimes, yeah, where I read a particular idea or a line more than sometimes other important parts of a novel. Maybe the plot escapes me, but I remember a line that I read in a particular chair, indeed.
- Mm-hmm. I wanna ask you a little bit about the structure of your books. Many of them are written in short sections, like these short trench sections that build on each other and accumulate. And I wonder if that is reflective of how your mind works or only having short bursts of time to work in, Alice Monroe wrote short stories because she was raising kids, small kids, or if there is so of this is a more theoretical approach about how you like to build the work.
- No, it's not theoretical at all. I think it has to do with a combination of the two things you've just said, right? Real life circumstances, like how many hours do I have or how many minutes of concentration might I get? And also how does my attention work? And I think that during the pandemic where we had a completely different experience of time, all of us, because our normal everydayness was so shattered. And I was home for so many hours a day and I thought, "I'm going to pen a novel, it's gonna be like some kind of sexy vampire series and I'm not gonna tell anyone about it. I'm just gonna write under a pseudonym and this is what I'll do in the pandemic." And I tried and I failed absolutely because it turns out it's really hard for someone with my kind of ramifications or I don't know, probably something neurological of a structure, impossible to think of something like chapter one, it just felt monumental, like, what is a chapter? How do you do that? So I've never written a chapter and I've been a professional writer for 15 years or so, and it turns out it's really hard to write a sexy vampire novel and I didn't do it. And I hope one day to maybe achieve a kind of maturity that allows me. So if you see a vampire novel in some years, it's not signed by me, but happens in Mexico City and maybe New York. You'll know. You'll know she did it. But all this to say, I've kind of made peace with the fact that I can concentrate very well on short fragments, and then I just kind of rework them as if they were like a small sculptor of some sort and just kind of take them apart and put them back together and take them apart again. And what's always a challenge for me is because it doesn't matter how many times I've done this, it's as if I haven't learned how to do it. So next time I begin a new book, my question is "How did I do this last time?" And then usually when I finish a book, the question is "How the hell did I do this?" Like, there's always a feeling of walking a little bit in the dark. And sometimes I'm very fine with that, like, I think that it allows me to explore and have fun and always feel very much alive with what I'm doing since there's no blueprint and there's a sense of risk and following something unknown. But more than anything, I think the interesting thing for me every time, is okay, if I can only work with fragments, how do I connect them, right? And that has changed every time with every book. Like how does this tiny piece connect with this tiny piece? And how do I find an architecture inside of, or with all this material, right? So now for example, I've been for four years working on a book, it was called "Maternity Leave" and it was about a mother and a daughter, but I've taken so long to write it that since then I've had another daughter, and so I'm not sure about the "Maternity Leave" conceit anymore. And I still to this day, after four years, have just scattered fragments, and I have not found the internal architecture yet, and that's what I get for not knowing how to write a chapter, you know?
- I mean, how did you do it in previous books? So like, let's take "Lost Children Archive," so composed of short fragments, did you have a number of fragments and then thought, "Oh, well, what's the thread here? How do I put them together? Or do you remember what that... How you found the through line for that?
- So maybe this conversation's gonna help me write the new novel, right?
- [Jennifer] It's therapy right here.
- It's feeling a little like therapy. I think that with "Lost Children Archive", I had like a very clear pulse because I had one or two questions that were guiding me very forcefully. And one of those questions was about how the atmosphere within a family may be taken over by a kind of electricity generated by children's imaginations. And what happens when you've spent enough time enclosed in a space of a car, for example, with children who are kind of reenacting reality and reinterpreting story in a way that the adult world starts to feel a little strange, a little strangified by that electricity. And I wanted to explore how a child's imagination may take over a narrative completely. And at the same time what that meant in more kind of longer generational terms. What happens when you hand down a story to a generation, and that generation reconfigures it in a way? So I had that to guide me, and therefore it wasn't that hard to put things together because whatever there is a plot in that story emerged from that kind of momentum, right? I knew I had to have a child takeover and I had to give that child enough elements in order to take over completely and tell the rest of the story.
- [Jennifer] Mm-hmm.
- And, well, there were other questions, but maybe I won't go into all of them.
- Well, I mean, in the way that you were just describing a building towards something in "Lost Children Archive," there's also a careful attention to absence and ghosts or what used to be somewhere, and that this is in some of your other work. Also, there's a keen observation of, or listening for the absences of past lives, or the remnants of past lives that have made it into the present. And so I wonder where that concern comes from, and is that something that's conscious?
- Yeah, it's conscious to a degree. I think I'm very interested in... Forgive me if this sounds a little French academic, I'm really not, I didn't mean it, but I really like finding in an archive enough cracks to kind of go into those cracks and find in them grains of detail that then allow me to construe more imaginatively. And so in order not to sound just Frenchy abstract, I'll give you a very concrete example with something I've been trying to work on for some time now. So three or four years ago, I was interviewing reenactor cowboys in Arizona and New Mexico. So these are usually middle-aged men who dress as cowboys and then shoot each other. And they reenact scenes from the American sort of western, southwest mythology. So it's just like Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid, and it's always kind of the same story with different little variations. And there's a very successful town called Tombstone where I was interviewing Doc Hollidays and Wyatt Earps, and then I went to a smaller town nearby in New Mexico called Shakespeare, which has always really elicited a lot in my imagination. And Shakespeare is a failed reenactment town, like it used to be a mining town like all of those towns, but then it failed as a mining town. So in order to reconstruct itself, it presented itself as a town for reenactments of the southwest, but it didn't quite make it for some reason. And so it became a rehearsal town where reenactor cowboys from El Paso and another and Arizona go simply to rehearse gun fights and lynchings and hangings. So if you arrived in Shakespeare on a given Tuesday, you might just see someone shooting at another person or hanging another person. And so, I mean, we all know America is scary, but this America, I find particularly so, but also particularly fascinating as it happens to be right at the border with my country, and or my other country, now I'm American. And the fact that it ignores Mexico so consistently is always something that has made me wonder, right? There's no Mexican characters in the reenactments, even as enemies. Sometimes in skit there's like a Mexican outlaw, but there's no character, there's no presence, right? So all this to say, I've been researching a lot on Shakespeare because ultimately my goal is to reconquer Shakespeare as a Mexican and take over the town. In fact, really, like, I'm really, really quite serious about when we give presentations on borderlands project, in case there's funders in the audience, I always talk about this because I'm interested in someone wanting to buy the town back 'cause now it's owned by one guy who runs these reenactment rehearsals. Anyway, so Shakespeare's there, one day, it'll not belong to me, but I will help buy it in order to turn it into a kind of borderlands counter reenactment space. But in the meantime, I've been doing all the archival research, I've been able to do, there's very little on Shakespeare, but there, for example, fascinating census, full of course of Mexican inhabitants that are not present in any of the narratives of the town. And so when I have, I recently, a couple of weeks ago, went to the border to... Well, I went to Phoenix, really to Tampa, to give a kind of workshop on Shakespeare in the borderlands. And since I'd never given a course on Shakespeare, I gave a course on Shakespeare in New Mexico, but this was four people who actually do know about Shakespeare, the guy, and they're like the borderland Shakespeareans. And so I'm trying to amass an army to eventually take over Shakespeare. And these guys were the only people ever, like so far that have been really into this idea and the Shakespeareans of course. And so I showed them the census after having showed them a lot of sort of sound recordings of the interviews I've done with the reenactor cowboys and pictures. And so we looked at the census for a long time and just made an effort to imagine, right? To imagine the lives of the characters or the lives of people who we can think of as characters that have been kind of left off stage. And it is in that process, I think, that I find something enticing for the imagination, right? Like, this is always that the story that has been told, okay, let's look at all the things that have been consistently ignored and let's start from there. Like, how did this person look? What was their job? Why did they end up in Shakespeare in New Mexico? And so on and so forth. And so, my work is very rooted in space, yes, in history as well, but I have the... I guess I'm not a historian, so I can happily just depart from the archive as well and use it for fiction making.
- Well, it sounds like some of the work that you're doing now is... Well, it's sound documentation, right? So how does the sound work connect to the fiction writing? Or do you see them as separate projects? So maybe similar desires of investigating history, but through different mediums. Obviously, there are sound documentators, documentarians in "Lost Children Archive".
- Yeah. No, I don't see them as separate at all. And the more time passes, the more I'm interested in sound, or in listening or simply the aural experience, aural as in au and not o, as the beginning of the imaginative process. I have felt an enormous decline in my own ability to listen with concentration over these past 10 years or so. I think because of the presence of our telephones and the way that we connect to information now. Those of us who are, I don't know, 35 plus, 40 plus, we grew up in a really different world in that sense. And, I very much do have a nostalgia for a quieter, a slower pace. And I have found that only in a kind of retraining of aural literacy, of really making an effort to sit in space and listen because you can't fast forward sound the way you can scroll images, you have to sit in time with sound in a very, very deep way. So it connects you to time in a way that maybe your other senses don't quite right, or the other great sense of ours, our eyesight, doesn't. So I'm interested in sound as such, and I'm interested in sound recording, and I'm interested in sound archives, but I'm more than anything interested in sound as a practice of writing and of just retraining our attention.
- Mm-hmm. That's interesting. You were speaking earlier about beginning your writing career, writing in Spanish, "Lost Children Archive" was written in English. Can you tell us about that journey from writing in Spanish to writing in English, and maybe some of the stops and the key moments along the way?
- Yeah, that's a good question. And I am gonna have to give a talk in Chicago Cat Center next week where that question's gonna be central to the talk, but it's coming from the Mexican side, so I feel like I have to answer different things to be... Like, if it's coming from the Mexican side, I have to say sorry before I become-
- [Jennifer] Because you've become a traitor?
- Because I've become a traitor and I write in the language of the empire, so I'm fully colonized. I mean, I started writing in Spanish because I really wanted to, I had been schooled in English, and maybe because English was the language of my schooling, I had a much more complicated relationship to it, right? It had been always a language in which I was scolded at school, and I was very often scolded at school, it was a language in which I was graded, it was a language that felt much less like a playground and much more like the language of a certain hierarchy. So I started writing in Spanish, but also it was not all playground to be honest. It was also, I think a kind of nostalgia for something not lived, but something that I was born into in some way, so it felt like a recovery and like a coming back home. And so I wrote my first book, which in Spanish is called "False Papers," "Papeles Falsos," and in English is called "Sidewalks," don't ask me. And I then started writing a novel in English that I didn't quite work in English, and I wrote it in Spanish and that was "Los Ingrávidos" in Spanish and "Faces in the Crowd" in English. But that began in English and then switched to Spanish.
- [Jennifer] Why the Switch?
- I think it was something quite trivial and mundane, honestly. I was living in New York when I began writing it, and so I was just functioning in English, and I was mostly reading in English, but then I moved to Mexico in the middle of it and my brain switched to Spanish, so I started writing in Spanish. And, I mean, maybe other psychoanalyzing reasons, I had just had a kid and I guess I was speaking, trying to speak Spanish to my kid, and who knows, maybe that had something to do with it. But in any case, I switched languages in the middle of that. And then there was little doubt in my third book, which was "The Story of My Teeth" because the way I wrote it, I had to write it in Spanish 'cause I decided to write it in installments for workers in a juice factory so I wrote it in Spanish. There was no back and forth for me there. And then began again the process of thinking English or Spanish. And it's a way in which I also procrastinate for sometimes years because I make notes in both, and just know or tell myself that eventually one note is gonna be really the beginning of the novel. And, I mean, sometimes it's really three years or four before I hit that note and start writing, actually writing. And so that happened with "Lost Children Archive". I wrote it in both languages and notebooks until something happened in English. And I said, "This is it. I have to follow this voice, this tone." And then...
- [Jennifer] And what was that voice, in that tone?
- It's just something quite ineffable. I think it's just like some something atmospheric, yeah, it's something that you kind of feeling in the air. There's nothing... I mean, it's composed of course of something rhythmic, so it can all probably be traced back to syntax. But what creates one syntax rather than the other is I think a mystery to be held as such, right? And in the middle of writing "Lost Children Archive," I wrote, "Tell Me How It Ends" in English. It was a commission originally for a magazine for Freeman's. And so I wrote it in English, and then I sent it to my editors in Mexico, asking them to search for a journal in Mexico where I could publish that essay. And they read it and they said, "No, no, no. We would like to publish this as a little book. So when you come to Mexico, let's have a meeting and talk about it." And I thought, that's kind of crazy, that's not a book, that's an essay, an essay for a magazine. It's not quite, doesn't have the gravity or the density that a book should have. And so I did go to Mexico a few months later and we had a meeting, which in the case of my editors means cantina mezcales. And by the third mezcal, they had convinced me that I was a trader to like the Virgen de Guadalupe, and my mother, and everybody else. And so I ended up signing a serviette. Then I learned many years later that Muhammad Ali had signed something in a serviette, so I was like, "Okay, that's kind of catchy." I signed something in a serviette, saying that I would self translate to Spanish, everything that I dare write in the language of the empire. That was the wording. And so I did rewrite "Tell Me How It Ends" in Spanish, and that's called "Los Niños Perdidos," "The Lost Children." And it was a really good exercise in the end because it did become a book in the process of being rewritten into my mother tongue. Like, it really was just an essay, and something happened with it in Spanish that it acquired that gravity that it didn't have. And what you read now in English is the retranslation into English of that Spanish second version. And yeah, now I'm both... The sound project, excuse me, is very easy because it's bilingual or actually multilingual. So if we record someone speaking in Apache, that's the language that we record in. And the parts that I write for the sound piece are both in Spanish and in... We'll just have to sit, I mean, with sound, it's 24 hours sound piece, so no one's gonna listen to it fully. As maybe two crazy people in the world might actually sit and listen to the 24 hours. And there'll be parts that you don't fully understand if you don't understand all the languages. And that's how life is also, and it's okay. I think anyone who knows English is really, really spoiled because no English speakers are accustomed to others catering for them, right? For everything is always available in English. And it's a good experience to have to not understand sometimes, and to know that if you don't walk the mile, you don't get to see everything or understand everything. And then the novel, I'm still procrastinating, so I don't know if it's in Spanish or in English, although the idea is that it's in English, but it's partly translated by my mother into Spanish. And then there's some kind of contention with her translations and my versions.
- Well, you spoke to this a little bit just in your answer, and maybe this isn't a fair question to ask you, but I was wondering if you... What you think sort of the differences between a bilingual or even a trilingual life, and a monolingual life. And you haven't had a monolingual life, so maybe you don't know, but do you have... Yeah, do you have thoughts about what those differences are either for a writer or for a reader?
- Yeah, I mean, I cannot imagine how I would be a writer if I didn't know other languages or at least attempt to read them or learn them. I mean, I learned a couple of languages as an adult, so I speak them really badly. But I think that just the effort, what it does to the brain to attempt to grasp another grammar and another phonetics is immense. And I think that anyone who wants to be a writer really should have that experience of the foreignness, of not penetrating a language. And then maybe slowly being able to touch at least part parts of its surface. I do think it's an important experience for the imagination. That said, there are plenty of amazing monolingual writers. So my theory just broke down, but deep down, I still feel it. I do think it's important indeed. I mean, and I do often wonder, for example, I lived in South Korea for four years, but as a child, and I was placed in an American school where they didn't teach Korean. And I do always sense that my life would be so much more interesting if I knew Korean, which is so much better.
- [Jennifer] Missed opportunity.
- Missed opportunity. My parents' fault.
- That's right. Lots to put on their shoulders. We can begin taking some questions, or if you have written questions or haven't already, we can sort of begin collecting those and get to some audience questions in a moment. We have a question collector somewhere, a basket in the back.
- A question collector is something that I would love to...
- If it's a profession here at Amherst. You have to study many years to become a question collector. So while people are thinking and bringing their thoughts forward, you spoke a little bit about "Tell Me How It Ends" and "Lost Children Archive" are sort of companion books. One is a novel one, one is an essay, both are concerned with undocumented children coming from Mexico or Central America to the US. Can you say a little bit about how that focus of undocumented children came into your life in such a focused way that you wanted it to be the subject of your writing? And then the two forms interest took or interest. Yeah.
- Yeah, I think that I was at a point then when in 2014 where I was trying to write a novel about growing up in post-apartheid South Africa. I grew up in South Africa in the mid '90s with the beginning of a democratic era in South Africa, the fall of the apartheid's regime and the presidency of Mandela. And I wanted to write somewhat biographical piece or novel about those years and what it meant to be a child going through a transition of that kind in a country. And then the so-called immigration crisis, and I say so-called because it was more, more accurately called a refugee crisis started in the summer of 2014. And I was crossing the United States by car with my family, and I could not quite wrap my head around the idea that there were tens of thousands and later hundreds of thousands of kids stranded alone and undocumented. And that the problem was being thought of as an institutional one. How do we process these kids rather than how do we really create a mechanism that protects these children that are arriving? And I couldn't wrap my head around the numbers, the reasons, the situation, and so that happens to us sometimes, right? There are particular political crises that hit us more than others. And this one was one that overtook and haunted my imagination to a degree that it didn't seem that I could really write about anything else because I couldn't really think about anything else. Everything felt kind of dimmer compared to that. And so I started really just documenting what I heard on the radio or read on the newspaper or thought or saw along that journey in that summer of 2014. And then when I returned to New York after that summer, I decided to more actively engage by becoming a translator in court, not a court translator, but a translator for testimonies that then would be either represented by a lawyer or not, depending on if a lawyer saw that they were, I guess worth taking. And my brother was simply to interview and to write a testimony in English that then would be handed to a lawyer. And it was somewhere in that process that I without first knowing and then more consciously started working on "Lost Children Archive." But then I stopped altogether because I realized that I was turning "Lost Children Archive" into a kind of receptacle for the work that I was doing in court or the stories that I was hearing. And I was doing no justice to either reality by fictionalizing it as it happened or to the novel itself, which then had to become this kind of political instrument that it really could not be, right? I don't know how to instrumentalize a novel in that way. So I stopped writing the novel. I thought I need to take a break, and understand what I'm doing, and what I can do and what I can't. And that's when I wrote Tell Me How It Ends" that is a much more straightforward, I guess, testimony of what I was seeing in court as a close observer of a situation. And once I wrote, "Tell Me How It Ends," I was able to return to "Lost Children Archive" with much more freedom, and with less of a feeling that the novel had to be a hammer with which to hit people on the head with because that's not really a readable novel, right? A novel has to be something much more complex, alive, ambiguous, and not really a standpoint, really just much more of a slice of life where there's people that talk, and there's children that sleep, and saliva, and divorces, and people that suck their thumb, not in that order, but in somewhat of a messy order the way life is messy, right? So then I was able to go back to it and just understand it in that way. And I'm glad that I was able to separate the two things at some point, even though they're both in very deeply connected. They do two very different things.
- Right. And you have also said about "Lost Children Archive," that it is novel about documentary form. I mean, it's called "Lost Children Archive," and it is an archive, the book is sort of structured in that way. And so can you say more about the documentary form that you were interested in and what you wanted to show about how we go about documenting things?
- Well, yeah, I guess to answer that question, I have to go back to the very idea of archive, right? And what this novel, I think, tries to do with that idea, which is to really strip it off its officialness, right? Like, archives are usually something that we consult as a kind of final receptacle, material receptacle of a connection to a certain past, and it has a kind of authority. And what gets archived is somewhat a final version or a final evidence of history. And so I was interested in rethinking archive in a way that what is amassed as an archive in the novel is quite heterogeneous. And in a single box for example, there is a series of maps documenting crossings, border crossings, but also in that same box, there is a volume of "Pedro Páramo" a very brilliant modernist novel written in Mexico by Juan Rulfo. And in that same box is maybe Ezra Pound's "Cantos." So the question there, and this idea of how this novel archives is what happens when you constellate objects that are usually not placed together, and how do they get resignified by being in a kind of in a similar place, right? In the same box, so to speak. So the novel documents through those, or through that very, I guess, heterogeneous notion of what is an archive.
- Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we have some audience questions. One of the first ones is about the imagination of a child. "So how did you connect with the imagination of a child so as to let it take over the narrative of 'Lost Children Archive?'"
- Well, in that period, I remember my daughter who's now a teenager, but she was little then, and every night... I was still young enough that I could write at night until really late, and still wake up the next morning and function. And so I would put her to bed and then I'd go up to write in a studio. And she would always say to me, "Oh, you're going with your little friends now, mama, right?" With a kind of irony that she still had then. And I mean, she had then already and she still has now. So yeah, it was my little friends indeed who were completely kind of taking over. There's no generic imagination of a child, I think, that can really work as a vehicle for a novel. I think that we see a lot of it in bad television or maybe in bad novels too, like a generic 10 year old that speaks like a generic cute something. But I don't think that works. No. I think we all, as spectators or readers, I immediately kind of sense the flatness of a generic 10 year old or a generic child, right? So I think the process for me in writing this particular boy that takes over the second half of the novel was, I don't know, but might be similar to how an actor trains for a role in the sense that I really think that I came to know, something grew inside me. Like, I really thought a lot about who this kid was, and imagine him and his voice, and the things he would say, the things you would read. And there was a lot of that person somehow either growing inside me or me inside them, who knows, that's where it gets really murky, and one goes to play with one's little friends in the attic. And it was only once, I think, that process had really reached a deeper level that I was able to sit with the novel and then kind of go with his voice. And strangely, all the slowness I had in writing, the female narrator became a kind of torrential thing with the boy. There was something a lot more fluid somehow in that. And I think it's because of the work that had happened without my totally knowing that it was happening.
- There's another question about "Lost Children Archive." "What was your thought process behind layering the 'Lost Children Archive' with multiple narratives of migration with the lost children of the border and familial migration?" I think this question is referring to the book within a book?
- Mm-hmm, yeah, probably the book within a book, but then also maybe some other bits and pieces of archive of other great journeys of a children along history. The 13th century peregrinations that's mentioned, the Children's Crusade and the "Orphan Train Riders." And I think, I was very interested in not circumscribing this story to the political moment that we were traversing then and are still traversing now because I didn't feel that it was, first of all responsible of me to try to capture it as such, but also that it was possible to really capture it. So I think what a novel can do at best is to try to understand the present in juxtaposing it with the many iteration of similar things in history. In this case, I was looking at forms of state violence against peoples, and in particular the United States, and its government against people whom the government has either deported, or internally deported into reservations, or internally deported into prisons, so all these forms of disappearing people or excluding them from the social fabric. And in juxtaposing, for example, the deportations of Central American children, most of them indigenous, some of them also mestiza, but most of them indigenous, and the deportations of Native Americans into reservations in the 19th century. I think that the novel at least tries to see how this kind of violence is structural, and not just something that is a new circumstance that we should understand as isolated but rather quite the opposite, that it's structural and that it happens over and over again with different names and different forms and with different details as well. But how do we address it if we understand that it's a much deeper structural violence, right?
- Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, maybe just one or two more questions here. One of them is, so "I know that besides being a writer, you are also a scholar and a professor. What do you think about the relationship between critical and creative modes of literary thinking?"
- And I think they're all creative. The idea that we have a creative writing versus the other whatever is I think quite ridiculous because no form of writing is critical or none is less creative. That said, I don't think I can really call myself a scholar, so thank you, whoever said that, very generous of you, but I have not published a single paper in my life, just a PhD thesis and it's pretty literary in its wording and maybe not too serious. So, I wouldn't call myself a scholar. I rely a lot on research, but I think that my passage through research is very much that of a fiction writer. Was that the question? Did I answer?
- Sounds good. Was there anyone who asked it who wanted to follow up? Argue with the answer? So maybe the last question circles back a little bit to this idea of absence, because it's about what you leave out. So "When writing non-fiction or creative non-fiction, you encounter the question of what you write and don't write for the purpose of the narrative. But in fiction, in your stories, how do you choose what to keep and what to leave out?"
- Oh, that's a great question. I have to ask myself that every day, but I forget, so thank you for reminding me. I mean, I think that... Yeah, I think my answer's gonna be a little mundane, so, excuse me, but it's, I think that's really how it kind of works. We have good days and bad days, right? And mostly we have bad days. And so mostly we write bullshit, and there's some days that are really good. And the only thing that you can do is sit every day just to see if it was a good day or a bad day 'cause if you skip a day, it might have been the good day, right? I finally understood this during the pandemic, one understood many things during the pandemic, right? 'Cause there was an ice cream vendor who in the middle of the pandemic would come with his ice cream truck, the music. And of course no one would buy him an ice cream because it was the middle of the... It was the beginning of the pandemic, so no one would go out and buy an ice cream in March. And the fear, I mean, how do you wash an ice cream, right? But the guy would come every day, and he came in March, in April, and May. And eventually, the neighbors would start going out for ice cream. It was like the clap at the 6:00 PM, I don't know where if you guys, wherever you were, there was a clap at 6:00 PM, there was the clap at 6:00 PM and the ice cream guy at 5:00. And it was part of the day, and eventually we all started going and getting ice cream for him. And I thought, it's exactly what a writer has to do. You just do it every day, and one day someone comes and buys an ice cream. It's one day, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm really extending them analogy and it's getting sticky, but one day you write a paragraph that's a little worth it. And so then that one sticks, that one stays. And you realize just upon rereading and rereading, and if you have someone as patient as... I don't know in your life who might be patient enough to listen to you read out loud, you notice when you read out loud how the energy deflates when you reach a really boring part, that one's out, and so on and so forth. I think it's more a process of erasing than anything, right? I think writing is more a process of erasing. And yeah, you have to trust... Maybe not erase the first time, but the second, if it's still not ringing, you erase it, you'd take it out.
- [Jennifer] And just keep going and doing it over and over.
- Like the ice cream guy, yeah.
- Thank you very much for this.
- Thank you very much.
- I want to remind the audience that there is opportunity and time for book signing, so books are for sale back there. We'll bring a table up front for Valeria to sign books. And thank you so much for being here.
- Thank you very much to all of you.
