This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: A Venezuelan writer, Raquel Abend van Dalen now lives in Houston, where she holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Thank you for accepting this invitation, Raquel.

Raquel Abend van Dalen: Thank you very much for the invitation. 

A.P.: So, you have a PhD degree in creative writing. Tell us about this step in your life.

R.A.V.D.: When I finished my master’s degree in creative writing in 2014, most of my classmates went straight into PhDs in Hispanic studies or Caribbean studies, literary studies. I didn’t do that, because most people told me, “When you apply, don’t say you’re a writer, let alone a journalist, they don’t like that.” It was like I had to censor myself all the time. I wouldn’t have been able to censor myself in that way, I thought it would have been appalling. So, when I discovered that there was a doctorate in Creative Writing, where the same priority is given to the creative as to the academic, I said, “This is perfect, this is the solution,” and it definitely has been. It’s been incredible, it’s been wonderful.

A.P.: How did you get into literature, Raquel?

R.A.V.D.: I confess that every time I’m asked that question, I answer something different. I already have many versions of how I came to literature. Many things have happened, but one of the essential parts of my life is that my maternal grandfather was a Dutch bookseller; he arrived in Venezuela in the fifties and set up a bookstore in Caracas called Las Mercedes. So, from a very young age, I was always surrounded by stories, books, even stationery. There was a section of pens, papers, notebooks, which also in some way gives materiality to writing. There was a lot, a lot, of magic in my house, a lot of fantasy. For me, being in an environment like this was essential. On the other hand, it’s true that from a very young age I took literature as a very serious job, a very concrete job, because my parents are both artists by profession. They have always considered art in a very rigorous, very disciplined way. Not a day goes by that they are not working, and I think I see literature the same way.  

When I say the art in my house was very concrete and material, I mean their art paid for my braces, my school, the electricity. It wasn’t an abstract or idealized thing, it was beyond the art you find in museums. It was almost like the coins we lived on. So that gave me a perspective of literature as very work-related.

A.P.: How good, how wonderful to have that nourishment and rigor from your parents. Thinking about the doctorate, how do you believe the study of literary criticism contributes or not to the work of a writer?

R.A.V.D.: Before starting my doctorate, I would have told you it didn’t contribute anything because I had no idea. But now I realize that, for me, it has been fundamental to be able to read critically, to establish and think about links between literary and theoretical texts. The truth is that it has made my own writing work much more interesting, even for myself. 

I feel that the work of writing has to be regenerated all the time, and the critical, theoretical perspective opened up a whole new world for me, which made me no longer able to see literature in the same way. I think that’s essential, and being surprised is essential, discovering is essential. So, in that sense, it has been very positive, and that is very necessary.

A.P.: Of course, and of course you have Cristina Rivera Garza at the helm of the program, along with all the material and the guest writers she curates. It’s a magnificent program.

R.A.V.D.: Yes, the program is magnificent, not only because of Cristina—who is obviously a wonderful writer and academic—but she has also been in charge of curating a very special program, bringing writers from different parts of Latin America, even the United States.

A.P.: Raquel, you live in the United States. How do you see the challenges faced by a Venezuelan writer living in the diaspora in this country? 

R.A.V.D.: In my case, I had to come to the United States at the age of 22. The following year, my first collection of poems came out in Bogotá, and then I continued publishing with presses that publish books in Spanish in the United States, such as Sudaquia and Suburbano. In general, my books have come out outside of Venezuela, including Cuarto azul, which, although it came out with a Venezuelan publisher, Kalathos, was published in Madrid. This has meant that, in some way, I remain very little read in my own country, which in a way is a little painful for me because one obviously wants to be read in one’s own land. Another issue is that the economic situation in Venezuela means very few people can really buy books. For that same reason, I decided to publish my book of short stories, La señora Varsovia, for free for a month, and now it can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or Kindle, but it made me feel terribly ashamed to realize that, in general, Venezuelan readers who consume books, who like to read, cannot buy them.

A.P.: What you just said is so interesting. On the one hand, it is sad, and on the other hand, it is inspiring to hear of the ways people are looking to support readers and the work of writers. Raquel, throughout your work you shift between poetry and narrative. How is this happening?

R.A.V.D.: From the beginning, I think I was handling both genres because they were very different things. For me, narrative gives me a space for fiction and poetry gives me a space for reality. For example, many writers have diaries where they write their daily lives and record what they think. I would say that, for me, poetry is a space to think, to understand, to record, even to look at everything that happens to me with humor and irony. Sometimes I have even really digested the poems that may sound more dramatic before making them public. So it’s a very different relationship, and in poetry in general, mine is quite autobiographical, even though I’m not the character, it’s not a poetry of the self, but I do use my own life a lot. On the other hand, in the fiction I write, as you read in La señora Varsovia or Cuarto azul, I use the stories of others.

A.P.: I like that difference you make and how you are relating narrative to a space for fiction, and poetry to a space for reality. In Cuarto azul, for example, the premise is very interesting. But now let’s talk about the re-edition of another magnificent book, Andor. 

R.A.V.D.: I started writing Andor at the age of nineteen. I was very young and had a very different idea of life than when I was able to republish the book. Let’s say that I was able to polish, not so much the prose, because I practically didn’t touch the prose, but certain concepts, certain ideologies. For example, in the first edition I remember there is a moment when the protagonist, Edgar, describes the women arriving at the party in their dresses and the men arriving in their suits. This distinction of genders and clothing didn’t sit well with me when I was able to republish the book. For me they were people, regardless of gender, and for me they were dressed as they wanted. So, in that sense, I changed things that clashed ideologically with the “I” of the reissue. The reedition also made the book visible again because it came out in Caracas in 2013. 

A.P.: The beginning of the book has that very strong image of the oven, along with that image of going back to childhood at the moment of dying, going back to that womb. You can really grasp the symbolism and parallelism you use between a dark oven and the mother’s womb. Tell us more about this book.

R.A.V.D.: What you’re pointing out is interesting, because precisely at the end the mother is like a kind of ghost that is haunting the protagonist throughout the book, it’s what connects everything. This is a book that deals with life and death and the idealization of these concepts, and other concepts.

A.P.: Is Andor a purgatory? 

R.A.V.D.: If you point to the Christian tradition of hell, yes. But, at the time of writing, I was thinking, “What could be worse than hell?” And, in my head, what was worse than hell, which we already see so much in religious and literary iconography, is to be trapped in a place that is nothing, where you don’t finish either dying or living. For me, that confinement was much more disturbing than that of hell itself. So I think that was my intention in writing about that hotel.

A.P.: Now let’s move on to your book of short stories, La señora Varsovia. At the beginning of the book you say, “This book is for those who don’t have a home because they are always in another house.” Tell us about this book. 

R.A.V.D.: Well, this book came about because Gladys Mendís, from Los Poetas del 5, contacted me saying that she wanted to publish something of mine, but she asked me for poetry and at that time I didn’t have any manuscripts ready to publish. But I told her, “I have many stories on my computer that have been accumulating for years, and I’ve never published them.” I asked her if she would be interested in them and she said yes, I should start sending her material and we could compile the book together. It was a nice project that we completed during quarantine. So the dedication in this book is for the “unhoused” like me, which has to do with the fact that right now I am “unhoused,” I have no home and I have also moved at least eight times in the past nine years. That is to say that the home is carried within.

A.P.: You see this a lot in your work, but you also see the relationship and the figure of the mother. What do you think are your thematic lines?

R.A.V.D.: I think perhaps at certain times, in certain periods I have written consciously thinking about gender issues. It’s not something I’ve done all the time, but I have liked to think about the idea of the mother and what corresponds, according to a heteronormative society, to what a man or woman supposedly is. In my case, I have also associated it with sexuality because, in some way, I like to use literature to subvert certain roles. In La señora Varsovia you can see very well how there are these crossings all the time. I like to set certain traps so that if the reader has something in their head, already very settled, and begins to read a story and believes the narrator is a man, suddenly in the third paragraph they realize it is actually a woman who is narrating. Or, for example, one thinks the lovers who are narrating a story are a man and a woman only to suddenly realize they are actually two men. Or, for example, the relationship between a mature woman and a teenager is not that of mother and daughter, but there is an erotic bond there. I mean, I like to try all the time to bring about these types of situations that, as you say, are related to gender, especially now. 

A.P.: Well, Raquel, many congratulations on your work. Thank you very much for this interview and we will look forward to what comes next from your pen.

R.A.V.D.: Adriana, thank you very much. It has been a great pleasure to talk with you.

Translated by Alice Banks

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Venezuelan writer Raquel Abend van Dalen.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Katya, thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Welcome to Hablemos, escritoras.

Katya Adaui: Thank you, Adriana. I’m so happy to be talking with you today.

A.P.: Tell us, Katya, you were born in Peru, but you live in Argentina. Why do you live there now? What do you do in Buenos Aires?

K.A.: Yes, I’ve lived in Buenos Aires for five years. I am a teacher for a really lovely degree program called The Art of Writing at the National University of the Arts. I teach a Narrative Workshop, a sort of generalized study of literature, to students who have just graduated with a film degree, and to students who are taking their very first writing workshop and need plenty of rigor, companionship, love, and compassion. 

A.P.: What do you tell them when, for example, they have to start working past the fear of sharing their writing, or when they come to you with this idea that they can already write, but are in need of more guidance? 

K.A.: I try to quell that anxiety around sharing their work, which everyone has when they arrive at the workshops. I tell them, “The writing comes first, that sense of peace comes first, that feeling of being proud of the material, of creating and weaving something.”

A.P.: How did you get started in literature, what were your surroundings like? What were your first experiences with reading and writing growing up in Lima?

K.A.: It all has to do with my parents’ jobs: my mother was a secretary and my father was an English teacher. So I grew up seeing my father grading tests in another language and my mother writing in shorthand all day. Back then, it was the era of the telephone, and my mom was always chatting with her secretary friends. She was the vice president of the Association of Secretaries of Peru, so she would spend her days taking down little notes that I couldn’t understand. My parents’ languages were cryptic to me and I wanted to understand them, but there were very few books at home—fortunately, my mom was a bit of a hoarder. She would buy the encyclopedias that they offered at the bank, which she would store downstairs, on a shelf. So, even from a very young age, I would crack those tomes open, wanting to know what they said, why there were drawings in them, why I didn’t understand what my dad wrote, and why I didn’t understand those signs my mom wrote down that didn’t look anything like the language she actually spoke. So there was always this temptation to read, to understand, and to pretend that I could read when I actually couldn’t.

A.P.: Katya, you have the best of two countries, Peru and Argentina. How do you view the literary scene in these two communities? Is there any kind of dialogue happening between them? What do you think is happening, what is brewing in this wonderful part of the world? 

K.A.: I feel it is a privilege to exist, to live as part of two such narratively rich places, countries of storytellers and poets. But it must be said that in the Argentine publishing industry—which is quite maimed as a result of the current political landscape, due to its being quite anti-culture—there is a sense of resistance coming from independent publishers. There are municipal awards for creative writing, there are national awards, there is a National Fund for the Arts and sponsorships for literary residencies in the MALBA. In Peru, there is this feeling that everything is very nascent. We have very good independent publishers—as well as larger, more established ones—but still, Lima is so centrist that we won’t read a writer from the outskirts, unless they win a renowned prize. So it is quite an interesting situation. There is a program on the national radio called Entre libros which I hosted a few years ago in order to be able to speak about regional literature. In contrast, Argentina has very strong regional publishers with a noted presence in the capital. Selva Almada has her own regional distributor called Salvaje Federal through which she brings books from small provinces to big cities. Those dialogues are lacking in Peru, and sometimes it’s the editors who get burnt out. Their work is so laborious that they get tired and give up while, elsewhere, others persevere. There is some momentum, but also a need for more support, more dialogue. 

A.P.: Katya, your work spans different genres—you mainly move between novels and short stories. I would like to know: What calls you to write in one genre or another, how do you know whether a given genre will best express your idea? 

K.A.: Well, I begin to feel a bit like I’m being stalked by an idea, that is, I begin to ruminate on it when I go to sleep, when I’m in the shower or in bed. As soon as an idea comes to me, I take out my notebook, write it down, and say to myself, “I have to write about this.” It could be something I saw on the street, a piece of fruit… sometimes it’s something really silly, like a photo I found lying on the ground in Buenos Aires that says “2001” on the back. So I collect things that I find on the street, little pieces of rubbish, CDs, Polaroids, even forgotten pencil cases. I start to piece something together in my head and, when I don’t know what to write, I go back to that material and say, “This has the feel of a short story or this is for a novel.” So, therefore, it’s not that I like one genre more than the other, because they all vex me in their own way, but I love the challenge of trying new things. Even essays and newspaper articles. So I’m always trying to write something, and I do a lot of editing behind the scenes. For me, real training comes from the act of writing, no matter what it is about.

A.P.: And what do you read? 

K.A.: I read children’s books, I read novels, I read short stories, I read essays, I read the newspaper a lot. My greatest sources of inspiration are actually headlines. I mostly just read the headlines, because there are some that are just so great. For example, this one is awful, but it’s very good: “Santa Claus had his own children buried in the backyard.” That was one of my inspirations for Geografía de la oscuridad. How can this person we know as Santa Claus, someone who brings gifts and the magic of Christmas, come out in disguise and kill his own children?

A.P.: One of the characteristics of your writing are these very succinct sentences. Tell us a bit more about your approach to writing.

K.A.:  I really avoid condescension and prejudice in my writing; I’m more interested in work that has to do with dignity and compassion. Over the years, my writing has become less opaque and has instead gained a sense of luminosity. It’s almost as if, through my own grieving processes, of my parents, through the loss of some important relationships, my writing became a kind of celebration of life. Right now I think there’s this sense of hopelessness in both Peru and Argentina in terms of their awful governments. I truly feel like I don’t have much scope to be able to change anything. What I can contribute to the world is what I can do for my neighbor, for my partner, for my dog, the people who are close by. These acts of love, these acts that come from the heart are just small. But I feel that what I can offer, what I can do to do good, is take advantage of the fact that I adore writing and that I can turn that into an offering of love to a world that feels closed off. This is what I can do. And so, I write all over the place. I write in cafés, on the train, on the bus, on planes, even sitting on the floor of the market. Since my background is in journalism, I have a lot of experience writing with lots of noise around me and being able to detach myself from my surroundings (laughs).

A.P.: Let’s move on to your books. And, I should say, congratulations on being a finalist for the 2024 Ribera del Duero Prize. Tell us about your book Aquí hay icebergs (translated as Here Be Icebergs by Rosalind Harvey).

 K.A.: I was going through a process of grieving, My father had died three years prior and my mother had just passed away. So, I left for Buenos Aires to work on my Creative Writing Master’s at UNTREF, the National University of February Third, which is directed by a poet, now a good friend, María Negroni. I told myself, “What I have to do right now is write.” So I put myself on a diet of writing. I also went on walks, went to therapy, and visited friends, but I spent a lot of time on my writing. When I finished the book, I presented it as my thesis and I expanded it and edited it a lot so that I could then submit it to Penguin Random House in Peru. And they published it about six months after I returned to Peru.

A.P.: Congratulations to you. Many of the stories in the book really focus on the relationship between what we are inwardly and what is outside of us. Tell us a bit more about these stories and what inspired them during that important moment in your life.

K.A.: For me, it doesn’t have as much to do with the Iceberg Theory of writing; for me, it has to do with the problem of water. Peru is one of the countries with the most water resources in the world, and yet more than eight million Peruvians still don’t have running water. How is that possible? In my own home, I remember there was running water on the first floor, but not the second. And, what’s more, we also have the floods that come with El Niño in the north of Peru. We go from drought to fires and then to floods. So that made me think, “What is going on with water?” Water has this strange thing about it, with how it adapts to the shape and space of whatever is containing it. So what is going on with water in all its different forms? Upon thinking about the different states of water, I came up with this concept for the book, because short story collections are always a concept, a world, they aren’t isolated facts, right? So I wanted the book to always be ruminating on this idea of water, for it to be the element that is always running through these stories.

A.P.: Wow, what you’ve said about Peru not having water is really shocking. Another of your books is Geografía de la oscuridad, which won the National Literature Prize in Peru. Many congratulations! In this book, you delve into the topic of fatherhood with an acutely intimate lens. Tell us about Geografía de la oscuridad.

K.A.: Well, in my opinion, if there’s something that language can do, it’s make you shut up (laughs). I’m very talkative… I’m gossipy, conversational, inquisitive; what I love more than anything is to converse, to listen, to talk. But when I write it’s as if there were another “me” who is more measured, which doesn’t exist in any other part of my life. I have this judiciousness that makes me say, “Who is this wise old lady who knows when to stop talking?” So, my writing is very elliptical because I need the reader to think and complete the thought with me, not for me but with me. Just like how not everyone could comprehend my father’s English or my mother’s shorthand, not everyone can engage with every piece of writing. Wanting everyone to love your writing is unrealistic. So, I took this style of writing to heart, from beginning to end in that book. Once I finished it, I said, “Well, that was fun, you tried something just for you, a certain style, now let it go.” So all of my writing after that is much less elliptical, but in Geografía de la oscuridad the techniques I used are ellipses, lists, fragments, and lots of heart.

A.P.: Of course, ellipses really strengthen your writing and, just as you were saying, allow the reader to complete an idea with you. Tell us about how you communicate your ideas in such a compact form using only nouns and verbs, but mostly through nouns and the descriptions of what is happening. 

K.A.: I mean, you can’t separate the form from the content, in the sense that horror is a vortex—it sucks you down and leaves you in the deep, underground, or trapped below something. Sometimes we get lucky and the vortex itself spits us back out, but that doesn’t always happen. When I use enumeration, each word, each sentence, is colliding with the next, which creates the effect of blows to the body. So, in order to achieve this, it had to be comma after comma after comma, and testing the rhythm over and over.

A.P.: So Katya, you have a new book, Quiénes somos ahora. It’s a book that addresses fatherhood again, as well as death and motherhood, but it’s a bit different from your previous books. What was it like for you to write Quiénes somos ahora?

K.A.: For me, in terms of writing it, it was a celebration of the life I’ve been given, the only life I’ve been given. There are many moments of giving thanks to writing in this book. It was a change in how I write as well, because I moved away from the darkness, it’s much lighter. It’s still fragmentary, but much less elliptical. But something that happens, for example in Peru, is that some people say, “Where are the chapters?” because they are used to chapters. But it’s important, then, to remember we had La casa de cartón by Martín Adán, which is composed of many vignettes—it’s one of my favorite books. So, this book is a very explicit homage to Martín Adán in terms of its style.

A.P.: Katya, I have to ask, what makes a writer confess their love to their dog in a book? Dogs are a way to talk about these big topics like loss, joy, and pain, but in a way with dogs there are only happy memories, right?

K.A.: Yes, at the time I was writing this book I was reading My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley, which is a really affectionate book. And it actually was my little dog who confessed their love to me, this unconditional love that dogs give. We would always sleep curled up next to each other. After the book came out, I read that single women sleep better when they sleep with their dogs in bed with them (laughs). The link between us and animals is really important to me. I work with this concept a lot in my workshops, but I make them remember that it’s not just vertebrates. In my own writing I always try to remember the other lives that live alongside us, no matter how diminuitive or small.

A.P.: Well, Katya, thank you for this beautiful conversation and congratulations on all of your work.

K.A.: Thank you, Adriana. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. Long live Hablemos, escritoras and thank you for supporting us every day through your work.

Translated by Kathleen Meredith

You can hear and read the full interview at Hablemos, escritoras.

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Peruvian writer Katya Adaui, by Richard Hirano.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Thank you very much, Mónica, for coming on Hablemos, escritoras.

Mónica Szurmuk: Thank you very much for the invitation. 

A.P.: Tell us: How did you get your start in literature, what were your beginnings?

M.S.: If you’re asking about the origin of it all, I would probably say it was at school. I had the measles when I was seven or eight years old, and it was then that I felt like a reader for the first time. I dedicated that week of being bedridden to reading. My mom, dad, and grandparents brought me books, and that was the first time I read an entire book. I was always a reader. Literature, the subject known as “Castellano” here, was always one of my favorite subjects. When I finished high school, which was during the dictatorship, it was very difficult to pursue studying literature at university. And so, instead of getting a degree in literature, I joined a teachers’ institute, which is a teacher training institute, and studied literature there. And thus, I started training as a literature educator.

A.P.: Then you studied in California, so you also come with this influence from American academia.

M.S.: Exactly, I studied at the University of California in San Diego, which at that time had—well, it still does—a program for literature. Not literature by country, but literature at large, which was what attracted me to that program a lot. The program didn’t focus on any specific country’s body of work, which allowed for a more widely comparative exploration of the craft based on theoretical questions. So, I got my master’s degrees there, first in Comparative Literature, then in Latin American Literature. I got my doctorate in what was then called “Spanish,” but which was really Latin American literature. And I always existed at the intersection of different languages, and that’s why being part of that department was so pivotal for me. Many of the professors I studied with came over from other areas, and I maybe wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with people like that if I had pursued a doctorate that focused strictly on Spanish. My doctoral advisor was Susan Kirkpatrick, who was fundamental in my understanding of the intersection of gender, class, and race; I also knew Jaime Concha and Carlos Blanco, and I met Ileana Rodríguez. During those years, a group of female professors from the different campuses of the University of California—who were already working as a collective, and had begun to meet and work together to analyze women’s literature and gender—created a way for graduate students to have a similar collective experience. These teachers were Francine Masiello, Mary Louise Pratt, Martha Morello Frosch, and several others. They had started meeting after a LASA conference, when they noticed that women had no significant presence there, that all the important panels were organized around male-centric issues, that women had little voice. And so, they were the ones who led the way and started holding a series of conferences across the different campuses of the University of California, where graduate students had the opportunity to present papers, to get to know each other, to start collaborating with each other and also to collaborate with them, an extraordinary group of feminist critics. In that sense, I was very lucky to have that experience at that time and also to be in San Diego, very close to the border, where we had the influence of Mexican teachers. 

A.P.: With Ileana Rodríguez, a professor who is as exquisite, exact, and profound as you, you edited the volume Latin American Women’s Leadership with Cambridge University Press, where you feature Francine Masiello, Debra Castillo, Ana Peluffo, Maricruz Castro Ricalde. Tell us a little about this book. How did it come about? What line of research did you and Ileana pursue? It’s tricky to put together a volume like that, isn’t it? Also, whom do you invite and whom do you have to leave out? Because if you didn’t leave some people out, it would be an endless volume. 

M.S.: It was one of those wonderful things that just happened. I was leaving a LASA panel that I had organized with a series of critics in the field of Latin American studies. Among them were Jean Franco, Mary Pratt, and Marisol Vera, director of the publishing house Cuarto Propio. Ileana invited me to work with her on this history of women’s literature in Latin America. The book bears a historical imprint. We wanted to organize it chronologically, and it was very clear that the field of the nineteenth century was a little abandoned at one point, and that changed thanks to the enormous boom around the production of women in the Latin American nineteenth century, that is, both the literary production and the production of the female critics who began to read this literary production in the North American academy. Well, I think in the national academies they read the nineteenth century, but not a lot of women writers from that time were being read. It took these women critics in Latin America, in different countries, in the United States, for these women to be read. And when we arrived, there was already an important nineteenth-century corpus, there was already a very important decolonial corpus and accounts of what had happened before colonial times. We said, “We can’t start in 1492, we have to start earlier.” Then the book was transformed into an extraordinary space. What happened to us is that we thought, when we started preparing the book, that there was much more than we thought, but even so we were very surprised by everything we found. 

A.P.: Great, well, what an adventure, and I imagine Cambridge University Press must have been happy with that volume, and now we can enjoy it. Let’s discuss your first book, entitled Mujeres en viaje. Here, you focus more on the local, on those women who in some way are making history through travel. And, obviously, the Southern Cone has wonderful women authors who were travelers. Mexico has some too. Tell us about that book.

M.S.: I wrote my thesis on women travelers, and what interested me was to think about how Argentina, the Argentine landscape between 1850 and 1930, had been written from the perspective of women, Argentine women who had traveled and had written about other geographical places. But of course, like any woman traveler, the Argentine woman traveler draws comparisons with her place of origin, like the European and North American women who had written about Argentina. In other words, ultimately, my thesis, which later became the book that was published as Women and Argentina: Early Travel Narratives, was a book about how women can build an authorial place from which to write. And, at the same time, it’s about how the gazes of these women see things that men don’t. But, in some cases, they’re very trapped by racial or class determinants of their time. So, what interested me in that book was to be able to think about the landscape, place and the place of enunciation, the place of writing and what we were talking about when we talked about women travelers. What intrigues me is how these women had these writerly experiences when they had no political rights, because at the heart of it all is the fact that these women did not vote, they did not have power over their own children. In many cases, they could already be owners, own property, but in many cases, depending on their national origin, they couldn’t. That’s to say, what are the interstices, what are the places from which alternative identities can be constructed? So, think about these readings. I really like, for example, the readings that Sylvia Molloy did, which try to make their way into the texts and do a very close reading that allows you to see where there’s a small break that reveals the potentiality of the text, reveals the difference, and reveals how we can intervene as critics. There is something that I call “the hospitable archive.” I believe that literature allows us to reconstruct moments of the past, but also, it’s as if it were taking the temperature of a particular moment, where women could say certain things and not others, but this is archived and literature works in a hospitable way, as an archive of that which could not be said, that which could not be articulated but was already there.

A.P.: I find it fascinating, and those are precisely the conversations you can have when you’re joining forces and making comparative analyses. Mónica, you have another book on which you collaborated, Latin American Literature in Transition.

M.S.: Well, I had the opportunity to create a series for Cambridge University Press, which is a series called Latin American Literature in Transition. What it proposes is a global rereading of Latin American literatures, thinking about the category of transition. In other words, how can we think? How can we look again at the ways in which all Latin American literature was written using this category? I liked the challenge of designing a series of five volumes where, from the present, we look back at what happened in Latin American literature. I believe that, due to the characteristics of Latin America, the construction of what we could call literary texts and critical texts has always been parallel. So, what if we review it? It’s like looking at everything with new eyes. The first thing I thought about was how to organize it, and I did so chronologically. There are five volumes organized chronologically. The first begins before 1492 and ends at the time of the revolutions, around 1810; that one was edited by Rocío Quispe Agnoli and Amber Brian. The second was edited by Ana Peluffo together with Ronald Briggs, and deals a lot with the moment of the construction of national states, but also with the construction of all the institutions of national states, from linguistic institutions to institutions such as slavery. That one goes up to 1860. The third volume goes up to 1930 and was edited by Fernando Giovanni and Javier Uriarte. The fourth volume runs from 1930 to 1980, edited by Amanda Holmes and Par Kumaraswami. And the last volume was edited by Debra Castillo and I—it begins in 1980 and goes until 2018, and is like the decantation of everything that happened in the other volumes. And in that volume, we were interested in thinking about what is happening in current literary criticism. So, we have a chapter on criticism, which was written by Graciela Montaldo, and we have chapters that deal with new genres, such as comics and rap. There’s a chapter by Maricruz Castro Ricalde that deals with Mexican cinema in Hollywood. We have chapters about women writers who create new genres as writers but also as critics, as in the case of Liliana Colanzi and Cristina Rivera Garza. We have a chapter on border literature in Portuñol, for example, the literature of the triple border between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. We dedicate a lot of space to thinking about the native languages of Black women as well.

A.P.: You examine the evolution of gender and sexuality studies in Latin American literature from a critical perspective. What do you think about what has been happening in recent years? How do you feel these gender and sexuality studies have changed in relation to Latin American literature?

M.S.: I think these are fundamental areas. And it also seems to me that, particularly with studies on sexualities and dissidence, the feedback is continuous. In other words, it seems to me—unlike in other areas, for example—some critics who were my students a few years ago have been transformed. And it also seems to me that there’s a continuous feedback loop between the street and the university. So, this gives us a way of thinking about literature that’s different, and I’m not saying it hasn’t always happened, but in Latin American literature, for a variety of issues, the echo from the outside has always been fundamental and has been very strong. As is the case in the Southern Cone with the number of writers who disappeared, who were victims of torture, and this has also happened, of course, in Central America and in Colombia, in Brazil. It seems to me that, in the case of sexual dissidence, there’s something that gets developed in the street and then returns to the university. In other words, the feedback is continuous, it’s more immediate. And I would say the same thing happens with the movements of indigenous peoples, with brown women in Argentina, but it seems to me there’s something there that has been thought about in academia and suddenly explodes into the street and has an immediate echo in academia, in cinema, in journalism, in theater. 

A.P.: How wonderful. Well, to close, I’ll congratulate you on the new book, A History of Argentine Literature, that you co-edited with Alejandra Laera. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation. 

M.S.: Thank you very much.

Translated by Will Howard

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Argentine academic Mónica Szurmuk.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Welcome, Clara.

Clara Obligado: Hi, thank you very much for the invitation.

A.P.: So, you are joining us from Spain, right? Where are you? Where do you live, Clara?

C.O.: I have been living in Madrid for about 42 years, I think, or something like that; I’ve been here since ‘76.

A.P.: Tell us a little about your story, how did you get to Spain? Which city in Argentina are you from?

C.O.: I’m from Buenos Aires, part of a family of male writers, national poets, but in a very different way than mine. I come from a very right-wing family, but I am a left-wing person, so in 1976, during the military dictatorship, I had to go into exile in Madrid. Since then, I’ve stayed here, with a lot of contact with Buenos Aires, because I go back and forth, but well, I even have a Spanish grandson now, that is, two generations later.

A.P.: This is evident in your work, and something you talk about is this midpoint, as a migrant and as an exile; that one writes from a line, from a dash, from a rupture. Tell us about this metaphor of the rupture that you have used in many of your works.

C.O.: Anyone who knows the effect of distance understands that it doesn’t happen overnight, but rather gradually one realizes that they are changing. So, little by little, I built a body of work that I also consider mestizo, which is neither short story nor novel, and is formally situated halfway. From there, I try to represent what the loss of a homeland means; it’s a journey that is thematic on one side but is primarily represented in the structure of the works.

A.P.: In Spain, you founded the first creative writing workshop in 1978.

C.O.: It’s also important to consider the Spain I arrived in. I arrived a year after Franco’s death. At that time, Spain had very few developed aspects, while Argentina was coming from a process of youthful and very modern change. So, to some extent, it was a bad time for me personally, but a good time socially. I lived through the era of “La Movida” in Spain, and there I made my contributions along with many others who arrived during that time.

A.P.: You were a student of Jorge Luis Borges. What was that experience like?

C.O.: Yes, I was a student of Borges, I think it was around 1972/73 when Borges left the public university and entered the Catholic University, where I was studying. They didn’t want to let him in because he was agnostic. So, the students wrote a letter asking for Borges to be made a professor, which also speaks to the university’s inflexibility. Borges gave very unique classes that consisted of him talking about whatever he felt like. There were classes where he spoke in Old English, and we didn’t understand anything. There were wonderful classes, and he was a very curious person, well educated, very generous with his knowledge. I always say that what I learned from Borges was how to read in the margins.

A.P.: In Spain, you are recognized as one of the great masters of microfiction, and in some ways as the introducer of the genre. Would you like to tell us a bit about this?

C.O.: It’s an adventure like all my adventures, which start just because. Because I like them, for no other reason. And now it’s precisely twenty years since the publication of Por favor, sea breve, which was the book that brought microfiction to Spain. In it, I set myself two challenges: one was to have a text from every part of Latin America, making microfiction a bridge, not nationally but built by all Spanish speakers. The second challenge I set for myself was to have half of the contributors be women, which, twenty years ago, caused me quite a few problems. From there, I began working with this genre that essentially negotiates with silence, with the precise word.

A.P.: You write and write a lot, you write short stories, you write novels, and once you said that the short story is a great passion, while the novel is a tedious marriage.

C.O.: Yes, the novel is a bit like a stonemason’s work; in the novel, you lay out the plans for the house and from there, you must finish it. Meanwhile, a short story always has something magical about it. It’s not because the genre is easy—it’s particularly difficult—but it does have an element of leaping, juggling, light, which I think is much harder to sustain in a novel.

A.P.: How do you choose to write in one genre or the other? What themes invite you to one or the other?

C.O.: I think I have now found this way of telling stories that is a mix of short story and novel, and I’m comfortable with it. On the one hand, I have character development, more typical of novels, and on the other hand, the precision of a short story. I worked on this in my last three books. This idea consists of giving back to the short story what the novel claims as its own; for example, complex plots and deeper character development. I even have a book of short stories that is a detective novel, meaning each story contains a clue. I’m searching for this middle path. Honestly, genres don’t interest me much. To read them, yes, but not to write them; they bore me a bit.

A.P.: You have worked extensively in creative writing workshops; you have the wonderful Clara Obligado Creative Writing Workshop, and it has lasted many years. When did you found this workshop and what is the philosophy behind it?

C.O.: I’m fortunate to be outside of academia, it’s a gift; if you’re in academia, you’ll understand. I no longer have any bureaucracy, no prerequisite programs, no problems added to my own literary enthusiasm. I gave my first workshop when my daughter was a baby, and now I have one with her.

A.P.: Well, let’s go to some of your books. There’s a novel, La hija de Marx, which was published by Lumen in 1996. With it, you won the Lumen Women’s Prize, that very year. That was your first award, and this is, so to speak, your first novel.

C.O.: It’s my first novel, and I wrote it while I was teaching a course on erotic literature. Suddenly, I realized I was writing about Russian exiles and what happened to women after the Russian Revolution. I was also, in a way, writing about my own generation, about what happened to the women who lived through the political movements in Latin America during those years. It’s a novel that mixes a lot, like all my novels, and spans from the time of Marx to just before World War I. It blends humor with horror in equal measure.

A.P.: Wonderful. Let’s talk about a previous book, El libro de los viajes equivocados, whose title I really like. It was also published by Páginas de Espuma, but in 2011. It’s a moving book because it also made me rethink and reflect on the meaning of exile and something you call the wounded memory. And you say in it, “one does not forget a smell as one does not forget a touch, nor does one forget the last vision of things, and this wounded memory stars for years in the migrant’s dreams.” Recently, we were talking with Rosa Montero about the fragility of memory, even its nonexistence, and something I thought about is this definite existence of sensory memory, or how it sometimes does not exist because we are remaking our memory. What is memory for you?

C.O.: For me, the theme of memory is a central one, but I approach it from a different angle than Rosa Montero. I think a lot about memory as a social commitment. I think of memory as a way to avoid repeating things, in the Argentine sense of “never again.” So, I believe that memory is also what builds justice, that without memory there can be no justice. This is quite strongly presented in El libro de los viajes equivocados. On the other hand, there is also the aspect of losing something on an individual level, and how that memory is dynamic. Perhaps the only feeling, the only thing we can control, is the past, and we change it every day, we invent stories, and this helps us to live.

A.P.: What is your relationship with reading?

C.O.: Well, I’m an addict; I read a lot. Moreover, if I like an author, I read their complete works; not just their complete works, but everything they recommend; not just everything they recommend, but all their influences; not just all those influences, but everything related to them. Not only that, but I teach workshops all day, my students notice it. For example, Alice Munro was one of my latest obsessions. I can’t stop until I understand what she does. When I understand what she does, I let it go.

A.P.: I would like to now discuss La biblioteca de agua, one of your recent works, also published by Páginas de Espuma in 2019. Here you are already explaining the entire narrative experiment that begins with El libro de los viajes equivocados then continues with La muerte juega a los dados and ends with this book as a kind of trilogy. The idea of the saga interests me. What would you say arouses and should arouse literary perplexity when a reader approaches a book?

C.O.: If a book doesn’t startle me at some point, I’m not interested. By startle, I don’t mean Stephen King frightening me, but if there isn’t an adjective placed somewhere or something said that I hadn’t heard before, or some play that surprises me, I’m not fully interested in what’s been written in some way; it doesn’t interest me. So when I write, I do the same. I always say that I write to change literature. Does this book change literature? Later, it turns out not to be true because one doesn’t change literature—it’s a very naive thought. But indeed, to undertake a work with that enthusiasm, what you want to demonstrate is that the order of factors does alter the product. The idea that a city is traversed from the past and from the present upwards and downwards.

A.P.: How wonderful. I invite everyone to explore the work of Clara Obligado. Thank you very much, Clara, for taking the time to talk with us today.

C.O.: Thank you very much to you, Adriana, for your interest in my work.

Translated by Alice Banks

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Argentine/Spanish writer Clara Obligado, by Mayolo Yllera.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: You’re Ecuadorian, but tell us a little more about your origins. Where do you live and what do you study? 

Mónica Ojeda: Well, I’m from Guayaquil, a city on the coast of Ecuador. I came to study here in Spain in 2011. I spent three years studying here, between Barcelona and Madrid, and then I returned to Ecuador to work for another three years, and finally I’ve come here to live and have been living in Madrid for two years, not as a student, but living for real, working and doing what adults do. I publish with a press here in Spain, with Candaya, which was basically the sentimental connection that I developed with Spain. 

A.P.: And suddenly you realize that you want to write a novel with all your critical reflection and with all your studies, and you publish your first novel in 2014, titled La desfiguración Silva, which won the 2014 Alba Narrative Prize. Tell us about this book. How is it that you come into yourself as a writer, as a novelist, as a fiction writer, and this novel comes out?

M.O.: Well, I started writing at a very young age, and I knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. So, I went to university in Guayaquil and majored in literature. I got a scholarship and went to study in Barcelona, for a master’s degree in creative writing. I didn’t feel I needed to do a master’s in creative writing to write a novel because I think you can do that without getting a master’s, but for me it was an opportunity to escape, that is, to leave Ecuador. That was when I was 23 years old, and that’s where I completed by master’s. It was a master’s that was made to give you as much time as possible to write and, since I won the scholarship, I had no problems either, I didn’t have to worry about working. That was when I started to write this first novel. I submitted the novel as my master’s thesis. And then I sent it to the ALBA Narrative contest—which I thought I wasn’t going to win, I even forgot I had sent it—and then a journalist friend of mine found out before me, because the email where they told me I had won had gone to spam. I hadn’t even heard about it until a journalist friend found out and told me and I was very surprised and super happy, obviously. And that’s how it all started.

A.P.: That’s great, congratulations. What a great way to find out you have won an important award. Double the surprise, how wonderful. So you mark your territory in 2016 with Nefando and you leave us dumbstruck, with a book filled with strangeness, fear, existential emptiness, disconnections between generations, peripheral sexualities, the abject and, obviously, we hear echoes of Osvaldo Lamborghini and references to George Bataille, of course, with this mystical question, union and drive and the question of sex and death. How did you conceive Nefando?

M.O.: Well, because of a personal situation, actually. I began to write, to need to write Nefando, because of a personal matter: a friend of mine confessed to me—when I was a child—that she was being abused by a member of her family, but when I was a child I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand what she meant. There was a moment when I was 24 or 25 years old, I had a kind of recollection. I had completely forgotten about this situation because, like I said, when my friend confessed it to me, I didn’t understand anything she was saying. Suddenly, I remembered that conversation very clearly and, of course, at 25, I suddenly wondered what my friend was saying to me, so I called her again. She was a friend with whom I didn’t have regular contact, she had been a childhood friend. I told her, “I remembered this conversation with you and right now it sounds like you were trying to tell me this and I want to know if you were trying to tell me this.”

And she said, “Well, look, don’t feel guilty because you shouldn’t have understood, because we were kids, but I was in my own way trying to tell you about this.” And then, of course, for me it was a very hard blow because obviously my friend didn’t want me to feel guilty and, obviously, I know logically that there’s no reason to feel guilty because I was a child and quite ignorant and innocent about these issues. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about the issue of child abuse, everything that surrounds child abuse. I started to do some research that wasn’t for any purpose, it was just because of my obsession with the subject at the time and because of my own sense of guilt. And I got to a very obsessive moment, I went to the deep web, I went onto pedophile forums, forums where there is, of course, no kind of child pornography content, but there is a discourse. So that obsessive, harmful experience I had is the origin of Nefando, because from all these recurring ideas, I started to think about many more things. I was working on a research project on Latin American porno-erotic literature. So I was thinking of these links: desire-evil, desire-harm, desire-violence, desire and death, desire and pain. And the drives that pivot between these concepts. That’s how Nefando came about; I had this need to talk about the damage that comes about because some people are capable of desiring and imposing their desire over other bodies and sometimes destroying those bodies in order to fulfill a desire. It was a bit like that.

A.P.: The subject of writing is at the core of this book. What is writing, how to do it and why, and what is the strength that comes from writing itself. Want to tell us a little bit more about that?

M.O.: I actually think it has to do with the fact that, when we live through extreme experiences, experiences of extreme pain, but also experiences of pleasure, we stay in a liminal zone, an area that borders the silent zone, a place where there are no words, where we are unable to build a kind of narrative about what we have lived through. That is why, in Spanish, there is a gap between vivencias and experiencias. We use experiencias to describe all those experiences to which we have been able to give language, but those experiences that we are unable to narrate remain vivencias and do not become experiences. It was a challenge for me, in this novel, to talk about something that was painful for me and that I know is painful for other people as well, and to know that it’s such a complicated subject, that it’s an open wound for a lot of people. And I knew, when I was going to write about this, I wasn’t going to be able to do it without questioning the writing itself, that is, without questioning the extent to which I am capable of expressing what, a priori, is inexpressible. Or to what extent it is ethical to even try to express what is painful for others. 

A.P.: The reference to the game is interesting. Tell us about this video game. What is it about and how are you connecting it to the lives of the characters?

M.O.: Sure. It is the center of the novel’s narrative focus. The game Nefando is a video game that some of the characters in this novel create and build together and upload at some point to the deep web, which is this area of the web where there are no browsers and it’s difficult to move around that space because you can find even illegal things that are not allowed on the normal internet. They post this video game online, design it, develop it, program it, upload it, and for a while it’s on the Internet. And the novel is structured in such a way that we know there’s an investigation behind this video game, a person who is constantly asking these characters who have created it questions about the game. 

A.P.: Let’s talk about Mandíbula (2018), translated into English by Sarah Booker as Jawbone. And well, the name already puts us on alert, doesn’t it? Jawbone is a book that makes you catch your breath when you read it. From the beginning, it’s in the voice of one of the main protagonists who is tied up, kidnapped by her teacher. She is the one who has kidnapped her. How did Jawbone come about?

M.O.: Well, it comes out of this interest I had for a whole year in studying fear, but fear as an emotion—primitive, atavistic, even, in the body. Fear in the sense of studying the things that scare us. What does it mean to be afraid on an emotional level? And I specifically wanted to examine fear in passionate relationships between women. Jawbone is a novel in which there are only female characters from beginning to end, and they relate to each other in very intense and generally quite violent ways. There is one specific character named Cara, who is also the teacher who at first kidnaps one of her students. The novel begins with a kidnapping that has the characteristics of a thriller, but is not entirely a thriller. And this teacher suffers from anxiety attacks, and I was having anxiety attacks at the time I was writing Jawbone. So for me it was like a way to delve into a truth by means of fiction, if we say fiction always leads us to the truth of the human condition. You might say I was coming to the truth of my own human condition through an invention.

A.P.: Very, very interesting. Monica, what is your poetics for writing about horror?

M.O.: I think, without a doubt, it’s one of the emotions I explore the most, literarily speaking, and it has to do with the fact that it is precisely a rather complex emotion that has been undervalued in literature. I mean that, until relatively recently, horror or literature that deals with fear was seen as a literary subgenre. I think that’s changing now. To me, literarily… I mean, when I write I’m not very interested in writing horror novels because I don’t write horror, but I do write novels about fear and, therefore, when you read a novel that is about fear, you can also, through a kind of cause and effect, end up feeling fear. But that’s not the main goal of my work. What I am interested in is finding out through writing what happens to us, as human beings, when we are paralyzed by fear or propelled like a rocket by fear. The literary conclusions I sometimes arrive at have to do with the use of violence—not only physical violence, but also psychological and verbal violence. 

A.P.: What are you working on now?

M.O.: Well, right now I’m finishing a book of short stories that I’m going to publish this year, and I’m also writing a novel. I still think I have a little more time left to go on the novel, but the story collection will probably be finished in a few months and will definitely come out this year.

A.P.: Excellent, Mónica. Congratulations on your career. Thank you very much for taking part in this project.

M.O.: No, thanks to you.

Translated by Will Howard

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website. 

Photo: Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda.

This is an excerpt from a conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Esmeralda, you write from the United States about Puerto Rico in the United States. At some point, did you realize that you were part of a movement of something that was happening on a national and international level? Would you call this a movement? What is happening with Puerto Rican writers writing from the United States?

Esmeralda Santiago: Well, I think good writers come and I think publishers are also much more open to finding voices that are different from the traditional ones, let’s say. And now we’re writing a lot in both languages, English and Spanish, and it’s being translated from Spanish to English, English to Spanish, so there’s an exchange between readers as well. 

A.P.: You’ve talked about that topic, about what language you feel most comfortable writing in. You prefer to write in English, don’t you, Esmeralda?

E.S.: Yes, I’ve been here in the United States for so long and the truth is that I speak English 90% of the day, and every now and then I talk to a family member or friend in Spanish, so my Spanish is not as developed, as literary as my English, the language that I practice almost all day. So it’s not a decision of which one I prefer, but which one I’m more skilled at.

A.P.: Sure. Your family came to the United States as migrants when you were very young and you come from a large family. Tell us a little about that moment, that time, your childhood, your community as a child when you arrived.

E.S.: I grew up in the countryside in Puerto Rico, in a place called Macún. It’s a neighborhood in the town of Toa Baja. And then my mother, whose family was in New York, was divorcing my father, and so she decided to go to the United States. I always say, “I didn’t leave Puerto Rico, they took me.” Because the truth is that I didn’t want to leave Puerto Rico. I didn’t want to leave my dad and my friends and the place that I knew, but that was a decision she made because she was looking toward a future I couldn’t see. So, it was difficult, as you can imagine, to arrive from the countryside in Puerto Rico, to be in Brooklyn, to learn a new language, to adapt to the weather, to learn how to live in a city. 

A.P.: Sure. And in the nineties, you wrote When I Was Puerto Rican, which is based on several interesting moments in the history of Puerto Rico from the fifties to the sixties. Tell us about this first book.

E.S.: I started writing when I was about 38 or 39 years old. I started writing personal essays that appeared in newspapers and magazines, and an editor at a fairly small but respected publishing house outside of Boston read one of my essays. She wrote to me and said, “I liked that essay. Do you have others?” I sent her a bunch of what I had. She gave me the idea to write a memoir. I was writing novels and couldn’t think of doing something else. But then she read the essays and she told me, “Here’s a story that hasn’t been read here in the United States, especially in English.” And it was her who suggested that I try to write a memoir. The first draft of this book was almost 700 pages long, because when I started writing I couldn’t stop. And so, well, the idea was, “Let’s cut the book a little bit more.” Fewer stories. And then, when I finished the book, it didn’t have a title. I used to call it Memoirs Number One. No, I didn’t have any idea, and my editor said, “Esmeralda, we need a title… It’s important to have a title.” I went for a walk near my house and asked myself, “What is this book about?” And then I realized that I wrote a book about a childhood that no longer existed in Puerto Rico. And that you couldn’t have in Puerto Rico since what happened with Hurricane Maria. 

A.P.: Of course, you’re making me think of other women writers who have addressed precisely that question of identity. For example, Sandra Cisneros, who, by the way, wrote a blurb on your book Las madres. How do you think these contrasts—because each of you also write from a different background, from a different heritage—how do you feel that you connect in some way in a wonderful dialogue within the United States, which we need to somehow go beyond into the rest of the world as well so that other readers can read your work?

E.S.: That’s the truth, it’s the right word. It’s wonderful that we, a generation of women writers, should appear in the literary world as if out of nowhere, like Athena coming out of Zeus’s head, right? But the truth is that we were women trying to present our lives and our experiences. I think we started writing to learn about what we were going through. And then, the more we wrote, the more we realized that this information, these tales, these stories were necessary for our people because we weren’t the only ones who were asking those questions. 

A.P.: Your book Almost a Woman (another title that I love) made it to the big screen in 2002, in a movie directed by Betty Kaplan. What did this book mean to you? What was it like for you to see the story there on screen, to imagine what people were going to think and feel when they saw it?

E.S.: Well, the book Almost a Woman was the second part I mentioned, from the first draft of When I Was Puerto Rican, when it was 700 pages long. That’s when I cut the book in half. I had already written the second part of Almost a Woman, and then it was a process of rewriting that story from the point of view of a teenager, a girl who is still learning and maturing. It was a big surprise to me. An American company owned by two older ladies found the book at an airport, I think. They lived in Los Angeles, they were traveling, I think from Chicago or New York, and they stopped at a bookstore at the airport and there was the book. One of them grabbed it, and she says when she got to L.A., she said to the other, “Hey, this is a movie.” And about two or three weeks later, they called me and my husband and suggested this idea, they had a contract to do five movies for Masterpiece Theater and they wanted my book to be a part of that series, and it was… Well, imagine my excitement, but I was also like, “But why don’t they want to do When I Was Puerto Rican?” Since it’s the first book. But she was very interested in that process of learning the language, adapting to the climate, the environment, and also this idea that the little girl, Nelly, was more aware of what was happening, so it would be better than making a film about that childhood in Puerto Rico. 

A.P.: That’s wonderful. Something I see Puerto Ricans writers doing, and it’s very interesting, is recognizing our ancestors, our mothers and our grandmothers. Yolanda Arroyo has this project and this program precisely to bring grandmothers to the fore, and to go to our family tree, especially on the maternal side, on the female side. Tell us a little about this process of going to the origin, but the origin of a matriarchy, of a genealogy where women pass their legacy down from one to another, and with this question we begin to warm up to start talking about Las madres.

E.S.: It’s very interesting to me what you just mentioned, that we’re all very interested and want to write about our ancestors. I think, because we are women who were raised by, well, very strong women, many of whom did not have many resources, but with everything they had they found a way to give us those ambitions and that idea that you have to fight, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to give up because it’s difficult—the more difficult it is, the more effort it takes. And it’s very interesting; I think we can all talk about our mothers, whether they are mothers or grandmothers who raised us, and that is definitely the case for me. For me, my mother was and continues to be the muse behind my work. 

A.P.: Wonderful. Well, this book Conquistadora, which was a total revelation for many—that’s where you enter historical literature, a novel that is fictionalized, of course, but has a lot of history, to do with this genealogy, also from the historical point of view, right? Tell us a little bit about Conquistadora.

E.S.: Conquistadora, or the idea of Conquistadora, begins with conversations I had with my father and my mother. I recorded them in the last years of their lives, I recorded them and I asked them many things that no one in the family had thought to ask them, but I am very impertinent according to my mother and father. So, I asked them things they might never have revealed to anyone, but I had them on tape now. And the more I listened to those stories, the more interested I became in their lives, in the time when they grew up, where they grew up, etc., and then I began to imagine their ancestors as well. 

A.P.: And, well, I have this gorgeous book in my hands, this edition of Las madres. What a necessary book, so conciliatory with friendship, so deep in its solidarity with this question of care. How long did it take you to write this beautiful and important book?

E.S.: Thank you very much. Yes, Las madres starts with a scene that came from I-don’t-know-where. Three women on the roof of a building in the Bronx watching the fireworks on July 4, 2017. This came about after Hurricane Maria. I knew I had an idea to write something based on the events in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, but I still hadn’t decided in what direction I would take it, and I was still researching and reading and talking to people from Puerto Rico and here, but suddenly, one day, I woke up in the morning and I had that idea and I started writing. So, it’s three women, and I ask myself, “But who are they and why are they talking like that?” And that familiarity from the beginning. I felt that there was a good, very intimate relationship between these women, but I wasn’t very sure. So I said, “Okay.” For two or three days I kept exploring, and I think the first full chapter that I wrote in a day or two was a scene where Graciela, who is one of the girls, is driving from the Bronx after the Fourth of July to her home in Maine, a small town in Maine.

A.P.: Unbelievable.

E.S.: It’s a process that’s interesting to me. Someone asked me if it’s easy to write. No! Writing is very difficult. I cry a lot, I throw things against the wall, I slam doors when I leave my office sometimes, but there are times when I sit down and write something and say, “Wow, wow. Where did that come from?” I don’t know, some muse is talking, right? But it’s not me. It’s a very, very fascinating process.

A.P.: Thank you for being so honest. Thank you very much for your generosity and for leaving us so excited and motivated to follow your work and that of all the women of your generation, nationality, and region who have written so many things about Puerto Rico. 

E.S.: Thank you very much. We’ll see each other soon, hopefully.

Translated by William Howard

You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Puerto Rican writer Esmeralda Santiago.

This is an excerpt from the conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: You have a master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Citizenship studies, from a very prestigious program at the University of Barcelona. Tell us a little more about your background as well as your background as an economist and sociologist.

Brenda Navarro: It’s actually quite funny because I wanted to study sociology, but film studies. I had always wanted to narrate and it was difficult for me to know exactly how to narrate, which is why I thought I had to know the world, know how it worked. So I became a sociologist in that sense, but I realized that sociologists are kind of “all-ogists” and that in reality the world won’t change much. I ended up more frustrated than I was at the beginning. And when I started studying the world from the perspective of gender at UNAM is when I said, “Of course, this is where I belong, I want to keep studying everything that has to do with women’s issues, with gender, with human rights, etc.” 

I came to Spain to learn how to give a different value to what I had learned in Mexico. In other words, it’s true that we have many deficiencies in our education system that should be better, that need improvement, there are lots of negatives, etc., but since I started the master’s degree in Barcelona I feel so grateful for the feminist professors I’ve had in Mexico, for the plurality of voices that I encountered at UNAM, and for the capacity we have for dialogue in Mexican society. 

A.P.:. So tell us, how does your work come about? At what point do you feel the impetus to write and mix your voice with your own reflections on gender?

B.N.: I think it was all linked, there was no before and after. I’ve always thought that since I was little (and it seems a cliché to say that, I know, but it’s true, ever since I was little), because of my mother and my sister. They were super into pop music. And they listened to all this music by Marisela, Daniela Romo, and Amanda Miguel. I knew all their songs by heart. If you played them right now I could sing every word, but I didn’t relate to them. Ever since I was a little girl, I used to say, “Why do women only sing about these things?” And the first exposure I had to something different during my adolescence was Alanis Morissette, who in my opinion talked about other things, who was no longer the woman who suffered or was unfaithful, but an angry woman who also spoke up, who used irony to take on the world. 

A.P.: You have a very interesting project related to this idea called Enjambre Literario. Tell us, where does it come from and where is it going? What’s the future for this project?

B.N.: Enjambre Literario first arose from the belief that women’s networks have to remain visible. Women have survived throughout history precisely because we know how to create networks, but we don’t talk about it that much and I think it’s important not to lose sight of this ability. Furthermore, in literary creation you know what it’s like to sit alone with a computer or with your notebook and lock yourself in your own world. So it’s not like you can go out and be with a group of friends and do other things, because you have to focus on yourself. Sometimes it seems like it’s a pretty lonely activity.

Then there’s the conflict with the scholarship or grant systems. They give the impression that you have to compete against other writers. And I like the idea of not having to compete, that we all have our own voice, we’re all different and what we have to do is generate networks to know exactly how we can collectivize our needs. That’s how the Enjambre started. I needed to talk to people because I had these concerns. I was lucky that Fernanda Melchor and Yuri Herrera believed that this could be something bigger and they helped me organize the first Enjambre call for texts (to be published digitally, which is something that interests me a lot) professionally. It worked so well we were able to publish a wonderful book by Sylvia Aguilar Zeleny, El libro de Aisha, and Tatiana Maynar, who also wrote a novel.

A.P.: Your first novel is Casas vacías (translated by Sophie Hughes as Empty Houses), a novel about forced disappearances and the impossibility of speaking about private things, published by Kaja Negra Editores. Tell us about this novel, which has been described as “uncomfortable,” and about the anxiety that I think it undoubtedly provokes in everyone who reads it.

B.N.: Empty Houses came about from another kind of questioning that wasn’t exactly about motherhood, as it has been for the readers. I started writing it in Mexico when this “non-war” was creating a lot of pain as well as a lot of disappearances, which are still occurring, but it was one of the first times we were living through something like this, that we were, let’s say, in the eye of the hurricane. And everything you heard, everything that was being said and discussed in the news, were the statistics of the people who had died or were missing and about the military, and little was said about the women. These women, mothers, who were traveling all over the country to find their missing children. And when I thought about it my heart ached, because I couldn’t find the right words. Because, I thought, how can a woman who is a Mexican mother, with all that being a mother in Mexico implies (many Mexican mothers are single moms or they are abused by their partners, or they are poor and have to work double or triple shifts)… how do they raise their children? And then they wake up one day to their child missing. They’re just not there in any tangible way, so they can’t mourn them. That’s how I started writing Empty Houses.

A.P.: Another issue that caught my attention was the immigration status of the girl. 

B.N.: Yes, I think it would be helpful to clarify that the first version of Empty Houses had a different title, it was originally called Los pájaros se estrellan en el cielo (or in English, “the birds crash in the sky”). That first version of the book wasn’t so focused on the theme of motherhood, I actually changed the second part completely. And I changed it when I was already living in Barcelona and had given birth to my second daughter. I had to go through motherhood completely alone, without any network. My first daughter was like every daughter in a Mexican family, with grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles all around, so raising my first daughter seemed really easy to me. I did lose a lot of things in many personal ways, not as a woman but because of my life story, but it wasn’t hard for me to be a mother. It was a very social thing. But with my second child it was difficult precisely because of this, because I was a person who didn’t have social networks in Barcelona, because I was alone with my partner and because I didn’t know what to do with a baby. I knew in theory, but even when I had her there I was really scared and had to face a lot of my fears.

When I went back to writing the novel to have it published, I said to myself: “I’m not going to talk nonsense,” which was kind of like romantic love. And I also said, I have to get all this on paper, all of these things that are the reason I feel like a single mother. There’s a TV show that you probably know called Six Feet Under, and in one of the last episodes the character named Ruth tells her daughter-in-law, “If my experience is anything to go by, motherhood is the loneliest thing in the world.” This really stuck with me, and when I did live through it completely alone, I said, of course, we live totally in solitude because we put on the appearance that since we are mothers we know how to do everything.

A.P.: What are your next plans, what are you working on now? Where is Brenda Navarro going?

B.N.: Right now I’m writing a novel in which I’m asking myself, what is forgiveness? And for what? It’s about women, of course. I’m trying to find another kind of voice to avoid repeating myself, but one that is still intimate and that can continue to speak to those who want to get closer. I’m going to talk about a rather uncomfortable topic: what is forgiveness, and also what does forgiveness have to do with militarization. I’m trying to think about all of this without having to talk explicitly about militarization. It’s a big challenge for me. Dehumanizing the people who were forced to join the military leads us to the kind of confrontations that we are experiencing now. That’s what I’m working on. I want to finish writing it this year and we’ll see when it comes out. I’m not in a hurry, it will come out whenever it’s ready.

A.P.: Perfect, congratulations. I think when you were younger you must have been like one of my granddaughters, for whom everything is why, why, why? Everything you do is rooted in your curiosity and your questioning of the world. Well, Brenda, I’m sending you a really big hug from Texas. I wish you all the best and thank you again.

B.N.: Thank you so much and we’ll keep in touch; sending you a kiss.

Translated by Kathleen Meredith

You can hear and read the complete interview in Spanish on the Hablemos, escritoras website. 

Photo: Mexican writer Brenda Navarro, by Daniela Spector.

This is an excerpt from the conversation with the Argentine author on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: Let’s start with a very basic question, how did you start writing, Selva?

Selva Almada:  I started writing, I would say, almost by accident. From a very young age I read a lot. I think it was what I liked to do the most, reading. I wrote when I had to write at school and I was good at it and found it came easily to me, but it’s not like I wrote stories or had the desire to be a writer. I hear other colleagues say, “when I was twelve years old, I wanted to write a novel.” But the pull to literary writing came much later for me, at about the age of twenty when I was studying journalism, because yes, I liked journalistic writing. In a workshop that I took in college, where things were a little more relaxed, suddenly I found myself writing story after story, and well, I began to be interested in moving over to the fiction side of writing more so than journalistic writing. 

A.P.:  Where are you from?

S.A.: I was born and raised in a very small town in the province of Entre Ríos where I lived until I was seventeen years old. It’s a province that is north of Buenos Aires, about four hundred kilometers from the city on the Argentine coast.

A.P.: About the literary scene and what is happening in Buenos Aires, what do you feel has changed from that moment you arrived to the present day? 

S.A.: The first big positive change was post-2001 when independent publishers began to appear. It seems to me (at least in Argentina it usually happens to us, perhaps because we are always going from crisis to crisis) that crises also bring out a creative side in us. And, well, that’s kind of what happened with the phenomenon of the independent publishing houses that began to emerge in 2002 and 2003, it was like an effervescence. Within a decade, many publishers began to appear, many of which are now very prestigious and are already much larger in size. I am sure you will know Eterna Cadencia or Entropía. They are publishers that are about fifteen years old, and both emerged in those early years of the first decade of the 2000s. That, for me, contributed a lot to bringing diversity to Argentine literature, because suddenly it was much easier to publish than it was in the nineties, for example. 

A.P.: Of course, that’s on point. Hear this out, Selva: in 2022 we were pleased to receive Gabriela Cabezón Cámara here in person, and one day we would love to welcome you to Austin as well. We talked about the Pañuelos Verdes movement with her. How do you see that women writers are currently contributing, and have contributed in the past, to these movements and to the creation of these networks throughout the continent and in general in the Spanish-speaking world?

S.A.:  In Argentina, there are two very strong and important moments for feminism, a movement in which we writers are so involved. The first of these is #NiUnaMenos, a movement that was born spontaneously from a call made by women journalists, which writers and other artists also joined. It is a movement that points out the urgency of doing something about femicides, of doing something against gender violence, a movement that takes all that anguish and rage it causes us to the streets. This was in 2015, and a short time later the Pañuelos Verdes came with their campaign for the legalization of abortion. This was a new wave, as there was another campaign that had already been in existence for years. Suddenly the request, the urgency, and the struggle to take to the streets and go to the marches became much more massive. The possibility was raised, a small door was opened to the possibility that it could become a law. It finally happened for us in 2020, the so-called voluntary interruption of pregnancy law. But in those two years before, the law first had a vote in Congress in 2018 that failed. Finally, then, in 2020, it passed, but that first part of the activism of many of my fellow writers was fundamental. Claudia Piñero was one of the visible faces of the movement and many other authors accompanied her. We all accompanied each other in the streets, we accompanied each other in the campaigns, we accompanied each other by disseminating the word, but some of us, like Claudia, went to talk to senators or deputies trying to get the support of the legislators so that this could become law. Later, these two movements had a beautiful, contagious effect on the rest of Latin America, and I hope that more countries can also see voluntary interruption of pregnancy become legal, it is something that is so important in poor countries like ours. 

A.P.: Such strength! You have shown us the way and motivated us on a continental level to fight for many of these struggles that are so important, right?

S.A.:  The struggle doesn’t end with the law, because the law is still quite new, it’s three years old, and there’s a lot of reluctance on the part of doctors and public hospitals to carry out interventions, so there are often complaints of conscientious objections.  Doctors can refuse to perform abortions, so even with the law, the fight unfortunately never ends.

A.P.: That’s true. Well, we’ve been talking about women’s rights. And something that I think is very important about your work, something I find fascinating is that you are also talking about and reflecting on an issue that should concern us all, which is masculinity. Especially with these three books that have been coined a men’s trilogy, El viento que arrasa (The Wind that Lays Waste, tr. Chris Andrews), Ladrilleros (Brickmakers, tr. Annie McDermott), and No es un río (Not a River, tr. Annie McDermott). I highly recommend them. How difficult is it for you, or how easy is it for you, to contribute to this subject, and the themes you explore of men having their own battles and determinisms that they cannot get rid of?

S.A.: Yes, the trilogy was also a bit involuntary or accidental, in the sense that the novels came about, especially the first two, without a trilogy in mind. In fact, I don’t think that at that time I could even find much of a relationship between The Wind that Lays Waste and Brickmakers, for example. But when I started writing the last one, which is Not a River, the communicating vessels between these two novels and this third one that I had started writing just appeared. And I started calling it the men’s trilogy. But, of course, it wasn’t really a plan to write three novels that centered around or focused on the lives of men or a male character. But this appeared a little in the first novel, which is The Wind that Lays Waste, where there are these two fathers who are in charge of their children, for different reasons the mothers are not there. The men are there in the center of the novel, and the way these men relate to each other has repercussions on the lives of others, on the lives of the women, the lives of the mothers, girlfriends, sisters. This type of relationship, alliance and betrayal reappears in Not a River, where there is a much greater presence of women. 

A.P.: Selva, your readers will surely not forgive me if I do not move to a book that was also a watershed moment in Argentine literature, Chicas muertas (Dead Girls, tr. Annie McDermott). This book was also published in 2014, and from this point onwards I feel that a wave of writers began to bring up the ever-present issue of femicide. How difficult was it for you to write Dead Girls, where do the stories of these three girls come from? And tell us, how long did it take you to write this book?

S.A.: Actually, the project came from one of the cases in the book. It narrates three cases of femicide that happened in small towns in Argentina in the 1980s. They are not related cases, they do not share murderers and the victims are not related, but they share an era and the fact that the perpetrators have remained unpunished to this day. In other words, we never knew who the killers were. One of these cases, Andrea’s case, happened in a neighboring town when I was thirteen years old. It is a case that shocked the whole area, especially the women who were entering adolescence, because Andrea, who was the victim, was nineteen years old. She was practically my brother’s age, she could have been my older sister, let’s say. She was kind of very close in that sense, not because I knew her, but because it had a very big impact on me. Twenty years later, when I began to research for the book, I remember that I talked to two of my friends from that time to see what they remembered, what memories they had, and they had the same frightening memories as me, of how totally helpless we felt thinking that something like this could also happen to us, to think that we too could be dead, that they could also kill us. The femicide happened in the victim’s own room while she was sleeping. 

A.P.: It was a long process. Obviously, you have also been a part of other projects that I find very interesting, very important, and something that caused me a lot of curiosity is this book El mono en el remolino, because Zama is a movie that I have seen, yet I never knew of this connection with the monkey in the whirlpool. Tell us, how did you come to this and what did it mean to you?

S.A.: Zama is one of the most important novels in Argentine literature, the author is Antonio Di Benedetto, an author of iconic novels. I knew that Lucrecia Martel had been planning to adapt the novel to film for many years. In fact, it had started at some point and then for some reason the project hadn’t gone on, but we were all hoping that one day someone would be able to make a film of Zama. I had met Lucrecia a little earlier, because we had been asked to work together on a project, and she was about to start filming Zama. Then at one point she called me and said, look, the producers of the film are planning to do several things around the film and one of those things is to invite an author to the filming so they can write something about it. And she told me, if you’re interested, I’d like it to be you. And I said yes because I was also very curious; I read the book again and thought about what the shoot was going to be like and what Lucrecia’s work was going to be like. She’s a director whom I admire a lot. Then the dilemma was, what book to write? Because there was complete freedom. When I talked to the producers, I said, “What book do you expect from me?” And they told me, “The book you want to write.” The only terms they had were for the book to be about the filming and what emerged from it, it wasn’t to be about the film, but what came out of the film and the process. So the premise at that time was very liberating because I didn’t have to do a certain thing, I could do anything. 

A.P.: This is just a banquet, a delicacy for everyone. Thank you very much for everything, Selva.

Translated by Alice Banks

You can hear and read the complete interview on the Hablemos, escritoras website. 

Photo: Argentine writer Selva Almada, by Enrique García Medina.

This is an excerpt from the conversation on the podcast Hablemos, escritoras, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.

Adriana Pacheco: You live in Spain, so how has being able to see your country from the outside changed things? But then also coming back, catching up, seeing everything in your own country firsthand, how does this impact your work?

Gabriela Wiener: It’s always had an impact. From the beginning, my work was conceived as the work of a person already in the diaspora, precisely because the material conditions of my country did not allow me to grow as a writer or even as a journalist. Now, due to the state of the media in my country, it is clearer than ever that my immigration was on an economic, labor level, but in some way it was also on a social level, because it is outside, in this limbo, in this liminal condition in which writing springs up. Writing springs up from a distance, from conflict, from being somewhere or from not being able to be there; it also springs up from not wanting to be there, because queer or racialized people—any vulnerable communities—are still oppressed in my country of origin. Being in Spain also, I encounter similar problems within my own community (not just personal ones), such as everything that migration implies for a person, for a person who creates their own family and also their own cultural or artistic production—in my case literary—in this second country, and everything that that entails, all the walls that you have to smash through, everything that you have to fight. 

A.P.: What you’re saying is very true. We begin to adapt, to see and use what we see in our day-to-day life in the diaspora, which we then return to and connect with everything that is happening in our own countries. Something that catches my attention is your great work in magazines and newspapers. What has it been like for you to be in these newspapers, in these magazines? Who are you talking to from these spaces?

G.W.: I’m a literature person, but I come from a family of journalists. My father and his siblings have worked as journalists. My mother, now, for example, does some kind of communication work as well. I come from a family that was made up of people who liked writing and telling stories. The kind of journalism I saw every day in my house was always activist journalism. Now, we talk about feminist journalism, for example, which I have defended several times, or anti-racist journalism. Both are journalisms that do not try to be neutral or vindicate their activities and ethics so much. They are journalisms that involve their tools and their resources and their work in the struggles of the present. These were the kinds of journalisms I saw because my father and mother are political people. At the end of the last century, and more concretely at the beginning of this century, I started in journalism that covered an elitist, a profoundly elitist, reality. Thus, cultural and more supplement-focused journalism allowed me a freedom of expression and a freedom of subject matter. A genre that we began to see a lot of in the first decade of the millennium, a genre that was flourishing on all levels in Latin America with several publications across countries, was chronicle magazines—there was a real boom of these specialized, thematic magazines. At that time, I started writing for the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra, a cult publication. I published my first chronicles with them, written within the Latin American tradition. The autobiographical subject and the fact that I am interested in issues of the body made me make self-references very early on. The good thing is that this was a magazine that allowed me to do so, even if I was often the only female Peruvian journalist being published. 

A.P.: You won the Peruvian National Journalism Award with an impressive story. What did it mean to you? What repercussions did this prestigious award have within the world of journalism, both in Peru and internationally?

G.W.: None. It didn’t have any impact. I’m not like an award-winning writer or journalist at all, I mean, if you compare me to other journalists or writers of my generation, this was something quite unusual that happened. In fact, the great investigations that I think I’ve had the opportunity to do, in two or three cases, have been my own initiatives, because I considered them to be issues of activism, of political commitment. In this example, it was a case of gender violence in which Diego and I got involved in a selfless way, proposing the idea to a media outlet, so really, the prize was like we were being paid for the work and that’s it. There was no more to it than that. It was important, yes, to continue making these cases of violence visible, in particular a case of violence that had to do with a person who was a character with a cultural profile and recognition in the world of literature. I think it was also something that came out of the victims or survivors themselves who were looking for someone to tell this story, in addition to having a very large retrospective component, because it had happened when they were children. 

A.P.:  Thank you very much, Gabriela. Thank you for your courage and for your lucidity and for understanding exactly what is important. So, you started with poetry, with Cosas que deja la gente cuando se va, and then you wrote a narrative book, Sexografías, translated by Lucy Greaves and Jennifer Adcock as Sexographies. Tell us a little bit about these beginnings.

G.W.: Poetry has been with me for a long time. When I was still in college I participated in readings, I wrote some poems, and I also published a small book. It’s a tiny, micro book, but it contains several poems that would eventually come to be part of my only published poetry collection, titled Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu, published many years later here in Spain with La Bella Varsovia. I then started writing a book like Sexographies, which contained a lot of humor, mishaps, and adventures. It was a book of first-person chronicles, very much in the vein of what was called journalism—but that was a label that was put on the book, a label that I wouldn’t necessarily have put on it myself. Basically, they were stories of immersions in worlds that I was drawn to, but that were foreign to me. I think poetry appears in my writing all the time, and it is doing so more and more. I always consider that I’m a person who has a poetic eye when I write narrative, and that is something that I never lose. Sexographies is a very particular book where there is this nexus of what makes me a writer of personal literature or auto-fiction—or whatever you want to call it—alongside the liking I have always had for poetry. 

A.P.: Moving on to Nueve lunas, translated by Jessica Powell as Nine Moons, I came across this interview where you’re talking to your daughter, Coco. They are very different: the Gabriela who wrote the book, in the moment she had the impetus to write this story, and the Gabriela who is now rereading herself to make re-editions and even resume and retrace some steps. What was it like writing a book like that, which was a bit explosive at the time? 

G.W.: Nine Moons passed without pain or glory, honestly, because it was left out of the new feminist wave, or it was a little bit early. After Sexographies, within my own oeuvre, the book was quite ignored, or simply put aside as a book for women. It’s a book about pregnancy, it’s not a universal theme. If with Sexographies they could say, “what a perverted girl,” with Nine Moons it was, “I’ll give it to my mom, my cousin, my aunt,” or “I’m not interested in it because I don’t want to have children,” or “I’m not interested in it because I’m a man.” 

A.P.: You were a pioneer. The book was published in 2009 and then came this boom of so many other books about motherhoods—I love the plural motherhoods. Then comes Huaco retrato, translated by Julia Sanches as Undiscovered. What an interesting book, how interesting the way in which you work on the figure of the father, the family, identity, inheritance. How difficult was it to write this book? 

G.W.: It’s a book that evolved over time and maybe evolved with my own life as well, with knowledge, with my dead and with everything that started to give me more consistency in order to be able to write the book, the reality that I had to write it. It’s a book project about my great-great-grandfather, as my idea was originally called—I can go back to the moment I had that idea, during the time of Sexographies, 2008, 2009 more or less. I already had it in my hands and I knew that I had to write this book about the cross between my own ethnic identity and my European surname, about the shadow of these ancestors whom are celebrated by my family, celebrated as the reference to which we owe ourselves, the shadows we defend, to whom we are permanently endebted. So this book, for me, is a book in the present, in conversations about the present. 

A.P.: Tell us about Qué locura me enamorarme de ti and the literary performance you have with 1986 with Jaime Rodríguez.

G.W.: In some way my writing has always been a writing that performs, that is, a writing that puts forth the body and activates things in the world, that really sticks its finger in the wound, or tries to do so. Of course, I’m speaking about performing in the sense of exposing the personal and the vulnerable within us, in a kind of recreation that is evidently filtered by imagination and, in my case, by literature and language, or using other languages. I think it was a very natural thing, alternating writing and publishing books with the production of a stage work; it was something that started off at first shyly and then precariously between Jaime and me. We produced a couple of performances, Dímelo delante de ella and 1986. And Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti also started as a performance. In particular, Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti is a work clearly connected to the things I write—it’s like Undiscovered or Dicen de mí. They have communicating vessels.

A.P.: Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. We are very grateful that you have this impetus, and that you want to continue covering everything, because from all of this experimentation we come out on top, from seeing your work. A thousand thank yous.

G.W.: Thank you very much.

. 

Translated by Alice Banks

You can hear and read the complete interview in Spanish on the Hablemos, escritoras website.

Photo: Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener, by Daniel Mordzinski.