ACWWS Talk Di Tings: With Ana Menéndez (part 2)

But I felt even just from that little section that you read that I knew what I needed to know in him, and that he could be John or Karl or Henry, it didn't matter. But also that it became clear to me because he was this — he himself is a straight line, you know, and I thought without interruption, and I thought what a metaphor for privilege. So immediately I saw, or I could envision, who he could look like. And of course that may be different in different spaces, right? A person with privilege in the U.S. might look different from a person with privilege in Jamaica or in Haiti or somewhere else. But I got the very clear sense that it was good that he didn't have a name then, because you could just insert him somewhere. Because what a name does is that it can also, because of the cultural nuances around naming, it can also place you.

But without a name, you can then become a metaphor, you know, and other people can step into your body. You know, we're talking about craft here. Yes, and one of the things that I love a lot about a lot of Grace Paley's work, for instance, she has this wonderful short story, prose poem, whatever you call it, called 'Mother,' and it's — you know, I sometimes see mothers standing in the doorway. It's an absolutely stunning and devastating story, and mother never has a name. And I teach that story often and say exactly what you just said, not as eloquently, but this idea that if we name the mother, if Grace Paley were to name the mother and name her, you know, Helen Rosenberg, that's somebody else's mother, not my mother. But in keeping her 'mother,' all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, and the story really hits you because it is an intergenerational, first generation in the United States, daughter of immigrants. And at one point the mother says, 'You know, you're turning communist, we solved that, your father and I, we followed that back in the old country, that's nonsense.' I mean, again, I'm paraphrasing Grace Paley in a horrible way. It's an absolutely beautiful story. And you see that all of a sudden it cuts through the years, it cuts through the cultural differences, to become a very personal piece. And that's what not naming gives you.

Yes, and that is very much a part of craft, right? When we're deciding whether to name our characters, and what we make, we give them specificity by naming them. That's maybe something that you need for the story, right? But we also close off identification, yes, in a lot of ways with the reader. And we disinvite the reader to create alongside of us. The more detail we get, and so it's always a balance between giving the reader enough to participate, but staying in control of the story that you want to tell. And it's always a trade-off.

I think, you know, it's what all writers are always telling young people: just read, read a lot. I think we came to this in history years primarily as readers. And I always say this, and sometimes I'm among real writers and they cringe, but I always say if somebody said to me, 'You cannot write another word for the rest of your life,' I would probably be okay with it. If somebody said, 'You cannot read ever again,' I wouldn't be able to go on. And so reading has to be a narrow amount, I think. And then close reading, you know, attentive, mindful, conscious, the same way one lives a good life, right? Which is with awareness, with generosity, with attention. And to read that way, to read with these questions: when the story annoys you, what is it about it that you know? When you keep thinking about it, what is it that you know? Maybe think about it. And then applying that to your own story and the way that you tell your own stories. Because the crafting of fiction is many, many moving parts, right? There is personal experience that you bring into it, there is your reading background, there is your life. All of us bring absolutely unique things to the work. And how do we balance all of that with all the things that we've learned? It's an enormous undertaking, a lifelong apprenticeship, really.

I have so many. I always, when people ask this question, I go home and think, 'I can't believe I didn't mention so-and-so and so-and-so,' because there are so many. You know, different people at different times in my life and for different areas, right? Audre Lorde — I never forget, you know, 'Poetry is not a luxury.' That's always front and center as a woman. I think, and there's a woman from a group that's not represented many times in the literature that we learned, as a theorist and a poet. Audre Lorde, I feel like that's who partially raised me. I feel like I wasn't fully raised as a woman until that. Virginia Woolf, in 'A Room of One's Own,' she talks about the bad food and horrible situation at her women's college, and she says, 'Why didn't our mothers work and bequeath these institutions that would take care of us the way the fathers took care of their sons?' Why does such a powerful thing? She says, 'Why didn't they?' Because they had 13 children and they were working at home. When I remember my first read of 'A Room of One's Own' many years ago as an undergraduate, or even before, I didn't make as great an impact as it did in subsequent readings, as I became a woman and as I became an engineer in the world. And to realize that these structures of privilege affect you even if you're not aware of them, and in fact affect you more. And so Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich — and a lot of them are poets, right? You'll see which ones. They are the same age group, yes. And speaking about the things that still continue to affect us, I think they continue to resonate with our work and with our lives. And then, growing up, you talk about — I think writers will say this and love this idea of a writer raising you. And so I had many parents. Growing up, I really liked Robert Cormier. He wrote 'The Chocolate War' and 'I Am the Cheese.' They weren't your typical children's books, but yes, they were dark and they were psychologically nuanced, and they were very important for me as a budding writer. I think Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden — more than Nancy Drew, the Trixie Belden books, which were about really strong girls solving mysteries and crimes. And you sort of learn from that without knowing that you're learning about women, even while at school you're just learning about great men. And so that's important, a potent counterbalance. And then in recent years, I am a huge, huge fan of W.G. Sebald. I really love the work that he did in terms of immigration. I think 'The Emigrants' is probably one of my favorite books of the last few years. 'Austerlitz,' of course. And what he does in layering time and memory, and constructing memory as a fiction itself, as a kind of species of fiction, it's very important to my work. It is important because memory is so unreliable that it's another form of story, another form of storytelling.

Well, first let me say that you generously say that we both rediscovered her. I actually discovered her through you, so thank you. I knew her work in another — I can't remember the other — she writes about curdling in culture. I knew that many years ago from a graduate course that I took, but I was not familiar with this essay. You shared it with me, so I'm very grateful because it gave form and substance to an essay that I was writing, and I saw that it made the whole essay cohere. I know it sounds very — I'm grateful for you introducing me to that. But to the question of how have my travels and journalism influenced me: very much. Because I grew up — I was born in L.A. and grew up in Tampa, but really I came of age in Miami in a very kind of monolithic group. We were, you know, I went to high school where we were almost 90% Cubans, and not just Cubans but middle class, poor, with the same kinds of backgrounds, parents came at the same time, we believed the same things, we moved in the same circles, we all knew each other. And it wasn't incredibly — my graduating class was incredibly successful, I'm very proud of that. But at the same time, it was a very, very small slice of the world. And I always say that the first time I moved to India 20 years ago, now more than 20 years ago, India stripped me of my vanities because I had grown up very sheltered. I knew all about the Cuban suffering and the human story, and that was it. Living in another place is an incredible education, and more than being a tourist, more than visiting, you have to live in a place. You have to wake up with the sound of people selling things on the street, you have to go to bed with the sound of the temple or the call to prayer or the bells of the cathedral. And after days and days and days, you come to see your own place in the world. And not that it diminishes you — I think it expands you. It's not that you feel smaller in the world, you feel part of the big world. And it was the best education that I could have had. Journalism is also the best education I could have had as a writer. Not just because of the craft that it teaches you — it teaches you to take big amounts of data and make sense of them and put them into understandable chunks, which is important — but also that it forces you outside of yourself. It forces you to literally meet people where they are. And that's a lesson that I carry to this day still. And so, you know, we talk a lot about empathy and understanding the other, and these are good concepts, but how do we put those into practice? We put those into practice by being uncomfortable, by going out there and meeting people where they are, understanding the world from their perspective. And living abroad and being a journalist abroad has enriched my life in ways that I have not even begun to quantify, really. And so, yes, I lived three years in New Delhi, I traveled extensively through Pakistan, through Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, saw war up close, and experienced those personal and professional things. I lived two years in Istanbul, which was fantastic. I was a year in Cairo on a Fulbright, which was one of the greatest years of my life. I met my husband there. And then spent two years in Amsterdam, three years in Maastricht. So it's been a really privileged life.

Yeah, I love the traffic. It's a great question. Is place important for writers? Absolutely, I do. I do think that it's good to write about a place when you're outside of it. And all of my books that have been about Miami have been written outside of Miami. And I think that's important because it gives you, of course, the obvious: it gives you the necessary distance, but it also makes the place a fictional place, which it must become for your writing. You cannot write about the actual place; it is a fictional construct. And being away from it brings that into relief. But it is, of course, important for me to be in Miami for personal reasons. My family is here, my parents are here, all of my cousins, my friends, my school — I'm still in touch with many of them and love them dearly. My sister, of course, our three beautiful kids. So for all those reasons, I'm glad to be back in Miami. And we came back because my husband got a job actually at the University of Miami. And so we came back about five years ago.

Yes, thank you. Yes, that's one of my missions in life: to get artists to become as self-sufficient and efficient as possible in a time in our time and culture that's not necessarily supportive of that. And so we have to take care of ourselves. And I realize that saving half is not possible for the vast majority of us, right? Especially as we get older, we have parents to take care of, we have children. Which is why I like to get to students young and say, at this time of your life, before you have kids, you really have the opportunity to save a lot more than you do. And I think that a lot of students don't because, again, they're not conscious of it. And if I have any message, it's to be always conscious of your choices, of your life, of what you're doing. And then do things with intention, right? If you want to buy that $800 purse, then that's okay. I'm not a Calvinist here. You are allowed pleasures. And in fact, as long as you pay cash for it and in full. If you're borrowing for the $800 purse, then no. But also, pleasure is important, right? We spend on pleasures. I spend an extraordinary amount on travel, which is obscene almost, but I love it, it brings me pleasure. So I'm not going to deny people their pleasures. But do it consciously. Not only should you not borrow — I mean, that goes without saying — but be aware that what that $800 really costs you over the term of your life, because interest — that $800 will grow tremendously over the course of your life. Can you just put it away and get yourself a purse at Target? It's like, make your choices joyfully but with intention, and not be deluded about what this means nothing down the road. Yes, it does mean something, you know.

Yes, thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of 'Taught It Takes.' Until next time, keep your head up, and we'll see you soon.

Yeah, that's fine. I want to go over why, but I want to back.