dominican-novelists

"I often wish I was asked more about the craft of the verse. I spent so many agonizing hours ensuring every line break was precise, every word and repetition chosen with care—because it was important to me to maintain the integrity of the lyric while also advancing the narrative. It’s that tightrope walk I’m studying in other people’s work and am continuously looking to understand further."

"I think I have a sense of how things need to sound, how to pull an audience in with tone, timing, and pacing. That affects a lot of my writing, too, being hyper aware of how an audience might read something. I want what’s happening on the page to mimic what my body would do on stage. A lot of that came out in the audiobook. I think I would have struggled to record the audiobook without having stage experience because it’s a lot of work to maintain that kind of performance voice."

"I try to tell the most authentic stories I can about womanhood and Dominican-ness and Afro-Dominican-ness/Afro-Latinidad that I can. Then I go back in and edit with the eye of who sets the table in this book, who gets left out, what am I saying, and what am I not saying right? I lean in or be more intentional about that. For me, it’s trying to be authentic and mindful of my own biases and questioning those while also just being incredibly truthful since truthfulness is inherently intersectional, right? I can’t not be woman and Black-descendant and culturally Latinx. Everything I write will have that in it."

"Part of it is finding your readers. Sometimes your readers don’t look like you, or come from your same background, but you get a sense of like, they know what I’m trying to do. They’re not telling me what they would do or telling me what their favorite poet would do. They’re telling me “Okay, based off the work you brought into this room, this is what I’m hearing.” That, to me, is such a generous way of reading because it’s reflecting back what you’re doing and you can figure out if it’s working or not. So, figure out who are your people…"

"people read like they eat: Sometimes we want comfort, sometimes we want to work to crack something open…Books truly are nourishment for me."

"(How do you distinguish Y.A. books from adult fiction?) Partly voice, but my own personal ethos is that Y.A. requires hope. I’m less stringent on my requirement for hope in books for adults."

"I don’t think writer’s block is real either…but I do think of it as a response to anxiety that oftentimes when we think [what] we have [is] writer’s block [but] what we may be grappling with is that we are uninspired, and that to make you have to also be taking in, and you have to be taking in at the same kind of level as you want to put out. And so if I’m working on a poetry collection it is helpful when I’m reading poetry or if I’m reading with a writer’s eye… Even if I’m not actively writing I’m always percolating, my brain is trying to make meaning and so I want to give it as much nutritious content as I can if that makes sense. And so I think the other thing we say when we say writer’s block is that we’re just stuck—we’re in the middle of something and maybe we don’t know where it goes or we don’t know how to finish the essay… and so we get anxious and tell ourselves we can’t, and I think both of those have an answer but it’s about figuring out what you’re actually dealing with. So, for me, I feel like writer’s block can often be an easy way to relieve yourself of having to do the work of what is it about creativity and this moment that I am stumbling over and how can I address it, right?"

"In a way, writing has always been lonely, that’s not really a new thing due to the pandemic per se, but it’s nice that it’s kind of forcing us—forcing you—to find ways to kind of work around that. It’s lonely I think in different ways because there’s the possibility of let’s meet up and write or let me go to an open mic and listen to other writers, and I think we’re finding new creative ways to create that community. Writing has always been lonely but everything else also feels lonely [now] and so to create communal relief somewhere—that felt so important."

"I feel like each book requires a different level of research. “The Poet X” was the most closely aligned with my own upbringing, and I know slam poetry [and] poetry styles pretty well, so it was less research for that book. “With the Fire on High” had a little bit more—she’s afro-Puerto Rican, it’s set in Philadelphia and it has to do with culinary school… so I had to dive in there. She’s also a teen parent."

"I didn’t personally have anyone in my family who passed on that crash, but I remember how it ruptured our understanding of each other at that moment—like who was on that flight (AA587 in 2001), what happened, is it terrorism? What does it mean when you lose almost 300 lives in two and a half minutes?"

"I’ve been lucky to travel to DR to the Mariposa Foundation and so speaking with the young women while I was doing workshops there as to their experience with an area that has a high percentage of sex tourism and also child prostitution and so the research sounds haphazard but it was really my trying to locate each character, their reality and make sure that all of this information doesn’t end up in the book that I had a very clear sense of the world that I am trying to write."

"I think I always go into a project imagining that I’m not going to pour too much of myself into it, and I think it helps that I write for teens, so there’s a distance there—between the kinds of things I’m dealing with versus the things you deal with when you’re 16 and there’s a lot of firsts still to encounter. But I do find that often at some point in the draft—perhaps halfway through—there are things that start coming up that are really things I’m dealing with."

"I think so often how people, particularly poets, begin first writing out of heartbreak, out of loss. Like I think most people’s early poems are because they are so emotional over something and this is the only form that feels safe, I can get it out on paper, at least that is how I remember writing and when I often encounter a young poet it is because of a thing that they are almost trying to exercise out of themselves and writing is the way to turn… and that does feel like creating from crisis."

"I also think of how often, when you’re first-generation, your parents don’t have the ability to self-actualize. They are working, or at least my parents were working to make sure there was food on the table, to make sure there was money they could send back to their own families… There wasn’t a lot of time for my mom to say I’m going to take care of myself and this is a practice and a thing i’m going to do outside of church...to be an immigrant in this country there’s a lot of uncertainty and instability you’re constantly dealing with"

"I think that one of the things I've noticed when I've spent time in the Dominican Republic, it's such a diaspora community in terms of who's in the U.S., that even when people feel really satisfied with what they're doing, there's still this desire to see what's in the U.S., what is happening in New York, like, what is this world we're always hearing about?"

"I don't imagine I'll ever write a book for young people that doesn't include an intergenerational theme — for me that was such a big part of growing up. And I think literature that is contemplating the family, you need the parents coming in and they can't be perfect. They can't, you know, save the day on their own."

"my own growth requires me to be able to forgive."

"It's hard to find stability when you're constantly rotating between the place you are and the place you're from."

"I was born and raised in this intersection between Harlem and Columbia University. Very much what felt like in-between worlds. But in a very Dominican immigrant Black community. My journey begins with my listening to my parents tell me stories, and with listening to bolero music and listening to hip hop. I wanted to write music long before I ever considered myself a poet or a writer…"

"But actually, it was teaching. I was an eighth grade English teacher, Prince George’s County, Maryland. I taught at a school that was 78 percent Latinx, almost 20 percent Black. They had never had an Afro-Latina teaching there at all. So here I am in this space where my students are so representative of the spaces I come from, and yet they had never seen a figure in front of them that reflected their background—and my students were struggling readers. So that was where the first kernel of “Maybe my writing is leading towards my offering something to these students.” That was where the idea of a novel first sprang up."

"Every one of my characters is Black. And every one of my characters wrestles with what that means. I’m trying to think about the many ways that people might come to terms with their race and identity and provide young women reading different blueprints. There are many ways you can be you and that you can exist in your Blackness. And here are some questions you might be wrestling with because I know that I’ve kind of sat in, “what do I call myself?”"

"What does it mean to say, “Alright, I can be Black and not be Black American and still be in solidarity with Black Americans.” Recognize perhaps we have similarities, but also, like in supporting you, you might have differences. You might have things that you have going on because you generationally lived in this country that I may not understand. So I can stand here and be like, “I am Black, too, but I will be quiet because right now, this is a different beat. I can learn here.”"

"this isn’t new. I think that’s my biggest thing, right? Negritude has been around. It has been a movement in Latin America for years, for decades. And we are finding the language and doing some deep dives, that also may complicate our understanding of our heritage."

"when it came to having conversations with editors, I felt really prepared to be like, “I want to know how many folks of color you’ve published. I want to know what their trajectories were. I want to know how you support second books.” Right. Not just this one book."

"I think having that longterm vision was helpful. But I want folks to just do the work. Right. Do the research. Information is out there. There’s a lot of ways to hustle even before you’ve been signed to anything."

"I’m still learning a lot. For me, it’s like, “Where could this be going?” Alright, let me do that work now."

"(What book should everybody read before the age of 21?) “The Poet X,” by Elizabeth Acevedo. It’s a stunning story told in verse about a young Dominican poet learning to use her voice and take up space. I think as we grow up and start to discover who we are, we also have to discover what we want to say. Then we have to get comfortable saying it. I think this is the kind of story that makes you feel strong when you’re reading it, and then you can lean on that strength when you need to use your voice and take up space in your real life."

"Elizabeth Acevedo is a national treasure. She does so many things well while being a lovely person. Read everything she writes."

"what I know from experience: that writing is a vocation and a practice over a lifetime, with its ups and downs. It teaches me humility, the great democracy of each time having to start over."

"Mine was an oral culture, full of storytellers, but reading and writing were not encouraged. (No public libraries, no free press!) Coming to the United States suddenly thrust me into a world where I was an alien, where I spoke the language with an accent. This abrupt and painful “translation” led me to the company of books, the homeland of the imagination where all were welcomed. In trying to master my new language of English, I had to pay attention to words, their little reputations and atmospheres, their exact weights and balances, their smells and sounds and textures…"

"In writing about Margarita and Julia, I received a sign in the fall of 1986 that these poems were complete and ready to emerge. I met two women poets who have these names and who have had an impact in my life: Margaret Randall and Julia Álvarez."

"In the worlds of film and television, cultural gringoism is almost pathetic. Mainsteam recognition of Chicano and Chicana homegrown authors did not begin until the discovery that the Raza world could be colorful, amusing, exotic, magical. Rarely was that world projected as full of anger at racism, struggles for justice or revolutions of the body and spirit by women as well as men. Now come the new books of Julia Alvarez and , both with radical political themes. They have garnered flattering reviews, but profound political or social questions raised in both books have gone ignored; most critics seem happier with the romancing...Julia Alvarez, now a professor at Middlebury College, was brought to the United States at age ten by her family to escape Trujillo's repression. After her first successful and lighter book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez took up the challenging task of telling the story of the butterflies. Some Dominicans have berated the author for supposed errors. The book isn't perfect reading; it tells almost nothing about issues of class and color or the Afro-Dominican experience, for example. But the book remains a treasure, for Alvarez has told a story unknown to most people in this country and told it unforgettably. In her last message about the butterflies, the author says: "by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women." This she seeks to correct by making them real people, whose courage is thus made real, too."

"History, I was learning, is the story we tell ourselves about what really happened. My task as a writer/novelist was to try to get as many versions of that reality and then imaginatively construct the story. The fact that there were so many versions of what really happened should not surprise us: After all, we experience history as individuals through our particular characters, personalities, points of view. This reality of how we live history ideally suits the form of a novel, which focuses on “the truth according to character."

"The pies browned, the pastries puckered in the cavernous oven I waited to open."

"Gloved with two potholders, I listened while she told me not long ago a girl could not marry until she could roll her dough so transparent her beloved could read his Bible through it."

"I dreamed of stretching my pastry dough out to cover the earth with a crust so fine my love would think it was nothing but the world at his feet, baked by the summer sun, dusted with cinnamon."

"The tarragon dotted the rice in the cauldron. And now, as if signaled, the spice jars popped open, unladened their far east wonders: cumin, turmeric, saffron, and endives. The aunts each put in a shake of their favorites. The steam unwrinkled their frowns from their faces."

"...the aunts stopped in in the middle of swallows, heads cocked... as if they had heard ...their own baby crying. It needed a pinch more of saffron? Paprika?"

"The uncles ate seconds and rose in a chorus ...empty plates glowed like the eyes of the spellbound."

"I remember the whirr and whine of her black Singer, the gold traceries on the cast iron rod by the wheel that lifted and lowered the needle. Threading, eyepieces, winding the turquoise string through hooks, around miniscule wheels, up and down, her hands clever in labyrinths, ...the needle racing through gingham, poplin, seersucker, cambric, the pedal pressed heavily down with the weight of one woman, eye intent, hands feeding and receiving the fabric."

"threading her needles, winding her threads; the spools sat in their rods in the sewing box, ends tucked in the notch on the flat tops, a palette of greens, laurel, mint, olive, aquamarine, shorts, skirts, blouses, dresses, and nightgowns— better than storebought."

"...the furious whir of the Singer."

"But my house, though protected with charms, can't block the spell mortality has cast... I turn thirty-three."

"My friend Carol says aging evens out the advantage of beautiful women over plain ones. ... Where are the girls who were beautiful?"

"My gay friends ask, Well are you gay or what?"

"33 is the year that Jesus Christ embraced His life... ...Wasn't he crucified at 33, I ask, depressed, deserted by his friends, divorced from god, subject to human laws? Wasn't he the most single finally at 33, meeting his lonely end? Yes..."

"Are we all with acute loneliness, chronic patients trying to recover the will to love? ...Sometimes the love of another wounded one acts like a salve which soothes the dying self but cannot heal our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels like to be human, and we are all well?"

"It's UPS with two parcels! ... a handsome lad, guesses it's my birthday and asks how old I am. He acts surprised he's a decade younger. We linger at the door one of us is not immortal anymore."

"I'm watching a romantic play in Plato's cave; half the time I don't believe in it... Other times I'm so addicted I'm one of the mainliners... hallucinating that in truth a man's body is one of the Absolute Forms. I look around when the houselights come on and see no one!"

"I say, Don't trust those men with better, bigger versions of love if they refuse the small, shabby sample they gave others the tribute of believing it was true."