Let's Walk (with Halli)
Go for a walk with Halli as he chats with creative people about their life and work.
Let's Walk (with Halli)
Valeria Luiselli : Memory, Fiction, and Reality
Valeria Luiselli's literary voice resonates with a rare intensity that comes from inhabiting multiple worlds. Born in Mexico but raised across continents—from South Korea to South Africa, India to Spain—she crafts stories that blur boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and imagination.
In this conversation, Luiselli shares the intricate details of her six-year journey creating her forthcoming novel "Beginning Middle End," which explores how stories shape our perception of reality through a mother-daughter relationship. With remarkable vulnerability, she reveals her writing process—rising at 5 AM to write by hand, starting with atmospheric feelings rather than plots, and collaborating with her teenage daughter to authentically capture a child's perspective.
What makes Luiselli truly revolutionary is her multisensory approach to storytelling. For five years, she's been recording the entire Mexico-US border with sound engineers, creating what she calls "a 24-hour sonic essay" capturing everything from underwater whale songs to children interviewing rivers. This ambitious project reflects her belief that different mediums allow us to experience stories in complementary ways—her novels existing simultaneously as text, sound, and sometimes visual archives.
Luiselli's perspective on fiction challenges conventional thinking: "Fiction is not the opposite of truth," she explains, tracing the word to its Latin root fingere—"to mold something out of clay, to give shape to something already there." This philosophy illuminates why her work feels so alive; she's not inventing from nothing but sculpting meaning from the raw materials of existence.
The conversation culminates in a profound reflection on narrative's power in our lives. "The value we give to our lives is determined by the way we tell the story of ourselves to ourselves," Luiselli observes. In her hands, storytelling becomes more than art—it's a way of making sense of our existence, of anchoring ourselves in an increasingly unmoored world.
Dive into this episode to discover how one of literature's most innovative voices creates work that resonates with both intellectual depth and emotional truth. Then explore Luiselli's books to experience her singular vision firsthand.
Okay, well, good to see you. How are you Good to?
Speaker 2:see you. Good to see you, my friend. Here we are back, back, back again.
Speaker 1:How is how's life? What's happening?
Speaker 2:Life's fabulous. We're just uh been using the time to um eat. I think Los Angeles as a foodie when I every time I say that, all my friends roll their eyes Los Angeles, I think it's literally the most exciting city for food currently I wanna say I say this, of course, very biased, very biased, but the plethora of food we have down here, and everybody gives San Francisco all the flowers.
Speaker 2:You know about that. But San Francisco is 700,000 people. We're like a couple of million down here. So we we have a bigger Chinatown, bigger this, bigger that, just so much yeah insane.
Speaker 2:I mean Ethiopian food, this, this, this regional Indian food, south Thai food, that's like. Actually went this week to Jitlada, which is a legendary Thai place here in Los Angeles, and I mean, jesus Christ, you just don't know how lucky you are when you live here and just walk into a place like that and have your socks knocked off for $40, you know, I love it, obsessed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not a foodie, so I don't relate. I mean, I like food, fine, but I don't remember food. You know, I have friends that will tell me, and my wife is the same. She will talk about food she had 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:Yes, I relate to that.
Speaker 1:I don't. If the food is good enough, then that's fine, and then that's it. I don't remember eating.
Speaker 2:Wow, I mean, just this morning I was texting a friend of mine who's in Rome who was like hey, where do I go in Rome? And I was just like, oh my God, there's a sandwich at this place that still haunts my dreams. I had it in 2023. I'm still thinking about it. It's amazing, I mean. But thank heavens, not everybody's the same. That's a good thing too, you know, because then everybody want to be where I'm at and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:I don't really like parties that much.
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 1:So I want to be social, but I'm not really, and so I joined for half an hour and then I was exhausted and had to escape into the bedroom.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, that was my last night. I don't drink, but I feel hungover just from that 30 minutes of joining that party.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, you're just exhausted from the hang Jesus.
Speaker 1:Yes, all the people there was noise. I mean they're all nice people, but it was just, it was too much.
Speaker 2:No it's all very I mean, it's so funny because I'm a super social person and sometimes even my husband will be like, hey, why don't you go check on so-and-so and see if they want to hang out and blah blah. And I was like, hey, I'm not good with like one-on-one people. I used to. I like to have two or three sometimes to volley.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think the reason is because I am the chatty kathy and I have come to breathe in and out and be like you're not responsible for moving this conversation forward. But then, if I don't, people just sit there in silence and it gets really oppressive. So I'll just start tap dancing and talking. So I'm trying not to do that, the bolder I get, because I'm sometimes like what the hell? Well, I was on the ropes, I didn't even know what I was talking about half the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I do. I actually do enjoy a one-on-one conversation. That's, I mean, that's the premise of this podcast.
Speaker 2:This is true, that's true.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, maybe we should jump into the guest who is?
Speaker 2:Oh my.
Speaker 1:God, yes, who is someone that I'm really looking forward to meeting. I'm really looking forward to meeting. I'm going to go to New York soon and chat with her.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Her name is Valeria Luiselli. I did put a little bit of an Italian spin on that, but she is actually Mexican, yeah, and she comes from a very eclectic background. She traveled a lot as a kid and I think I've been reading a couple of her books and I'm hoping to have read more once I meet her Got it. She is fantastic. She weaves together reality and fiction in a way where you sort of lose touch a little bit. It feels like every word she uses is intentional, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure she rewrites these things over and over again. It feels like every word she uses is intentional. Yeah, and I'm sure she rewrites these things over and over again because every sentence feels so deliberate.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And yeah, and people have noticed her obviously for the tremendous work she puts out and she has put out, I think, four or five books now. She has won a bunch of awards. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wow, she won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best fiction. Yeah, I mean New York Times bestseller. She's got all the flowers.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's fabulous.
Speaker 1:And it's very much. Yes, she deserves it, at least from everything I've written. So I'm just really excited to go and chat with her and get to know her a little better.
Speaker 2:Are you a big reader? You read a?
Speaker 1:lot. Yes, I really like to read. Over the years it's gone more. It's a lot of audiobooks now. I like to go on long walks and I like to listen to books, as I do that.
Speaker 2:It's one of my favorites, hence the let's Walk. I love it, I love it, I love it. I love it because I'm not a big reader I need to read more, but I do enjoy audiobooks and I'm super excited to see what Valeria has to offer, and then maybe I'll pick up a book, because I certainly need it.
Speaker 1:Nobody's ever gotten worse by reading something Well, maybe somebody, but we'll see, I think there's a handful of bad books, but overall they're pretty good.
Speaker 2:Well, all right, let's get on with it, and I can't wait to talk about it afterwards. See you on the other side, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you, bye, bye-bye, all good, so how are you? I'm good, yeah, I'm fine. All good, so how are you?
Speaker 3:I'm good.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm fine. Yeah, I just finished the novel, so it's a period like a weird limbo period of wait and rest and vacuum, but I've been working on it for six years, so it's it's been a tour de force and it's done, is it?
Speaker 1:it's?
Speaker 3:done it's, I'm rewriting it. I write in Spanish and English and I'm rewriting it in Spanish now and I'm almost done for the first draft in Spanish. So that's not really done and I'll have to do edits in English when I once I start working more directly with my editor. But it's, it's done, it's done, it's done.
Speaker 1:Are you happy with it?
Speaker 3:I actually am. It's not easy for me to feel satisfied with work and just say this is good, this is great. It takes me a long time to get to that place, but after six years of hard work, yes I am. I am satisfied.
Speaker 1:When will it be released?
Speaker 3:Editorial processes are really long. The release date in Spanish will be February 2026. But in English I'm not sure. I'm hoping that not after the fall of 26. But sometimes it just takes a really long time to put everything together.
Speaker 1:Do you have to fall into a slot?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's some of that. Yeah, there's a slot you know backlogs in editing. There's books that are, you know, that have already been printed, that still need to get out there. Especially with big publishers it's like a slow process.
Speaker 1:What do you do after? Do you start writing another one, or do you start writing straight away, or are you then in just limbo until this one is released, and then you have space to work on something new?
Speaker 3:It depends always that saxophone was really beautiful, by the way, it depends. There's a novel that I've been wanting to write for a couple of years that's very outside my usual experimental space. That's a little bit more genre.
Speaker 3:I really like vampires okay usually my fiction is like much more literary a little more brainy maybe and nerdy, but uh, two years ago I started pole dancing okay, because I had a lot of hip issues and someone someone told me you know, you need to strengthen your muscles and I tried everything and it seemed so boring Pilates and gyms. And then I went pole dancing and I loved it. I used to be a dancer when I was younger.
Speaker 1:What kind of dance?
Speaker 3:Contemporary ballet, and when I was even younger, I did a lot of gymnastics. So pole dance became it's like a combination of the happiness of hanging in the monkey bars when you're little and the freedom of dance, and so I decided that I would be talking to a lot of the women that dance in those spaces pole dance and night dancers and in a moment of political situation like this one, so obscure, I thought that writing something inside the pole world, inside the vampire genre of women taking taking action and taking revenge against these bastards, was really my perfect space for so pole dancing vampires yeah, okay, so this is, but I think I'm gonna pen it like I'm not writing it under my name, at least, so I have the freedom to not be so myself, to really just like inhabit some other mind and really feel it as a playground.
Speaker 3:I really am needing a playground. Yeah, I'm gonna try that. And and I've been working with sound for a long time for five years so that's ongoing and between the novels I work in one way I do work with.
Speaker 3:I work with two collaborators who are sound engineers and sound artists. I have no idea about the technicalities of it so much. I do more sort of the conceptualizing and the writing, and we've been recording the Mexico-US border for five years just with the premise of like, what does the border sound like? And what is coming together with these five years of recording so far is a 24-hour sonic essay of the Mexico-US border from Multiple locations or one. It's like a road trip that starts in Tijuana actually starts underwater and we recorded with hydrophones.
Speaker 3:We recorded whales and underwater sounds.
Speaker 3:And then you move up from the water into the beach, which is like the place where the wall dips into the ocean, the very eerie beach called Playa de Tijuana and it's called Imperial Beach on the US side, and then we drive along the border in pieces.
Speaker 3:So it's like we're getting bits and pieces of the border talking to people, everybody that wants to talk to us, but also recording dust, storms and rainstorms and coyotes and birds and tons of cities and border crossings and migrants and border patrol, and so it's like a very rich sonic landscape and it ends in the Gulf of Mexico and we're about halfway there after five years. It's like a decade long project. We had funding until now from the Harvard Art Lab and from the Dia Foundation, this museum art collection, and now we have to reboot. We're halfway there. Now. We're rebooting, resting a little bit as well, because we've been traveling a little too much and too intensely, and then we'll restart, hopefully late this year or maybe next year, recording the other half, which is the hardest half because it's Texas and it's all a liquid border.
Speaker 3:It's all the hardest half because, it's Texas and it's all a liquid border, it's all the river right so that's a trickier part to navigate. Um, we only did some, some Texas recordings so far in a small town called San Ignacio, with children interviewing the river. That was a very beautiful experience. We did a workshop with children from the town and then we just went out to the river with them and and they they held interviews with the river, like asking it, like why are you so green and why do you wait?
Speaker 2:why did you kill my uncle?
Speaker 3:and it was very moving actually. Then the other little bit of texas we recorded was, um, kind of horrific for me, but it was, uh, the space launchings that leon elon musk funds. They're right there on the border. It it's called Starbase, and we arrived in Starbase when they had just launched one of their successful rockets that went up and came back down. So it was like Woodstock there, like just like thousands of people that had come from all over the country. They're like they call themselves a space community and they're convinced that they're going to go to Mars one day. And they're just there. You know, there's murals of Elon Musk everywhere and like photos of him. Like it's really like a sect, and so we camped out there with these people and spoke to them for days and talking about Mars, and it was very surreal. But yeah, so we're just sort of recording everything that we can.
Speaker 3:How will you publish this audio, because this audio has so many different roots, right? So we have already a very beautiful little book called Echoes from the Borderlands and it's study number one, and so this is that. That's like a 70 minute compression of the first 12 hours of the border journey, and it's a book. It's a beautiful little thing where there's a QR code and you can listen to all the archive while you read, and each page is one minute of sound. So there's like different layers of sound. There's a more narrative strand, which is what I write, that kind of takes you along the journey or kind of in a kind of road trip, and then there's transcriptions of all the other sounds that you're hearing. So that's one way that it shows.
Speaker 3:But then there's we had a sound installation in a gallery in chelsea, which you know I I'm not so fond of sound installations. To be honest. I find them a little. I can't really concentrate, but a lot of people do, you know, so people would stay there for three or four hours listening. They were like just listening stations and like is there any visual?
Speaker 3:we are documenting visually. One of the persons in the team takes analog photographs, so we have a visual documentation of where we, where we record. But the visual component is the least important. I think it's really more a sound journey. And then the idea that I like the best but we've never been able to do it yet is to partner with radio stations along the border line so that we could time things so that they could play a section of the piece that corresponds to the radius of their antenna on a loop, so that when you're driving anywhere along the border you can catch that signal and listen to whatever section you're driving through. So you're listening to the section of space that you're driving through, but it's like an echo of the past. But because it's also very archival right You're listening to. We record a lot of field recordings, but we also are retrieving a lot of sounds from archives.
Speaker 1:You could do this with an app.
Speaker 3:Or it could be an app.
Speaker 1:Or you have, we're not very techie though.
Speaker 3:Well, my guys are very techie with sound, but not with apps and stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, let me know if you want to help, because that's not a complicated thing. You would have geolocation turned on and then you can drive along the border and play the sound that corresponds to where you are.
Speaker 3:To where you are because the app is synchronizing. Yeah, that would be amazing. We could just have something like that. That would be another way definitely.
Speaker 1:I can help you with that if you want, oh that would be really cool.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, I would love to show you more about the project. It's a very ambitious project, but then when we realized how big it was, we were like, okay, we thought it was going to be like a two-year project. And then we're like, no, this is like a decade long project and we just have to do it, you know, very meticulously, very lovingly, and yeah, so we're halfway there. Halfway there, we're going to reboot, to do more fundraising and then do more trips and then continue. But this, yeah, this is a weird moment. It used to be kind of easier to fundraise in the us for these things, but now have you asked for anything that you use? The words environmental justice, social justice, immigration, immigrants or any of that is a like a red alert yeah, it's been stricken from a lot of these yeah it's no no yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I'm trying to find a language that's different, like the american landscape instead of environmental justice. The voices of the Americans, something, something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting, there are words now that are banned basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah they are. It's insane.
Speaker 1:By the free speech people.
Speaker 3:Exactly, they're the new woke. They were complaining about their wogues being people that cancel. No, they're there, the hyperwogue.
Speaker 1:Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3:I grew up in a lot of places. I grew up in Costa Rica and South Korea and South Africa and India and Mexico, where I was born, and then I lived in Spain and here in New York and a little bit in France.
Speaker 1:Were your parents diplomats.
Speaker 3:My father. Yeah, well, first they both worked in NGOs, so that's how we started leaving the country and traveling. And then, yeah, my dad was a diplomat. He would probably not approve of my saying this, but I think he was a bit of a rogue diplomat because he was never like a career diplomat. He would just get presidential appointments directly when they wanted him far away but close under their watch, particularly when we went to Korea, which was in the late 80s, and my dad had a very difficult relationship with the president at that time, salinas de Gordari, and so there was no other place on earth that seemed as far away as Korea.
Speaker 3:For Mexico in the 80s there were very few relationships between. There wasn't like really an economic relationship between the country. So for us it was like living, yeah, in Mars, not not Korea itself, but in terms of the Mexico-US I mean Mexico-Korea relations. But then South Africa was a little different because it was more. It was during the Mandela administration and my father had been an international observer in the elections, in the first democratic elections after apartheid. Then the government Mexican government asked him to stay and to open the first Mexican embassy there. So we were there during the entire Mandela administration, which was really beautiful. It was like a very luminous moment of South Africa that didn't ever return, but those years were luminous.
Speaker 1:What does that kind of movement do to your sense of place and belonging in the world? Do you feel like you have a home?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think I feel at home in many places, but I also quite fundamentally feel unanchored and maybe you know that's. I find that anchoring. In writing, I think I like when I feel most untethered and feel disquiet about that is when I'm not writing. When I'm not writing, I don't feel that I'm anywhere. I feel that I'm not touching ground. I feel disconnected from people and space and the sense of time. And when I am writing, even though you know, even though it occupies so much of my mind and my heart, I can be speaking but I'm also working things out, but strangely I'm very much more connected to people and conversation and my kids and my love. And when I am writing, that's when I feel most anchored. I don't know if it has to do with having moved around so much or if it's something that some of us feel more existentially and that we work it out in different ways. You know, I don't know.
Speaker 1:And when did you start writing?
Speaker 3:When did I start writing? I think I loved writing like as a physical activity from when I was very young, because I remember I used to play before I could write that I was writing, just like filling notebooks with like you know Scribbles. Scribbles, scribbles and I was like, wow, it was like this.
Speaker 1:So I suppose I really notebooks with, like you know, scribbles, scribbles, scribbles.
Speaker 3:So I suppose do you remember those moments?
Speaker 1:I do remember them with like do you remember, did you feel like you were writing, even though you didn't have, uh, the alphabet that you were writing?
Speaker 3:specific thoughts yeah, because I was telling myself a story yeah I was like who knows what I was saying to myself.
Speaker 3:But I remember very like I remember the room where I was in. I remember, like these notebooks perfectly and the big pens that I used to fill them with lines. And then, yeah, and shortly when I learned how to write, I started. I was in Korea, I didn't speak English, I was learning English and at the same time I was learning how to read and write. So I was like five, six years old and I found it very hard to pay attention to my classes because I didn't understand the language.
Speaker 3:But then I was starting to learn words, so I would, and I was starting to learn how to write them. So I would write them in these little notebooks that I would make with, like you know, folding paper, and then I would write words and eventually those words became a sentence or two sentences, and then, and eventually, those words became a sentence or two sentences. And then, eventually, and you know my, my teachers at first, I remember they complained to my parents, but then they realized that it was the only way that I was kind of quiet and there so I guess it's the same now.
Speaker 3:It's like when I'm, when I take a pen and a few pieces of paper, I'm, I'm, just I'm there in space and time is that still how you write with pen and paper?
Speaker 3:I do. Yeah, my first, everything, my first thoughts. Uh, my first, uh, you know, morning waking into writing. I used to write at night when I was younger, until very late at night I just smoke a lot, drink coffee until three in the morning, whiskey, whatever, and until I was like in my early 30s and then my body was like uh-uh, and so then I had a period where I just had to reinvent my habits and relationships writing, and then I started waking up at five to write a cup of coffee early morning and write by hand and then, yeah, that's how I began writing this novel for the past six years. It's called beginning, middle end, beginning middle end.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like a story should be told it's about, about the sense of time in for the past six years it's called Beginning Middle End, beginning Middle End, beginning Middle End, yeah, like a story should be told.
Speaker 3:It's about the sense of time in the world right now, what's happening to our sense of time, the sense of endings, and how do we begin? How do we begin again? How do we begin again in life after big endings? But yeah, I write by hand until I'm like very deep in the process of already, you know, having I already have a lot written down on the screen, and then I do just wake up to that not to make notes.
Speaker 1:And how do you begin? Do you start with characters? Do you start with themes story?
Speaker 3:That's a very good question. I don't know if it always starts the same way. I think I start with like, with something very just, like feeling, but not like an emotion, not like sadness or nostalgia, but but like a feeling of, like an atmospheric feeling, like, oh, I want this world feel like this like the way a moment feels.
Speaker 1:What's the feeling for the book that you just finished?
Speaker 3:I think the feeling for that book has a lot to do with like a nostalgia of the present, a feeling that like a hyper-consciousness of the fleetingness of the present. So the present is recorded, kind of as it slips away. The two characters are a mother and a daughter. The daughter is like 12 years old. She's also in that transition between childhood and adolescence, you know, when consciousness becomes a little, you know, less luminous, more grays, more nuanced as well. Yeah, she's kind of leaving behind childhood and has a lot of childhood memories that are false because her mother is a fiction writer.
Speaker 1:Is this solved from the point of view of the daughter?
Speaker 3:The point of view of both of them. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you have a 12-year-old daughter?
Speaker 3:I don't, I have a 15-year-old and a 4-year-old, okay. But yes, it was actually very much written in collaboration with her, like through these years. I would ask her hey, maya, so do you think a 12-year like say this or do this? She's like, of course not, like obviously, that's like totally wrong. So we would sit and kind of do like writing room sessions. Yeah, she's very, she's very intelligent and has a sense of like she has an x-ray vision of narrative. I think that that was very, very. It was very, I don't know quite marvelous for me to discover that that she has such a like natural sense of foreshadowing. She doesn't, she wouldn't sense of foreshadowing, she wouldn't call it foreshadowing, but how you plant something in a story here and then it comes back later and the presentiment of it coming was always there building up. So, yeah, I don't know. I had great conversations with her during these years to the point where I told her hey, do you want me to credit you in written by Valeria Luceli in collaboration, and she was so snobby about it. She was like, well, I don't know, I don't know Whatever doesn't do. Well, I was like, okay, fine, but yeah, now we're moving on to this kind of really exciting version of the novel.
Speaker 3:You know I work a lot in translation. I write it in English and I write a version in Spanish and now I'm starting to conceptualize and think about the sound version of the novel with my team that I work with, but also with my partner, charles, who's a sound engineer also and he owns a recording studio here Really great place called CDM Studios. So we're thinking poor guy has read the novel three times already. Now he's reading it a fourth. But he helped me out a lot reading it out loud so I could hear him reading and I could see where my rhythm on the page wasn't really the rhythm that I wanted to.
Speaker 3:But now he's reading it a last time, just marking all the sound, all the sonic elements of it. It's like a sonic map of the novel so that we can go to the place where it takes place, which is in Sicily, in the Aeolian Islands, where supposedly the wind comes from according to Greek mythology. I'm sure the Scandinavians have another origin of it and we're going to go record those sounds, mostly sounds of water, underwater rain, rainstorms, streams, the sounds of fire in the volcano. So he wants to lower the drone with a hydrophone into the lava obviously not in the lava, but to record lava sounds, the sounds of different forms of sounds of earth. So we have a geophone that you can stick into the ground as well and hear sounds from the point of view of the earth. And then, of course, wind.
Speaker 3:It's a very windy novel, but it's very much like the elements in the Greek traditional sense, the pedoclean elements the four elements are like the kind of Greek chorus in the novel, so when we go into its sound version, the idea is that those are present in a way that they cannot be on text. It's a translation in the sense that you won't have those on text, but in the audio version you won't have the other element that you do have on text, which is a photographic archive of the novel. I take Polaroids while I write, so those are on paper but they won't be on text, and it's just like different forms of relating to the same material, right?
Speaker 1:So the audiobook will have all the audio that you're recording.
Speaker 3:That we're recording on-site. Everything will be recorded where the novel happens. Yeah, yeah, it will.
Speaker 1:And is that feeling of sort of nostalgia for the present? Is that what I connect that to is I have children and you see them growing up and you know that every moment is precious and you're in the moment, or I'm often in the moment, and I think this is really special and I'm going to miss this later on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it does exactly happen a lot when we see our children, because you are conscious of time and time passing through them in a way that you don't see it with almost anything else. Maybe you see it with your parents as they age. It's a different kind of nostalgia, it's much slower, slower, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean time passes slower when we're children, so we see them grow old, our parents, but we don't see it the way it happens. The transformation in our children is just. There's a lot of vertigo in seeing time that way, right. So I agree, I think it does happen a lot. It's like a parental gaze on the world. Yeah, the fleetingness of that and the impulse to record it right. Yeah to to get some to just put some of its feeling on paper or on sound or whatever. How old are your kids?
Speaker 1:they're 8 and 13 oh nice, you know those ages, and I guess I mean probably all the, but at least up till, I assume, until they're 20, 25, they change every year, so fast.
Speaker 3:So fast.
Speaker 1:I've been away now for four weeks and I think I'm going to go home to new kids. Yeah, you will. Yeah, you will, especially the younger one, the eight-year-old one. You know, he will jump between or or things that he's fascinated with very quickly. Yeah, he blinked, there was something new yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 3:and the 13 year old, like that age too, like they're still children one minute, and then they, you know, then something in their consciousness shifts and you can see how they're already, you know, moving towards something, you know, more adult, more mature, more complex, but then the next minute they're children, moving towards something more adult, more mature, more complex, but then the next minute they're children again. And it's a very interesting age because they're really like tick-tocking, like a pendulum more than a tick-tock between childhood and a more grown-up consciousness.
Speaker 1:Do you write a lot of your work in collaboration.
Speaker 3:No, I write very much Well, I don't know yes and no, like there's a part of my work that's deeply solitary and I require, you know, long periods of solitude and hours of solitude a day to reach a kind of concentration that allows me to then reach a level of depth that's not surface.
Speaker 1:Do you forget yourself once you're in a flow, or yeah, I guess?
Speaker 3:that's a way of saying and forget like I. I inhabit the thought or the feeling completely. In that sense, yes, I do when I get to that level of concentration, but that requires, you know, a lot of solitude and days and days of repeating that same thing, where then you set your consciousness up for that deeper plunge. It doesn't happen just like that. But then, yeah, a lot of my books actually have been written in different forms of collaboration.
Speaker 3:There's one demented book I wrote that I enjoyed writing.
Speaker 3:It's really kind of a demented book but it was very fun to write, first of all because I didn't know I was writing a book.
Speaker 3:I was really just in a very fun back and forth between a group of workers in a juice factory in Mexico City and me, and so I would write like a short installment, no more than 20 pages or so, and send it to the factory. It would get printed there and on Wednesday evenings, when they finished their turn, they volunteered to come together in a kind of reading group and read the installment out loud to each other, and then they would comment it and criticize it and suggest ideas and they would record themselves in just audio and then I would receive that and then write the next installment for them. But then I would bring in their stories, and sometimes some of them as characters, and it went on for months. It turned eventually into that book, the Story of my Teeth, about a person who auctions people's teeth in big auctions but gives them value through the stories he tells about them. As things are in terms of added value right, things don't have necessarily.
Speaker 1:The stories give them value.
Speaker 3:Yeah, value themselves. The stories, narrative, narrative wrap something, endow something with, with a value when it didn't necessarily have one before and they're famous purple's teeth yes, like plato and aristotle and virginia wolf.
Speaker 1:Well, they're not actually their teeth, or is that unclear?
Speaker 3:it's unclear because you never know the the narrator is not quite reliable. So no, it's not for another teeth really.
Speaker 1:And it's an auctioneer. He sells these teeth to people that then, through the stories, gives them the value of connecting it to a real person that is famous or known. And that becomes their value.
Speaker 3:And that becomes the value. Yeah exactly becomes a value, and that becomes a value yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:I studied economics. I didn't write my thesis, I quit. Before it came to that, the thesis that I wanted to write was about value oh, interesting, about value in the sense of adding value. Well, what creates value?
Speaker 3:Beyond demand and supply. Yeah, especially when value, because it's Beyond like a demand and supply.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, especially when you think about it, there are things that are commodities, and those are often you know. They get lower and lower in price, but then art or a lot of the things we value in life don't have any intrinsic value. There is no.
Speaker 3:There's no use value.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't use value. Yeah, you can't use them. If you were in a different situation, they'd be worthless.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a painting, for example.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Beyond the contemplation of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're in a desert dying of thirst, what good is a painting?
Speaker 3:I mean, maybe it'll just be beautiful to look at it in your last moments of life, right you?
Speaker 1:know, yeah, but you know there's my kingdom for a horse idea of you know, in certain situations something that holds a lot of value becomes worthless, and something that has no value or very little value becomes priceless.
Speaker 3:Absolutely Well, I think. I mean as a writer, I think that that value really comes I don't know if primarily, but I would maybe argue that primarily through storytelling and narrative, like what discourse is formed around a thing, whatever that thing may be a commodity or an art piece, or even something more ephemeral and abstract commodity or a or of an art piece, or or even something more ephemeral and abstract.
Speaker 1:Right, there's something in in what you say about things, or how you weave words around some, something that endows, endows things with value yes, because then later, when I uh, I had a creative agency and we did a lot of brand work and the same thing as you were saying there it's. You know what's the difference between this thing and this thing? Kind of're kind of the same thing. It's just how you package it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can sell it for a lot more. If you have a good story and if you have something that people feel that it's more valuable than the other thing, that is the same thing, basically.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, yeah, yeah, but we are made of words. Yeah, I mean even beyond value, just like the value of things. Like words, yeah, I mean every like, even beyond value, just like the value. Value of things, like the value we give to our lives and the meaning we give to our lives is very determined by the way we tell the story of ourselves to ourselves right, like we can.
Speaker 3:we can have a version of our life that, like you know, sinks us into a version of ourself that's uh, dire and andized and has suffered and has been whipped around and abandoned. Or we can also tell a version of our, you know, choose the events of our lives and decide to tell a story that's more about survival and about bravery and about resilience and that really determines the way you are in the world, the way you sit in time and experience and love others. And I don't want to say that it's all about language and it's all about writing or fiction or narrative, but it is such a powerful thing.
Speaker 1:And what is your inner story, what is the story you tell to yourself about you?
Speaker 3:Hmm, that's an interesting question. I mean, I don't think I've ever told it from beginning to end. Maybe I'll do that exercise if I live long enough to have a wise thing to say at the end. I think now, like in my early 40s and in a much more luminous place in my life now than I was, maybe, you know, 10 years ago, I like to tell myself a story that's more about having had a lot of good luck or having been able to stand up again after big blows. I think I like to tell myself that parenthood is such a difficult thing but you mess up easily. But I see my daughters, I they're usually these two glowing things. So I think I like to tell myself, okay, I've done something. Okay, like it's not, I've given them the fundamental, which is like unrestricted love, unconditional love, that I think that if we feel that as a base in our lives, the unconditionality of being loved, we have a strong place to begin right. Yeah, and then I think I've been. I think I've been lucky with things.
Speaker 3:I believe in luck very much you do I do, yeah, because I unfortunately don't believe in god. I would really. So I have to believe in something a little, you know, more unexplainable, and I would love to eventually arrive at a place in my life where I can embrace a bigger belief in God or the divine in a bigger way. I'm not there yet. My consciousness is not evolving.
Speaker 1:I'm in the same place, although I feel like there are glimmers, the little rays that sometimes come in where I feel the presence of something bigger, but usually it's a closed box.
Speaker 3:Yeah, presence of something bigger, but usually it's a closed box. Yeah, and I'm in the dark. Yeah, me too. And the most I can say in those moments that glimpse is like okay, thank you, there you are.
Speaker 1:Whatever, whatever this is hi do you feel like you had that base of unconditional love?
Speaker 3:yeah, I I think, yes, fundamentally. Yes, I do think that I experienced a lot of solitude during my childhood, but maybe not abandonment Solitude, yes, but maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Speaker 1:Self-imposed solitude.
Speaker 3:No, not that. Some of it maybe yes, some of it maybe Like for example, I remember perfectly well when I was 12, over 11, my mom had just kind of decided to leave the traditional structure of the family for a while.
Speaker 1:What does that?
Speaker 3:mean she decided to join a revolutionary movement in Mexico and decided to move to the jungle. To be part of this important insurgency in the south of Mexico, the Zapatistas and my father and I went to South Africa to live. So that was definitely a moment of a big rupture for me.
Speaker 1:How, old were you.
Speaker 3:I was 10.
Speaker 1:Did you feel abandoned.
Speaker 3:I think I felt confused and sad, but I wouldn't have called it abandonment. Then I think, maybe in later narratives of my life I did say to myself the word abandonment. But now, you know, narrative changes, thank goodness, and now I don't feel that it was an abandonment.
Speaker 1:I feel that you understand her better.
Speaker 3:I understand her reasons better and her need to also, you know, find a meaning in her life. She's always been very deeply, deeply connected to a sense of social justice that not everybody has. It's been a commitment in her life. So in one moment she put that in front of other values family values, she came back.
Speaker 3:She came back. Yeah, she came back, and now that I'm an adult, for example, she's been such a present grandmother. I wouldn't have been able to do anything of the things that I've been able to do as a writer, because I've been a single mother now for five or six or seven years and you know I have to travel for work and isolate myself to work. She's been incredibly present all these years. I mean for longer than that, but especially these seven years and yeah, I don't know, she's a magnificent presence for my daughters and fundamental for me too.
Speaker 1:Your dad is still around.
Speaker 3:My dad is still around. He's a little more detached right now from the world. His mind is a little forgetful. A brilliant man with a humongous imagination, an economist that is a daydreamer as well, and I don't know. He's a. He's quite an extraordinary person, and it's always sad to see your parents age.
Speaker 1:But it is a good time to detach from reality.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're right too. You know now all he does all day long he writes these like short stories about astronauts going to space and he's writing. He's been for years now writing a book about how Latin America should be like one great nation, always dreaming about the great big family of Latin America, and he collects little cars like a 12-year-old and he's very happy. Those three things occupy his mind. So I think well, you know, when I I was 80 and I can wake up every day to writing like that and I wouldn't collect little cars, but maybe yeah, maybe collect something like little matchbox yeah little matchbox cars yeah, what was your first book?
Speaker 3:my first book, um, is called papeles falsos in spanish I wrote in spanish and it's called Sidewalks in English and it's just a collection of essays little essays, about exile and bilingualism and writing and reading. It's a very kind of. They're very walking essays. They're very like in the tradition of walking through cities and being an eroving eye or a meandering eye. I was very young.
Speaker 1:How old were you.
Speaker 3:I was 21 when I started writing notes, never thinking that they would form part of a book, never thinking that I could write a book. And I finished when I was 24.
Speaker 1:It gave me years of collecting little things.
Speaker 3:But I have love for that book because there's a kind of freedom that you write with when you don't know that you're going to write a book that you never get again. So it's written with a lot of freedom and I wrote it in Spanish because I had grown up outside Spanish and outside Mexico City and I really wanted to write myself into my city and write myself into my language, my maternal language. So it's a book very much about Mexico City. It meanders out to other places but it's centered around Mexico City.
Speaker 1:In some of your work you mix reality, at least the reality of our world, into the reality of your world. What was that part of that book as well?
Speaker 3:I think you know, that's very much part of my latest book, beginning Middle End, the one I just finished, because it asks itself, you know, what is our responsibility in storytelling and how do we modify the outlook of the world that younger generations have? By telling the world a certain way, by articulating its narrative in a specific way and altering, therefore, the way that the younger generation, our children, see it. And more particularly in that novel, in this novel Beginning Middle End, the narrator is a mother and a fiction writer and her daughter has all these false memories of her childhood because she's heard the mother do readings in bookstores that confuse her about what happened and what didn't in her earlier childhood. But then the daughter kind of I won't tell you what happens, but kind of takes these narratives and like sort of appropriates them with she, she owns them differently and pushes back with the current of her own, with her own imagination, against the mother's imagination, and so it's a bit of a you know, the clashing of two waters. There's a story, there's a story.
Speaker 3:One of my favorite stories is by Jorge Luis Borges, argentinian writer, and it's a bit of an like a philosophical allegory, like most of his better stories, and there's a character who walks into a bar in a hotel, I think after some academic conference about Shakespeare and he's at the bar drinking a whiskey or something, and someone comes into the bar and offers him a ring that holds the power of bequeathing to its user, to its owner, shakespeare's memory.
Speaker 3:So he comes and he's a Shakespearean scholar, so this guy offers him this ring and he's a little drunk and a little skeptical and he says yes and takes the ring, and I won't tell you exactly what happens in the story, because one should read it.
Speaker 3:But everything thereafter is his own consciousness or memory, mixing waters with this other memory that he now has to come to terms with. And you know, in many ways it's a, it's a, it's a yeah, like a parable or an allegory of of what fiction is in our lives. Right, we have our own memory, our own experiences, but then we also have all the inherited alien experiences that come into our consciousness through the words of others, through fiction, and those become also part of our experiences, the way we see a city that we've already read about and maybe experience a love story through literature. And then you know, space suddenly has a meaning that it didn't have before, and so, anyway, I really love that story and I think it's somewhere at the heart of this novel in terms of what to do with how we compose memory.
Speaker 1:Do you believe in reality?
Speaker 3:Yes, I do.
Speaker 1:Do you think there is a reality?
Speaker 3:Like, are we here right now.
Speaker 1:Well, no more in the sense of a shared reality, a shared truth, because I feel more and more that I don't live in the same world as a lot of people that I interact with, especially, you know, with the current politics, and there's a such a deep disconnect where you don't, it doesn't feel like, even though we're speaking the same language, that we live in the same world yeah and so I'm starting to doubt that there is any common sense of reality, because my reality, you know, even with people I agree with a lot, is often very different.
Speaker 3:I do believe in, in some common reality, you know, because I I believe in the reality of the feeling of a connection toward another person.
Speaker 3:You know the way that blooms in love, for example, even though two people may have different versions of their experience with the other. But there's still something, you know, something that intertwines two souls, two minds, two bodies, two, and not only in romantic love, but, I think, in friendship and in relationship to our kids and in listening deeply to others. Like maybe you know, I have the fortune to teach and in a classroom, and I have a sense of real conversation in class when my students listen to each other deeply and respond and don't necessarily agree, but are thinking with the other. So I do have, I think, a strong sense of shared reality. But absolutely I agree with you that, again, the version we tell ourselves of the world can differ so, so radically, that we really see the same thing as two different things. Right, one person, for one is a foe and for the other is a friend. And one phenomenon, for some is genocide and for another it's justice. And you know how to reconcile that? I have no idea, no idea.
Speaker 1:What is it like living as an author, economic, as a novelist?
Speaker 3:oh, it's a good question. It's, um, when things go well, there is an the enormous surprise that suddenly something you've been sitting by yourself with, or in the dark with or not not really trusting of it what it is, or suddenly goes out into the world. And there is, if there's enthusiasm and there's economic compensation because someone thinks that others will also be enthusiastic about it, then it's like this kind of great relief and exhalation for a while, because you know you get book contracts and then maybe a movie contract and then there's a period of like oh okay, if you like him.
Speaker 3:And then you never know when you're gonna finish. Well, I never know, because I never I don't write books quickly I don't know when I'm gonna finish again. I don't know what I'm gonna write next exactly. I don't know if it's gonna be good, I don't know if it's anyone's gonna connect with, so so there's a lot of uncertainty in like the next, you know, uh, and then a lot of like relief and surprise and like thank goodness to good luck, good things coming together, that yeah, when they do come together.
Speaker 3:And you know, in the in the in-betweens of those, you know, every time you finish a book, the only peace of mind I've been able to to give myself is to not rely solely on my writing to sustain my children. So I teach, I used to write more journalism and things like that. I give talks, I give extra workshops here and there, but it's uncertain. It's uncertain because you really never know how the next thing is going to do and if it's going to end in this one or if you're going to be able to continue or not. But also, I think the only way to remain kind of free from the constraints of thinking about market when you're actually writing is to do something else that secures your income, otherwise I think I would fall prey to.
Speaker 1:Writing into a trend.
Speaker 3:To writing into something that will make it you know yeah as opposed to writing something that I need to write or like absolutely have to write, and I think that freedom for me is very important. I think I would find it very anguishing if I only had writing as as a source of income for my life do you think great art, literature or any kind of art always finds its audience?
Speaker 1:Or is there a lot of art out there that never finds anyone just because it was poorly branded packaged supported?
Speaker 3:That's such a good question and impossible to know, because there might be things out there that we will never hear about, because it was never, maybe never left a person's drawer, you know. But I do think that you know good things, truly beautiful things, truly meaningful things, eventually, if not in their time, eventually find their people. And it need not be a mass approval, but even within small pockets of people, something may become truly, truly meaningful because it may speak to them so so directly, so so forcefully, and I think eventually those things happen, eventually things get to where they need to get, they're found by the people that need to find them.
Speaker 1:A lot of luck involved in that do you have a good team around you? I mean, it's a huge investment spending six years writing a book. Do you have a team that you can hand this over to and you trust?
Speaker 3:Professionally speaking.
Speaker 1:That they will bring it, that it will find its audience.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Yeah, I have two brilliant agents, literary agents, one of whom I've been with since I was 25. And another whom I've been with for about eight years here in the US, who's, you know, brilliant and warm, and both of them really are like these very, very strong, almost maternal figures in my life that have taken care of my work beautifully. One's work goes out first to one's agent, although, you know, before I give it to my agent, there's always a small group of close friends who are very good readers that I ask to read a book and to, you know, to be critical and to be honest and to go deep, and that's kind of the first circle of the concentric circles that ripple outward, you know.
Speaker 3:And then it's my agents, and then it's editors, often the same editors that I've been working with for a long time, sometimes new ones, because things change in publishing a lot and yeah, and after that it's the unknown, it's the readers. You know, but that team I mean both that first team, my agents and that, and then the teams within each language that publishes a book. That's been for me some part of the most meaningful thing about publishing, like the work you do with your translator into Chinese and the kind of questions that a Chinese translator might ask are just so different from a Polish translator and that you know, the focus of lexicon and the focus of rhythm are different in so many languages and that engagement for me is really interesting. And then the more unsuspected parts of the chain of publishing that I actually never knew until my previous book, lost Children Archive, because I had never been published so widely as with that novel.
Speaker 3:So I was sent to like a warehouse, big book warehouse somewhere deep in Maryland and I was like what the hell am I doing here and what is this?
Speaker 3:And I knew I had to go sign books, that's all I knew. And I arrived and there were 5,000 books laid out on tables like that. But then it turned out you know, the people that came in was a team of warehouse specialists and they are the most insanely fun crew. They've all they all studied literature in some point of the lives of the other. So they're the people that call from like behind these boxes. They call the bookstores everywhere in the country and say we got this book and they talk. They're really good about talking about books but creating a narrative from their warehouse outward to the world. And we formed like a line, you know, like in a factory, put on music and had great conversations and we were like takata, takata and it was the funnest. I don't know how long it took me seven hours maybe, with some breaks in between and I had never known that part of the distribution chain.
Speaker 1:It's invisible.
Speaker 3:No one talks about the warehouse specialists, and they're an incredible bunch. I mean, that's a team. So yeah, I think a lot goes into publishing. We don't even think about parts of the chain.
Speaker 1:What was that book about?
Speaker 3:Lost Children Archive. It's a road trip of a family across the USA as the family is coming apart it's like a pre-divorce last trip, last try to keep things together and as they're driving down from New York toward the border in Arizona, there is a very serious refugee crisis starting at the border, with children coming alone into the USA undocumented and seeking asylum. So the yeah, the narrator is and has become, and more and more becomes Ratanabal, deeply involved in thinking about and trying to document the story of those lost children. Quote unquote lost, you know, lost in a system, lost in the immigration labyrinth, lost in history. Her children, in the back seat of the car, listen to the stories on the radio that they're playing and that the mother is telling and they themselves kind of decide to reenact the story of lostness, of being lost, and the novel kind of unfolds into this more imaginary not imaginary journey of children alone.
Speaker 1:What was the feeling you started with there?
Speaker 3:I think there was a it was a feeling slash question which had to do with, like with how do children take bits and pieces from the world around them and tell the story of that world to themselves? What would it be like to live in a world composed by the imagination of a child? So the novel begins like an adult world that's coming apart, but as it moves on it becomes a world completely determined by the laws, by the laws of a child's brain. So the feeling was that of maybe spiraling into the beautiful and complex chaos of children's versions of things.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure you believe in reality.
Speaker 1:Because, Because I think all your stories are about reality in some ways and different interpretations of the stories we tell ourselves and the worlds we live in. Obviously, a child's brain is different than an adult's, but in many ways we're still kids still and, as you described, the children's world, the fragmented version of events that they use to build their version of reality is, I think, the way we assemble our version of reality yeah, yeah, I think it just terrifies me too much to think that there isn't an ultimate reality, but there must be something.
Speaker 3:You know I don't know what that thing is like something that we bounce out of and then we compose, you know, theories, thoughts, you know, like light hitting something. At the end, light has to hit against something in order to bounce back as color or form, but it has to hit something. I think we are similar. We behave like light in that way.
Speaker 1:You also wrote a book. What's it called? Was it called 40 Questions?
Speaker 3:Yeah, tell me how it ends in the same 40 questions.
Speaker 1:Which is about. You'll tell it better, but as I understand it, it's about the bureaucratic system around immigration.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wrote that book while I was writing this novel, lost Children Archive, because I was working in immigration court as a translator for children's cases, as a volunteer translator not an official court translator, but with a group of volunteers that were bilingual and were able to to do intake questionnaires for children, understand each of their test, testimonies, their stories, and then, once, you know, once testimonies were on paper, it was much easier to find lawyers that would defend them against the deportation order. And so I was doing that while writing Lost Children Archive. And then, you know, at some point I started trying to fictionalize what I was hearing, because I that's what I was thinking about all day. So I would come back at night at home and want to somehow, somehow put that into words and find meaning and sense in those narratives. But then I realized that fiction was not the place for that.
Speaker 3:I wasn't doing justice to the novel by trying to use it as a as a vessel for political message. And I was also not doing doing justice to the novel by trying to use it as a vessel for a political message, and I was also not doing any justice to the situation by trying to fictionalize it as it was happening in front of my eyes. So I stopped writing the novel for a bit and I wrote this essay, which is just a very short testimonial essay, about that immigration crisis, about those children, about the immigration system in the US and yeah, I just told from the viewpoint of a close observer of that situation. Yeah, and ever since then I've remained acquainted with some of the children that I interviewed and followed. I followed their cases through to actually good endings. You know Many of them got green cards. One of them is up for nationality now.
Speaker 3:But at the same time the panorama panorama more generally for children arriving to seek asylum has become more and more dire. So yeah, I don't know, I've been working on another essay, like book length I'll say, about you know what happened with that situation eight years later, ten years later, and the detention system and how it's growing, but it's again like during this administration, not a book that I'm sure I want to publish, definitely a book I want to write. I'm writing it in Spanish and English at the same time, this time not not one and then the other, but kind of simultaneously. So maybe it's a book that I can publish in Spanish. First, wait, wait a few years to see what happens here, and then maybe eventually I haven't really decided- what are the questions that children are asked when they enter the country and are put into the system?
Speaker 3:and some are very factual, like why did you come? Although that's a really complex question, actually, you think about it, for a child for a child I mean especially if it's a seven-year-old yeah they have no idea sometimes why they came.
Speaker 3:They were brought over, you know. Sometimes, in the best-case scenario, they were brought over to reunite with their mother or father or both. Many of them are fleeing violence, gang violence, domestic violence, civil war. But yeah, that's the first question why did you come? How did you come? And then there were very specific questions about the situations back home, like were you forced to work? You know, did any member of your family abuse you? Did you belong to any gangs? Because they wanted to make sure that none of the kids that come here were part of any gang there.
Speaker 3:A lot of them are fleeing precisely that, you know, being sucked into a gang. And it's very complex because if they don't have parents, growing up with an uncle who's maybe abusive, and then suddenly there's, you know, a street gang that takes them in and makes them feel like they have a place in the world, they're not at all kids that want to seek out violence, but kids that want to seek out a place in the world but then realize that they don't want to be that and so they flee those circumstances. And or, if you know, if they're girls, mostly they're fleeing from from sexual violence related to either gang culture or domestic situations and is there a humanity in that system?
Speaker 3:there's very human people in the system. There's always thoughtful lawyers, there's a good judge here and there. There's a lot of pro bono work. There's a lot of organizations that do good work. So yeah, I think you know, in those very dark things you always find like the brightest lights. How does a person spend their lives doing this? You know, even when what they can change sometimes in the system is so seems like so little, but it isn't right, because one by one it is not little at all how do you, how do you keep your light on in that situation as a volunteer?
Speaker 3:oh, it comes on and off. Honestly, writing has something to do with it because I think you know, it allows me to reorganize things, uh, internally, to give them, you know, to try and seek some meaning in them. Teaching I taught in a detention center for a while and seeing the effect of reading and writing in those spaces was very humbling and very like. It made me in a moment in which I think I was a little skeptical about the place of literature in the world. It reconnected me to the sense of meaning in literature and writing and using one's imagination and having access to one's imagination.
Speaker 1:So again you go into fiction as a way to understand reality.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because fiction is not the opposite of truth, not the opposite of fact. Fiction is actually the meaning of fiction. Originally, you know, it comes from the Latin fingere, which meant to mold something out of clay, to give shape to something that was already there. So if you think of fiction like that, it's more about creation of meaning through giving something a shape, rather than coming up with something out of the blue in a vacuum. Right, but it's more about shaping something. And yeah, in that sense, yeah, exactly, I do.
Speaker 1:What do you want to get out of the pole dancing vampire? Is that a revenge fiction? Is that a way for you to get back at the world?
Speaker 3:I wonder if that's what it's going to be. Right now my feeling is like when I read the news I'm so angry. You know, will it be that kind of playground? Will it be a place to? You know, I love the term revenge fiction. I've never really heard it. I've heard the term revenge sex, but revenge fiction sounds kind of great. It could be that, but that might just be like the source of where a feeling comes from. But then that doesn't necessarily translate to plot and I never know what's going to happen in a story before I write it. I just have to sit down and figure it out. If I know what's going to happen, I don't write it, because then it's kind of already written and there's no fun in my trying. Like, I sometimes have a sense of images that I want to produce, but I don't know what's going to happen in terms of events. I figure them out along the way and I think it's the only thing that really actually sits me down every day. I don't think I would have the discipline otherwise.
Speaker 1:So you're just curious to find out what happens.
Speaker 3:I'm curious to find out what happens. That's what keeps the light burning for me, or the fire burning the enthusiasm of just not knowing what's coming. And then some writers are very disciplined. I think they can sit down and say, like, I write a page a day, or write, and. But I seriously don't think I would sit down to write if I knew this is what I have to do today. This is where I need to get. This is where I'd be like no, fuck it, that's so boring, do?
Speaker 1:you think there's a potential for redemption through revenge? It's a good question. Can you imagine a story that is violent that ends in a character going to a better place?
Speaker 3:After crossing violence. You think I don't know. It's a good question actually. You're putting me there in a difficult spot, because I would tell you that I'm a pacifist, which then really is a problem for a vampire novel.
Speaker 1:Well, if you have a pseudonym, you can be anything you want.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, maybe that's why I get to. We all have our other part of ourselves that we don't like to explore so much.
Speaker 1:It's very hard being I'm also a pacifist, but I get angry, obviously, but then I've never found any happiness in anger.
Speaker 3:No, that's it, Minita. When I've been most unhappy in my life, it's when I've been angry, and it's like Minita, when I've been most unhappy in my life, it's when I've been angry and it's like because that anger just gets very directed inward and feels very poisoning. So, yeah, I know, but maybe, you know, maybe there's a redemption in maybe not in like playing out violence in an imaginary terrain, such as fiction about vampires, but like playing out like intelligence, like what kind of intelligence does it take to be invisible, to get around a system of surveillance and something that feels very asphyxiating, and I mean it's not necessarily eating the shit out of the guys, like a vampire.
Speaker 3:There might be something else, something more along the lines of like you know what is seduction in that, in that sphere, like, how can seduction subdue as well? Right, in a way that you almost like, how do you say it? If you're like, if you like deprogram a robot or something like you, you disable that. You, you turn the switch off of that seemingly unending need to do, to do wrong in the world. That that I, you know, that I, I perceive in a lot of the actions of this current administration. How do you turn the switch off?
Speaker 1:Are you happy?
Speaker 3:With our talk.
Speaker 1:In general.
Speaker 3:With life. This is a very good moment in my life. I have found a partner that I'm deeply in love with. We met with an incredible coincidence and luck, I think and I have two beautiful daughters that I have a very good relationship with. I'm able to wake up every day to do what I love. So I honestly yes, this is a good moment and my partner and I met thought we were meeting on the internet. I was coming to New York and my girls had been super COVID and I hadn't seen an adult in two weeks, so I'd just been taking care of them and I was coming to New York and my mom was going to be here. So I thought I'm going to leave the girls with my mom this weekend and I'm going to go out to dinner with any decent enough human being.
Speaker 3:So with any decent enough human being. So I downloaded one of these stupid apps and I looked at so many horrible profiles thinking, oh my God, no way, what the hell is this? Anyway, suddenly I come across lovely face, a real smile, someone who looked decent, smart and not pretentious. So we had a bit of a back and forth and I hadn't used my real name on the app, I just put an initial and we're trying to figure out a way to see each other have a glass of wine. I said I wasn't in the city for more than two or three days and we're trying to figure out a way.
Speaker 3:He was with his son that weekend. I was with the daughter. We eventually gave each other our real phone numbers, just trying to figure out a plan. When we communicated by message I said oh, by the way, nice to meet you. My, my name is Valeria. That was a Friday night.
Speaker 3:Saturday morning he had written to me saying hey, valeria, I confess I googled you because your name sounded familiar and I knew you were a writer because I had said I was a writer. He said, and I can't believe it's you. So he said I own a sound recording studio and I made your book six years ago. So I know your voice very well. But not only that. He said my son, who was then 12, 13, is the voice of the boy in your novel, and in that novel the boy is the narrator's stepson.
Speaker 3:And we were both like, oh my god, what the hell. And then he showed me a picture of this certificate that his son his son had won an award for the narration he did for my novel. He's very good and it's in the certificate. It's all our names the son, me, my daughter, because she was also a small part in the audio book, and he is because he was there in January and that certificate had hung in his room for five years. Our names are in some weird constellation together. And then the good part of the story is that we met and we really liked each other and then we really love each other because we've been together for a couple of years again.
Speaker 1:That's just more proof that there is no reality no, there's an absolute reality no, that's not a real story.
Speaker 3:That doesn't happen in real life it happens in fiction but, you know, fiction is not the opposite of truth, or it it's not equivalent to unreal.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful, it's been really great it has been really great to speak.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you for your conversation.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, so we're back on the other side. Wow, another beautiful interview you did, Jale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, valeria again, I mean not that any guest has disappointed, but she did not disappoint. She was just as smart and thoughtful and kind and generous as I imagined her to be and, yeah, I was so excited to get a glimpse inside her mind and how she works, how she operates, how she does these things and the dedication she puts into everything she does. I think she mentioned this. It takes a long time for her to write a book and it takes five, six years for her to write these things Striking.
Speaker 2:She said six years to write this new book that she just did.
Speaker 1:I was like whoa Dedication man it's wild, and I think I mentioned this when we talked before. But because it does feel that way, it does feel like there is craft and care put into every single word that she puts down in her books.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's chiseled out like a Lamborghini. There's no accidental anything anywhere, it's just super concise and like thought out, meticulous, meticulous.
Speaker 1:Yes, so yeah, what do you think?
Speaker 2:I think, my favorite. So it started off, of course, like when you asked her like where are you from? And she's just started spouting all these things that she's literally like from, born in Mexico, but then, like, went to South Korea and then India and Wisconsin and God knows where and now lives in New York and I'm always fascinated by, and you asked right away because you're very insightful, like were they diplomats or what's going on there. And of course, lo and behold, her dad was and her parents, both NGO workers.
Speaker 2:So you know, you get a sense of it kind of really nails, because when you asked her what her home is, she says it's by writing, because that's where she kind of plants herself, because she really belongs everywhere and belongs nowhere. So when she puts hand to paper like she said, said it she that's where she's at home and that's kind of. I find that to be so interesting and very common with people who move around. A lot is either like this wild adaptability to make home home base, even if it's just like yourself, or or writing, writing which is very, very interesting and what a, what a way to weave all her tapestry into her books.
Speaker 2:Like you know, the being a translator for the, for the immigration, uh, children, and I mean that is yeah heavy stuff and apropos as as it is these days in the current political environment not very uh friendly to this or like you were talking, it was like a red word, a banned word, you know. She was talking about finding it hard to fund that because of people using the wrong words and all that stuff, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're right, and everything she does. She goes so deep in her work. It is extremely personal and I think I've read now, I think, most of her books.
Speaker 1:Wow extremely personal and I think I've read now, I think, most of her books. Wow, and they are, and especially after meeting her, you get a sense of who she is and you can feel her in every like. You know there's you know maybe I'm projecting, but there are characters where you feel, oh, that's her. Yeah, and I can't wait to read her latest books that she talked about a lot, which is about, in a way at least, about her and her daughter yeah sort of growing up together and what it's like to be a daughter of a novelist and what that does to your sense of reality and yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought she was just fantastic.
Speaker 2:And that's exactly what you were talking about. That's not a real story. You like to bend reality and the meta-ness of that being the two voices being the daughter of herself and this and that. And then I also find her to be such an innovative writer, because I mean her wanting to not just place you in her world while you're reading it, she wants to place you in it with the sound, like these audio things that she's making. It feels like performative art to me, like performance art.
Speaker 1:That is something amazing to immerse yourself in, that you know yeah, and then I've dug really deep into that because I'm actually uh. I was so interested in that project that I I've been working with her and her team on uh actually making that more accessible through yes through websites and apps and and, and it's just listening to those things. I mean their, her team is amazing. She works with, especially, two just wonderful audio technicians and what they've done with this it's called Echoes from the Borderland. It's just fantastic.
Speaker 2:And so.
Speaker 1:I find myself listening to it for hours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just like this audio archive that she is accompanying to place you. Like she said, it's a windy novel. At one point she used the word it's a windy novel, so she wants to get the wind from this and that, and it's such a super specific way to place the reader in her universe. It's just, I find it so innovative, so absolutely crazy, and of course I heard you, I'll help you with that, so I'm glad that's happening. That's awesome. That whole radio with the GPS, with the radio on loop where you're close to the border that sounds amazing to me. What an incredible thing to do.
Speaker 1:And then this is so. You know she talked about it a little bit how extensive this is, but it is. I mean, just what they're doing. They've already been working on this for five years, wow, recording obviously not constantly, but, you know, regularly and there's five more years left. I mean, yeah, that's a lot of commitment to a project.
Speaker 2:I mean this is like David Attenborough level of like preciseness, of like archiving. She's always she wants to set a tone. You asked her like what do you want to go first with? Like what comes first when you write a book? And she says feeling, you know like a like a feeling, so she's she's very intentful of creating that feeling and making the reader know exactly what that feeling, curating it.
Speaker 1:I mean, this woman is absolutely brilliant, wow, bravo she is, yes, she is brilliant, and and and again. Having read her work now, the feelings you get are very distinct. You know, I think I'm I'm getting the same feeling as the at least I I'm getting very strong feelings when. I'm reading her work and there's, without it being sort of hammered in, it just feels layered in a very, very specific way.
Speaker 2:Very delicate balance and what a wildly articulate person to be able to convey that. I mean you're getting it. I mean that is a feat on its own. Well, I got to read more of her stuff, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I I do want to mention one more thing, because there was something that I've been thinking about a lot since we talked, and it's the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and obviously, the world as well, but but about ourselves.
Speaker 1:I think that's one of the most fascinating things, just in general, about it, it is, it's true, we meet people that are in what we could describe as bad external situations and they seem very happy. And then we meet people that are in great situations, or seemingly, and they seem unhappy. And I think it's what she said. It's really just all about this internal narrative that we have about our lives and whether we're are we victims? Are we? Are we, uh, survivors, are we? You know, who are we? And I think I think she's very intentional about it and I it made me think about how I thought about my life and and definitely how I, when I meet other people, how you feel how do you perceive yourself?
Speaker 2:what is your narrative?
Speaker 2:your internal narrative. Yeah, because what is therapy except to maybe help you reframe some bad memories or reframe your internal dialogue with how? Because that has to do with confidence, self-image, self. Everything a bad thing can be. You can flip it over this way or you did it, and a good thing can be flipped over that way. But and she said, narrative changes. So isn't that? I mean, it's not like a re-explanation, but narrative does change, you know, and and that's a, that's the, that's the question behind the question, that's the you got, that's the core right there, the internal yeah conversation.
Speaker 1:The internal narrative isn't credible yeah, yeah, and I think if we you know the I've been trying I have my periods when I go down and I think those are the things that get me down. It's when the internal critic takes over Always, when I forget who I can be and who I am. I mean, I took a lot of things from this conversation, but that's the thing that stuck with me the most is just keeping track of how I'm thinking about myself.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And how I think about the things that I do and or things that happen to me, how I frame them, because it's so easy to become a victim.
Speaker 2:It really is and your brain does lie to you. It lies to you routinely and you have to fight it back. I mean I think it's like on viral right now. There's like a lady talking about her intrusive thoughts and like when she has these bad thoughts, she named her brain. When he's doing that, so she'll start talking about. She's like that and I think she named her brain Becky or something and she was like Becky, you got to stop right now, like I'm not listening to you today, and like, and she said, by taking my brain out of it and make it into like a character, maybe. I mean I mean I don't know if it's a good thing for some people, but I mean I thought it was brilliant because she's like I was able to tell Becky to go take a hike right now, because I don't really need this right now, to just kind of stay on course and not spiral into negativity or whatever was happening right then. You know. So these are super important things for all of us, all of us, for the human condition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that reminds me of inside out, which is which are some of my favorite movies love that movie uh, and inside out too, was actually great. Great as well yeah well, at least I liked it and uh, it is. Yeah, the the giving your thoughts uh names and maybe that helps us, and I think it. It helped me definitely with my kids talking about feelings.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah yeah, it's incredible, like unlocking a little toolbox to be able to talk to your internal dialogue, which is so important. So I think, on that note, it seems like we've solved it right.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think so.
Speaker 2:We've solved life. I mean, look at us go just learning more and more masterclasses with your beautiful conversations. Thank you for letting me be part of your world. Thank you so much thank you so much.
Speaker 1:I'll see you next time see you next time. Bye thank you for listening to let's Walk. This episode was produced by Tanya Serak and edited by Gunnar Hansson. Our theme song is by Altner Unar Hlövesson.