In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—G C Waldrep
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—G C Waldrep
Your poems, “Night 410” and “Night 550” are from a work titled Plague Nights. What does Plague Nights entail?
As with every other writer and artist I know, the lockdowns of the pandemic (spring, summer, and fall of 2020 especially) left me with time and anxious energy I didn’t know what to do with. Plague Nights was one answer: a poem-diary across the first three or four months of the pandemic, a successive lyric record of my engagements with that moment. At some point I came up with the idea that there should, of course, be 1001 “nights” (poems). I made it to 969 during the early days of the pandemic and then decided to wait for the pandemic to end to write the final 32. But the emergency has never really left us, and the cycle remains unfinished.
“Night 410” uses a lot of mirror and film images. Where did this poem come from?
It came from wherever all the other poems come from (!), meaning I don’t know. Just before my university’s library closed, I hauled away 60 or 70 books to get me through the spring and summer: poetry books, works of theology and literary criticism, many art books. Sometimes I could draw a direct relationship between a poem and something I was reading on a given day, but I don’t have any notes in my poem-journal of 4/20/20, just the poem.
(My reading diary for that day says I was rereading Reina Maria Rodriguez’s wonderful Winter Garden Photograph, as translated by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen).
“Night 550” uses some interesting dissonant sensory images; “O taste & see, bandage/to the heart’s lip/where music nicked it.” What was your inspiration for this sensory detail?
“O taste and see” is a Biblical reference, and I think I know who that “carpenter” is. In the poem the gesture of “O taste and see” is being compared to a bandage, something we use to bind up—to correct for—damage, harm, terror. Sometimes damage is psychic damage, damage to the metaphorical heart. Sometimes music speaks to those wounds much more directly than language can. In Christianity we often associate the figure of Christ with healing—among His many names and offices, He is the Paraclete. But how psychic or spiritual healing works remains obscure, at least to me. It seems we are apprenticed to a cycle of wounding and healing.
“Night 550” is dated 4/25/20, so only five days after “Night 410.” Yes, that does mean there were 140 other “nights” across those six days. I remember not sleeping much.
And again, “Night 550” feels very much like a journey. Can you talk about that? How did you craft this poem and what the editing process was like?
The entire cycle was a journey. Some of the poems have been revised many, many times over the past five years. But not 550. It’s almost exactly as I drafted it, with a few minor edits.
What themes does your work revolve around?
There is always a religious element to my work, and always a metaphysical element (these things are related but not identical). And nearly always a metaphorical or transformative element. When the Covid pandemic hit, I’d been writing for many years about chronic illness. Serious illness is something the (healthy) society does not like to discuss: when it comes up in casual conversation, the listener will likely express sympathy in the most basic way, then rush the afflicted towards some narrative of recovery or healing, actual or anticipated. Chronic illness evades the second of these in ways frustrating to both the listener and the afflicted. After a point, nobody—not even one’s closest friends and family—wants to hear more.
My last three published collections (feast gently, The Earliest Witnesses, and The Opening Ritual) all circle my experience of chronic illness. Trying if not to solve my medical issues then at least to grapple with them in what I hoped were useful ways, to situate them, emotionally and spiritually.
What was strange about Covid, at least during those early months, was that suddenly everyone had been transported to Planet Illness, that place of ongoing, irresolvable medical uncertainty, with all the associated anxiety and horror. What was even stranger to me was how swiftly, circa 2022, with the immediate threat fading, most people shifted back to pre-Covid understandings: of illness, of the body, of what it meant to walk together in a shared world.
The thing is, human beings find it hard to live inside an emergency for any length of time. This is perhaps the most difficult lesson for those with chronic illness, and for their loved ones. For a little while, you and I and everyone we know were asked to join in that project.
What texts and authors are your favorite?
This is always such a hard question! Do you mean today, or six months ago, or six years ago, or six months or years from now, or when I was starting out? I like to think of other authors and their books as stars in a night sky. It’s a shared sky. But I form constellations from that field of stars that you don’t see—a bright star for me might be barely visible to you. And sometimes weather conditions obscure the view.
Whom was I rereading, while working on Plague Nights? René Char, who is one of the most important poets for me. I mentioned Reina Maria Rodriguez. Dan Beachy-Quick, Anne Carson, Tim Lilburn, Barry MacSweeney, Alejandra Pizarnik, Henri Michaux. I took deep dives back into Stevens, Williams, Jabès, and Oppen. I read Rilke’s Duino Elegies for the first time, also Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. Weil, Merton, and it appears Eliade, although I don’t remember rereading Eliade.
What are you currently working on?
I write…a lot. Whenever I can. I do this because I enjoy it—it is one way (for me, a primary way) of being in the world. I always have many, many projects going, some of which will find their ways into the hands of strangers, many of which won’t.
Tupelo has tentatively accepted two collections for future publication. One, Winter Constellation, is a lyric manuscript, sparer (and I hope more buoyant) than my recent books. The other is a long poem, Purton Green, about a bit of contested footpath in the landscape of West Suffolk, in England—also sparer, but also longer. It’s a walking-poem.
Right now I’m working on a poetics book. After years of thinking about it and taking notes towards it, I started drafting it…six days ago. I have no idea whether or how it will turn out!
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Carla Panciera
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Carla Panciera
Your poem “Smart Girls Always Have a Plan” blends math and myth in one of my favorite lines, “Math, after all, is one letter removed / from stories of the gods.” Where did this poem come from? What inspired it?
Speaking of myths, this is a bit of a long story. Sometime during my extended maternity leave from my job teaching high school English, I read an article in American Scholar Magazine about an educator who set up a poetry stand where his students wrote poems on the spot, for free. Today, we see these stands pop up at various events, but this was pre-2006. I’d never heard of anything like that and thought: Wouldn’t it be great if I could actually convince kids to do this? The idea seemed impossible. But I was fortunate to return to work in a school where arts are prioritized, and my students loved the idea. By the time I retired, over 200 students had staffed the stand at venues from literary fests to Boston’s Financial District to Whole Foods Valentine chocolate buffet (our personal favorite). As a writer, I’d never asked my students to do something I hadn’t done—until they staffed the stand. So, when I returned to writing poetry after a few years of writing prose, I decided to have people order poems from me, except I cheated in that I asked friends and acquaintances. The idea for “Smart Girls” came from a close friend and colleague who felt trapped in a difficult marriage. She also happened to be a brilliant and innovative math teacher. I considered the different ways in which she and I went about teaching problem solving in our classrooms.Then, because having to write a poem that didn’t derive from my own impulse, I did what all of these requests forced me to do: I began with research. I had never started poems this way before but this did open me up to ideas and subjects I’d never tackled. I looked up “math” and (full confession) read the Wikipedia entry where I came upon Galileo’s quote about the labyrinth, and where I also kept coming across the idea of math being connected to the arts. In fact, no one seemed to be able to say for certain whether math was art or science or both. Math, for me, had always seemed impossible, very much other. It made me feel trapped and filled me with dread and I admired anyone who could find their way through such a traitorous alphabet. But the research showed me the connections between my friend’s world and mine, and I had a place to start.
Ariadne, the daughter of the King of Crete and Theseus’ scorned lover, features heavily in this poem. What made you center her story of the labyrinth?
Once I had the idea of the labyrinth from Galileo’s quote, I felt the earth under my feet! Mythology! A subject, unlike trigonometry, that I LOVED in school! It was an easy jump to Ariadne, an early problem-solver. Theseus has no chance of defeating the minotaur if she doesn’t come up with a plan. At the time my friend requested this poem, she wrote that one of the things she wondered about was, if she did divorce her husband, would she find happiness on the other side? Ariadne’s myth has two possible endings. The more common one is that Theseus abandoned her, an unforgivable transgression. Yet, even in this version, she is rescued by Dionysus who loves her so much that, when she dies, he takes the crown he had given her and sets it among the stars. But there is another version of the myth where Theseus puts Ariadne ashore because she’s seasick and then returns to tend to the boat. When a storm erupts, he’s separated from her, and, in his heartbreak, forgets to unfurl his sails and dies. That’s another great thing about stories. They can have different endings. They have that over math. If Ariadne’s story had only had one tragic solution, I could not have offered it here.
Can you talk about the beginning of the poem’s lament that teachers didn’t teach how they should have?
I’ll start with fourth grade where we did self-paced math. In other words, ten-year-olds sat at desks with our books open and talked with our friends. Every week or so, we’d take a chapter test and, if we didn’t pass, we took it over, our seatmates conveniently keeping their books open to a page with an example on it. Our teacher never even stood up from her desk. In sixth grade, we started the math lesson by correcting our homework according to what the teacher told us the answers were and calling our grade out loud. If you received a “C” or below, you had to re-do the assignment. Thus, I had two assignments each night and succeeded in understanding at least one mathematical truth: Most of the class was smarter than I was. But those experiences seemed borderline effective compared to trigonometry class, sophomore year in high school, which was, by far, my worst experience in academics, not only because the subject matter was so difficult, but because I had a teacher who believed (he admitted it at the end of the year) that shaming us would motivate us to work harder. He would, for example, call us up to the front of the class to sign our “deficiencies”, those hellish slips of paper (you had to really press down because of all the carbons) that alerted your family and, now, all of your classmates, that you were in danger of failing the class. One girl got excused from class to take her tests because she got so anxious, she passed out. This was 1979 when accommodations for students were unheard of. But one day, the teacher said, “Tomorrow, I have a story for you,” and, impossibly, I felt a surge of hope. The story was about Renee Descartes. I don’t remember what he said, only that it ended up being very brief and not particularly inspiring. Yet, when he promised a story, I considered it a lifeline. Something, finally, I could grasp. Obviously, this is my bias, but my math teachers never used enough words. Everything was a formula, a theorem, a symbol. They also didn’t seem to understand how some of us just could not get it. Good teaching can be defined as the ability to break complex tasks into manageable chunks. Oh, and not humiliating your students. Ironically, one of the ways in which the friend who requested this poem distinguishes herself as a math teacher is that she incorporates discussion into her class. She asks students to talk through problems. Teaching methods have come a long way since I was in high school. My former math colleagues often acknowledge some kids’ fear of their subject. Their classrooms and their approaches are much less intimidating than some of the experiences I had in school. I only wish they’d been my instructors.
What was the editing process for this poem? How did you end up with the couplets for formatting?
Here’s a little window into my (very drawn out) process. I began writing this poem in 2014. The content has remained relatively the same, but the initial form contained random lines and stanza lengths. It was messy, but I usually try to let the poem dictate what it’s going to look like on the page. Then, six years later, I turned it into couplets. I don’t remember the initial impulse, but my guess is that I wanted to neaten it and, at least on a craft level, to force myself to make some difficult choices for what material to cut. I grew up on a farm and, every spring, my dad would have to go into the same fields and clear out the rocks. It was as if they grew there. In the fall, the fields had been fertilized and planted with winter rye to protect the topsoil. Later that summer, they would produce acres of corn and alfalfa, but each spring, it was nothing but heavy, tedious work. The moving rocks part of writing poetry happens when the material is there but it needs to be picked up and moved, no matter how laborious. I will say that the poem in its original form must have, once I started playing with it, allowed for couplets. I just hadn’t seen them before. However, I’d like to think that, at play in any poem, are more subconscious impulses. There are dualities here: Male and female, tragedy and romance, math and English, numbers and words—even my friend and I. Finally, the idea of two ways towards a solution: unicursal and multicursal. Sometimes, you think you’re controlling the poem; more often the poem reminds you who’s really in charge.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
The publisher of my first book once described my work as deeply personal. That was a couple of decades ago, but that still strikes me as true. When I’m not writing based on a request, I’m more apt to be inspired by the stages of my own life or by the natural world. I’ve always lived near the ocean. I grew up on a farm and spent my childhood roaming through woods. I love birds. I take long walks where I come upon stranded snapping turtles, flocks of turkeys, baby snakes newly hatched and struggling to cross the road—so many things to wonder about. I also write about my loved ones and, quite often, their names appear in my poems.
Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you have texts that you return to, or that have shaped you as a writer?
I’m a prose writer who took a poetry class on the advice of a friend during my final year in college and was surprised how much I loved the genre, so my biggest inspirations for writing are actually the essayists, Joan Didion and E.B. White, especially his collection, One Man’s Meat. Their work taught me a great deal about the absolute necessity of the best details. I re-read their pieces often and am still awestruck at the lessons they impart.
I’ve always struggled to name my favorite color, my favorite song, my favorite anything, but I do have some things that I love and return to. Poems: Robert Hass’s “The Apple Trees at Olema”; “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Collections: Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec; Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf; William Dickey’s The Rainbow Grocery (the first poetry book I read); Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude; Poets: Jane Kenyon, Stephen Dunn, David Berman, Keats, Shelley, Byron. I’m sure I’ve left hundreds of poems and poets and collections out. Another miraculous thing about poetry is how often it is possible to fall in love with a poem. Unlike novels, even short stories, it only takes readers a few seconds to find a poem that can blow them away.
What are you currently working on?
I just sent the final edits of my third poetry manuscript to the publisher for a fall 2025 release date. (You might recognize the book’s title: One Trail of Longing, Another of String). I’m happy to say that, obviously, “Smart Girls Always Have a Plan” will appear in it. I am also awaiting notes from my agent on a novel-in-progress and will spend the bulk of my summer revising that book.
Carla Panciera‘s latest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press). She has published two poetry collections: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her short-story collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts. A retired high school English teacher, Panciera lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine
“February at the Johnsons’” is about a woman going through a divorce. Where did this poem come from?
I was right out of college when I married for the first time. It was a disaster, an abusive relationship. That didn’t make leaving any easier, though, because I was still in love with the person he had been before he started to hurt me.
The end of a marriage is difficult regardless of the circumstances; when we were splitting in two what had been a whole unit, there was incredible pain. The physical act of dividing up joint property was a reflection of what was happening on the emotional level.
I found comfort in repetitive movement and routine—packing and repacking boxes, running the same circuit every day, repeating a scripted prayer for help. It was incredibly hard to stay still. I craved movement, but movement that didn’t require deep thought, because at that point merely existing took up all my emotional and mental energy.
Penelope showed up in a very early draft—she who is the literary symbol of the faithful wife, undoing all her work at night to postpone a forced marriage to someone else. I began thinking of the alternative Penelope, no longer a wife, unpacking and repacking the same few boxes every night as she sought to be faithful to herself, now, instead of to a philandering (or in my case abusive) husband.
There’s so much beautiful specificity surrounding the division of the kitchen items; why did you choose to focus on that part of the house in the first half?
I chose it for several reasons. First, for me, the kitchen was a symbol of his controlling nature. I was a vegetarian when we got married, but he didn’t allow me to do the grocery shopping and forced me to eat meat during our marriage. So there was a lot of emotional weight around kitchen items in particular.
There is also something so intimate about a kitchen and the importance of sharing meals together. As a picture of the excruciating nature of divorce, it works really well: you take something that had been a symbol of family and fellowship and start ripping every piece of it in two.
Then there’s the idea of “equitable division of property”—rigorously dividing everything in equal portions. It served as another tool of punishment for me, but there was also an element of the ridiculous in the midst of the sadness of dividing a kitchen full of tools. Counting out forks to make sure each person gets exactly half. Taking turns picking the unique or singular items: I took my favorite dish towels, he took the big, manly carving knife. Good riddance to the knife; I had gone vegan when I first left him anyway.
While there’s the tension between this woman and her husband, there’s also this looming Other Couple—the Johnsons. Can you talk about how you find that their presence influences the text?
In terms of the narrative, when I left my husband, I lived for six months with a married couple whom I had known since childhood. It was one of those incredible situations; I was living halfway across the country from where I grew up, and it just so happened that these friends had bought a house half a mile from my apartment. So it was a safe space—they had known me before the abuse but also knew the self that I had lost under the abuse. I trusted them in a way I couldn’t trust myself at that time. They were incredibly kind and loving. And yet, I was an extra in their lives—the long-term houseguest. I lived in the back spare bedroom, cooked in a kitchen that didn’t belong to me, and used their utensils and furniture while everything from my marriage was boxed in their basement until I figured out my next move. I was never completely at home because it wasn’t my home; it was their happy house and full lives, and I carried my brokenness around with me as I tried to figure out how to begin healing. Their life wasn’t my life, their friends weren’t my friends; I had to figure out who I was and what my life was going to look like now. I lived in fear, too, as a result of the abuse; it’s why I wouldn’t answer the door if I was home alone unless I knew the caller.
The use of couplets in the poem up until the end when the couplet is split have such a wonderful significance, punctuated with, “learning to divide a life.” When did this structure appear in your editing process?
Unless I have a specific form that I’m writing in, I tend to write my early drafts in one big block and worry about stanza lengths and breaks later in the process. I focus more on line breaks first. When I write, I allow myself to overwrite to begin with, adding anything that feels like it might fit into my early drafts, and then spend my revision process ruthlessly cutting out unnecessary lines, images, and words. Once I feel like my lines are set, then I start thinking about how stanza lengths and structure will deepen the poem, and where those breaks are needed to slow the poem down or add breath.
I also tend to write slowly—it can take several years, sometimes, to finish a poem. Most of my poems go through many, many drafts. This allows me the freedom to experiment without losing an earlier draft that may have something I want to return to.
This was one of those poems that took me a long time to get right. It wasn’t until draft 24 that I split it into couplets—prior to that I played with varying stanza lengths and with only the last line dropped down alone. But it never quite worked. Once I split it into couplets, though, the whole thing opened up for me—I saw the couplets as the married couple and then the split couplet at the end as mirroring the impending divorce. It took me a long time to see that in the poem. It’s why I’ve learned to trust my subconscious; it so often leads me to the right solution in a poetry problem before my conscious mind can figure it out. People call it trusting the poem or trusting your instinct, but what it really means is that your subconscious mind has been working away steadily on something—for days, or months, or years—and will provide you with the answer when it’s ready if you can get the part of you that wants to force things in a certain direction out of the way and trust the process.
What themes do you find that your work revolves around?
My first manuscript, which I’m planning to finish this fall, centers around the long road of healing and recovery from that abusive marriage. For a long time after I escaped, I thought I’d never be happy again, but I did heal; I found that I’d grown in ways I’d never expected. It was a horrible experience, but I don’t regret it. It’s shaped who I am today. However, it took me a good ten years to have enough emotional distance to be able to start writing about that period of my life. “February at the Johnsons’” is in that manuscript.
I’m also a mom of four, and so motherhood themes enter into some of my work, especially recently. Although I don’t write specifically about my kids a lot, my worldview is filtered through the identity of motherhood. I also have a relationship with God, and so spiritual issues find their way into my poetry. I love being outdoors; the natural world has a huge presence in much of what I write, particularly in the way it can layer meaning into our human experience and emotions. My husband sometimes rolls his eyes and asks, “another bird???” when he reads a new poem draft. Birds do seem to find their way into my poems. I love to feed the birds, too, but if I forget to bring in my bird feeders at night in summer, I discover I’ve been feeding the local black bear instead.
What stories inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
I love stories of hope, stories of redemption. Stories that make me remember what a gift our lives are. Stories of forgiveness—of choosing life over bitterness or hate. I love well-written novels because they are a counterpoint to poetry for me. I cried when I read Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country; it was incredibly powerful and beautiful. I love Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey Maturin novels—I read all 20 of them in the space of a couple months; I couldn’t put them down. The friendship between Jack and Stephen is one of the most inspiring and deeply true friendships I’ve ever read. My top books of all time include Middlemarch, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The War of the Rings trilogy and Watership Down. I’ve also got a bucket list of great classic novels I’m slowly working my way through. It’s about 5 pages long, so it’s going to take me years. When I need to laugh, though, to exult in amazing sentences and plots so twisted up it seems they could never untangle, to forget the seriousness of life for a while, I pick up P.G. Wodehouse. He’s my happy place.
In terms of poetry authors, I’ve too many favorites. Don’t we all? But who I return to over and over – that’s Marianne Boruch, Franz Wright, Lousie Glück. Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, Joanna Klink’s The Nightfields, and the anthology Joy: 100 poems edited by Christian Wiman. I recently finished Pablo Medina’s Sea of Broken Mirrors and have almost every poem in there starred as a favorite. I know that will definitely become one I return to often.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve been working on my first manuscript for ten years. As I said, I’m a slow—or as I like to think of it, patient—writer. I plan to finish it this fall. I’ve also started working on poems that I know will be in a second manuscript. Those are poems that fit in a different emotional space. It feels good to stretch out into new areas and energies of writing after spending so long focusing on the themes of my first manuscript. I have a triptych of peacock poems from the two years we lived in a tiny village in England—one was in Iron Horse last year, the other two will be coming out in Poet Lore this fall. I’m writing more about challenges surrounding my elderly parents. I have a goal to write a short poem—half a page or less—that really works. I find short poems so difficult to write well. I keep thinking each new poem I start might be the one, but recently everything I’m completing ends up in the 2-3 page range. I’ll keep trying, though.
Jana-Lee Germaine is senior poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bracken, Chestnut Review, Tinderbox, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, EcoTheo Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She earned an MFA from Emerson College. A survivor of domestic violence, she lives with her husband, four children, and four rescue cats in semi-rural Massachusetts. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for her local public library, and she can be found online at janaleegermaine.com.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cristina Herrera Mezgravis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cristina Herrera Mezgravis
Where did your inspiration for your fiction piece, “Ninina,” come from?
I drew inspiration for “Ninina” from my own relationship with different women in my life—my mother, tías, and abuelas. Like Nina, I was also once a female teenager growing up in a sexist society dealing with rising crime and economic hardship. These external factors put a lot of pressure on an already fraught mother-daughter relationship. In this story, I investigate how we fail and succeed to communicate and how we keep loving each other despite these difficulties.
The central relationship is a tense one between Ninina and her mother, punctuated by the line, “She liked to think the good things [about her] came from [her father], and the bad came from Ma.” Can you talk about this line? What made you develop their relationship in that manner?
That line represents Nina’s tendency to idealize her father and place her frustrations on her mother. Nina’s father died when she was 7 years old; additionally, since her parents took on very divided gender roles—dad as main breadwinner, mother as main caretaker—her dad wasn’t as present as Nina’s mother when he was alive. In his absence, it’s much easier for Nina to blame and criticize the present parent: Ma is around more and this leads to more friction and clashes between them. I wanted to be so deeply entrenched in Nina’s adolescent brain that statements such as these, even with their flawed logic, make sense to her. The line says Nina liked to think this way: for Nina, it’s a choice. It’s easier and rather childlike of her to think in dichotomies—dad, good, mom, bad—instead of sitting with, disentangling, and understanding her complex feelings for her mother. As an adolescent, she’s caught between being a child who thinks in simple terms and an adult who is better able to understand complexity.
The way you’ve crafted the setting, with the specific descriptions of the streets and the detritus and the feel of it seems like a character in itself. How did you craft the setting to have maximum effect in your story?
Thank you for this question. As an immigrant away from my birthplace, it makes me happy that Venezuela comes across as a character in itself. I didn’t set out to do it consciously—at least not in the first few drafts. It was all about being really present in the character’s mind and body. Since I grew up in Venezuela, I thought back to the objects and fauna that made up my experience: like Nina, I didn’t like the taste of nonfat long-life milk, but it was often what we had at home—with the food and product shortages, many times there wasn’t much of a choice. If Nina was going to walk out the front door, I knew she had to open a multi-lock gate, as crime was rampant back then. For the same reason, there would be a guard downstairs. In walking, Nina would have to step over or around fallen mangoes—a staple of the parks around my parents’ home. Muggings and kidnappings were on the mind’s of everyone I knew back in 2012. By being fully present in Nina’s experience, I was able to capture the details that shape her life organically—a lot of this, of course, happened through revision. With every new draft, I added details or scaled back.
I feel like Rafael plays a really interesting part between these two women, a sort of balm for Ma and a watchful figure for Ninina. Can you talk about his role in their relationship?
It’s an interesting relationship: on the one hand, he’s an employee of the building where Ma and Nina live; on the other, he’s been there for so long he knows many intimacies about their lives. Rafael has seen Ma go from pregnant to young mother to widow, and he’s seen Nina grow. He has insight into their lives that Nina and Ma don’t have into his—like Nina thinks, they stick to the same, superficial topics of conversation in part because of the employer-employee relationship and because of social norms. I wanted to represent this grey area on the page: Rafael is a witness, in a sense, to both Nina and Ma’s lives while their participation in his life is limited.
Ninina and her mother are caught in this circle of pushing against each other. At the end, Ninina’s mother is able to begin to break that cycle by reaching out to her daughter. What made you end the story in this way? Were there other versions that you worked on where they didn’t come back together?
Looking back at drafts from 2018, when I started writing this story, I found two or three other versions, but they all have Nina and Ma coming back together: in one version, Nina steps into the elevator, certain that her mother knows she’s on her way up; in another, Nina and Ma end up cracking up, laughing so hard they have to shush each other to keep from waking up the neighbors (it’s nighttime in this version). I think my instinct to have them come back together stems from a desire to communicate that Nina will always be Ma’s daughter, and Ma will always be Nina’s mother. Nothing can change that, no matter how much they hurt each other, no matter what happens. I believe family is family, meaning, we have to do our best to work out our differences rather than holding grudges or resentments because estrangement, although in some cases necessary, can ultimately end up hurting more. I believe in the power of love to move people past their fears and differences, so I guess the move to end the story with Nina and her mother starting to reconcile is a reflection of that belief.
Do you find that you return to certain themes in your writing?
Oh, for sure! I write about mother-daughter relationships, about migration and alienation; employer-employee relationships, often in the domestic sphere, female sexuality and desire. And, certainly, the big ones, the ones we can’t escape: love, not only in the romantic sense, and human resilience—how we’re able to keep going, laughing, dancing, loving, despite the trials we face.
What books and authors inspire you? What are some of your favorite works?
“Ninina” forms part of a novel first inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—I love how he writes about a place through the experiences of different characters within the same fictional town. Ever since I read Gabriel García Márquez in highschool, I’ve loved how he captures the idiosyncrasies of a place with wit and without losing sight of tension, especially in his short stories. I greatly admire how James Baldwin writes about interpersonal relationships, more specifically about our ability to love and how it’s trumped by societal and gender norms. Tobias Wolff is a master of the short story, always writing with humility and humor. Junot Diaz mixes the rhythms of the Spanish and English language artfully, as does mi compatriota and fellow Michener grad Alejandro Puyana in writing about Venezuela in Freedom Is a Feast. In Dominicana, Angie Cruz tactfully writes about a woman’s immigrant experience, domestic violence and female sexuality. Ana Menendez’s short story “In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd” made me cry and I still remember it with fondness. And there are many, many more authors and books that I could gush about.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a coming-of-age novel about Venezuelan migrants (of which “Ninina” is a part).
Cristina Herrera Mezgravis is a writer and eductor from Valencia, Venezuela. She earned awards in both fiction and nonfiction at Stanford University. She has worked in tech and in college prep in the Bay Area and in Lima, Peru. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and their tabby cat, Lima. As a second-year Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, Mezgravis is working on a coming-of-age novel about Venezuelan migrants. “Ninina” is her first publication.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Stephanie Early Green
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Stephanie Early Green
Your fiction piece tells the story of Sabrina, who begins a new job after the trauma of her last one where she was forced into sex work. Where did the idea of “Nojento” come from? Why did you set it at a summer camp?
The idea for this story sprang almost fully formed into my head. I’d been thinking about human trafficking, which, sadly, is a huge problem in Brazil, but I didn’t necessarily want to tell a human trafficking story. I was more interested in the aftermath: what happens once a person breaks free from an exploitative or coercive situation? How might a person escaping this life try to start over? The setting of a summer camp came from my own memories of my Girl Scout sleepaway camp in Michigan (shoutout Camp Innisfree). All of our counselors were young European women, many of them from Eastern Europe, and I always wondered how they ended up at a camp in southeastern Michigan, and what they thought of us soft, suburban American girls.
There’s a lot of intricacies with language in this piece; Sabrina looks up phrases she doesn’t know. Can you talk about how language informed your characters and played a role within the story?
I have a real fondness and appreciation for Brazilian Portuguese. My first job out of college was as a paralegal at a law firm in São Paulo, and I returned again four years later as an attorney. I loved learning and speaking Portuguese, which is such a fun, dynamic, and endearing language, in no small part because of how generous Brazilians are with people trying to speak their language. Brazilians absolutely love it when a foreigner attempts to speak Portuguese. They inevitably say, “Oh, your Portuguese is so good,” even when it’s not! But I always appreciated the ego boost. As someone who’s lived and worked in a language that is not my own, I can relate to Sabrina’s struggles to express herself fully in English, and the constant translation, appraisal, and comparison that happens when navigating mother tongue and adopted tongue. Sabrina in America – in English – is not the same person as Sabrina in Brazil, partly because of the experiences that have shaped her in America, but also because of the language that she must use to try to narrate and make sense of those experiences. Living in another language is a process of noticing cognates and false cognates, of searching for equivalences and finding, sometimes, absences. And for some experiences, there are no adequate words in any language.
Alissa is such a fascinating character; she’s a girl who has a wealth of knowledge, and her openness helps to bring Sabrina from her shell. Can you talk about how you developed her as a character, companion, and foil to Sabrina?
I was thinking a lot about silence when I wrote this story: what can be said out loud and what remains pushed down. Sabrina is someone who swallows things, for a number of reasons: hesitancy in a new language, shame, the desire to be left alone. But I see Alissa as someone with no hesitation about speaking out, a person calls ‘em like she sees ‘em, for better or worse. I always think of Charles Baxter’s essay “Counterpointed Characterization,” in which he says, and I’m paraphrasing, that as a fiction writer, you must put characters together who force each other to unmask, to expose the secret facets of their personalities. This is what Alissa does for Sabrina, allowing her to open up, but in the end, she goes a step further and speaks for Sabrina. And, maybe surprisingly, this unmasking feels liberating for Sabrina. On Alissa’s end, I thought of her as a child who does not easily make friends or fit in, and so to have the undivided attention of an older girl – a counselor! – probably felt really validating. Both of these characters were getting something out of their friendship; it wasn’t one-sided.
This piece jumps back and forth in time, talking about Sabrina’s past work. When first writing “Nojento,” did you have these time jumps included? What was your editing process like to shape the piece into what it is today?
I actually went back to my initial draft to answer this question, and the time jumps were in there from the beginning. In the beginning of the first draft, though, I spent more time on Sabrina’s backstory. I explored her relationship with the family whose house she cleaned, as well as her relationship with her parents and siblings back home. In the revision process, I ended up cutting this backstory because it slowed the plot down too much. I initially workshopped this piece at the Community of Writers (virtual) workshop in 2021, and went on to tinker with it for several years before it reached its final form.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
Girlhood, motherhood, foreignness and alienation, female friendship and rivalry, body image.
What authors or books have influenced you as a writer?
Oh, man, so many! In terms of craft books, I was introduced to Charles Baxter’s essays during the first semester of my MFA program at Warren Wilson, and they were so brain-expanding for me as I started to think more deliberately about craft. Some of my favorite fiction writers are George Saunders, Kate Atkinson, Anne Enright, Shirley Hazzard, Susan Choi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Emily St. John Mandell.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing my novel, which is an adaptation of a short story of mine that imagines a world in which some but not all women turn into neanderthals. At this point, three years into working on this novel, the plot only bears a tangential relationship to the story that inspired it, which was published in 2021. It’s been an interesting process of adaptation.
Stephanie Early Green‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, The Chicago Tribune, New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing (judged by Charlotte Watson Sherman) and her work was Highly Commended for the 2021 Bridport Prize (short story). She was also named a finalist by judge Rumaan Alam for the 2021 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. She is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Virginia with her family and is at work on a novel.