Q&A with After Dinner Conversation author, Celia Lisset Alvarez
A bite-sized interview for your Sunday morning.
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Q&A
Is there any standard publishing or writing advice that you disagree with? Or any standard advice that you feel is too often neglected?
Although I acknowledge its value, I really do bristle against the “write what you know” school of advice. It’s really limiting to the imagination. How would any sci-fi or fantasy ever have been written if authors only stuck to what they know? I do realize the political implications of representation involved. We all know what has happened and continues to happen when white writers write minorities, or when men write women. As a Hispanic woman, however, I feel twice burdened–no–exhausted–with the dictum to always represent. What do I know about my people? In my first chapbook, I wrote, “I have no people.” I am hopelessly assimilated. I don’t dream in Cuban. I think in English. Believing I could write the Hispanic or Latina or even the immigrant experience is a ludicrous concept, well-meaning but based on the assumption that a single experience could somehow do this. First, there are many kinds of Hispanics, even many kinds of Cubans. I can’t speak for the post-Mariel Cuban immigrants or the people still trapped on the island. I don’t know the first thing about them (unless I take an imaginative leap, of course, but any writer could do that). And I believe it is unnecessary to explain how seeing one woman writer’s experience speak for all womanhood is both ludicrous and dangerous. My experience of womanhood is vastly different, say, from an upper-middle-class, white woman’s experience, or that of a Muslim woman. No one wants to bring back the idea of a universal human experience–that is way too dangerous, has proven too often to be white, male experience by default, in disguise. But also, our identities are so fragmented by race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, education, income, abilities, and political beliefs that we are at a point where there is no we. I can only speak authentically for myself, and that is boring. I don’t always want to write about Cubans in Miami. In fact, I rarely want to write about Cubans in Miami. I don’t want to “represent.” I want to be free to write about “the human heart in conflict with itself,” dammit. And I am perfectly cool if other writers–Cuban or not–want to write about Cubans in Miami, as long as they do so with sensitivity.
What is the greatest compliment you have received as a writer? The most stinging criticism?
I think it was during the COVID lockdown that I did a Zoom reading where I read one of the grief poems from my collection, Multiverses, which is about the death of my infant son. A woman commented that she felt “seen.” That is the ultimate compliment. I was able to wrangle my experience into something someone else could connect to, could feel explained by. So often we are unable to express ourselves even to ourselves. When a piece of literature can help you do that–feel recognized, explained, spoken, “seen”--that is amazing. It’s like medicine for the soul.
And then there’s a professor I had in college, whose identity I will protect, because I’m sure he didn’t realize how devastating his comment was, and also because it was true. He said about a poem I was revising that it felt not so much as a poem as “notes for a poem.” Ouch. I have never forgotten that!
Which authors or books would you recommend to those who want to challenge their own thinking?
This is a rather broad question, so I’ll just think broadly. Everyone should read Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs at some point. Although it is specifically about nineteenth-century American fiction, it is an eye-opener for anyone interested in literary history and criticism. What is the relationship between sales and critical acclaim? What powers dictate taste? How is it that a book achieves “classic” status? Tompkins has great answers to all these questions. Then, anything by Toni Morrison. First, in my book, she’s probably the greatest American writer to date. She had a way of presenting the black experience in this country that makes you both want to look away and keep reading. All her books belong in the freezer (an obscure Friends reference some will get). Same goes for Alice Walker, which is good, because I think her style is more accessible. You have to work through Toni Morrison (that is a compliment). I’m trying to be brief, so I’m not being too selective, just writing what first pops into my head. Everyone should read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It is heartbreaking and a complex yet wonderfully simple rendering of the colonial experience. Maybe follow it up with Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon if you want to understand postcolonialism, which you should. I could go on and on, so I’ll stop there.
Celia Lisset Alvarez is a writer and educator from Miami, Florida.
She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami and has four collections of poetry, Shapeshifting (winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry Award), The Stones (Finishing Line Press 2006), Multiverses (Finishing Line Press 2021; finalist in the narrative poetry category of American Book Fest’s Best Books Award), and Bodies & Words (Assure Press 2022).
Her stories and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in the anthologies The Book of Life after Death (Tolsun Books 2023) and SMEOP II (Black Sunflowers PoetryPress 2023) and in the journal After Dinner Conversation, which just nominated her story, “The Pool,” for a Pushcart. This is Alvarez’s second Pushcart nomination. She has also been nominated for a Best of the Net Award.
Alvarez was born in Spain to Cuban parents fleeing from Castro’s communist regime.
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Yes. It‘s motivating to write with a financial reward just waiting for your manuscript. However, it’s liberating to write descriptively what you have experienced, especially when you sustain a bracket around judgmental voices from within or projected. I project moral voices onto church leaders past and present. Withdrawing these projections returns my unconscious shadow energy, which became trapped in projection.
I agree with your assessment about fiction, most importantly, being left open to imagination. Creative writers I know all say they couldn't be truly creative without that freedom to be whomever they want to be. French author Albert Camus' quote also stayed with me about this: "Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."