INTERVIEW WITH JACQUELINE HERRANZ BROOKS
Editorial CAMPANA, United States

1. When did you begin to write, and why?
I began writing regularly in 1990. That year, the year I graduated from photography school, the photographic material that would arrive at the studios in Havana from East Germany began to grow scarce because Orwo [a manufacturer of photographic film], from what I heard, had collapsed. I’d just graduated and finished my social service obligation and was working in a photography studio in the center of Havana three times a week. Twice a week I taught at the palace of pioneers in the same municipality. I traveled regularly from the beach to the center of Havana and was fascinated with the ruined facades of the buildings that I always wanted to photograph. That’s how I began to write. As I didn’t have rolls of film or money to buy them in the black market, I made notes of how I’d photograph the buildings in the future, when I could. For example, I’d write: photograph the two balconies of the blue building on Virtudes street where the blind is falling, or photograph the wall of the house on the corner of Saint Lazaro. That’s how I wrote the collection of poems, Liquid Days, where some of the poems came from these notes that I made as I walked.

2. What subjects have been constant in your creative endeavor?
My life, my personal experiences, are the constant. The things that have happened to me, things I have thought, but never things that I’ve been told, not even the things I find most interesting, attractive, and even literary.

3. What is the process you go through to prepare for a body of work, the necessary conditions, major obstacles, defining moments of your “creative routine”?
The conditions vary; the conditions I write and live in are what give shape to what I write, maybe more or less concisely, more or less hermetically, more or less long, depending on the space I have or the space I work in. Since living in New York, what could be called a creative routine doesn’t exist. But I do think of the time I wrote in Cuba, where the fact of my living and writing and describing that experience could be called a routine. Not that I wrote about everything I lived, that would be impossible, but I remember writing pieces that were very short and immediate, like photos taken as I went along, the accidental experiences.

Here in New York months go by before I can find time to go back to a piece that I’ve left half written, abandoned for months, and when I do find the time, I feel differently than I did when I began the piece, its no longer the same. I have to begin by reading what I’ve written and then try to reinsert myself into what is happening and then, boom, time’s up because I have to do something else, finish reading a novel for a class or writing an essay for another class–or simply begin to edit what I’ve already written, which leaves me without energy to continue writing. Maybe I haven’t yet found that method to working. Maybe I should do something similar to what Judith Ortiz did to finish The Latin Deli, discipline myself, sleep less, organize myself while I tell myself that I have to write every day, watch less television… but this might not work with me.

4. What public do you work for? What would be your ideal public? Where have you distributed your work?
In Cuba my work moved very little and was distributed very little, even though I’d won a prize that put my work into a widely read magazine. In New York I’ve distributed my work more and in different places, in jails, mainstream bookstores such as Borders and Barnes and Noble, and in local community bookstores, like Caliope. Also in universities in New York, where I often read my work to students, who sometimes like it a lot, which truly makes me happy. But I don’t think about them when I write, at least not consciously. When I began writing I didn’t have the awareness that I’ve now accumulated over the years, as well as by coming in contact with other writing, of course. At any determined moment, I discover who I wanted to write for, and it was when I began to realize that there wasn’t (in the literature I was reading nor in what was coming out of Cuba) people like myself or my friends, any literature that represented us. I thought that by describing daily life I’d get closer to doing that, and my main readers were this closed group of friend who understood the characters, jokes, etc. right away. It was difficult, it always is, when there are no models for what one’s doing, when there seems to be a standard that says one kind of story and character is more literary than others. The work I did for Cubaneo, with Manelic Ferret and Alejandro Aragón was very important in the development of my work. I don’t know who my ideal reader would be, maybe someone who is interested in daily life, in a literature without violence of expression, with a certain acerbic, but not dark, humor. I’ve thought that a for a book like Scenes for Tourists, the ideal reader would be a lesbian or gay Cuban of my generation, who has lived in the street like I have, without parents in important places, people who have dropped out of college a couple of times, breaking their head because they didn’t know where to go. But I’ve found readers here from other places who are just as interested in what I write, or readers who could relate to this, though coming from other places.

5. For your writing and intellectual life, what have been the advantages, challenges or sacrifices that have come from leaving Cuba?
Living here is completely different than living there, now and then. Nothing but skeletons remain from what I wrote then, but maybe some of what I write now is a rewriting of what I did then, but more filled out. Now, here, I’d be ready to write another Scenes for Tourists, but about society here. I’m not doing that yet, though. I still think about writing about Cuba without realizing I’m writing about it, or that I’m moving my characters through the streets of Havana or putting them on a train to Holguin or Santiago instead of going to the Bronx or Manhattan. But my work has changed. Now I work with longer texts that I can’t finish in a day and immediately begin to edit. They are long texts based more on memory than immediate living, contrary to what I did before. I also try to say more than I used to. Before, in Cuba, I was made to think that good literature was hermetic. Now I feel more sure than before that what is considered good or bad is just that, a consideration, a point of view and a value judgment that critics and the market try to impose on us.

6. What criteria do you employ when writing about homosexuality in your stories?
The theme of homosexuality runs through my stories the way hunger or a headache does, particularly because I am lesbian, as are many of my friends. It seems natural that my characters be queer, and it is something that comes out spontaneously. If the theme is there, it is not because I’ve said, ok, now a lesbian should come into a scene and say that she hates her girlfriend and prefers the girlfriend of the storekeeper, because she has bigger hips, or that in this story the central theme should be somebody’s homosexuality because there are a lot of homophobic people who have to be convinced that there’s nothing strange about us. I don’t think in that way. If it were to be said that I employ some kind of criteria, it would be that I write about the reality that surrounds me, a different reality than that of any other queer or lesbian writer, of course.