INTERVIEW WITH SONIA RIVERA-VALDÉS
Editorial CAMPANA, United States

1. What family, childhood or student influences affected the beginnings of your intellectual life? Do you remember one particular instance?
The response to these questions has taken up entire chapters of The Book of Anniversaries, which I hope to publish at the end of this year or beginning of next. When I was seven years old or had just turned eight, a little before or after the end of World War II, I lived with my mother, father, and brother in Havana, in what today is known as Central Havana, in a room with a tiny bathroom and kitchen at the end of a dark corridor. In the chapter in which I recount a childhood episode, I describe the place as worse than the worst place in El Lazarillo de Tormes. There I wrote my first story, a total plagery of my favorite fairy tale. My mother didn’t like cooking nor taking care of the house, but she liked to tell stories, and she did it very well. I proudly showed my mother what I’d written in those folds of shiny paper that I don’t know why were in my house. She looked at it and said nice, and continued frying the plantains in front of the coal stove. In any case, I always remembered the satisfaction I had in producing that first story lying face down on the black and white tiles of the floor. My parents, although neither of the two studied beyond elementary school, were avid readers. He was a tobacconist, and in the tobacco stores people read every day for an hour in the morning and another in the evening, and my mother was raised reading out loud to her adopted father. In my house, reading was an integral part of family life, though no material gain could come from it.

2. How do you prepare to write a book, what are the conditions you need, the major obstacles, the defining moments of your creative “routine”?
My main obstacle to writing is lack of time. I teach at York College, I organize activities, and I dedicate time to LART (Latino Artists Round Table), a cultural organization that I started with several other people in 1999, as well as also working with other cultural organizations, like the Association of Dominican Studies. I have a family life and am socially active, and for the past few years have had diabetes, which takes up a lot of time if I want to remain healthy. I write in the gaps of days and nights, whenever I can find an hour or two to do it in. I have a very active creative mental routine because I am constantly imagining stories, but to actually sit down and write on determined hours every day... I don’t do that. I would like to.

3. Where do your characters come from, where do your ideas for your stories come from?
The stories are born, and I don’t know how. At any given moment something I’ve been told, something I’ve seen, lived, dreamed, grows and is converted in my head into a story that takes on a complete shape as I write it. The spark that transforms the story from real life into a literary story is almost always a phrase or a word. That’s what happened with Stories of Little Women and Grown-up Girls. I constructed the story so that I could use that phrase, which also has its own history. What I do is create a story that has a theme I’m interested in. In the case of "The Eighth Fold," this involves the right that women have to determine what their love relationships will be. This is a right that even today many men think belongs to them, and many women aren’t aware that they possess it.

4. Did you personally know Ana Mendieta?
Yes, we were good friends. In The Necessary Note, which appears at the beginning of Stories of Little Women and Grown-up Girls, I mention how painful it was for me erase her name and address from my phone book. At the beginning of the eighties we lived in the West Village, and she visited me often. We always got together at my house or at some friend’s house. We were founding members of the Cuban Cultural Circle. The four stories that appear in Stories of Little Women and Grown-up Girls, under the title "The Four Seasons of Ana," began to write themselves when she was still alive. My intention was to give the story "Ana and the Magic Wand" as a gift to her, but she died before I could finish it, because it took me years to resolve the ending—what Ana does with the wand. I wanted it to be something that left open the possibility of a miracle and the psychology. That story came from an anecdote of her life that she told me on Christmas Eve in 1981, which we spent together with a group of friends. Ana was very sad because she had separated from her companion, who she eventually went back to and was with until she died on September 8, 19985.

5. Tell me about Martirio Fuentes...is she your alter ego?
Literary critics have often said this. I understand why they do, but I think that the construction of Martirio Fuentes, like that of most of the characters I develop, is more of a process of “impersonation”, imitation of the behavior and reactions of the person created. I can put myself in their place easily. I think I learnt this as a child, as I’d try to understand the abrupt changes of mood and frequent depressions of my mother through her gestures and conduct.

6. Is there a common theme to the stories in Stories of Little Women and Grown-up Girls?
All the characters are capable of doing, without sentimentality, the things they need to do in order to move ahead with their lives, and in the case of Ana Mendieta, with eternity.

7. What criteria do you use in writing about homosexuality in your stories?
The same criteria I use to deal with any human relationship. I describe and explore the situation posed in the story. Human relationships are very complicated, all of them, heterosexual, gay, lesbian, the one with our mother, our father, our children, brothers and sisters, friends. I think to embitter our own life and to embitter it for others by creating a problem and even a tragedy over the fact that someone shares their romantic and erotic feelings with a person of the same sex is absurd. As absurd as complicating live for someone because they fall in love or go to bed with someone of a different race, religion, or nationality.

8. How do you not cross the boundary between the erotic and the pornographic in your bedroom scenes?
For me, pornography’s unique purpose is to sexually excite. I’ve never written anything like this, it doesn’t occur to me. I write bedroom scenes when I think they are necessary in order to move the work towards the theme I want to explore, and I think that they have to be as realistic as possible. In my opinion stories that ring false aren’t worth much.

9. Do you think that artists can be good artists if they censor themselves?
It is possible to be a good artist if one censors oneself, but one would be a better artist if one didn’t.

10. In reading your stories, one feels great empathy with the main characters. How do you manage that?
I pay great attention to what people tell me. I don’t do it with the intention of turning it into literature, but because I’m interested in what people say, and listening to what they say without judging helps me get to know you, or at least, to try and get to know you. I don’t feel sorry for myself. And the same way that I try and understand myself, I try and understand others. That’s what I do when I create characters. I try to act, think, and feel as they might, according to their circumstances.

11. The women in your stories are strong women, who take up the reins of their own destinies. Did you do this on purpose?
Yes, I did.

12. What audience are you addressing? What would be your ideal audience?
Everyone interprets what they read according to, among other factors, their life experience, their knowledge or lack of knowledge of the milieu in which the story unfolds, and their values. Once a text is finished and converted into reading material, one is no longer owner of how anyone interprets it. My ideal reader is someone who reads what I write because they want to—not because it’s assigned as reading material for a class (though I like that what I write be read in schools) but because they are interested in reading it. My ideal reader is someone who is capable of reading the text and subtext of what the story says, someone who realizes that although there is an explicit sexual scene, for example, the story as a whole means something else. This is the ideal, but it doesn’t bother me at all that people interpret what I write in different ways. On the contrary, I love it when someone says they’ve understood something that I haven’t seen or intended to say. Or thought I had no intention of saying, who knows. One has so many things going on in one’s head and heart.

13. What are the advantages and the disadvantages of writing in Spanish while living in the United States?
It depends what your priorities are when writing. If I were to write in English it would be easier to divulge things. Now, in order for a text written in Spanish to reach an English-speaking reader, it has to go through a translating process, which takes time, makes the book more expensive, and it is not easy to find a good translator. I have had good luck because the person who translated Stories of Little Women and Grown-up Girls, Emily Maguire, is excellent and we work harmoniously together, which is important for me. My previous book, The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda, also had excellent translators. The advantage of writing in Spanish is that if the book I write is sold in a book store in Havana or in Santo Domingo or Mexico, anyone can read it. This gives me a lot of satisfaction. And here, in the United States, I’m interested in contributing to an existing literature in Spanish.

14. Where has your work been distributed? What has been your realtionship to the market?
In a certain way my work has been lucky. In another, not that much. I’ll explain. I wrote The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda the way I wanted to, in a colloquial language, a little defiant, not of only the style but of the subjects, and it won a prize from Casa de las Americas, something that I never thought would happen when I wrote it. It was published in Cuba. Without an agent and without suggesting it, it was published in Spain, the United States, and in Turkey. The problem is that the book appears to exist independently of the person who wrote it. Sometimes I hear that it is being read, for example , in Arberia, a place that, frankly, I had to look up to find where it was. These are the meridian provinces of Italy where there was a strong influx of Albanian immigrants. I haven’t been pleased, for example, to hear by chance, because the publishing house never told me about it, that the The Forbidden Stories were published in Turkey. I found out because someone saw it on the internet. And I have a story, "The Patriotic Kiss," that was published for the first time in 1986, and appeared in another anthology, Album, many years later, an anthology that the Board of Education adopted for high school Advanced Placement courses, and that is also used a lot in universities. I knew that story was there because a friend who was a high school teacher told me one day that his students liked it a lot. I didn’t know what story he was talking about. I have more stories like this than I would like. Now I’m happy that what I write is published by Editorial Campana. The publishing house is fair to its writers, as should be.

15. Why do you write?
I ask myself that a lot. The closest answer I can give is that I write because I like to, because it is the best way that I’ve found to feel alive. I could say that it’s a way to put my world in order, writing makes me feel calm. I can do an endless amount of things, do everything one does in a day or a week, and if I haven’t written I feel like I haven’t done what I should have done. Maybe... maybe I’m always waiting for my mother to read what I’ve written and to say to me, that’s fantastic Sonia. But my mother, when I showed her that story I wrote when I was seven years old, just went on frying plantains, and now she’s dead.