Julia Alvarez on Mortality
In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Julia Alvarez about her new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: It’s interesting how much the plot of The Cemetery of Untold Stories is so intrinsically linked to our mortality. You know, when we’re young, we think we have all the time in the world and our paths are like the branches of a tree. But the older we get we don’t have that many options. So, I can understand that you’re saying that these top stories have to get told soon.
Julia Alvarez: And there’s so many, there’s so many, because the thing with having lived that long and, and a lot of time behind us instead of ahead of us, there is a whole village with us, you know. And so, it’s ironic that as we have less time, maybe we have, I don’t know, richer, more layered stories to tell, but less, less time, less anima, less energy, all of those things. I heard Ruby Sales said, you know, the thing about aging is terrible. You got bad knees, your eyesight has gone bad. You’re hearing all this stuff. But she says, from where I sit, I have the most amazing vision because I have hindsight, foresight and insight. And it’s 360 degrees. So, I thought, well, yes, that’s true. And so, it gets also harder to write because the story branches out, it’s less tidy. And Edward Said actually in talking about the late style noted that in older writers that their stories are messier and more entangled and more feral. You know, I think that’s a product of how the life itself has a large root system now.
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Julia Alvarez has written novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, collections of poems including Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, nonfiction works including Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti, and numerous books for young readers including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go? Her new novel is The Cemetery of Untold Stories. In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
