An Interview with Pablo Medina
Pablo Medina is a novelist, translator, and poet. Born in Havana, Cuba, Medina moved to New York City with his family at the age of 12 and later studied at Georgetown University. His memoir, Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood, appeared in 1990, and several novels followed, most recently The Cuban Comedy (Unnamed Press, 2019). His work in translation includes The Weight of the Island: Selected Poems of Virgilio Piñera, Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (with poet Mark Statman), Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, and Everyone Will Have to Listen by Tania Díaz Castro (with Carolina Hospital). His poetry collections include The Island Kingdom, Soledades and, most recently, The Foreigner’s Song: New and Selected Poems (Tiger Bark Press, 2021). His work has appeared in many journals and periodicals, among them Poetry, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Five Points, Zyzzyva, and On the Seawall. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, among other honors. Medina served on the board of directors for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs from 2001 to 2007 and as its president from 2005 to 2006. He is currently a faculty member at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and lives in Williamsville, Vermont.
While working on one of your recent novels, The Cuban Comedy, did you find any challenges writing outside of your own gender?
Yes of course, but I’ll tell you a story about how that came to be. The Cuban Comedy is a story I had been working on for a lot of years. I started the book in 2004. I ran into several dead ends in the story. I put it aside, and I went on to work on several other things — several books of translation, poetry, individual essays, and so on. The novel always kept gnawing at the back of my head like a little creature that said, “Well, I have to be finished.” I almost gave up on the book. It was written from the point of view of the male character in the story, Daniel Arcilla, the poet whom Elena marries. Then I was talking to my agent about it — I just couldn’t get the story right, I didn’t feel comfortable with it. She very casually said to me, “Why don’t you write it from the female point of view?” I said, “The female point of view? I’ve never done that, that’s not something males are supposed to do.” I struggled along with the issue, and I finally I thought she was probably right. I decided to try the female point of view, not necessarily wanting to get into the head of the character but just trying to see how it could solve some of the structural and thematic issues I was dealing with. I started writing in a fable-like tone, slow and sure. How does a woman think? I don’t know, let me find out. It was a process. You could say necessity is the mother of adventure, and attempting the shift as an adventure worked. And the narrative began to grow in ways I didn’t expect.
Were there any female influences in your life you found yourself drawing from for Elena’s character?
Yes, she is a compendium of people. I drew on both of my grandmothers, whom I was fortunate enough to know. I also drew on, of course, my mother — although the character of Elena Blanco is very different from these people. I also drew on a female Cuban poet, who was a dissident and who suffered greatly at the hands of the Cuban regime. The answer is yes, I was influenced by the lives of many women, and they were all summarized in this character.
In honor of why you will be with us, what Hispanic writers have influenced your writing career?
I read a lot of so called “writers of the boom.” When I was in graduate school, those were the writers who were coming to the forefront. They were on everyone’s lips, so I read their books voraciously. Among them were García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, whose Kingdom of This World I eventually translated into English.Through them I began to form a vision of what it meant to be someone of Hispanic background and someone who straddles more than one language and culture.
Being from so many different places, does that also shape how you write?
Absolutely, place plays such an important part of the kind of writing I do. I am just now beginning to write about Vermont, where I live now, and the landscape here. New York too. I was born in Havana and grew up there until the age of 12 and then moved to New York. That experience reinforced the urban perspective in my work to the point that I like to say New York is the Havana of the world for me. It opened me up to the world. At the same time, I can say — with apologies to Lydia Cabrera — I discovered Cuba on the banks of the Hudson River. It was there that I learned so much about the island of my birth. I came there when I was 12, and 12-year-olds have a very limited experience of life and their surroundings. It was in New York that I began to research and found out what Cuba was like. I realized Cuba wasn’t a nation to me; it was a notion, an idea. You need distance from what you write to fully look at all the shading that’s there. I think it that has to do not only with place but also with character.
Where does your writing process start?
The first couple of drafts that would become The Cuban Comedy were very different. I began with a male character looking out at a snowstorm. One of the things that always fascinated me growing up in a tropical place was snowfall. I remember the first time I saw snow actually falling. I was in school in Manhattan looking out the window, and I saw the flakes coming. Even though I had seen this in movies, the actual experience blew my mind. I drew on that experience as I wrote the scene of the character. That scene was thrown out, as much as I loved it. Once I shifted to the female character’s point of view, she was actually in an imaginary town in Cuba watching young men going off to war. There couldn’t be any snow. The way I wrote the initial scene as it appears began with a reading of Caesar’s Gallic diaries: “All of Gaul is divided into three parts.” I wanted a sort of mental division within Elena, so I began with her world divided into four parts. It was an echo of Caesar’s first line. The more you read, the more your reading informs your own work. Sometimes I begin with a phrase, and other times I begin by echoing other writers.
Throughout your time writing, have you ever found yourself struggling to create material, especially after pouring so much into larger works?
Yes, and I think everyone struggles with that, especially after finishing a long project like a novel. You have poured everything you have into a book, so you have very little left. You have to step back to regain your energy and voice. There is a fear I experience to this day that the poem I finished today, the story I finished yesterday, or the novel I finished six months ago is my last one. It is a scary feeling that doesn’t go away. So far, I have been able to move on, but the fear is always there. It might be a matter of preparing myself for the time when the feeling becomes real. There are famous writers who have gone through it. Philip Roth is a notable example and J.D. Salinger, and Juan Rulfo, who wrote one novel Pedro Paramo, but boy what a novel! I read some time ago that writers tend to have a limited span. This writer concluded that it is about 30 to 35 years of activity, but who knows? There is a Spanish author by the name of Francisco Ayala who was writing novels when he was over a hundred years old, and yet there are others who stop at a relatively young age. Arthur Rimbaud stopped at the age of 19, yet he wrote these luminous poems that are still read today. If we define ourselves as only writers and that moment comes when you run out of material, inspiration, or you die, you have to find a way through it.
As writers, specifically students, how do we find the right balance of self confidence and humility?
Sometimes you feel good about your work, but writing and all artistic endeavors are not about feeling good about yourself. Jimmy Breslin once said, “I am not in this world to be happy.” It doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be happy, but that’s not the end all be all of being in the world. I think the same goes for a writer. You are not here to aggrandize yourself; you are here to explore the world as a writer. I write every day, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, without necessarily knowing exactly what I will come out with at the end of the day. It may be good or bad, but that’s not the point. The point is you are involved in a practice that has peaks and valleys, and you have to take both.
