Discovery and the “Eye” of Writing: An Interview with Fred Arroyo
“You watch. You follow. You write it down. Read it, revise it, try to get it down just right.”
Fred Arroyo is the author of Alba and Other Songs, winner of the 3rd Gunpowder Press Alta California Chapbook Prize, which was published in 2024 in a bilingual edition. His Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging was shortlisted for 2021–2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. He is also the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions and The Region of Lost Names. His writing has appeared in the anthologies Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity and the Natural World. He is currently working on a book of poems, Emigrant Creek and Other Songs, and a collection of short fictions, The Book of Manuels.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
What inspires you to write? Do you draw inspiration from different places, or can you pinpoint specific things or one major thing that inspires you? Does the inspiration change/shift over time or have anything to do with what you’re working on in that moment?
As I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve lost the presence or importance of inspiration for my writing. My life is very melancholic. I don’t experience inspiration like when I was younger, when a feeling, idea, or sensation might make me write a short story in a single day or night. Now it’s more about working regularly, as much as possible, so I’m present to discover what I must write. For example, I had always wanted to write a book of poems, and yet it seemed that all I would ever write is prose. At some point during the pandemic, I realized I had no choice but to write a book of poems. I had to discover what I could accomplish in poetry. Before that choice, however, I had already done some of the groundwork when for a time I wrote two or three poems a day. I found I was writing poems I could share with others, as if I was teaching myself to write poems, and I was then “inspired” to dedicate even more attention to writing poems. At first light, I would sit outside with a notebook and write three pages of whatever I experienced — just there in the moment, not worrying about any sense of meaning or narrative. There in the moment I created images, captured details, followed sensations: the sun rising over the trees, the shadows slowly moving across the backyard, how shades of greens appeared each morning. The wind in the trees. The birds of first light.
I was and I’m still very inspired by the poet John Clare: “I found the poems in the field / And only wrote them down.” There is so much in the field of your attention that you can write without waiting for inspiration. I remind myself of his words often, and they were there helping me to write my new book of poems.
The Swedish poet Thomas Tranströmer has written, “In the day’s first hours, consciousness can take hold of the world / like a hand catching a sun-warmed stone” (“Prelude”). I capture much language like this in my notebooks. Something is working in me with lines like these, and as I collect more phrases and lines, I start to discover that I’m noticing something, trying to understand or know something, and this is a process that inspires me to write and Tranströmer affirms the kind of morning writing I do.
The conflict or problem for me is that I write so much from or about memory; memory is an obsessive source that continues to return to me. And that can make my writing very interior, if you will, melancholic, and thus sometimes painful, sometimes exhausting. The weight of memory and the repetition can add up. Will I always only be inspired by memory? Is it possible to exhaust memory? Who cares about my memories? My sense of inspiration has changed, then, in terms of trying to write from what is immediately experienced, and in following more the process of writing en plein air or alfresco writing. Writing in the fresh air, in other words, like when painters paint in nature. The physical world — the field — already containing the writing. Travel always helps with this, too, and is a continual source of change that also creates a connection between memory and immediate inspiration.
And isn’t reading such a part of what inspires us to be the best writer we can be? I dedicate much time just to reading — filling myself with the pleasures of language, with a variety of words, and then discovering craft choices for my own writing. Why all these years of reading? Why still today on this extremely hot and lazy afternoon am I reading? As Sumana Roy writes in her Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, “. . . it was language I was seeking, simply to take pleasure in it, hoping it would make everything new again.”
I love that you write to gain a sense of or to experience a sort of discovery. I think the Tranströmer quote is great, and I can see how both this aspect, along with the “field” you mentioned, both set an environment to aid in fostering creativity. What I am really hearing here is that you feel something working within you, a sort of creative energy or essence within you and the desire to learn and discover yourself throughout the process.
I really appreciate your perspective based on both experiences you’ve had and the awareness of where you are now, in the present. The love of language, discovery, and the inspiration that is drawn from reading, and from noticing your surroundings and learning to soak in everything possible from reading, and nature, and to revel in the unfolding and continuance of your experiences.
Thank you. Yes. Your perspective, words for this energy of discovery is key. And it’s important to recognize, value, and honor your unique experiences — in nature, in reading, in language.
Can you make yourself write even if you’re not feeling inspired? Or can you make yourself write if you just don’t feel like writing? If so, what does that process look like?
Yes. That’s part of the process of writing regularly — being there at first light to write, to habitually be present to what I can discover. The image of the process: a chair on the deck underneath the Japanese maple tree; next to the tree on its own platform is a statue of the Buddha; and if it is a sunny day, the backyard is filling with light. I have a book, pencil or pen, and I sit in the chair with a notebook, perhaps some scraps of paper, or some notecards. Something will catch my attention — some movement, some bright detail, maybe a smell or sound — and I begin writing. You begin without worrying about any intended meaning or product — you immerse yourself in the process of composing images, capturing details, awakening yourself to being embodied — sensually embodied — in the moment. You are awake and alive like at no other time in the day. You can write two or three pages, say 500 words, that just might be the beginning of something, or even have possibilities for several works. A week later, maybe a month later, I’ll start to recognize certain repetitions, certain patterns, and I’ll begin to know what I’m trying to write. These things will feed into a poem or story; they might be the raw materials for a work, and yet they might reveal connections to a memory I want to explore more, or they might have a connection to something I’ve already drafted.
Because I have this regular process of writing, I suppose it makes me believe in my writing, know that writing is possible, and there’s not much “writer’s block.” So then later in the day, say the afternoon or evening, even if I’m exhausted, I can turn to the draft of a poem or a fiction, and something about the energy and spirit of the earlier writing will offer that same belief to accomplish something. The writing itself is doing much more than I can do.
Much of this begins in my borrowing from the writer Kim Stafford and his notion of having faith in fragments (The Muses Among Us Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft). Our lives can often feel very fragmented, and we may have lots of other things that get in the way of writing. Our writing should be essential, yet we may have to figure out how to write in briefer moments of time, briefer forms. Fragments. So I also carry a small notebook and write down fragmented experiences or language from life — images, details, phrases overheard, words from signs, even graffiti. Cloud or bird or tree formations. Reading the world’s fragments. These are collected over time without worry about significance and meaning. I will return to this collection of fragments, read them, and begin to discover creative potential within them. I will often find three or four fragments magnetizing around a not-yet-written poem or story I can begin writing. This has happened so much I can’t disregard my faith in these fragments. These fragments are gifts I’m grateful for. I also write down mysterious phrases from my reading: “When horses were blue.” Or: “A barn for the blue horses.” Is this my language? Or is it from Thomas Tranströmer? I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. These phrases might inspire the title to a poem, or maybe they are fragments I’ll keep returning to in possibly writing a poem. Any fragments like this I repeat a lot, listen to them, catching the music — aural, vivid — that will be the accompaniment to other language, new music.
As writers we are remembering, imagining, feeling, worrying, and obsessing over things constantly, even if only at the subconscious level. These obsessions are there when you write regularly. Your obsessions will appear — they’ll call to you, speak to you. In his From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, Robert Olen Butler writes,
“We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. There are superficial yearnings, and there are truly deep ones always pulsing beneath, but every second we yearn for something. And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.”
What you can’t escape is your yearning. And that yearning is essential to compelling writing. So you don’t have to write in the morning like I do; you don’t have to write on notecards, scraps of paper, or in notebooks like I do. But if you develop some process of regularity for your writing, so you are present for your writing, you’ll discover your writing, your yearning.
I do like how Christian McEwan suggests the importance of having a process, of not being so focused on a product, because in your developing process you’ll discover the essentials of patience, persistence, and possibilities. She writes,
If we are flexible and patient, if we able to persist, there comes a time when the world itself begins to respond, when a conversation starts to develop between one’s project and oneself: Each moment of clarity giving rise to the next. People talk about synchronicity, the influence of dreams. But to say that presumes that one remains a separate entity, “subjects to influence.” The truth is far more fluid and astonishing. It is as if one had indeed dissolved into the larger universe, and the universe itself were doing the making, as if, through the act of self-surrender, the writing had started to appear on the screen, the painting to paint itself, the music to play on its own (World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down).
This is such an important matter: self-surrender. Losing who you think you are to discover a better self through your writing. And we don’t say this enough: Our unique writing process is our own best teacher or mentor. No one else. Just our process, our writing. “What is the best way to write?” Gail Scher asks in her One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. Then she provides an answer, “Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.”
Nice. McEwan’s quote reminds me of a section in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, when Virginia Woolf’s character explains her writing process. Cunnigham writes, “It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance.”
Very interesting. It can be difficult to accept how much mystery there is to life, to writing. Yet that’s a part of the self-surrender, the secret.
When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
I’m not sure if I have an exact answer. I sometimes wonder if my writing for over 30 years has something to do with the continual decision — better yet need — to write. You earn that day by day. And my story is that I shouldn’t be a writer. These are the details of Sown in Earth, and several conflicts that shaped my writing. The conflict of feeling linguistically confused in English and Spanish. I also grew up believing that my father’s third-grade education meant that work was more important than going to school. As a result, I didn’t imagine the possibilities education or writing. Even today, after all my education and writing, there are times when I wonder if I deserve my writing life. You look back and begin to see all kinds of moments where you were not deciding anything, though these moments have something to do with the yearning to do something like writing. It’s rather mysterious how you remember a meal being cooked with very simple things, a car being worked on, a garden being hoed, working in the fields or in a factory. There are images. Actions. Colors. You hear and smell things and it is all very vivid in your mind. And vivid in such a way as if your memory and imagination are following, for example, someone hoeing a garden, making rows and planting seeds, how this activity has a process, something is being made. You watch. You follow. You write it down. Read it, revise it, try to get it down just right. And you experience that self-surrender from earlier because what you are remembering and imagining has its own vivid, sensual, and detailed life. You can amaze yourself — you jar or shock yourself into knowing there is some greater presence than who you might think you are.
I found myself seeing — reading — ways of life that were seemingly not the stuff of Literature, and yet they seemed to be showing me their grace, dignity, and beauty — making me pay attention, making me listen to them. In a way, then, there was more than one moment, and these various ways of life were gifting me the possibilities of writing, rather than me deciding I was going to write. I’m reminded of Alistair MacLeod’s short story “Vision”: “This has been the telling of a story but like most stories it has spun off into others and relied on others and perhaps no story every [sic] really stands alone.”
There was one moment that stands out, though I’m not sure if I’m remembering all the details correctly. It’s now part of a story I imagine and remember and tell myself. I was maybe 22 or 23, working in a factory at night and trying to attend community college during the day, after already failing a basic composition class there. I was enrolled in the class again, and I was supposed keep a notebook for writing. I had a different professor this time, and she taught writing through the reading of poems, essays, and short stories. Through literature. And you had to regularly write in a notebook, and she would read your writing and talk to you about it. One night I was in my apartment, sitting at the red card table where I would try to write in this notebook. For some reason, out of nowhere, I remembered being maybe 7 or 8 and visiting my grandmother in Puerto Rico. It was dawn, I had awoken underneath a blue mosquito net, and the light was beginning to grow inside her concrete house. I walked down the hall to where she was cooking breakfast. The house was newly built, there were metal blinds but no windows, and so if the breeze picked up, banana leaves would enter the kitchen, hummingbirds darted inside, and I don’t remember there being a door but only seeing all the green of the trees and the back field through the doorway. And here I was, some 12 or 14 years later remembering that morning. Where did that memory come from? Why had I gone so long in Michigan and never remembered that morning? And why was I seemingly possessed by that memory of my grandmother as I wrote it down vividly and sensually without any hesitation? It was a mysterious moment where the power of language and memory was very present. And a sad moment because I had almost forgotten.
I don’t remember saying to myself I’m going to be a writer, but that was probably the beginning feeling for writing mattering in my life in way more essential than anything else. That professor encouraged that page of memory writing. I started writing more and more in that notebook.
How did you first become published? Did you make it a goal, or did you actively pursue it? Can you share this experience?
Publishing wasn’t, at first, a goal. I felt it would happen when it happened. The writing was more important. I was discovering and living so much through my constant reading and writing. Unfortunately, however, and perhaps partially due to my background, and also due to all my education, over time I struggled with perfectionism, which caused me to focus on revision too much, trying to write something perfect. And that is, I now see, impossible — and, more importantly, unnecessary. That perfectionism was getting in the way of the intuition and impulse to write.
You reach a point where you write things — in my case they were short stories — that others have read, offered suggestions, and you’ve revised and revised. You arrive at the point where you feel something is done. You have exhausted its creative possibilities. So that was a short story that I sent out, and it was published. But more to your important question is that there is a time where you have to “actively pursue” publication. It’s a long-drawn-out story but I went through perhaps a 10-year period where I continually revised a book. Sometimes it was made up of short stories, sometimes it was a novel. My dream was to be a novelist. And I wanted this first novel to be perfect — so I revised and revised, maybe writing three or four books, before I finally arrived at what would be close to the novel I would eventually publish. I met with agents and editors in New York City, I received positive feedback, but it was always of the nature that though I wrote beautifully, they didn’t know how they would sell the book. I realized that I couldn’t let others decide what and how I should write, and I needed to write the novel I needed to write. I realized, too, that if I didn’t publish it, I would never amount to anything as a writer. This is probably where my sense of patience, persistence, and possibility started. So I focused on a new revision — several years of attentive work, and as you ask, I looked around to see what publishers existed where my work would belong and have an audience. When I sent the book to the University of Arizona Press, it didn’t take long for it to be accepted; and I’ve now published three books with them and have never been disappointed.
You have to persist in publishing your work. Yet I know that I always wanted a writing life — and what I receive from that life is more essential to me than publication. And when I’m writing I need to be utterly alone — no readers or audience allowed in the room. No concern about publication.
My goals include becoming a professor and hopes to become a published writer in some capacity. However, I’m not sure what type of writing I should pursue (as I’m still figuring that out). Do you have any advice for me based on your experiences in both teaching and writing?
An important question. Perhaps we each need to figure out the answers for our own lives. Life. Meaning vital to your life. Rainer Maria Rilke returns to me saying that in vital matters like this, answers are not what we need. He has it that you must live with the questions. Well, that’s what I’m remembering because I had some of these same goals and questions, and though some may read his Letters to a Young Poet as dated, I found his words inspiring and helpful. They saved me many times — to live with the questions, sometimes all day, sometimes late into the night, to discover what I must write. To let the writing reveal its own life. Perhaps once again those connections between patience, persistence, possibility, and process. My sense of your important question, however, has to do with labels. Also, with the possible recognition that we are multiple or pluralistic selves. A moment ago, I mentioned a writing life — I want to write as often as I can, and in multiple genres without worrying about the label or a genre. When I was younger, I discovered and explored the works of poets like Charles Olsen and Robert Kroetsch, who both wrote very long poems, book-length poems, and one could say a poem beyond the books — what Robert Kroetsch describes as the lifelong poem, the lifelost poem. In other words, the life of the poet was lived in the poem that continued to be written from the particulars of a life immersed in continual poetic creation. That’s what I’m remembering today. Something like that — and which I admire greatly. So, I would suggest that you write as much as possible, in various genres, and discover how and why you write. How you make things. How you see and form your world. How you sing, paint, sculpt, or dramatize that world to bring it to life in words. Again, there won’t be any writer’s block. Why? Because you’ll have various forms or shapes to write in, and you’ll discover how these various forms and shapes overlap and speak to each other in helping you make the most of your writing. You’ll find what you need to write: Today it is a poem, tomorrow it is play, next week it is a short story. Maybe a grocery list, a webpage, a pamphlet, the instructions for a putting together a bookcase, a catalog of seeds for flowers and vegetables — these supposed nonliterary genres of discourse will reveal their poetry.
My answer makes it sound like I have a well thought-out answer. Again, this all has something to do with my background, my life. I grew up in a house without books. We did not read. Education was not important. When I started going to community college, I brought no knowledge of literature or genres. And that was true when I started writing. I intuitively wrote prose works that were lyrical narratives that sometimes read like essays and sometimes read like fictions. In a very odd way, without even knowing who Jorge Louis Borges was, and thus without having the opportunity to read his Ficciones, Borges was already a precursor. He wrote in a way that helped writers to imagine the boundaries of genres as more porous, malleable, given to what the writer imagines and makes. You may have encountered this passage by Borges before: “The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (“Kafka and His Precursors”). It was, mysteriously, as if I didn’t know how to write, and yet I was writing.
I try not to view myself as a professor and an author, or as an author and a professor. Those labels or titles don’t mean that much to me, though I know they can be very important. I just want to have the wondrous opportunities of language, of reading and writing, of contemplation and creation. I’m fortunate that I can do that every day, that I can swim in my own language sea, a sea that is fed by many traditions, forms and shapes, and languages. Being a teacher requires me to learn something every day — well, if I’m hoping my students will learn something about their writing in each class, I need to be open to that possibility of learning myself. I don’t see myself as an expert as much as a practitioner. Or let’s say a beginner. In this regard, I often quote Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He tells us, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” I want to discover and experience many possibilities. In addition, Suzuki tells us (and this has much analogy to writing),
“So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point.” [My emphasis.]
Being — being embodied — requires a fresh mind. Teaching, writing, writing, teaching — I like to always be a beginner. And if not, I imagine it would be difficult, sometimes confusing, sometimes depressing, to make distinctions between teaching and writing. You would lose psychic energy worrying about where you should give your energy. Ultimately, writing is the most essential thing — yet what a wonderful thing it is that teaching doesn’t have to take away from your writing.
I sense that I’m a better writer because I teach, and I’m a better teacher because I write.
Also, I wonder if I’m just fortunate to love reading, and for somehow — humbly — to know I’m a good creative reader? Again, just to return to the importance of reading — and how so much of my teaching and writing has to do with being a beginning reader, one who hopes reading will make everything new again. That’s the great creative challenge, no? How to make the world anew in writing and teaching.
Do you have a favorite writing exercise that helps you get your creativity flowing?
I don’t turn to writing exercises. Having faith in fragments as I described earlier is key. A writer who is essential to me is John Berger. He taught me much about the importance of storytelling, and I often return to his essay “Field.” (Now I recognize there is some pattern to turning to John Berger and John Clare). Berger also has this fantastic book Photocopies. That is the wonderful invention of the book: What if a writer uses words to create photocopies of compelling, important moments from life? In a world of simulacra, copy after copy, how does one capture decisive moments of experience, meaning, and materiality? This is a brief sketch of very complex and essential matters he’s working with, but it’s a book that imaginatively explores fiction/nonfiction, and I read the writing as forms of sketching, drawing, noting, documenting, photographing, and copying. He was always interested in perception — ways of seeing — and was an artist as well as a writer. He has inspired me to imagine that the “I” in my writing is always an eye. I like alfresco writing — writing outdoors, in fresh air — because on one level it is a kind of exercise to begin writing, but then what you are writing transforms into much more as you discover the language, shape, sound, and perception, say, of a creek moving down from a mountain into a valley. When the writing is magical in a place like this, I am neither “I” nor “eye “— I am creek. The marvelous poet, essayist, and fiction writer Merrill Gilfillan has been indispensable for my sense of alfresco writing.
Do you have any advice for someone who doesn’t have much experience and trying to improve at writing creative nonfiction?
In the spring of 2023, the writer Michael Martone visited for our In Process Spring Fete of Creative Writing. Michael writes various forms of lyrical prose (fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms). His newest book during his visit was Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana. Michael could have easily been a part of the conversation in the previous question, since Plain Air is drawing on the tradition of alfresco or plein air painting or writing. He writes the story of a fictional Winesburg, Indiana in a series of sketches that are usually in relation to an object — a hog oiler, one of those older ice trays with a handle to pull up and break the ice free, the wooden flat paddle-like spoon often included with cups of ice cream. I don’t have the book with me, but these are the objects that immediately return. The sketches capture the voices of various inhabitants (characters) in Winesburg, and often there is the text and an image — photocopy — of the object in the story. In this way Plain Air is a fantastic collection of object stories that have much to do with the emotional materiality of our lives. What do we collect from our past? Why collect them? What do they mean to us? How do they contain history, memory, story? A life? What is an object’s story? Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects is a “memoir” made up of objects that help Raffel remember her family. These are both excellent books for a beginning to imagine creative nonfiction because as you are reading them, the distinctions of genre begin to break down or disappear. Some works read like lyric essays, flash fictions, even prose poems. You begin to see the importance of juxtaposition, pattern, metaphor, and sequencing, too. The power of brevity. You are in a sea of creativity — and very compelling writing. I do write object stories, and writing them was helpful for writing Sown in Earth. I should add that Michael Martone was my mentor many years ago, and he tried to help me move beyond being a perfectionist and valuing being an amateur, as well as valuing the gifts of my writing, the gifts from life that shape my writing. One of the essential ways he shares these elements is in looking for story in everything. So it isn’t just objects that contain stories, but plein air painting contains stories, memorandums contain stories, postcards contain stories, as do letters, emails, instructions, and even guidebooks. Everything has story because its existence is a story. It seems to me looking at story in this way is important for creative nonfiction. Imagine the countless stories to write from life (the “nonfiction” of life). Because some of the best creative nonfiction relies on forms of collage, you can hear, I hope, the importance again of cutting up, breaking down, patterning, quilting, and juxtaposing genres or forms to discover the shape of creative nonfiction.
Specifically: Why not write 10 postcards of a compelling, strange, mysterious, misunderstood time in your life? Or write 10 letters or snapshots for a photo album of that time. Try to capture the immediacy and intensity of each of these 10 moments in 500 words or less. Each of these 10 may seem like a part of the story, like fragments from an incomplete creative nonfiction. Yet in these parts you’ll being to see the whole you are beginning to imagine and write. You’ll discover, perhaps, something about metonymy, about expression and silence, as well as memory and imagination. You’ll be writing a CNF that matters to you because you are creatively making something unique.
These are fantastic ideas, and I appreciate your advice. I plan to delve into some of these possibilities with my writings.
Last question:
If you’re writing something where you know some content will only be fully understood by a certain audience, do you change or add or take things out to make the content more universal? For example, I recently wrote a play inspired by several modern philosophers and thinkers. It’s a comedy, and some of the jokes are only understandable by individuals who’ve read Nietzsche and Descartes. This makes me wonder if enough people will get it or even like it. Do you ever feel this way? Do you just write what you write for yourself and let it be and not worry about it? Or do you consider your audience? How do these aspects shape your writing?
This is a very important question about information, context, subtext, and even translation. I think when you close the door to your work room you are declaring: Stay out. No one is admitted. You can’t think about a reader or an audience because you are beginning to censor yourself. I realize audience is important for a play. In my writing the first reader is me: I want to discover a short story, poem, or essay that I want to read. And so I have to write it because no one has written it yet. I also have some wood boxes stacked near my writing table that include writers I’ve been reading, need to read, or have read and admire greatly. They are my ideal readers. But I don’t worry about them too much.
When I write I’m not concerned with any information, per se — instead, I want to create something that shares what it feels like to be alive. That yearning again. When I’m yearning there is no information I need. I don’t think of ideas or “truth” when I’m writing. There’s more of an emotional truth I don’t fully understand — a desire, a need, confusion, a pain. I want to read works that provoke me to experience emotional truths, and, again, that very vital, mysterious, and subjective feeling for what it feels like to be alive. Interestingly, the poet and philosopher John Koethe helped to me to understand the importance of written art creating that experience, rather than information, theories, knowledge, or philosophy.
If what you are writing is urgent and important to you, if you are struggling with something vital, and you are honest with yourself that you’ve composed the best words, you’ll have readers who value your creative writing. Your words will be like air, water, fire, bread.
I sense that in the last 50 years, writing has greatly changed. It has become briefer, more fragmented, filled with white spaces, silences. Perhaps writing is caught up in the frenetic speed of our lives, and with that speed and overall lack of attention. But that’s why we turn to written art: It arrests our attention in a world that seems to move too quickly, too chaotically. In much new writing subtext is important; there is much underneath the surface of the text that never has to be stated, that the reader brings to the experience, and that means that the reading experience is very subjective and intimate. Everything is translation, our lives are acts of translation. George Steiner — After Babel, Real Presences — would have it that translation is essential to creativity in language. For both the reader and writer. Maybe this is a story about translation — and what we choose to include in our writing, and what we choose to leave out. When I began writing, I was made to feel that I had no choice but to be a bicultural writer. Or maybe it was expected that I was only a Latino (or today Latinx) writer. I accepted that. But more and more I’ve discovered something more essential: I want to be part of a writing family that contains places, peoples, and voices from around the world. So in my new book of poems, I evoke places, peoples, and voices from Montana, Sri Lanka, the Maritimes, Yugoslavia, Spain. There was a strange watershed moment that eventually became part of the process that led to this. Earlier you asked about publishing. At one point in revising that novel, I noted that I had written Puerto Rico well over 100 times. Who was I writing that word for over and over again? Why did it feel like some exterior form of information unimportant to the emotional lives of the characters? I immediately felt so much freedom removing that information, and then trying to immerse myself in the characters’ dreams, fears, losses, and yearnings. If I can write the characters with immediacy, in their moment-to-moment sensual lives, I’ll have a chance to bring them to life on the page. There’s a great sense of happiness and accomplishment in getting that right. And then they are almost perfect pages because they are places of freedom for any reader to feel what it is like to be alive.
Jessica Cristen Pruitt is a current senior at MTSU, pursuing degrees in Philosophy and in English (Writing). Jessica is the recipient of the 2024–2025 Charles E. Ray Creative Writing Scholarship.
