Imagination and Possibility: An Interview with Fred Arroyo
Fred Arroyo is the author of Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging (University of Arizona Press, 2020), as well as the collection Western Avenue and Other Fictions and the novel The Region of Lost Names. His writing has been included 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. A recipient of an Individual Artist Program Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, Arroyo’s fiction is a part of the Library of Congress series “Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers.” In the past decade Arroyo has driven considerable miles along the northern border of the United States, particularly in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, where he has camped, walked, canoed, and fished in a real and imagined North Country that’s influencing a new collection of short stories and a book of poems.
What is most compelling to you about a current project you are working on?
The most compelling aspect is that I’m writing a poetry manuscript — something I wasn’t sure I’d ever attempt. There was a great amount of fear that I had spent the past 20 years mostly writing fiction, even if when I started taking writing seriously I was writing poems. One of the difficulties is the false idea of approaching writing through intelligence or technical skill. Poetry is like bread — essential, a form of sustenance, life, that can exist without someone’s version of “intelligence” or “technical skill,” that is a part of everyday life and does not need to exist only on a page. The Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s lines from “Como Tú” return: “Creo que el mundo es bello, / que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.” I had to remember that — poetry is for everyone. Or I had to exist within that place, and so once I made the choice to sit down and begin writing, I was suddenly writing two or three poems a day. A process that helped once again to confirm what the poet John Clare wrote: “I found the poems in the fields, / And only wrote them down.” Looking, listening, there was music and poetry in the fields.
“Compelling” doesn’t need to be about conflict, of course, and so what’s compelling is being drawn back into this poetic place, this sense of being, where, once again, I experience how my writing leads the way to what must be written.
I’m also working on a collection of fictions, and what I’m discovering, and find compelling, is a new appreciation of time and space. As I’ve been writing these fictions, sometimes a part of the story will provide a glimpse into a new story I hadn’t imagined. So I’m discovering the possibility of a story in a fragment, which I then intensify to create a special duration and time. My last book is composed of essays, many of them brief and lyrical, and that space and form is shaping these brief fictions. Especially through a fictional self and voice that is essaying or meditating these brief moments of time.
How does your life, your travel, the physical space you write in effect the writing itself?
This is an essential question, matter. Decades ago I discovered through Jim Harrison these words by Wallace Stevens: The worst of all things is not to live in a physical world. Writing can seem isolating, sedentary, distant from the physical world just outside your window. Because my life had been shaped by physical work before turning to writing, I have to envision writing similarly: I have a work room, a work or writing table (not a desk), and most of my writing is done by hand, with a pen or pencil, because the physicality of writing in a notebook, on notecards, or scraps of paper is physical, sensual, a more intimate feeling of making something with my hands.
Sometimes when I look around I think it’s a wonder that any writing gets done with all the commitments of work and life. Travel is key because of the change in place, the journey and process, and the conflict and creativity of encountering the familiar and the strange. There’s the return to the physical, too, because when I travel, walking, hiking, camping, canoeing, dreaming by the fire at night, and the exhaustion shape my writing. One of my last trips was to a mentor and friend’s house in Vermont, in a very small village, where I was alone and isolated. The house was some 150 years old, I believe, and right outside the door was an old covered bridge. It was all very picturesque, part of a dream or desire to live in a place like this, even if only temporary, and very unfamiliar, strange. The sound of the river was constant — the rapids and rocks creating this continual and loud voice, a being greater than water and rocks, and distinct with tones that were something more than music. Sometimes it was lulling, frightening, awe-inspiring. There was something physical and elemental beyond thought. And it had a strong role in the many poems I composed.
All of this has to do with forgetting your “self.” Silencing the ego so you might hear your writing, and your writing self. The physical world has a way showing you you’re not that important. Returning to Harrison, he has this marvelous essay, “Passacaglia on Getting Lost,” where he writes, “The shock of being lost as a metaphor is the discovery that you’ve never been ‘found’ in any meaningful sense. When you’re lost you know who you are. You’re the only one out there.” How to get lost? How to inhabit this place in writing is most difficult because we see writing as something that is thoughtful, a product of mastery, creative, and meaningful.
You might remember that we read Joy Castro’s excellent essay “Getting Lost” (from Island of Bones). I find myself returning to this essay as of late. She describes how her father drove out into the English countryside without any route or destination, and then meditates on why getting lost is an evocative metaphor for writing. Castro writes,
Saturday mornings were deliciously agenda-free. We were aimless, and the wondrous world beckoned. I loved the mystery of getting lost, the thrill of sudden swerves, and the heady power of telling my father what to do.
For me, writing’s like that: an opportunity to get lost, to amble, to poke through ruins, to scare myself but within a frame of faith, a faith that’s like a buoy, both anchored and floating at once. Spill out whatever you want; the page will hold you up.
Writing provides a way to make sense, in language, of the puzzling, wild, beautiful moments our lives keep delivering to us: Here, whispers Life. Figure this one out. Offering us psychic space, privacy, slowness in a rushed and noisy world, writing gives us a chance to tell our secrets, voice our own perceptions. It’s the psychological equivalent of having the house to yourself for a whole evening and playing whatever music you want, with no one to see you dance around. As Sandra Cisneros wrote of her character’s desire for a literal house in The House on Mango Street, “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.”
Writing can be home.
You write many biographical pieces. How does the process of writing help recover yourself and your past?
In Sown in Earth I consider some words by the Canadian poet and novelist Robert Kroetsch, which I am very fond of and paraphrase often. A version is something like this: I am trying to write an autobiography in which I don’t appear. Who am I? What is my past? What am I recovering? I admire Kroetsch’s words because one way to look at the self is through various selves, various languages and words and voices. Various masks. And there is the sense that regardless of what genre you are writing in, you are inventing a unique truth. One that did not exist before, and so the past isn’t so much a place of recovering something at it is the grounds for creating a story, storytelling. Still, there are these questions: Who am I? How did I get from there to here? My own story at the center of Sown in Earth is that my past did not possess or nurture what we might call imagination and possibility — in other words, my writing life. It seemed a story and life of physical labor, poverty, silence, loss. But that was only one part of the story. I had to struggle with, as Wright Morris often said, the real losses and imaginary gains of life and writing. Gradually I started to listen to and recognize how that seemingly rural and poor life has as much dignity, honor, and beauty as any painting, sculpture, or photograph in a museum. Or the books on library shelves I so admire. I had to see that writing was hard, it is a struggle, and without that my writing wouldn’t be of value. So it was up to me to figure out how to create a space that allowed that past to exist in a way where others would recognize that life, my writing, my humble contribution to storytelling.
The biographical, as you suggest, became a story to help me discover/recover what is often overlooked and silenced, what is of value for this life. For a story.
Another side of Robert Kroetsch’s words, another voice, is one I also often paraphrase by Jorge Louis Borges:
Through the years, a man peoples a space with images and provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
How does your writing or storytelling connect to other forms of expression you are interested in or engage with? Photography, film, theater?
This is an excellent question because doesn’t one’s writing exist because they have certain images, metaphors, and beliefs that guide or light the path of writing? Solvitur ambulando. Walking solves everything. Thus writing solves everything. We are often discovering those images, metaphors, and beliefs through other processes, fields, locations, and forms of life. Always ask yourself: How does this form of life help me to tell — make possible, shape, form — the story? Photography is very important in many ways, and I’ve given quite a bit of time to looking at photographs and reading about photography. In part because I have an eidetic or photographic memory, and often that shapes what and how I write. I’m very much beholden to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive moment. You have to be decisively ready to take the photo, write the moment, the story. John Berger and Wright Morris are important influences on my writing through their engagement with photography. I have a new story being published, “Death in a Doorway, San Joaquin Valley, California, 1938,” which I would not have been written had I not continued to look at Dorothea Lange’s photo of that death. I have two other fictions that will also soon appear shaped by photographs. For years I thought of ekphrasis negatively. I’ve now discovered why photography and art are important to me, in terms of texture, atmosphere, image, and narration. This is why I’m always recommending Berger’s brief and wonderful essay “Field.” How remarkable to see through a field the possibilities of writing a narrative, composing a story.
Music is central, too, especially the blues and jazz. Part of my emotional makeup is bluesy, if you will, rather sad and mournful. Periods of depression. I’m inhabited by the blues. I know no other way to approach my writing, and I accept loss and death returning in my writing. I’ve expressed this before in other conversations through añoranza; a sense of yearning or longing, a powerful nostalgia, and a need and struggle to return to a place. To be sown in earth. In my writing/being añoranza becomes a mood, a tone, an atmosphere like the blues, a kind of blues that is like a knife, the longest night, the saddest song. Or añoranza is part of the duende and deep song — canto hondo, song of the earth — a flamenco singer is possessed by or taps into as they begin to throw out or fling a unique, powerful voice filled with urgency, pain, peoples and voices, stories and places, even joy and celebration. The poet Federico García Lorca wrote that the power of the duende has “is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.” You move into a mysterious existence where spontaneous creation leads the way. Music is essential in this way. How can you ever write if you haven’t sung, if you haven’t danced, if you haven’t felt the darkness of night well in your heart? There are probably a half a dozen essays in Sown in Earth that began simply from me riffing in memory following a jazz standard. I probably listened to various versions of “Some Other Time” hundreds of times, and it became a kind of melody or shadow to the writing. And this element of music, in terms of tone, mood, and atmosphere, has something to do with how a color like blue becomes sensual, creative, and evocative in offering me states of remembering and dreaming that in words evoke more than a standard or defined version of “blue.”
To return to your important question, I find this process is always happening — the images, metaphors, and language that each writer apprehends and believes in to make their art possible.
What personal identities are important to you? How do they inform what you write? The themes you explore?
The most important identity to me is the one I encounter in the process of writing. I need to experience those strange, mysterious, vulnerable moments I suggested a moment ago. How some mysterious spirit, even demonic spirit, or duende appears in my writing room. Because it’s then that I encounter my lyrical identity, my best sense of self. James Salter once spoke of how he discovered a better version of himself in writing. That was one way to articulate what always felt rather private and too mysterious and wondrous to explain. Then I read Kristjana Gunnars’s Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing. And that metaphor was a revelation. When I write I have to wait for that stranger, I have to listen for that stranger, and once that stranger has entered into my writing room, they help me to discover my writing in ways that are much more essential than some idea of a personality like “author.” I suppose this is why writing — its possibilities, its power — is such an important form of life within my fiction and nonfiction.
I am always struck by someone saying that I seem rather calm, meditative, spiritual. Ascetic, monk-like. There is something mysteriously spiritual within me that I don’t often recognize or cultivate. It is just something that shapes and infuses my writing self because writing takes faith, it follows certain rituals and practices, and at times it is a form of prayer or meditation. I think this may have to do with wanting something otherworldly, some form of paradise, and a writing life is the closet paradise I can create. Or that I may have a wish to live in past, in a different place, say it’s me and Antonio Machado walking in old Segovia at night, takings these long walks where we meditate on the poems we’ll write.
Of course there is a dynamic and creative relationship between reading and writing. Readings has all kinds of unrecognized or unaccountable effects on one’s writing — regardless of how one focuses on craft. Still, in answer to your question, I believe I have a reading self or personality. Reading is a form of life. I discovery family and friendship and sustenance in reading beyond what it offers to my writing. I’m always, therefore, choosing to read authors and books that may have no relationship to how I see myself as a writer. At the same time, I know that I have to feed or nurture this reading self in order to write. I’ll have a shelf close to my writing table filled with authors and books that relate to future possibilities. Right now there are books by or about Cézanne, Delacroix, Velasquez, and van Gogh. I’m not sure what it is I’m thinking as much as I’m wanting to embark on this journey, this exploration of my reading self.
Because my writing has so much to do with internal exile, there is a part of me that never feels at home, or feels that I do not belong. This may have to do with growing up with two languages in a country where one language was valued and taught. There is a Fred who was and is still linguistically confused — no matter how much reading and writing I accomplish. Of course, linguistic confusion is one side of the coin: on the other side: a heightened attention to languages. Earlier I mentioned the new fictions I am writing, which are part of a tentatively titled manuscript The Book of Manuels. In writing these fictions, there are different people named “Manuel.” In addition, the stories may have manual labor, or a manual or a book as part of their world. They often have something to do with the power or conflicts of sight and perception (and that made me consider Immanuel: one with ideals, one who can see). There has been a lack of empathy for the working-class in America, their lives and stories often marginalized or erased these past decades, though the pandemic makes their lives and stories matter even more. Class is a theme in my writing, and I imagine The Book of Manuels is being shaped by my personal identity of internal exile and linguistic confusion and class.
What are some things integral to finding your writing identity that are often overlooked?
This is a fiction that exists: There are people in the world who have a strong “writing identity.” If you look at what are the most important things in their life, however, writing may be the very last thing. They’ve decided that they are a writer (or an “author”), and believe for some reason they need to do a dozen other things for that writing identity. In other words, they have all these external ideas and values that are outside of their control. The only thing you can control is the time and effort you give to your writing. Behind my writing table, written on a blue card taped to the wall, are these words by Harry Crews: “I have found nothing in this life that can match the feeling of writing something I’m proud of.” I turn in my chair, get up, and often return to these important words. I have to keep them close because this feeling is achieved by sitting in your chair and facing your writing. I think it’s essential to remind yourself of this every day: I am only a writer, and I’m trying to write something I’m proud of.
Or I follow what Jean Rhys says, even if it is old-fashioned: “For I know that to write as well as I can is my truth and why I was born.” How can you discover the possibilities of your writing if you overlook the truth Rhys knows? Or I follow M. F. K. Fisher: “Do what you most want to do, whether or not it is of any value to anyone else.” Unfortunately, I’m repeating myself (these writers are included in Sown in Earth). Fortunately, I can’t overlook beliefs like this that are the keys to writing.
You’ve talked before about the way you approach creating and writing characters for your stories. Would you like to talk about that here?
I need to return to those earlier lines by John Clare: “I found the poems in the fields, / And only wrote them down.” It so important to my writing. There are so many characters and stories out in the world, in the fields, and a great part of the writing is to write them down, to capture them, and to do so in lyrical and effective language that makes readers pay attention to them. Feel for them. The way I approach this has to do with my dislike of “characters.” I want to create people, I want to bring people to life on the page so they have a chance to take residency in a reader’s imagination, memory, and life. This is just an example, an anecdote, maybe simply a fiction after the fact. But when I was writing what would become the penultimate draft of my novel, The Region of Lost Names, I was alone and isolated near a very small town in northern California. My writing cottage was ideal, a dream, and when I left my writing table I could see and walk along the Pacific Ocean. The writing wasn’t going well. I was struggling, still writing the same story — and I could tell it wasn’t good enough, it was not a fiction to be proud of yet. There is a character, Magdalene, who I did not understand very well. That is, I was just including her as a way to highlight the main character’s story. She was Swedish, and I had written her to represent some ideas. Mistakenly she was only a character, a symbol, and was not the person I needed to imagine, listen to, and allow to exist within the story. One evening after a difficult day of writing, I couldn’t stop thinking about the novel, was obsessing over it, and it was as if in the reflection of the gold lamp on the window, the dark blue sky of night barely visible, there was a kind of shadow or figure that appeared. I closed my eyes and I could see Magdalene as she spoke to me. I never realized that she was a Puertorriqueña in that small town, that she grew up with some of the same conflicts, fears, pains, and dreams that the main character, Ernest, had experienced. I have to use the same word again — mystery. Such a mystery that she spoke to me, and then that she revealed a crucial secret I never imagined. Magdalene, now as a person, was telling me her story — and I had to listen.
Character is everything. You have to listen to and let them invent or guide where the story must go. But for me I have to see them as people. This returns to your earlier question about the biographical. I have been told that I don’t know how to write a story because I’m often writing these biographies. In other words, there is some implication that a fiction has to be very subjective, perhaps in the first person, and we need that narrator or character’s story. I value greatly hearing the stories of others. There are so many people in the world who have a story to tell.
What are your writing implements of choice? How do they aid in the creative process for you?
I always begin writing with a fountain pen or a pencil in a notebook, on notecards, or even on scraps of paper. Attention, focus, and what you allow to exist on the page are central to writing — and so the space of the notebook, scrap of paper, or notecard is like a visual space of possibility for what is contained and composed. Formally the image is my unit of composition, and that works well on paper. Also, for some reason I see writing in paragraphs, and so it is important to create paragraphs. Image and paragraph in my mind is like creating a photograph in words. Although the sound and music of language is central, my writing begins with this image and paragraph because I can visual what is possible out of silence, out of a seemingly empty space. In the first draft this photo in words might read as nothing especially meaningful, but as a photo of words I’ve accomplished something. And the more of these paragraphs that I write, the more invention happens, and with that discovery. Certain parts begin to magnetize to each other, while others are eliminated.
I love the idea that a writer can see or feel the whole arc or image of say a novel, and then when they sit down to write it is all there. For me it’s a more chaotic and messy process, one of multiple drafts, and in great part because I write a lot images, sketches, and descriptions to build the story in my mind, while writing drafts to see what is most necessary for the story. Then there’s all the wonderful work of fragmentation, cutting, collaging, and rearranging. All on paper. I’ll arrive to a moment when it’s time to move to a yellow pad or the computer, and then I can begin to build the story in new way as a constructed narrative. I’m never in hurry — I enjoy the process too much, and value discovering something I may have not if I began at the computer first.
Earlier I evoked Wallace Stevens through Jim Harrison: The worst of all things is not live in a physical world. Writing with a pencil or pen provides a space to live in that physical world. What I’m remembering through Ann Berthoff’s sense of allatonceness — your hand, eye, and imagination working together in the act of meaning making, or creativity.
Finally, what are you most looking forward to during this semester’s In Process series?
Well, I enjoy the readings greatly — it is moment to listen to language and stories whether in poems, fictions, plays, or even a musical performance. They are moments to celebrate the written word, to feel not so alone in the writing life. I view them as an hour and a half of creative possibility for my writing. I try to forget about the rest of life, always have some paper or a notebook, and I’m able to write all kinds evocative phrases, images, and especially write down inspiring and helpful thoughts and ideas writers share about their writing process. If writing is a journey or learning experience, these In Process events add to that continual journey. My old friend and mentor Pablo Medina is reading this fall for In Process. We met some 25 years ago. I never imagined that long of a friendship and correspondence because of writing — even was unsure if that would happen in life. Pablo’s friendship is a gift that continues to influence my writing. I’m happy that he’s visiting, and I hope that like this interview, Pablo’s visit might help to illuminate some meaning and possibilities for student writers (beyond education, or even perceptions of what it means to be a “writer”). The student readings and performances are always excellent at the open-mic events. Every time, I pass around sign-up sheet and then at the end ask if there’s someone who didn’t sign-up who would like to read. Every time, there is someone. They are inspired, lose some of their fear, want to take part — whatever the reason it is a powerful moment because, like others, it is most often the first time they’ve read their writing to an audience. There is a glimpse into the power of language, the power of sharing stories.
