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–Interview by Diana Clarke
Chew on Leslie Blanco’s bite-sized fictions in the December issue of PANK, then come back here and ask yourself if they were really stories at all.
1. Workshops and publishers often demand that writers categorize their work along tradition lines of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, but I see short shorts, such as your pieces here, as something like poems and fiction at once. Where would you plot your own work on the genre continuum?
Interesting that you should ask this question of these particular stories, because I have categorized all of them alternately as nonfiction, poetry and finally, fiction. Many years ago I went through a difficult divorce, and I could only write about the emotions I felt by jotting down tiny little scenarios. Anything longer was too painful. At the time I thought of them as autobiographical prose poems, which I thought I was writing only for myself. Before long I had an entire divorce memoir written in “poems,” which I entitled, tongue in cheek, Screw You: Angry Divorce Poems for Women. I had a vague idea some day of anthologizing the divorce poems of other angry women. I put this secret manuscript away for many years. I got remarried. One day I took the secret manuscript out, selected a few “poems” and showed them to my poet friend who also happens to edit a literary journal of poetry and flash fiction. Nope, he said. No way. Not poems! These are flash fiction. Eventually, I realized that memoir will always be too vulnerable a form for me and that yes, these could work as flash fiction.
When I started to rework them as fiction, I loved the way that imagining they were poems had changed my patterns and habits as a writer. I began to see that I had granted myself permission to let language drive the stories, to rely more heavily on imagery, and on blank space, the meaning of which could be interpreted by the reader. Finally, I began to see the form itself as a metaphor. This is how our relationships are! So much of what’s important is unsaid. So much is left out or taboo. So much emotion collects in the vacuum we don’t fill with words. For me, flash fiction is simply its own genre, a hybrid, stealing elements from poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and uniquely suited for the efficient and intense laying-bare of emotional truth.
2. Though it’s written in English, your story “Thanks, Sistah” incorporates a lot of Spanish. How did you choose to italicize the Spanish words and phrases?
I italicize all Spanish words in my work for clarity. To me it seems that having the word set apart is less confusing to the eye as it skims along the line. If it’s in italics, the reader knows it’s an intentional insertion, not a typo, not something she is misreading.
Which words I choose to present in Spanish is a more complex question. I throw in Spanish words because the characters don’t sound Cuban to me written in English. Some of my characters have Cuban accents when they speak English in my head and others don’t, but all of them speak Spanglish. Inserting the Spanish is a form characterization, especially where there’s very little dialogue and the internal monologue is all I’ve got to allow the reader to hear the character’s voice. I also throw in Spanish words where I want to reinforce one of the themes that appears frequently in my work: the ramifications of culture clash. Immigrants are always dealing with language and cultural barriers. English speaking readers are generally not going to understand a word in Spanish so by definition, when I insert a Spanish word into an story written in English, I am highlighting that sense of separation by also giving the reader an experience of separation. I usually try to make the meaning of the Spanish clear contextually, but the reader still has to slow down for a moment, feel separate, a little disoriented, and in order to reorient, she has to look closer. In that moment of looking closer I hope the reader will really see and understand the character, partially bridging both the language and the culture gap.
3. Did you write these stories assuming a relationship between them? How did you come to submit them together, and what do you see as the threads that connect them?
Initially, the connection between these stories was that they all stemmed from the emotions of my divorce. In the interim, I’ve had a lot of friends (both male and female) confide in me about their break-ups and divorces, and I’ve begun to understand that break-up pain is universal and monumental. The details of a relationship and the triggers for pain are completely idiosyncratic, but the emotions engendered by the details are almost stereotypical. Even though I’ve turned these “poems” into fictional stories, there are still connections between them. Groups of two or three are about rage, some about grief, or humiliation, or guilt, still others are about the propensity to blame the break-up on cultural differences, or to condemn the opposite sex or even all people as unknowable and untrustworthy. These three are to varying degrees about the helpless rage of the aftermath, and being unable to let it go.
4. I especially enjoyed “Because He Still Signs His Emails Love, Ramón.” The title conveys such longing and stinging loss, but we don’t learn anything about Ramón or the woman he left until the second to last line of the story, suggesting that in this case, emotion, rather than fact, is the important narrative. What’s your relationship to plot?
You’re right. “Because He Still Signs His Emails Love, Ramon” is more about being totally at the mercy of an overwhelming emotion than about the details that led to that emotion. For me plot gets more important with the length of the piece I am working on. I write flash fiction, traditional short fiction, novella length fiction and novels, or at least there are several unfinished drafts of novels on my computer. Though emotion is at the heart of all of these forms, in longer pieces what happens and how the characters react to what happens feels more important to sustaining the narrative, and to approximating the emotional complexity of a life, as opposed to the emotional complexity of a single moment in a life. In flash fiction, I feel that the emotion has to be center stage, because the story is mostly only hinted at, and the reader is free to invent the details.
5. I loved that “Divorce for Cuban Dummies” takes into account both religious tradition, such as the invocation of Yemayá, and stereotypes about women, love, and fury–which is its own kind of mythology. How do you make these old notions new and relevant?
Mythology never gets old, does it? Archetypal stories, new and old mythologies, even those promoted by daytime television, move us at such a deep place because they make us recognize that whatever we have been through, someone else out there has been through something very similar, at least in the emotional spectrum. I think the only way to make these notions new and relevant is to focus on the idiosyncracies of character, on the unexpected drama that culture clash sometimes provides and on the ways stereotype is always more complex than it seems. There’s something fresh about someone recognizing that they have become a stereotype, for example. That awareness allows us all to dare to hope that we can transcend stereotype.
6. I’m writing these questions on the day that the US and Cuba publicly agreed to normalize diplomatic relations. You write here in PANK about Cuba, and about tradition—such as Santería—and shift, like Daniela’s interest in Buddhism. How did you react to the news?
I am cautiously optimistic. Other than as politics appears in my writing, I always feel like I’m going to get into trouble when I talk about politics. The truth is that U.S.-Cuba relations have a long and complicated history, and that this might change very little. I have been anti-embargo for many years, because it hasn’t worked, and in fact, it is my belief that it has perpetuated an oppressive regime because it has allowed Castro to seal the island off from outside influence and ideas. I am more interested, however, in the emotional, psychological and cultural changes that will come of this policy shift. How will the culture of exile change? How will the definition of “Cuban” change in Cuba and outside of Cuba? And how will “Americanized” Cubans who eventually go back to Cuba change the culture? What will remain the same? What cannot be influenced away? Santeria, for example, is a completely syncretic religion, created by the collision of various African religions and Catholicism. It is not indigenous to Cuba, it was created there (and in different forms throughout the Caribbean and Brazil) by immigrants. Some historians claim creating Santeria was the only thing African slaves could do to keep their religion alive, mask it with seeming devotion to Catholic saints, and this is probably true. But as far as I know no one is trying to go back to a purer form of the original African religion, and milder forms of Santeria are popular even among Catholics in Cuba and Miami, who will, for example, put a photograph of a troublesome person in the freezer to cool the situation down. It’s this constant cross-pollination that interests me. I am fascinated to see what new mythologies and religions arise from this policy shift.