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T A B L E_ T A L K How did you come to terms with the differences between you and your parents? Discuss making familial peace in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Recipes make the woman Conception by deception First Pick by proxy Time For One Thing: Fly-Fishing Who needs experts? BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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SOMETHING TO DECLARE | PAGE 1, 2, 3
You write very eloquently in this book about weighing your career vs. having children, and you chose not to have any. Does that decision loom large in your life these days? Yeah, but first of all it's never a decision. Maybe some women make these decisions where they sit down and make it very clear-cut. But your life leads you in certain directions and certain things don't happen in time. And certainly, certain basic things -- like if I had never fallen in love -- if they hadn't happened, it would feel like a loss to me. The idea of never having been a mother to a child, that is certainly one of those things. Because of the time I grew up in, I thought that it had to be an either/or. I didn't know that you could try to do it all. And the kind of men that I was seeing also believed you couldn't have it all. It was hard. A lot of my friends who chose to have children are not in their original marriages, as they found out that it didn't have to be either/or and they and their spouses or partners struggled to figure out what that meant. One of the things that has happened with being a teacher is that I feel that I've had some of that feeling of nurturing and mothering and taking care of students over time. And certain students remain in my life over time. The other thing is that now, especially with being in the Dominican Republic, with this project that we've started up in the mountains, I have a lot of kids there that I feel a responsibility toward. All of a sudden I have this whole crew of kids. It's not the same as raising them, but I'm connected to the future. What project is this? We bought some land, Bill and I, in the mountains and we have an organic coffee farm there. We've joined a cooperative that's growing organic coffee. It's a very, very special community of farmers up there. And we bought land in the cooperative and we started a foundation there. We're hoping that the coffee will take off and help fund an arts foundation for Dominicans. Dominicans don't have things like Yaddo, they don't have fellowships they can apply to at colleges. And if there's a writer or painter or musician, there really isn't that center where they could go and maybe get a month or two months off and a stipend and work on their work. We've had it now for about a year and a half, getting it started. I became the godparent to one child and that became a relationship, and all of a sudden it started to spread -- that Julia was out there as a potential godmother. How often do you get back there? This year I've been three times. And Bill's been five times, I think, because he's the farmer in the family and so he's really involved in the coffee project part of it. When you go back, are you claimed as a Dominican writer? Absolutely. I can't believe it. I've said, "But I write in English. I come so much out of this other experience." But I think part of it is just that your roots are always your roots. It's like if you leave Middlebury, Vt., and you grew up here, everybody always thinks of you as a kid who grew up in Middlebury, Vt. Even if you're in California. There's that sense that you're theirs. Their Dominican blood is in your veins. It's an important topic now, especially in these so-called third world cultures that have had a lot of immigration. And the Dominican Diaspora is huge. There's a real dialogue going on now about what it means. I mean, if Naipaul lives in London but he grew up where, in Trinidad? What happens if you also change language? It's odd. And yet you're definitely writing out of a Dominican focus and background and maybe even a lot of your themes come from there, but it's another language and you've also gone through this other experience and sensibilities. Do you feel a kinship with other Latin American writers? Both men and women? I think I feel a kinship particularly with USA Latinos. Because I think we're not easily defined. I'm not a Dominican writer, and I'm not an American writer if we're going to define an American writer in a traditional sense of somebody who grew up here and has roots here and, you know, had a certain formation. And I think that's no longer the way we think about American writers at all. That's been exploded by the literature of the last 20 years. But I'm not a writer of these places -- I'm that mixed breed. I'm that hybrid. I think of myself very much as someone who is putting together different kinds of worlds and a different understanding of language from having those two worlds. I think that being American, of this hemisphere, is about that encounter. America's a place where worlds collided and languages and experiences collided. I think that in a way it's more and more the experience of the whole globe, as you get, say, someone from Bosnia who lives in San Francisco and marries a Japanese-American -- what are their kids? With these great shifts of population and mobility and immigration of this late 20th century we are more and more these hybrids. You offer quite a bit of advice in this new book to young writers. Among other things, you counsel them to avoid self-importance in literature. You say you realized the importance of the vernacular partly by talking to maids. In the Dominican Republic we have a society where class is important, and growing up I was raised by maids. They were the ones whose stories I heard as a kid. They were the ones whose view of the world I absorbed. So the idea that literature comes only from a certain pure, canonical entity, and that's what literature's all about -- that's the education I received in the United States, it was about the canon and certain literary subjects, the big subjects that mostly male writers wrote about. And until I started to believe that other voices or possibilities were also part of literature or could be part of literature ... that's where Maxine Hong Kingston was so important for me. You know, to discover this Asian-American woman with a very different experience from mine as a Latina, but that this could be made into fiction and into wonderfully lyrical, wonderfully written fiction. I thought, wow, I didn't know that. Maybe I should have known it but I didn't know it. This was my first encounter with it. So it's about paying attention and finding those moments of magic in what is out there, that might not have a big sign on it that says, "This is literature." When you talk about avoiding self-importance, are you talking about style or theme or both? It's hard to separate in a work what is one and what is the other. It's all of a piece. The writers who always surprise us and start us thinking in new ways about literature always break those molds anyhow. You get a James Joyce doing something totally different than what was done before. You get Virginia Woolf. Those writers were listening to something else than what were the canonical, right ways to do things. But on the other hand, and this is what I tell my students, they knew what those forms were. It wasn't just rebelling to rebel, but it was an understanding and knowing of that form and that kind of thinking. And moving beyond it. And that's more when you get to the level of craft. That you have to understand what you're going to explode, what you're going to do differently. You have to understand that tradition that you're working against. I was fascinated to read about your daily writing rituals. Can you talk to me about the clean bowl of water you put on your desk every day? There's nothing to say. Except that I do it. You also avoid newspapers in the morning. Why is that? Well, I think I want that beginner's mind which you have when you wake up in the morning. Like no other time. And if you start filling it with what's happening to Clinton today, or a year ago Lady Di died or all those things that become ripe in your head with images, then you lose it. Or at least I do. Other people are better at concentrating. It's just
something about my focus and wanting to hone it on what I'm working on.
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