This week, TheLatinoAuthor.com is featuring author Dahlma Llanos Figueroa. Dahlma grew up in NYC; however, she was born in Puerto Rico. Her short stories and memoir pieces have been published in numerous anthologies, literary journals and magazines. Her novel, Daughters of the Stone, was short listed for the prestigious 2010 PEN America Bingham Literary Award. Read our interview with Ms. Figueroa and see what drives her passion and inspiration to write.
Can you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself; where you grew up, where you currently reside, family upbringing, or anything you would like our readers to know about you?
I was born in Rio Piedras, PR, but my family lived in nearby Carolina. I came to NYC as a toddler and lived in El Barrio for a few years until we moved to the Bronx where I have lived ever since. My mom was a nurse at various city hospitals and my dad was an accountant. Although we lived in various parts of the Bronx, we were always lucky to be surrounded by a large, extended family and group of friends. Much of my writing is based on the few years I spent living with my grandparents in rural Puerto Rico. When my parents had saved up enough money for us to move into our own home, I returned to the Bronx. I went to college at SUNY Buffalo and returned to NYC to teach and work as a young adult librarian in the public school system for thirty years. When I retired, I dedicated myself to a long awaiting passion, writing.
Being a creative writing instructor and now a full time author are closely related; however, each profession has its own challenges. Which do you find to be the most challenging and why?
Each of these is a totally different world. Your question is like asking which of your children do you love best. Each of these feeds my soul in a very different way. I absolutely love teaching creative writing, especially to adults who have a lot to say but never had a chance, or were never encouraged, to do so. I find they come to me with a richness of experience that makes their work substantial and real. I especially love my workshops in the South Bronx where there is such a wealth of cultural and lifestyle variations. It was like teaching creative writing in the United Nations – wonderful tapestry.
Writing my own fiction is a whole different source of satisfaction. I look at my world and I realize that there are stories to be told that reflect our reality like no media production has done (with some very recent exceptions). I live in a world of afrodescendientes latinos who have been overlooked and ignored. Our stories have always been submerged under other stories and somehow have risen to the top. It’s time for our reality to be reflected and recognized as part of the American landscape. Now that I look back on what I have written, it seems these two parts of my life have much in common. I like giving voice to the voiceless and invisible elements in our society. Sometimes the voice comes from me and sometimes I help other people find and value their own voices.
Has writing always been a passion of yours, and if so, where do you think this enthusiasm came from?
I have writing since I was in high school. But for many years, I didn’t have any real models to follow. The mostly male, mostly Eurocentric models that I was presented with were intellectually satisfying but gave me no cultural or linguistic foundation on which to base my own stories. There were books that I liked, loved even, but they didn’t reflect my world and their language didn’t reflect the cadence of the voices I heard around me. Then I read Piri Thomas, and Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende and Oscar Hijuelos and Leslie Marmon Silko. These are writers who wrote with clarity and honesty and wrote about lives that no one else was writing about, in ways that were different and exciting. They took the lives led in the privacy of their communities and spread them out for the world to see and acknowledge. When the standard English language didn’t suffice, they bent and twisted and reinvented language to suit their needs. They demanded to take their place in the world of letters without changing or compromising their essential truth. Their characters stood naked before the reader and said here I am and here I’ll stay, just the way I am. Their work gave me permission tell my stories, my way.
What are the most important elements of good writing and must have tools for writers?
I think aspiring and emerging writers need to read what came before. First, read constantly, go beyond the assigned readings and delve into your own interests. You can learn much from the writers of the past, what they tried to do, what worked and what didn’t and why. So read everything you can get your hands on. Read American and definitely read foreign writers. We live in an amazingly varied and creative universe. Read Japanese and Nigerian and Columbian and Canadian writers. Read the old dead guys and the new graphic novels. Read poetry and prose and sci- fi and imaginative novels. Read non-fiction, the newspaper and travel books. They will all contribute to your journey to find your own voice.
Secondly, make sure you internalize the tools of good writing—grammar, punctuation, all that boring stuff you tuned out in high school. Remember that all those literary devises, writing tools, like metaphors and imagery and symbols and setting and tone—all of them will help you tell your tale in a more interesting way. So check out how other writers use these devices and decide which you want in your toolbox. Then, if need be, tear it all up and create a new language that tells your tale in a better way or a new format that better serves your story. But you do so with the sure knowledge of which rules you are breaking and why. But most importantly, make sure you have a solid story with compelling characters. If there is no story, a reader will pick up a novel and never finish it. A well-written narrative is a wonderful thing but I don’t want to be dazzled by technique alone. That leaves me asking, “where’s the beef?”
There is also something else and that has to do with the way you read. This is a lesson I only learned in the past few years. I used to be a very polite reader, never dog-earing pages or making marks. The books on my shelf were pristine. I took pride in their perfect condition. After I started writing, I started reading like a writer. I devoured books, quite rudely too. I underlined every perfect turn of phrase, every wonderful image, and every amazing metaphor. I folded pages in half if that’s what it took to help me come back to a great passage. When a writer’s words stopped me dead in my tracks, I asked myself, “how’d she do that?” And I dissected the sentence, savored the words, read aloud and listened to the sounds. I have become a much slower reader now because I pay attention in ways I never did before. The short answer to your question is 1) Read 2) know the mechanics of the language 3) have something to say 4) Read like a writer.
Where do you get your ideas for writing?
This one’s easy. I don’t know. Sometimes I see something or hear something that sets me off imagining what the story would be. For instance, whenever I’m in a very old place, I try to imagine what it must have been like to live in that society way back when. Sometimes I hear a story from an elder and try to put myself in their place to see how I would react. But those are only starting points. In order to get to the real heart and soul of my work, I do a lot of listening with my inner ear. I meditate and pay attention to the imagery that comes my way. Sometimes, it takes a long time before I understand where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. I have learned to trust my inner voices. They are generally the voices of my characters telling me who they are, what they want and where we’re going. If I force it by setting up a false schedule, or outline, the resulting prose is stilted and plain awful. So I’ve learned to respect my process. I can feel when the story is coming and I’ve learned to wait. It’s like pregnancy. You can’t rush the due date but you know when the baby is ready to be delivered.
Do you ever have writer’s block, and if so, how do you overcome this? What motivates you to write?
All writers have periods when they aren’t actively writing. I prefer to think of those times as gestation periods. I am always writing on some level, whether I’m sitting at the computer or not. Thinking is part of my writing. Dreaming is part of my writing. As long as the story is on my mind, I believe I am writing.
The untold story is my biggest motivator. What motivates me to write is knowing that the stories of my people have yet to be told. My mother and grandmother and all the women in my life told stories all the time. Their stories were seldom heard outside the circle of our family, friends and neighbors. And yet, those very stories have sustained generation after generation. Life was never easy, but those stories taught us resilience and continuity and perseverance. So often when I am telling stories, I am standing on the shoulders of the women who came before me. For my current book, I am branching out, listening to my friends and students and the stories of their families. I read the newspaper and find the half-told stories that lie beyond the headlines. I find an old photography and I’m off on another narrative. The more I write, the more stories find me.
When you write, do you work from an outline?
No, I have never worked with an outline. For my first book the story grew organically. I wrote in my journal for years. I wrote about these characters and their lives as they came to me, never in sequential order. Stories came as they came, kind of like a puzzle that later had to be assembled in some kind of recognizable order. So after I recorded all those images and scenes between characters, I polished and honed and revised and at the end of twenty years I realized I had a whole novel. In fact, I probably had two whole novels. I’m glad that worked for me then. However, for my second book, my process seems to have changed. I am much more organized and have much more control over my material as I go along. I know my themes and have a general sense of my characters and the times they live in. I started with the names of the characters and their relationship to one another. I did a genealogy chart and looked at the historical markers for each generation. I then had a framework on which to hang those stories. Once I had that part, I started doing research into the social life of people at that time in that place. I started reaching out to people who had a lot more knowledge of history, psychology and medicine to make sure what I was writing was accurate and had the heft of truth. This is a whole new way of writing for me. I still depend on images I get during meditation and the images in my dreams. These are the core of my story and that will never change. But I learned a lot from writing my first book and this time I began with the general plan and then opened myself up for the creative flow of narrative; kind of like making the bed before delivering the baby.
What were some of the obstacles you faced when publishing or marketing your literary works?
Marketing is a big problem because I think most major publishers have no idea of how to reach out to our Latino communities. In many instances, they don’t even try. I am told that the economic environment has shrunken promotion budgets. But I’ll never understand why the available money is spent on established writers who already have a following rather then emerging writers who need the promotional support to find new readers. It seems to me that by ignoring emerging writers, publishers are insuring their failure. What’s wrong with this picture?
Beyond that, I feel that there is too much pigeonholing. Why can’t all writers be marketed across the board? Who said that only Latino readers would be interested in works by Latino writers? We don’t isolate one section and call it Jewish books, or WASP fiction. Why do it with books written by Latino authors? There is universality in good literary work that goes beyond culture and language. Mother/daughter relationships, storytelling, family secrets, voiceless ness, female bonding, emotional and psychological scarring, being the outsider, acculturation, love and hate—these are universal themes whether the characters are black, white or green.
Which persons, personal or professional, have influenced your writing and why?
I’ve already mentioned several writers that have had an enormous impact on my development as a writer. I am also inspired by Julia de Burgos, Cristina Garcia, Paul Harding, Susan Minot, all for different reasons.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Never stop learning. Be open to new possibilities. I learn from my students, from children seeing the world with fresh eyes, from old people reacting to a rapidly changing world, from my husband who brought a totally different culture into my life. Hone your skills. Go to workshops, travel, or go to international writers’ conferences and retreats. Join writers’ organizations and attend their conventions. Interact with other writers. Stay on top of what writers are doing around the world. Meet people in the publishing field. Listen—to concerns, advice, constructive criticism, suggestions. See if these fit in with what you are trying to do. Revisit advice you thought didn’t pertain to you. Remain open to new and different points of view. The worst thing for a writer is to stagnate or close herself off. Learn from the past, relish the present and move on to the future.
Can you tell us about any upcoming projects in the near future?
As I mentioned, I am working on my second novel. It’s complicated and I’d rather not go into a lot of detail but I’m very excited about it. It has a life of its’ own. I thought I was going to tell one story and it’s morphing into something else. We’ll both be surprised.
Visit me at: www.llanosfigueroa.com!
