Sandra Rodríguez Barron was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Connecticut and El Salvador. She graduated from the University of Connecticut and obtained a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Florida International University. In 2006, she published her first novel, The Heiress of Water. Isabel Allende said of the novel, “Sandra Rodríguez Barron’s exuberant prose yields an immensely entertaining reading experience. You are fraught with the certainty that she is a gatekeeper of the secrets of the sea.”
I had the pleasure of meeting her in 2006, when we read together at the Miami International Book Fair. She kindly agreed to be interviewed for this blog.
Barr: Sandy, thank you for doing this interview. Let me start out by asking you this — when did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?
Rodríguez Barron: I announced that I would become a writer at age seven. It’s amazing to me how long it took me to return to that early self-knowledge. I believe that most of us identify our life’s passion pretty early on. What happens in between, how we get lost, how we ignore who we are, is another story.
Barr: Can you see yourself doing anything else?
Rodríguez Barron: I suppose that if it came down to my child eating or not eating, I’d do anything. But given a choice, no, there is no turning back now. Once we’ve tasted the thrill of doing what we love, it’s so hard to go back. I will always write. As we all know, choosing the writing life is a brave decision; it’s certainly not the safe road.
Barr: What would you say to someone who is thinking about enrolling in a creative writing MFA program?
Rodríguez Barron: It’s a great experience but it won’t guarantee publication or employment in academia or anywhere else. With that said, I can think if a lot of good reasons to enroll: the mentorship and coaching by seasoned writers, the friendships between classmates, the networking and sense of community was all extremely valuable to me. I enrolled in Florida International University’s MFA program because I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know where to start. I needed the structure and discipline of an academic deadline. There are other benefits too, such as access to a serious library, should your project require research, as my novel did. In the end, it paid off for me in that I sold it to a major publisher.
Barr: Here are some nitty-gritty questions: Do you have a writing routine? When and where do you write, for example? Do you write in longhand or on a PC?
Rodríguez Barron: I try to maintain a semblance of a routine, but my life is chaotic and ever-changing, mostly because of family obligations. One of the basic rules for me is to always write before lunchtime. After that I’m just sleepy and my mind is dull. As for place, I mostly write in my home office. Sometimes it gets claustrophobic, but I haven’t found a place locally that’s all that comfortable for several hours. I write mostly on the PC, but I keep a large hardback notebook on my desk that I fill with notes, ideas, short scenes and later transfer them if I want. I have been incorporating yoga and short walks into my routine to combat muscle stiffness and weight gain that creeps in due to being sedentary for so many hours. I also worry about my vision, so I go outside and focus on objects in the distance. I figure Hey, if I’m in this for life, I’d better nip those occupational hazards in the bud.
Barr: It’s funny and oddly comforting to me that you should mention those occupational hazards because the same thing is happening to me — with the muscle strain, the eyesight, etc. I thought it was just me. Is there any writer or writers who inspired you to take up writing?
Rodríguez Barron: Since I was seven, I suppose it might have been the first book I read on my own did that. Earlier, I hinted at straying from this impulse, and it took many years for me to get serious about writing. The first creative thunderbolt came when I was in college. I was living in Aix-en-Provence, France on a study-abroad program. I was hanging around the library of the school I attended, just procrastinating, doing my French homework. The building was a former monastery, a thirteen-century stone building that was cold and damp, with chipping frescos on the walls. On one of the tables, someone had left a copy of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. I had never before read a book written by a Latina. And the cover stated that it was an international bestseller! I was electrified that someone who fit my demographic profile could be a part of the literary scene and in a big, international, bestselling way. I took it home and couldn’t stop reading for a couple days. I even skipped a class or two to finish the book. When I put it down, the world had changed because I now saw possibilities I had not considered before. My desire to write reemerged. But the reality was that I still had not idea how to approach the challenge. What I did all those years between that time in France and when I enrolled at FIU was to keep journals. I have gone back to those journals for ideas, but found that most of it is very boring. Unfortunately, I was a shy and well-behaved girl. But it gave me a taste and comfort with the act of moving the pen. That cannot be underestimated.
Barr: You were born in PR but reared in El Salvador, did you ever feel like a foreigner while you were there?
Rodríguez Barron: Yes, always. In both places. But I have come to appreciate the role of the native foreigner — it is to hold up a mirror. I know these places better than an outsider, but I don’t live there now, so I see them in a fresh way. I go to El Salvador and Puerto Rico and explore and write about places and wonders that the citizens themselves have either never seen or completely take for granted. The reaction I get is similar to the reaction I would get if I wrote a poem about the beauty of someone’s little sister. They would sit up and say, yes, I suppose my little sister is beautiful. I never saw her as beautiful, I just see her as my sister. That’s how most of us see our home. We are oblivious. I experienced this in reverse when my French “sister” came to visit my family in Connecticut a few years after I left France. Everywhere we went, she was so curious, asking why do you have this, what’s this for? She had never seen a screen door. She thought it was a marvel. Why don’t we have screen doors in France? she wondered. It was delightful to see my own world through a foreigner’s eyes.
Barr: Do you think feeling that sense of “otherness” is necessary in a writer?
Rodríguez Barron: Not ethnically. Plenty of Apple-pie Americans have written beautifully about the American landscape and that’s true of Latin American writers and everywhere else. If the otherness you refer to is a more personal point of view, yes, absolutely. The artistic point of view is very “other” in our culture. I remember a comment that Les Standiford, my former professor (and director of FIU’s Creative Writing Program) made on my first day of classes — that we (writers) are “a band of one-eyed cats.” We’re freaks no matter where we are. That rang true for me. I always felt different from other people — everyone else was busy living the moment while I was observing it in a sort of slow motion, in recording mode, something other than real time. The artist’s mind is predisposed to treat life as material for creating. That impulse is our shared “otherness.”
Barr: You are headed to Bread Loaf with a fellowship. [GB Note: This interview was conducted over a period of several weeks before the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in August 2008.] Can you tell us what made you decide to apply for that?
Rodríguez Barron: I was having dinner in Connecticut with my friend Marcel Landres, a New York writing consultant who has a ton of wisdom and experience in publishing. She said, “You know, the next thing for you would be a Bread Loaf fellowship.” I had heard about Bread Loaf because my former professor, Dan Wakefield had been a fellow. So I applied. And I got it. I was thrilled.
Barr: In your novel, The Heiress of Water, the story develops against the background of the guerrilla wars of the 1970s and 1980s. I noticed that you walked a fine line and did not venture into making a political comment. I’ll be up front with you where I’m going with this question: I think it is a risky thing for writers to inject politics into their writing for several reasons. Was your choice to stay away from politics based on similar reasoning or was there some other rationale?
Rodríguez Barron: Yes, I agree that if you are political, you risk alienating readers who have another perspective. Also, it can take the focus away from the universal. The greatest writers, I believe, are not political, they are more literary anthropologists. They ask questions and then get out of the way so their audience can process the question and come up with their own answers. I like to think I write “human” stories rather than stories that are (insert political leaning) or even “Latino” stories. I don’t like any of those labels.
Barr: I couldn’t agree with you more, especially about the label part. A friend of mine does not mind being labeled a “gay writer,” even if it means that his books end up on a separate shelf. I would very much mind an “identity” label of any kind and agree with you that the book has to stand on its own, regardless of the author’s ethnicity or sexual orientation. All that stuff is distracting. Nobody puts Proust in the “gay” section or Wright in the “Black” section. Back to your book, though, although the novel is a short one, it has an epic feel to it as it covers three generations of family in El Salvador, the last one of which emigrates to the US. Do you plan to explore the American immigrant experience in more detail in a later work?
Rodríguez Barron: Yes, as part of a greater context, but it’s not the focus. I don’t have any family experience with immigration as most people define it. My dad was Puerto Rican and my mom became a US resident and ultimately a citizen through marriage. There were no boats, fences or borders involved. My characters tend to be bilingual and multicultural, but not immigrants. I don’t know enough about the experience to write about it.
Barr: How many languages was The Heiress of Water translated to and are there any more plans with that book?
Rodríguez Barron: Heiress has been translated to Spanish (and published by Rayo) and German (published in hardcover by Fischer and in paperback by Weltbild). I collaborated a great deal on the Spanish version to make sure that the Salvadoran vernacular was right. The translator, Patricia Torres, is from Colombia. She did a wonderful job, but I tweaked it to make sure that every word flows. It was picked this year by Criticas/Publisher’s Weekly as a “Top Pick for Hispanic Heritage Month.”
Barr: That’s great! Congratulations. And for those readers who may not know, Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated in the US in October. Are you working on another book and can you tell us what it is?
Rodríguez Barron: I am working on a novel that is under contract with Harper Collins. It will probably be out in early 2010, but that’s just a guess. It has had about a dozen titles, so I won’t bother trying to give it a name for now. I don’t think you can name a novel until it’s done anyway. Here is the summary: After a category five hurricane in 1979, five toddlers are found inside the cabin of a fishing boat, alone and adrift in the Caribbean Sea. They are rescued and taken into US custody in Puerto Rico. They are too small to contribute any information, and speak only a few words of Spanish. Despite extensive media coverage, the children’s origins remain a complete mystery. They are separated and adopted in the United States. Almost thirty years later, the adopted children have found each other and share a strong bond based on their unique and mysterious past. When David, the youngest of the five, is diagnosed with a deadly form of brain cancer, his “siblings” rush to his side. Upon waking up from brain surgery, David insists that his name is Javier — possibly his real name before they were all abandoned, adopted and given all-American names. This revelation provides a rare but dangerous invitation into the past, a challenge that stands in direct opposition to their most closely held common value: never seek their biological relatives. All five of the siblings have been holding on to a carefully constructed personal history and an emotional kinship that cannot withstand the insult of DNA testing and frightening, recovered memories. But David is living with an entirely new set of priorities. He has a powerful reason to force them into the emotional upheaval — he believes that knowing the source of their most primal wound — their abandonment — could also be the key to his survival.
Barr: Well, I wish you the best with the new novel. And hope that it will not be too long before it is published.
Photo: Sandra Rodríguez Barron from the author’s website.
