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Episode 287: Boomerang with Achy Obejas
197 Plays3 years ago
Achy Obejas is an author and poet whose latest collection is Boomerang/Bumeran, poems in English and Spanish that aim to be gender-free (tough in Spanish) while addressing immigration, displacment, love, and activism.
Social media: @CNFPod, @creativenonfictionpodcast
Up to 11 Newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Patreon: patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor love: West Virg. Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing
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Transcript
Introduction and Submission Details
00:00:00
Speaker
Before we dive in to the interview want to remind you that the submission deadline first you three of the audio magazine Well, it's been extended to December 31st the theme is heroes To do with that what you will
00:00:16
Speaker
Essays must be no more than 2,000 words. Bear in mind, it's an audio essay. So pay attention to how the words roll out of your mouth. Email submissions with heroes in the subject line to creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com. I've got a few more. I've got a couple. I've got three. I'd really like 10. That's a good number to select from. Or more. Anyway, pay writers, too, that fat burrito money.
00:00:45
Speaker
So you dig it? Do it. All right. Do it. What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? My dad used to kid that poetry was just one letter away from poverty.
00:01:00
Speaker
And so, I guess I never really thought about it like as a profession, a thing. And I was always amused, especially, I mean, there are very few people in the US who introduce themselves as, well, I'm a poet, because almost nobody who's a poet makes a living from poetry. You know, it's a very rare bird.
Meet the Guest: Archie Obejas
00:01:30
Speaker
Oh hey, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to bad-ass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? At cnfpod on Twitter, at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram, at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara on Instagram. Ew. Archie Obejas is here to talk about her poetry collection, Boomerang Boomerang.
00:01:57
Speaker
Poetry Poecia. It's published by Beacon Press. I know what you're thinking. Brendan, why are you massacring such a beautiful Latin language? It's because Achi's poetry is English going out and Spanish coming back.
00:02:14
Speaker
half in Spanish half in English like it's like oh man what is what is it what's the thing that goes out and back oh the that kid you wish would leave the nest but he just keeps coming back
00:02:30
Speaker
What a treat. And Achi was nice enough to read two poems, Heroes in Exile and Dancing in Paradise in English and Spanish. I've got them spliced into the interview so you'll
00:02:48
Speaker
You'll hear me have a little aside, if you will, to introduce them. Partway through the conversation, Heroes in Exile will be the first one later in the interview towards the very end. Dancing in Paradise. Awesome stuff. Support for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
00:03:09
Speaker
Now in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent CNF faculty have been Randon Billings Noble, Jeremy Jones, and Sarah Einstein. There's also poetry and fiction tracks.
00:03:25
Speaker
with Ashley Bryant Phillips and Jacinda Townsend and Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple holding down the fort no matter your discipline. If you're looking to up your craft or maybe learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Go to nfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
Conversation Themes Overview
00:03:51
Speaker
Well, Archie and I talk about
00:03:54
Speaker
the writing you do in private that is more or less less pressured
00:04:01
Speaker
less pressure to publish, the stuff you kind of do for fun, how the personal can become political, her role as a translator and how the art of translation works, English to Spanish and vice versa, and how her job writing synopses for Netflix helps her artistic writing. This is a fun conversation. I only wish we had more time.
00:04:31
Speaker
on one more thing Saturday November 13th 7 p.m. Eastern tomorrow if you're listening to this on CNF Friday I'll be interviewing debut author Ricky Tucker about his new book in the category is
00:04:46
Speaker
as part of a CNF Pod Live event for the non-fiction sessions put on by my MFA alma mater, Goucher College at the virtual conference. Great stuff. Tickets are like 20 bucks and there's gonna be a few great items on the docket. There's a conversation taking place with Brian Broome. I mean, he was on this podcast when his book Punch Me Up to the Gods came out, my favorite memoir of the year.
00:05:11
Speaker
So he'll be there. You can also go back and listen to our conversation. It was a pretty toe-tapping good time. I am wont to say toe-tapping. But yes, if you want to be in the audience for a CNF Pod live event, warts and all, the Eventbrite link will be in the show notes and across my various social media accounts, notably at Creative Nonfiction Podcasts on Insta and at CNF Pod on Twitter. Want to give a shout out to Kevin and Melissa
00:05:41
Speaker
New patrons over at patreon.com slash cnfpod, very exciting, happy to have you aboard. Means the world to have newbies come on board, and of course the legion of CNF patrons who have been here from the beginning, like Suzanne Biro. She and I had a nice CNF and happy hour this past Wednesday on Zoom. It's part of my newsletter, I give away an exclusive code to everybody on the newsletter list.
00:06:10
Speaker
First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. You can get that at brenda.mera.com. Suzanne was the only one who showed up this week, and we had a lovely time talking shop. It's good stuff, good times. You should have been there. All right, you've been so patient, so here's your reward. Achi Obeyas.
Archie's Journey into Poetry
00:06:43
Speaker
Now, in terms of telling a story, there are any number of ways to go about telling true stories, whether it be straight memoir or linked essays, or in this case, so many of the vignettes in the stories, your story you tell, are through poem and prose poem in English and Spanish. So in your head, what was the calculus to telling the story you wanted to tell that you do so wonderfully in Boomerang?
00:07:12
Speaker
You know, Boomerang, it was a bit of an accident. I have been writing poetry almost my entire life, but I never thought about publishing. I was busy working on prose and really focused on prose.
00:07:28
Speaker
And so poetry was this very private thing that I did for myself. Poetry is also where I go to every single day. I read poetry every day. This book really happened because a friend of mine named Lawrence Schimel, who's an author and an editor, when I lived in Chicago, he used to come and stay with me for
00:07:48
Speaker
a week or so every year. He'd usually have a conference somewhere in the city or in Madison or something like that. And every year he would ask to read some of my poetry. And finally one year he said, you know, you really have enough for a book and I would love to put together a chapbook.
00:08:08
Speaker
I actually handed him a bunch of handwritten spiral notebooks and said, all yours, bud. He put together a little chapbook called, This is What Happened in Our Other Life.
00:08:28
Speaker
To my shock and amazement, the chat book got a terrific response, both critically and in terms of sales. It became his press's bestseller and it wound up on the Poetry Foundation bestseller, which was really like a riot.
00:08:50
Speaker
And then suddenly I had to sort of take myself seriously as a poet. One of the advantages, I guess, in putting together this book and waiting so long to put together this book is that I had a lot of material and I could really look over what I had and sort of come up with a real sort of curatorial approach to it in a way that maybe years before I wouldn't have been able to pull off. But I wanted to talk about the personal and how it
00:09:19
Speaker
leads us to the political and how the political is also very personal. How we sort of negotiate and vacillate between those two things that overlap, but we tend to think of as sort of extremes. I'm interested in my personal life and in my public life in repairing the world, helping to repair the world, obviously an impossible task. One that I think we all have some responsibility towards
00:09:49
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes it's just about marching and moving your body in a particular way. And sometimes it's about being very responsible as a parent or a partner or something like that. I was thinking in a kind of a inward to outward direction and
00:10:15
Speaker
trying to slate the stories and the anecdotes and the emotions accordingly. In what ways are you on a day-to-day basis and maybe even year-to-year trying to fix the world, as you say, in the way that you can?
Activism and Personal Life
00:10:35
Speaker
Well, I mean, I have, you know, certain issues that are closer to me than others. Cuba is a very big topic for me. I was born in Cuba. My parents brought us out of Cuba when I was six and a half years old.
00:10:52
Speaker
But it was that exile that they chose, that they opted for, was also something that very much derailed, affected, perhaps even to some extent destroyed their lives. And, you know, they weren't alone in that. And I've been back to Cuba many times. I lived in Cuba for a while when I was in my 40s.
00:11:16
Speaker
You know, I've gone through phases where, you know, I'm very much in love with it. And then, of course, it gets a little bit diabolical, and then I'm not in love with it. You know, right now, if he was going through a terrible period, the current president was not elected, was chosen by a very minuscule
00:11:36
Speaker
group of people. His first act as president was to sign a law that forbade independent art making and free expression. There have been protests on the island for the first time ever since the 1959 Revolution that have been spontaneous and really propelled by young people
00:11:55
Speaker
And you know, from where I sit in the San Francisco Bay Area, it doesn't seem like there might be much to do, but some friends of mine and I got together and we've put together for this coming Monday, a 24 hour marathon of poetry and art, live and on tape, that will be
00:12:14
Speaker
run in concordance with protests that are currently planned in Cuba. So that's like a small thing. But I think we do activism in that kind of public way. And we also do activism in very sort of private ways. I have two children. They're both boys. I want them to grow up to be men who are responsible and who are in the world for good. So I end up
00:12:44
Speaker
doing a lot of role modeling, even though I'm not a man, but also trying to make sure that we do some good.
00:12:56
Speaker
you know, we together contribute to the food banks, we, you know, pass out, you know, bags of goodies, you know, like, you know, wet wipes, whatever to, you know, homeless people so that they get this idea that they are of a certain privilege, and that they have some responsibility with that privilege, and that they are lucky little bastards.
00:13:20
Speaker
And they need to spread that like around a little bit. So I mean, everybody does what they can in their way, not everything is accessible to.
00:13:29
Speaker
everyone in the same way. So we do what we can. And, you know, and issues also vary. You know, at one point I, when I lived in Chicago and I was single and younger, I was very much involved with the human rights ordinance and helping pass that bit of legislation. You know, I, but I didn't lift a finger towards marriage equality because I was busy doing other stuff, you know. So, you know, we pick and choose what we can and what we feel strongly about.
00:13:59
Speaker
What did it mean for you to return to Cuba maybe the first time or even subsequent
Cultural Discoveries in Cuba
00:14:05
Speaker
times? What does that mean to you as someone native to Cuba?
00:14:09
Speaker
Well, the first time it was a real stunner. So you have to understand, you know, exile was so different from immigration because with exile, you're cut off, you don't go back. And so my parents were, you know, when they talked about Cuba, it was the magical land of Cuba. And I have a friend who always kidded about how when his parents talked about Cuba,
00:14:32
Speaker
It was always sunnier in Cuba, pre-revolution than post-revolution. It was true. It was just this land of myth. And they were very attached, I think, to their myth. They had the key to what Cuba was for us. And when I went to Cuba, it was actually very unsettling for them because suddenly I was going to experience it for myself. And in experiencing it for myself,
00:15:03
Speaker
I might come back and ask questions and some of those questions might be uncomfortable. And in fact, that was precisely what happened. I was stunned, for example, by how much blacker Cuba is than the impression that had been given to me as a kid. You know, I had no idea Cuba was an African diaspora country. I knew that there were plenty of black people in Cuba and that a lot of our culture came from Afro Cubans and that we were very happy and proud of that. But I did not understand just
00:15:33
Speaker
how very black Cuba is and how much Cuba owes to black people, black culture, the African diaspora until I literally got off the plane and looked around and I don't think I saw a white person for like the first 40 minutes I was in Cuba.
00:15:50
Speaker
And that continued to be true throughout my time there. That was a great shock. The other thing that I think was really sort of curious to me was how I was treated. I think my parents were convinced that I would be treated with a certain amount of suspicion by virtue of being from
00:16:12
Speaker
The US but in fact everyone sort of absolved me of the sin of leaving because I didn't make the decision I would get people who would publicly say things like Well, you had nothing to do with it. Your parents Kidnapped you as if one's parents could kidnap you And then that very same very radical person might lean down and whisper in my ear, you know Not 20 minutes later and say you should thank your parents for taking you out of here
00:16:42
Speaker
So the public-private split that exists in Cuban society was something that was very new to me and that I had no real
00:16:55
Speaker
sense of until I got there and saw it play out over and over and over and over again, where people would take these very public positions and then privately say very different things. I remember I had dinner with some cousins. They were
00:17:13
Speaker
pretty melodramatic about almost everything they talked about. But one of the things that really struck me was that I had noticed a framed photograph of my cousin's husband in her apartment, and he was at one of the rallies, one of the big pro-government rallies. And
00:17:32
Speaker
I asked him something about it. It was very benign when I asked. And his response was that they force you to do that, that there's a tremendous amount of pressure that at work, buses come and take you to the rally and that you only get lunch if you go. And then, of course, he rattled off a bunch of criticisms about the government.
00:17:58
Speaker
And the whole time he's talking to me, we're at this restaurant, he's looking around and making sure that nobody can hear him. This became very par. I got very used to it. I also got very used to the idea that foreigners were of incredible import.
00:18:17
Speaker
in Cuba and that Cubans were willing to bend for foreigners in a way that was completely unheard of. I remember one time we were in a religious procession. For me, I'm Jewish, I'm not a Christian, but I was very curious about the spectacle, the event, and these friends of mine. They're Cuban friends from Cuba.
00:18:46
Speaker
We had been in this possession for hours and we're going through a residential neighborhood and everybody's dying to go to the bathroom. And of course, none of the people who live around there are going to let these
00:19:06
Speaker
hundreds of people and they're going to let one person go to the bathroom that they don't know. They're not going to let any strangers come in because then it's going to be the whole mess, right? And at one point, one of my friends says, wait, Archie, you can pass for American. You can get them to open the door for us. And I was like, are you kidding me? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, affect an accent in your Spanish. And as a joke, I did it. And I was flabbergasted how quickly
00:19:36
Speaker
the door flew open and we were allowed to go in, use the bathroom, drink some water. It was, I mean, and this happened over and over and over and over again, where the foreigner was sort of all important. I think the absolute height of that for me was my girlfriend at the time was an artist, she had an assistant.
00:20:01
Speaker
who had a Cuban boyfriend whom she lived with, but she depended on her Spanish boyfriend for financial reasons and for maintenance of her entire family. And the Cuban boyfriend was totally in on this. And every time the Spanish guy came to Havana, the Cuban boyfriend would not only exit their mutual apartment, but the entire apartment was converted so that there was no sign of the Cuban boyfriend.
00:20:32
Speaker
so that the Spanish boyfriend could believe that she was just pining for him whenever he wasn't there. And this sort of theater and pantomime and double lives, that was stunning to me because it takes a lot of emotional and psychological energy to pull that off.
00:20:55
Speaker
Cool cool cool Stepping in here. I think now's a good time to cut in and let you know that achi is going to read heroes in exile then immediately She's gonna first read that in English and then immediately after it'll be in Spanish. All right, check it out heroes in exile
00:21:16
Speaker
after the threats and the hunger strikes and the years in the cold wet prison and the beatings after the headlines and the dramatic rescue or the negotiations for release by honorable or not so honorable delegates after the reunion with family and those in solidarity and the media interviews and the stipend
00:21:35
Speaker
from the private foundation that's good for only a month or two after the White House coffee with the sub-secretary to the assistant to the advisor to the vice president of an international commission on human rights. Heroes in exile stand on the shoulders of a smaller atlas and ponder how their lives have taken such an horrific twist. They accept awards and write editorials. Plot returns and fundraise. Go to the doctor to check for long-term effects and disabilities.
00:22:05
Speaker
They meet with Olympians who gift them with medals and struggle to decipher prescriptions and insurance forms. Heroes in exile give speeches filled with polonian precepts, promises or disappointments, admonishments or bitterness and sometimes genuine hope.
00:22:23
Speaker
They wait for applause and for the car to get an oil change, read a newspaper, eat a bagel. Heroes in exile listen to their critics with compassion or envy or fear and reflect or take revenge or hide from shame in the cloakroom or kitchen, the backroom packed with nostalgia and regret.
00:22:43
Speaker
heroes in exile, sing kaddish, quote Lincoln, and Mandela, Reagan, and Havel, but especially Havel, though Havel's real exile, if generosity permits, came later. After the revolution and the presidency and the splitting in two of the country heroes in exile compose aurorian letters they never write but consider while lolling in the garden
00:23:07
Speaker
tending yellow tulips and daffodils, fields and fields of daffodils.
00:23:22
Speaker
freya, mojade, y les palisas, des pues, de les titulares, y le dramatice, es rescate, oles negotiations para le deliberación, por les honorables, onota honorables, de legades, des pues, de le reunion, con le familia, y le solidarias, y les entravistas, con le medios, y les dependios, de le fundación privade, que solo dura una parte de messes, des pues a le cafe, en le casablanca, con le sub secretarié,
00:23:50
Speaker
to the assistant, to the assessor, to the president of a national commission of human rights. The service in Alexilio was separated from one of the homes of one of my friends. The reflections of how these videos have been made, a hero has been hallucinated, accepted, and described in editorial books, written by Rereso's or Recaldan Fundos,
00:24:14
Speaker
Bán a le medique para verificales effectos a largue plazo y les escapacidades, sin cuentran con olympics que les regala medallas, y luchan por decifrar resetas mediques y planillas y seguro, deservos en lexilio, tan niscusos y enes de preceptos pollonias, promesas, o decepsiones, amores tasiones, o amorigura, y aveces en uínes péranza, paosan para verles a plazos y míntras le cambia en lezete,
00:24:43
Speaker
a suscarros lein una periódico, comen una bego, heiros en l'exilio, escuchén a suscritique es con compassion, o embiida, o miedo, e reflectiona, o se bengan, o se sconde en porvenguenza, el investuario, le cosina, o le cuarto tracerre, yene de costalia, y se la menta, les heiros en l'exilio, cantan carish, sitan a lincón y a mandela, a regan y a havel, perpeciamente a havel,
00:25:12
Speaker
a pazade que su bedadera excelio, si lejena, enorcedad lo permite, vino más tarde, después de la revolution, es su presidencia, y la division en dos, su país, des eros en excelios, componen cartas, die fanes, que nuke scriven, pero de scontemplamentas a requestan en le jardin cuidando, tu li panes, y narcissus amarias, campos y campos de narcissus.
The Writer's Pressure to Publish
00:25:39
Speaker
There was something you said earlier about how your writing poems was just a thing you kind of did for yourself and a practice you did for yourself. And so many writers, they put a lot of pressure on themselves, whether it be for essays or novels or memoirs, that everything has to be rowing in the same direction that every word has to somehow be a publishable quality.
00:26:03
Speaker
but it seems like for you poetry early on especially was just something like you said you did for yourself so how important might you or how important is it for someone to maybe cultivate just a sense of play and practice where the words are just for them and that to take some of that pressure off feeling the need to constantly publish such a good question but you know everybody's different i mean different people have different practices for me it just evolved because
00:26:31
Speaker
I realized that writing poetry brought me joy, it brought me calm, it brought me tremendous satisfaction. And my dad used to kid that poetry was just one letter away from poverty.
00:26:48
Speaker
And so I guess I never really thought about it like as a profession, a thing. And I was always amused, especially, I mean, there are very few people in the US who introduce themselves as well, I'm a poet, because almost nobody who's a poet makes a living from poetry, you know, it's a very rare bird who does that. And so, but
00:27:15
Speaker
in Latin America, there in Europe, there are people who make a living off being poets. And I'm always I mean, I always wanted to giggle when I was introduced to somebody as, oh, and I would be like, right, right. You know, because I couldn't quite fathom what a poet did all day if they weren't also, you know, working for
00:27:44
Speaker
I don't know, Netflix or teaching or being a dentist or something. And so that to me was sort of stunning. But for me, it was just because I'd been writing poetry since I was a kid when publishing was not even within the realm of possibility. When publishing was such a far-fetched concept, it got integrated into my
00:28:12
Speaker
practice in a way that was very organic and very personal. And, you know, I mean, there were there was a period in my 20s when I when I sent some stuff out and some stuff got published. In fact, I mean, I published enough to get an NEA grant in poetry, which was another stunner. Amazing. Yeah, my check was signed by Ronald Reagan, who was the president then. And my father, who was a big Ronald Reagan fan, took more pictures of the check than he did of me receiving the check.
00:28:45
Speaker
I love that my name and Ronald Reagan's name were on the same check.
00:28:49
Speaker
But, you know, I think because I was a kid that and when I started doing it and developed a habit that it just became that way. And so I never felt any pressure about publishing for that. And for me, that was really good. I think that the one thing that I have felt pressure about publishing is novels. When I start a novel, you know, those are such time consuming and emotionally rattling kind of exercises that, you know, do you pour
00:29:18
Speaker
yourself into something for, you know, a year and a half, two years, it's really hard to let go and say, well, that's not working. Let's move on. Oh, yeah. It's the worst. Yeah. Because there are that you will spend so much time in the fact that you put all that time in that you feel like, well, I because I invested all this time, I am owed some degree of some kind of reward for all this effort. And sometimes
00:29:45
Speaker
And a lot of times it's just not the case. Your reward is, you know what, if it's not working, you get to start another one. And you're better by one book, even if that book didn't get published.
00:29:56
Speaker
Exactly. Because you always learn, right? In the process, you always learn about stuff. I have only really put away one novel, and it was devastating. I remember I had like a week after I made the decision where I just kind of moped around. I was the distinguished visiting writer at Mills College then. I had an office that said writer, but I kept
00:30:18
Speaker
I kept moping around and feeling not only very fake, but like telling people, I guess I'm just a college professor now. Which was so stupid because obviously it was a learning experience and it was good for me to have done that and to have tried all those things that I tried in that book. And who knows? I mean, I'm not dead yet, so it may get a revival.
00:30:44
Speaker
I have friends who've put things away and have gone back to it years later and with fresh eyes are able to sort of dig the nugget out of the morass. So who knows? I'm not, I mean, I didn't like delete forever. It's, you know, in my deep, dark file of, you know, stuff not going anywhere.
00:31:12
Speaker
Right. These things never truly die. That's a big reason, a digital drawer or a physical drawer. You can just put it in there and you know what? You're going to keep developing and maturing around this little time capsule of a thing. And like you said, there might be some nugget in the morass or just a way you can imbue new experience on it or you can just throw it in the incinerator and move on. Who knows?
00:31:38
Speaker
Who knows? I read somewhere that Nelson Algren, whenever stuff didn't work, he'd crumble it up and he'd put it in the top drawer of his desk. Then when he was stuck, he would just reach in there and pull something out. Sometimes it made its way into the new thing. Sometimes it just kicked him into thinking about something in a different way, and sometimes it didn't work at all. But he had hundreds of pieces of paper
00:32:05
Speaker
torn pieces of paper all crumbled up in this top drawer just for that moment and they were all from things that did not work.
Creative Work at Netflix
00:32:15
Speaker
Now you're a writer and editor for Netflix and also a professional writer so maybe you can for one kind of describe your role in Netflix because that struck me as I'm like I didn't realize that there were writers and editors there like I'm sure there's a certain content wing where that matters and I'm just curious about that.
00:32:32
Speaker
But also because that is a job and then also your art are kind of tethered together because they're words. You know, how you have a firewall between the two and don't get burned out when you want to do, you know, your poetry or your novels. Yeah, it's a good question. You know, it's what I do is I write and I edit a synopsis. When you click open Netflix and you see a little description
00:33:01
Speaker
of whatever it is that you might or might not watch. That's something that somebody at Netflix wrote. And there's a very specific way to approach these things. And there are very many different ways of doing it. We have synopsis that are only 150 characters. We have synopsis that are 500 characters. We have synopsis that focus on prizes won by this particular director.
00:33:29
Speaker
you know, so we do all of that. And I and I mostly work on Latin American titles, I do a lot of other stuff, but I mostly work on Latin American titles. The beauty of working with Netflix is that the work is short. I'm not
00:33:46
Speaker
involved in it like when I worked at the Chicago Tribune as a reporter you know sometimes you're working on a story for three months and that's why you think about it and that gets very much in the way of everything else you're trying to write because you're still thinking about the story or you know you owe the Tribune. The only time that really happens with Netflix is when you have a telenovela and those have a weird way of warming into your brain and you find yourself thinking about these characters as if they're
00:34:13
Speaker
relatives or something. But like right now I'm watching one that's 91 episodes. And I find myself talking like my mom used to talk about her telenovelas. I never watched the telenovela in my life until I started working for Netflix. So that's been sort of funny. The truly great thing about working at Netflix
00:34:35
Speaker
is that every single person I work with is absolutely brilliant. These are some of the best writers I've ever, ever worked with or ever met. And I mean, that far exceeds the, I mean, they're, they're just, I mean, I've worked places with great writers like the Tribune and the Chicago Reader and, you know, writing departments at very many different universities, the University of Chicago and
00:35:04
Speaker
Northwestern, Mills, et cetera. But these people are really amazing and they're all slightly wacky and they all have their own thing going outside of Netflix. Nobody's at Netflix for Netflix, except maybe the managers. They're interested, they're in there, but they're also writing scripts and novels and other stuff on the side. To me, that's exciting because there's a real creative energy going on all the time.
00:35:35
Speaker
There's several years ago when when I was I believe I was I was actually binging the first four seasons of Breaking Bad on Netflix. So we're talking like probably 2012 2011 2012 when when it went on to Netflix.
00:35:51
Speaker
And I just I remember at that time I was taking note of these synopses that were written and as a way to sum up. We're often told about like elevator pitches for books and if you if you have like 10 seconds to sell your book.
00:36:08
Speaker
How are you gonna do it? And it's like I started reading those I'm like, these are great one sentence two sentence pitches for what the entire series is about and it's like it's really a great exercise and distilling it if you do really only have 15 seconds of an agent's time or a publisher's time Like this is what it's about. It is like those things are so valuable really. That's great exercise No, it is a great exercise and it really makes you You know, it makes your brain work in a very different way. I mean
00:36:38
Speaker
I find that after a day of killing it with synopsis, when I go back to my own work, I'm like hacking through it. Everything becomes much more compact. I don't need that there. That's not a bad thing at all. I actually think that that's very helpful. But there are all sorts of things we do that we don't necessarily think at the time that
00:37:07
Speaker
It has an effect on our writing, but it does. I was translating for the time I was a kid because my parents didn't speak English. I never thought of what I was doing as translation. And yet I was playing with words and trying to find the more appropriate one. And I find that now that I do translation, I mean, what that has taught me is to be
Translation as a Creative Art
00:37:30
Speaker
an incredibly close reader. And I'm not sure that I would be as close a reader if I weren't translating because I don't, most of us don't consider every word when we're reading. That's not how it works. Our brains put together this
00:37:46
Speaker
assemblage of words and comes up with meaning. But in translation, you have to consider every word, whether you translate it or not, you have to consider it. And so you become a very, very close reader. And I think that, you know, things like that are really interesting. I don't know. I mean, I think everything sort of feeds what we do, you know,
00:38:09
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And given that you're a translator, in an age where you can cut and paste a lot of things into Google Translate, how have you seen your role in the art of translation? How has that changed and how has your relation to it changed, given that a lot of people can just take the easy out of Google?
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I mean, Google is, is, is not bad at all for, you know, like, you know, just kind of getting along, you know, I mean, especially since they added the AI component where Google translates actually learns. Um, it's, um, it's actually not a bad place if all you really need is function, but it sucks when it comes to creativity because it doesn't understand lexicon.
00:39:02
Speaker
You know, and so it will translate something from English into Spanish with an English construction. Um, and it, the words may be correct, but it sounds weird. Um, it would be as if I suddenly started talking to you and like, instead of using the English possessive was suddenly talking about, you know, the hat of Donald.
00:39:25
Speaker
as if that were the normal way of referring to Donald's hat. It doesn't work. I think you always need a human being for literary translation because you need creativity. You need someone who
00:39:48
Speaker
has a voice and who can capture the voice of the original writer, you need somebody to sort of examine that and figure out what's their swing? What's their thing? How is it that they do what they do? What do they sound like in this other language? If they had been born talking this other language, what would they sound like? When I translated Junodias,
00:40:16
Speaker
It was tremendous fun because, you know, he's got this incredible groove in the way he writes English. So it was just screaming in your face, you know, do this in this other way. But when you translate somebody who's more subtle, like,
00:40:35
Speaker
you have to find her voice in more nuanced ways. That, to me, has been a real interesting experience, too, to inhabit these other voices. Now, with Boomerang, why was it important for you to have the Boomerang symbolized in the entire construction of the book, whether it's going out in English and coming back in Spanish or vice versa?
00:41:06
Speaker
Well, I think, I mean, for me, it was a lot of things. One, because I go back and forth from Cuba. Two, because I think the public and private kind of go back and forth. And there's this sort of eternal, just kind of bouncing off and coming back and bouncing off and coming back. And I, for one, feel like I return a lot to different times and different points in my life and sort of reconsider, rethink,
00:41:35
Speaker
reappraise, I don't necessarily know or think anybody else does that in the same way, but I do. I do a lot of that. I think now, especially that I have kids, I've had to rethink a lot of things. My parents, for example, were very, very lax about religion. They did their thing, they each had their own thing they did, and it was very cool.
00:42:01
Speaker
Um, but I really had to sort of think, well, how am I going to do it? Am I going to be really relaxed and you know, really cool about this? Or am I going to force my kids into Sunday school? And I realized, yeah, I'm going to be that parent who's going to force my kid into Sunday school. Part of it was because I had experiences my parents didn't, which was, uh, being out in the world. And, um, I remember in college, I worked for a bakery
00:42:29
Speaker
I was actually run by a cult. I wasn't in the cult, but it was a local ashram. They actually had to hire people outside the cult in order to not be breaking the law. Also, they didn't have enough cult members to run this incredibly successful business. One of the things that struck me about all my coworkers is that they all came from really relaxed religious families. One of the things that the cult offered them was
00:42:58
Speaker
something to hold on to. So I realized I would prefer if my kids had something to hold on to and rebel against than to have nothing and fall through the black hole of, you know, this kind of very restrictive and, you know, very black and white situation. So and I mean,
00:43:24
Speaker
And also, I think there's a lot of beauty and the values of Judaism, which is what I practice. I like the idea that, again, that my kids have some sense of citizenship in the world and responsibility to that world. But I really had to think about it consciously in a way that I don't know that my parents did. I know my parents made other very conscious decisions,
00:43:51
Speaker
my parents decided that we would speak in Spanish at home because they did not want us to lose English. And that's not a decision I made, but I wish I had been able to keep it up. But now having made a slight attempt at it at one point, I understand
00:44:09
Speaker
how hard it was for my parents and what an incredible gift they gave us to let us grow up bilingual. But they had that experience of exile also that was very urgent for them and this possibility that we might go back and they wanted us to be able to function in Cuba.
00:44:27
Speaker
It never crosses my mind that Elon and Pablo are going to need to function in Cuba or anywhere else other than this country. And if in fact they do function somewhere else, it'll be someplace of their choice, I hope, and not a question of exile and being forced into or out of someplace. They'll learn languages, but they might not learn necessarily Spanish.
00:44:55
Speaker
I hope have an interest in the world, but the focus may not be Cuba, and that's okay. They're not me, and they're not my parents.
00:45:08
Speaker
I love how a lot of the poems, there are some that have an edge to them, but there are also ones that are very tender, like you're dancing in Paradise Wine. It just feels very warm and tender. As we kind of wind down our conversation here, Achi, I just wanted to get a sense of how important it was for you to balance some of that tonality throughout this collection.
00:45:34
Speaker
Oh, it was hugely important. I mean, there's a there's a music to this, you know, like you you have, it's like this is like putting together an album, you know, you read songs and then you have the overall sound you, you have an, you know, a concert to put on with these different songs and you have to find the rise and the fall and the moment of tension and the moment of tension release and
00:46:05
Speaker
all those things, I mean, it's you, I think, and I hope that people, you know, approach this book, however they need, you know, that is if they just want to open it and read a piece here and there, that's fine, too. But if anybody chooses to sit down and read it all the way through, I think that they'll also find that there's something there that's different than reading it. So in such a scattered way, right? And I think that there's something beyond the individual pieces as well.
00:46:35
Speaker
Final aside, I kind of like these. I kind of like cutting in here and there. It kind of breaks things up. I've got to think about how to work that in more, but it is more work. I don't know. Final aside, nevertheless, in terms of poems that are more tender, I really loved Dancing in Paradise. Again, Archie is reading English, and then in Spanish. Enjoy. Dancing in Paradise. You lean against me as we dance. A soft huddle up our heads together.
00:47:04
Speaker
Our breaths clean steam and the blue smoke, rapid, exhausted. We mix margaritas because I like the name, a woman you love. You're older, unwilling, drunk, unbuttoned. You lead, peeling glare, after wet layer, a heap of sweaters, shirts, and precious metals. Your breast is slick with sweat, hands agile, eels and glass waters.
00:47:33
Speaker
When you scoop me up, I twist in your lap. A thick needle thrusts through my tongue. Later, you give me a reading list, blank journals, your mother's recipes. You take what you need, knowing there's no autonomy of the senses, those five carnivores in their own essential food chain. What survives is memory, twin jewels, the blade of a pelvic bone. Instinctively, we keep our eyes open, ears keen,
00:48:03
Speaker
Her marine smells, salt, the plexus of light, sound, water.
00:48:31
Speaker
Tu es mañor y estoy despuesta moracha de sabrochada. Me guías, qui tando nos capa mojade tras capa mojade, una montón de sueterez camisas y metales presioses. Chusenos están respaladíces por lesudor manos ajiles, and guílas en aguas crystallines. Cuando me currucas mejir en tu reaso, y un inguores se aguja a travieza me lengua.
00:48:59
Speaker
Juego, me das un elista de lecturas, di arios en blanque, recetas de toma má. Te llevas la nuloc en necesitas. Saviendo, que no hay, autonomía de lecentidos, ese sinques, carnivores, en su propia, cadena, trofica y essentiales. Le que su revivos memoria, hoy a seméles. Le filo de legues o pelibique. Instinctiva mente, man tenemos lezodos aviertes.
00:49:34
Speaker
Excellent. Where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work?
00:49:43
Speaker
Um, they can find me online at my website, um, achiobeyhouse.com that's A as in Apple, C as in Kat, H as in Henry, Y as in Yankee, O, B as in boy, E as in Eric, J as in Jack, A as in Apple, S as in Sam.com. Um, and there are tons of interviews and, uh,
00:50:06
Speaker
reviews and articles I've written and all kinds of stuff upcoming events. This will be on there eventually.
00:50:15
Speaker
Beautiful. Yeah, that's the best place. Fantastic. Well, of course, this is great fun getting to just kind of talk shop and pick your brain about this, you know, this wonderful collection and the creative way you went about putting it together. It's kind of, it's very singular in that way. And it is definitely, you know, wonderful to immerse yourself in. And then of course,
00:50:38
Speaker
get to hear you read those poems in English and Spanish. So it was a wonderful experience and I deeply appreciate you coming on the show, Achi. Thank you so much. Absolutely.
00:50:57
Speaker
okay oh that was great had a good time there it's really nice for her to read those poems and uh at the spanish ones oh my god i mean even if you i like i i don't understand but it just sounds so beautiful it really does amazing
00:51:15
Speaker
I hope you had a good time. Thank you to West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing for the support, and also the patrons who helped make this show possible. Yes! The show is partly made possible by the incredible cohort of members, patreon.com slash cnfpod, new and old.
00:51:32
Speaker
building up those patreon coffers grants you access to transcripts and audio magazine and coaching I I'm debating whether to turn the audio magazine more loose on the general public just because
00:51:48
Speaker
I don't know if that might get more people interested in the whole enterprise. You know, the first issue, let's just say it went out to roughly a thousand people, and then the last one went out to like 13, because that was the Patreon audience at the time of that publication. That's a big difference, right?
00:52:07
Speaker
So I don't know. I might reach out to the Patreon people and be like, listen, if I just kind of retool those tiers, would you be okay with that? Because that matters to me. So in any case, building up those coffers helps pay for the podcast hosting, which is several hundred dollars a year to make the backlog available for all time. And your dollars go into the pockets of writers. Like I say, that burrito money.
00:52:36
Speaker
So visit patreon.com so I see an F pod shop around help support the community That's what you're doing
00:52:44
Speaker
And like I said, for the little guy, and that's me, and so a lot of you out there too. Reviews make the world go around. If you can spare a moment and head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a kind review for the show, I'll read it on the air, I always do that. They mean everything to the way we're seeing effort. Me personally, I don't have any real name recognition, let's be honest.
00:53:09
Speaker
I'm not, yeah, let's just leave it at that. But if people see more and more of those reviews, they have to take notice and they might just join our little community and then they might become patrons and I can pay writers more and maybe even make some of that, a little of that vegetarian burrito bowl chipotle money for myself and get some guacamole on there.
00:53:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I just might be able to get that guac in a Corona. Anyway, I don't have much to say today. I thought I did, but then I just forgot, and so I'm just gonna leave. I'm gonna make a little bit of food after I'm done packaging this, because then I gotta put all this crap together, and I'm gonna have some wine. Actually, I'll probably be done with the wine by the time I hit stop on this.
00:54:03
Speaker
I don't even know anymore, bro. So, just stay wild, CNFers, and if you can't do Interview, see ya!
00:54:55
Speaker
you