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Episode 149: Anika Fajardo—Writing is About Communicating
133 Plays6 years ago
"Part of me thinks nobody should write a memoir," says Anika Fajardo, @anikawrites.
Anika Fajardo, author of Magical Realism for Nonbelievers, joined me for a nice conversation about her late-blooming journey through writing. She thinks writing is about community and connection and writers need to be submitting work.
Be sure to keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod.
Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
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Transcript
Introduction and Rebranding of CNF
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm gonna steal a line from Seth Godin, but modify it only slightly for the purposes of the show. You ready? People like us riff like this.
00:00:20
Speaker
Oh yes, that's right. Get ready. I'm starting the process of rebranding the show's look and packaging. So here's phase one. Brace yourself. This is CNF. The show where I talk to badass stellar. Damn it.
00:00:39
Speaker
This is CNF, the show where I talk to badass tellers of true tales about the art and craft of creative non-fiction. How does that sound? It's not too bad. The title that will soon die is redundant, right? The creative non-fiction podcast? It's redundant. It's, of course, the podcast.
00:01:00
Speaker
You don't watch Game of Thrones TV show. You watch Game of Thrones. I've never seen her read the books, but what if? Plus, CNF will fit nicely onto a new logo instead of that lame ass shit I have at the moment.
Guest Introduction: Annika Fajardo
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Speaker
Hey, this week's headliner is Annika Fajardo, author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers, a memoir of finding family. She can be found at AnnikaFajardo.com.
00:01:29
Speaker
and on Twitter and Instagram at onica-writer. CNF is brought to you by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts and Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names.
00:01:51
Speaker
The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
00:02:19
Speaker
Well, here we are again. How's things? What's going on with you and your work? You finished that thing? You cranking hard on that book? That essay? That film? Did you get that rejection? It's all good.
00:02:34
Speaker
Subscribe to CNF on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Sponsorship Highlights
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Speaker
And keep the conversation going on Twitter. Add Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod. Also Instagram at CNF Pod. Facebook, Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
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Speaker
For now, let me know what's on your mind. You can also email the show, creativenonfictionpodcast.gmail.com. And if you wouldn't mind, leave a kind rating or review on Apple Podcasts. It looks good when there's a lot of reviews, man. It looks real good.
00:03:11
Speaker
head over to BrendanMara.com for show notes to this and every other episode of the podcast. My goodness, CNF is also brought to you by Bay Path University.
00:03:27
Speaker
It is the first and only university to offer a no-residency program. Discover your story, man. Fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction. Attendful or part-time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community.
00:03:47
Speaker
You'll master techniques of good writing, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation of your memoir or collection of personal essays. Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long summer residency in Ireland. With guest writers including
00:04:13
Speaker
Andre to abuse the third and hood and Mia Gallagher, among others start dates in late August, January and may find out more at Bay path.edu slash MFA.
Annika's Early Life and Love for Reading
00:04:26
Speaker
So yes, Anika Fajardo is here. Her memoir reminded me a lot of Jean Guerrero's memoir crux, which came out last year.
00:04:36
Speaker
You can check out episode 109 for that interview. A nice even number, that's 40 episodes ago. Annika's memoir is equally good and she was great to company. Here's my conversation with Annika Fajardo. What kind of kid were you? What were you doing with your early childhood?
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Speaker
Well, I was an only child and I grew up with my mom, so as a single mom for most of my time. And then we spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents who we're really close to. So it was often me with a lot of adults. So I was definitely a reader. I did a lot of play, like dress ups and
00:05:29
Speaker
exploring on my own and a lot of time spent alone, but not lonely, I think. In those times where you were by yourself often, I was kind of the same way, finding refuge with stuffed animals or just my own imagination or whatever. How did you occupy those alone times that didn't feel lonely, as you said? I did a lot of imaginary play.
00:05:56
Speaker
I would, so my grandparents lived in this neighborhood with a lot of other kids. And so whenever I was there, I would, you know, head off into the snow usually. In my imagination, like my whole childhood was filled with snow. And so when I was out, I would just, you know, I was a pioneer girl hiking through the snow or I was Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Big Blizzard. And so I did a lot of kind of
00:06:24
Speaker
time as if there was other people with me so often I would imagine that I was in an orphanage and there was lots of other kids with me so I always had like these not imaginary friends um the way like my my daughter had an imaginary friend that was a very real part of our family but so not like that but sort of people that would come and go and I would have stories about them
00:06:44
Speaker
Did, uh, with the imaginary friends specifically with your, with your daughter, do you, do you, um, like set a, did you, or do you like set a spot at the table and everything and like really make that person a part of the family? Um, my daughter's 12 now, so it's been, um, probably, yeah, she did outgrow it by about four, I would say. Um, and so her imaginary friend was, while we didn't set a place at the table, we talked about him a lot.
00:07:10
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And he had other friends also that would come along, so then there was more of them. He never really knew who was around. It was fun. Wow, there's a little gaggle of them, huh? Yeah, there was. As you're growing up, what kind of crew did you run with in middle school and high school? Who were your people, so to speak? The best way to describe it is that in high school, I had a group of friends
00:07:35
Speaker
And we called ourselves the Misfits because we didn't feel like we fit in with any of the other cliques that happened. I did some theater in high school and I also was in choir. And so I was on the edges of other groups, but my core group of friends was a very small group. We did a lot of our own things and didn't do what other high school kids were doing. Like what?
00:08:03
Speaker
Well, I was just telling the story recently that in middle school, I think it was eighth grade, my friend had an Anne of Green Gables themed birthday party. And we were way too old for that, but we loved it. Of course, we didn't tell anyone else that this was happening. There was three of us. And so, you know, it wasn't what everyone else is doing for sure. Yeah, yeah. Were you into music at all? And whether instrumental, like playing an instrument or just into a certain kind of genre?
00:08:35
Speaker
Both also actually I played the piano from about the time I was in fourth grade on and I was pretty serious about it. I never thought I would do it professionally or anything like that, but it was definitely my outlet. I would I would spend hours playing the piano and then I went through for music. I went through. I started with in middle school with the Beatles and moved to the doors and then moved to Led Zeppelin and then I went crazy with them.
00:09:03
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90s, late 80s, 90s grunge, huge fan of REM, Indigo Girls kind of got into kind of folk rock kind of stuff.
00:09:14
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My wife and I routinely, every week probably, usually a Friday night, maybe under the influence of a couple libations, we put on Amazon Prime, like the grunge station, and we have pretty much just two-person 90s dance parties where we just jump around to Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, you name it.
00:09:41
Speaker
That's awesome. That's like our big coming of age decade was 90s grunge pretty much. You've got me beat by just a few years, but that's kind of, we're speaking the same language in terms of that music.
00:09:59
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So you're into that kind of grunge scene. You played the piano, you're into theater. Did you identify as an artistic person and think that you might become an artist one day? Well, I did identify as an artistic person because I knew very little about my dad, but one thing that I knew about him was that he was an artist.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I was definitely encouraged from my family in the visual arts. I had a teacher in third grade that just really thought that he really encouraged me in my art. But it never, you know, I enjoyed it, but it never really grabbed me. And then I did, I started writing when I was 12, I think sixth grade, I wrote a 100 page hand wrote 100 page story. It was a
00:10:52
Speaker
Gone with the wind slash little women take off. And I really wanted to be a writer at that point. But later, as I got a little older, I got really pragmatic in high school. My mom got remarried, and I had a step family. And then she got divorced right before I graduated from high school. And just the pragmatism of having a job overtook any ideas of being a writer or being an artist.
00:11:20
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Right, right. Wow. So you really had the bug early. Some people don't, some people come to it late, but it was something that was sort of in you, you know, very early, right? Oh, definitely, definitely. I started keeping a journal in fourth grade and I've been keeping one ever since. How has your journaling practice evolved over the decades?
00:11:43
Speaker
People tell me, I can't believe you've been keeping a journal for this long. And people have been telling me this for years. And I always tell them the secret is to not feel like you have to write in it. At least that's my secret. So I might go months without writing in it. And then I might write in it twice a day for a couple months. So I feel like giving myself permission to do whatever I need to do with it is the best thing. And I just started giving myself permission to write lists in it for some reason.
00:12:13
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that wasn't part of it before. It had to be like writing, like paragraphs. And now I've kind of given myself permission to branch out. I even have a few diagrams sometimes now. So things that you can do with a pen, I think it's because it's things you can do with a pen that you can't do on the screen and just that different medium.
00:12:33
Speaker
That's cool. I've done in my journals, I've kept one not quite as long as you, of course, but about 23 years or so I've kept a really routine journal. And sometimes it's taken the form of flowcharts where I'll just draw like a square and an arrow and this is sort of the shape of the day. Or I definitely in a little
00:12:54
Speaker
sort of a yearly calendar, daily calendar Moleskine notebook. I actually use that as a day log, but just as a list, like 10 things that happened that day. So that's a separate one. But but I just use those those black model journals that are like 50 cents at stables.
00:13:12
Speaker
Like that's that's my journal. That's all I use. I do write every day. And but that's I just because I'm addicted to it's probably the highlight of my day in the morning before the sun's up to to dive into the journal. And it's just it's a fun. Fun might be the wrong word, but it's it's a great activity. It's so good. It's addicting to me, at least. Yeah, that's interesting. You write in the morning because I always write before I go to bed, write my journal before I go to bed. It's kind of my
00:13:41
Speaker
close out of the day. And maybe it's my writer overactive imagination. I also have at the back of my head, like, what if I died overnight? I need to have something written down the night before. That's great. So what was the next step for you as you crossed through high school? Where did you go to college and start just progressing through your young adulthood?
Career Path: From Teaching to Writing
00:14:08
Speaker
I got a degree in education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to be a teacher. I studied Spanish also, because that was really important to me to kind of grab back my heritage. And I studied abroad in order to learn Spanish, but I actually went to Spain instead of anywhere in South America or Columbia. I wanted to have the Spanish, but I also wanted to distance myself somewhat from my heritage. I was a little confused.
00:14:37
Speaker
So the plan was for me to be a Spanish teacher. And then my husband, my now husband, got a job in Silicon Valley during the dot com boom. And so we moved out there. And so I taught fifth grade there a couple years. And it was a lot harder and a lot more frustrating than I thought it was going to be. I was I didn't feel like I was changing lives. And I was just standing up miserable. So then I went to library school.
00:15:03
Speaker
I was so depressed while I was teaching. I used to watch Oprah every day after school and eat Pringles and drink Dr. Pepper, which is things I don't normally ever do. It was the sign of my depression. Other people were on drugs and I was on Pringles. And so Oprah said to think about what you love and then make it your job. And I was like, well, the only thing I love in my life right now is reading. So if I don't have to take the GRE, I'll go to library school and get my graduate degree.
00:15:32
Speaker
So I did that kind of on a whim, really. And I loved library school, actually. I really ended up loving the computer side of it and web development. It was just the very beginning of sort of the average person starting to figure out how to do HTML and online searching was just, you know, just coming out. And it was so fascinating to me, kind of this organization of information just really sparked my interest. And then
00:16:02
Speaker
So I ended up working as a librarian for many years. I worked at a college here in Minnesota. When you were writing, ever since you were in fourth grade and then of course you just kind of kept up the habit, what would you say you were particularly good at early on that allowed you to lean into it with a certain degree of rigor and not phase out and sort of grow out of that writing habit?
00:16:28
Speaker
So I actually didn't keep up a writing habit after high school. As I said, I really got into just pragmatism, doing things that would get me a job and make a living for myself. And I didn't give myself permission to write again until I moved back to Minnesota and started taking classes at the Loth Literary Center, which is here in Minneapolis and one of the oldest writing centers in the country. And so taking those classes, it was like all of a sudden I had permission to do this.
00:16:58
Speaker
And I didn't have kids. I had a part-time job because that's all I could find. And so I had the time. And it just kind of took me over. And I think that just the play with language is what really keeps me always going. And I think it's one of the early talents that people saw in my writing back in high school. And even in college, as I was writing college essays, I got good comments about that.
00:17:26
Speaker
That's one thing I underlined in the acknowledgements was the Lough Literary Center in Minneapolis was your first writing class and the sort of the late aughts there. And I wanted to kind of hinge on that. I was like, wow, that's kind of like a, you know, for someone who has this memoir published, you know, coming out soon. And then I think you've got probably, do you have a novel coming out shortly? Yes, a middle grade novel coming next year.
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah. So for someone who's sort of like a late bloomer publishing writer, it's like, it seems like you really, you know, the skids got grease for you at this moment in time at the loft literary center. Yes, definitely. I was, I had took my very first class, we started a little story, I started a little story and I shared it with the teacher who looked at it and said, you know, this could be the start of a novel. And
00:18:20
Speaker
Kind of like how I obeyed Oprah when I was changing careers. I also obeyed her and I said, oh, okay, it's gonna be a novel. So I wrote my first terrible novel. Terrible, just terrible. I was reading a lot of Chiclet. I was a book reviewer for Library Journal for a long time and my area was Chiclet.
00:18:38
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And so I wrote a Chiclet novel and that will hopefully always stay in a drawer and never see the light of day. But you know, I learned how to do it on the fly, learned how to write a book, basically, you know, how to structure it, how to go back and what it takes to kind of carry a character through a long piece and how to have a narrative arc and how to put in detail. And even though I was doing it really badly, I was figuring out how to do it myself.
00:19:07
Speaker
That's amazing that even though you said it was bad, maybe even objectively bad, it's still something, you finish something. And so many people, they don't see things through because it is very hard to get through, and any piece of art, I don't care what it is, but writing is germane in our conversation.
00:19:29
Speaker
Things, new beginnings are very shiny and they're very distracting and it's, so how did you, that said, how did you, even though it was tough and rough and something that you ultimately want to keep in the drawer, like how did you see it through and empower through and actually finish the thing? Well, the biggest thing, I think, well, the very first class, this very first class, you know, I've taken a lot of really great classes after that, but this first one, just there was so many things about it that helped me.
00:19:57
Speaker
And the teacher had two things that I wrote down and kept in front of my computer. And one is begin again and write badly. And those two pieces put together just kind of helped me just sit down and just start putting words on the screen again. And then I also had found a quote that I put up that said, the difference between a published author and an unpublished author is the published author didn't stop submitting. And I know a lot of people who
00:20:26
Speaker
don't do enough submitting. They have lots of material and lots of work, but it doesn't see the light of day because they're not following through with the submission part of it. And that's the scary part, right? It's putting your words out in the world and waiting for somebody to reject you. But if you don't submit it, it can't ever be published. So that also kept me going, I think.
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's the, to me the most exciting part is like once you've got something that is as far as you can take it and you start submitting it. I love that moment when you have attached the file to the email or dropped it into submittable and then you hit send.
00:21:05
Speaker
There's that moment when you send it, when you're done, and when it's in the ether and landing into that inbox over there, that it could be anything. They haven't said no yet, and there's like this charge of, I don't know, of optimism. In that moment, and it'll go away soon, but it's almost like, it's kind of like a drug to me, I don't know.
Writing and Rejection: Annika's Approach
00:21:27
Speaker
How do you feel after you've submitted something?
00:21:31
Speaker
great way to describe it. Yeah, there's sort of this momentary like I did this thing and I put it out there and and also giving up of control of it. So now I don't it's not mine anymore. I don't have control over it. I can't change that comma one more time. It's out there, which is very freeing, I think. And I love looking at submittable and seeing all of the things in progress, which right now I have like nothing in progress. That's terrible. But it is nice to just know that it's out there and not
00:21:57
Speaker
with the novel, my very first novel, my horrible novel, novel, I did send it out to agents and, and I did get a little bit of interest. I think the book itself is so poorly written that there was no hope for it. But I figured out how to write a query and how to pitch the book. And the most amazing thing to me as I was doing that was the idea that some that another human being was reading my words. And I think, you know, I do teach creative nonfiction now. And
00:22:27
Speaker
And I always tell people, you know, that writing is about communicating. So that's why we have to send things out. And that's why we have to share them. And that's why we go and do open mics or whatever, because we need to share it. And if we're not sharing it, we're writing it in our journal, right? I mean, there needs to be a point where it goes out into the world and we communicate with a reader.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, I liken that to in basketball, there are some people that their shooters shoot, you know, whoever it is, it's just they if they're going over 10, they're still they're still shooting. Eventually, they're going to eventually they'll land a few baskets. And it's like,
00:23:04
Speaker
You just gotta keep, if you're going to be in this game, like publishing and shooting, you just gotta be shooting. And eventually you'll knock some down, but it's just like that's part of the thing. When you sign the contract of this kind of art, it's just like writers write and publish. So shooters shoot. And so you just gotta, it's all fine and good to write in your journal if you don't ever wanna publish, and you just like it because it feels good. That's cool. But if you wanna publish, you gotta shoot, right?
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:23:35
Speaker
So have you built in, given this, you like to see the submittable in progress things, and of course, admittedly, it's empty at the moment, but do you build in moments of celebration for you along the generative phase of a piece of work so there are these moments to celebrate the fact that you got your first rough draft done and so forth? Is that something you build into your creative process?
00:24:07
Speaker
I don't think I do. I do, however, reward myself for rejections. I have gotten much better, but I have pretty thin skin. As the rejections have come in, and I have now received hundreds and hundreds of rejections over my career, so it's gotten easier. But I have had to do things for myself that counteract that sting.
00:24:34
Speaker
At first, it was every time I got a rejection, I would get to go out to a nice dinner. I always joke, well, then I started getting really fat. You're sending out a lot. I have no money and I'm getting fat. Yeah, exactly. I had to scale it back a little bit, but I do try to give myself a little consolation prize when I get a rejection. As I've gotten more of them, of course, it's gotten less of a big deal.
00:25:02
Speaker
recognition that yes, you did a good job and you got a rejection, but that's okay. It means that you sent it out and yay for you. I think it's important like whatever you can do to help yourself get over those and to move on. I also, when I was sending out lots of essays, I would immediately send out another one whenever I got a rejection so that it would just like keep that steady flow going.
00:25:27
Speaker
What would you say was your earliest or maybe your first publishing or writing victory that allowed you to get some momentum and kind of keep you going? Well, very early on, I had an essay that actually almost in its entirety is in my book.
00:25:52
Speaker
It's the third person story about a little girl whose teacher tells her that families have a mom and a dad, and this girl is only a mom. And that story submitted the old fashioned way in an envelope. I got an envelope back and I got second place in a competition for a very small journal here in Minnesota. And it was my second piece I ever had published.
00:26:16
Speaker
And I was ecstatic. I remember just literally jumping up and down in my living room, screaming, I got second place, I got second place. And there was no prize. They published it. But there was no prize. There was nothing. The next year, second place got a prize. But the year I did it, they didn't. And I almost feel like that moment, I've never had a high even now with two books. That was the most exciting high.
00:26:42
Speaker
was that very first time that I won second place in this little tiny contest. And it definitely kept me going, definitely.
00:26:50
Speaker
And in this line of work, sometimes it's hard to define what it means to have a hard work ethic or what it means to have rigor and tenacity. It's kind of a nebulous feeling. You kind of know it internally, but it's hard to define. So for you, how do you define what it means to have hard work and rigor in your writing? How do you measure that so it feels like you're getting work done over time?
00:27:20
Speaker
That's a great question. Because I'm not a writer with a regimen, I work from home. I actually started working from home doing freelance two years ago. And that was a really big step for me to say, OK, I am a writer. And if I'm going to be a writer, I need to make space in my life for this. And luckily, my husband has been very supportive. And I'm so lucky to have somebody else that gets the health insurance and helps with the bills
00:27:50
Speaker
To allow me to do that, but that was a really big step in for me to you know I'm accountable every day for the time that I spend at home and some of it is paid freelance work But a lot of it is my own writing and so keeping going and writing when I can because I'm not super regiment and I have a 12 year old and so I've been writing all this stuff as she's been growing up and I've spent a lot of time being a mom and
00:28:15
Speaker
So grabbing time when I can. So I'll write during her piano lesson, for example, I'll write while she's at camp or, you know, whenever I can squeeze it in. And I am always writing in my head, though, always thinking about, you know, solving the next problem or figuring out what's going to happen next. Then I don't take notes, I just kind of keep them in my head. And then when I'm back at the page, I'll work on it.
Writing Retreats and Deep Focus
00:28:40
Speaker
And I also do take retreats for myself.
00:28:44
Speaker
pretty frequently. I have a great couple places I like to go. I have a friend that goes with me a lot and I have a family cabin that I can go to. And I pretty much work the whole entire time when I go away. And so I get a ton done when I do that. And that kind of jump starts me to start writing again at home too, just because I really like having those long blocks of time in order to look at things
00:29:08
Speaker
from a broad perspective. And I do a lot of printing and literal cutting and literal taping of work so that I have a lot of time to do that. And then that just is the best feeling ever. And what would you say, or what are maybe three to five books that you find yourself, that inspire you, that you find yourself rereading to sort of unlock it for you to see how it's done, so to speak?
00:29:36
Speaker
Well, I read Jane Austen over and over again all the time through my whole adult life. And I don't know what she does for me as a writer because obviously I don't write Regency and I don't write historical and I don't write romantic comedy. But there's something about her writing that just pulls me in and just shows me, you know, some of there's some tricks that she must be using that I feel like through osmosis I'm getting.
00:30:06
Speaker
And then I also read 100 Years of Solitude regularly. Pretty much I'm always in the middle of it. I finish it and then a few months later I start reading it again. In nonfiction, I also read Boys of My Youth multiple times and Abigail Thomas multiple times. Those I go back to over and over again.
00:30:32
Speaker
just because the way that both of them put together their work and the way that they play with how you can tell a story has been so informative to me. What would you say about 100 Years of Solitude resonates with you so strongly? I think it's the language and the way it has a feel
00:30:58
Speaker
of Spanish, but it's in English. I can't read in Spanish. I speak pretty basic Spanish, fluent enough to communicate with my family, but I'm illiterate. But I just feel that ambiance when I'm reading it. And I also just love the kind of ridiculousness of the stories and the way that it's ridiculous and super serious at the same time. I love anything that's
00:31:27
Speaker
that conflicts with itself because it makes you think, like it pulls you in, but at the same time you have to think about it a little bit. How would you define magical realism? Well, magical realism is when writers take an ordinarily realistic fiction situation and put magical things into it as if it was part of reality.
00:31:56
Speaker
I think that it gets confused a lot with fantasy because it's not just something magical randomly happens. It's more about the way that it's portrayed than the actual magical thing itself. So if you're reading 100 Years of Solitude and there's the sleeping sickness, it's not told like it's magical. It's told like it's real, like it happened.
00:32:24
Speaker
and which is something I find really interesting about playing with magical realism superimposed on creative nonfiction because, I mean, it's contradictory again. I love these contradictions. You can't really have magical realism in creative nonfiction, right? I mean, it's sort of like that's opposites put together. But I think in nonfiction, it allows you to recognize the magical things that do happen in life because I mean, obviously there are amazing things and
00:32:54
Speaker
Some people might call them coincidences, or happenstance, or it's just memory, or you forgot. But we can tell the story as a creative nonfiction writer. You can tell the story in a way that makes it real. And how did it figure into your memoir? It's right there in the title. So how did you know you wanted to play with that in this book?
Magical Realism and Cultural Heritage
00:33:24
Speaker
The biggest reason that I play with the words magical realism in the title is the stereotype of South America and Columbia, particularly, and magical realism and this idea that, you know, like, if it's going to be a book about Columbia, it has to have magical realism. So it's almost like, like a wink at the reader. But as this book has kind of come out and had some reviews and
00:33:52
Speaker
I'm realizing that people are taking it quite literally, which has been really interesting to me. I mean, the truth is that when you're in Columbia, magical realism is all around you, and it's everywhere. My father will point out things all the time. Everywhere we go, he'll say, look at that. So there's magical realism right there. Anything that's sort of unusual or, again, anything that's kind of contrasting
00:34:21
Speaker
is what he sees as being magical realism. And he often uses in Spanish the word surrealism, which technically, I just recently read this is completely different, but he equates the two things together. But I think they are, you know, it's like, is this really happening? And much of much of my time spent in Colombia has been things where, you know, if I if you wrote it as fiction, no one would believe you.
00:34:46
Speaker
And so what was the spark or the genesis of you picking up the pen to write this particular story that you become acquainted with your father and your young adulthood? Like you said earlier in our conversation, you lived with your mom and your grandparents nearby in Minnesota. So at what point did you realize that this was going to be a story that kind of bridged two realities for you?
00:35:17
Speaker
Well, it started as essays I wrote, much of the book started in various essays, and a lot of them have been published over the years separately. And the original vision that I had was that it would be a collection of essays that would feel more like stories, essays with sort of a story feel to them. And so the first draft of the book, it was just sort of like, you know, these were the stories I needed to tell as soon as I discovered that you could
00:35:44
Speaker
write real things and you don't have to write fiction. That kind of just set me off like with all these various memories that I have, and finding how to, how to dive into those stories and make them universal. So I started with this manuscript that was all separate chapters were each little stories of their own. And, and that manuscript actually was a finalist for the Bake List Literary Prize.
00:36:11
Speaker
Um, from bread loaf. And it was the year that nobody won that prize and it was the last year they ever did it. I have a tendency to close out, um, prizes. Um, and so I felt like there was something there obviously, but it wasn't quite right. And so I had a couple of grants that allowed me to hire, I'd hired a couple of editors who, um, said, well, we, this should be more of a memoir than just a collection of essays. And then it needs more of a chronological narrative arc.
00:36:40
Speaker
So I undid the whole thing and wrote it as a straight up chronological memoir starting at early childhood moving forward. And that couldn't get any traction either. Lots of rejections. And it didn't feel right to me. It didn't feel like the story I wanted to tell.
00:37:06
Speaker
The feeling, the act of searching out your family and figuring out your identity and figuring out where you came from and who you are is not a linear thing. And so it was really hard for me to capture the storytelling that way. And so I'm so lucky when my editor at University of Minnesota Press approached me, he let me send him both versions, the original and the chronological version. And he loved, he said he loved both of them, but we had the idea, he had the idea to put them both together.
00:37:36
Speaker
So I undid both of them and just kind of wove them together. So that's sort of a combination of the two that I started out with. And then it started to feel more like what I was trying to say, which was a lot. So there's a lot of disjointedness to it. That's a reflection of just kind of the disjointedness of, you know, finding out things about your family that you didn't know and figuring out that your life isn't really what you thought it was. Instead of like this happened, then this happened, then this happened.
00:38:07
Speaker
There's a part where you write that, excuse me, where you say, I needed to know what kind of power this country, being Columbia, had that would make a man choose a place over a person. And in that phrase, did you, and in the course of just growing up too, and you're in your 40s now and not in your early 20s when you met your dad pretty much for the first time in your conscious adulthood,
00:38:36
Speaker
Did you get a better understanding of what it would take to pull a person, have a person choose a country over a person? Yeah, and I think it's a combination of both Columbia itself and my father and who he is as a person, an artist. He's a visual artist, he's a painter and a sculptor and a graphic designer and a photographer and he's taught
00:39:04
Speaker
at the university for most of his career. He's taught different various arts. And so the artistic sensibility and Columbia just really go together. And if you, you know, when I first went to Columbia, I hadn't been really much outside of Minnesota. And so mountains and eucalyptus trees and, you know, jungle and all that kind of stuff was so
00:39:32
Speaker
well surreal to me because I hadn't seen it and I think if I'd grown up in California where I later lived and then saw it I think it would have been a little less shocking but seeing that for the first time and then meeting him and seeing those two pieces together started to make it make sense and I also of course realized why my parents couldn't be married because they're just very different and so I
00:39:58
Speaker
And I also learned that it was less of a choosing on his part than sort of what happened in terms of me growing up without him. But that feeling, I grew up with that feeling that he would rather be in Columbia than be with his daughter. And I mean, there's just no place like Columbia, I think, especially where he lives in the city, where he lives in the mountains.
00:40:27
Speaker
where life is very precarious and, and very, you know, it's a lot of sort of living for the moment living for the now, which is so different from how we live here in Minnesota. Because, you know, we've got we're like those little mice that have to store up for the winter. So we are always thinking about our survival in the future. And in Columbia, it's not like that, right? You can pull a mango off a tree and eat it. So it's such a different way of life and a different kind of way of thinking.
00:40:58
Speaker
And also the subtitle of your book, of course, is a memoir finding family and the pieces of the family come together throughout the course of the book. And there's even a moment too where you wrote where you were like, I'm getting the wording wrong here, but you were like flush with family and there was almost like too much family.
00:41:17
Speaker
So how did this, how was that experience of, you know, feeling, you know, alone and
Emotional Family Discoveries
00:41:24
Speaker
without that traditional family, and then slowly, you know, the parts are assembling over the course of this of the story? What was that like for you? It was, I mean, there was a lot of melancholy to it. And obviously, I refer to that a lot, this sort of feeling like, what if it hadn't
00:41:43
Speaker
What if it all happened earlier? What if I'd had this all along? And I think that's why that idea of what didn't happen and what if just really holds me. And I'm constantly thinking about that. And so there's a lot of sadness about it, about how now we're happy, but what if we could have been happy earlier? And I'm sure that's not unique to my family. There's a lot of people that, once they reconcile or find people,
00:42:11
Speaker
you still have that idea of what would have happened if these things would have happened in a different order. And then because my husband's mother died when he was in his 20s, and so that kind of, also there was kind of some guilt there because my family was growing and his was getting smaller. And other people around me who had lost family either through death or through other, you know, just estrangement or something,
00:42:41
Speaker
It was strange for me to suddenly find, like, my family is getting bigger and yours is not. But ultimately, I feel very grateful to have this amazing Colombian family. And it's definitely this missing piece. It fulfills this missing piece that I had growing up. How has your definition of family changed over the years?
00:43:10
Speaker
Well, I was, you know, to me, I always felt like family were people that looked like each other. And I, while I don't like look super different from my maternal family, I do, I did always, you know, look a little bit different from them. And so I, I always felt like, you know, family or people that, you know, you all look the same, and you all have the same past experiences and the same memories. And
00:43:40
Speaker
So I feel like family can be so much more than that. And, um, and the, the idea that your family's always there for you no matter what, um, is, and that whether you like them or not, they're always there for you. I have a first cousin on my mom's side who was just a year and a half younger than me. And we spent a lot of time together growing up and I used to tell her, because I was an only child and she had sisters and I used to always tell her,
00:44:03
Speaker
You're not my cousin. You're not my friend. You're my cousin. And I felt like that was the greatest compliment I could possibly pay her. And it turns out, I found out much later when we were adults that she was really insulted by this idea that I would say she's not my friend. She's my cousin. So she thought that she valued the idea of me being her friend. And we acted like friends. But I thought the greatest thing was that we were related and that we were family. And that was even better than being a friend with somebody.
00:44:32
Speaker
And so I do feel like that like we get this better. It's even a better relationship than being friends with someone. You can be friends with your family, but also that's a separate piece.
00:44:42
Speaker
Yeah. And when did you or when would you say that that that split between, say, you know, America and Colombia or even Minnesota and Colombia, when would you say that the split between between place felt the most intense for you or you felt the most unmoored by this experience of experiencing two places? Well, definitely my first
00:45:11
Speaker
After my first visit there, I was in college. And so I'd just come back from a semester in Spain. And then my father invited me to Columbia for the first time. And I was 21 years old and spent the month between semesters in college. And it was like everything couldn't have been more different because it was January. I was in college in Wisconsin where it was 20 below.
00:45:36
Speaker
And all of a sudden I go to Columbia and it's just, you know, and I thought I knew about the world because I had been in Europe for six months. And so I thought that I knew everything that was to know about travel and about being in another country. And I spoke Spanish, so I wasn't worried about that. But the country itself was so different. And then coming home and finding myself homesick for Columbia, even though I had just spent a month there and it wasn't my home, was a very disconcerting feeling.
00:46:06
Speaker
And also walking around and feeling like, why can't people see me and know that I am from two places? And why don't they want to ask me about myself? How can that not be a thing that people need to know? And maybe that's part of the impetus for writing the book. It just felt like, how can I understand this? And how come everyone else isn't interested in this?
00:46:35
Speaker
How has the book or the writing and the research of the book affected your relationship to your father and your mother?
Family Reactions to Memoir
00:46:45
Speaker
I was so nervous to share my story with them. My mom has been to many of my readings of my essays, which, as I said, a lot of them appear in various forms in the book. So she was already familiar with my writing.
00:47:05
Speaker
I, when I got the art, my first, no, it wasn't an art. It was the very first manuscript and I sent it to her and she was at, she was at our family cabin and she texted me and she said she was halfway through it and she has to, she had to stop because it was so hard to read and she, you know, was doing a lot of crying and, and I was so nervous that what her reaction was, because, um, you know, there was choices that she ended up making that were the very best that she could make at that time, but that she feels bad about now.
00:47:34
Speaker
And I think objectively, someone might say that they weren't good choices. But I definitely feel like, you know, she did what she did the best she could with what she had at the time. So I was nervous about that. And luckily, she was very, she's been very supportive. And all her friends are coming to my book launch. And then I sent it to my dad, and I actually put off sending it to my dad for quite a while. And one of the advantages of having your dad in another country is that you can kind of
00:48:03
Speaker
ignore it for a while. I didn't invite him to my wedding until it was too late for him to actually decide that he wanted to come because I didn't want him to say that he couldn't come. So I waited before telling him about it. So I waited as long as I couldn't. Finally, he told me that he felt bad that I hadn't sent it to him. So I sent it to him.
00:48:27
Speaker
I emailed it to him, and four hours later, he emailed me back and said, I absolutely loved it. So I'm assuming he sat down and read it front to back right away. And so that's good. And I think that he understands sort of the strangeness of the whole situation in Colombia and our family and how it is. And because he's an artist, I think he understands the metaphor
00:48:57
Speaker
and the crafting on a different level, that even though he's not a writer, he still has this artistic sensibility that helps us. We speak the same language in that sense.
00:49:12
Speaker
It must have been hard for you not only to write certain aspects of it, but then, of course, to share sensitive things with people most integral to the story, namely your parents. And I'm just looking at one particular line in particular that
00:49:28
Speaker
That must have been hard for your mom to read it's just early in the book and you it was I think it was she had already remarried and he had the two stepbrothers the unruly stepbrothers and and You know you had just written that my mother was too downtrodden to stick up for me so she was kind of like you know mired in her own her own depression or whatever was going on with her and
00:49:49
Speaker
for you to pick up on that as a young person and to write it in this book, I think of that, that must have been hard for her to read. Did she pick up on that at all? Oh, definitely. Yeah, it was very hard for her. And when I teach nonfiction, people always bring up, well, what will my family think? What about this? What if somebody reads this? And I always tell them,
00:50:17
Speaker
write like no one is ever going to read this. Because you need to be completely honest with yourself. You need to not write as if it's never going to get published. Write as if you're going to be a complete failure. No, I don't tell them that. But that's kind of like what I think, what I've always thought myself. And it turns out that someday you might be published and your family might read it, which has been sort of a shocking experience to me.
00:50:46
Speaker
I stick with my advice that you should write like no one's ever going to read it. But there is a point where you have to start thinking about how will this affect the people you love and are you okay with that. And there was some things that my editor flagged that we took out that were a little too close to the bone and unnecessary in order to get the point across. But there were things like that that
00:51:10
Speaker
needed to be in there because it's that was the truth. And that's the greater that you know, that's the bigger, the bigger picture. And so I think writers have to be have to kind of balance out their personal life and how they can negotiate their relationships with the art and what's worth it. And, and it's a hard decision. It's a really hard thing. And
00:51:37
Speaker
part of me thinks that no one should write a memoir. Write about, write about Seabiscuit, do not write about yourself. But it's so rich, right? Because you're an expert in this, if you write about yourself. So it's, it's, it is a hard call. And I do think when you're writing, you do need to write like, no one's ever going to read it.
00:51:59
Speaker
When I was speaking with Andre Dubuis III a while ago about his memoir, Townie, and he was debating whether or not to even write the thing, and he was bouncing the idea off Richard Russo, who had just come off writing his memoir about his mother, and so they were going back and forth, and Richard told Andre, he's just like, if you're writing it to, I'm paraphrasing, if you're writing it to settle the score, then
00:52:27
Speaker
do not write the book. But if you're writing it to tell a very true story, then with no score to settle, then you must go. And I wonder, early on, maybe some of those things that cut too close to the bone that you just mentioned, that maybe, did early drafts sound too much like you had a score to settle? Yes, I think so. And I think early drafts, some of them, I was writing almost like a journal.
00:52:56
Speaker
where you write kind of your worst side of yourself. So it wasn't even things that necessarily I believed, but thoughts that, you know, had crossed my mind. And that, you know, that I had written not because this was the absolute truth, but because it was just like a fleeting idea or, or even cliche almost. And so it is really important to just, you know, go to that, what's your intention, what's your intention for what you're saying?
00:53:26
Speaker
And in the course of your writing career at this point, what would you say you're better at today than you were just five years ago? Oh my gosh, everything. No. I think that I am much better at kind of teasing out the double meanings behind things and
00:53:53
Speaker
being subtle about what I'm saying. And by subtle, I actually mean, you know, it might be actually what feels to me like hitting my reader over the head, but when the reader's reading it, they're having a different experience than when I'm writing it. I think the other big thing is structure. I had so much, so much trouble structuring this memoir, as I said, and I pulled it apart many times and changed it a lot. And
00:54:20
Speaker
So I can see, you know, I see kind of how the, how the sausage is made, you know, like all the pieces and how they have to be all in service of the same thing and the same question. Working on my novel, I learned so much about stakes that I hadn't understood. I'd been told a lot many times, your book needs more, the stakes need to be higher. And I just couldn't really understand that. And now I really see what that means.
00:54:49
Speaker
in terms of what, for all of the characters in your book, what is at stake for each of them and how that really needs to be heightened. And even if it's not like they're standing on the edge of a cliff and they're going to fall, but, you know, even if it's, I'm going to get embarrassed, you know, I mean, it doesn't matter how big the stakes are, but you have to pull them out so that they ring true and that they ring important. And that, you know, so that's something that's really, I've learned so much about, um,
00:55:20
Speaker
about how to kind of pull the story together. Although I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it again. I know that people say, you know, you just when you finish a book, you've learned how to write that book. Not not every book. So we'll see how it goes next time.
00:55:36
Speaker
And with the way the internet landscape and the social media landscape constantly bombards us with what feels like everybody else's
Managing Social Media and Personal Balance
00:55:46
Speaker
gold medals while we're just like an also ran in the race and so forth. I wonder how maybe you've cultivated a sense of patience with your own work knowing that things are gonna
00:56:00
Speaker
shake out when they shake out, but in the face of being bombarded with what seems like everybody's successes. Oh, social media is so hard on writers. It's, and you know, you're chained to your computer. And so you've got access to all that at all the time. And so I definitely struggle with that. I had my, my daughter has my Facebook password, so I can only get into Facebook when she allows me to. Oh, that's great.
00:56:28
Speaker
I do spend a lot of time on Twitter. I like Twitter better than Facebook because of the writing or community aspect on Twitter. I really have to watch myself and how much time I spend on social media. That's one of the reasons I like to go on retreats at my cabin because I can turn off the Wi-Fi and just be with the written word.
00:56:54
Speaker
And in terms of being patient, I sent this memoir. I really finished the memoir about four years ago, maybe. And so it had gone through two rounds of submissions. I tried to get an agent on the first version, and then I reworked it and tried to get an agent on the second version. And then I just spent a lot of time thinking, and I spent a lot of time
00:57:22
Speaker
kind of cultivating my literary community side. So I'm on the board of the Law of Literary Center now. I judge contests whenever people ask me if I can read something or if I can do something. I've been saying yes to everything and just being part of the community. And I think, you know, that's ultimately how I found my editor because I'm just part of the writing community now. And so, you know, looking out for other people and going to readings and just being in it has really helped.
00:57:51
Speaker
And at that point, I really gave up on the memoir. I thought, OK, this isn't going to happen. I've published a lot of these essays separately, and that's all that it was meant to be. And that's going to be the end of it. And so I packed up everything, put it in a box under my bed, and decided to work on this novel, which uses a lot of the same emotional truths as the memoir. And then one day, the editor contacted me and asked if I had something, and I had this memoir.
00:58:21
Speaker
I think knowing when it's time to give up and then really putting it away when it's done and making peace with that was a huge step in this process for me.
00:58:33
Speaker
That's huge. That's such a fine, funky line between giving it time or just pulling up anchor and quitting on a project and just moving on. That's so hard. But it could also be like, when I spoke with Mary Heather Noble a bunch of episodes ago, she said she believes in the power of the drawer. Just because something isn't publishable now doesn't mean it's not publishable in five or ten years. It's a matter of timing.
00:59:01
Speaker
Exactly. And I think patience is so important in this business. I mean, not just because the business is slow and every everything, you know, you've got things insubmittable for a year before you will get that rejection. But also because the timing in our society and the timing in your life and, you know, what readers are reading, there's just there's so many things that we don't have control over. And if we rush it,
00:59:27
Speaker
it's going to be the wrong time. And then we're going to end up feeling like we are failure. But really, it's just that nobody's reading whatever kind of genre this moment. And so keeping, you know, kind of keeping that distance between being patient and sending things out. It is it's a really hard line.
00:59:47
Speaker
And sort of piggybacking off of the social media thing and also the patience in the community aspect, how have you dealt with or avoid feelings of jealousy and competition among peers? I feel less competition, but definite jealousy for sure. And it's such an ugly, I feel like it's such an ugly emotion and I really would rather not be feeling it, not just because it makes me feel bad, but it's also
01:00:17
Speaker
was so not productive. And I actually want to be happy for these people. So the best thing that I do is think about the, you know, spend some time thinking and being in the other parts of my life, you know, enjoying going for a walk, enjoying my family. And just kind of appreciating the things that don't have to do with writing and that don't have to do with, you know, so and so got a six figure book deal.
01:00:45
Speaker
and just appreciating what I do have. And that being a writer is definitely a huge part of who I am, but it's not everything. And that's so important to remember. Fantastic. And what would you say are maybe some other artistic media, other media in general that you use to help maybe inform your writing or just to inspire you in other ways?
Artistic Influences on Writing
01:01:11
Speaker
I do really like going to art museums.
01:01:16
Speaker
We have an art museum here that in the last maybe 10 years has made it, it's free to go to and so it gives you this, you know, you can take your laptop there and sit in the coffee shop and then you can, you know, go through one floor and just look at a few paintings and then go back and you don't, you know, it doesn't, you don't have to invest a whole day, which I really like just kind of being in that space. I also see, I see a lot of theater and
01:01:40
Speaker
That really helps, especially with dialogue. I would never write a play and I would never write a screenplay. That seems way too hard for me. But I love the way that we can see how dialogue is working and how actors do it on the stage and how they inhabit those characters. And then I also really need some time in nature to really fill my bucket.
01:02:07
Speaker
And unfortunately, here in Minnesota, there's hard to be in nature in the winter. So I'm looking forward to spring. Geez. Well, Annika, this was wonderful to get to know you a little bit of your story and your approach to the work, so to speak, and of course, the story behind your wonderful book. So I just want to thank you for coming on the show. And one last thing, where can people find you online? I'm at AnnikaFajardo.com, which
01:02:37
Speaker
is hard to spell. And I'm also an Annika writer, both on Twitter and on Instagram, and that's a little easier to spell, A-N-I-K-A writer.
01:02:50
Speaker
Good times, good times. Go give Onika a follow, buy your book, do the thing, say hi, let her know what you think. You can let me know what you think too. If you're not already subscribed to CNF, be sure to do so. Keep the conversation going on social, at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod on Twitter, Instagram's at CNF Pod, Facebook, Creative Nonfiction Podcast for now.
01:03:16
Speaker
Don't forget to leave a kind review in Apple podcasts. Love to see that number grow. It's all part of the packaging, man. And share the show with a friend. You are the social network. Rage. Rage against the algorithm.
01:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, maybe consider pulling out your favorite quote from this and you can email me that or you can post it to Twitter and I'll jump in the fire with you, man. As we like to say here at CNF Pot HQ, if you can't do, until next week, interview, see ya.
01:04:19
Speaker
you