INTRO:

Angie Cruz is a writer, teacher, and archivist whose work often centers on the multicultural experience of immigrants in and around New York City. Her novels include Soledad, Let it Rain Coffee, and Dominicana, which was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and The Aspen Words Literary Prize, and received the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. Her fourth novel, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, was shortlisted by The Aspen Words Literary Prize, won the Latino Book Award, The Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Book Award, and was chosen for The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction. Her most recent work, a children’s picture book titled Angélica and la Güira, is available now. 

Joseph Heiland: You direct the MFA program in Pittsburgh. Can you speak to that?

Angie Cruz: I’ve been teaching for a long time. I started teaching at Pitt in 2013, and I’ve been very invested in the MFA program, I think because my experience as an MFA student wasn’t so great. In some ways, I wanted to make up for thinking about what is the possibility of an MFA. Especially now where there’s less funding for writers. And in some ways, in the best case scenario, an MFA could be seen as one of the few moments in your career where you could be supported—if you’re in a fully funded program—to just write and be wild and take risks. If students use it that way. I mean, I think sometimes there’s so much pressure to professionalize and publish that they forget. This might be one of your few moments to have peers to share your work with and play and figure out who you are, not where you fit, right? 

As a director it’s been really fun because, when you’re teaching, your connection to the program is usually as an outsider; I teach my students and only know my colleagues by the committees that I’m a part of. As a director, you get a sense of the entire mechanism. So I’m much more connected to all the different efforts in the university, and I keep thinking, Oh, this would be really beneficial for the program. You kind of have a macro- versus micro-vision of the program.

JH: You love to hear that. I can imagine it being, not necessarily an awkward transition, but going from writing and teaching being your life to a more administrative role—what was that like?

AC: I find directing and teaching to be really creative as well, so it fulfills some of those needs. I’m a creative; I’m really committed to transformation and change. When I put all that energy into teaching, my students’ work, and directing, that is in competition with my writing. Thank God, I have a lot of stories to tell. But the writing is always like, What about us? 

This is why I apply constantly to writing residencies. I have to apply to so many because I get rejected all the time. People don’t believe this. That’s what’s so interesting about being more established. When I was a student, I felt like somehow everything would get easier, but it actually doesn’t. You still have to hustle for the rest of your life because everyone is capable of writing a good story. The most democratic thing about storytelling I think, is if you have a good story and you work really hard on it, you could be nineteen [years old], twenty-five, fifty, seventy, and you’re all in the same place because you’ve achieved this one thing where you wrote something beautiful. Right? Once you understand that, you never know what your life is going to look like. It’s comforting.

JH: And horrifying.

AC: In a way. I was like, What do you mean? My life isn’t going to get easier? I think the shift from being just a writer, which I did for many years, and then moving into teaching, is that suddenly these things I learned to do for myself—establishing a voice, thinking about place, developing a research method—I had to do gracefully. And the only way I could compare it was to a dancer, or a violinist who has to do scales. They kind of sound terrible until they don’t sound terrible. And then suddenly they’re playing music and it sounds beautiful, but they’re not thinking about that beginning moment when they sounded terrible. They just have access faster. And I got to that point as a writer where I was just writing and I understood how a scene worked intuitively, almost embodied. Teaching people who’ve never done it before, having to break it down and start again—to say, Well, I guess we need to start with the scales and how to hold the bow—that required me to revisit fiction in a different way.

JH: That makes total sense. If it’s intuitive for you, having to articulate it gives you the language to understand what’s going on, reinforcing those skills.

AC: But then you become hyper-focused. Suddenly you’re training in a different way, and you become a lot more articulate about how to figure out what is or isn’t working in a story. But it also made me hyperconscious of my own writing. I was suddenly like, Oh, that graceful line was actually kind of choppy.

JH: With the music metaphor: I can imagine playing as a professional—a scale, or whatever—and someone who’s uninformed being like, That sounded great! while you’re all like, That one note was a little sharp. Again, hyper-fixated. 

AC: Yes. It’s good and bad. Everyone’s path is different. When I look back to my first book, which I wrote in 2001—a long time ago—the seeds of that were planted at Binghamton University. I took a class with Liz Rosenberg, who still teaches here, which is amazing. It was my last semester. I took a Children’s Lit class and wrote something for an assignment: “My name is Soledad. My mother named me this so I’ll never be alone.” That’s how I started my novel. The magic of teaching is that I didn’t know it was a good idea. I was a baby writer… But I remember Liz printed out that line and put it on her door. I walked by her office and saw that she had singled out that line, and I thought, That must be a really good line! What a vote of confidence, right? Oh my gosh. So I kept that line. She did this for everybody. You realize the power of the teacher. You’re like, Oh, when I tell students something, that might be the thing they hold onto. So I try to be as honest and intentional as possible, because I understood those moments in my career were incredibly important. 

When I ended up going to the MFA program at NYU, I was like, I’m going to build on this character who was named Soledad because her mother never wanted her to be alone. When I rewind and fast forward, I think, What is our job as writers in the world? Yes, to publish. But it was so unimaginable for me to become a writer. When I’m in the classroom, I think there must be so many people in the class not taking it seriously—maybe they take it seriously— but this could be the moment in which I open their mind to the possibility of telling their own story. You don’t need to publish to be a great storyteller. I always say this: Being a great storyteller could save you from a fight, get you a job, or help you fall in love. It defines the way you present yourself. Storytelling is how we organize our lives. In some ways, teaching that is almost like a life-skill.

JH: I was hoping to discuss the role food plays in your writing. You describe cooking at some point or other in all of your books: it’s the only real viable solution that Ana can dream up to survive and thrive independent of Juan [in Dominicana], as well as her primary method of establishing community in her building. The quality of Cara’s cooking [in How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water] is something in which she takes enormous pride, but it’s also a service she’s able to provide for the people she cares about. In Let it Rain Coffee, cooking isn’t featured as heavily, but you establish conflict between whether or not characters share food—as I see it, something like the individual versus the communal. And of course there are plenty of examples in Soledad. Your writing of food is also quite evocative. I was hoping that you could speak to, on the one hand, the role of food as a muse for your writing, and then, on the other, how it functions as a symbol of community, culture. 

AC: I love this idea of sharing versus not sharing food. I read this book by Gish Jen called The Girl at the Baggage Claim. She’s a wonderful short-story writer. She has this fantastic story called Who’s Irish that’s taught a lot, but she also has this nonfiction book basically speaking to the idea of the individual, which she calls the avocado pit. Are we interdependent, or are we individuals? And what does that look like functioning in the world as writers as well as community members? I think about that a lot, now more intentionally because the work I’ve been doing in all my books is that. It’s not something I’m hyperconscious about, but I realize it comes through because I care about it in my own life. Is that how we translate interdependence? I was raised interdependently. When I make a decision, it impacts everyone around me. Life is a collaboration. Yes, I’m an individual with my own will, but I’m also conscious of how my actions might impact everyone around me, as opposed to a culture that celebrates and prizes moving as an individual, which is much faster. Much faster to make a decision on your own. So when Soledad, the character in my first novel, leaves home as an individual, there’s pushback. No, you can’t just leave home! You have a whole family waiting! It’s like trying to figure out how to make American choices which really celebrate individuality while still holding onto the philosophy that raised and helped me come into being. The reason I am a success is because of that interdependence. So in literature, I feel like part of it is working through the question of how to continue living interdependently within my community. But I also move as an individual, as a writer, because I care very much about our singular voices and what we have to offer based on the ways we see the world and food. A part of my writing practice is that I’m always learning. I didn’t just study fiction. I took playwriting courses. I took poetry courses. I took nonfiction courses. And I feel like every time I tried to work on a project for one of these different courses, I was able to think about the character in a more holistic way. 

I remember this playwriting course many years ago. One of the works of the actor is to be active. They’re just not going to speak without doing anything. So every time I’m writing, I’m like, What are they doing? What are the objects around them? And that’s acting work. That’s stuff that I learned through acting and playwriting, not through fiction courses, where we’re not always thinking so much about the body, how characters embody space. So [in my novels] I was like, What are these characters doing? They’re cooking all the time… This is what fiction does. Part of our work as writers is to notice. I started to notice how the coffee is always percolating. If you’re home from eight o’clock to five o’clock, someone stops by, Do you want some water? Do you want some coffee? It’s ready to go. That’s one of the reasons it shows up so much. It is something that I think easily speaks to Cara. You’re here. I need to feed you. I need to host you. I need you to feel cared for. I want you to come back. 

JH: Not to add too much on top of that, but I think specifically of Dominicana, how it also functions for Ana as an escape. Where if the conversation isn’t going well, or you’re being singled out in an uncomfortable way, the kitchen is a place where you can go and continue to provide that service without putting yourself in the line of fire.

AC: It’s a way not to deal with social anxiety. To deal with hostility. 

JH: I’m glad you brought up writerly proclivities—your own preoccupations, and how they seep into your work. The name Caridad comes up pretty frequently in Dominicana, Let It Rain Coffee, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water. Having to kneel on rice as punishment comes up in a few different books. Even details like being shuttled by van to a low-wage factory job in New Jersey. And again, the prominence of food. Like you mentioned, we all have these preoccupations as writers, but I’m curious how actively these threads inform your work? Do they serve as rooting mechanisms? 

AC: When I enter a book, I almost erase whatever happened before, because it’s true that there’s repetition, but I think that’s unconscious. What I’m more interested in is form. When I wrote Soledad, I did it with very little mentorship. I went to an MFA, but I don’t think anyone in the department read the book. I remember my editor at Simon & Schuster saying, I have things I want to say, but I also don’t want to touch it. It had its own logical wildness, and I agree. It’s not heavily edited. I leaned into my oral-storytelling training as a child, the ways that we told stories in my family, and with Let in Rain Coffee I was given more time and security. I didn’t have five-hundred jobs while writing that book. I did a lot of residencies. I was able to dive into research. I remember taking a race and empire class here [at Binghamton University] with a history professor, Tiffany Patterson, who deeply impacted Let It Rain Coffee. After I graduated, I went back to those books. I’m glad I kept them. I didn’t sell them because I was thinking a lot about the Dominican Republic and the relationship between Dominicans and the US. But then I was interested in the braided two-points-of-view novel, and that’s what I did. When I was working on Dominica, I wrote many different versions. One was called In Search of Caridad. That version was much bigger, told in the 1970s. And then as I went deeper into the archives, I realized, No, 1965 is the right year, and went back and rewrote it. I had to think, What does this look like, putting these characters in a different moment in time? It was told in this polyphonic way—more so than Let it Rain Coffee. And then I was like, No, I need to do the thing. I hadn’t done one point of view, a three act structure. I needed to know that I could do it, to push myself. It took years. When I wrote How Not to Drown [in a Glass of Water], I was like, Okay, I’m going to diverge completely. What else can I do with the form and still call it a novel? You mentioned that Caridad [keeps showing] up. I think one of the reasons I’m haunted by this woman, Caridad, is because she saved my life and my mother’s life when I was born. And when I asked [my mother], What is one of your biggest regrets? she said, Never thanking Caridad. I’m thanking her for what she did for us when we first arrived. And being that nobody has any information except this little photograph of her, in some ways I keep thinking, What if Caridad’s life was this? What if Caridad’s life is this? In some ways, it’s a way of immortalizing and keeping her alive through story. You put someone in a world, you bring in the things that are familiar in that world. These things…signal culture. But one of the things I realized too, especially as I do a lot of readings, is that there’s a literary world, and that’s a kind of readership, and then there’s the mainstream reader. And then I go to universities where I’m being taught in certain classes where mine is the first book that someone will finish from beginning to end. They see themselves in it, right? So powerful. And when you have enough of these experiences, you realize that little moment where they see something so specific to Dominican culture really just opens their world to literature, thinking of themselves inside of literature, in the same way Julio Alvarez did for me. Julio Alvarez is a Dominican writer who published a book, How The Garcia Girls Lost their Accents… I remember seeing that book, and I was like, Oh, maybe I can write a book. It hadn’t occurred to me before. So I do think that there’s this way sometimes—again, not really intentional—of bringing in these authentic signifiers of place and people. This is key for people who just really want to see themselves and the things they love in books.

JH: One of the things I was considering as far as these recurring threads go was that idea of capturing familiarity. All of the characters are individual, and they are themselves realized, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have these shared experiences. You read a name and it’s a totally different character, but we all go back to the version we knew, which informs our reading in a very particular, communal yet individual way. Another thread that I picked up on, specifically with Soledad and How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, was the difficulty of recognizing immediate family as worthy of sympathy or grace. It’s definitely not the case in all of your books, but many of the conflicts in your writing center around that family dynamic. The most obvious grouping I think of is Soledad getting along much better with Goda than her mother, Olivia, [as well as] Flaca getting along better with Olivia than her mother, Gorda; in your most recent book, Fernando seems to have a much more nurturing relationship with Angela than his own mother. I was hoping you could speak to why we’re so drawn to these figures in our lives who most resemble those closest to us, but because of that degree of separation the relationship can be more amicable.

AC: It’s funny. I just came back from this trip with international writers, and I don’t know—something kept coming up in conversation. Someone would say something about a person who wasn’t talking to their mother. They’re like, Oh yeah, well obviously you have to kill your mother. This is a common expression; in order to become your own person, you have to kill your mother. You have to kill your father. Even in writing, you’re trying to figure out who you are in contrast with another book, another author… I’m interested in that relationship. In the first draft of Soledad, Soledad and Olivia got along. It didn’t move. Until one of my mentors said, I’m not even going to bother reading anymore. The main problem is that you don’t want to be mad at your mother. This is fiction. They should not like each other. Rewrite it with them having conflict. And I was like, But what if my mother reads it? She’ll be so mad. That’s the thing. You’re a fiction writer. Start a book, and then ask, How do I raise the stakes? That’s when the mechanics come in.

For example, in one of the drafts of [Dominicana], Ana was not involved with Cesar, was not interested in Cesar. I was doing an exercise with my students: Make a list of seven things that you cannot imagine would ever happen to your character. You can’t imagine it. It would go against everything… Then I go home and do the exercise myself. I couldn’t figure it out with Ana. So I said, Let me ask my mother. The book was inspired by my mother. Her journey. I said, Mom, what is something you can’t imagine could ever happen to you? She goes, I don’t think I will ever fall in love. And my mother, she’s in her sixties at this time. I’m like, What? You’ve never been in love? You can’t imagine being in love? It is possible that people who’ve had traumatic experiences…just won’t allow themselves to be in love. Not that she doesn’t have partners. She just won’t let herself fall in love. I fall in love every other day! What a privilege that is. So I rewrote the book to allow Ana, in this terrible situation, to fall for somebody… 

Conflicts are manufactured in a lot of ways. What makes a better plot? What makes it more propulsive? How do I move farther and farther away from auto-fiction until [the work] becomes its own beast? That was hard for me…With How Not to Drown [in a Glass of Water], the tension between the son and the mother, for me, was so beautiful. It was experimentation. I wanted to play… I didn’t know if I was going to ever get published again… Maybe if I didn’t feel that way, I wouldn’t have played with the structure. And then things happen that you don’t expect. I would say now it’s once a week, but two years ago, I would receive, almost every day, emails, DMs from young people, anyone under forty, let’s say, who was queer, thanking me for writing the book. Because they basically allowed themselves to have grace for Cara Romero, a kind of grace that they would never give their mothers. It actually inspired them to reach out to their family. I never anticipated this happening. I was so focused on Cara that I wasn’t focused on Fernando’s response to Cara. But I’ve been meeting all the Fernandos in the world. I mean, I do get notes from mothers that are like, Ugh, I read your book and I saw myself. It hurts to see myself. But that is so exciting, right?… Somewhere, someone is waiting for your book to figure out some big thing in their lives.

JH: What you’re describing feels very much like a magical experience. I was hoping to discuss the shift in your work away from what I interpret as a more classical form of magical realism. I think Soledad more cleanly falls into that category. There are actual instances—even if they’re understood to be imagined or whatever— of actual magical stuff going on. Things you can’t explain. 

AC: Most of the world is this way right now. I can’t explain it.

JH: It feels like, throughout your work, there’s been a shift from more overt, identifiable instances of magic, to more everyday manifestations of it. You talked about the power of storytelling. About your mom never falling in love, how passion and romance can transform you. It is magical. I think about how Ana’s mother specifically warned her, Don’t fall in love. Despite your best intentions, the best plans, it will upend you. It’s like a potion. I don’t know if that’s the exact phrasing [in the novel], but it’s something like that. I was hoping you could talk about how your relationship with magic might have changed. 

AC: Well, I think that it’s interesting. I did lean into it, probably because that’s what I was reading. I was a big reader of Toni Morrison at the time, and I am still, but then more. I was reading a lot of speculative Octavia Butler. It makes sense in a way that I was in conversation with them. To some degree, I guess some Marquez, but it was very annoying—everyone was [comparing us]. I don’t think I write anything like him. And I love him. I wish I wrote  [like] Marquez. I’m very rooted in American literature—more Faulkner and Morrison and the Chicano writers. But I’m so interested in growing as a writer… I feel like Dominicana was trying to figure out, What else can I do here? What else could this look like? And then with How Not to Drown, there’s maybe some kind of magical element where she believes she can smell cancer, but that’s rooted in science. It’s so funny—I’m very good friends with a neuroscientist who is constantly feeding me articles. And I was like, That’s what I said! Cara can do that. She would find the proof to my wild story. And I was like, These things are possible. So what is real? What isn’t real? Some people have exceptional abilities. Are the dead really dead? Do we still communicate with them? Maybe some of you just don’t know how to do it.

JH: As well as subtler manifestations. I should have thought of [being able to smell cancer], but when I was formulating that question, I was more focused on the power of wishful thinking, especially as relates to Alicia, the psychic, and how regardless of whether or not she’s part of a scam, or even a real person, the predictions comes true. They do come to fruition.

AC: I don’t believe in horoscopes, and horoscopes sometimes come true. Again, we’re storytellers. How we want to tell that story will really impact the way it’s framed, how it looks in our lives. In my new book, that I am still working through, there’s a lot more of this slip streaming into different realities. I’m interested in it because, again, I feel like the immigrant experience is one of multiverses. We are living in multiple universes at the same time. Multi-language, multicultural. I’m here and here at the same time. How do you write that? How do you fit that in a book? How do you write that linearly? Does it have to be linear? I love the book that just came out by Justin Torres— Blackouts. If you like vignettes, you’re going to love that one. Where he’s talking about this younger person taking care of this older person who’s dying. And there’s an archive, historical documents throughout the book. I have a real interest in trying to figure out how we explain this time when you also exist in other times—because we do…What does that look like in fiction? We’re in conversation. We’re unpacking it. We’re still trying to figure it out. 

JH: Before, you were talking about implications, how little choices make a big impact on the people around you. You mentioned a shift in the tension of Soledad, changing the year [Dominicana] was set in. How little choices extend outward in ways you can’t anticipate. That’s so powerful. I’m grateful to be a writer. It’s hard, always. But at the same time, there is real meaning and impact to the work. It’s heartening.

AC: It is. I spend time observing other people teach creative writing, and I think, Oh my God. This is the quiet revolution. We’re teaching people to slow down and think and make connections. This is important work, especially now.

JH: Now a few easier questions. So you’re the director of the MFA program [at the University of Pittsburgh]. Are you leading any workshops? 

AC: I will next year. 

JH: As a teacher, are there any particular writers or novels or collections that inevitably end up on your syllabi? Anything you have to teach? 

AC: I like to teach books I’m still not sure about, especially with graduate students. So we learn together. Next year I’m definitely going to teach this short story collection by Camila Villada. She’s Argentine. It’s a translation. It’s brilliant. She’s a trans woman writer. The stories are amazing. And there’s one, and I don’t remember the name of the story, but I swear it’s in conversation with [Flannery] O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I don’t have any proof, but I would like to read those stories concurrently. I’m really interested in how we borrow or change up [our influences].

JH: Just to go back to your point from a second ago—the subtle ways in which that sort of choice can majorly impact the course of a workshop or lit class. Having a particular book that you read is one thing, but the book that you pair it with, that follows or precedes it, is going to have an impact. Alright, another little question. So it’s been a little while since you graduated from Binghamton. Is there anything in particular that you’re hoping to do or see while you’re in town? Going to see the carousels?

AC: That’s so funny. I came with my son because he’s looking into colleges. When I came to Binghamton, I would only be here Monday through Thursday, and then Friday through Sunday I took the bus to work in New York City so I wouldn’t have any debt. It was pretty intense. I took a lot of classes, and I was very active. I feel like I spent a lot of time huddled in rooms talking about how to change the world. But I’m going to Lost Dog today! And I think it was here when I was a student. I’m not sure it feels familiar, but I did visit, maybe ten years ago. It must’ve been for Let it Rain Coffee or something. But I’m excited to be here. 

JH: Well, I hope the weather holds up, and that you’ll have some opportunities to huddle and talk about changing the world. Capture some of that old magic.

Joseph Heiland is a writer from upstate New York. He has stories published at Eastern Iowa Review, Lumina Journal, and Reed Magazine. He received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at Binghamton University.

3/20/24