The second interview in the “If You Lived Here” blog series is with Jennine Capó Crucet, author of the short fiction collection How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. How to Leave Hialeah is a beautiful and detailed map of the crowded beaches and neighborhoods of Miami as seen through the lives of the people who call them home. Her new novel, Magic City Relic, is forthcoming for St. Martin’s Press in 2015.
MM: I thought one of the important themes in the book was highlighted in this line of dialogue in your story “Relapsing, Remitting,” where a schoolteacher asks one of her student’s fathers if he’s ever been to Gator Jungle Island and he says he’s “never even been to the Everglades,” and she says, “I feel you. You live in a place your whole life and never see what you’re supposed to while you’re there.” How does this idea of perception, that you don’t pay attention or see a place clearly until you leave it, relate to how you thought about capturing place in this book? Leaving seems to come up over and over again.
JCC: Oh that’s true! In that scene, the teacher is just having this awkward conversation with the main character (who isn’t exactly thrilled to be chaperoning these kids on this field trip), but what she says is totally true, both in general and for the book.
When I lived in Los Angeles, all the people I worked with—pretty much all of them L.A.-born-and-bred—had never really been to what most people considered the “iconic” L.A. sites. The same was true for me about Miami (or, more precisely, that even though I grew up in Miami, I was a tourist in the places intended for tourists—spots like South Beach—and a lot of Miami Beach, really—and the shitty places we got dragged to on field trips, like the shitty, shitty, whale-oppressing Miami Seaquarium). It was weird to move away from Miami and then meet people who had been there once or a couple times who had very clear ideas about where I was from, which got me thinking about how something becomes iconic to a place—the ways in which something comes to be part of the cultural imagination of a place. My story collection was sort of my working through that question. It’s my contribution to the cultural imagination about Miami—something that wasn’t there before in quite that way, and which I hope opens up the place. It’s the book I wanted to read about where I was from, a book that didn’t exist until I started writing it.
MM: I love that you say you wrote the book about Miami that you wanted to read. That you felt compelled to dream up the book that wasn’t out there yet. There’s magic in the idea that by capturing a place you can open up a place.
Here’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask a writer. And maybe I’ll ask every writer from now on in the hope of tapping into some imaginative gaps. In all the interviews you’ve done, is there a question you’ve never been asked and wish you had been because you have a really good answer for it? What is the question and what is the answer?
JCC: No one’s ever asked me what I’d like done with my remains when I die, and I think I’ve settled on the answer. I would like my body to be composted; there’s a company in Sweden working on this as a viable option. I would then like the compost used on a garden of some sort, preferably one with some nice arugula, and then the arugula should be picked and fed to Pitbull the “Rapper” via a hearty salad. (I will likely die before Pitbull, because life isn’t fair.) Then, when he’s done with the salad, I would like someone to jump out from under the table and point at him and scream, THAT SALAD WAS DEAD JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET! YOU JUST ATE A DEAD PERSON SALAD!! (I think by writing this here, it becomes law and someone has to follow through on it, yes? Thank you in advance, someone.)
MM: Dead Person Salad sounds like a better idea than those carbon diamonds made from a person’s ashes. And healthier.
JCC: Actually, since you mentioned it, I did contemplate becoming posthumous bling, but the thought of me-as-diamond falling forever into the wrong hands (i.e., some future niece who never really liked me, or an evil villain who uses me-as-diamond as, like, a central piece of some dastardly machine, or Pitbull) overruled that idea. And yeah, I like the idea of me being healthy for once.
MM: You bringing up Pitbull, who is Cuban and from Miami, along with dead people and aging, is an ideal opportunity to talk about Castro. Exile, displacement, and nostalgia are recurring themes in the book, as many of the characters have immigrated from Cuba. In the story, “The Next Move,” the narrator, Luis, keeps taking a tai chi class his wife, Nilda, has signed them up for before she takes a trip to see her sisters in Cuba. One of her sisters recommended tai chi for arthritis:
Apparently, Castro required everyone over the age of fifty in Nilda’s old hometown to enroll in some communist Tai Chi class—this since the USSR died and stopped helping them survive money-and medicine-wise. I couldn’t help it: I imagined hundreds of people standing around in a field of dead grass, surrounded by dry palm trees, their fifty-something year old bodies slowly moving through ridiculous, exaggerated poses, while Castro stood up at the front, high above the crowd behind some podium, yelling some Chinese-sounding words into a bullhorn. Chinese in Spanish, what the shit, some revolution you have yourself there, Comandante, ha! Maybe someone could get him out of those ugly madre de Dios fatigues—Karate Castro! So of course I start laughing and of course Nilda took it wrong and thought I was laughing at her.
In this scene, we see the narrator paint a humorous portrait of Castro in his imagination, which leads to a misunderstanding with his wife. He, and the reader, knows she wouldn’t find this vision of Karate Castro to be funny. Can you talk about the different types of nostalgia you portray in this story, and the book, and how they create rifts in relationships? And how did this apparition of Karate Castro come about?
JCC: This story is the only one in the book that deals exclusively with Cuba and nostalgia, but the nostalgia that Luis feels actually revolves around his wife, not the island. He’s pretty explicit about that in the story, and even faults his wife for not feeling the same way as he does. Most of the characters in the book are American-born, so Cuba already exists as more of a story than an actual place for them, and Luis—because he’s been in the U.S. for so long—sort of falls in that category, too, though his wife’s visit to Cuba calls all these things into question for him.
The joke Luis makes about Karate Castro is totally his own. I would’ve never thought to say that if I hadn’t decided to tell the story in the first person point of view from his perspective. I don’t think Luis even really knows what he means—he’s sort of riffing when he gets to that point, amused by his own line of thinking, his own exaggerations. Though of course it ends up hurting his wife without him meaning to, which is a recurring problem for him, and one the story takes up as a central theme.
MM: There’s also a section in the title story, “How to Leave Hialeah,” where the female narrator says, “No one you love has ever died—just one benefit of the teenage parenthood you’ve magically avoided despite the family tradition. Death is far off for every Cuban—you use Castro as your example.” He’s definitely a part of the world of some of your stories, but not the focus or center in any way. I don’t want people reading this interview to think the book is all about Castro when, like you said, most of the characters are American-born and living in Florida.
JCC: But you’re right, though, that he’s part of the world of the book in some ways, because as a figure, he does linger in the cultural imagination of the city. He’s definitely a symbol of extremes, and many of the characters in the book hang out in that realm, so he’s sort of there whether the characters recognize it or not. I take up this idea way more in my next book, Castro Castro Castro!, which is exactly the same book as How to Leave Hialeah, but with all the characters renamed “Fidel,” “Castro,” or “Fidel Castro.” It’s pretty experimental. (I’m kidding—it would take forever to do a Ctrl+F and change all that up. Way too many characters.)
MM: That should be the premise of a future short story, at the very least. And I’m not kidding. But there are so many richly drawn characters in the book. For instance, the first story, “Resurrection, or: The Story behind the Failure of 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival,” tells the story of Jesenia, an intern at the radio station, who, coming off her high from pills, goes to see a nun at a church in Miami Beach at an ungodly hour to ask a strange question. The title alone made me want to read the story immediately and then you have such a compelling cast of characters—the story just “has it all.” I also thought the use of the second person point of view in the story was brilliant, how it is a distanced, omnipresent entity that is observing the craziness of this one night (the nun tells Jesenia to then go see a Santera named Ocila)— and also the inside guide who is addressing the self and the distanced narrator and the tourist/reader. Here is an excerpt, which includes one of the most memorable images from the book:
What happens next is up to you because it relies on your knowledge of Santería […] Maybe your narrator—me—then tells you about the santeros that lived across the street from my childhood home. How one morning, I woke up to find our entire driveway covered in pennies. I tell you how my mother made us all—my father, my grandmother, my two sisters, and my younger brother—pee in a bucket so Mom could pour it over the pennies and sweep them out into the street […]. I might admit that’s pretty much the extent of my firsthand experience with Santeria.
Why was it important to use this particular point of view for the first story of the book? How does the narration make the unbelievable—a nun telling Jesenia to visit a Santera and a familial bucket of piss being used to undo the curse of pennies found on a driveway—believable, in this particular place and in the world of the story?
JCC: It’s interesting that you say the story is narrated in second person. I always considered it third person, with the occasional direct address to the reader—to call attention to the act of reading—in order to set up the way the story breaks open near the end and introduces the first-person narrator “hiding” behind the story. Maybe that’s why the second person feels distanced: because I didn’t even acknowledge that that’s what it was until that “What happens next is up to you” line (which surprised me when I wrote it; it started off as a note to myself as I was writing the story – that I needed to look up what happens when one visits a Santera because I had no freaking clue, but I thought: maybe the reader doesn’t either? How much research do I really need to do?).
This story opens the book because I wanted to get it out there right away that this was not edutainment: you could not (or should not) read this book and think, Oh sweet, now I know what it’s like to be from Miami. I wanted to address and dismantle, as much as possible, the reader’s expectations insofar as they were connected to my ethnicity or the ethnicity of the characters they would encounter. I also wanted to signal that this wasn’t the Miami readers might’ve seen before in fiction, even if it evokes some of the familiar images in the process of subverting them.
I think what makes the unbelievable believable are the details, which are what convince us of any story. Wait though: is a nun telling someone to visit a Santera really that unbelievable? I don’t think it is! Maybe that’s why readers believe it—because I do? And for real, who doesn’t have a familial bucket of piss or two sitting around their parents’ house? Is this really just me? Probably not, right? (I’m joking, there’s no piss bucket in my parents’ house. I should make that clear before I get a call from my mom. But somebody’s family has that, I bet.)
MM: I’m going to make a point to remember the term edutainment. And maybe unbelievable is not quite correct, then. Unexpected might be better. I never expected the nun to say go see the Santera. But I also don’t have a familial bucket of piss at my parents’ house, and maybe I should check on that—though where I’m writing from, maybe outhouses are the equivalent? Let’s move from familial piss buckets to families. Another thing I admired about this collection was the role of tradition in the complicated portrayals of different generations of Cuban-American families. The story “Noche Buena” comes to mind, which revolves on the maddening rules of how one family celebrates Christmas Eve and the passive aggressive reinforcement, and breaking, of those rules. The narrator Manny tells us his older sister’s boyfriend, now fiancée, was never allowed to come to the family’s holiday celebration because he wasn’t technically family. The boyfriend couldn’t meet the extended family “until things were serious between them, and serious in my family means prometida with a ring to prove it.” When the sister, Tere, calls to say she’s on her way over after being at her fiancee’s family’s celebration, at the time when she was supposed to have arrived, things start to heat up and Manny knows their father will be furious and tells us:
If I could have been sure that no one would see me, I would have slammed the phone back in its holder on the wall over and over again, so that Tere would have for sure known I’d hung up on her. But with family on top of you as ours is—when they’re like the heat in a car you’ve left in the sun—I knew some tía, or worse, Mami, would have been asking what the carajo did I think I was doing trying to break the phone.
You’ve captured that suffocating feeling of this big, loud, and loving family so wonderfully in the line about the heat in a car that’s been left in the sun. The sister asking to spend part of the holiday at her fiancée’s was already a big deal and met with a lot of resistance, and now that she’s late, tensions start to boil over. Why are traditions so important to this family? How do you, as a writer, think about the challenge of portraying this family that is both loving and suffocating?
JCC: Traditions are important to any family because they help that family define themselves—it helps them even see themselves as a family. For this particular family, I think, it’s about the parents (and here, mostly the dad) not being ready to acknowledge that their kids are grown up, and by exerting control over them in these silly, regimented ways, they’re trying to maintain the ways things have always gone down. I don’t have kids, but I sense that watching them get old enough to leave you must be one of the hardest things about being a parent. It’s inevitable, but it’s my sense that some parents try to delay it in different ways—usually with disastrous results—and I wanted to explore that with this story by just being as precise and realistic as my imagination allowed. I don’t think the family here would describe themselves as suffocating—even if they are—so that’s probably the key to overcoming the challenge of depicting them.
MM: The title story, “How to Leave Hialeah,” is the last story in the book and won a well-deserved PEN/O. Henry Award, and the narrator is constantly trying to figure out her place in the world amidst the many pressures and expectations placed on her by her family, and everyone else, including herself:
The most reliable (and admittedly, the least empowering) way to excuse yourself from Hialeah is to date Michael Cardenas Junior. He lives two houses away from you and is very handsome and smart enough to feed himself and take you on dates. Your mother will love him because he plans to marry you in three years when you turn eighteen. He is nineteen.
I adore stories that feel as though the writer was writing them with her hair on fire—so urgent, and pressing, and as if her whole life depends on getting the words down to paper. This story felt like a hurricane on the page, a storm of words, a lament, a prayer. The story is many things at once, and some of those things are a coming-of-age story for a Cuban-American woman and also a coming-of-artist story. There’s a sense that the narrator can’t catch her breath except in these small moments where she’s writing down her thoughts, but the writing causes her to feel shame. Yet the story itself feels like a triumph, albeit a complicated and mournful triumph, over this shame, and so many other obstacles. For your narrator, where does this sense of shame come from? How do you see literal and psychological distance working in this story?
JCC: Oh wow, I think if I knew where the shame came from for the narrator, I wouldn’t have needed to write the story, and because it so quickly left my control in the first draft, I don’t know if I ever figured it out for myself. I should mention that this piece started off as two stories—one about two estranged cousins, one of whom is dying and very angry about it; and another about tensions at a high school surrounding a riot (which ended up not even making it anywhere near the final draft). When I realized that the main character in each story was the same character at different points in her life, I became fascinated by how she made it from one place to the other, how she’d covered so much distance, and this story was the answer to that—a sort of documenting of that path. And in writing it, I discovered how much she’d sacrificed without really understanding why, so maybe the shame comes from her not knowing yet if it’s been worth it for her. She’s still reeling at the end of that story, and a lot of the questions it raised ended up working their way into another project, which eventually became a novel, and perhaps it answers the question better than I can.
MM: I’ve very excited to hear there’s a new novel inspired by this story. I can’t wait to read it. Thank you, Jennine.
JCC: Thank you, Melinda. You are the coolest.
Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Miami Herald, the Miami New Times, and the Latinidad List. A winner of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and a Bread Loaf Fellow, she was the Winter 2013/14 Picador Fellow for American Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her new novel, Magic City Relic, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015. She lives online at www.jcapocrucet.com.
Melinda Moustakis‘s novel, Bear Down Bear North: Alaska Stories, won the Flannery O’ Connor Award and the Maurice Prize. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, Cimarron Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her story “They Find the Drowned” won a 2013 PEN/ O. Henry Prize, and she was a 5 Under 35 selection by the National Book Foundation. She was a recent Hodder Fellow at The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University, and received a 2014 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship. She will be the 2014-2016 Kenyon Review Fellow in Fiction at Kenyon College. She is also a Contributing Editor at American Short Fiction.