Spotlight on...Julia Alvarez

Author: Bri Cavallaro

Acclaimed Writer-in-Residence Julia Alvarez '71 talks about her new novel "Saving the World." Alvarez has published many a celebrated novel, such as "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" and "A Cafecito Story" as well as several collections of poetry and has garnered numerous awards including the Robert Frost Poetry fellowship from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1986; the Third Woman Press Award, first prize in narrative, 1986; and a grant from National Endowment for the Arts, 1987-88.



The Middlebury Campus: How did you come across these 22 orphaned boys who were the subject of "Saving the World?"



Julia Alvarez: I was doing research for my last novel, "In The Name of Shalome." I was studying the history of the island of Hispaniola, and [I found a footnote that] said that, in the midst of war the French in the Eastern half fighting off the Haitians that had declared independence, and the Spanish island had been occupied by the French; it was just a mess. There was a little note that said smallpox had broken out, and it had been too bad that the smallpox expedition that was going around the world with the vaccine carried by orphaned boys had not been able to make a stop at the island, and I thought, what's this? I have a friend who's a medical historian, and I asked him about it, and he had no idea. So I went to the Armstrong library and took out every book there on smallpox and, in a couple of them, there was a mention about the Royal Expedition - not too many details. It happened that I happened on this topic right as I was beginning to ride the great wave of Google, and I Googled it in Spanish, and by God, there was a Web site on it in Valencia, where he was born, and the bicentennial of the expedition was going to be in 2003. The port city from which they sent out was having its big exhibition in commemoration. My husband and I had planned to go on a trip - we had pretty much settled that it was going to be Italy, but I said, 'honey, we're going to Spain.' I guess that's what happens when you're married to a writer! 'Honey, we're going to Spain, I've got a story I can't let go of.' You think you're going to hit your novel ideas, this great illumination, and then sometimes this little thing catches the corner of your eye, and those are the things that I think are important to follow. If you're doing it just to see what the market is, or to see what sells, or what you think your next book should be or what your readers think your next book should be, it'll fail. You've got to follow those things that really grab you or haunt you. That's how it started.



TC: What is the ability of literature and art to raise awareness of social issues in today's American climate?



JA: That's such a big and complex question, because the way we experience history as human beings alive to a contemporary scene is almost like fiction. We have a specific lens and we have a narrative that threads events together - those are all the strategies of a fiction writer. In a way, it's like we experience history as a story, our story. We have a particular vision into what's happening during our times from our point of view and as the character we are and in a family and framework and neighborhood, and that's setting, point of view - all these strategies of fiction. None of us can say that what we're experiencing now is the truth - well, some people in the White House can say that - a whole complex dimension of what's it like to be alive in this world. A lot of times we forget that we're all fiction writers. When you meet someone, you fall in love with someone, you tell them the story of your lives. And even the story you tell is different than the story, say, a sibling would tell, a parent tells. For some reason we're these creatures that need narrative in order to put together the events of our lives into something that's coherent and cohesive that makes meaning and sense to us…a lot of times I think when we get depressed, it's when all of that falls apart, we're lost, nothing makes any sense. My sister who works with refugees in Boston, many of whom who have left Latin American countries where there were mass killings or they saw their families executed or some horrible thing, in counseling them she knows they're healing when they can tell the story of what happened to them, when they can put it together as a narrative. I think fiction and nonfiction are not that far apart. Even when I was doing the research for "In The Time of the Butterflies" and I went around talking to different people on the island who had lived in the time of the dictatorship, one person would tell you this story and another person would tell you another story, a different take on things. When we didn't have videos of Kennedy being shot, those documentation capacities, a lot of it is point of view, interpretation, the stories that get passed down. Even now, when we have all these supposedly accurate means of documentation - we have this new word spin, where we can take it and make it this or that. We're creatures that are constantly creating narratives from our experience. In a sense, our experience is already fiction, and I'm not saying that in terms of undermining it - I'm saying it's an important, and maybe even truer way of knowing things, because it means integrating things with your heart and mind and senses, as opposed to just straight, flat documentation, which is impossible I think already.



TC: Oh, wow. That's a beautiful way to see it.



JA: Good luck putting that into a two-inch column…I don't even remember the question now!