New Year's Reflections

Happy New Year! Today, quite appropriately, I am spending the day at my sister-in-law's house. She lives in the neighborhood in Pompano where Mike and I are moving on Feb 1st. A next step in creating a supportive environment for our growing family. With Auntie Agee to babysit and make sure I don't loose my mind and three cousins to play with, I think Baby Fuller has much to look forward to.

Driving here this morning was interesting. Pompano really isn't that far from Miami...30 minutes on the highway. But it's so different. So suburban. Part of me wishes I'd asked for a GPS for Christmas so I could find my way around. I literally don't know how to get to even the grocery store from here. But it's much more of a community, which I think will help in the long run. And as always, it's part of my new year's resolution to get in some kind of shape so I am hopeful about swimming in the pool and using the tennis and basketball courts, walking trails and the gym.

I should mention that Agee doesn't have cable but she does have a washer and dryer, something Mike and I are missing in our current place. So I'm spending my day in reflection, doing laundry, exploring websites on the Internet and thinking about what the New Year will bring. I probably would have spent the entire day glued to the TV watching reruns of Law and Order, House and all of the variations of CSI had I not come to Pompano today. So, as much as I was dreading no cable, I think it's for the best.

In my travels through cyberspace, I came across Julia Alvarez's website - via a high school friends facebook page (yes, I'm addicted). I feel like Julia is a good friend. My Dad introduced us when I was 10 with a copy of How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents followed by In the Time of the Butterflies. We have been faithful friends since. She has channeled my emotions from adolescence to adulthood - I have read my thoughts in !YO! and In the Name of Salome, reading every word published. I've grown to idolize Julia. I want to visit her home in Vermont, her farm in Dominican Republic and take one of her classes at Middlebury. But for the moment, I settle for her words.

I've read her biography many times before but reading it today was a little different. I guess it depends what I'm thinking and going through. It made me smile to think her first book wasn't published until she was 41. It means I still have time....it means it's ok that I want to be like her when I grow up and maybe even, that it's possible.

I share her bio with you here:


About Julia Alvarez

I guess the first thing I should say is that I was not born in the Dominican Republic. The flap bio on García Girls mentioned I was raised in the D.R., and a lot of bios after that changed raised to born, and soon I was getting calls from my mother.

I was born in New York City during my parents' first and failed stay in the United States. When I was three months old, my parents, both native Dominicans, decided to return to their homeland, preferring the dictatorship of Trujillo to the U.S.A. of the early 50s. Once again, my father got involved in the underground and soon my family was in deep trouble. We left hurriedly in 1960, three months before the founders of that underground, the Mirabal sisters, were brutally murdered by the dictatorship (see In the Time of the Butterflies).

It's not like I didn't know some English at ten when we landed in New York City. But classroom English, heavily laced with Spanish, did not prepare me for the "barbaric yawp" of American English -- as Whitman calls it. I couldn't tell where one word ended and another began. I did pick up enough English to understand that some classmates were not very welcoming. Spic! a group of bullies yelled at me in the playground. Mami insisted that the kids were saying, Speak! And then she wonders where my storytelling genes come from.

When I'm asked what made me into a writer, I point to the watershed experience of coming to this country. Not understanding the language, I had to pay close attention to each word -- great training for a writer. I also discovered the welcoming world of the imagination and books. There, I sunk my new roots. Of course, autobiographies are written afterwards. Talk to my tías in the D.R. and they'll tell you I was making up stuff way before I ever set foot in the United States of America. (And getting punished for it, too. Lying, they called it back then.) But they're right. As a kid, I loved stories, hearing them, telling them. Since ours was an oral culture, stories were not written down. It took coming to this country for reading and writing to become allied in my mind with storytelling.

All through high school and college and then a graduate program in creative writing -- you can get all the dry facts in my attached resume -- I was a driven soul. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. But it was the late sixties, early seventies. Afro-American writers were just beginning to gain admission into the canon. Latino literature or writers were unheard of. Writing which focused on the lives of non-white, non mainstream characters was considered of ethnic interest only, the province of sociology. But I kept writing, knowing that this was what was in me to do.
Of course, I had to earn a living. That's how I fell into teaching, mostly creative writing, which I loved doing. For years, I traveled across the country with poetry-in-the-schools programs, working until the funds dried up in one district, and then I'd move on to the next gig. After five years of being a migrant writer, I decided to put down roots and began teaching at the high school level, moving on to college teaching, and finally, on the strength of some publications in small magazines and a couple of writing prizes, I landed a tenure-track job.

1991 was a big year. I earned tenure at Middlebury College and published my first novel, How The García Girls Lost Their Accents. My gutsy agent, Susan Bergholz, found a small press, Algonquin Books, and a wonderful editor, Shannon Ravenel, willing to give "a new voice" a chance. I was forty-one with twenty-plus years of writing behind me. I often mention this to student writers who are discouraged at nineteen when they don't have a book contract!
With the success of García Girls, I suddenly had the chance to be what I always wanted to be: a writer who earned her living at writing. But I'd also fallen in love with the classroom. I toiled and troubled about what to do. After several years of asking for semester leaves, I gave up my tenured post. Middlebury College kindly invited me to stay on as a writer-in-residence, advising students, teaching a course from time to time, giving readings.

So here I am living in the tropical Champlain Valley. (That's the way folks in the Northeast Kingdom refer to this part of Vermont!) I'm happily settled down with my compañero, Bill Eichner, on eleven acres which Bill farms, growing most of our vegetables and greens and apples and potatoes and even Asian pears organically, haying the back pasture, and planting so many berry-bearing trees and bushes we now have enough birdsong around here to keep me humble. Recently, he has added animals: cows, calves, rabbits, chickens. As a vegetarian, it is an odd adventure helping raise somebody else's meat. But if you are going to be a carnivore (or wear shoes or carry a handbag) this is the way to do it: conscionable with affection and care and abiding gratitude to the creatures who provide for us.

I guess the only other thing I should mention about my life is our project in the Dominican Republic. About eleven years ago, Bill and I started a sustainable farm-literacy center called Alta Gracia. Rather than telling you the whole long story here about why we are growing organic, shade-grown coffee; why we started a school on the farm; why sustainability is so important a concept for us all to be thinking about, I'll send you to A Cafecito Story, a modern, "green" fable I wrote inspired by our project. The afterword by Bill tells all about our own farm. Visit our website cafealtagracia.com and find out how to order our coffee, Café Alta Gracia, and maybe even visit the farm!

I'll let the three-part resume (www.julialavarez.com) fill you in on the blow by blow details: publications, presentations, teaching experience, awards. Actually, the best place to find out about me and my writing life is to read my book of essays, Something to Declare. I wrote that book for readers who were always asking me about writing and about my life. I haven't changed my mind all that much since 1998 when it was published, which is kind of gratifying, to think that certain things remain true, like that Frost quote from "Into My Own," in which he says that, even after death, those who meet him won't find him much changed from him they knew, "only more sure of all I thought was true." Nice when poems tell the truth, even when we writers are known for making things up.