INTERVIEWED BY CHRISTINE RICE
Cyn Vargas writes fiercely and right on the edge of discovery. She also has the ability to capture dreamily-fleeting moments other writers overlook. Cyn’s debut collection, On The Way (Curbside Splendor Publishing), showcases her sharp humor and keen observations.
On The Way’s stories haunted me; their sights and sounds and images ambushing me days after reading them. The stories explore men and women, parents and children, immigrants, abuse, and the struggles of first-generation Americans. Her stories shift elegantly from humorous to gut-wrenching.
CHRISTINE RICE: Our first lunch was at Manny’s Cafeteria and Deli. There we were in all our half-Lebanese/full-on Latina glory eating in a Jewish deli. Slightly absurd?
CYN VARGAS: There is no such thing as absurdity when it comes to two friends eating delicious food. The only thing that would make that absurd is if I hated you or the food. Why waste energy on that? It was beauty, us being there – writers, women, lovers of yummy food. Plus we’re hilarious.
CR: We have our moments.
I’ve always thought of you as a much younger cousin who might join me at Thanksgiving dinner to poke fun at the rest of the family. On a scale of one to ten, how uncomfortable does that make you feel?
CV: I have many more wrinkles than you, so let’s compromise and say we are twin cousins (but not like those kind of twin cousins) that would happily comment on certain aspects of family members that we love only because we have to. So, on a scale of one to ten, I am a negative one on how uncomfortable this makes me feel, which means I’m cool with it, right? I don’t do math.
CR: That’s simply not true about the wrinkles, and I’m easily confused by math problems.
So there’s this wonderful piece in “Ploughshares” by Daniel Peña and he writes:
A student of mine asked the other day if Latinos still wrote. He was dead serious. And by the reddening at the tops of his ears I could tell it was a completely sincere question, a bold one with all of the shame that fills the liminal space between a bold question and the professor’s answer.
Tongues were clucked, little exasperations were aired. One kid even went daaaaaaaaaang for a really long time. And I have to admit, at first even I was like daaaaaaaang, because this is a Chicana/o course that I’m teaching. But when I asked my student to unpack his question with me, I found out he really wanted to know Who are the new Latino writers? Like, the not old ones.
Of course there’s a rich tradition of Latina writers and we’re now (albeit slowly) seeing more brave independent publishers like Curbside Splendor, Writ Large, and Copper Canyon Press, among many others, publishing authentic voices that, historically, had been marginalized. Why is it important that these stories are getting out there?
CV: That’s the thing. These publishers are brave. They want to put stories on the page from voices that haven’t been accepted or shared (chicken or the egg) with a larger audience. I am first generation Latina who heard story after story from my ma and my aunts. And my grandparents. I don’t know if it’s because not enough Latinos are writing, or not enough of them have mentors or ambassadors saying, “You can do this. I will help you be heard.” From what I have experienced, work and education is important and pushed in Latino culture but not always creativity. Either because it is not understood or because it “won’t get you ahead in life.” I was lucky enough that my ma just told me to do what I wanted.
I want to be confident in saying that more and more Latino/a stories will get out there but I don’t think I see it yet. There are so many more stories to tell. It’s important not because they are Latina/o stories, it’s important because they are stories. At the core of a good story is empathy regardless of the ethnicity of who wrote it. We are all human beings (most of us, anyway). We all tell stories from different perspectives. That’s what is beautiful. That is what should be embraced. Everything everyone is and all the things that people experience are what make stories unique. We should all be open to hearing those stories. That’s the only way we will continue to evolve.
CR: A number of themes run through On The Way: broken homes, absent fathers, lies people tell to get through difficult times, the disjointed angles of relationships. You investigate the health or brokenness of family. I’m thinking of, in particular, “Guate”, “The Keys”, “Then It’s Over”, and “On the Way”. Why do these themes draw you?
CV: This collection is fiction, but I am okay saying I came from a home where my ma raised three kids on her own with no financial or other help from my estranged father. I know how that feels. I may not have had the same experiences as my narrators, but I can empathize with them. At the core, I know how I would feel in that situation, so I feel it, and then allow my characters to feel it for themselves and react to those situations themselves. It’s something I am drawn to perhaps because it’s something I know well. It’s like being in the same boat with my narrators and sharing “let me tell you how fucked up my father was” stories. People want to share what they know. What is painful. What they hope for. My narrators don’t believe in happy endings and neither do I. I have been anti-happy ending since I was in kindergarten. I’m drawn to the theme of reality.
CR: Like in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, you heighten this sense of the great divide between what it means to be an American and a yearning for the old country. A number of characters have one foot back home and one foot in the United States. Your stories reflect the beauty of Central America while acknowledging its deep faults, too. Similarly, you see the same beauty and faults in America. Why is that tension, that schism between the two worlds, important in your work?
CV: I was born in Chicago. My ma in El Salvador. She learned English by watching Sesame Street. She spoke to my brothers and me in Spanish because that was her native tongue and we spoke to her in English because it was ours. Here in the States I get told that I have an accent and get asked where I’m from. I say, Chicago. When I go to Central America, I get asked where I’m from. Chicago, I say. I’m not “American” enough here and not “Latina” enough there. I’m in this limbo of “I just am” wherever I am (and whoever that is). That is reflected in my settings. A sense of familiarity and a sense of being different. The beauty and the flaws are one in the same, no? These countries have both. They are their own characters. They want to exist in that realm of reality.
CR: A number of stories in On The Way focus on relationships and how they can hobble along for quite a long time even while they’re completely broken. No question here. I guess that’s just a statement.
Tacos? Why are you a fan?
CV: Okay. So, I am not Mexican-American, which I get sometimes because I love tacos so much. I mean I am not from Argentina either and I love Malbec like you wouldn’t believe. I just love tacos because they are fucking delicious. Corn tortilla, carne asada, with just cilantro, onion, and avocado. Chihuahua. What was the question? I’m fucking hungry.
CR: Who can remember my question when you talk about tacos like that?
In his piece in The New Yorker, Junot Diaz writes about how most writing programs are “too white.” Thoughts?
CR: I will answer this question with a story (surprise, surprise). In one of my writing classes there was this other Latina. She was at least ten years younger. She wore glasses. We dressed differently and she was way skinner than me. We looked nothing alike. She also wrote about mainly one theme while I wrote about a whole other theme. There were some fellow students who MIXED US UP and we were the ONLY TWO Latinas in the whole program, I think. Whether it’s race or class, there isn’t that many creative writing students, especially graduate students, that are Latina/o-American. Not just where I went to school, but everywhere. It’s sad. One time a white male student told me I had it easy. I nearly kicked him in the balls. He was around a lot of other white males and he was telling me I had it easy. It didn’t stop me from succeeding in the program, but it was something I was always aware of on the first day of the semester.
CR: Children are always so much more attuned to lives of adults than we give them credit for and you’ve used a number of child narrators in your stories (“Then It’s Over”, “Myrna’s Dad”, and “At This Moment”). These kids know the score. Did you feel that way as a kid?
CV: Being a mom now, I tell my daughter I make mistakes. I admit them. I say I’m sorry when I have done something wrong. That doesn’t make me a Disney mom. I am not perfect. I grew up around adults that were not perfect. Just being able to admit that from the start I think makes kids less appalled maybe when they find out the adults are messing up. I mean I knew a lot of what was happening when I was little. Things that, if explained, might have saved me some worry and grief as a kid – grief and worry I then carried into adulthood. Kids don’t need to know everything, but they deserve to be told something that will reassure them that things will work out eventually. Adults ignoring the problems or “hiding” them only makes kids feel isolated.
CR: “Blind Guy” and “At This Moment” deal with abuse and the different ways that the abused and the abusers cope. These are issues that, especially as women, we see. What attracts you to these stories?
CV: Issues about being abused in any way are important to share, whether fiction or nonfiction because there are so many of us that don’t ever say anything about it. So many secrets are carried when it comes to abuse of any form, so many voices silenced. Putting it on the page could possibly get to a reader that needs to know they are not alone.
CR: In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Alice Munro said:
When you’re a writer, you’re never quite like other people — you’re doing a job that other people don’t know you’re doing and you can’t talk about it, really, and you’re just always finding your way in the secret world and then you’re doing something else in the “normal” world.
You have a family, a day job, too. Do you ever feel like this? Like there’s this “normal” world and then this world of the imagination?
CV: Yes, all the time. Though I think I live in my imagination world all the time. It’s like I want to live in two parallel worlds and I am constantly trying to figure out how to, though in general it’s hard to even live one life effectively. I am a mother and wife and work full-time. That is my reality. I am a writer. That is my other reality. I try to fit these roles together like they are Legos. These mommy blocks here and the work blocks there and let me see where I can put the writer blocks (ha ha) because I have to build a life that functions. Though sometimes, most times, it’s like all of those are just mixed up Play-Doh and I am just trying to make sure it doesn’t all dry up.
Cyn Vargas’ short story collection, On The Way, was recently published by Curbside Splendor Publishing. She is the recipient of a Ragdale Fellowship and the Guild Literary Complex Prose Award in Fiction. She was named one of Guild Literary Complex’s 25 Writers to Watch and has received two top citations in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers contests. She is a company member of the award-winning storytelling organization 2nd Story. Her work has appeared in Chicago Reader Fiction Issue, Word Riot, Hypertext Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.cynvargas.com.
