Poured Over Double Shot: Angie Kim and John Manuel Arias

By Jenna Seery / August 29, 2023 at 6:00 am

Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls is a family drama with an unconventional cast of characters centered around a missing persons case. Kim joins us to talk about disability awareness in fiction, how she started writing, getting into her narrator’s head and more.

Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias is a rich novel of secrets, loss and a government coverup set in Costa Rica. Arias joins us to talk about his own family’s connection to the novel, the effects of colonial intervention in Central America, how long it took him to write the book and more.

Listen in as these authors speak separately with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Jamie and Marc.     

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.         

Featured Books (Episode):
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
True Biz by Sara Nović
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
La Familia de Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
The Apartment by Ana Menéndez

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation with Angie Kim because here’s the thing, you know, if you’ve read Angie, that she knows how to open a novel. “We didn’t call the police right away” is how Happiness Falls open. And you remember Miracle Creek, “my husband asked me to lie.” I mean, come on, what a pair of opening lines. What a pair of novels. What kind of family territory, Angie Kim, I’m so happy to see you. But wow, once again, we get a little bit of mystery, a little bit of family drama, and a lot of very smart narrative from you. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Angie Kim
Thank you so much for having me, Miwa. Well, I have been looking forward to this for so long. I am so excited to be here when we can talk about this.

Right. We can talk about it with other people, because we’ve been talking about it for quite some time. One of the things I want to talk about before we really get into Happiness Falls is we are going to be spoiler free in this conversation, obviously, because you are also our September book club pick for Barnes and Noble, which is pretty cool news.

I’m so happy about that, I love Book clubs and the B&N book club for September. It’s a dream. I love it.

Here’s the thing, too, if you’re looking for spoilers come back when we do the book club meeting in October, you can find the details on B&N.com. But you do a very cool thing in Happiness Falls, which I would expect nothing less from you. But the person who goes missing is white, he’s the dad and not only is he the dad, he’s the stay at home dad, you’ve reversed the trope completely. I mean, Hannah, who I quite like mom, you know, you’re still playing with that good mom stereotype and everything else. But the person who goes missing his dad.

Yeah, that was really important to me. I’m so glad that you bring this up, because so many of the missing persons stories and you know, movies, and all of that sort of stuff that we know of mostly involve girls and women. It’s a trope. It’s something that we authors, I think joke about, actually, oh, here’s a, here’s a missing person story, of course, it’s gonna be a woman. And when it’s a stay at home mom, I think one of the questions that we ask is, well, I mean, did she run away because it was too much, you know, too. And that’s something that happens. And it was really important to me that we talk about it in a different way in this book, and to question why does that happen? And to try to do it in an organic way? And also to sort of see, okay, when the gender norms are reversed in this way, and the dad is the stay at home, you know, primary caretaker, are we going to all of a sudden began to be like, Oh, did he go crazy, could he not, you know, handle the responsibility and all of that sort of stuff.

And there are three kids, there’s a set of twins, Mia and John, who are 20. And they’re home because it’s COVID. It’s lock down. They’re doing their schoolwork from home. They’re everyone’s in the same house. And they have a younger brother, who’s called Eugene, and I’m going to ask you to introduce listeners to the three kids before we get back to the whole family setup.

Oh, that’s great. So this is a family that I have known and been thinking about for over a decade. So I first wrote a story about this family being biracial Korean American family, and the twins are born here in the US. And at some point, the family goes back to Seoul, to where the mom was born. And they and that’s where Eugene is born. And Eugene is a non-speaker. He was diagnosed at an early age with autism. And when he’s a little older, they find out that he actually has a dual diagnosis that they had not known about autism and Angelman syndrome, which, mosaic Angelman syndrome, which is a very rare genetic disorder that presents with motor difficulties, with in some severe cases, things like seizures, definitely trouble with speech with speaking and communicating. And also very unusually, Angelman syndrome kids are sometimes called in a derogative way happy puppets, because they have an unusual demeanor with frequent smiling and laughter. And so, the family thinks Eugene is a very, very happy baby and then they get his diagnosis he’s nonspeaking. And the short story that I wrote a long time ago, was about the twins when they’re about 14 years old, taking their baby brother Eugene, to a cemetery in Seoul, using what they think is a haunted stethoscope to literally try to find his voice in the ground because they feel like they did something when they were visiting this graveyard with their mom when she was pregnant with Eugene that caused him to be a non speaker. And so I wrote this short story, it was published in 2013. And it’s a very special story to me. And this family has just been with me for the last 10 years. And I’ve been thinking about them. And then when I heard about some therapies involving non speakers, especially in the Autistic community, who are being taught to use letter boards, so these are spelling letter boards, where you use your hands and you know, your fingers to sort of point to things one by one letters, one by one and spelling out spelling therapy, as they’re called. I sort of thought, you know, I wonder if this family use this with Eugene and what had happened. So these are the kinds of things whenever I hear about anything, I would sort of think, I wonder what happened with the Eugene, I wonder what happened with Mia and John. And so that’s how the story sort of was born.

And Mia’s our narrator and she loves data. And I’m pointing that out, because her brother is a little more on the emotional intelligence kind of level of the scale, right? He’s a little more concerned about people’s humanity. And Mia likes to pick apart the details. She’s actually a really good narrator, but she is also unreliable, which I really like about her because she thinks she knows so much. And I hate to break it to our dear girl she doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does, but it’s really fun to read.

Absolutely. I’m so glad that you said that. And she doesn’t mean to be.

But when did you know she was going to be our narrator? Because Miracle Creek we had what, six or seven?

Seven POV characters, okay. And, you know, they were, except for the very first chapter, they’re all close third. And this one is in first person Mia’s voice all the way through. And it was so hard to write. So different. And also, I do this weird way of writing that, because I have a theater background. And so I call it method writing kind of like method acting, where I try to stay in this character’s head, you know, so for Miracle Creek, I would take, let’s say, three months to write a particular chapter in a character’s voice so try to stay in that character’s, you know, head even when I wasn’t really writing, and then so on and so forth for all the chapters and for this one, so for four years, I was in Mia’s head, and she can be a lot. In the best way, I mean, I love her. I think some people get annoyed with her. And, you know, I think in the same way that my husband and my kids, I think, find me kind of annoying and overbearing from time to time. But she does, she is over analytical, she is sarcastic. She is, you know, I just love her so much. But she definitely has a distinct view of the world. And she thinks she knows so much. And it is so satisfying when she finds out that, you know, maybe she didn’t know everything the way that she thinks she does. You know?

This also, I mean, it’s so much tighter family unit. I mean, partially, yes, the book is set during the early days of lockdown so that sort of determines some of the setting and some of the interaction and some of the limitations on the characters, which from a plot standpoint is great. It’s really smart. I know, you started this right after Miracle Creek, but I’m wondering too, like, when did you make that shift from this really the seven POVs down to one really tightly knit family? I mean, that’s a whole different trajectory for the story.

Yeah, it was really important to me that Happiness Falls be different from Creek. I started writing in my 40s, I don’t have an MFA. I really want to learn; I want to grow. And it was important to me from a writing craft perspective, that the novels be different that they explore different issues. And of course, I’m obsessed, you know, personally about different things. So I’m sure you’re gonna see, you know, nuggets of the same things and all of my novels probably, you know, where’s that one? I was seven POVs. I wanted this to be one because it is a challenge. It’s really fun and in a way easy to kind of sort of finish a scene in one POV and go, Okay, well, I’m getting a little bored, let’s move to something else completely different and see what somebody else is up to. And especially in this story, which is a missing persons story, where one of the points that I wanted to make and explore was the idea that missing persons stories inherently, are so frustrating for the people who are going through them because you don’t know anything. It just seemed like the perfect way to demonstrate that is by staying in one person’s head, so that the reader kind of experiences that same frustration too.

I know I said, this is the top of the show, but I love the idea that you’re blowing up all of these tropes in Happiness Falls, there’s so many things, especially when it comes to a missing person’s story, right, the thing that’s sort of keeping us glued to this family as they go through, obviously, a traumatic event. But at the same time, you know, we’ve got this narrator who thinks she knows everything, we’ve got her brother who’s just concerned about the people, we’ve got Eugene, where we don’t really know what Eugene is thinking. We don’t necessarily know what mom is thinking. And we certainly don’t know what missing dad is thinking. But the way you handle secrets, the conversations that Mia and John have, like, we have to protect mom, we don’t know if they find out some stuff about their dad before their mom does, right? And their whole idea is, well, you know, we can’t, we can’t. And at some point, the twins actually have a little bit of a fight about whether or not it’s disrespectful to their mom to keep their dad’s secrets. And I think that’s such an interesting way to phrase it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where it’s been described as secret keeping as disrespectful to someone. And I just I want to pick that apart for a second with you. Because I think it’s a great idea. And I think it’s really good and smart for these characters. Exactly what they would do. So can we just talk about secrets for a second?

Yeah, absolutely. And also gender tropes in keeping secrets, because that’s the thing is that, and you talked about this before, how John is sort of the more sensitive, emotionally caring type. And Mia’s the sort of, data driven, you know, analytical type. And in this context, I think that, you know, Mia’s pointing out is that, Hey, John, you are trying to protect mom, by you know, sort of keeping something that about dad that you think is going to hurt her feelings that she didn’t know about before. And the thing is, is that, you know, and she points out to him, that’s kind of paternalistic. And she uses that word specifically to, because she knows he doesn’t like to be accused of being paternalistic, because he thinks of himself as a feminist. And so she does that kind of to goad him. But it’s true also is that he’s, what he’s trying to do is to protect her and even though that is a noble thing, I think, you know, for kids to do, and for us to do with any people that we love. I do think that in the context of, you know, hey, dad is missing, we need to figure out everything we can, you can’t be used making those types of judgments, you just have to sort of, you know, say the willingness to sort of try to discover the truth has to trump everything else, including emotional sensitivities, especially for your own mom, because you’re the kid, you know, and Mia says she gets our mom gets to make decisions like that about us, not you or me, toward her, you know.

And again, John means well, he really does, but it’s so patronizing. It’s so patronizing.

Absolutely. And that’s the thing is that and, and I think that’s what makes some of these, you know, suspense filled novels and stories sometimes frustrating, is sometimes you do see these characters, and you can sort of see, yeah, I can see why they’re keeping these secrets. But you do want to kind of like reach through the screen and bonk them over the head, right? And be like, come on, talk to each other. If only you would tell each other everything, you know, you could figure this out in like two seconds. Come on.

Yeah. Now, which brings me back to Eugene because, again, obviously, we’re not in Eugene’s head. And there’s this idea to that if you’re nonverbal and when I say there’s this, I mean, just sort of floating around larger. But if you’re nonverbal, you’re not smart. Like straight up, you’re just not smart, but somehow being able to communicate verbally is a sign of intelligence, and it’s a great metaphor for living life in translation, right? Like you came to the States when you were 11. And Korean was your first language, and you actually learn to understand English before you were really comfortable speaking it, which is not shocking at all. I mean, my Chinese— not good, my Japanese, passable-ish, but like my Chinese is appalling and no, seriously. But it’s like I lose my ability to communicate. And it’s really my eyes are getting big just thinking about it. It’s so unpleasant. And you know, of course I can live through on English, like many people do in Asia, but it’s very frustrating to know that my Chinese is not good. And that my Japanese is, you know, passable.

And there’s an embarrassment to that, right? A language that you feel like you should speak or even want. Even the day after I came to the US, there was a really good reason why I couldn’t speak English, I still felt ashamed at not being able to speak this language and not being able to communicate. Because we have this deep understanding and assumption in our society. I think all of us that oral fluency equals intelligence. It’s just kind of all around us, and it doesn’t matter. You know, it doesn’t really matter why you’re not orally fluent, you know, in your oral communication. It could be because yeah, like, I didn’t speak English, because I’m not a native speaker. And I had just come to the US, it didn’t matter. I still felt stupid. And once I learned English, enough to understand it, but people still thought that I couldn’t speak it. I heard people talking about me in front of me. And I figured out that yeah, that is what they think they think, yeah, it’s kind of, you know, it’s kind of a, she’s not all that smart. And I think that because we equate oral fluency with intelligence. That’s something that really had a traumatic impact on me, especially since I experienced this at, you know, in middle school, when I was 11, which is like the worst time to anything emotionally traumatic, right. And, you know, it’s now been 40 years, I’m over 50 years old. And I still feel this like burn of shame, you know, when I think back to that time, and so when Eugene, who is this 14 year old character, who is the only one who might know what happened to dad, because he was with him, when he went missing, he comes home alone and he has blood under his nails, and on his shirt and things like that. And the family desperately wants to speak to him. But they can’t, that frustration is just so huge. And you know, and the thing about people like Eugene is that they have been experiencing this their entire lives. Unlike me, you know, I mean, it was frustrating for me, but I knew that I was going to learn English, eventually, I knew that it was going to be a temporary thing. And I still had an outlet in Korean, right? Whereas somebody like Eugene, they don’t have an outlet at all, and people are assuming that he can’t understand and if you can understand, and you have words inside of you, so therefore you’re not nonverbal. Actually, you’re just non speaking, just don’t have that spoken outlet for your words and ideas and thoughts. The trauma of that is just huge. I work with non-speakers in real life. I volunteer and I teach creative writing this summer, I’m teaching three classes, one in person and 2 zoom and it is unbelievable, how just the words that are coming out of them, using these, you know, letter boards that are held up in front of them, and they are using their fingers to point to letters one by one and it sounds slow and it is and it’s, you know, I can’t even imagine the patience that it takes for them. Because these are their ideas that they’re trying to communicate and the frustration of that. But when they come out, it’s almost like because they’ve had all these words inside of their heads for so long and they’ve been kind of editing them in their heads. They come out in this beautiful, like, wonderful paragraph, and it’s just unbelievable to watch. So I really wanted to try to capture that both of frustration and you know, and just making the point that I hope that people can read and try to understand that there are people like this and that we need to not assume just because somebody can’t speak fluently, that they’re not intelligent. We do that too often with, you know, people who stutter, with people who speak with accents, all of that.

One of the things I really appreciate, too, about Happiness Falls beyond the blowing up of the tropes, which is really possibly my favorite thing about this, like, the sibling relationship is really important. And Mia and John, obviously, they have that twin connection, but they love their little brother. They really, really love their little brother. And yeah, Eugene’s complicated. And also, can you imagine being a 14-year-old who can’t? Like 14 is hard enough, and then you can’t actually, you know, fight with your siblings the way you would like to? I mean, I feel for him, I really do. But it’s a great sibling relationship. And it’s really, there’s a lot of nuance to it. And again, Mia and John mean, really well, but yeah, they’re not in Eugene’s head, they think that they are.

They really, really do. Because again, you know, they know everything. Because they’re 20- and 20-year-olds, I’m sorry, I have a 20 year old and a 21 year old, and a 14 year old, all boys. And so I see this dynamic play out all the time. And it is sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes wonderful. It’s just a mix of all of these things. And I’m an only child, and my husband is an only child. And so I think I’ve always been fascinated by sibling relationships. And I have cousins very close to me who I was close to in Korea. And then they moved to the US to the Baltimore area same as same as my family. About a year after we did so we’ve no, so we’re pretty close. And they’re twins. And I was I’ve always been jealous of that relationship. I always wanted siblings So I’ve been kind of fascinated by and obsessed with sibling relationships for as long as I can remember. And you know, and watching my kids, it’s funny because I’m their mom. So of course, you know, I’m involved. But I also find the relationship so interesting. So I sort of find myself sort of, you know, observing in an almost an analytical way, as well as you know, being their mom. So it’s been really, really interesting to write about, and sort of put in there some of the things that I see with my own kids. And of course, it’s exacerbated by the fact that John and Mia are both you know, labeled gifted, right? They are very precocious. They are very both very verbal. Even though Mia calls John relatively monosyllabic. But then Eugene, and they just have such a love for him. And they feel so much responsibility for him because something did happen when their mom was pregnant with Eugene a prank gone wrong and they feel responsible. They both do. And I think that, you know, no matter what you tell your kids about, you know, that’s not actually your fault, because and you can make all these logic-based arguments. You know, they feel the way they feel. And so I love that they have that protectiveness toward Eugene, but I also love that Eugene is kind of like, hey, you know, I’m my own person. And kind of rebelling against that a little bit, too. And so I love that dynamic.

Yeah. And I’m hoping too, it helps bring a little different perspective, to Eugene’s situation, because the siblings are just like, yeah, he’s Eugene. And yeah, there’s stuff that we have to deal with. But they have, there’s a whole language in the family, and a whole set of skills and a whole set of things that you do to help you gene, get through the world as Eugene. But there’s a moment to in the book where Mia says, Hey, listen, you know, don’t we have a responsibility, and I’m going to use the word disabled. And there’s lots of conversation happening around that word, but I’m using that word very specifically, because it’s also the language that you use in the book, but that she says, Hey, listen, you know, why is that such a conflict? And I’m paraphrasing or poorly, but why is it such a complicated idea? If you can do away with a disability? Why wouldn’t you? And, you know, this is a conversation we’re going to be having more and more of, as time goes on, as communities continue to find their voices, which we’re finding, you know, the further we go, but I do want to have that conversation with you. And one of the reasons I’m thinking about it, too, is True Biz is this novel by Sara Novic, which you and I were talking about before we started taping, I love this book. I love this book. I love this book, and it’s set at a school for the deaf. And you know, it’s illustrated with ASL slang, I learned so much reading that novel and I love those kids and it is such a punk rock novel, but again, you know, Deaf is a culture. And we as a community, and in this society for years, we described a culture as being a disability. And, you know, I think we’re sort of at the pivot point here for communities like Eugene’s, whether it’s Angelmans or autism or what have you. And I just I feel like we need to, as a start having this conversation, but I think you’re kicking it off with Happiness Falls.

Thank you, I mean, that would be a huge, you know, both responsibility and honor, my oldest child actually was born deaf in one ear. So he has something called unilateral auditory neuropathy. So this is something that I thought about a lot, and that we explored a lot. And all three of my kids had various ailments, medical ailments, that were kind of medical mysteries as babies, they’re all fine now. So this is something that I’ve sort of been thinking about and kind of been obsessed with, you know, for, you know, the last 20 years plus, something like that. And I think especially for Eugene, here, it’s such an interesting thing to think about, because the Angelman syndrome, what he has, is a genetic disorder. So scientists are experimenting with, you know, replacing the missing allele or the broken allele or whatever, in order to try to come up with a genetic quote, unquote, fix for that. And so there are, you know, studies and things like that, that people are excited about. And what really was so striking to me was that I was researching this, and I read some discussions about happiness, and that were related to this, which I thought were so interesting, because people were saying, Well, wait a minute. So Angelman syndrome, like I talked about before, is characterized by kids who present as happy as they, they smile a lot, they laugh a lot. And I just thought it was so interesting that people were saying, so since these kids are happy, why would we want to fix that quote, unquote, fix that? Why would we want to correct that, because think about how many kids are, you know, who are so called, normal kids, so called typical kids are miserable, they are in high school, you know, Eugene’s age, they are stressed out, they are depressed. So if we have people who have this, you know, so called disability, but they seem perfectly happy and even happier than, you know, people like Mia and John, right. So why would we want to do anything to tamper with that? And so that was such a fascinating discussion to me. And I think that’s really what sets the parents especially the father in this novel thinking about happiness? And should we try to manipulate happiness? Can we manipulate happiness? Does an outward appearance of happiness, like smiling, and, you know, laughing necessarily mean that he is happy? And even if there’s micro level of happiness, like a hedonistic, you know, like, if you could just eat bonbons all day and watch TV, you might be happy, but is that the kind of life that you want to have, you know, is that like, you know, macro, like Aristotelian kind of happiness? Is that the kind of life that you would want for your own child? So then you start thinking about all of these different levels of happiness objective versus subjective and that’s where sort of everything blew up and those two issues the voice fluency issue, and the happiness issue kind of emerged for me and came together I actually have a Venn diagram I’m looking at on my wall where I have you know, the dad is missing a circle and then the Venn diagram of and then a voice balloon and C equals you know, intelligence circle, and then the relativity of happiness circle, so and where they all come together in the middle is the end.

So what does happiness mean for you, as Angie Kim, not necessarily Angie Kim novelist or Angie Kim mom or Angie can entrepreneur, former lawyer, but Angie Kim person because you know, all of those pieces or parts of you, right

That is such a difficult… No, but also an important one, right? I mean, and I feel like happiness is something that I’ve been grappling with. And again, it goes back to my experience as an immigrant as pretty much everything In my life does, because when I think back to my life in Korea, we were so poor, we were living in one, my parents and I so three of us were living in one room of, you know, somebody else’s house, we had no running water, we, I don’t think we had electricity, you know, we didn’t have a kitchen, everything was outside, we didn’t have you know, we had a water pump outside, and we had outhouses, we didn’t, you know, we went to the public bath whenever we could afford it, that type of thing. But I remember being happy. I just remember just sort of, simple, you know, things of childhood, and being with my mom every day, who was a stay at home mom, and, you know, having dinner with my dad every night and you know, rolling out the sleeping mats every night, and you know, all sleeping in the same room. And then when we found out that we were going to be moving to the US, I remember everyone being like, it’s like you won the lottery, you know, and I was told that I should be so happy. And I was I was so excited. But then we got here. And we did have like all the objective markers of happiness, it was such a better life, objectively, we were in this beautiful house, in the suburbs of Baltimore, I had my own bedroom for the first time, I had bathroom, multiple bathrooms, you know, microwaves, color TVs, which I had never seen, refrigerators, all these things that were wondrous things, and I did win the lottery. But my parents, you know, bought a store and not bought, they were working at a store and in downtown Baltimore, and they were working really, really long hours. So they were basically sleeping in the cupboard in the back, and I never saw them. And I couldn’t speak English, like we talked about. So I didn’t have any friends, I felt, you know, completely stupid, I lost my sense of confidence, competence, everything. And it really made me start thinking about sort of should versus actually is and the relativity of happiness, because I kept on telling myself, I should be happy, I should be happy. This is so great. This is so great. Like, my life is so much better now. But then not really believing it right? Like trying to like really convince myself of that. And so I feel like that is something that I’ve been kind of obsessed with. And I majored in philosophy. And, and so and where I went to undergrad, Stanford of course, you know, has a great psychology program too. And they’re kind of next to each other. So taking some of the psychology of, you know, Philosophy of Psychology and vice versa, types of classes, and thinking a lot about happiness, which a lot of people do these days, and thinking about the science of happiness and experiments and what it means to truly be happy. I think that to me, it really is just not wanting what you don’t have, which is hard for us in, in America, right? Especially we’re so ambition driven, always wanting the next thing. And I think I have that kind of personality. So I’m always trying to tell myself that. And that’s what the dad’s happiness quotient theory, which Mia discovers is kind of all about is, is you know, measuring happiness, not as an end, in itself, not an absolute that you can measure, but a relative thing relative to your expectations relative to what you expect, what you want, what your baseline is of your life, how you consider the baseline of your life. And so it’s always that comparison. So the less you want, the more happy you are. But then, of course, that’s kind of, you know, anti advancement, societal advancement, right, so, so there’s all these things that sort of come into play. And I think that’s where the interplay of the dad’s thoughts about happiness and Nia who was very ambitious and very driven, and her critique of that was so fun to write and, you know, to to let those characters kind of have at it as far as those two sides of the debate are concerned.

Okay, so before I let you go, I know there was one other thing that makes you happy. And that was Dennis Lehane’s, Mystic River and using it to teach yourself how to write a novel and I love this story. And I would be remiss if we didn’t bring it in to the happiness conversation because you reverse engineered a debut novel that got a lot of attention and you don’t have an MFA. You are doing a lot of other stuff on the side as you figure it out. well, essentially, you taught yourself how to write a novel. And you use Dennis Lehane’s, Mystic River, and I think it’s going to surprise some people to know that that’s the book that helped you create Miracle Creek.

Absolutely. I love that you brought this up. I really, really love it. And you of course, see the parallels in the title right, mystic? So I don’t have an MFA. And I did start with respect to creative writing, I started with writing short stories and essays and publishing them in, you know, tiny literary magazines and things like that. And when I set out to write a novel, I sort of thought, Okay, I’m gonna write something. And I knew there was going to be this incident. And I knew that I wanted to use the mystery, almost like a container, almost as a Trojan horse, to sort of bring in other people’s lives, and explore things that had happened in their past and how they intersect with their current lives. And, and also just tried to make it really fun and entertaining and page turning. And so yeah, one of my favorite novels is MysticRiver by Dennis Lehane. And I went through that book page by page. And I outlined it. And so every single scene in that book I outlined whose POV it is, how long it is, what gets revealed in that. And so I have this, like, you know, six page outline of it. And I know how many POV characters there are, and how many pages each POV character gets, like, for example, one character has, like slightly over 50%, one has, like 2%. And then there’s even an omission, two paragraphs, you know, things like that. And I tried to look through and see how he made this novel happen. And I did this with some other novels too, his wasn’t the only one but he’s definitely the most influential and, and also the voices to it, just the intimacy and the raw honesty of some of the characters, voices, and how different they are from each other. That was really important to me that for a novel with seven POV voices that they be different, and they be distinct. I don’t like when I see multiple POV novels, and all the characters sound the same. So yeah, I put those together. And I tried to emulate it. And I tried to learn from it. And in fact, I sort of thought that Miracle Creek was not going to be a real published novel, I thought it was kind of my practice novel that I would, I’m actually looking right over my computer screen, I’m in my writing closet. And right over that I have a sign that’s hanging up that says, this is not a novel. I have that hung up. And I had hung that up to remind myself, it’s okay that I have seven POV voices, it’s okay that I’m writing kind of a mystery, and I have no idea who set the fire. And it’s okay, because this is not a novel. This is just my practice, you know, and, and it was funny because I kept this up. Because it’s, I think it’s a good reminder to myself that, you know, to just kind of not be afraid of writing, I get a lot of, you know, that kind of tendency, because I’m such a perfectionist. And I remember after I started writing Happiness Falls, my husband came into, he was like, telling me something and he came in or maybe he was bringing my morning coffee, which he does every morning, which is so nice. And he looked at my sign that said, this is not a novel and he said, I hate to tell you this honey, but this is novel that you’re working on. Because you have a contract with Hogarth, and you have an editor, like, you know, waiting for it. So it is a novel, it has to be a novel. And I was like that’s a really, really good point. And so I actually put above it, and I wrote in in red ink. I’m looking at it right now where it says this is not a I put a little like marker and I put on Missing Person novel, because I wanted to remind myself, this is not a missing person novel in the sense that my character Mia, who this is not a fun novel for her. This isn’t this is real life. And you know, and I wantthis to reflect that. And including the messy ending and everything else. I don’t want it to be what we think a missing persons story should be. This is a missing person. This is real life for Mia, whose perspective I’m writing. And so I thought that was appropriate. And so I still have that up.

I think that’s awesome. I think it’s very funny. Why do you write?

Why do I write. I write to work out what I think I write to find out what I think about things that I don’t know. I think things that are really, really easy that I you ask me a story, you know, a question I can answer easily. I am probably not very interested in writing that, I write about, like when you asked me What does happiness mean to you? And like? Well, that’s a really good question. I spent four years writing a novel to try to figure that out for myself, right. And I also wrote this novel, because I didn’t know what happened to the dad. I didn’t know until I got to that part of the ending. And so it was a way to find out, you know, and to discover. And so I think, yeah, I think that’s why right to figure out what I think about things and to explore ideas that are fascinating to me, and that I find myself thinking about even when I’m doing other things.

Yeah, I really am looking forward to having readers experience Happiness Falls, because that’s the best way to describe this book. You’re experiencing it right along with me and John, mum and dad and certainly Eugene, but I’m going to leave that for book club. Anyway. So Angie Kim, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over and really book club, telling him we will do all of the spoilers, we will do all of the things that we danced around in this conversation and you can find that information on bn.com

I’m so excited to thank you so much Miwa for having me. I can’t wait to have that discussion. Because this was hard because….

And we’re leaving so much out.

I have to be careful as I’m like answering when we like wait now I can’t say that. So this it’s gonna be such a pleasure to do the book club discussion. And so I hope everyone listening listens in for that. Thank you so much. I can’t wait for that discussion.

Same, I can’t wait either. See you soon.

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer producer and host of Poured Over and John Manuel Arias has written an amazing novel. And I’m so looking forward to this conversation Where There Was Fire is about to come out. And it is so good. But I’m going to ask John to introduce himself. And the book because it really, I’m so excited about this book.

John Manuel Arias

Thank you so much. I am so excited. I’m so humbled and grateful to be here. My name is John Manuel Arias. For those who don’t know me, my book Where There Was Fire is coming out August 29th 2023. In case the time has already passed, it’s about a 1960s, Costa Rican American fruit company that is in the middle of a massive cover up. And one night, a banana plantation burns to the ground. And with that burning plantation, and those ashes goes the future of a family of Costa Rican women. So 30 years later, there is left a matriarch and her daughter who are estranged, and during a freak hurricane, they have to reconnect in order to build a future together.

I love the way you write about the terrain and the weather. And the women. They’re really, they’re so great. So much happens in this book, we are going to stay spoiler free, because this is airing on pub day. We’re going to keep a lot of good stuff to ourselves, we’re going to talk big sort of themes and ideas, because reading this book was such a pleasure between the language and the characters. And also, frankly, the history and the big political ideas. You’re hiding all these big political ideas in a domestic drama. And I love that. I love it when novelist do that, because we need the context, right? Like we need the context. And I think there are a lot of folks who maybe don’t know, America’s history in Central America, let alone Costa Rica. So I was pretty excited when I realized what you were doing and where you are doing it. But can we talk about starting the book in 68? I mean, that was a pretty big year around the world.

JMA

Yes, absolutely. Very, super deliberate. This book, let’s say all books start with the first person who tells you stories. And the first person to tell me stories is my grandmother. And you know, she would have these little inventive tales. But when I was older, I became more interested in my family history. And so that seems storytelling that she had done. For me when I was a child, she gave our family history. And one of the most interesting things was that my grandparents were in DC during the riots, the MLK riots when he was assassinated. Yeah, they actually drove from southeast DC to northwest to essentially save one of their friends. And so the participation of, you know, a Costa Rican family in American history, in a moment of American history. 1968 has always been like this year for me. And so DC was on fire that night. And also, in this book, this Costa Rican neighborhood and plantation are on fire. So I’m always looking for parallels and the 1960s is just so rich anyway, it is, I mean, I also love Madmen, so that I do think it is just so good. It is just upheaval and revolution and ideas, the old world and sort of the new world at the time clashing, which created this incredible, and also the moon, moon landing, we love a moon landing, the moon is very prominent in the book. And there were just new frontiers and just new ideas, and it was a fun place to start.

And then you roll us into the 90s, you roll us into 1995. And partially, it feels like a technical, perfect 30, you know, 30-year generation kind of thing. But at the same time, no cell phones, no computers, you’re still in a moment where serendipity is possible, where you have to really work to uncover information, right? You need things on paper. It’s actually something that Celeste Ng does really well, in Little Fires Everywhere is set in a similar timeframe to right, you can’t just Google an image, where you have to physically go somewhere, you have to talk to someone. And I do I love that, because it helps the story unfold in a way that feels very intimate. And it feels like I’m just listening to someone tell me a story about this family. And these women, I want to keep coming back to these women. So you start with your own experience, you start with these big ideas about ‘68. And, and what have you. But which of the women showed up first?

JMA

It was I mean, the first sort of scene in the novel, which is still there came to me like very late high school, and it was about a woman whose husband has yet to come home. And when he does come home, there is tragedy. And eventually, the woman took on the form of my grandmother. And the man took on the form of my grandfather. And so you know, my grandmother is always very present in my life. I do adore her. Everyone in my family knows that I love her most and everyone is fine with that. There’s no changing it. But actually something very interesting is that I had to work super hard to separate her from the character of Teresa. And because they were living parallel lives, right, so a similar family history, similar character study, let’s say, but I had to separate them in order to put the character what she needed to be put through and let her make her own decisions independently of what my grandmother would have done. But loving her nonetheless.

You lived in Costa Rica for four years.

JMA

I did

Writing this book.

JMA

I did famously well, the funny thing is, is that I moved to Costa Rica to finish the book, right? But like anybody who says that they’re gonna finish a novel, they don’t finish a novel, I did not finish the book at all. I didn’t finish the book until actually I moved back to the US in 2017. And I think the reason that I could was because my father had died. And so I was writing about, I was trying to write about a very sort of shaking, foundational shaking and intense thing that isintimate death. And I couldn’t unlock it.

Because I had not experienced that level of death before that intensity of death before. And that came when my father died and it all came pouring out. Because I could finally approach it sort of authentically because you can read on the page, often when writers are sort of reaching, but when you experience something to that level, I think it came through also The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat shout out very much helped me write, fabulous.

yeah If you’re going to do the whole death grief cycle, she is absolutely someone you want to have walked through the experience of writing that family story. We’ve got all of these sort of poetic and intellectual ideas about time and space. And there’s some magic realism, which is great, right? And there’s some ghosts.

JMA

Ghosts are fun, but I honestly hate them. So they’re very annoying. When I lived with my grandmother, there were also many ghosts in the house. And so you hear them at night, or you see them flash across, like, you know, those old convex television screens that old people have in their houses. You see them flash across. There’s so terrifying at night. They’re like, they just show everything.

Well, there’s that but they’re great storytelling. Oh, they’re great storytellers. And honestly, you do need them in Where There Was Fire. I felt like all of the bits of magic realism just fit. And you know, there’s often conversation about who gets to write in the style, what it is what it means. I mean, certainly, Garcia Marquez is the probably the one of the first names that we all think of when you hear the phrase you did grow up in the States. I mean, you grew up in DC, right? I mean, you’re still an American kid. You don’t lose the Central American parts. Your mother’s also not Costa Rican, correct.

JMA

She’s Uruguayan.

But at the same time, I mean, you’re still a kid from DC.

JMA

Shout out to DC

I mean, props. But you understand why I’m bringing this up that? I mean? Yeah, of course. Did you know this was always going to be a piece of it? Because when it’s done well, it is glorious. And then sometimes it’s not.

JMA

Yeah, we spent almost every summer in Costa Rica. And my grandparents actually raised me the first five years of my life, my parents were working so much that I would live with my grandparents or spend most of my time with them. And the connection to Costa Rica itself was never, in any danger of American intervention, right to Uruguay, I don’t have a connection because my mother left that just hit the dictatorship in the 80s. And she never looked back. So that vacuum, right, left by my literal maternal line was filled with the maternal line of my father, if that makes sense. Because the streak was never lost. It was never separated from me. My father was very proud. My family’s very proud. So you know, with immigrant kids or like, first gen kids, the United States stops at the portal of the door, when you walk into the house, you’re back in the country of your origin, but you were

But you were bilingual, from jump, right?

JMA

So it’s really funny, not haha, funny, but my parents refused to teach my sister and I Spanish, because they suffered so much with the racism. And so my mother especially was incredibly triggered. And she said that my children will not have an accent, they will not go through what I went through. So with kids, we’re sponges, so we understand everything, but we had our tongues sort of withheld from us. And so once I became old enough to, like, wrestle my identity, in that way, I began to speak Spanish. And then when I moved to Costa Rica after college, you know, you have to master a language if you’re going to ask for milk at the corner store somewhere. And so here we are. And I talked to my grandma every other day, and she only speaks Spanish. And so I’ve never, I haven’t lost it since.

That’s very cool, the American footprint in Central America, and we’ll stick to banana plantations for the purposes of this conversation. There are a lot of good books that you can read, however, that we highly recommend. I’m going to drop probably a few in the show notes, at least I think our role there is not necessarily something that’s taught until you get to college and choose to chase it. It’s not something that we talk about at younger levels. And it’s I still think it’s information that younger kids can process because, yeah, you know, if we can talk about America’s footprint in Asia, or America’s footprint in Europe, after World War Two, I think we can talk about America’s footprint in Central America, and we don’t seem to be rushing to do that even now. But for you, I mean, you grow up sort of knowing this, but not knowing it. So how do you write about a thing that is both intimate and not and is not necessarily immediately accessible to you.

JMA

I did not grow up knowing about the fruit companies, I ate those Chiquita bananas, fine. You know what I mean?

I do.

JMA

But I did Latin American studies as my degree, along with English literature. And of course, I’m writing novels about Latin America. So I am one of the only people putting their English degrees to use. When you do Latin American Studies in college, one of the first things that they teach you is that the CIA and the coup d’états that the United Fruit Company today, Chiquita Banana, orchestrated in 1954, in Guatemala and in other countries in other years, so learning just that information radicalizes you to the core. And so that’s what it did to me, it radicalized me to the core. And the banana is such a fascinating fruit. It has such a deep rooted history in the United States, as much as it does in Latin America, and the marketing of the banana. And, you know, sometimes you read about the banana, and it seems like it has its own mind. And there’s this great book called The Botany of Desire, right, where plants and fruit they’re actually manipulating us into propagating them. And the banana kind of sometimes seems really insidious in that way. But the agent would say, of the banana are the Americans is the United States and corporations and capitalism, that really creeped its way and, and funny enough, Costa Rica is the first banana Republic.

I almost fell off my chair when I read that line in the novel, because, I mean, obviously, we still have a clothing company that goes by that name.

JMA

Oh, I know, I should wear that for my book launch. I should wear Banana Republic.

I mean, it’s also a phrase that obviously, you know, third world, there’s so many ways that the language that we use to talk about places like Costa Rica and its experience of the world and American, the language needs to change. It hasn’t. It’s been so limited for so long. So we’ve got these women. And we’ve got the setting. And you’ve got the landscape and the heat and the jungle, and it’s just, it is otherworldly, almost. And the ghosts, I get it. They’re kind of a pain, but they’re great to read. There’s a subplot. And one of the characters is a counselor in a fertility clinic. And there’s a connection, obviously, to corporate decisions that were made at the banana plantation. And it all sort of comes together. And I’m not that’s, that’s as far as I’m willing together. But this idea of propagation right as a metaphor. And colorism and how the two come together and who gets to take their place in the world and how you left nothing out. So when did you know that was going to be a piece of this novel? Because it’s, again, a little unexpected, really smart, great way to talk about ideas that are sort of floating around in the ether now, but plant them back in a period of time where they would have been really novel. Their characters experience,

JMA

I guess, I don’t want to give too much away. But let’s talk historically, yes. This standard Fruit Company, today known as Dole, used a pesticide throughout the 60s. And its name was Nemagon and Dow who was producing it came to Dole and said, this pesticide that you are using is causing sterility in mammals. And we believe it is causing the same in men on your banana plantations. And so what Dole did was they sued Dow for everything that they had. So for another decade, the nemagon was coming in by the ton. And there is a conversation in Central America and Nicaragua, and Costa Rica about nemagon, and about the after effects have never gone. But then nemagon takes on a very masculine analysis, because the at the forefront are 30,000 men who were sterilized. However, there were women affected by nemagon, who miscarried more times than they could count who developed cancer and other conditions that has made them suffer. And there’s actually unequal restitution in Costa Rica for women and men. It’s really interesting. So the government gives restitution to those who are unable to have children after the year, I believe 1980. And so that benefits the men because they can prove that they don’t have the children. However, the women, they could have had 11 miscarriages before 1979. But since they have a baby born in 1981, they don’t have right the money. They don’t have right to restitution by the government. And, you know, is mind boggling how even justice is gendered? And it drove me crazy. And so, you know, the counselor, the character of a leader, do deals with infertility, and deals with the aftereffects, both of nemagon and her own life and her own decisions after that, right? Yeah, a lot of this book came from rage. Hopefully it doesn’t, you know, I’ve always wanted the book to read very beautiful, but also very angry.

I don’t think we need to separate the two. And the women, whether it’s Teresa or her neighbor, Christina, who’s also very different or her daughters, certainly Carmen and there and the three Maria’s I love them.

JMA

They’re my favorites.

No, no, we won’t, we won’t, we won’t tell them. But they’re great. Anger is a thing they have a hard time with. And rage is really hard for them. And if I sound a little elliptical, it’s because I’m trying not to give anything with such a part of so many characters journey in this book that they have to find the language they have to find their own understanding of what that is. And it seems to me to, and certainly this is not limited to Costa Rica in any way. But it’s partially generational. It’s partially cultural, that women are not supposed to be angry. It’s just rude. And that’s part of why I love this book so much that because they’re given their rage. And we sort of get to muddle through it with them, because there’s some moments where they’re really trying to figure out what’s going on. And it’s not because there’s a cane tip. But that they really are genuinely trying to work it through and they don’t have context. Like if you look at Teresa, and certainly her mother, her mom is her mom. She has very definite ideas about a lot of things, but she is seriously a product of her environment. And I’m not making excuses for the character. But you can see how you end up with these patterns of behavior that get repeated. But I don’t think the rage over plays its hand at all. I just think it has to be part of who they are. Because they’re figuring out what this world is and what their places in it. And we just don’t let women to that.

I mean, not to not to this level of no, I’m really mad. I’m really mad. This is unacceptable. I’m really mad. But I suspect you had a lot of fun writing this book, the way the prose flows on the page. Even if you’re angry, even if you’re taking on, you know, neocolonialism and American imperialism, again, chemical poisonings and all this, there seems to be a lot of joy in this book.

JMA

I love writing, writing is so much fun. And you know, I’m originally a poet. So the musicality of language, and I like to tackle a book at a cellular level. So if the sentences are good, then the paragraphs will be good. And you just build and build and build. So if you get the joy in every sound, as you read it back, you read it in your head, you give a good metaphor, or a simile. You can impart that joy. And it was I was very angry when I wrote it, but I wanted to have fun with it and have fun with the narration because it’s a heavy book. And if there wasn’t any joy in between the lines, let’s say, then, it would be way too heavy to read. You know, the narrator has a lot of fun with the characters and a lot of fun with criticizing the government and criticizing the systems. Right. You know, it’s a very active narrator and that was useful for such a heavy book and I also got that cue from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and live. She heard narrator and it’s one of my favorite novels. And she just laid out this groundwork of very heavy book, that there’s so much joy and comedy as absurd as it is. And so that was definitely a guiding light.

Shouldn’t our art give us the space to laugh? At the terrible things we’ve done? We shouldn’t be cruel about it. But I think you need that sort of emotional release to be able to say, Oh, this is terrible, this is unacceptable. How do I change it? To me, there’s an underlying sense of hope, when you’re able to laugh at something because it’s like, well, this is horrible. And it might also be because I’m a New Englander. And we laugh at terrible things. But I think it’s just in the programming, you know, it’s not the same. Absolutely, you understand what I’m saying. But it’s like, you have to just sort of be able to process the terrible things and then figure out how to either fix it just destroyed completely. So something else can take its place. I do appreciate a novel that’s going to push me to think. But I, there’s a moment with some wild boars. It’s an incredible image. And you know exactly what I’m talking about, and just the setup around it. And there’s so much tragedy in that moment. And yet, the way you describe these wild boars and what they’re doing, and some of the consequences, and then how someone else responds, it is absurd, because sometimes, tragedy is absurd. You’re walking this very fine line. And I was going to ask you how your poetry and prose feed each other. But you already answered that question. So I do want to get into a little bit of craft talk with you, though, because this is your first novel, you have published quite a lot of poetry. But you haven’t done a chapbook yet, right? It’s all been individual poems.

JMA

It’s all been individual. Yeah.

So at some point, we will probably see a chapbook, a collection, something, I’m sure.

JMA

Most definitely, yeah, I have a poetry collection in the works.

Okay, good. So can we though, talk for a second about how much of the writing of prose for you is in the rewriting and in the collaboration with your editor is pretty great. She’s really wonderful.

JMA

Oh, amazing.

But, you know, here you are sort of living a very solitary life. Working. I mean, a writer’s life is not necessarily in a key, spend a lot of time at a desk, talking to people who don’t exist. But before you send something like this out into the world, I mean, there’s a lot that goes into a novel, and there’s a lot that goes into a debut novel, and I just didn’t any of that process really surprise you. Was there anything that came out of it, where you thought, Oh, I’m glad to know that that’ll make writing the second novel, easy.

JMA

Definitely structuring, learning. I mean, this novel was particularly difficult to structure because I guess it’s the most poetic out of my projects, even though I’ve written tons of poetry. So I describe myself as an associative poet. And that means that not through a narrative through a poem, but I’m jumping from images, I’m jumping through associations. And so that’s where, Where There Was Fire is taking a reader. So I don’t believe in chronological time, you know, I have a fire, I have a hurricane, I have these things that are very clear markers and imagination, from which to jump or reader. And so we’re not, we’re leap, frogging through time through, like, spatial recognition, right. And structuring definitely, is something that I learned with this book, and definitely something that I learned are perfected, and hopefully perfected with my editor. And also Nagi helped quite a bit with my double metaphors or like my mixed metaphors. As a poet, you write 4 metaphors on a page, and it’s completely fine. But when you do it in fiction, it’s just like, No, no.

Really it is actually distracting, it pulls you out. So dialogue is really hard to do. And I will say the dialogue here really swings which I appreciate mixed metaphors and dialogue that intends to be something else but isn’t, pulls me out of the story so fast. I will make, you can tell me that people are flying and that’s fine. If it’s done well, I will hand myself over to narrator But there are technical parts to writing dialogue. There are technical parts to choosing your metaphors where it’s kind of like that record needle on an LP where it’s like just kind of sit up and say, okay. I see what you were trying to do. But I would like to get back to the story, please. And sometimes you can, and just keep going. I also sometimes read around the things that annoy me. I don’t know if there are times where I’ll get to something in a book and be like, Yeah, okay. Which is not necessarily….

JMA

Very generous to keep reading, you know, read a lot of people just put the book down.

Yeah. And that’s fair, too. I mean, I see so many people on social media saying, Well, do I finish it, I finish everything. And like, please don’t forget, if you don’t like it just don’t finish it just, there are so many books in the world, if you are not connecting with something, you know, telling someone that they need 100 pages before it gets really good.

JMA

That’s true, if I’m not liking a book, I stop reading it as a reader. And then I start reading it as a writer. And I say, I see what you’re doing here, right, because I also want to be read that way, you know, I don’t want someone to, to necessarily give up on me. Because writing a book is so hard. It’s such a long time

And it is a long time reading as a bookseller is also really different. It’s partially why I can say things like just put it down and pick up the next thing. I absolutely respect in terms of an author’s heart and soul. And it’s not to diminish that experience for the writer, because there is someone who is going to connect with that book in exactly the way that it was intended, or a brand new readers are going to bring their own experience to any book they read, right? I have no experience with Costa Rica, I have not even been serving in Costa Rica, my experience of Costa Rica is through books, and through people. And at the same time, I feel very connected to your characters, I feel very connected to the context that you’ve given them. I feel super connected to the language, there are a couple of scenes to where it’s almost like you’ve written a play, a miniature play. There’s some exchanges, especially towards the end, there are two women talking to each other. And I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. Again, there’s that sort of back and forth. And it’s very quick. And you can feel it in the sentences. So knowing that you’re thinking on the sentence level, I think shows for me as a reader.

There are people that I’m really hoping come to this book, because there may be someone they love, who’ve written similar things, or maybe there’s things they’ve read that are not quite similar to you. There’s so much pleasure in what you’ve done here. And I think being able to put your characters and context really shouldn’t be overlooked. And because they all have their own voices, and their own arcs. And yet they can’t get free of each other. Did you map them out? I mean, as you’re as you’re sort of chipping away at the sentences, right? You are you call it cellular level, you’re writing at the sentence level, you’re building your characters out of sentences. But is that a parallel track as you’re writing? Or is that I’m gonna get it all out? And then we’re gonna fix it?

JMA

I definitely mapped and I definitely outlines I guess I care most about my writing on the cellular level, right. But I know that I can get lost very quickly on a sentence level. And so I needed that outlining and I needed that character mapping. And I knew a lot of these characters in life. And you know, I love the three Maria’s so much, because they’re based on my three great aunts. And so similar Yes, yes, yes. You know, I always make this joke. I, you know, I wrote a novel about older women. Yeah, because for four years, I lived with my grandmother who was 80 years old at the time, and my three great aunts were all 80 years old at the time. So make the joke that I lived with 300 years of women, and I listened to their stories, and I got to know who they were right. And even in death, they come back to talk, right and back to chat with that character mapping was made a little bit easier because they knew them but also exploring what they could have been in a parallel universe was also super joyous. I knew that there were beats I needed to hit in character arcs. I knew that I needed to give enough exposure in context, one character but needed to take it away to give it another character who was quoting, more important, but reached out some people.

Okay, as a reader, I felt like I had the right number of people. So if that makes you feel any concern at all, I’m sorry, you had to chop people. But at the same time, I found out because it’s true enough depth, and enough breath to follow everyone and well to choose favorites. And there’s some characters who pop in the background for the moments that they need to pop. Like Hector, we have what we need from him in terms of the story. And I like the way you’ve got people sort of rotating around in the background, right? Like, there’s also that American doctor, but I mean, he serves a purpose. But yeah, we do, actually. We do need him for story purposes. And not it’s, I don’t want to suggest that it’s we need this guy twirling his mustache. It’s not that. But we do need it. Do you miss this world? Do you miss these characters?

JMA

I still live in them. I still, you know, this. It was so much of it was based on family history. And I don’t, it’s not that I don’t like to admit it. But I tried to separate myself enough from it, because it is a completely different world. But because everyone looks so much like the other. I am reminded of it constantly. And that’s really joyous. And it was a beautiful book. It was a fun book to write and a beautiful book to write that I really want to leave.

I mean, it’s totally fair. What are some of the other books that you feel that way about? Like, what are some you’ve mentioned, Arundhati Roy has God of Small Things which is incandescent, and great, and, and just one of those books where it’s sort of tattoos itself on you, after you’ve read it. But what are some of the other books and some of the other writers who have made you who you are as a writer?

JMA

we’re going to go back to Edwidge Danticat and The Dew Breaker, The Dew Breaker was such a transformative book, the last, you know, because it can be read as a novel it can be read is a book of short stories. It’s all surrounding this man, that the last story is just so beautiful, and well-paced, and heartbreaking and confusing and even redemptive. It’s, she’s a bananas writer, and I will always appreciate her and her books. I love the book, have you read The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela? It’s fantastic. It’s basically a man who’s in jail and he’s talking to us the reader in first person and saying, I’m innocent. I swear, the reasons why I killed my mom are good. is fascinating. It is a fascinating, you know, I love a good narrator. You give me a good voice and like an empathetic although a really screwed up human voice. I’m there, right? I’m there with you.

I’m the same way voices voice is absolutely the first thing I’m reading for. But for me voice also, I can’t separate out sentences. I really, I need. I can read without great sentences. But I get a lot more pleasure if I’m reading great sentences. That to me is how you build an indelible voice. There are times where certainly you’re reading something where plot has to drive everything. I understand that completely. I can read those books, and I can enjoy them, or I can do whatever I need with them. But yeah, I really like when you get great sentences. It’s so good. I love knowing that you’re reading for boys too, because I just I think you can’t separate them. I think you’re absolutely language and voice just like are why would you want to separate them?

JMA

Because it’s like, you know, we’re not just writing, we’re storytelling. How do people tell stories? Right? How do you and a lot of people learn from their family members? And where are they telling these stories at the kitchen table? Right. And Angie Cruz brought it up when I saw her at her book release for How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water and her Narrator Cara Romero is one of the most fantastic I’ve ever read. She sits right down next to you. And she’s talking to you. And she said that she learned from her grandmother because you know, when you’re when you’re gossiping at your kitchen table, you have to keep you have to keep your listener interested. And how do you do that everyone has their own technique. Right? And for me, keeping the reader going through the sentence level, right, like the minute little currents of sentences and metaphors and all of these things. That is where I found my strength to be in storytelling and what I also most loved and other writers and other books.

We started thinking about the next thing. Okay. Yeah. Conventional wisdom, it’s better to have started the next thing as the current thing is coming out into the world.

JMA

I might admit that book two is done. It depends who’s asking and also who’s listening.

Okay. We’re not going to I’m not going to jinx any of this. But was it faster to write book two? Having done book one? Okay.

JMA

It did take quite a long time. And I hate to admit, no, I don’t hate to admit. But you know, for everyone that is listening who has been on a project for a long time, I’m on year 14 of this project. So from inception to birth, right, it is 14 years. And I made sure that my second book was not taking for 14 years. It took about four.

I’m not gonna push, we can be patient. We can be patient, we can be patient we need we need everyone else, to be able to experience Where There Was Fire the way, well, maybe not entirely the way you did. But certainly the way I got to experience it as a reader, I, honestly, I walked into a cold. I saw the jacket. And I said, Hmm, this is interesting. I didn’t read and I’m working off an ARC, I’m working off of an advanced reader copy. And I didn’t really read a single word, I just started with the first sentence. And then obviously, I went back after I finished, it was a glorious way to read. And I quite often do like to read without, I need a basic idea I need. Sometimes I just need to know who the editor is. And I can just I can go. And it’s a really great way to read. It’s a really and not everyone chooses to read that way. And I understand that completely. I’m okay, before I let you go, did we miss anything? Is there anything you really want to talk about in our elliptical conversation about your debut novel that we haven’t been able to cover? Spoiler free.

JMA

We covered most of the bases and I so much appreciate the opportunity to be on here, but a huge part of the book.And a part of that rage is for someone to put down the last page and hopefully read it again, for a different interpretation of the reading, but also to Google the word Nemagon. I want that so badly. Because I hate how history varies. events, especially when the events are against and subjugating people from the developing world. And especially when those people are my people shining a light with this book was a huge impetus to write it. And so it would kill me if a reader did not finish it and go Hmm, let me let me find out a little bit more.

It takes a lot to be able to write with a point of view, shall we say a slightly? Okay, let’s say an angry point of view. Right. But you do it in such a way. Okay. But here’s the thing. You do it in such a way that the reading experience is fantastic. The reading experience, like, again, we’re putting everything into context. Right? Like, you shouldn’t be we should all be angry. I mean, thalidomide, Agent Orange. I mean, there’s so many pesticides that are some are still in use. I mean, that’s all of us. Right? Like, the hormones. There’s so much. So if you can start a larger conversation with a beautiful book. Why not do it right, then again, I’m a bookseller.

JMA

No, but I mean, I mean, it’s true. You’re right. It’s like a historical and a very political novel, packaged in a family drama.

It’s so satisfying. It is so satisfying. And I cannot wait for readers, not to diminish the men. The men are great too. But the women are really the stand outs.

JMA

Thank you. They were always I was like, I love her. She’s great. They’re gonna love her and the man evil. I’m just like, you know, we, yeah, it’s true. It’s like, making these characters. Definitely empathetic was very important. But when it came to fleshing out a man versus fleshing out a woman. I always went with a woman always did and hopefully you can read it into pages. It’s just, you know.

I could, I could, I could.

JMA

It was just lot of love. And so I had so much love, you know, I even had love for the, for the worst characters. Because I think it’s important for a novelist not to hate any of their characters.

You know that what you just said right there just also reminds me of James McBride’s novels, specifically Deacon King Kong and the most recent one that happened Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. You have to have that empathy even for the people that you’re just like, really you’re back? You. Because if you’re writing about a community, right, which you are, the family is driving the story, but you’re writing about a community and you can’t have contempt for the people you’re writing about. Because otherwise, then we get a polemic, then we get a thing that, honestly, not a lot of people want to read. And if you write with empathy, you get a story that just pardon the metaphor, you get a story that sings. Right? You get sentences that fly, you get characters that you get very attached to even though you know, they’re not real, right? Yeah, they’re real on the page. But it’s your thinking, Oh, I could walk down the street and talk to that person. If it were only for possible.

JMA

Yeah, and I definitely learned that, you know, and I think all writers learn that from Toni Morrison. You know, these characters that she’s writing, they’re so horrendous. Some of them are so horrendous, right, but you’re like, oh, man, I could see. And that comes from the contextualization, which is what I tried to do is that the context has so much to do with who we are. It builds us, we’re within this form that it creates for us. And so sometimes, it’s just like, what else was this person gonna do? What else were they expected to do? Yeah, personal agency. Absolutely. But everything else is working against them. Every single thing. It’s like asking them to jump up a waterfall. And sometimes the current is just going to sweep them away. Right, but why not write about the struggle to get through that current to? Because isn’t that what we’re doing?

Yeah. John Manuel Arias, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, Where There Was Fire is out now.

JMA

Thank you so much. I so much appreciate this opportunity.