This week we are excited to share the first part of our incredible conversation with award-winning author Reyna Grande. Reyna’s body of work such as her celebrated memoirs, The Distance Between us, A Dream Called Home and her debut book of essays Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I can’t Forget, powerfully illuminate the complexities of immigration, family separation, pursuing the American Dream, and the ongoing-exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in this country.
In this first part of our interview Reyna shares what led her to write her first book of essays and what the writing practice can be when one decides to make space for happiness alongside sadness.
The first time I came across Reyna Grande’s work was reading an excerpt of her book Migrant Heart: Essays About Things We Can’t Forget, on Julissa Arce Raya’s newsletter, La Historia Uncovered. The Queen of Misery, tugged at some central part of my being. In this excerpt, she explores whether processing memories through writing might have led to the commodification of her pain as a woman and immigrant writer. She writes, “I ask myself, Have I commodified my suffering? Have I pigeonholed myself as a writer who writes in “the genre of victimhood”? Where is the line between self-reflection and self-exploitation?”
Reading this excerpt shifted something in me as an immigrant woman and writer. I have never shied away from the aesthetics of sad girl prose and stream of consciousness writing, or the heavy excavation of one’s suffering. This work has been my lifeline, as Reyna wrote in this essay, and to be confronted with such a reflection prompted a similar untangling of my own practice.
First, I had to get my hands on every book ever written by The Queen of Misery herself to understand her. I read Reyna’s work ravenously and out of order. I read Migrant Heart in a matter of days, devouring her essays about being an immigrant mother to U.S. born children. I stood in front of the stove frying tortillas for tostadas, crying while holding the book in one hand and tongs in the other reading Eva’s essay, The Storyteller.
I read The Distance Between Us where Reyna captured the voice of herself as a girl so raw, visceral and beautiful. The image of her running across the border with her father and siblings still vividly plays in my mind and as the dark desert night comes into view I try to imagine my own crossing with my mother and brother when I was two years old. Then I read a Dream Called Home and traveled with her to college where I witnessed this great writer growing into herself and writing herself into her Dream Home. As summer in the concrete desert of Phoenix entered its hottest days my kids and I holed up at home with the a/c whirring 24/7 and I worked my way through Reyna’s diverse body of work. I chronicled this journey on instagram sharing pictures of the books I was reading or listening to, with some of my favorite quotes, memes for comedic relief, and to express my emotional reactions to them. A seismic shift began to happen within me as an immigrant. The work of being a writer became even more important to me.
Then one afternoon in June, I met with Reyna over Zoom for an interview to discuss her book after several weeks of being nose deep in her work. I spent a week and a half developing questions and trying to hype myself up for the interview. It would be the first time I interviewed an author by myself. Even when I got the opportunity to speak with Angelica Vanessa Villareal, a literary legend, about her book, Magical Realism, I was a co-interviewer. After Antero’s brief introductions he left the zoom. It was just me, the open doc of questions on my desktop, and The Queen of Misery herself, Reyna Grande.
CHRISTIAN PENA: Hi Reyna, My name is Christián. I’m a writer and the editor for La Cuenta. It is so nice meeting you.
REYNA GRANDE: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s nice to meet you too.
CP: I am so excited to talk to you today, thank you so much for taking the time. I was at your author talk at the ASU museum a few weeks ago and got to hear you discuss your debut book, Migrant Heart. I have been reading your body of work the last few weeks and this book is very different. I love the way you played with style and genre. During that author talk at ASU, you briefly discussed this leap into writing a book of essays for the first time and playing with form and style. I would love to hear more about that process and how this book came to be?
RG: Well thank you so much. I wanted to write another memoir, but I didn’t want to do it like the last two memoirs, which were written in a more traditional and chronological style. I wanted to focus on certain moments in my life. I wanted to explore different topics and different themes without the book feeling disjointed and that led me to personal essays. Every year or so I am asked to contribute an essay to an anthology. And so I already had about ten essays I wrote over the course of a decade and these essays became the basis of the book proposal and it allowed me to think about other themes and topics I wanted to explore. I have always admired essayists and although I felt a bit intimated by attempting to write them, I felt the best way to learn how to write good essays was to just start writing them.
CP: So glad you took that leap! Through your amazing body of work we get to witness your voice in the many phases of your life through memoir and your work of fiction. You have been incredibly vulnerable and honest in your storytelling throughout this work. In the first essay of Migrant Heart, Queen of Misery, you reflect on how writing has been tied to your suffering and what a lifeline that has been for you, but also wrestling with the desire to write with joy. What have you learned about this delicate balance of remaining authentic to your voice, but also being mindful of writing with joy?
RG: I’m thinking about Ocean Vuong, I quote them in the book and I really like that approach that they talk about–embracing both, right. Embracing your joy and your sadness. I mean joy and sadness go together and you don’t have to pick one or the other, you can live in both. And that really resonated with me. I want to embrace that because I do want to stop constantly fixating on my trauma because that’s not healthy, but it’s also unrealistic to constantly feel joyful.
Right now I still tend to lean more into my sadness. So I am working toward finding a balance. And one thing that has really helped me is to write it out. Writing out my emotions. My writing has really helped me to do that because I can process both the joy and the sadness together in this practice.
CP: It’s kind of hard to ignore the emotions that surface while writing. You talk about this process of excavating parts of yourself when you’re writing. It happens sort of organically in this process and I also can’t imagine trying to ignore surfacing emotions.
RG: I was just thinking about this yesterday, where its like…Well, as a writer its good to know that you’re really good at one thing. And what I am really good at is writing about misery. And maybe it’s okay to just embrace that.
CP: I’m a sucker for the work of a sad girl, a queen of misery. I want to read about the emotional landscape of women and women embracing all of their emotions and personally–especially misery. And I really resonated with your essay about trying to stay true to that but also the challenge and desire to move toward a more balanced writing practice where multiple emotions can exist.
RG: Right, yeah. I cannot reject my sadness. It is a part of me. As human beings we tend to fluctuate. There are many downs, but also ups and now I am just trying to avoid having too many downs and invite other emotions.
Propina
We are incredibly grateful for Reyna Grande, for the powerful body of work she has created and for joining us for a conversation on writing and storytelling. If you haven’t already we encourage you to get your copy of Reyna’s debut book of essays Migrant Heart: Essays on Things I can’t Forget.
We’ll see you next week.