Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and currently serves as a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Her voice has been praised as “singular and wise” by Cathy Park Hong. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, which described it as “one of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima is a collection of loosely-connected short stories surrounding a writer and a Devil who said “she could keep her soul to herself.” The writer as she heads to appointments with the USCIS, DMV, and to workshops, where she has to be conscious but also not overly conscious that she was “also an immigrant” from Brazil as the stories she write swerves uncannily with female desire next to demands to “Limpiar” consumes the Americans before assimilation consumes the characters she write. “Like fiction, whether it was real in a literal sense was not the point. Though at least with fiction, everyone was on the same page.”
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening story, “Rapture,” set the reader up for what is to follow? There’s the centrality of the Devil, and a narrator who is a woman, an immigrant, and writer who is grappling with her identity, family, and relationships.
Ananda Lima: “Rapture” initially existed as a single story. But once I realized I wanted to have a meta layer in the book, the layer of the writer writing this story, I very quickly also understood that “Rapture” would be the story that would serve as a basis for the meta frame. Although the majority of the story is set in that Halloween party where the writer meets the devil, it had within it this quality of the narrator looking back (only a small hint of it, with the opening line and some brief reflections in the end). That narrator looking back, the idea that there is a storyteller and there is the story works so well with the meta layer. That story works as an introduction (for the character and for the reader) to the Devil and his relationship with the writer, and it is how I began to love that character of the Devil (I loved spending time with him throughout the book). It’s the interaction with the meta frame sets you up to this porous border between the stories and the writer, it is a story which has heart and fun and opens up to the rest of the book.
TT: You write in one of your stories that what matters in fiction is less that it is the literal truth. What truth or truths do your stories grapple toward?
AL: I think it grapples with many intersecting truths. One of them is the complexity of being a person, and identity being just a part of it, which is a big part, but not the biggest part. When you are a person who is also an immigrant, you are still a person. That means that you are complex and nuanced. You experience awe in art and time as well as having thoughts related to your identity or how you are treated here, how you might be described in the news or what have you. There is so much more to each of us than that. Some other, related truths here are that life, existence, is complex, beautiful and often incredibly difficult and sad at the same time. I feel like there are so many wonderful ways to write out there that are very different, but all beautiful and necessary. I love reading writers who synthesize and thrive at distilling complex truth in a way that is graspable, simple to say. There is good work of that type that can be very helpful and necessary. In my case, I happen to be a writer who works best in the layered complexity, and I am not great at spelling out a truth into something simple and spreadable. I do best embracing complexity, layers, intersections and connections, and working with reverberations, and things that are unsaid as well as what I say. So my truths are there but they are not easily summarizable. I think the way to say them for me is the book itself. I know that that is not a super helpful answer, but it is kind of like looking at a painting: we can write beautiful descriptions and analyses of a painting (which I love reading in their own right). But whatever we say about the painting is not exactly the same as the painting is saying. The painting says it with color and spacing and its whole self. What it says is what it is. I feel the same way about some prose and poetry. I can describe a poem, but the truth I reveal in my description is not exactly the same truth revealed in the poem.
TT: Can you describe the process in writing the collection and putting them together?
AL: Writing this book was so much fun. I was working on a novel and realized it was not as interesting to me as it should be. It was doing okay with beta readers in workshop, it got me into some things. But I was not doing it for me. It was not interesting to me in the right way. So I started writing stories on the side, and in those, I was having a lot of fun. I was doing what I wanted and what was interesting to me. When I had a few of those, I looked at them together and realized they were really working together. They were talking to each other more than other short stories I wrote in the past. Then I came up with the word “craft.” That was it: all the stories had “craft” in one or more of its meanings. They were concerned with writing, the craft of writing, storytelling and the big (sometimes dangerous) narratives that permeate our lives. They also played with the supernatural or with some deviation or play with what is considered real. Once I had that title, I saw it as a book. Soon after, the meta layer came. A lot of the stories were meta, with writers writing or revising. It was meta drilling down into the stories, so it was a fun thing to go meta in the other direction and go above, meta out the stories too. That also allowed me to play a little bit with the conventions of auto-fiction, something I always wanted to do was write fake auto fiction. The meta layer allowed me to play with that and play with poking outside of the book, making little references linking the writer to me, the author, in playful ways. The book is a result of all this play and layering of things I love to think about, things I love to encounter as a reader, things that move me, which I shaped and structured.
TT: Turning to character and character building moving across countries and generations, what are some works that inspire in creating the characters, which also traverses a very bureaucratic worldscape versus a surreal/ imaginative liminal space, as the speaker looks at herself and those around her?
AL: It is hard for me to trace the lianeage directly, but I think there are so many great works made a big impact on me and went into the brewing of the characters and worl in Craft. I will mention a few that come to mind for their atmosphere, characters and worlds that touch on the surreal, liminal or bureaucratic. Some that come to mind are Kafka (various stories), Clarice Lispector (particularly the Hour of the Star), Ben Lerner (10:04), John Keene (Counternarratives), Bulgakov (The Master and Margerita), Machado de Assis (The Alienist and more), Camus (The Stranger), George Saunders (Tenth of December), Oswald de Andrade (The Cannibalist Manifesto), Mário de Andrade (Macunaima), Gremlins 2, the work of Carmen Miranda. A couple of these are referred to in Craft, and others just impacted and what I gravitate towards as a writer. But thee are more (these are just the ones that spring to mind today).
TT: How did you approach the form and points of view in sequencing the stories for the collection?
AL: It was a bit of an intuitive process. There was an emotional arc, a trajectory of how I wanted the reader to feel as they moved through the book. There were also considerations of grounding and preparing the reader. I played with it, and when I arrived at the final order, I knew. I sent it to my editor, who also agreed. There is a build and it ends in a place of beauty, art, and awe, but also mystery with “Hasselblad”.
TT: How was writing Craft the same or different from writing poetry for you?
AL: I think there are a lot of things that I brought from my experience as a poet: a lot of layering and density (saying a lot in a limited space). I also let some of the work to happen in reverberations within the reader, rather than spelling everything out to them. A love of language, including sound, trust in the power of the image. A love of play and structure (and play with structure). Those are some things that are the same. But there are big differences in style and content for me. I think this is not a poetry vs. prose thing in general, but just for me. I know some people who write both who are more in the middle: they might write flash fiction and prose poems that are closer to each other. That is not the case for me: in poetry I tend to write very short lines. I write “skinny” poems. In prose, I love a long twisty luxurious sentence. They look so different for me. I also tend to write about different things where I need a whole lot of space in poetry. Like writing more directly close to my life. I feel like for me, poetry feels a little bit like taking the reader on a long-ish road trip along a path. There is a lot of scenery and stops along the way, but we are following a path. Poetry feels more like stopping at a prairie and letting them loose, or picking up a single flower and looking at it backlit by the sun. Both are beautiful but are different in terms of psychological length, guidance, style, concentration.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers?
AL: My hope is for readers to enjoy the book and that it opens something up in them, like it did to me. And thank you for reading.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.