In an interview with writer Ananda Lima, whose debut collection Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor, June 2024) writer Christina Berke discusses how Lima’s poetry and photography play a role in her writing, Brazilian cordels, and how it’s good to have different readers for different work.
Ananda and I have crossed paths a few times– I was leaving as Managing Editor of Witness when her piece was getting published; a couple summers ago at Sewanee where she was a photographer; again at AWP; most surprisingly after we agreed to the interview, as I was waiting for a coffee, I saw the sign of a shop called Ananda. And even before then– we both attended UCLA graduate school and are South American. The zigzags that we’ve experienced mirror the narrator and the Devil’s recurring appearances in this short story collection that Kelly Link describes as “an absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic.”
Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press) and Tropicália (Newfound), winner of the Newfound Prose Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Witness, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She was awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, and was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Chicago Review of Books Chirby Awards. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Originally from Brasilia, Brazil, she lives in Chicago.
Christina Berke (CB): This collection hit a lot of most-anticipated lists– Chicago, Debutiful, Ms. Magazine, Electric Lit, a starred review with Publishers Weekly and many more! Congratulations! With all of this buzz, how do you feel? Is there an added sense of pressure, or does it feel more like a sense of support for all of your hard work?
Ananda Lima (AL): Thank you so much. It has been so lovely to see this early inclusion and recognition. As I worked on this book, I was having so much fun with the stories, the characters, the frame. But I had no idea how it would go when it went out in the world. It is my strange little baby, but I didn’t know how it would go for others. It has been beautiful seeing the reaction from the early readers, getting little windows of how people read it. There have been such insightful reads in the mix. I feel so seen and grateful.
CB: As a poet (and photographer!) you’re trained to pay attention to imagery and language. How do these other art forms inform each other and this story collection?
AL: I love how I can play with my love for imagery and language in different ways across my three mediums. I think the image, and letting images speak for themselves, is present in all three. But where and how you let the image reverberate are a little different in each, in wonderful ways. I feel like having these three different ways allows me to marvel and experience the image and language the way I need to while still being appropriate to what I am building. For example, if I want to geek out on the language part and even escape verbal meaning and narrative, I can play with poems (though my poems often tend to be accessible, understandable, I can play in less accessible, more language-heavy ways there and I do). If I want to go very non-verbal, I have photography. That allows me to go lyrical and enjoy imagery and language in my fiction while still being able to serve stories and plot, and not feeling like I am missing out on anything. I have outlets for my different impulses, which is wonderful. But that is not something I think about when I am working. Over the years I started getting a good instinctual feel for whether something is prose, poetry or photography. Having this sorted out, I felt very free in playing with images and language in this collection in a way that served the story.
CB: Speaking of imagery and sensory language, there’s a fuller sense of experience embedded in your stories– the body, the music, the food. What’s your writing process like– do you go back in to flesh out the pieces more? Add in sensory details later during revisions, or do they come to you as you’re drafting? How can you tell when you’re done with a piece?
AL: I feel like this is so important for me as a writer. Many times the seeds of stories are a sensory world to me. I have a scene, a moment or an image that sprouts the story. I will have little pieces, as if old memories, a movement, sunlight coming from a window in a dusty room with the character there, packing a suitcase, or what have you. Things like that. Everything begins in the senses. Then it is a mess in the middle as I write a first draft. I do come back sometimes to the moments in between the initial scenes. When they are not yet fleshed out, I go back and get into the scene, imagine it sensorially, try to embody the character and often figure things out this way. (There is a scene in “Ghost” of the writer-narrator in the story trying to do just that.)
CB: You’re a multi-genre writer and artist. How did you come to write a collection of short stories– were you certain of its form from the beginning, or do poems sometimes feel like they’re too big for the space and need to expand into another container?
AL: Earlier on I had a harder time telling what something wanted to be. I had times where I would get this one line and would end up writing stories around it. And in the end I only liked that one line I started with. They were meant to be poems! But these days I have a better understanding of what something is. It is more instinctual. If I am to put it into words, I think there is something about a balance of how much I am saying things with words and how much you are saying with the space around the words. In poems, the spaces say a lot. There is more of a literal visual aspect to it (how things look on the page). With fiction, you are more creating a world and taking the reader on a ride there (in the best way). For some writers who write both poetry and prose, they hover a little closer. They have this hybrid work that sometimes moves closer to poetry, prose poems, and sometimes move closer to prose, in this flash-like poetry. I love that kind of work as a reader. But for me as a writer, poetry and fiction feel quite different.
CB: Though bitingly witty, the pieces in here deal with not-so-humorous topics like sexism (i.e. how a mother would handle a brother’s kidnapping versus the daughter), racism, organized religion (the church asking for money despite brand new Audis), aging parents, DACA, immigration, even the audacity of NY apartments calling themselves 1-bedrooms. In what ways does humor play a role in your writing? How do you find the right balance of tone?
AL: I think in the background some of the humor comes from this sense of the absurd. How things that happen in our actual life can be so hard and terrible, but also kind of ridiculous if you stop and think about it. I didn’t set out thinking there would be humor, but somehow the voices and characters in the book brought that out of me. Parts of what happens in the world can be horrible. And horrible for a long time. We need to find some joy and laughter at it all too. This is something that I was grappling with while writing and I love that the humor showed up for me, that weird mixture of sadness and laughter. It is not something I consciously engineer, but in the end, it feels true, it feels like a part of what I was trying to do, even if I didn’t always know it.
CB: Your work is compared to Mikhail Bulgakov, Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado and others. What writers, or other artists, have influenced this book?
AL: I love all these writers you mentioned so much, thank you! There are so many writers and I am bound to forget to mention many. Like most Brazilian kids, I was introduced to writers at a young age who have a playfulness to their serious writing: Machado de Assis (including The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, The Alienist). Like so many people, I love the freedom, profound surprise and weirdness in Clarice Lispector (and the meta too, in The Hour of the Star). Others whose work speaks deeply to me include John Keene, Jose Saramago (I love this shorter book of his, Death with Interruptions), and auto-fictionists, more notably Ben Lerner. More recently, I love seeing the imagination and playing in the work of writers like Gwen Kirby and Mona Awad. Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut is coming out this year, but I had encountered her work before that—the writing is so beautiful and speaks to my heart in the best way. All of that goes into the mix. But there are more too.
CB: “Idle Hands” is an epistolary piece told with MFA student workshop letters. Anyone who’s been in a creative writing program like me would laugh in recognition– the peers getting the narrator’s name wrong, the instructor who vaguely nods a lot, the contradictory comments proving you can’t please everyone (I’ve heard this idea that if you take everyone’s workshop comments and implement them, you’ll end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a story). Tell me more about your experiences with workshops, and perhaps how your experience was at Rutgers MFA program. Did it help you grow as a writer, confuse you more, or were you in a place where receiving feedback was helpful and pushed your pieces forward?
AL: I was very lucky because I had such a beautiful time in my MFA. I know that is not always the case for everyone, but for me it was such a special time. I had great teachers, loved my thesis advisor and loved my cohort so much. I grew a lot. These were people I loved and respected and who were excellent writers. But the weird stuff I was into was not their favorite thing. We had different favorite writers and were into different types of work. There were many things I would bring to class that would not land as much with them. I spent a whole year with that group.
The thing is, I loved them as people and thought they were super smart and great writers, and that they cared about me and wanted me to do well. It is just that my stuff was not the stuff they were normally into. But it was a great experience to go through. It helped me understand how there are different readers for different work. It made me weirdly more confident about my writing, as I had to let go of the idea of writing to please the workshop pretty quickly. And it made me understand what to take in and what not to take in in terms of feedback.
There was still a lot of good applicable feedback in the mix too, and then there were things that were there because they were not into the stuff I was into. That was totally fine. It was the best thing, in a very roundabout way. The very last semester, I ended up returning to the class that had more of my type of weirdness going on, and it was perfect. A perfect way to end. I brought that story, with the feedback letters, as my last story submitted to the MFA. They laughed a bunch. It was super fun.
CB: Many of these stories have been published in literary magazines and are award-winning– congratulations! With your experience working with several different literary magazines, what have you learned about the submission waiting game? Do you have a strategy for submitting work? And what have you learned about the editing and publication process? Maybe something that surprised you, or that you hope that emerging writers know? Did your pieces ever get too edited down where it changed your voice or shape?
AL: I am so grateful for the beautiful work all the people behind our literary magazine ecosystem do. They create so much beauty and magic in the world. Because I am also a poet, I have sent so much work over the years. What I learned is: what you need is patience and persistence. Send enough work so that eventually you become a little less stressed out and hung up on the process. Get to the point where you can send and forget it. Treat it like an ongoing thing. If you need the motivation, make goals that are tied to the sending of the submissions, rather than just acceptances. Like, “I am going to make X many submissions this month.” That goal is more under your control. You also get to celebrate when you do send out that number.
I have also been lucky with the editors I have worked with. They have been so kind and respectful of my work. I love getting edited by someone who understands the work. It is such a gift. They always made it clear that edits were optional. And sometimes I didn’t take their suggestions. But more often I did because they were great suggestions. My advice is, if you can, be open and think about things generously, even if you ultimately only make the changes that make sense to you.
CB: I think a lot of us experienced the strangeness of time during covid; as you write: “2 years and 5 minutes feel like the same thing.” And when someone is ill, that further messes with our concept of time, which your stories examine too with the devil showing up. Can you talk more about the role time plays in your collection?
AL: Time is such a fascinating thing to me. How we experience it, what it is, how it actually works– it is so mysterious. I love reading physicists talking about it (when they explain it to non-physicists like me). As I get older it fascinates it even more. We have so little time, but can live so much. I love that you brought this up as it permeates a lot of my work. It is there in Craft, in the pandemic and also in the span of time this character has these encounters with the Devil. It continues to be very present in my writing.
CB: The Devil is such a polarizing figure– in myth and religion and nightmares and everyday life as people place binary labels of good and evil. How does humanizing a character like this help to explain themes of morality?
AL: In a strange way, I have had these fun encounters with the figure of the Devil in different contexts over the years. My family is from the Northeast in Brazil and there they have this popular form of literature with pamphlets called cordel which involves writing and also this specific type of wood cut illustrations. Though my family is not necessarily big readers of cordel, that aesthetic was always around me. The Devil is a kind of recurring character in that literature, which I just love. I remember when I was a kid, there was this woman, I think she was trying to convert me or something like that, telling me a little bit about the Devil. How he had done this big betrayal. I listened quietly, but I couldn’t understand what the betrayal was. Later I enjoyed seeing the various portrayals of the Devil in movies and stories. I loved the character of Woland in Master and Margarita.
Much more recently, I came across some fascinating work on the figure, especially by a political theologist Adam Kotsko, who traces the story of the Devil from medieval christianity. It is such a strange story of how the Devil came to be the Devil and how that figure has been used since in the political sphere. I find the scapegoating aspect of the devil fascinating and maybe, as an immigrant, sometimes relatable. But I didn’t want to (nor could) say the same things that I had read. I had to let my Devil be his own thing. The themes of morality, politics, etc are definitely what got me interested but once he became a character, I let him free to be what he needed to be in my story, and it was so much fun. I knew that people like Kotsko and others do the scholarship beautifully, and that that scholarship is available to everyone and is not my work to do. I was free to do my own thing and have fun.
CB: There are nine short stories, but also in between there are these interludes. I’d love to hear more about the structure and order of the stories. How did you determine the sequence?
AL: It took some playing around. There were some stories I knew more or less where they would be early on, but there were some I shifted a little bit until the whole thing felt right. The first story had to be there to establish this fun meta layering of the book. The early stories serve to ground you with the characters and this meta character of the writer more solidly in the beginning. Then there is a movement to something more open, dreamy and transcendent towards the end.
CB: Kelly Link calls your collection “an absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic.” What are the ways you infuse magic into your everyday life that might find itself onto the page?
AL: Both the absurd (including things that are terrible and terrifying) and magic (in the sense of awe and beauty) are all around us. I am a very secular, non mystical person. But I think the world as it is, as we see it and try to understand is awe inspiring, and feels magical. For me, magic in my work is a part of the alchemy of trying to create something that translates some of that onto the page.
CB: What’s your favorite cure for writer’s block?
AL: Sometimes it is fine to embrace it. Don’t write for a while, but take tiny notes. Take nonsensical notes for weeks, months, without pressure. Read, go see plays, take walks. If I do these things, at some point the writing becomes easy again.
CB: What’s next for you?
AL: I am working on my next poetry collection (to do with vision and parallax) and a novel. The novel is new but I am very excited about it. So far it involves the midwest, mid-century architecture and ghosts. Writing always goes through phases, some harder than others, but right now I am in a fun phase with the novel, where I am just very excited about things. So I am trying to enjoy it, even if I don’t have a ton of time to write right now, I am excited to have this waiting for me to really spend time on it later.
Quick Write:
Pen or computer? Computer. Though sometimes I go to the pen to change things up, I am really a computer person.
Word or Scrivener? Word (really google docs most of the time). Need to keep things simple.
Word count or number of pages? Word count
Fiction or poetry? Can’t choose!
AM or PM? AM
Coffee or tea? Coffee
Times New Roman or Arial? Times New Roman
Indy press or Big 5? Both
Christina Berke is a Chilean American writer and educator. She’s working on WELL, BODY, a memoir on body image, eating disorders, and childhood trauma. An excerpt of this was Longlisted with Disquiet Literary International. More at www.christinaberke.com.
