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An interview with Beatriz Rivera - Interview

MELUS, Summer, 2003 by Frederick Luis Aldama

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FLA: Tell me about your trips from New York back to Miami.

BR: I was in Miami two weeks ago. I feel that it's Miami, that that's where my writing roots are, that it's south Florida. It's not even Cuba. According to my sense of an internal geography, it really is Cuban south Florida: Miami, Tampa, Key West, that area. I feel that's the place of my writing, and the next novel will be there. So that's where my roots are. When I look for my roots, they're Cuban, but what I remember is there in south Florida.

FLA: Do you distinguish between, say, your physical home today and a nostalgic or maybe imaginary home in south Florida?

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BR: Well, I mean I have a home in upstate New York that's a refuge. The place itself is not home. I mean culturally it's not home. I've been told that I'm not from there and that you have to be there for 300 years to be from there. I'm well aware that the place is not mine, that I cannot lay claim to it. But I can lay claim to Miami. I can claim it as mine. Maybe some people would object: "Well, you've only been there since you were six." But it's not like that. I think Miami can belong to me.

FLA: If your imagination and feeling lead you back to Miami, where do you write?

BR: Well, I haven't written anything creative in two years because I've been doing a lot of academic work.

FLA: Some writers talk about the academic writing as stifling, or being at odds with their creative writing?

BR: It is at odds. When I first started writing academically, I thought that what I wrote was much more interesting; it was funnier and had a different twist. Now I find it serious and boring. When we moved to upstate New York two years ago, there were no teaching jobs, so I started working for a newspaper. In the beginning I was more creative with it. I'd cover a planning board meeting, for example, and I'd write about a leak in the ceiling and the blue bucket. I'd write about the people present like the chairman as if they were characters. The articles were scandalous. I annoyed a lot of people. But I thought journalism was like that. I had to tone it down with the first newspaper.

FLA: Actually, that reminds me of some of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's early journalism where he would mix fact with fiction in his column "La Jirafa" that appeared in El Heraldo.

BR: People really get awfully offended. It's incredible.

FLA: How about the other writers who've influenced your writing?

BR: I think that there's a Spanish side that has influenced me, even without my knowing it. So much of the Spanish literature--Miguel de Cervantes and Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas--has this side that's serious and another that's comic. I think that's the Spanish spirit in me where I don't separate the tragic from the comic. Publishers say that my novels are too comical and that's what turns them off. They say, "Well, we just want drama. We want something serious." I think what I do is really serious, but there's always this twist. I don't know, it just happens. It's not something I say, "Well, I'm gonna be funny here." I think that's the Spanish spirit that somehow flows through me. There's also a strong presence of French writers like Balzac who was read to me when I was a girl.

An interview with Beatriz Rivera - Interview

MELUS, Summer, 2003 by Frederick Luis Aldama

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