Q&A with “Aliens & Other Stories”
Author Kathleen Wheaton
What inspired you to work on this book?
When
I went to Buenos Aires to write a guidebook to the city, Argentina was
recovering from the trauma of a brutal military dictatorship in which 30,000
people disappeared. It was a strange time to be writing a travel book. Often
I’d be in a cafe discussing maps or photos with a contributor and the person
would casually mention having been arrested during the “dirty war”, or having
gone into hiding, or that someone close to them had disappeared. These abrupt
revelations haunted me, and later I wrote a couple of short stories based on them.
When I moved to the D.C. suburbs, after years of living abroad, I identified
more with people who had come from other places and were struggling to adjust
than with fellow Americans who’d always lived here. These experiences have informed the stories
in “Aliens.”
Have you visited Buenos Aires since you were there to write the
guidebook? If so, what had changed? What was the same?
My husband and I returned together in 2007 and then with
our teenage sons in 2009. There were some shiny new shops and condos built
along what had been a smelly and derelict wharf, but in 20 years the city had
changed less than I’d expected—some of my favorite cafes had the same waiters,
20 years older. But the dirty war was farther in the past, so it wasn’t the
subtext of every conversation. The internet has connected Argentina more to the
rest of the world, and yet there remains this sense of remoteness. Most
Argentines have roots somewhere far away, and so Buenos Aires has an air of
melancholy and nostalgia that is very enticing to a writer, since we traffic
heavily in those two emotions.
Do you consider yourself more of a journalist or a fiction
writer?
I
began as a fiction writer and fell into journalism when I went to South America
and fell in love with a journalist. It seemed like such an interesting life,
though I felt I wasn’t aggressive enough to be a real reporter. But I was
encouraged by something Joan Didion said to the effect that a harmless
appearance can be an advantage. If you are just quiet and willing to listen,
you hear the most extraordinary things. In DC, where people are practical and
career-oriented, I’ve noticed that a lot of fiction writers use their day jobs
as cover. Then they’re outed when they publish a novel or story collection. But
I continue to enjoy doing journalism—connecting with real people, not having to
struggle to make an unbelievable story sound plausible.
How do you juggle your two writing careers?
When we moved to Bethesda I had the
good luck to begin writing for a bimonthly magazine that was just starting up,
and which has continued to give me assignments. This meant that if I was
diligent I could spend a month reporting and writing a nonfiction piece and
then have a month free to write a short story.
This has made both kinds of writing feel like a “vacation” from the
other—at least for the first few minutes, until I actually sit down and start
working. Because then you come up
against the reality that all writing is really, really hard.
Have you used stories you’ve reported as a journalist in your
fiction?
Journalism
would seem to be a rich source of plots and characters, but the truth is that
once I finish a nonfiction story to my and my editor’s satisfaction, I’m done
with it. I might claim some high-minded refusal to use the people I’ve
interviewed as fictional fodder, except that I do steal things from them—their
home furnishings, their mannerisms, something they mentioned in passing about
their grandparents. Fiction writers are magpies.
You lived in Spain and Latin America for 12 years before moving
back to the United States in ‘97. Why do you think these
stories stuck with you for so long?
Maybe even more than childhood, a person’s twenties are a
really formative period. So many great (and not-so-great) works of art seem to
center around the themes and preoccupations of that time of life. And it takes
a while to figure out what it all means. At least it has taken me a while.
Because the minute I say this I think of writers from Fitzgerald to the Spanish
novelist Carmen Laforet, who wrote so beautifully and profoundly about youth
while they were young, as it was happening.
What do you hope readers take away from “Aliens and Other
Stories?”
For me
the experience of going to live in another country and learning another
language was a revelation—my sense of the strangeness of life was suddenly,
objectively, true. Being an actual foreigner struggling to understand was both
freeing and reassuring. So I hope that readers who literally have been aliens
as well as those who simply have felt that way will find they have something in
common with my characters.
What countries would you like to visit next?
About a year and a half ago I wrote a magazine piece
about an Iranian family and decided to study Persian, which sounded to my
uncomprehending ear beautiful and poetic. I don’t have much hope of visiting
Iran or even of mastering the language enough to read the Persian poets in the
original, and yet I keep at it. It’s
opened up another world.
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