What are you currently working on? â€� Julia Alvarez Q&A

What are you currently working on?

Julia Alvarez In keeping with Mr. Johnson's commandment, see my advice to aspiring writers, I write every dayâ€”or try to. But I donâ€™t know where Iâ€™m going till I get there. If I give you a destination or set up the parameters of the work by describing it, Iâ€™ve already contained it in my idea of it. So Iâ€™m letting myself play and wander and wonder over stories in my familyâ€™s past, stories in the past of my native country (Dominican Republic), the narrative ties that bind us all into blood families, nations, human family. That about covers the whole map! Additionally, Iâ€™m not just interested in content, but also in how a story can get told in ways that surprise. I remember my astonishment reading Julie Otsukaâ€™s The Buddha in the Attic and realizing the effectiveness of writing a novel in the first person plural point of view and in small vignettes. More recently, Iâ€™ve been dazzled by Colum McCannâ€™s Apeirogon, and its almost Scheherazadian way of telling a story in 1001 small narratives, with "everything" thrown in and, amazingly, everything fits. . .

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