APOOO member and reviewer, Dera Williams, is facilitating the February book of the month selection, Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez. Dr. Nunez was gracious enough to take time out of her busy schedule as a professor and author on tour to participate in a Q & A session.

Anna Sinclair, a New York senior editor, goes home for her annual vacation to the island of her birth where issues of family dynamics, social climate, political views, cultural identity and class values collide.

DW:  Thank you Dr. Nunez for taking the time for this interview.

You were born in Trinidad. How long have you lived in the States? How often do you visit home?

EN:  I first came to the US when I was nineteen.  I was awarded a full scholarship to Marian College in Wisconsin.  I returned to Trinidad after I graduated with a BA degree in English, but after a year and a half there, I was restless.  I wanted more stimulation than Trinidad provided at the time.  I enrolled at NYU and eventually got MA and PhD degrees in English.  Though I visited Trinidad frequently, I never returned to live there.  I married an African American and had a son.  I am now divorced.

DW:  Where and what do you teach? Did you always know you wanted to be a teacher?

EN:  For many years, I taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in Brooklyn.  I am now a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where I teach Creative Writing, Fiction.

I always wanted to be a teacher.  My grandfather and father were both teachers at different points in their lives. When I was a child, I was fond of gathering my siblings and neighbors together and playing school.  Of course, I was always the teacher.

DW:  What is your writing process?

EN:  My brain works best in the early morning.  A good day for me is when I wake up around 5:30am and go directly to the computer.  Sometimes I walk for an hour before I start to write; sometimes I walk after about two hours of writing.  While I walk, I am in the world of my fiction and many new ideas come to me.  I try to write 1,000 words a day, five days a week. I do not work with an outline.  I write with the faith that ideas will come as I write.  However, as I write, I do get a sense of how the novel will progress and I jot down notes.  So, I suppose, this is a sort of backhanded way of outlining.

DW:  What do you hope to achieve by telling stories of the Caribbean and the people of West Indian descent?

EN:  Like all writers, my stories are grounded in a specific place, time, and with characters from specific backgrounds.  Since I am most familiar with Caribbean characters who live in the US either temporarily or permanently, I write mostly about them.  I want to tell their stories of their challenges and triumphs.  I want the world to know the greatness of Caribbean people, but I also hope that all my novels speak to the human condition and will appeal to all people anywhere and at any time.

DW:  In a city like New York there are a great number of blacks who are either West Indian born or second or third generation. What are the similarities and differences between your students of West Indian descent and black Americans in their academic endeavors?

EN:  When I teach, I make no distinction between my African American and Caribbean American students.  Generally, however, as with all immigrant families, students of Caribbean immigrant parents tend to be more motivated and diligent.  Their parents have made the sacrifice to leave their homeland for a better life and they instill in their children the ambition to succeed.

DW:  Anna, the protagonist in Anna In-Between, is a senior editor of an imprint focused on finding writers of color. In reality, is there a need to have this specialty in order to find fresh talent?

EN:  I think the challenges faced by imprints specific to writer of colors are similar to the challenges of Affirmative Action programs.  Because of the continued existence of racism in America, there is need to protect the interests of people of color, but this protection is a double-edged sword.  Affirmative Action programs give people of color opportunities for education and employment they ordinarily would be denied because of the color of their skin.  However, the exemptions required for these opportunities often cast doubt on the qualifications of candidates.  Special imprints provide writers of color with opportunities for publication, but they also unfairly tend to cast doubts about the quality of the writers’ work.

DW:   Why is it difficult for literary writers to have the phenomenal success many commercial authors experience? Do publishers incite friction between literary and contemporary writers?

EN:  A book becomes a bestseller because many people purchase it.   Writers of popular or commercial fiction appeal to a wider audience of readers who read a book strictly for entertainment.  Generally, these readers are less educated than the readers of literary fiction.  They are the same people who would rather see an action movie than a movie that challenges them intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically.

For writers of color, the situation is more problematic.   Publishers seem to make the assumption that only black people read books by black writers.  As if that isn’t enough, they also make assumptions about the level of education of black readers and their ability to appreciate a work of fiction that is challenging. Publishers, therefore, tend to publish few works of literary fiction by black writers.  They think there is no market for such novels.  They think that black people will not buy literary fiction by black writers. Publishers argue that they are in the business of making money and if there is no market for a certain type of novel, then there would be no profit for them.   We need to demand that publishers publish and market literary fiction by black writers.  The best way we can do that is by purchasing literary fiction by black writers.  I worry that if the current trends continue, we may find ourselves silencing a potential James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston.

DW:  You must be excited by the up-and-coming writers in your classes? What kind of topics are they writing about?

EN:  Though I teach at Hunter College, I also volunteer to teach a workshop in a bookstore in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that is open to the community.  Interestingly, many of my male students seem to be writing stories about women who betray them.  They also write about drug addiction, crime, police brutality and unemployment.  Though my female students also write about hardships, particularly of raising a family alone, their stories seem to be more hopeful that there will be a bright future ahead for them.

DW:  What writers have influenced you or do you admire?

EN:  I remember reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and running afterward because I was so full of emotion that I needed some physical release.  Before this novel, most of the novels I had read were by English writers.  I continue to like English writers, past writers like Jane Austen and contemporary writers like Ian McEwan, but it was awe-inspiring to read a literary work by a black writer about characters who look like me. My favorite Morrison novel is her latest, A Mercy.   I also admire Gabriel Garcia Marquez and J.M. Cotezee, and though I do not appreciate his world view, I admire the literary style of VS Naipaul.

DW:  Are you working on anything now? Please tell us a little about it?

EN:  I am working on a sequel to Anna In-Between.  My tentative title for it is Anna Hyphenated.

DW:  What book is on your night stand?

EN:  Triangular Road by Paule Marshall

DW:  Thank you for writing such a phenomenal book that informs and entertains on several levels and for your contribution to the canon of Black Diaspora literature.

February 27, 2010

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