Process Talk: Ann Dávila Cardinal on The Storyteller’s Death

When the audiobook of Ann Dávila Cardinal’s novel, The Storyteller’s Death, showed up on my Libby app, a global read, no less, I was overjoyed. I know Ann from our time together at VCFA. (She’s recently joined the faculty of a brand new MFA program in Writing for Young Readers at the University of San Francisco.) I know her words are as wide and bold as her laugh. I knew I was in for a treat.

I was immediately drawn into the audiobook, finding myself resenting every pause in the service of mundane tasks. I ended up doing what I rarely ever do—when I finished listening to the audiobook, I got myself a paper copy so I could sense this story the old-fashioned way, by scanning text and turning pages. To keep my conversation with this book going, I’m so pleased to welcome Ann Dávila Cardinal to Writing With a Broken Tusk.

[Uma] What made this book bubble up for you in the first place?

Ann at VCFA book launch. Image courtesy of the author

[Ann] I needed something for a workshop in fiction. I was a nonfiction writer. I wrote for magazines and I got accepted to the MFA and I decided I had to write something for workshop. I was with some writer friends in a cafe in Montpelier and we were talking about how old people are treated in different cultures and how in this culture we sort of send them away. And I said, “Well, you know, there was always some old woman dying in the back room in Puerto Rico when I was a kid.”

And my friend says, "That's it! That's the first line of your story."

[Uma] Was it a novel from the start?

[Ann] Well, I started what I thought was a short story, and whenever I tried to do short stories in the program, people would say, this wants to be a novel. So it sort of took off from there. The speculative part came from thinking about those old ladies. There were many of them in my childhood. I really didn't know who they were. I was thinking about the stories that died with them--they weren't really communicative at the point they were in my great aunt's house. I thought about all the things they held, all the pieces of family history that we were going to lose. I thought, you know, I don't want to lose those stories.

When I was growing up, when I was in Puerto Rico, and I was told a story, I saw very vivid images in my head. Isla’s visions came from that. I had some interesting experiences with them. I'm a visual person and, so storytelling was very exciting for me because of that. It created little movies in my head. Then I wanted to address some things about my relationship with my Puerto Rican heritage.

People often say to me, you don't look Puerto Rican. But I connect so strongly with that half of myself that I wanted to do a story about that, and so in part it's a love letter. Also, I see racism and classism is something that really isn't discussed down there. I've had situations with family where I say about something, Isn't that racist? And they go, “You're too sensitive.” I wanted to address that as well.

[Uma] Now talk to me about the setting. It’s gorgeous. It’s not only lush and vivid and all of that stuff. We know that you can do that. You're a writer and you know how to play with words, to get the effect you’re after. But it has a heart to it. It has a beating heart that’s more than just context and background. So talk to me about that, about place and your writing.

Elena Luisa Davila, Ann’s Puerto Rican mother. Photo 1939, Bayamon Puerto Rico. Image courtesy of Ann Dávila Cardinal

[Ann] I'm in love with the island and that happened, I think, in adulthood. It happened after I lost my mother. It was like a piece of Puerto Rico died with her, and I didn't want that to happen. My connection was always strong, but it became something else. I had a son, not long after, and I wanted him to know that part of himself. I wanted to share that love with readers. What I didn't anticipate is how the natural world came in. I had a great aunt who lived on a property that was like a jungle. I wish I'd paid attention when she talked to me about the plants and all that, because at the time, I felt, oh God, here she goes again. Now I'm interested. That property in retrospect now represented a part of the island that is going away, that is just about gone. That little jungle in the middle of urban sprawl was significant and it was like a different time in Puerto Rico.

I wanted to capture what it was like to be there. I wanted people to want to go and to fall in love with it.

[Uma] Let's talk about Isla—a beautiful, meaningful name—and how she forges her own relationship with the place and its people. Will you talk as well about her mother? How did these characters grow for you?

[Ann] Isla started with me, but she took on a life of her own. I often deal with addiction in my writing, because I had an alcoholic mother—I should say she was different from Isla’s mother. It's unique, first of all, to have to grow up prematurely and have a parent die when you are just a child, and secondly, to grow up with an addict.

The reason I started writing for kids is because I wanted to write books that kids could see themselves in, could see a character like that going through some things, because I didn't see it. Judy Bloom was mind-blowing when I was growing up, because nobody was writing for that age group. Her stuff was honest, and it was brutal, and controversial as a result. Because I was missing that, I often deal with the issue of addiction.

But being the age I am, I see also that my mother was dealing with her own ghosts. Like with these visions in the book--you don't know what they're going through, these women.

My relationship with my mother was the most important in my life until I met my husband and had my kid. She wasn't much of a traditional mother. I was the fifth of five, and my oldest sibling was 16 years old. She was tired by the time she got to me, so she was kind of a nonparent. It's like you're bringing up yourself. The only time I felt parented was in Puerto Rico. She would ship me down there. Later I realized culturally, it's actually pretty common. You sent the kid to go be with your family, so they stay in touch with the culture and the place. Like in The Island of Forgotten Gods.* It's a middle school book about the same thing. Parents who went through a divorce, the parents ship the kids down. Because the relationship with the mother was like processing my own grief with that. Talk about complications—my great aunt who saved me at that time of my life, literally saved me, took me to the dentist, did all the things that my mother didn’t do. She was a racist, and I didn't realize that until later. Try to deal with the emotions of loving someone so deeply who has beliefs that horrify you.

[Uma] Talk about the women folk, the power of the women.

[Ann] The relationships between women in Puerto Rican families are important. The power of the women, is really astonishing, it's so strong. And it's complicated. It's not all love and roses. I don't know whether you got the email from Libby about my prologue and the epilogue that they took out?

[Uma] No, I did not get that.

[Ann] The prologue had Isla today, and she is, you know, a woman of a certain age. She goes to visit. It starts with her at the property, which is now a parking lot. She remembers they told her not to go and she goes, and she remembers what it was like. And then she goes back to her condo and lies in a hammock and falls asleep and the novel follows.

The epilogue is a young man hiking in Utah with a friend. He's coming around a bend and he sees a couple, young woman and a young man coming down the trail. He says, “I think that's my grandmother. But when she was young.” His friend's like, what's wrong with you? He says, “I don't know. But I think I should call her.”

[Uma] This leads me to my next question: what makes this not a YA, but an adult novel?

[Ann] There was a period of time where my old agent wanted me to redo it as a YA. She didn't want any retrospective. And so she so when I rewrote it, I didn't like what it became. It wasn't the same novel. This is not a story that can be told in a linear fashion, but I also hate that that then means that we're assuming that young people are unable to handle complex narrative. I don't. It really destroyed it for me, and I had to go back to what it was before.

I was raised on magical realism. It was on the shelf. My mother let me read whatever, and so I was reading Marquez and Allende and all the classic magical realists at a time in my life that was very difficult. I loved the idea that there's this sort of thread of magic woven through a powerless situation.. And, you know, Marquez was writing it in a horrible time in his country. I wanted lush language, and she wanted that gone too.

[Uma] Well, I’m glad you didn’t pare it down to “American girl goes to Puerto Rico,” which is what the YA version might have become. Can you talk about the family stories and how everyone has a different take on them?

[Ann] The family stories are right out of my family. They were stories that I've been told, like monkeys. “One day the monkeys…” and we’d know what was coming, to the point where we would start laughing before she could finish the first sentence. If anyone pointed out that the nearest zoo is miles away, I figured it didn't matter.

My mother told me all these family stories. And she died. She was only 70. I was at lunch with her brother, her full brother, and a bunch of family, and I started telling these stories, and he said, “That's not true. This is not true. What are you talking about?”

I was so angry, because I was like, she lied to me.

And then my cousin by marriage, Jose Luis, said, "No, Annie, why are you angry? The stories that our family tells that aren't true are as important as the ones that are.”

[Uma] That is really moving.

I know, and there was a room in my great aunt's house. She wouldn't let anybody into it. She was a teacher, mainly it had books in it. But my mother told me her father shot himself in that room because they had the TV on then and he didn't want to alert the family. And then my uncle says no, he died in the hospital. So. I don't know what the story is. It was interesting to imagine something beyond the truth.

[Uma] Beyond the truth and yet, very much telling truths about history and families and what it means to be human. Thank you so much, Ann for the gift of this book and for your reflections on what writing it meant to you.

*The Island of Forgotten Gods by Victor Pineiro