Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Love War Stories
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.ivelisserodriguez.com/
CITY:
STATE: NC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017075241 |
| HEADING: | Rodriguez, Ivelisse |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Rodriguez, Ivelisse |
| 370 | __ |a Puerto Rico |
| 373 | __ |a University of Illinois at Chicago |a Emerson College |
| 670 | __ |a Love war stories, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Ivelisse Rodriguez) data view (Born in Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez earned a PhD in English creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA from Emerson College. She has published fiction in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, the Boston Review, and elsewhere) |
PERSONAL
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
EDUCATION:Emerson College, M.F.A.; University of Illinois at Chicago, Ph.D..
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked as a senior fiction editor at the Kweli Journal. Also founder and editor of an interview series, published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, New York, NY
WRITINGS
Author of the chapbook The Belindas was,2017. Contributor to All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, the University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2014. Contributor to periodicals and websites, including the Boston Review, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), Obsidian, Label Me Latina/o, and Kweli.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She studied creative writing at the graduate level and is short story contributor to periodicals and websites. Rodriquez also founded and edited an interview series for the Centro Voices e-magazine of Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies. In her debut collection of short stories, Love War Stories, Rodriguez presents nine tales about Puerto Rican women who want true love but often face betrayal and grief or believe that it is inevitable. “There is this dissonant message I remember receiving as a Puerto Rican girl—that men are sucios and not to be trusted, but that was coupled with a message that we needed to get married and have a man,” Rodriquez told Cassius website contributor Stephanie Long.
The tales in Love War Stories begin in Puerto Rico but then move on to western Massachusetts and New York City. “Western Massachusetts was the second stop in order to highlight the diasporic journey Puerto Ricans made there and to showcase the lives of Puerto Ricans outside of New York City,” Rodriguez noted in an interview with Necessary Fiction website contributor Amina Gautier. Rodriguez went on to note her American hometown of Holyoke has more Puerto Ricans than anywhere else except for Puerto Rico. Rodriquez went on to remark in the Necessary Fiction website interivew that “all the diasporic literature is centered around New York City. So much so that other historical enclaves, like those in Western Mass and Cleveland don’t show up in the literature.” Commenting on the progression of the stories to three primary locations, Rodriquez told Neccwary Fiction contributor Gautier: “Besides the location-based element to the arrangement, I also thought about the message of each story’s ending and how they created a narrative trajectory of their own — moving from brokenness (and not necessarily in a bad way) to self-assuredness.”
The collection opens with “El Qué Dirán,” which finds a girl preparing for her quinceañera, the fiesta de quince anon that celebrates a girl’s fifteenth birthday. The girl, however, is troubled because of her aunt’s public heartbreak. The disaster, in the young girl’s mind, threatens her social standing and even her date for the celebration. The next story is titled “Holyoke, Mass.: An Ethnography,” which a Publishers Weekly contributor called the collection’s “most structurally interesting story.” The anonymous high-school narrator comments on an ethnographic account of her hometown, Holyoke, that she has read. The narrator’s account is offered as the real version of the town. The story features Veronica, who was discussed in the original publication. In the narrator’s version, Veronica must contend with sordid rumors.
“The Simple Truth” features an older narrator who tells how an assignment to curate an exhibit about poet Julia de Burgos coincides with a newfound respect for her own mother. A Puerto Rican boy is dealing with the awareness of his sexuality in the story “Summer of Nene.” He finds that he is attracting interest from the most desired girl in his class. Meanwhile, he has an affair with a male friend who is ill. Another story titled “The Belindas” features Belinda who once again encounters her ex-boyfriend. Although handsome and charming, he is violent and abused Belinda. She finds that, while the relationship altered her life forever, the ex-boyfriend seems free from concern about any of the it’s violent aspects.
The book’s title story, which closes the collection, revolves around a college student thinking about what she has heard over the years concerning broken relationships. She ultimately coming to the conclusion that relationships are worthwhile nevertheless. “Love War Stories is a bold collection that marks the shortfall between romantic illusions and reality,” wrote Karen Rigby in ForeWord. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented: “Rodriguez’s best stories are both heartbreaking and insightful.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Foreword, July 16, 2018, Karen Rigby, review of Love War Stories.
Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2018, review of Love War Stories, p. 68.
ONLINE
Aster(ix) Journal, https://asterixjournal.com/ (October 22, 2018), brief author bio.
Bust, https://bust.com/ (September 20, 2018), Erika W. Smith, “Love War Stories Explores Love and Heartbreak.”
Cassius, https://cassiuslife.com/ (June 20, 2018), Stephanie Long, “Book Ends: A Chat with Author Ivelisse Rodriguez about Love, Hope, and Destruction.”
Ivelisse Rodriguez website, https://www.ivelisserodriguez.com (October 22, 2018).
Necessary Fiction, http://necessaryfiction.com/ (July 31, 2018), Amina Gautier, “An Interview with Ivelisse Rodriguez.”
Rumpus, https://therumpus.net/ (October 22, 2018), brief author bio.
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her short story collection, Love War Stories, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in summer 2018. Her fiction chapbook The Belindas was published in 2017. She has also published fiction in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, Obsidian, Label Me Latina/o, Kweli, the Boston Review, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is the founder and editor of an interview series, published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She is currently working on the novel ‘The Last Salsa Singer’ about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico.
Ivelisse Rodriguez holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a PhD in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her short story collection, Love War Stories, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in July 2018. She is the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers, published by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez earned a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA from Emerson College. She has published fiction in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, the Boston Review, the Bilingual Review, and others. She is a senior fiction editor at Kweli, a Kimbilio fellow, and a VONA/Voices alum.
Ivelisse Rodriguez
Ivelisse Rodriguez holds an MFA from Emerson College and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the English/Creative Writing program. She has had work published in the Boston Review, Migente.com, Latinostories.com, and other outlets. She is currently finishing her short story collection, which mostly focuses on adolescent Puerto Rican girls and their conceptions of womanhood. She has also begun work on a novel about the African Diaspora in Puerto Rico.
Love War Stories
Karen Rigby
ForeWord.
(July 16, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Ivelisse Rodriguez; LOVE WAR STORIES; The Feminist Press (Fiction: Short Stories) 16.95 ISBN: 9781936932252
Byline: Karen Rigby
Ivelisse Rodriguez's Love War Stories is a bold collection that marks the shortfall between romantic illusions and reality.
Here, love -- abusive, storied, unspoken, obsessive, or enduring -- is rendered in memorable forms. Whether narrated by a fifteen-year-old whose aunt pines for the husband who left her or by an office administrator whose memories lead her to stalk an ex-boyfriend, these stories reveal longings that ripple with consequence. Here, love involves a challenging negotiation between what Latinx culture fosters and what individuals want to believe. Rodriguez deftly portrays this tension before her characters reach their decisive moments.
Several stories feature teenagers whose ideas of love harden into defiance. In a Massachusetts high school, a narrator revises an ethnographer's study on Puerto Rican youth to include an insider's perspective. One of the girls portrayed, Veronica, then faces ugly rumors and fights she'd rather avoid. Another story examines a transplant to an upper-class school who experiences the widening gulf between her future, college-bound self and the neighborhood boy whose love she questions and wants. Both young women reveal their vulnerabilities, as well as the extent to which others impact them.
Stories that include slightly older narrators bring a different wisdom. In "The Simple Truth," a daughter curates an exhibit on poet Julia de Burgos while finding renewed respect for her own mother; the knowledge that history depends on perspective paves the way toward a reconciliation. In "Love War Stories," a college student reflects on broken relationships and
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decides -- despite all that she's heard -- that love is worthwhile. The choice turns out to be a fitting end for a collection that emphasizes the vibrancy of girls and women who refuse to believe that the needle is stuck on lamentation. In a refreshing twist, despite bitterness or betrayal, believing in love becomes less naA[macron]ve than singularly hard-won.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rigby, Karen. "Love War Stories." ForeWord, 16 July 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547401413/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=fa175880. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547401413
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Love War Stories
Publishers Weekly.
265.22 (May 28, 2018): p68. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Love War Stories
Ivelisse Rodriguez. Feminist Press, $16.95 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-936932-25-2
Rodriguez's uneven debut introduces readers to a cast of characters who range from unhinged aunts to scholarship students at a private New York City high school to legendary Puerto Rican poet and activist Julia de Burgos. Rodriguez's characters struggle with, covet, and seek to subvert their familial and cultural legacies of suffering from love. In the collection's most structurally interesting story, "Holyoke, Mass.: An Ethnography," an anonymous narrator responds to the publication of an ethnographic account of her hometown by providing her own, truer version: interweaving the story of Veronica, a girl featured in the ethnography, with the cultural and industrial history of Holyoke. However, though ambitious, the conceit isn't carried all the way through--as a result, the two strands don't come together convincingly. The two standout stories are "Summer of Nene," which fully inhabits the voice of a young Puerto Rican boy dealing with his burgeoning sexuality, including an affair with his chronically ill male friend, as well as interest from the hottest girl in his class; and "The Belindas," in which Belinda comes face-to- face again with the charming, handsome, and volatile ex-boyfriend with whom she shares a violent past that has completely altered her life and yet left his untouched. Other stories feel underdeveloped, and though the collection is only somewhat successful as a whole, Rodriguez's best stories are both heartbreaking and insightful. July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Love War Stories." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 68. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638771/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0d110661. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638771
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“Love War Stories” Explores Love And Heartbreak
BY Erika W. Smith
IN Books
lovewarstories 0fe50
Ivelisse Rodriguez’s short story collection Love War Stories (Feminist Press) shares a name with the final story it contains. In the short story, a group of young girls go to war with their mothers over the concept of love: “Just the summer before—fighting, yelling, believing—me, Yahira, Alexa, and Ruthie and a host of other girls would tell love stories,” Rodriguez writes. “And our mothers would tell antilove stories. And we did this every week in Springdale Park for three years until we went off to college. This was our war. And now, love is fighting all of us—it’s kicking our asses.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Love kicks the asses of many of the characters in this collection, though not all. Rodriguez’s stories portray a variety of characters and a variety of romantic experiences, but they are all feature Puerto Rican characters and are tied to the concept of love. In the opening story, “El Qué Dirán,” a young girl is preparing for her quinceañera when she finds that she's at risk of losing her social position (and her date) because of her aunt’s public heartbreak. In “Summer of Nene,” a teenage boy has a secret romance with his male best friend, who becomes disabled after a fall while running from the police. In "The Belindas," a woman watches her abusive ex pursue a new relationship, knowing he doesn't recognize her because of her post-breakup weight gain. Throughout the collection, Rodriguez’s prose pulls you in, and her characters will stay with you even when the stories are only a few pages long.
Love War Stories is out July 10, 2018.
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nterviews · 07/31/2018
An Interview with Ivelisse Rodriguez
by Amina Gautier
Veronica looks at Ralfy’s bronze face and sees that beautiful grin, that smile that she really wants to believe exists only for her. It breaks the hardness of his face, and he seems like two boyfriends at once. Since she was thirteen, she’s seen him at all the parties, and even then she wanted to be the girl he invited into hallways to rap to. He entwines his fingers with hers, bites his lip, and presses his forehead against hers, until Veronica has to return his wondrous smile. Despite his bullshit, Veronica is elated Cassandra is here to observe this moment, so that all those people who talk shit can know, can see, he really does love her.
~ “Holyoke, Mass.: An Ethnography”
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As its title suggests, love is at the center of Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut short story collection Love War Stories (Feminist Press, 2018). Or, to be more exact, the concept of love is what comes under fire. In nine short stories that take place in Puerto Rico, Holyoke, MA, and New York City, Rodriguez depicts Puerto Rican girls who dream of ideal relationships and perfect loves — and their mothers and aunts who know better. From a young girl dreaming of a perfect quinceañera and the first dance with her escort to an aunt who keeps the love letters sent by the husband who abandoned her, to a tough teen who everyone expects to become pregnant, to a college grad who eats to obscure her identity after breaking up with an abusive boyfriend, these stories reveal the idealized yearnings of young women who have been taught to put their faith in love, while suggesting that love is both a performance and a rite of passage.
Necessary Fiction recently spoke with Ivelisse Rodriguez about her short story collection Love War Stories, the concept of love, and the stakes in her fiction.
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Congrats on the publication of your debut collection! ¡Felicidades! Please tell us about the process of creating your collection. How did you put the collection together? How long did it take for the stories to become a collection? What determined the arrangement of the stories within the collection?
As I was writing the stories, I always thought about them as part of a collection. Never did I see them individually. Some of that probably had to do with being in an MFA program and knowing that I had to write a thesis.
In terms of the arrangement, I wanted the collection to start in Puerto Rico then travel to Western Massachusetts then New York City. Western Massachusetts was the second stop in order to highlight the diasporic journey Puerto Ricans made there and to showcase the lives of Puerto Ricans outside of New York City. I grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico, but all the diasporic literature is centered around New York City. So much so that other historical enclaves, like those in Western Mass and Cleveland don’t show up in the literature. So it was supremely important for me to feature the stories of Puerto Ricans in Western Mass.
Besides the location-based element to the arrangement, I also thought about the message of each story’s ending and how they created a narrative trajectory of their own — moving from brokenness (and not necessarily in a bad way) to self-assuredness.
How long did it take for the collection to find a publication home and what was that process like?
It took a long time — I started the first story from the collection, “Love War Stories,” twenty years ago. Over those two decades, I completed an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English and creative writing, and I was slowly becoming a better writer during this time. I was also submitting and getting rejected but that was because the manuscript was not ready for publication. But sometimes you hear these urban legends from the publishing world where someone gets a book deal with scant written, and you think that can happen to you. But, no, don’t send your work out if it is not ready. It is a waste of everyone’s time.
I kept revising and revising the manuscript, and I eventually started placing in contests and/or getting nice rejection letters, so I was finally on the right track. Then I was a finalist for the 2016 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize from the Feminist Press & TAYO Literary Magazine. I didn’t win — the wonderful YZ Chin won for her book Though I Get Home which focuses on characters from Malaysia — but the Feminist Press still wanted to publish my book (so this publishing urban legend came true…).
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers out there working on their debut collections?
I would say that they should know that it is harder to publish a short story collection and that they should also begin working on a novel (if that is one of their goals). Or they should publish the stories individually and not get too attached to getting a book deal for the collection. In other words, don’t let rejection of your short story collection stop you from continuing to write and working on new projects.
I would also tell them that learning to become a writer is not just about writing but also dealing with these emotional aspects that no one talks about in workshop — like the pitfalls of perfectionism or fear of facing the page. I don’t agree with the adage that people have a fear of success. I think people have a fear of failing and that their work isn’t good enough and that they are never going to really get the story out like they want to. And sometimes you don’t. I think that you have to accept that, along with the fact that all your stories are not going to be equally strong, but each story will find its own set of fans.
I also highly suggest that writers learn their writing process. Audience members often ask writers about what his/her/their writing process is. I think this a good question for comparative purposes. Sometimes it is quite stunning to see how different writers write. But ultimately, a writer needs to learn her own process. For example, I learned that starting a new story felt like being at the bottom of a mountain and that then there was always a point where I felt like this story was never going to come together, and then I would have a breakthrough that got me to the end. Learning this about my writing process allowed me to talk myself off the ledge when the story felt hopeless because I knew I had been in this position before and had been able to come out on the other side.
The women in your stories seem to fall into two disparate groups, i.e. younger women who are looking for love and older women who are weary of love. How do these women progress from believing in love stories to antilove stories and how does age affect their outlook on love?
The young women in my stories are like most heterosexual women who have been indoctrinated to believe that love is this thing that will fill them up. It is the one thing in life they are meant to achieve. And they have limited experience with romantic relationships, so they think that the right one (person or relationship) is just around the corner, and their lives will be radically different. While their viewpoint is a bit too idealistic, the young should be hopeful.
And older women should know better. My older female characters can’t really conjure up that idealism one needs at the start of each new relationship because they have been through it. They are hardened to love and love no longer holds the primary spot in their lives like it once did.
The generational clash stems from the older women telling the younger women that their worldview is the truth. For the young women, what the older women think about love is wholly inconceivable. The young think that those unfortunate love stories will certainly not happen to them; though they are already happening to them.
Ultimately, though, both age groups are where they need to be — the older female characters are wiser and have learned from life, and the younger female characters are still dreaming, as they should be.
Many of the stories are about love that has been lost, and about fathers and husbands who are not seen due to death, divorce or abandonment. Although the men seem to be the source of the stories’ central conflicts, we don’t often see them. Even in the stories with younger narrators like “The Belindas” and “Holyoke Mass.: An Ethnography,” the men are often seen from afar. How important are the men to these stories of love?
Men are important to stories of love in that they set them off. They have to show interest in women, they have to say the things women can then repeat to their friends, etc. But in other ways, men are negligible to stories of love because for heterosexual women, their greatest romances are the ones they are carrying on in their heads. Many of the girls and women in my stories are dealing with shady boys and men, yet what is more important for some of these women is the men they have built in their minds. Women will spend hours daydreaming about men, talking about men, inventing a future with men. In a sense, these women are in a relationship of one or in a relationship with a man they have dreamed up, a man who is much better than the man who is physically there (or not there). I wanted to capture this dissonance — this physical absence of men, the ways men disappoint women, but how women hold onto a fantasy (of the man and the relationship) and how much the presence of men in women’s lives exists in the imagination of women.
In “La Hija de Changó,” you have this awesome chiasmic moment where you depict Xaviera, the narrator, interacting with her boyfriend Anthony at the Ritzy party where he is shown to be the outsider, and then you reverse it and have the narrator attend a neighborhood family party with him, where she occupies the outsider position, and I’d love for you to talk a bit about the significance of having your characters navigate disparate cultural spaces and what’s at stake during those various interactions.
In “La Hija de Changó,” Xaviera is a junior at an elite prep school in Manhattan, but she comes from East Harlem, so she straddles two disparate worlds at once. What I wanted to do in this story is capture what so many of us who went to boarding schools or prestigious day schools through scholarship programs or through organizations like ABC or Prep for Prep experienced. Education is normally presented in positive terms, as this great equalizer, but it also brings losses. If you are not coming from a privileged background, elite education cleaves you from where you came from. It is akin to a (im)migratory experience where X land is seen as having streets paved with gold, and when you get there, you realize that your relationship to your homeland will never be the same, that you have to learn a new language, that you are no longer the “norm,” but, rather, you are now starkly different and stand out.
For Xaviera, everything she does — learning about Santeria, trying to stay with Anthony, not dating boys from the Whitney school — is a way to try to hold onto or return to something that is irretrievably lost — lost in the sense that she is now somewhat of an outsider in this space where she once belonged. Xaviera, like so many others, will never be able to get back to the feeling of security that comes from belonging.
In “The Simple Truth,” the narrator dedicates the exhibit to her mother, who is an academic. How does your background as a scholar and an academic inform the stories you want to tell and the way you craft your fiction?
It is important for a writer to be well-versed in her/his/their genre. You need to come to writing knowing the history of the stories you want to tell. It’s a matter of craft. If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to study the conversation you are entering. So as a scholar and a writer, it was important for me to understand the trajectory of Puerto Rican literature from the continental U.S. and to see how I could add to that oeuvre without telling the same story. For my preliminary exams, I studied Latinx literature, but when it came to the Puerto Rican literature, I was always looking at it two-fold — as a scholar and as a writer. This informs my fiction by the topics I select to discuss in my writing and how I can speak about that history. I can contextualize my work and make connections to past writers and also show where I diverge. Furthermore, when I read my work while revising, I am reading on three levels. I read as a reader, then as a writer, and then as an academic. Reading as a reader means relaxing into the story and focusing on how the narrative unfolds, letting the words and story overtake me. Reading as a writer signifies that I am then focusing on plot, if ideas hold up through the entirety of the text, if that phrasing captures my intended meaning, etc. Lastly, reading as a scholar means that I am reading with the whole of Puerto Rican literature from the continental US at my disposal, so I am making connections, thinking about a whole sub-group of fiction as I revise, and doing a scholarly analysis of my text. This allows me to easily switch perspectives and think about multiple audiences at once.
Why do you write? What’s at stake for you?
I write because I love reading, and what I want to do as a writer is recreate what reading has done for me — which is to give life to my thoughts, to offer validation of a world I see in my mind. There is this line from Tar Baby about dogs kneeling and I knew what Toni Morrison meant, and I felt she made material something I had thought about, so reading is about connection and being seen. The author validates a world I couldn’t articulate.
Also, there are lines that I carry with me by other writers — like “if love isn’t eternal, what’s the point?” by Sandra Cisneros, or “You your best thing” by Morrison. These lines function like prayers — they provide comfort. And I hope that is what my writing does — offer connection and comfort to readers.
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Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut short story collection is Love War Stories (The Feminist Press, 2018). She has published fiction in The Boston Review, All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, Obsidian, Kweli, The Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. The series is published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She is currently working on the novel The Last Salsa Singer about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. She is the recipient of the Camargo Core Fellowship, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the International Latino Book Award, and the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
BOOK ENDS: A Chat with Author Ivelisse Rodriguez About Love, Hope, and Destruction
CASSIUS spoke to the writer and scholar ahead of the release of her short story collection, "Love War Stories."
By Stephanie Long, Editor, News & Culture
Culture 06.20.18
Ivelisse Rodriguez 'Love War Stories' Cover
Source: Courtesy of Feminist Press / Feminist Press
When Ivelisse Rodriguez was a little girl, she received a “dissonant” message from her elders: “that men are sucios and not to be trusted…coupled with a message that we needed to get married and have a man.”
In her forthcoming short story collection, Love War Stories, the Puerto Rican author and scholar explores how love serves as a source of both “hope” and “destruction” for women and girls. She also illuminates the humanity of those who are often overlooked.
CASSIUS caught up with Rodriguez ahead of the book’s July 10 release to discuss the inspiration behind the collection and its significance within the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Read the conversation below.
CASSIUS: The back cover of Love War Stories reads: “Puerto Rican girls are brought up to want one thing: true love. Yet they are raised by women whose lives are marked by broken promises, grief, and betrayal.” Can you elaborate on this statement and how it informs the stories in the book?
Ivelisse Rodriguez: There is this dissonant message I remember receiving as a Puerto Rican girl—that men are sucios and not to be trusted, but that was coupled with a message that we needed to get married and have a man. As a child, I remember feeling sorry for any woman who had a man in her house because I assumed she was being beaten. Life always seemed better when there was not a man in the house. So there is this clear reality, but, somehow, it is overwhelmed or overridden by this fantasy that love is this panacea when in actuality it is making the wound. And everyone participates in this because it is not seen as a lie, but rather “bad luck.”
Nonetheless, I recognize that love is where the young live. Love for them is this bubble of optimism where anything can happen, where their lives can radically change. Love offers hope, but then love can also dish out destruction. So throughout my stories, you’ll see this push and pull that is often represented as a generational conflict.
C.: What went into making the decision to tell multiple stories in this book versus telling a central one? Have you always wanted to write a short story collection?
I.R.: I started this collection in graduate school, and, at that moment, there were several short story collections that were out and were making a big splash. The workshop is also just better suited for short stories, and that is what most of my classmates were submitting, so it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to be working on. But that was back in 1997. And then later, the short story collection became persona non grata. But I was already in it, and it was the project I had to finish. Right now, I am working on a novel. So I am ultimately focused on writing fiction in the form that my current project necessitates, more so than being attached to a particular form.
C.: Speaking of short story collections, do you have any favorites written by other authors?
I.R.: My favorite short story collection is Drown by Junot Díaz. I read it in graduate school when I was getting my MFA. Actually, I remember I had to do a report on it and present it to the class. Drown for me was the first fiction text that was literary, yet showcased the world I had grown up in. So as a reader, this was monumental for me. Beyond the significance the book has for me, it is a book that I have read several times, and it has always held up, deepening my love for it. There are some books that I have loved once, but not a second time. Drown endures. And it does what I think great fiction should do—deepen my understanding of humanity, haunt me as a text, and really touch my heart. It offers me the experience I am looking for as a reader, which I don’t find in most books.
C.: Were any of the stories in Love War Stories based on personal experiences?
I.R.: Yes and no. There may have been an impetus from real life, but by the time the story is complete, the story does not look like that bit of truth anymore. For example, my uncle one joked about how my great-aunt Nelba was still waiting for her husband. I asked my mom about his comment, and she told me how Nelba’s husband had left her to go to the U.S. My uncle’s laughing and what happened to Nelba is what sparked my story “El Que Dirán.” In real life, Nelba’s husband left Puerto Rico for the continental U.S. to live with his mistress, which is not what happens in my story. In any case, this small kernel led to a completely different and imagined story.
“Some Springs Girls Do Die” was inspired by my friend’s suicide. Her suicide was unexpected, so the protagonist in my story imagines the whys and what her friend’s last day of life was like.
“The Light in the Sky” has some elements of a trip I took with my mother to La Parguera—where she did think there was a UFO, there was a young couple we gossiped about, there was a speedboat, and the UFO turned out to be a blimp from the Coast Guard. There were other true elements in the story I had to take out because the truth is the enemy of fiction. And the story was a hot mess because it initially was a retelling of this vacation, with some fictional elements, but there was no plot. So I had to go back and strip all the true elements that were weighing down the story. You can incorporate real-life elements into your fiction, but often, the truth impedes your narrative. And you have to work in service of your story, not the truth. I added more fictional elements, and the story is much better than it initially was.
C.: The experiences of the women in your book speak to those of the women propelling the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. How does it feel to be releasing this book during this time?
I.R.: That’s interesting as I never even thought about that, especially since I started this book twenty years ago. So I have spent almost half my life with these stories, which were true and pertinent then as they are now. But since you asked, I wonder if today’s current movements will change how the book is read, how the readers experience it.
C.: In regards to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, do you think we’re progressing? Is there still more work to be done?
I.R.: I think the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are on a continuum with previous feminist movements, and just like with those movements, there will be more work. Partly, because society keeps changing and activities that have been normalized or were seen as the norm in the past are now being challenged. Looking at the Aziz Ansari case, what I take from it is not the actions of an individual, but rather a normalized aspect of dating culture. And here is a moment to call out this behavior and discuss why it is problematic and to start shifting what is the norm.
To further feminism or any movement that is invested in equality and uprooting current power structures, I think we also need to become comfortable with discomfort and imperfection. Since the election and all this talk about Hillary Clinton being imperfect, I have been disturbed by this need for perfection and the requirement for our heroes and allies to not be problematic on any level, at any point in their lives. That’s just not reality. People are just going to disappoint you in one aspect or another or one time or another. And if we pursue perfection at all costs, then there will be no allies or any members of the left still standing.
As an academic, I love theory and imagining all the possibilities of what we could strive for and how we can become a better society, but I am also a committed realist. There are plenty of ideas we can subscribe to, but I think we need to understand that shift from theory to practice is going to unearth problems we never imagined when we were just ruminating about something. Ideas don’t easily translate to life because ideas are pure and people are complex.
Also, sometimes we find that we have differing sets of beliefs that are at play at the same time and are in competition. For whatever reason, you can’t incorporate both these ideas in a successful way, so which one will be chosen? Which one is more important in this moment? So people committed to X beliefs may not always be able to uphold them in a way that is currently perceived as being on the right side of the issue. So, I think any radical movement needs to be more realistic about these complexities in order to keep growing.
C.: What do you want readers to take away from Love War Stories?
I.R.: I want readers to hear the stories of these young Puerto Rican girls and for the stories to matter. I want readers to see how detrimental being a woman or chasing love is. I want people to see the humanity in people who may not look like them. I want these stories to grab the reader by the heart.
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Book Ends , Ivelisse Rogriguez