ET: Throughout your work as a creative writer, you've always been a journalist. How did you arrive to the Fourth Estate? What do you think the job of a reporter offers you as an artist?
AM: I started in journalism more than 20 years ago. My undergraduate was in English lit, and I took two journalism classes in the early 90s. That's when everyone was studying business and I panicked and thought I had better study something a bit more practical. This led to a part time clerk position with the Miami Herald. Like most things in my life, it just sort of happened. When I graduated from college, they gave me a job in the Neighbors section.
It's the best thing that I did. I complain about it now, but I feel as if I learned so much. It's really the best way to educate yourself as a writer. Hemingway said it much better. I’d say it taught me to be concise, to tell the truth, to respect deadlines; the latter is something creative people really need to learn. Deadlines matter. If not you’re floating. Also, that the work is not finished until it's read. It's an interactive process. Journalism teaches you to keep the reader in mind, and that in itself is a hallmark of human imagination. We can imagine what other people think. When you're writing as a journalist you really have to write and arrange your thoughts in a certain way. It teaches you modesty and a spirit of service in writing vs. self indulgence. That's the biggest lesson that journalism gave me. And it's an important one.
ET: What’s next?
AM: I’m writing décimas for the new novel; it’s divided into a hundred parts, vignettes, really, the closest thing to poetry that I’ve ever written. And I'm at Maastricht University. They hired me to come up with a creative writing minor. It’s not really done much here in Europe; they don't have a creative writing focus. It's given me that connection to the real world. It’s dangerously easy to retreat as creative writer. It's important for artists to address the world and be part of it, and not in a polemic way, bur rather in a way of sharing the experience of being alive in this particular place, at this particular time.
Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), winner of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Little Spells (GOSS 183, 2008).
Ana Menéndez is the author of four books of fiction, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, which was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and whose title story won a Pushcart Prize, Loving Che (2004), The Last War (2009) chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the top 100 books of the year, and Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011). A former journalist, she now lives in The Netherlands, where she lectures at Maastricht University.
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