Authorgraph No.242
Elizabeth Acevedo interviewed by Nicolette Jones
Elizabeth Acevedo, winner of last year’s CILIP Carnegie Medal for her debut novel in verse, Poet X, should have been in the UK this month for the Hay Festival, promoting her next-but-one book, Clap When You Land. Instead she and her husband are in their apartment in Washington DC (where she teaches classes that are all now online), venturing out daily for half-hour walks, and grateful that they have ‘space, an exercise bike, and plenty of food’. We meet on Skype. She smiles a lot, laughs easily, has a warm voice, and expresses herself clearly and powerfully.
Yahaira, living with her parents in New York and motherless Camino brought up by her aunt in the Dominican Republic. An inspiration was American Airlines Flight 587 bound for the Dominican Republic (where Acevedo’s parents were from) which came down in Queens two months after 9/11. All 260 people aboard died, but the press quickly lost interest when it emerged that terrorism was not the cause.
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Acevedo researched the crash, and found there were passengers leading double lives, as the father in her book does. Others who died had dreams that were not fulfilled; some she used. The story is deliberately set now, however, so that history is not echoed too closely. It is particularly about grief, of which Acevedo says fortunately she has little experience, though ‘I had an aunt pass when I was 11’. But she has seen the different ways other people mourn, used her imagination and her own difficult moments and relied ‘on other folks’ – her editor who had lost her parents, and another writer she met in a Facebook group whose father was on that flight, and who saw a draft. ‘The way the media was captured, and the grief was captured, felt true to her.’
The book is ambitious, too, about other subjects. ‘I am trying to talk about rape culture, sex tourism, child prostitution, as well as the media, and race and privilege and gentrification. I wanted to see how much verse could hold’. This book, like Poet X, is told in blank verse. ‘I am interested in the level of interiority, the inner thoughts of young people. It is not so action-driven. There is rumination. You just have to sit with that for a few pages. We’re not racing anywhere.’ The creative process involves ‘gunning through’ a first draft, though not in a planned order, and many sharpening drafts, ‘until you stop when they rip it from your hand’. Her second novel, With the Fire on High, the story of a teenage mother with a magic touch as a chef,
is, by 8 Books for Keeps No.242 May 2020
lap When You Land tells the story, in two voices, of teenage half- sisters who discover each other’s existence after their father dies in a plane crash. They are chess prodigy
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