#literuture

[ignatianlitmag]

Writers of San Francisco: Interview with Rafael Hererro

Rafael Hererro is a creative nonfiction writer in the University of San Francisco’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He is an open mic reader at Sacred Grounds Coffee Shop, and his interview is featured in the Spring 2016 Ignatian issue.

Ignatian: What genre do you write in?

Rafael: I am enrolled in the MFA Fiction department for two reasons. Memoir is a specific kind of genre. It is nonfiction, but there is a current trend in which I partake; I am one of those memoir writers that want their memoirs to read like a novel, like fiction. So we are applying the laws of fiction to nonfiction.

I: What made you want to write in the memoir genre? What inspires you to write?

R: They say write about what you know. That’s where you become the strongest. When you write about what you know, you come across, even if you’re not trying. One of the fundamental rules of writing is to never underestimate your reader. Your reader knows a lot, and even if they don’t have conscious knowledge. They get things. So you are not trying to prove your authority on a subject– readers get it. They start reading and they think “this is someone I trust. I don’t know why, but I do.”

A lot of people that you will come across will say “oh my gosh, so many things are happening to me–I should write a book.” That mentality is something you should be very careful about. Writers sit back and say ‘uh huh’ because people have no idea the kind of work, time, and energy that goes into one single book. Books take years to write. There’s the thinking process, the writing process, the editing process, then you must find an agent who will rework it with you and then a publishing house that wants to rework it with you. It takes years. Then you need the technique. I had an acquisitions editor who said she wanted my story but only if I could actually write.

I: What ideas are central to your writing?

R: The difficult process is knowing what should get in and what should be taken out. We write a lot, but a lot has to be taken out because it’s not good, not useful, not adequate, or it’s not in the right tone.

You should write what your body asks you to write. That being said, distance helps a lot. Many say you shouldn’t write about life events until several years have gone by because when things happen to us, we can get angry. And being angry is probably not a good reason to write.

One of the reasons people write memoirs is not out of anger, but to set the record straight. Something awful happened, and it is awful, but I have to return to it to set the record straight. Distance is important because you’re more objective and less indicative. There’s less axe-grinding, and you get perspective. Perspective is important for writing.

But then again, if you feel strongly, never refuse that to yourself. Another writer once said to me that every time you write about someone else, there’s a small murder there. But every time you refuse to write about something, there’s a small suicide there. So if your mind and body are telling you to write something, write it! It doesn’t mean it has to be published.

I: What made you want to be a writer?

R: I have a very unusual path. In a nutshell, I became a doctor, with a focus in gynecology. It took many years. I did scientific writing, but it just isn’t the same thing. Creative writing just disappeared from my life. I had no idea I was going to get into writing, no idea.

I did many years of therapy to learn about myself. Therapy is very good for writers because you go into the subconscious and go about analyzing feelings. You get around the anger and you get new perspectives. I would tell my therapist my stories and he would usually laugh and say ‘you should write about this!’ to which I would respond ‘I don’t want to write about this! This is very painful.’ But sure enough, two years later I thought ‘Maybe I should write about this’ and that got me writing.

Also, because I am gay, I don’t have children. A lot of people who have children see being a parent as creation. And I was looking at my job, and I had a wonderful job, but it wasn’t creative at all. I think for human beings to be completely fulfilled they need to create. I asked myself what could get me involved in creating, and writing came to mind.

Now that I am fully involved in writing, I can see the writer in me when I was younger. It seemed to me that it had disappeared, but it was there. I think that things that are in you bubble up.

I: So you consider your creative writing like your children?

R: I do. And they say you start writing and your pieces take on a life of their own. I have writing that went in a direction I didn’t want it to go. But, you know, they have a life of their own and they grow. You try to educate them like children, but they have their own personalities. And it is amazing that you think that you’ve written something, and no matter how concise and well-written, people will read it completely differently. They just keep on growing.

I: What was the process of writing your first memoir? Are you still learning from the process?

R: You never stop learning! Once my boss told me ‘you made a mistake’ and I answered ‘yes, I am imperfect, I make mistakes.’ And you know what, the day I stop making mistakes is the day I am dead. Because a book is made up of learning and mistakes, I daresay it is never finished. But once it is in print, let it be.

I: Are you afraid of publishing your writing that is about your life?

R: I do feel scared. And you know what, if you don’t feel scared, that’s a bad sign. We don’t want to write about you having a burrito, okay? What we want when we’re reading literature is to discover what it means to be human. I don’t read sci-fi, but I’m sure we can discover humanity even there.

We read for a reason, and I think it is because you want to go on an adventure without scraping your knees. We want to go places where we cannot go on our own. If you are not daring as a writer, is it really worth the ride for someone else to go with you? Do we want to go on a ride with something that has been done a million times? In good writing, you have to take risks. Actors often say that they are shy and that they have stage fright. And that’s a good sign, because it shows you’re still on your toes.

[coonfood]

Ida B.

"A voice of reform and reason, Ida B. Wells-Barnett led the anti-lynching movement. In 1892 she expanded the column that she wrote for The New York Age and published it as a pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Three years later, she published A Red Record: Tabulated Stastictics and Alleged Causes of Lynching  in the United States, 1892 - 1894. Concerned with the causes and the occurrences of lynchings , Wells-Barnett argued that white women were making false allegations of rape. She stressed that political and economic reasons, as well as consensual sex, prompted most of the lynchings. She knew this to be true from her many years of research and from personal experience. In 1892 in Memphis, Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells-Barnett, and two other black men were lynched because their grocery store attracted black customers away from a white grocery store. 

Born to slave parents in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells-Barnett had to take caare of her seve siblings when her parents died during a yellow fever epidemic in 1878. To do so Wells-Barnett used the training that she had recieved at Shaw University (later Rust College) to become a teacher. She moved to Memphis where she began the activism for which she is best known. In 1884, she sat down in the ladies coach, rather than the segregated coach for blacks, and white male passengers had to remove her. She sued, won her case, but a higer court revervesed the decision. When she critiqued the condition of black schools in Memphis, she was fire from her tacher job. She began soliciting subscriptions to the Memphis Free Speech an Headlight,  a newspaper she edited, becoming a full-time newspaper-woman. When her editorial on the Thomas Moss incident appeared in the paper, she was at a general conference meeting of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Mobs destroyed the office of Free Speech and threatened her life. Wells-Barnett then settled in New York where she began writing the columns of New York Age that would become Southern Horrors. Because she was interested in a wide range of issues affecting the black community, Wells protested the exclusion of black from Chicago World's fair of1893, publishing twenty thousand copies of her pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. She stayed in Chicago, formed the Ida B. Wells Club, and married Ferdinand Barnett, a Chicago lawyer. who had two children. The couple had four more children, and with her husbands support, Wells-Barnett was able to continue her activist agenda , founding the first black female suffrage club, the Alpha Suffrage Club, in 1913. When her white Illinois delegates refused to let her march in the national suffrage parade with them, she waited until the right moment and stepped in the front of the procession, thus integrating the suffrage movement. Wells-Barnett was a champion of issue of race and gender and a towering transition from the late 19th century to the Harlem Renaissance." -Valerie Lee [African American Women's Literature]