(lively music) - You're up against the mystery when you're writing, this huge mystery, and you need your courage and you need to gird yourself, and you need to find ways to honor and respect it, you know, to say, "I know what I'm up against.

This story is powerful."

(lively music) - Well, hi, and welcome to the "PBS Books Readers Club."

- Today we'll be joined by literary icon Julia Alvarez to discuss her latest novel "The Cemetery of Untold Stories."

- Julia Alvarez is the bestselling author of "In the Time of the Butterflies" and "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents."

This novel follows Alma Cruz, a writer whose sanity is threatened by her unfinished books.

Wanting her stories to rest in peace, she creates a literal graveyard in her homeland of the Dominican Republic for the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life - As readers, we, too, become haunted by the ghosts of Alma's unfinished characters, listening to their stories of both heartbreak and tremendous resilience.

It reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished even at the end.

- We are so excited to speak with Julia Alvarez.

And we'll also reveal our pick for next month's read, so stick around for that.

- Hi, I am Fred Nahhat, here with Lauren Smith.

Princess Weekes is an award-winning video essayist and author who brings her master's degree in literary theory to our table, joining us today from New York.

And Heather-Marie Montilla, our resident librarian and the PBS Books national director, always here to offer an expert opinion on our book of the month.

- But, of course, you are the most important person in this book club.

As we discuss "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" today, please share your thoughts with us and the other book clubbers in the comments.

It really means the world to us.

We love reading your comments.

Seriously, it's the best part of my entire month.

We love reading those comments in the chat.

And every time we see a little like or a love float across the screen, truly, it makes us smile and lets us know that you're enjoying the time you spend with us.

- And speaking of enjoying time in the company of other readers, be sure to join the PBS Books Readers Club Facebook group.

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- And please make sure to share this event.

As we always say, friends do not let friends miss out on great books.

And what's better than a book club with great friends?

- Nothing.

It is absolutely the best.

So let's talk about "The Cemetery of Untold Stories."

The book centers around a writer named Alma Cruz in the later stages of her career.

She's struggling to complete the narratives of her unfinished novels, and ultimately she decides to lay them to rest in a graveyard in her home country of the Dominican Republic.

Among them are stories about Bienvenida, dictator Raphael Trujillo's abandoned wife, who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

- But her characters continue to haunt not only Alma, but the local groundskeeper who becomes a sympathetic ear for their secret tales, and perhaps us too as readers.

So, book friends., what did you think about this book?

Princess, what were your thoughts?

Get us started.

- Yeah, this book was really big for me in a lot of different ways as, like, someone with Caribbean heritage, as someone who has a lot of Dominican family members.

There was so much history and nuance and gravity to the topics that were being covered here.

And as a longtime fan of this author, it just felt like a culmination of so much intelligence and care, but also love for the Dominican Republic and the ever-changing relationship it has with its people.

So I really just thought it was like truly one of my favorite books that we've read through this entire season.

- Oh, I'm so glad.

And, Heather, I know you have sort of a personal connection to this book too.

- I do, I do.

So my husband is Dominican, and so I feel very connected.

Obviously I feel Dominican in many ways.

I have a Dominican family for the last 20 years.

And so for me, this, it was so much a celebration of culture.

Also in it, it had things that are the harder parts of things that we don't always wanna discuss.

But it even addresses that in the book, that there are some stories that should be untold and there are some stories that don't need to be fully uncovered, but also wrestling with those stories.

It was amazing.

I actually found personal connection throughout the whole thing.

But I think any reader will enjoy this book.

- Yeah.

- Mm-hmm.

I mean, it is like, kind of like in a film parlance, like an Altman film.

So there's, it's not like I was so interested in one thing, it's the whole thing.

Really captivating.

And how the author is able to put it all together in the end, in these intersecting and parallel and coinciding stories, to me, that is a literary feat.

- Well, one of the best things about reading, always, is the opportunity to spend some time in somebody else's life, in their shoes, in a part of the world that maybe you haven't had a chance to be a part of.

I learned a lot reading this book and it opened my eyes to so many things.

And I hope that our readers felt the same way.

I just thought it was fantastic.

And I can't wait to talk with Julia Alvarez.

She is amazing.

Such an icon.

- Icon.

- Icon, yeah.

- I am so thrilled that she's gonna be here with us joining our book club.

Hey, Julia Alvarez is in our book club.

Yes.

- it's pretty wonderful.

- So much to discuss with Julia Alvarez.

She's standing by to join us in just a moment.

And we wanna invite you to join the PBS Books Readers Club too.

Tell us what you thought about "The cemetery of Untold Stories" and maybe pose a question or two for other book clubbers to react to.

- [Laura] Like any good book club, it's more fun when we all get involved.

And there are many ways to connect, including our e-newsletter.

This is really special.

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One of those gifts is an ebook download of "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" or one of our PBS Books features for your phone, tablet, or e-reader.

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And it makes you a member of your local PBS station, giving you access to all the amazing shows in Passport, including the extended edition of this interview with Julia Alvarez and the "American Masters" series, including their documentary "Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined."

- "American Masters" is awesome.

If you haven't watched it before, you're gonna love it.

They create documentaries on so many great authors like Julia Alvarez, but also Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, Louisa May Alcott, and more.

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(squeals) It's so funny.

I love it.

- So perfect.

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Just click the link in the description or visit pbsbooks.org/donate.

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Again, donations support your local PBS station and it'll help us keep the book club going for another month.

- And now let us welcome our guest author Julia Alvarez.

Her semi-autobiographical novel "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" was published in 1991, followed in 1994 by "In the Time of the Butterflies," which sold over a million copies and raised global awareness about life under Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, a theme that's reflected, once again, in "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" in the tale of Bienvenida, Trujillo's discarded wife and one of the main characters in Alma's unfinished novels.

- Spanning multiple genres and audiences, Alvarez's work includes three non-fiction books, three poetry collections, 11 books for children and young adults, and seven literary novels.

And we are so excited to have her join our book club today.

Julia Alvarez, welcome to the "PBS Books Readers Club."

- Thank you for having me and inviting me and my novel "The Cemetery Untold Stories" to be with you today.

- We are more than thrilled to have you with us today.

Thank you so much for joining us and for your book "The Cemetery of Untold Stories."

Tell us a little bit about how the idea for this book came to be.

- Where the idea came from.

First, I don't work with ideas, really.

It's too much in my head.

It's more of, you know, it is like a pebble in my shoe.

And the pebble that was in my shoe is that as I grow older and enter the late chapters of my own life, I wanted to explore the landscape of growing old and especially growing old in a craft that I've given my life to practicing.

And, you know, instead, usually you read "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," I wanted this to be a portrait of the artist as an old woman and a Latina, many of whose stories came from somewhere else, and explore that landscape.

And it was interesting because as I finished the book, I was reading some critic and I found out about this critic in Canada named Constance Rooke.

And she coined the term for a new kind of novel that she saw coming up everywhere, which she called the vollendungsroman, and that, instead of the bildungsroman, which is the novel of growing up and coming of age, the vollendungsroman is the novel of completion, of growing old.

So it's wonderful to feel like I'm exploring a landscape.

And there are others that as we, as the boomer population ages, becomes more and more interested in this landscape, which we all, if we're lucky enough to live long enough, we will all be entering.

So that's where, you know, the whole idea or the pebble that got in my shoe, where it came from, that I was... You know, I write to understand things.

I don't write because I already know things; that would bore me to death.

I write because I don't know and I wanna explore what that landscape is like.

- That's a great answer.

- And if you don't mind me saying, that pebble in your shoe may have been more like the sand in the oyster, which has created this wonderful, complex, and fulfilling story.

But going back to the beginning, Alma describes her relationship with her writer friend, unnamed.

While this writer started out as a mentor, ultimately it was this writer friend's unraveling over an elusive story that led Alma to create "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" in the first place.

Talk about that relationship and how Alma's anxiety over repeating her friend's failings inspired both motivation and distress.

- Well, if you can imagine someone, a writer who has been kind of a little bit of a muse and mentor suddenly being stuck...

Your muse is not supposed to do that on you.

So it perplexes her and makes her understand that maybe, you know, as with other things, you have to kind of realize when the duende has declined, when the animal is no longer there, and have the grace to move to one side and let the, you know, the new arrivals in the field of time and literature take their place.

But it's a, you know, I don't have a solution to that, just that it is a troubling situation.

And I think every writer is Jacob wrestling with the mysterious stranger that he meets in the night; he doesn't know who it is, later he calls it an angel.

You don't know what it is you are working on and you're working in the dark and you don't have a recipe, and you struggle and struggle and you won't give up.

And Jacob, at the end, gets a new name and he gets to, he doesn't stop the struggle till God, so the Bible says, blesses him.

And I think that's true for a writer too.

You're in there for two, three, four, five, sometimes a decade working on this novel, and you're not going to give up even though it seems sometimes to be, you know, going to beat you to a pulp.

And you want it to be finally blessed and named, which is what happens in the biblical story, that's why I bring it up.

But it's not a guarantee.

Obviously it's not a guarantee with the writer friend or with Alma, who ends up with all these unfinished, unsuccessful, abandoned drafts and characters.

- Your book can be enjoyed by all readers, but I feel in many ways it's like a love story to Dominican people and culture: its music, merengue; food, so much great food is discussed; and language, which is really woven through the text.

Being married to a Dominican and feeling very much part of Dominican culture, it's a little bit, no pun intended, like inside baseball.

Can you talk a little bit about your desire to immerse the reader in Dominican culture?

- Well, you know, it's who I am.

You know, it's that whole complicated mixture.

When I first started writing, it was before multicultural literature, African American studies, before we had Latinx writers, none of that was happening.

And I thought to be an American writer and be accepted on the shelf of American, USA American literature, I had to be an all-American writer.

I couldn't have Tia Rosa, I had to have an Aunt Rose.

And it just, when I wrote with that mindset, I couldn't write, I couldn't write.

And I finally realized, it was a, you know, a slow evolution, that I was really, I, not these other sort of more mainstream writers whom I respected and whose work I loved, but that I wasn't them and I was the one who was an all-American writer.

With my roots, my traditions, my native tongue, my rhythms, all of that, in the southern part of the Americas, and my training, and my command, to whatever extent I have it, of English in the northern part, so I am a hemispheric writer.

I am all-American because America is not just the North America, it's all of the hemisphere.

So that was a great... You know, yo be able to name it and to understand it and to embrace it was important to me.

So when I write, I'm not trying to make it Dominican, (chuckles) it's just all of these things that I bring to bear in storytelling.

And so it's really, you know, it's been an evolution, but also a recognition that this is what enriches our stories, when we bring all our tribal baggage, all our traditions, and the rhythms we learn from another language and landscape, and flora and fauna, when you bring all that with you to the page.

And so, you know, it's a love story, yes.

And it's part of what gives me the kind of richness that I feel is a real legacy that I got from coming from the Dominican Republic.

- I've always loved your work; I grew up with it.

And as a first-generation American myself, I find that when you're writing from such multiple perspectives...

I mean, you came to this country at the age of 10, I believe is what I read.

And I just wonder how that experience of going back and forth and being between different worlds, how that impacts the way that you tell stories about the Dominican Republic.

- Well, that's a good point you made, that, you know, unlike older models of immigration, when you came from Europe and you never went back and you cut off all your ties, we always went back.

Once the dictatorship was over, we did summers there, we did vacations there.

When we misbehaved, we were sent there to be disciplined and made into nice Dominican girls.

You know, all of that was going on.

So it was always hybridity.

So I grew up with all of that as part of my, as part of my culture, my background.

And, of course, Mami and Papi and my sisters at home, we were Dominican, a Dominican nucleus before there was a Washington Heights or before a whole generation of new Dominicans came on.

We were not everywhere as we are now.

But we had each other and we always went...

I still call it going home.

Figure that.

I'm 74.

You know, I came in 1960 and I still think of it as going home.

Yep.

- Well, throughout your book, your story does highlight often that cash can solve problems even today.

In what ways has this changed in the last century in the Dominican Republic?

- Well, (speaks in Spanish), as we say.

There's still corruption.

There's still the idea that a public servant is there to serve themselves many times.

And, you know, you have people entering government with maybe sometimes the best intentions and all of a sudden they have huge houses and exonerated licenses on their expensive cars.

And you go, "Wait.

How did that happen?"

So it happens.

And I think it happened during the dictatorship, of course.

He was the ruler and he held the purse strings.

And maybe that was a blatant and obvious example.

And I think sometimes it's more insidious because it's underground, so... And I don't think it's just, I don't think it's just something that I'm bad mouthing the Dominican Republic.

It happens in this country, we find out all the time.

And, you know, we have this problem that it's not a public servant, they're serving themselves, many of them, and not the people.

So there is corruption and there is, you know, class differences.

There is racism, even though we're an 80% mixed breed nation.

You know, we have colorism.

I remember one of the questions asked me about colorism.

And, you know, the bank, if you go in a bank, the light skin girls are up front, they're the tellers.

And in the back, there might be the darker skin employees that really have more power, but the presentation is... And I think that's partly, yes, colorism and the influence of the so-called first world that floods into our media and seems to be the thing to aspire to.

And so, yes, there is corruption.

And the fight continues, younger generations that are getting it and coming forward, and the influence of Dominican Americans who go back and have learned of, you know, new concepts about service and pride in your race.

And I think that, in some ways, sometimes the influence of the first world, so-called, is negative and sometimes it can be positive by bringing those influences to bear.

- I was wondering about the colorism question 'cause that's always my passion project in Caribbean studies.

And I found, like, that was one of the first things that really pulled me in, is that being addressed and how those things can be hidden in families.

Do you find, in, like, more modern Dominican works, that there is more of a reclamation of sort of Afro Dominican identity and African culture?

Or do you think it's still evolving, like, we're still figuring it out?

- I think it's evolving.

I think it would be naive to say that it's figured out.

And, you know, sometimes it's just, it really takes generations.

A group of us Dominican Americans from the diaspora started a project in 2012 on the border with Haiti called Border of Lights, where we really wanted to address the racism, the Haitian massacre that happened in 1937 that the government and the powers that be have never addressed or redressed.

And, you know, if you don't know your history, you're bound to repeat it.

And so, you know, it is an issue, but it's an issue that I think is really evolving on a grassroots level.

Maybe still the, you know, the governmental powers are invested in keeping that antagonism going.

But on the grassroots level, a real desire to combat that kind of negative history because it's like hating yourself.

We're a mixed nation.

And if you deny, as did Trujillo did... Trujillo had the congress officially declare us a white nation even though his grandmother was Haitian.

- [Princess] Yeah.

(laughs) - Self-loathing, you know?

And it's in the psyche and in the imagination, and you have to combat that.

So border of lights was an attempt, and it's still ongoing, to address those issues from the ground up, which is where it really works anyhow, in communities, among people, neighbors, (Julia speaks in Spanish).

And that's where it begins.

- Yeah.

And the art reflects that.

- Uh-huh.

- The idea of a graveyard for unfinished stories is very intriguing.

What does this symbolize for you personally and in the broader context of your work?

- Well, oh, that's such a many-pronged, a question that invites a many-pronged answer, so forgive me if it seems to grow in my answer.

First of all, I come from the Caribbean, and we have the traditions of Santeria, of rituals, of, you know, how you address the mystery that surrounds you, the baffling mystery of the world, and the other dimensions that might not be addressed in a more rational culture, of the spirits and, you know, and the spirits in nature.

And so I grew up always with that sense of ritual in Santeria.

And I've always had rituals when I start a book and when I end a book.

For instance, when I finished "In the Time of the Butterflies," I took my final copy edited draft and I went back to the house where the girls were born in the Dominican Republic, in Salcedo, and I buried it in their yard.

Because I thought- - So it it was you.

It's true.

- I'm never...

Yes, I just, I thought, "They are not going leave me so I can go to my next book."

We're such fickle characters, writers.

"I've gotta ritualize this."

So I always have these rituals of completion.

And then with this, you know, I wanted, as I grow older, and we talked about that, I realize, you know, when I was younger, I had all these boxes and unfinished novels and finished novels that still needed work, and characters that I promised them I'd get back to them.

And you think, when you're a young writer, "I'll get back to you.

Don't worry."

As you grow old and older, you realize there isn't gonna be enough time and they haunt you because it's like they took possession for two, three years, two, three months, whatever, and they're still inside your psyche, and how to bring them to rest and completion, how to honor them.

And so that's where the idea of the cemetery came from.

And, again, as with that critic from Canada, when I was finished, my agent sent me this wonderful clipping of Viola Davis at the Oscars a few years back.

And she, this was part of her speech, she says, "You know, there's one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered, one place, and that's the graveyard.

People ask me all the time, 'What kind of stories do you wanna tell, Viola?'

And I say, 'Exhume those bodies.

Exhume those stories,' the stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost.

I became an artist, and thank God I did, because we are the profession that celebrates what it means to live a life."

(Julia chuckles) And I thought, "She gets it.

She gets it."

And, yes, so there is that... You know, I often, when I was teaching writing, I would tell my students who were stuck, "You know, if you want a writing prop, go to your graveyard, just look around."

You know, there's a big stone and there there's a smaller, daintier stone for the wife, and then she dies and there's another wife that comes in, and there's little stones for babies that were lost, all within a family.

You can just envision it.

There's so many stories that never get told.

And that's part of the novel, too, because it's also a meditation on narrative and whose stories get privileged, whose stories get told, whose stories get celebrated and who decides that, you know?

So that was part of the whole cemetery.

And, of course, like that saying, "They tried to bury us, they did not know we were seeds," she tried to bury us, she did not know we were stories.

(chuckles) They won't be silenced.

They'll come out somehow.

- Well, Julia, speaking of narrative, I love words, I'm in love with writing.

Yours, so often, read like poetry.

Let me call out a couple of passages for you.

One is: "Why does God allow for sorrows?"

One is: "There are stories in the silence, too."

And then let me read this one, which is so beautiful: "Moving beyond the groomed lawns of once upon a time.

If that's betrayal, so be it."

And I wonder, do you labor over these passages or do they almost come through you?

- Oh, boy.

Fred, are you kidding me?

(chuckles) Well, what's great is I don't ever want my readers to know the difference.

If that paragraph or that sentence took me a day or a minute, you should not have to suffer through that.

But that's what it means.

Writing is writing and revising and revising and revising.

And to tell you the truth, I don't like to read from my own book, because even 20 years out, I'm reading it and I think, "No, uh-uh, that's... How could you let yourself get away with that sentence," you know?

So I'm always revising it and I'm revising it.

So it is a labor and it is sometimes anguishing, but it's a labor of love.

It's something you love and therefore you keep at it even though it looks to everybody in the world like, you know, what a crazy thing to do.

And it can sometimes, you know, like Jacob with the angel wrestling that I said, sometimes it wrestles you to the ground and knocks you out and you can't get the book done, you can't get the character rounded out - When it comes to labor of love, within the book there are these amazing stories, these untold stories, and you've woven aspects of history into these stories.

Trujillo and Bienvenida.

Bienvenida's story is compelling, it's amazing.

It had me reading it, going back and reading it again.

Is it based on historical research?

How did you go about that historical research?

And what was your process in that?

- Oh, that's such a... Bienvenida is a character that I did, as Julia Alvarez, try so hard to write about.

I researched so much.

What interested me is that she was erased from history.

When Trujillo married the third wife and he dumped her, he had dumped the first one too, the new wife, who was his equal, just as treacherous and violent and horrible as he was, he met his match, wanted her name to disappear.

So, you know, streets had been named after her, schools, monuments, mountains, and, whoosh, she disappeared.

And, in fact, when she died and was finally buried, she was buried in an unmarked grave because they were afraid that even after the Trujillo dictatorship, because she had been married to him, that it would be desecrated.

So I think of all the victims of that dictatorship of 31 years, including the Mirabal sisters that I wrote about in "In the Time of the Butterflies," and they were casualties, heroic casualties of that dictatorship.

Bienvenida was a romantic casualty.

It doesn't have the punch of a political, brave, courageous soul, but it is a really sad story.

So the way I went about researching it, I had to find the people, in an oral culture, that still were out there who knew of her and could tell me the story, because she had been erased.

So I became very curious.

So a lot of the character... You know, of course, I don't... She didn't keep a memoir, she didn't keep a diary.

So I had to imagine, from the few letters that are out there, anguishing letters that she's writing him, a few of the facts of what happened to her, how she roamed as an exile with her daughter around the world.

And I just really got curious about that story.

- Can I ask, as a quick follow up, why is it that Joaquin Balaguer was not also erased out of the story?

How did he avoid, do you think, the wrath of being erased?

- Oh, because he was part of it.

I mean, of course he was, like, the puppet president.

And ironically, he was the first cousin to be Bienvenida.

Bienvenida, when she was married to Trujillo, is the one who introduced him.

And he was such a silver tongue that Trujillo hired him to write all his speeches because Trujillo could hardly read or write.

And so Joaquin Balaguer was his right-hand man.

And after Trujillo, he was thrown into exile.

But this is the thing that is really complicated about dictatorships: we can get rid of the dictator, but it's been a generation that has been brainwashed.

It will take generations before you take the little dictator out of people's heads.

And, in a way, Joaquin was brought back and he ruled almost as long as Trujillo.

He kept changing the law, which only allowed him two terms.

He kept serving and serving and serving.

So he is also a complicated character of the wily ways in which he was able to survive.

And as a matter of fact, if you read Mario Vargas Llosa, "The Feast of the Goat," it's in part about Trujillo, but a large part in the second half is about Balaguer because he was really an extension of that dictatorship.

- Absolutely.

Since I already asked this, the question about Haiti in a certain other kind of way, to build off what you just said, as someone, as a writer who pulls so much from history, from the past, from those shared traumas together in a culture identity, at what point do...

When you're forming your characters, at what point do you stop, like, just being totally pushed by history and it becomes you crafting them yourself?

- That's such a good question.

And there's really... Oh, there's really no answer, in the sense that there's always the temptation that, "Hey, maybe I need to read one more book."

When I was writing "Saving the World," and part of it takes place in the 18th and early 19th century in Spain, and I had to read all about the smallpox epidemic and the attempt to cure the world of this horrible disease, and the 24 little orphans that were taken out of a orphanage and carried the vaccine on their little bodies to the new world.

And then they went around the world vaccinating people, that's how it started, and almost eradicated smallpox.

But the point being that there was always one more book.

I thought, "Oh, maybe I need to learn a little bit more about this, learn a little bit more that about that."

And at some point you have to, you know, like a child, that finally it's time to give birth because... And the other tricky thing is that when you do, that research can't show.

'Cause, you know, the temptation is to sort of show off to your reader how much you know about that tall ship they were in.

But the reader doesn't need to know that.

You needed to find out so you could get maybe a little tiny detail, one sentence in the whole novel about that thing that you researched by reading several books.

So it's a tricky situation of feeling like, "Okay, I've gotten what I need for this journey, and I gotta get off, you know, the researching and reading and get going."

- Julia, I couldn't help but draw a parallel to one of our recent PBS Books picks, the incredible "James" by Percival Everett.

That book reflected heavily on the power of a person's name.

Having spent a great amount of time with "James," I was struck by the revelation in your book about how Filomena had to give up her original name to her sister Perla.

Talk about the significance of that detail.

- By the way, when you asked me about what books I've read this year that I absolutely love, "James" by Percival Everett is definitely one of them.

He's a wonderful writer.

Been up at Bread Loaf many times, and I'm always one of the fans sitting there.

This book is amazing.

But, you know, it's, first of all, Filomena doesn't cede it herself.

She never even is given the choice.

Perla, you know, aka the original Filomena, insists on taking it.

And I thought, you know, that is like the ultimate erasure, when someone co-opts and takes your identity, and your name is so much a part of it.

And so it doesn't have to be an outsider that does it, sometimes it can happen within a family, within a country, within a culture.

And so it's a form of erasure which has happened to her from the get go, but it's also something that has given her an amazing quality.

She is such a wonderful listener, that the stories come to her because she's receptive.

And she has a hunger to be accompanied, to be seen, to be understood, all the things that didn't happen when that got ripped away from her symbolically, and now she has it in the cemetery.

And one of my favorite books, it's a pick that people are often baffled by, is "Gilgamesh."

And I've read almost every translation of "Gilgamesh."

And I've learned that in Babylonian culture, the intelligence was believed not to reside in the head or the heart, or even the eyes, but the ears.

And a wise person is one who extraordinarily listens, so they're alert to the nuance and the, listening to all the voices in the world.

So in a sense that... You know, one of the many rapes that poor Filomena undergoes is the rapture of her name.

- I'm so glad you asked that question, Fred, because that's a beautiful answer, the role of the listener not always being, given enough credit for having that quality.

I also wanna talk to you about the relationships in this book.

There are layers upon layers of relationship drama in this book between Alma and her characters, Alma and her sisters, the cemetery groundskeeper, Filomena and her family members, Filomena and the buried characters, even between the characters themselves.

That's not even close to an exhaustive list.

It's like you're taking an unpeeled onion and sort of putting the layers back together into a cohesive story for us.

Talk us through the many relationships in this book and how you managed to piece them all together.

(Julia laughs) - Well, those of you like Princess and Heather, with Dominican connections, know that we are an extended family of a country.

You're always, you know, two degrees of separation from the person you're meeting somewhere, you know, we're all interconnected.

And so we also grow up with this culture in which we are not just a me, we're a we.

We're a little bead in the necklace of the generations and of the extended familia.

So all the stories, you know, sort of like Scheherazade in "The Arabian Nights," are one leads to another, leads to another.

So that was part of it.

And part of it is that it's kind of also, as I was saying, a meditation on narrative.

And one of the things that happens is Alma's desire, and carried out by Filomena at the end, so she becomes the one who's in charge of the cemetery and she takes down that little monitor and opens the gates because, you know, not to create a gated community of select people that are allowed to be the characters in your novel.

So once you do that, a lot of them will wanna come in.

And then, you know, you have the ones that are really the protagonists, but they're connected, they have a root system.

And you get little glimpses of that root system, which also gives texture and atmosphere to the novel, at least I hope so.

- Well, most of the characters in your book have made some serious mistakes in their lives, maybe an understatement, but some more terrible than others.

Talk to us about these themes of regret and the possibility of redemption.

And, of course, we all have something to be forgiven for.

- Absolutely.

I think to live a life, and a full life, is to mess up and to have many little deaths.

That's why my last novel was called "Afterlife."

And people thought, "Oh, is it gonna be about, like, the afterlife after you die?"

I said, "No, everybody lives many afterlives."

You die many little deaths in your life and you somehow, you know, if you are resilient and you go for the larger version of yourself, you have a resurrection.

And so regret is looking back and sort of, like the writer wanting to revise a passage, thinking, "Oh, you know, I wish I could have done it better," but we live our lives forward.

And one of the things that I think happens in the book, I don't know if you remember it, later in it, in the novel, Pepito goes to a trauma counselor about his mother who has refused to speak.

So it's the horrible thing she has done, she just is silent.

And the trauma counselor says to him that the healing will begin when she can tell the story of what happened to her.

Because when you tell the story, you build community.

And a listener who takes it in, it's a way of getting reconnected with the human family.

And Terrence, the Roman playwright who was enslaved and freed himself with his writing, once wrote, "I am a human being.

Nothing human is alien to me."

And that could be the motto of literature.

And it's also that in telling our story, having someone listen to it and not reject us and not judge us, even though they see, you know, the evil or the bad that has been done, reintegrates us into that human family in which nothing human is alien, for good or for bad, you know, in what it means to be a human critter.

And so I think the telling of the stories, the being listened to, the being seen, I mean, that's the thing that Filomena, who's not a reader, who didn't know how to read or write, what she finds in the cemetery is if she feels through these stories, then she is accompanied.

And it's like a mirror, she can see herself and her feelings and she can put language to what was inchoate and a model inside her.

And I think that's where forgiveness can come, of self too.

- So in your book, you write that Alzheimer's is rampant for Dominicans.

And I read this and I actually Googled and started reading a few stories and really found that Dominican families have a higher rate of Alzheimer's over others.

And I was wondering, is that part of your purpose?

Because it actually, among my family, started a larger conversation of Alzheimer's among Dominicans and things that can be done.

So is that part of your reason to include, to promote advocacy and ignite conversations among Dominican families?

- Well, you know, again, like with the idea for a book, I don't, I would lose my way, moving and journeying in story, if I try to do advocacy and education through it.

What I'm hoping is to be so true to the experience that the person reading becomes educated, not because... You know, the worst thing is when you have a novelist and you feel like she's trying to teach you something instead of just immersing you in that world.

So it wasn't my intent.

I have to tell you that I had two parents who were afflicted with Alzheimer's.

And my dear friend Sue Halpern was the one that initially started doing the research on Alzheimer's in the Dominican population in Washington Heights for "The New Yorker."

She wrote an article in 2005, I think.

And she's the one who started me reading about it.

And I knew that it was very common among old people.

But the thing is that in the past, people didn't often live to be that old, so maybe it wasn't manifested.

But the thing is that we were an island, we were a very isolated island.

After the Spaniards came and they decimated the Native population, they didn't find enough gold and they moved on and it became a very isolated island, or half island, the Dominican side, of intermarriage.

And so recessive really got strengthened.

So it's very much a part of the population.

And of course it ties into all the things that we've been talking about about erasure, you know, what happens when the story is in someone's head.

Not just their stories that never get published or told or privileged or celebrated, but their own internal narratives are wiped out.

And so that is definitely something that, you know, that life gave me because it was just a detail that comes very much out of the culture, but which fits into some of the narrative concerns of the novel.

- Can I just jump in real quick and say a moment for me which was a spine tingler was when Alma was talking about the Earth begins storying, scents turn into sounds, and then suddenly the spoons are dancing, talking, singing about being in the bauxite mine, and that drawer gets slammed shut.

Chills.

Now, that had such an impact on me 'cause I wanted to slam that door shut, too.

And immersing ourselves in the topic in a way that demonstrates this affliction, opposed to preaching about it, is so powerful.

- The listening can power you to the extreme, you know, of...

Seriously, when you think about it, so many, everyone's walking around with amazing stories in their heads.

Sometimes, I live in a small town, and I feel like I can't get outta the grocery store without bumping into a story, someone who has a story, and it goes on and on and on.

And, you know, one line that I love Filomena for saying is she says listening to the stories, that it has changed her, now there is room in her heart for everyone.

But there's also the danger, you know, that your head can explode if you take in all these stories and, you know, embrace them.

There has to be some sort of cipher, at least in real life.

So, yeah.

And thank you also for noticing that as the novel progresses, Alma begins to disappear, and it's the stories.

And that so much reflects what will happen to any storyteller.

They'll be gone, they die, and if their stories, some of them survive, that is what we have left; not the writer, but the stories.

- And they are amazing stories.

I apologize, this next question is, like, three-pronged, but I'll pace it.

Well... (laughs) Well, firstly, I love "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent."

I remember picking it up at Scholastic Book Fairs when I was in middle school.

So I have loved your work for a long time.

So the first thing I was wondering is: which of your works do you think has stayed with you the longest, and why?

- Oh, dear.

I think that's why I do those rituals, Princess, because I can't, they can't hang around.

They've got go.

It's like your 28-year-old kid, you know, who still- - Get a, pay rent.

(laughs) Like, go get, get life, you know?

I gave you life so you can have it, you know, not live just one version of it.

And that's why the rituals, because they do hang on.

I mean, you spend five or so years with them intensely, it's... You know, they still come up.

I mean, when you ask me about Bienvenida, I still feel like, "Oh, my gosh," you know, she's still so much in my imagination.

So they all come, they all...

It's kind of like with Santeria too, you get possessed by the spirit, you get possessed by your characters and then you have to find a way to move on.

And the only way that I've ever moved on is, as I said earlier, writers are fickle, to fall in love with another character.

(Princes and Julia laughing) - It's like, "New phone.

"Who this?"

But in writing- - Right.

(Princess laughs) - How do you think works from Latinx authors, especially Dominican authors, have evolved and changed since you were published?

Because you are a trailblazer.

And how do you think that trail has gone since?

- Well, I think I'm lucky in that my first novel, "Garcia Girls," wasn't published till I was 41.

And I was already an ardent, passionate poet as a teenager, and then writing, writing, writing for years, sending my work out, and it was always rejected because back then stories with characters like the ones I, you know, wrote about were considered sociology, not literature.

And then it's sort of like this explosion of multicultural literature, Latinx literature, Asian American literature, African American literature, that was the first wave that opened up other, recognition of other literatures.

And I didn't think of myself as a trailblazer.

I just thought of myself as doing the thing I love to do.

But now I look back and there's a path, now there's a road.

Now there's a Junot Diaz and an Angie Cruz and a Nelly Rosario; and Eliza Acevedo, our youth poet laureate; and a Jasmine Mendez; Loida Maritza Perez.

And it's, we're everywhere.

And it's so wonderful because it's the sense that, you know, that... Part of the pleasure of being a storyteller is that the stories keep, that they keep growing.

And it's not like (speaks in French).

No, it's all these wonderful storytellers.

And I saw... Oh, I just, I did a program in Washington Heights with Angie Cruz and Eliza Acevedo.

And as our fourth person, we got a Dominican American high schooler who was a spoken poet, and she opened the program.

And it was like you saw the generations right there on stage.

And it was, it's one of the highlights of my, of my writing and reading, when I give readings, one of my favorite programs: that sense of a building of community over time, of a diaspora literature, Dominican American.

- That's so beautiful.

And the final question.

To your point about work by marginalized people being seen as sociology and not literature, have you ever found yourself frustrated or, at all, feeling limited by conversations about your work because it was being treated that way?

- You know, you can tell.

You know, you have this detector.

(chuckles) When the question is a legitimate interest in your, you know... We're all at this huge campfire of storytelling, but we come from our individual traditions, our tribes, and we bring them with us.

And when that's being celebrated, and you're a Dominican American writer or a Latinx writer, but not you are that and you're like Langston Hughes in "I, too, Sing America," that he's sent to the kitchen minor writers and the real writers are sitting at the big table in the dining room, you can feel when there's that kind of marginalization even in the inclusion.

And that, I do bristle against.

Because when we write stories, we become each other and it's not like, "Oh, this is a story where you can become a Latinx character or a Dominican character."

I mean, no one says, "This is a story by, you know, Shakespeare or Jane Austen where you become white."

You become Hamlet.

Or you're crazy in love like Juliet and Romeo, you know, you're not thinking, "Now I'm gonna be an Italian."

So when it's used to sort of segregate and separate, which is the opposite of what stories do for us, then I resent it.

- You've touched on this idea of rituals, and I wanna dive into that a little bit more deeply because I think there's a lot of wisdom in that, and I think that's something I'm gonna take away personally from this conversation, is the need for ritualization of your work and your life and how that can, I don't know, just mark an important moment.

So I'm just curious about what some of your rituals are as a writer, but also just as a human being.

I would love to learn more.

- Oh my goodness.

I am... My poor husband Bill, from Nebraska, who just is baffled, I'll say, "No, no, no, don't empty that."

"Well, it's just a bowl of water."

"I know.

(indistinct) It's gotta bring in the spirits."

They go, "Okay."

Or when I'm on book tour and I have my little blue corn meal that I spread in the room, and, you know, housekeeping comes in, I have a little dish with it, I come back and it's spanking clean.

So (indistinct) like, "Don't touch."

- Wait.

So what is it for?

Tell us.

I wanna know everything.

- Yeah, that was given to me by someone from the Navajo Nation when I was on tour.

And she said, "Your poor spirit," you know, "You land in Albuquerque and your spirit is still in Chicago where you gave the last reading.

You need, you know, you need a way to bring your spirits with you."

So she gave me a little bag.

And then from then on, my husband, he doesn't understand anything about it, but he's a farmer, he grew a whole field of blue corn and grinds it.

- [Laura] Aw.

- We also eat it.

Wonderful- (group laughing) But it's, you know, it's a thing.

So I have these rituals because, you know, it's...

It might sound a little silly, but it's, you're up against the mystery when you're writing, this huge mystery, and you need your courage and you need to gird yourself.

And you need to find ways to honor and respect it, you know, to say, "I know what I'm up against.

This is, story is powerful and I wanna be up to it, but I need to come at it with all of the help, psychic, spiritually, listening, I can get."

So that's part of it.

I have other rituals.

Like, every January, for the last 25 years, I read T. S. Elliot "The Four Quartets."

I love that poem, and it's sort of like my spiritual gauge for the year.

I read it and I feel like the ceremony has happened to engage with a new year.

So I have all kinds of things: certain pencils, certain things, my little wristband of things my readers have given me.

And they just, they probably think I just put it in a drawer and forget about it.

No way.

- Aw.

- Especially when they come with a special story, you know?

So, yeah, I have these ways in which I...

But that said, in my actual little writing studio downstairs, I don't want anything that reminds me that I've had any success.

I don't want a trophy, I don't want a medal.

They can all go somewhere else in a box.

But I wanna have beginner's mind, I wanna have beginner's mind.

So I have my rituals, but then I'm at it alone, you know?

I'm at it alone.

And I remember one of the questions you sent, which I love: What's the best advice that I ever received and that I tell my young writers?

And it's a prayer by the Mayan weavers before, when they sit before their loom and they're about to start their weaving.

And there's no pattern, they make it up as they go along.

And their prayer is, "Grant me the intelligence and the patience to find the true pattern."

And to be able to do that, you have to clear the decks.

You can't go in with some preconceived idea of how it should go 'cause then you're not listening to the fabric and the threads and what evolves as you weave it.

So it's very much, you know, I need these rituals, but I don't want any pretense that I deserve or that I'm above the hard work and the beginner's mind that each book requires of you, 'cause you've never written that book.

Sure, you've developed skills, as an older writer, you know, you've used those tools, but you've never written that book before or engaged with that character or that sentence.

So you have to have that fresh, clean windshield as you drive in that dark road, with only very dim headlights showing a little bit ahead.

- Well, and I...

Some of that advice, and given your work and your downstairs writing studio, it seems as though you're a bit of an iconoclast and maybe you advise young writers to... What's the phrase?

"Be yourself, everyone else has taken."

But I did notice, in the book, a subtle dig at the publishing industry where you said, "As if a woman couldn't write a novel without having a beauty shot in the back of the cover."

Noted that.

And then also the chapter thing.

It's a wonderful novel in three chapters.

And a chapter is usually where I kind of jump off and take a break.

Couldn't stop.

What's up with the chapter thing?

- Well, there are parts, right?

There are little sort of headings and places to stop and rest, like Filomena with her chair in the cemetery, where you take a breather.

But I wanted, as you noted, with the many characters interconnected, I wanted it to reflect the great swirl and huge movements.

That is what life is, you know, how it carries you, how one thing is connected to another thing.

And the thing with the publishing, it is, in a way, also in Alma's life and with her writer friend who critiques her, that, you know, the book biz and buzz can sometimes take over what the writing is really about.

It's not about celebrities; and our culture tends to make celebrities even of some of the writers.

It's not about the writer.

The writer, if she's worth anything, has to disappear, as Alma does, in the course of the story.

It's about the story itself.

And so the ways in which sometimes, you know, that's the ageism in fiction, the sometimes sexism in, among the writers.

You know, the beautiful writer with an airbrushed, huge photo in the back, that is believed to be, it's gonna put books in people's hands.

And maybe it does, but then we keep, we keep privileging the wrong things and why we need stories and why we go to them.

You know, there's a wonderful story of... One of the things I loved about writing for young people, now it's changed since J. K. Rowling, but that in the past it was just, you know, it wasn't, there weren't many... Often, in the young readers, there is no picture of the author.

There was no picture of the author.

And someone told me the story, I think it was Eve Bunting who was with her daughter on a cruise up to Alaska to see the glaciers.

And there was a little boy, everybody's oohing and ahhing, and he's at the, on deck, but he's reading one of her books.

And the daughter was so taken with it, she went over and she said, "You really like that book?"

"Yeah," kind of, "Leave me alone.

I really like it.

I'm reading."

And she said, "Do you wanna meet the writer?"

And the little boy looked up and said, "What for?"

(all laughing) - Humbling.

(Julia faintly speaking) - That's really, it's about the story, you know?

And kids get it, you know?

But now that a celebrity thing has happened, even with, you know, writers for young readers, it's changed.

And social media, of course, you know, all of that.

And it's a way that we, it's a way to let people know the book is out there, so you kind of have your arm twisted to do it.

But, really, I think many writers, many of my writers friends are more comfortable in the solitude and the quiet of writing, and then suddenly you're marched out and it's like you're a deer in the headlights.

- Yeah.

My son would have given that answer.

He would have given like a cold, "No thanks.

(group laughing) No thanks."

I love that story.

- You trained him well, Laura.

(laughter drowns out Julia) - I can't take any credit.

(laughs) - Well, it is all about the stories.

At the end of your book, you write, "A woman must tell her story to save her life."

But Manuel's altagracia never told her full story.

You really...

I felt like you pointed to the fact that Manuel's altagracia, who continues to be supported by Alma and her sisters, I felt like you were pointing to the fact it was Filomena's mother because there were two dolls on her bed.

Did you leave this vague intentionally, and why?

- Because, again, it reflects a truth of narrative and something that the novel has been preoccupied with: Whose stories get told?

What happens if someone's memory is erased?

And the stories, you know, they say, I don't know from what country in Africa, that when an old person dies, a library burns down, you know, in an oral culture.

What happens when a story doesn't get told?

And this is a reality, that people all the time are, die and no one knows who they were, except maybe a few people.

And we can even be brushing up against a story that connects and relates to us and not even know it, not even know it.

So I wanted the vagueness of what happens to be... You know, it would be too tidy and not like real life if all of a sudden Tatica comes in, and Filomena and Perla, they have a great reunion, so...

But I was left wondering, as did Filomena, "So what happened to Tatica?"

And I thought, "Oh, I think I know what happened to Tatica."

But I leave it vague because that story is one of the ones, like Bienvenida's, that gets erased.

And so people are walking around with lost relatives all the time and lost connections, and sometimes they come back and sometimes they're lost forever.

And so, yeah, there's...

I meant for...

There is a connection of Manuel.

Tatica is actually is connected in a roundabout way to Alma and Filomena and Perla.

- We're always curious about the writing process.

We talked about laboring over those poetic turns of phrases earlier, but what about the bigger picture?

Especially when you have a book with so many sub stories, how do you go about writing them and then piecing all those, piecing the puzzle together, I guess?

- Oh, darn.

(group laughing) Revision, revision.

You know, the stories come in and sometimes, you know, you go into a side tangent that really enlarges the story and you keep it in.

Sometimes you go on a side tangent and you never come back to the point.

And you have to love the story and what it, be listening to it while...

It's a complicated balance, listening to it while crafting it.

You have to listen to it and you have to be willing to delete and delete and delete things that might even be interesting to your, but don't really work with the organic movement of the story.

So it's sort of... And what helps, too, is to have an editor who, after you think you're all done, and believe me, it's hard, you never get, you know, old and wise and thick-skinned enough to like it, who goes, "That chapter is not working for me."

And you have to... Because I even used to tell my students, you know, revision is reading your own work as if someone else had written it.

And that usually happens only after you put the manuscript aside and it cools a little bit and then you go back and you're able to see where it's, something is extraneous, some story doesn't need to be there.

But in this novel, I wanted, as much as possible, to put my arms around as much of life as I could because I really thought this was gonna be my last novel.

I really thought, "This is it."

It's anecdotal, but during the course of, after I began the novel, I suffered a loss of vision.

I had a retinal detachment.

And many efforts and surgeries and I now only see with one eye, and, with that, dimly.

So I need these special prism glasses that sometimes I'm too vain to put on.

And when it all happened, I thought I would never finish this novel.

And so my little bargain with the mystery was, "Just let me... " I'm bargaining: "Just let me finish this one."

And then I thought, "I'm gonna put everything (indistinct).

I'm gonna put my arms right around it."

And so I think of it as my feral novel too.

My earlier novels, I tried to be tidy and in control.

And I don't admire that as much anymore in writing as I've gotten older.

So I try to put a lot in.

And, of course, you know, once I'm done with this one, I started another final novel that I'll- - Thank goodness, by the way.

Please give us more.

- Feral.

- Well, if not, we've already talked about how there's a whole, generations of wonderful, not just Dominican American writers, but Dominican American writers.

So the stories will never... And that's my love.

My love is not Julia Alvarez and her stories, it's the stories that I've been privileged enough and lucky enough to be able to write down and to find listeners of those stories.

- I hope that there are many more stories from you.

I want to turn the tables a little bit now and give you a chance to learn something about your readers.

If you've ever wondered what your readers think about you or your books or their reading experience, now is your chance.

Could be a general question or maybe you want to know their thoughts specifically about "The Cemetery of Untold Stories."

So, Julia Alvarez, what questions would you like to ask your readers?

- Oh, my goodness.

First of all, when I'm writing, I don't mean to insult you, readers.

I need you.

I love you.

Thank you for being here because a book is only half written when you write it and publish it, and when it comes alive in a reader's imagination that it then becomes a full circle.

And that's, you know...

If Emily Dickinson just wrote her books and left them in the drawer, but when I read them and I stroke the cover, in the poem I've just read, that I love, she's alive again.

She gets resurrected again in my imagination.

So I would want that.

But when I'm writing, I can't be thinking like, as, you know, with a kind of wind sock: "Will my readers like this?

Will my readers appreciate this?"

because then I'm betraying the story.

I have to listen, like Filomena, to the characters and their stories.

Once it's done, I just... You know, I don't like to go to book clubs because- - Except for our book club, obviously - No, no.

(group laughing) I love this book club.

What I love is to be a fly in the wall of a book club 'cause I love to hear, unmanaged or manipulated for me, what it calls up in a reader, you know?

What things, you know, if you... And I really believe this, you exit a book that you've gotten into a different person, slightly different from the person who started reading, you know?

There's a kind of enlargement, I think, that can happen, an empathy that can happen when you come out.

So I wanna hear from my readers where that might have happened for them in this book, where they felt like they're, like with Filomena, that, you know, maybe they got tight in the chest at something, where they were moved, where something that was said connected and touched bottom inside them.

Where were those points?

I love hearing that.

But I feel like if I'm there, my readers are, I'm either controlling it too much and not, it's not coming from them, or they're so gracious and lovely that they don't wanna hurt my feelings.

Youre all I have-the stories I'm putting my babies to be raised by the rest of you.

And, you know, we want them to land in bookshelves and be well loved, you know?

Sometimes someone will come up after reading, a reader with a really torn book, and, you know, they've taken it to the bathtub, they've taken, they've got little Post-Its on it, and they'll apologize.

And I say, "No."

I love when that happens.

So, yeah, with this book, I would say, where did it move you?

What story would you be wanting to bury in the cemetery?

'Cause now it's open to all.

And what stories have you buried in your personal cemetery that you wish someone would listen to?

So I would ask that.

And, you know, what, when we tell a story, any story, you can't put your arms around how big life is, you know, of what is left out.

And so sometimes what's really interesting with my readers is: What would they add to the story?

- Mm-hmm.

I know I have some stories that I would like to bury and have them stay buried, for sure.

Readers, I really wanna know what your stories would be.

so please, please, please put those in the comments.

- And those were such great questions.

Book clubbers, share your responses here with Julia Alvarez in the comments.

You never know, maybe you'll influence her next great novel.

Julia, what do you hope people will experience in reading your books?

- You know, I just was listening to this writer, Jill Simmons, she's a wonderful writer.

And she was talking about, she gave a little story.

And I love answering questions not with answers, but with stories because I think they capture the full dimensionality of the question and, of the answer that you might give.

She had read Tracy Kidder's "Strength in What Remains," a nonfiction book about a medical student in Burundi, Africa, who ends up in New York, like, you know, delivering pizzas and things like that.

And she was so into that book and was so moved by it.

And she was writing up her elevator and there was this young delivery guy in the elevator, going up to deliver something.

And they got started talking.

And she said, "Because I had just finished the book and I was so moved and I had such compassion and empathy, I saw him."

And she said, "Wait, stop at my floor with me."

And she went in her apartment and she got all the cash she had, and she said, "Here, I want you to have this."

And she said, "I never would have done that.

I would have just gone up and ignored this guy.

But because this..." So to answer your question, that enlargement that can happen.

Because think about it, when we read, we become someone else, and then when we meet someone else that is like that character, we're open.

And there's, as Filomena, to quote my character, says, "There's room in her heart for everyone," once she started listening to stories.

So I would, that's what I would want, that kind of growth in empathy and enlargement and in connection by reading, which is what happens to me as a reader.

- Well, it's been so great to discuss "The cemetery of Untold Stories" with you, so thank you so much for that.

Don't go anywhere.

Please stand by, Julia.

Let me turn to the book clubbers now.

A quick note to remind you we will be revealing our PBS Book Readers Club pick of the month at the end of this episode, and it's a good one.

So be sure to stick around for that after the interview.

Hint, it's the inspiration behind a new hit Masterpiece series right here on PBS.

But first, Julia, I know our audience wants to get to know you a little bit better.

So we have a few more questions about you, if you are up for it.

- Okay.

Bring them on.

- All right, here it comes.

Question one: Did you always know you were a writer even as a child?

Or did that realization come later?

- I was not bound for anything worthwhile.

(group laughing) In the Dominican Republic, I flunked every grade through fifth grade.

I was a terrible student.

I was so bored.

I didn't like reading at all.

Because it was a dictatorship, all the books were kind of propagandish and really dull.

And I didn't like school.

And I would be sent home with notes all the time: "Julia does not pay attention."

And I'd get home and one of the tias and my abuelita would say, "Come here," you know, "let me tell you a story."

And I would sit there riveted.

And when they were done, I would ask for it again.

I had no problem paying attention, but I was bored.

And I wasn't growing up with books.

It was a dictatorship.

Part of the things that dictator does is he clears the shelves 'cause reading gives people ideas and all kinds of possibilities.

And so I didn't really...

I loved stories, don't...

I had a storytelling culture, so I had that in me.

And that's the root of stories that you write too.

But I would never have become a reader, never have become a student of literature unless the worst thing that had happened to us happened to us, to be suddenly in exile, losing everything: familia, language, home.

We were thrust into English, but I lucked out.

I had a wonderful teacher who could see that I was interested in stories, got me started reading, sent me to the library.

We had no libraries in the DR. Oh, my gosh.

I thought, "This is like a cathedral for books."

I loved it.

So for me, I came to reading and loving reading and books later, not.. You know, a lot of my friends were bookworms when they were little kids.

I was not that student.

But it happened with that immigration, coming into English and realizing that all those stories I had only in the past known orally were also between the covers of books, which I never thought that was even wildly possible 'cause I thought everything in there was boring.

- For telling those stories, what's your ideal writing setup?

Are you a morning person with a cup of cafe con leche, a night owl with a glass of mamajuana?

Do you like to work in an office, a coffee shop, or do you mix it up?

- I am a creature of my rituals.

I am, I am....

It used to be that I loved late at night because it was so quiet, everybody had gone on to their sleep or whatever, but I can't keep that up as I grow older.

I like early, early morning, you know, before the mind clutters with other things.

And I love the solitude, cup of coffee.

And I don't like to read emails or get involved with anything until I'm done because then those things get in my head instead of my characters.

And I don't, I could know more...

I have friends that go to the coffee shop to write.

Are you kidding?

I know these stories are walking around, and I wanna hear them.

I couldn't, it's too, I would be distracted.

I could not do it that way.

So I don't really mix it up.

I need that solitude and that quiet, and in a room with no trophies in it.

- I love that.

I'm like that too, Julia.

The first couple hours of my day, I try not to open my emails.

So if you're looking for an email from me at 8:00 in the morning, it's not coming.

I got work to do.

(group laughs) - Well, when you are discovering new stories, do you prefer physical books, e-readers, audio books, or a mix of any of the three?

- Well, I'm a dinosaur and I love the object and physicality.

And I've learned how to... Because I read as a writer too; I do graphs, when I'm really loving a book, where, "How long is this chapter?

How is this..." You know?

And I do these graphs that, as I'm reading.

And the pacing, it's just something that I get, you know, with the turning of the page and where a chapter a ends.

And with, it's lost on me electronically.

So I tend to want to read print books.

What I have had to, and slowly training myself, is with my visual impairment now and my compromised reading abilities and time, I'm getting more and more into audio books.

But get this.

I have to have the physical books too.

(group laughs) - Both.

- I feel that- - Because I'm listening to it and I don't always catch something.

And so, you know, it's, I need to see how it works on a page.

So it's a little doubling of, yeah, the technology, technologies whereby I get my stories.

- Okay.

Two-part question for you.

In your opinion, has there ever been a movie that was better than the book?

And part two: If your book became a movie, who would you like to see play Alma in "The Cemetery of Untold Stories"?

- I wish I knew enough about popular culture and the actresses out there that would play this, but so many... Talk about readers getting back to me.

So many readers would say, "This would make a fantastic series."

Right?

Right?

And then my cousin in the DR, one of my cousins who read the book said, "Oh, Julia, you have to see 'Encanto.'"

- [Princess] Yes- (group laughing drowns out Princess) - You should.

(Julia faintly speaking) - You know, this could be an animated, this could be an animated film.

So I don't know.

In an animated film, you don't really choose an actor, maybe the voice.

So, you know, Selma Hayek did "In the Time of the Butterflies," so I have a special, you know, tenderness towards her.

And I bet she could play a beautiful aging Alma.

And I love America Ferrera.

And she's so versatile, she could probably do it.

Or if you really wanna get an older actress, one that I do know from way back, Rita Moreno, you know?

Yes.

So, anyhow, there are some that are out there.

And I usually, if I've read, I usually read the novel first because if I read the, if I see the film, it spoils me for the novel.

So I, my first allegiance is to the written story.

I tell you, one... Oh, what was the Ondaatje film?

"The English Patient.

- [Laura] Ah, yes.

- I hated hat film.

(laughter drowns out Julia) I love his work, but I was lost in that novel.

And then I saw the film and I went back and I reread the novel, and it really, even though it wasn't the same as the film, but it helped me to map out the landscape a little better.

- [Laura] Interesting.

- So in that case it helped.

Yeah.

- Interesting.

- Julia, what would you say was the first book that ignited your passion for literature?

- Well, I did mention that I never read as a child.

Oh, my God.

To me, that was punishment to be made to read my textbooks.

But I had one auntie who read books.

And she was considered a jamona, an old maid, because she was all of 24 and not married.

And Mamita, my grandmother would say, "It's because your nose is always in a book.

What man wants-" (laughter drowns out Julia) basically is what she was saying.

And that tia gave me a copy of "A Thousand and One Nights."

And I loved...

I lied when I said books were all boring to me.

That book was beloved, beloved.

It was the first time...

Here was a girl with brown skin, she wasn't like a princess or something.

She could have been a Dominican.

And she was brave and bold, and she learned all the stories there were to tell.

And then she went into the Sultan's bedroom and she told stories after stories, after stories.

And she saved her life by storytelling, and the lives of all the women in the kingdom, and even changed the heart of the cruel sultan because he fell in love with her stories and he felt regret and redemption.

I thought, "Wow.

I didn't know stories at that kind of power."

So that was, to me, an amazing...

I didn't think of it this way.

It's too complicated, the way I'm explaining it, but it was, it was something, it put a little seed in the bloodstream of my imagination, which I carried with me when I came with this idea that stories have power and that a girl could tell them and free herself and all the other women in the kingdom.

Wow.

That's powerful.

- [Laura] I love your tia for sharing that book with you.

- She's still alive.

My Tia (faintly speaking).

I don't have a lot of pictures here, but of all the people in my... She's still alive.

She's about 94.

My tia.

- [Group] Aw.

- Yeah.

- She's beautiful.

We love her.

- She's my (indistinct).

Yep.

So she knows that she's responsible.

(group laughing) - What is the favorite, your favorite books that you've read in the last year?

- Oh, how many do... Where do I stop I wrote 'em all down.

- Top five.

- There are so many- - [Laura] Give us, yeah, give us top five.

- The top five.

Okay, I mentioned "James" by Percival Everett.

- Mm-hmm.

We agree.

- [Julia] Wonderful book.

It's a strange book and it's not getting much circulation here, but Susanna Clarke, "Piranesi."

- Oh, I love that book.

I love that book.

- Oh, isn't that... That book is amazing.

I love, let's see, this Argentinian writer, and she's now in translation, Claudia Pinero.

And she has a wonderful book called "Elena Knows."

I love that novel.

I love "The Consequences" by Manuel Munoz.

He's, like, an amazing, like, Chekhovian storyteller.

I love another book that's not well known, it's called "Reinbou," by Pedro Cabiya.

He's a Dominican Puerto Rican writer.

He writes in Spanish.

But the book, the novel was beautifully translated into English.

And it's spelled R-E-I-N-B-O-U because this little Dominican boy hears the American occupation, the Marines talk about rainbows, and reinbou is how it's spelled; a beautiful novel Angie Cruz's "How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water" is such a wonderful novel.

I have also poetry because I'm always reading poetry, my first love.

Do you want poetry?

- [Laura] Yeah, give us a couple poetry.

Yeah.

- Well, I mentioned too, but do you ever do poetry in your book club?

- [Laura] We have not yet.

We have not yet, but it's not a bad idea.

- Well, Eliza Acevedo's first memoir novel "The Poet X" is all in little poems, and it's a wonderful... Eliza Acevedo.

Yeah.

And, oh, I mentioned "Gilgamesh."

T. S. Elliot's "The Four Quartets."

I discovered this writer named Abbie Huston Evans, whom no one has ever heard about.

And I love this, when a writer has been erased and you find that old book.

And the way I discovered her is Galway Kinnel, the poet, used to do something beautiful in his readings.

He would read his own poems and then he would read a few that he was enamored of.

And so he once read a poem by Abbie Huston Evans.

And I still, I went up to him afterwards.

I should have said, "I love your poetry."

I said, "I love that poem."

He said, "Here, you can have it."

And so I've carried around this tattered poem.

And this year, I went in search, now that we have Google, Mr. Google went and searched with me and I discovered her.

And I love the poems, they're so intense and powerful.

And she just, you know, she was a friend of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, you know, took all the oxygen our of the air.

And she's a wonderful poet.

So I really, a plug for her.

Okay.

That's enough, right?

- Thank you very much for that.

- [Princess] That was perfect.

Thank you.

- Okay, I have a question, which is: What's the best advice you've ever received about writing or otherwise?

- Well, I do love that Mayan weaver's prayer, which I, because I think it really centers me as a writer.

And I think I need that focus of realizing that I need to cultivate the things that I'm in control of, you know, the intelligence, the craft, the practice, but also the patience and the dedication to the true pattern, you know?

So that's useful advice.

And the other advice, and it was given to me by a friend indirectly, because he made a comment and I thought, "Yes."

He said, "When my reading isn't going well, my writing isn't going well."

And one of the ways that I, that fuels me as a writer is to read, read, read.

And when I find a book I love, it's sort of like meeting this wonderful, in high school or middle school, this wonderful person that you're in love with and you wanna hang out with her and just, you know, just tag along 'cause you're besotted with them.

And you wanna be like them and you wanna look like them.

And so it's sort of, in the end, a really good book makes me wanna, I respect the profession all over again, I fall in love with it all over again, and I wanna write something worthy of it again.

So reading, reading, reading.

And when my reading isn't going well, my writing is usually not going well either.

- Finally, Julia, is there anything that you would like to say to your readers?

- Oh, I didn't wanna get bossy with this.

(Laura laughs) I don't wanna tell them, you know, what to do except read, read, read, read, read, read; not just me, read, read, read.

And they're already doing that.

If they're part of your book club, you know, they're already in love with books.

And loving the community that builds around reading in a group, in a community of other readers 'cause you find points of connection that you might not get to just in a conversation that's limited to your own life or something.

So reading, reading, reading.

Read, read, read.

Give life to all those books.

Give life to Abbie Huston Evans, who wouldn't have gotten read otherwise.

Give, you know, life to "Piranesi," Susanna Clarke's wonderful novel.

Give them life.

Give them life.

It's up to you, readers.

And the other thing is a pitch.

You know, pretty much weekly... Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but often I get one more notice from my agent or my publisher that my book's been banned somewhere, one or another of my books has been banned, or there's a committee of concerned parents that think there's too much pedophilia.

I didn't even know that I wrote anything that was mild even like that in my books.

And it turns out that the person that raised the complaint hadn't even read the book, but you raise that flag and all of a sudden parents get all concerned.

So my encouragement to readers is we need your advocacy, we need you to stand up and not let books be erased, not let stories be eliminated because they're not the approved ones, they're not written by people that look like us, they're not written about experiences that are, you know, or that have been monitored.

And it's not gonna happen if it's not the readers who are out there that putting a sort of cordon of defense around those books that they love because we need that kind of protection in order to not erase and not eliminate.

Because, you know, as the circle gets wider, we all get the richer for it.

But when you start cherry picking certain types of people, certain subjects out of there, you're diminishing all of us.

And stories are a safe place for young readers, older readers to encounter even troubling situations and be equipped with the psychic tools and the empathy to deal with them in real life.

So I need you readers to advocate for those books you love and to stand by them.

And I'm sure the readers that are in your book club do that already, but we do need them.

- Well, this has been so, so wonderful.

Julie Alvarez, we are so grateful for your time.

Thank you so much for joining us on the "PBS Books Readers Club."

- Thank you all for your wonderful questions.

I didn't think I could do this marathon, and it's, you made it easy and you made it fun.

And I will collect some of the pictures that you've asked about, but I'll be sure to include my tia so that you have her with you when I talk about her.

Thank you all.

- Well, she is incredible, how generous she was with her answers and her time.

What a wonderful experience that was.

Princess, what did you think?

- I would listen to her for hours.

I feel so nourished.

I wrote down so many things that, the Mayan prayer.

Like, she left such a deep impression and, as always, enriched the book so much.

But also, like, what a lovely legacy to have been a part of just speaking to her with.

- Yeah, agreed.

I mean, I think that, really, stories, right...

This book is all about stories.

And just to understand where those stories come from and her passion for telling the stories, and even how she shared with us about her own personal story and her vision and just what a gift this book is to all of us, this is, it was so amazing.

I'm so glad we got to do this.

- Yeah, me too.

I'm glad that...

I'm gonna start incorporating some more rituals, I think, into my life.

I think it's important.

- I do.

- I think I just blow by things and I just, like, get it done, get it done, get it done, and then I move on.

I think taking a second to have a ritual and acknowledge your work or your life or whatever, I think that's really cool.

I'm gonna take that away.

- I think it's important.

- A lot of wonderful moments in this.

As you've heard in this conversation, "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" is a novel about storytelling that reads like an instant classic.

And if you haven't read it yet, you can pick up copies at your local library or bookstore, or download the ebook when you support your local PBS station with a monthly gift of $10 as a sustainer.

- [Laura] We're going to reveal our next PBS books Readers Club pick in just a moment, so don't go anywhere.

But first, remember that as a member of your local station, you'll also get access to PBS Passport, where you can stream amazing PBS shows.

One incredible show that I know you'll love is "American Masters," a documentary series that examines the lives, works, and creative processes of outstanding artists.

One of my favorite episodes examines the incredible life of who else but Julia Alvarez.

Let's take a quick peek At "American Masters.

Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined."

(bright music) - People cannot ignore good literature.

People cannot ignore these stories because they were so well written.

- [Announcer] For extraordinary storytelling, the National Medal of Arts to Julia Alvarez.

(lively music) - I wanted to write about the tias and I wanted to write about the lore that comes when women are talking as they're doing their housework, which I thought you couldn't write about.

- [Reader] "Gladys sang as she worked, in her high, clear voice.

(reader speaking in Spanish) - [Commenter] There are people in Israel who read Julia, they're in Serbia, Croatia, Japan.

She found the words to express herself, and those stories related to a lot of people.

- [Julia] When we came to the United States, we left everything behind, even our language, our cultures, our families.

We were living in a hard dictatorship in the DR. - I remember that all of a sudden you just disappeared.

- [Julia] We weren't told.

We came home one day and (speaking in Spanish).

- And when we got in the plane, Mami and Papi just hugged each other and cried.

- You leave the country and that stuff is still in you.

We were constantly being warned that the world was not safe for us.

- [Commenter] There are very few writers of the Latin American diaspora that hold the same weight as her.

- I felt like I wanted to give voice to the landscape of being Latina, of coming from another place.

Our stories belong to all of us, but if you don't know how to read, you don't have the key to that treasure chest.

How could I not do something?

- Julia's in search of space, physical, emotional space, and she's in search of identity.

(lively music) (gentle music) - Filmed in the US and the Dominican Republic, "Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined" features extensive interviews with Alvarez, her family, and her literary contemporaries.

Just $5 a month makes you a member of your local PBS station, giving you access to full seasons of "American Masters" documentaries on Passport, including the Julia Alvarez film and others on the lives of authors like Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, and Louisa May Alcott.

You can also access the extended edition of this interview with Julia Alvarez.

- It was a long one.

There is a lot of extra content in the interview that you're gonna wanna see.

Everything she said was gold, so be sure to go watch that in Passport.

And get yourself the official PBS Books mug.

On the back: "My weekend is booked."

How cute is that?

Or with a sustaining gift of $10 monthly, you can download your ebook of "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" or any one of our featured reads.

Just click the link in the description or visit pbsbooks.org/donate and you'll be taken right to your local PBS station's giving page.

After you complete your donation, you'll get an email from your station with a special code to download your ebook.

- Okay, every station's donation page is just a little different, so you may need to search just a little bit to find the PBS Books gifts.

But stick with us because your support makes this reader's club possible.

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- Don't give up.

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Truly, your comments, shares, and participation mean the world to us.

Thank you so much.

Well, and now it's time to reveal our "PBS Books Readers Club" selection for next month.

Princess, will you do the honors?

- Absolutely.

Dun-dun-dun-dun!

Our next pick is the series of cozy British mysteries behind the highly-anticipated Masterpiece series "The Marlow Murder Club."

- [Heather-Marie] Yes.

The series follows the adventures of unlikely amateur sleuth Judith Pots, a 77-year-old crossword puzzle setter living happily on her own in the quaint town of Marlow.

- One evening, while out swimming in the Thames, Judith Witnesses a brutal murder.

The local police don't believe her story, so she decides to investigate for herself, and is soon joined in that quest by Suzie, a salt-of-the-earth dog walker, and Becks, the prim and proper wife of the local vicar.

- [Princess] Together they are The Marlow Murder Club.

When another body turns up, they realize they have a real-life serial killer on their hands.

And the puzzle they set out to solve has become a trap from which they may never escape.

- [Laura] Oh, it's a good one.

So read along with us and mark your calendar to watch the all-new adaptation of "The Marlowe Murder Club," coming to Masterpiece on PBS October 27th, 2024.

- And RSVP to our Facebook live event with author Robert Thorogood right now.

The event is October 30th.

Or subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can catch the episode there.

- Okay, book clubbers, it's time to get reading.

Be sure to go RSVP on the PBS Books Facebook page for our next event with "Marlow Murder Club" author Robert Thorogood.

You can do that right now.

- [Princess] We'll also have more book recommendations in the PBS Books e-newsletter.

Visit pbsbooks.org/subscribe.

- We are so glad, truly, to have you as part of the "PBS Books Readers Club."

If you loved this conversation, please consider making a donation to your local PBS station so we can keep our book club going.

Click the link in the description or visit pbsbooks.org/donate.

- [Fred] Remember, you can get your very own PBS books mug, along with the removable PBS book stickers for your laptop, phone, or wherever you'd like to show off your love for books and for PBS.

And you can also get an ebook download of one of our PBS features.

We have "The Cemetery of Untold Stories" ebook available.

So if you make your donation now, you can go download it as soon as you get the email with your special code.

- And everyone can help by sharing this video with all of your friends, giving us a like or a love, and subscribing to the PBS books e-newsletter at pbsbooks.org/subscribe.

- Thanks for reading along with the "PBS Books Readers Club."

(lively music)