Generational trauma, Racheras y Chiles
con Kirstin Valdez Quade & The Five Wounds
#NuevasPaginasconLupita is an expanded edition of the mini get-to-know the book and author interview series on Instagram aimed to "spotlight" Latinx authors with books out in 2021. The goal is to connect readers to new and/or old favorite Hispanic/Latinx/e authors and their books! So give this & every post a share to help us reach more readers!
How does it work?!
Here’s the deal, I came up with a set of casual/random/funny questions to ask each Latinx/e author I interview. For now the questions will all be the same but maybe in the future I’ll launch this into more specific questions to the author or maybe I’ll turn this series into a mini podcast or maybe……well, you get it! The possibilities are endless.
If you are new here don’t forget to check out the interviews with Elisabet Velasquez, Gloria Muñoz, and Zoraida Córdova! All of their books are currently available everywhere! We also have a really great line-up of guest authors coming up so make sure you don’t miss an interview by subscribing now!
Hey Heyyy Book Franz!
It has been so great to be able to do this every week & I cannot wait to continue this project. I almost thought we might have to skip this week with the big #instadown incident that happened to the world yesterday! If you are good about screen time, what happened was a bunch of those that love to (periodically) scroll on Instagram during the day lost access due to some glitch that whipped Facebook + brought down IG. It taught me personally how much I depend on Instagram daily to communicate with friends I’ve made on the app & to reach those that I have enjoyed talking books with the most :(! So, the more I get use to this newish space the more I want to invest more of myself because Instagram shouldn’t be everything. tr;dl (too long; didn't read) - expect more from me here in this space so make sure you hit the subscribe button <3
Today’s special author guest is someone whose novel gives me happy chills just thinking about it! Also, reading her responses to these questions fill me with so much more happy chills! I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did :)
Without further ado…….KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE!
Could you tell me a little about where this photo is taken? Is it special to your book in some way?
[My] wonderful, generous photographer Kristen Joy Emack took [this photo] this summer and has given me permission to use it. It was taken at MacDowell, where I started my novel.
Tell me about your book without telling me about your book - share any literary inspirations behind your book! If there are none, the gap you wanted to fill in the literary canon with your book.
There were so many literary inspirations!—some fleeting, some enduring. The short story that became the seed of The Five Wounds was influenced in part by Flannery O’Connor’s strange and wonderful story “Parker’s Back.” Alice Munro’s stories and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima were with me for the long haul.
What are two central themes in your book that you connect with the most and why?
I was interested in exploring how we might begin to heal from generational violence and reconcile with those we’ve hurt and who have hurt us. I’m endlessly fascinated by families—I love watching other people’s families in action, and my sister and I can talk for hours about the dynamics in our own family. I’m interested in how within a family our shared history can be a source of both sorrow and healing.
If a book was home, where would your home be?
Middlemarch—there’s so much life in this novel, and it’s such a rich picture of a community.
If your book was a famous musician who would it be and why?
Chavela Vargas. Tío Tíve would be into her rancheras, and, like me, Angel would love that she was a badass queer!
[Lupita jumping in here really quick to share a video of THE Chavela Vargas with you because she makes my queer heart so happy & I could write about her as a person/what her music/existence as a Mexican musician has done for me on a personal level, forever & ever! (maybe I will, right here)]
What comfort food could a reader pair with your book?
Enchiladas! With cheese and hot New Mexican red chile. Now that it’s fall, I crave chile every single day.
In what ways has access (or little to no access) to Hispanic/Latinx/e literature defined you as a writer?
I don’t believe that I was ever assigned a single book or story by a Latinx writer in all of high school, college, or graduate school. My discovery of Latinx literature was always on my own and accidental, and it gave me permission to write from my own experience in a way that my reading of other beloved books—passionate though my reading was!—didn’t. In high school, I found a copy of The House on Mango Street on my friend’s floor, and it was a total revelation to me that this Mexican American child’s life in Chicago could be the stuff of literature. Toward the end of high school, I read Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and for the first time, I saw on the page a landscape and family history similar to my own. This changed everything for me.
A huge thank you to Kirstin Valdez Quade for taking the time to chat with me about The Five Wounds! Please make sure you purchase a copy of her book in the link below #SupportLatinxLit.
Synopsis for The Five Wounds from W.W. Norton website:
It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.
Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.
The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
Bio for Kirstin Valdez Quade from her website:
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds (W. W. Norton, April 2021). Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (W. W. Norton, 2015), won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Princeton.
Friendly reminder that the best ways you can support Latinx/e authors and Latinx/e literature is by doing the following:
Leave a review for their books on any website that sells books
Request that your local library carry a copy
Purchase a copy of a friend, family member, your nemesis (hey! I’m sure they read too).
Shout about the book on any social media platform or to your friends and family!
Share this interview widely! Word of mouth does wonders for connecting readers to books.