On Migration & Sanctuary
with Leopoldo Gout & Eva Aridjis authors of 'Monarca: A Novel'
#NuevasPaginasconLupita is a space that is both an archive and resource aimed to "spotlight" Hispanic/Latinx/e authors with newly published books. 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 Hispanic/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.
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Hey Heyyy Book Franz!
Happy NEW Nuevas Pagina’s Day :) Thank you for being here. The last few days I’ve felt very sad but remembering that I have this space to come to and new interviews/Latine/o/x books to share with you all, really fills up my soul and gives me an added reason to get up and keep going. Today’s issue features our first ever co-authored book and it’s a graphic novel! If you know me, you know graphic novels have a sweet spot in my heart.
So without further ado, our special guest authors today are….
Could you tell me a bit about where this photo was taken? Is it special to your book in some way?
Leopoldo Gout: The photo was actually taken in a facsimile of my art and writing studio we’d built on the set of a feature film I produced called “Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life.” The movie is loosely based in my childhood, though I don’t think a terrible middle school experience is something unique only to myself! So, while we had this fake office built already, we took some photos of me inhabiting it.
The post-it notes everywhere are a representation of all the ideas, characters, projects, inspirations, and thoughts I’m constantly entertaining or wrangling in my creative space. I work almost non-stop and so I have a lot of different stories and projects to keep me busy between writing, producing, and painting. It does get to feel like my real studio should be full of post-it notes. It’s how I work with everything, but especially how I worked with Monarca. It just involved so many different aspects of my process.
My work transforms itself jumping from drawing, stories, smells, research and everything in between. Sometimes I start a novel by drawing a character. Drawing connects many aspects of my mind so it’s like a jump start. Then the ideas float around and ping pong with each other.
Eva Aridjis: This photograph was taken in my living room, in front of one of my bookcases. It is special to my book because I grew up in a family of writers—my father Homero is a poet and novelist, my sister Chloe is a novelist, and my mother Betty is a translator—and the walls of my childhood home were lined with bookcases full of books.
I have many books written by my family members on my shelves, but Monarca is the first book of my own. I have been mostly a film director and writer of screenplays, so it is incredibly exciting for me to be publishing my first work of fiction! I grew up reading constantly and studied Comparative Literature before I studied Film, so I guess it was inevitable that one day I would decide to try my hand at a more traditional form of fiction. My film work owes its existence to literature, as it was reading that allowed me to develop my visual imagination—where you are given the words but must come up with the images yourself—and also what developed my narrative sense of story, characters, etc. I work/write at home, surrounded by books, so this represents a familiar and comforting backdrop for me.
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.
Leopoldo Gout: My work always has some connection to my life. A few years ago while traveling in Michoacán with my family I kept noticing butterflies alighting on my daughter’s head wherever we were. Just that little image was the trigger for me to start imagining the story. I dove into all kinds of nature books about insects and the migration of the butterflies and just found it so magical. I made hundreds of drawings that started my journey.
I’m heavily inspired in Monarca not only by literature in the sense of books, but a lot of the Mexican folk art and Indigenous stories I grew up hearing from friends of my late mother Andrea Valeria. I met so many interesting people who would come to her for support and sometimes would give great pieces of folk art. One of the coolest things were these masks she would collect whose value wasn’t dictated by the size or the complexity, even, but by how “danced in” they were, how many spiritual performances the mask had been used for. It was like the energy that had been poured into them was quantifiable and was the main element that they considered to be its value. To me that’s magical. That’s a side of my country that I can’t get enough.
Eva Aridjis: The book is really a work that can be described as many different things: a novella, a graphic novel, a fable, an inspirational tale with an environmental message, a guide for transformation, a book for children, young adults, and adults of all ages.
The main inspirations behind the book were the monarch butterflies themselves, and our daughters Inés (Leopoldo’s) and Josephine (Eva’s). But literary inspirations could include The Alchemist, The Little Prince, and even The Metamorphosis in that it involves a human who is suddenly and unexpectedly transformed into an insect, and their experiences as one. And of course, mythology—most ancient mythologies feature shapeshifting or transforming characters, whether it be in Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and of course Pre-Columbian mythologies from Mexico, such as Aztec or Mayan.
Our hope is that the book will inspire readers of all ages to think more about their connection to the natural world, to their ancestors, and of course about the plight of the monarchs, which in turn could lead readers to do what they can to help these endangered, magnificent creatures. There is a whole Call to Action section at the end with very specific ways in which people all over the United States, Mexico, and Canada can help.
What are two central themes in your book that you connect with the most and why?
Leopoldo Gout: My daughter & transformation. The belief that one small fragile creature has the power to change the world. I think of my daughter and, to me, when she is on stage dancing ballet, she transforms herself into an extraordinary powerful human, I’ve experienced her transformation in many incredible ways. I know that within her is a great capacity to enact change in the world if she wished it. It’s in everybody. That capacity to transform yourself can be reflected outward to change the world. Butterflies are the only creature that transforms their DNA so they have actually two DNA lines and that’s incredible. Nature is so inventive and constantly surprises me.
Eva Aridjis: I have an issue with speciesism and the idea that humans are more important than the other animals and lifeforms we share the planet with. So, one of the central themes in the book—which is basically looking at the world through the perspective and viewpoint of the monarch butterflies—is what I hope will be an effective way of allowing the reader to walk in another’s shoes for a while, or in this case, fly in another’s wings.
I believe we have a lot to learn from the natural world and animals, and tragically 200 species are going extinct every day, amongst them plants and animals that we know little to nothing about. As we see with the butterflies in the book, there is a perfect harmony in nature where nature provides everything an animal needs to live: the butterflies get energy from the sun, they get sodium from alligator tears or mud puddles, the oyamel forests provide them with the perfect microclimate to overwinter in, one which is neither too hot or cold, nor too dry or humid.
Similarly, animals only take what they need to survive—food and shelter, which they find in their habitat. Meanwhile, we humans have forgotten our place in the natural world, and instead of respecting it we dominate and exploit it, we take much more than what we need and have lost touch with where we come from. If humans were to disappear today the planet would thrive, whereas if other species—like butterflies, bees and other pollinators—were to disappear, the planet would collapse. So really who are the important ones? When we destroy nature we are not only harming hundreds of thousands of species, we are also harming ourselves and all the future generations—our children and grandchildren—who are going to suffer the consequences of our actions (or inactions).
The other theme in the book, which is very important to me is that of ancestors and ancestral memory and heritage. This is explored in the book in three different ways—through the idea of the daughters of the sun and that every fourth generation of girls in this family being tied to the monarch butterflies. Then it is explored through the butterflies themselves, the fact that it is every fourth generation that migrates to Mexico—undertaking a 3,000 mile journey none of them have ever taken before, guided by the sun and ancestral memory. And they undertake this migration in order to keep their species alive—for if they stayed in the cold weather of Canada or the Northeast all winter they would all perish. So the butterflies are flying to this one very specific spot in Michoacán, Mexico, and then their offspring—the first, second, and third generations—are the ones who migrate back north and spend the summer there.
And finally, we explore it quite literally—the book’s characters are inspired by our real families: Leopoldo’s daughter Inés who is a teenage ballet dancer, and inspired the main character, my daughter Josephine who is a seven-year-old lover of animals and vegetarian who inspired the main butterfly character, my father Homero who grew up in Michoacán and was responsible for convincing the Mexican president Salinas de Gortari to protect the monarch habitat by creating the sanctuaries, and who appears as the boy in Michoacán who helps the butterflies defeat the greedy avocado farmer, and Leopoldo’s mother Andrea who inspired the character of Inés’s grandmother in the book, the keeper of knowledge and the family’s secret, and the person who sends Inés the butterfly pendant for her birthday early on in the book, which then sets the rest of the story in motion.
If a book was home, where would your home be?
Leopoldo Gout: In Michoacán at the butterfly sanctuary. A magical forest full of the silent beating of monarch wings. My hope is that Mexico can protect it. Right now, between the corruption of the government, the people that control Mexico, and the Narcos, places like Michoacán's sanctuary are under a lot of stress. The US recently banned avocados from there because it’s one sample of how trade is not as clear as we imagine.
My hope is that this novel can put some light where it’s needed.
Eva Aridjis: The book’s home could be a beautiful summer garden full of milkweed plants and wildflowers. This garden would be teeming with butterflies fluttering around looking for milkweed leaves to lay their eggs on and drinking nectar from the wildflowers. If you looked underneath the milkweed leaves you would find monarch eggs there—one per leaf—as this is the only plant that monarchs will lay their eggs on as these are the only plants that monarch caterpillars will eat. You would also have caterpillars there munching away, and jade green pupas with golden rims where caterpillars are transforming into monarchs. Basically, a place where the monarch is present in all four stages of its life, with plenty of food, shelter and warmth. The other home could be one of the monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacán, which is the ancestral home of the monarchs, the sacred place that only the fourth generation gets to journey to.
If your book was a famous musician who would it be?
Leopoldo Gout: Kate Bush. She’s a queen of transformational sounds and dance and I always feel like I can fly like a butterfly when I listen to her. But, also, the Purépecha women and other first peoples of Mexico whose music I’ve been working with, trying to capture the soundscapes of a great side of Mexico.
Eva Aridjis: I would say Vivaldi, and his four violin concertos The Four Seasons in particular. The number four figures heavily in the book: four chapters mirroring the four stages in a monarch’s life, and the fourth generation of monarchs being the ones to undertake the migration to Mexico, as well as the fourth generation of girls in Inés’s family—known as the daughters of the sun—who are the ones who transform into monarchs in order to help them, and repay the favor that the monarchs did for the Purépechas hundreds of years ago.
The Four Seasons is a musical work that incorporates narrative elements and explores the beauty and drama inherent in every season. They are concertos, which celebrate the natural world, the cyclical nature of existence, and the violin is an instrument whose sound reminds me of flight. In the concertos Vivaldi included sections and sounds meant to represent different sounds in nature: bird song, murmuring streams, thunderstorms, the rustling of leaves, the sound of rain, a dog barking, gnats and flies buzzing, even the sound of hunters. These are all things that appear in the book and, perhaps most pointedly, The Four Seasons ends with Winter—as does our book. Winter is when the monarchs complete their long and perilous journey and arrive at their sanctuary in the oyamel forests of Michoacán. Winter is when their greatest triumph takes place.
What comfort food could a reader pair with your book?
Leopoldo Gout: Well my fantastic co-author, Eva Ardijis, is vegan so I think in her honor it should be a vegan dish. So, I’ll say a vegan Oaxacan black mole with char grilled cactus leaves, chayote vegetable and whatever other veggies, roots and herbs you can smother in that mole. A nice collision of cultures and times that, together, make pure magic. Make sure you eat it with a nice organic wine from northern Mexico, something from Valle de Guadalupe and delicious blue handmade tortillas.
Eva Aridjis: I want to say guacamole and chips, because avocados—just like monarch butterflies—originate primarily from the Mexican state of Michoacán. And avocados grow at the exact same altitude and in the same climate as that found in the sanctuaries, which is why avocado farming has become such a big problem currently leading to the deforestation of the oyamel forests and the monarch’s winter habitat.
So this guacamole would have to be made with organic avocados grown without the use of pesticides and produced by Pragor farmers—a collective of Equal Exchange farmers in Michoacán who have been farming organically for at least six years and do not contribute to any new deforestation. Avocados and guacamole appeal to people of all ages and in all cultures, as we hope our book will, and it is of course a vegan food, which is nutritious and delicious at the same time. The tortilla chips would have to be made from native corn grown in Mexico, and not the genetically modified American corn that has flooded the Mexican market and put thousands of Mexican corn farmers out of work thanks to NAFTA.
In what ways has access (or little to no access) to Hispanic/Latinx/e literature defined you as a writer?
Leopoldo Gout: I was born and raised in Mexico City, where we didn’t have a lot of money but there were always a lot of amazing artists and authors around visiting my mother and eating, drinking deep into the nights when I was growing up. So, I was lucky to have a lot of cultural knowledge floating around me as a kid from all those great writers and painters. I had an amazing opportunity to meet some brilliant minds from Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Peru, you name it. I even spent a few months when I was 12 in Cuba where I also met some poets. Those formative years in a cultural and artistic melting pot like Mexico City certainly affected my mind and my work.
Eva Aridjis: I grew up in Mexico with a Mexican father who was a writer so I grew up surrounded by literature and writers, the majority of them Spanish-speaking. My father organized several international poetry and literary festivals in Mexico and I had the wonderful experience of meeting Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, María Sabina, Laura Esquivel and countless others, as well as painters, filmmakers and musicians. I wrote my thesis at Princeton on the concept of “the other” in the works of Borges and Cortázar, and I’ve also read the Popol Vuh several times and have done extensive research and work involving pre-Hispanic religions and their relationship to death in particular.
For me Hispanic literature—from pre-Columbian works to the most contemporary ones—have influenced me greatly. It is a literature, which is mystical and magical in its essence, which searches for truth, or which provides an alternate way of looking at the world or an alternate world itself. Borges wrote about meeting his double on a park bench, Cortázar wrote about visiting an axolotl at the zoo in Paris and the protagonist suddenly turns into an axolotl himself. Borges and Cortázar explored the uncanny, Márquez and Esquivel work in the Hispanic tradition of magical realism, María Sabina represents an oral tradition of storytelling, a visionary poet whose chants—spoken and sung during hallucinogenic mushroom ceremonies or veladas—contained messages from the gods.
Another important Latin American writer—though of course I never met her—was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz- the Mexican nun who was both a philosopher and a poet, spoke both Latin and Nahuatl, and is considered a protofeminist. In the Mayan book the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins must voyage to the underworld to outwit the gods of death and retrieve the ashes of their dead father and uncle. I think so many of these writers and their works and the themes they explored influenced this book and my creative sensibility in general. And then of course my own father Homero Aridjis—who writes a lot about the natural world and its destruction in his poems—has been a huge influence on me, not just through his literary work but also through his environmental activism, his devotion to his family, and his absolute and constant dedication to writing.
Where can readers keep up with your work?
Leopoldo Gout: My Instagram is @leopoldoleopoldo my website is: leopoldogout.net
Eva Aridjis: My work so far has been mostly films that I’ve directed and written. My films can be viewed on my Vimeo page https://vimeo.com/evaaridjis/vod_pages or through my website http://evaaridjis.com
And then through social media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evaaridjis/
Twitter: @EvaAridjis
Instagram: @evaaridjis
A huge thank you to Leopoldo Gout & Eva Aridjis for taking the time to chat with me about their book! Please please make sure you purchase a copy (or request your local library carry a copy) of their book #SupportLatinxLit!
Author Bio’s:
Born in Mexico City, Leopoldo Gout is a visual artist, award-winning author, filmmaker, and producer. A graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art in London, he has written, packaged, published, and developed books for more than a decade, and was the head of his own imprint, Leopoldo & Co, at Atria/Simon & Schuster. As a Visual artist he has showed works in galleries and museums around the world. He has produced award-winning films and television series, including Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game, American Jesus, the award winning feature film Days of Grace and Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, and the forthcoming Get Millie Black (with novelist Marlon James, for HBO/Channel 4) & currently is in production of American Jesus for Netflix co-written and to be directed by his brother Everardo Gout among others, and was co-president of the James Patterson Entertainment company for many years.” He lives in New York City.
Eva Aridijis is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. She wrote and directed the narrative features The Favor and The Blue Eyes and the documentaries Children of the Street, La Santa Muerte, Chuy, The Wolf Man and Goodbye Horses. She also wrote on Narcos: Mexico.
Synopsis for Monarca from Bookshop website:
An illustrated fable for all ages about a Mexican-American girl who transforms into a monarch butterfly and undertakes the great migration to Mexico, Monarca braids together the values of heritage, ecology, and personal transformation.
On her thirteenth birthday, Inés receives a mysterious necklace from her abuela in Mexico that turns her into a monarch butterfly--the fulfilment of a prophecy linking Inés' destiny to her family's legacy and the butterflies' survival.
The adventure continues as Inés joins the monarchs on their long journey south to the butterfly sanctuary in Mexico--an odyssey that has become increasingly perilous due to human activity. Together, the swarm travels from the northeast to the swamps of Louisiana to the pine-filled mountain tops of the western Sierra Madre, finally alighting at the Sierra Chincua sanctuary. On this wondrous journey in the vein of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Little Prince, Inés discovers the connections between all living beings, and the urgent need to protect the monarchs' migration and habitats.
Divided into four chapters to mirror the four stages in a monarch's life--egg, larva, pupa and butterfly--Monarca blends Mexican folklore, environmentalism, and magical realism in an enchanting novella. Illustrated with stunning full-color drawings by Leopoldo Gout, this book will inspire readers to protect and cherish the sacred natural world around them.
The best way you can support Latinx/e authors and Latinx/e literature is by doing the following:
REQUEST that your local library carry a copy
PURCHASE a copy of a friend, family member, or 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.
REVIEW their books on any website that sells books!
The other day one of my cousins asked in our family group chat….” Hey! What kind of music does Lupita listen to?” and without even missing a beat my brother replied “AUDIOBOOKS”!
The moment audiobooks stepped into my life, they became my music. I listen to them on walks, while doing laundry and chores — basically any moment I have to myself. So if that is you too (or if you simply want to fit in more reading during your daily life) check out Libro.FM! If you use the code LupitaReads you’ll receive two audiobook credits for 14.99 USD with your first month of membership. These credits can be used on your choice of more than 250,00 audiobooks on Libro. FM.
And if you need some audiobook recommendations - I made a list just for you!
Thank you! I can’t wait to get this book now
This book sounds amazing! Thanks for featuring it. I look forward to reading it.