First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ruben Reyes Jr about his new story collection, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: I find the second person to be almost the most intimate form, but you don’t usually have a book of short stories with more than one second person story because it’s very precious. I’m curious your thoughts about that point of view.
Ruben Reyes Jr.: I think I was kind of skeptical. I agree. I think it’s really intimate. I think when a writer uses it well, it can be very powerful. I also think that it can sometimes feel gimmicky, which is maybe why authors don’t write books full of second person stories. And so. when I was writing, I was thinking about why do I want that intimacy? Why do I want the protagonist and the reader to kind of fold into each other in this way? Because that’s kind of what’s happening, right? When you read the you, you become the you in a way. And yet there’s a character on the page that is different than you. The other thing I wanted to ask – which is what I ask myself in my own work – is how close can I get to the experiences of these migrants? Like when I’m reading fiction, am I actually getting close to the experience? It’s all mediated through art and through writing. And I think there’s something really powerful to be learned about immigration and all the other themes in my book. But that story was a way of being like, okay, so you can get close, but how close can you get?
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Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants. He completed his MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a graduate of Harvard College where he studied History and Literature and Latinx Studies. His debut story collection, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, was a finalist for The Story Prize, and longlisted for the the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award. Archive of Unknown Universes is his first novel. Originally from Southern California, he lives in Queens.
