In Conversation with Margarita Saona

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/10/2023 (1091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Finding time to write is hard, especially when you’re as busy as Margarita Saona.

Professor, academic, writer and poet, Saona told the Winnipeg Free Press that “my writing is very condensed, minimal and also sporadic. I can consider myself happy if I finish a handful of short stories in a year.” Her latest collection of short stories, The Ghost of You, is out now from Laberinto Press.

Born in Peru and currently teaching Latin American literature and culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Saona will conduct an online Writing Craft workshop titled Poetry and Pain on Oct. 15. It will explore the connection between mental and physical ailments and experiences with health care. Additional event details can be found at thinairfestival.com

WFP: How did the collection The Ghost of You come to be?

MS: For some years now, I had wanted to compile and translate Comehoras and Objeto perdido, two collections of stories I wrote during my first 10 years in Chicago. I was lucky enough to have Luciana Erregue, the director of Laberinto Press, stumble onto my book and contact me. She was interested in promoting Latinx writers in North America. Luciana and I worked together refining colloquialisms and the title. We felt that the phrase “the ghost of you,” part of the story The City Where You Are Not, conveyed the longing expressed in many of the stories.

WFP: Could you speak to the relationship between time and vulnerability within your stories?

MS: The title of my first collection was Comehoras, a word literally translated as ‘time-eater.’ I loved the idea of problematizing the consumption of time. There are different ways of thinking about the passing of time: people can think of progress or transformation or deterioration. It is hard for humans to reconcile with being transient. Writing is, for me, a way of being in time.

WFP: Memory is a theme prevalent in many of your stories where you play around with a self-reflexive or self-conscious narrator who questions their own voice or choice of language. Did you choose to pair these two elements intentionally?

MS: I rarely think about what kind of voice I am using for a story. There is an image or a feeling I try to capture, and the character grows out of that confrontation with that image or experience. I suppose that when I have read about the self presented in autobiographies, or about how neurological networks recreate images of the past, some skepticism filters into my stories and into what characters can say about their lives or even about themselves.

WFP: You have an upcoming Writing Craft workshop titled Poetry and Pain on Oct. 15. What do you hope participants will take away from this event?

MS: Questions raised by my readers brought me to a new research topic: why did I write the poems I wrote when I was going through a life-threatening illness? I did not have answers at the time, and so I started to systematically read poetry about the suffering body and realized there are some common mechanisms that help express the kind of alienation caused by illness. I share these mechanisms with participants, so they can experiment with intentionally using them in their writing.

WFP: What are you reading lately? What are you writing lately?

MS: I just finished the beautiful and devastating I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. The last piece of fiction I wrote is a sort of sequel to the Against the Door story in The Ghost of You: the little girl who used to see “el cuco,” a monster of Spanish lore, is a grown woman who goes back to the house where she grew up. I am delving into monsters because I just published an essay called De monstruos y cyborgs in which, as a survivor of heart transplantation, I explore the physical and emotional effects of medical interventions. I hope to publish an English version in the next year.