Spark: What is magical realism?

Vaz: It's the realization that the magical can happen in the world. The magical realist finds what is extraordinary in the world; for example, levitation. We've heard the stories. Is it a miracle or mind control? It's rare; it may not be probable, but it is possible. Magical realism is the possibilities that start with realities. By "imagination," Marquez does not mean "things made up." He means using the talents you have with your mind to see the hidden truths of things. In a way it's just using the mind, clear thinking, smart thinking, and the imagination to see what's truly going on. A failure to do that and to bring that to the world tends to make us forget what has gone before us or what's happening right before us, and it is an obstruction to the creation of beauty in the world. So magical realism is recognizing what's truly there and bringing the imagination of beauty to it, finding a voice for the imagination which is not unconnected from reality—it's not making things up. One can speak of metaphors and be speaking of a real thing.

It's also extrapolation. All writing attempts to find what's extraordinary in what's ordinary. That's just all writing, any tradition or genre, but the difference with magical realism can be that it starts with, for example, a real law. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, you've got pots and pans dancing, and you've got wooden beams straining because of a magnet. It's almost like a dance of desire. That's not real in that a person can come into a room with a magnet and the beams don't start swaying and singing; the house isn't dancing, but it starts from a real law: metal attracts metal. The mind of the magical realist will say if it is true that metal nails and magnets attract one another, then I can extrapolate with my mind and imagination to make the house dance. It's a small but clear distinction. Your imagination exists in the real world, and dreams are real. Just because dreams aren't visible things in the world doesn't mean they don't do something in it. We put them into the world, and dreams are who we are and change who we are.

Spark:In Saudade, Clara can speak in colors, food as paints, and in crystals of sugar. How do you view her vision of the world; is it a privileged vision?

Vaz: No. That's a very good question. I don't think she's special in that way at all. She recognizes a distance from the world that I think all people feel, but they think that they aren't supposed to feel it or that they aren't supposed to protest. Finding the language to deal with the world is extremely difficult. I never could quite decide if she really was deaf or if she just didn't want to hear what was being said to her. What was shocking to me was when I saw the The Piano when it first came out. I did a double take because it was at about the time I had finished Saudade, and it was at the printer's. I thought, "Here's a woman who we're not sure if she's deaf or if she just doesn't want to speak," and I thought, "We're all working on the same idea at the same time. Women find a language and a way to connect with the world very difficult." I think that's what people, if they were to feel it at a certain level, feel generally. In Clara's case, too, it's a problem of being a displaced person, between worlds; it's not knowing where she belongs.

Spark: Fado is dedicated to your parents. Could you explain how they have influenced you?

Vaz: My parents were big readers. They read many books on all subjects. We listened to Portuguese music and classical music. I studied the piano for nine years. My father paints. My father also invented the idea of dialing in color. My godmother's housekeeper could not read English or Portuguese, and she couldn't identify numbers to dial a phone. We put the numbers in color so that she could identify them that way. So basically, growing up, we were taught that the arts are important, that money was not important, and that thinking visually—with shape and with sound, with words—should be a part of everyone's life.

Also, my father comes from the Azores. Many stories of Portuguese Californians are unknown and are waiting to be told. There is a world out there that is disappearing: traditional ways of cooking, of using language. A friend of mine was interviewing some older, Italian women. They said, "When we're gone, the stones cry." In Portuguese, we say "You might cry stones": great sorrow is crying stones; it's so heavy. These tie the natural world to the spiritual world. How can I tie this into my world and to my grandchildren's world? Who are we culturally? What is identity about?

Spark: Is that part of why you wrote Mariana—to preserve history?

Vaz:Yes. The Portuguese believe Mariana did exist. The French admit that she existed but do not think she wrote the letters. Rilke translated her letters into German, and she was an inspiration for his own writing, so the Germans do not doubt her existence. There are things to suggest that she wrote the letters; for example, a phrase she uses in one of the them, "from the window through which I can see Mértola." That's impossible; Mértola is 60 km down the road. It's called the Mértola window because it looks out on the gate that leads to that road. You had to live in the convent to know that such a town or word existed. There are other cases to be made on both sides, but no one has written about this woman's life, saying that she did write them, and here's what her life may have been; they just want to argue about the issue of authenticity. As a novelist, based on the letters and a respect for the facts, what kind of relationship can I construct to fill in what history has left blank?

Spark: You were raised Catholic. Has this influenced your writing?

Vaz: Deeply. Completely. I can't imagine it not being a part of who I am. I was raised on the stories of saints and the idea that things can be ornate and lush. I was used to seeing artwork that some people think is too graphic, but that was what I was raised with. You were hoping for a miracle, hoping for something unexplicable to happen. So yes, I would say that has a lot to do with it. And I was raised very Portuguese. We went to the different festivals and the big parades during Pentecost.

Spark: How do you view original sin?

Vaz: Original sin is very Catholic: that you are born faulty, with a mark on you, that you carry what someone else did. I think it's an interesting concept that you bear the weight of what humanity has been. I don't find it uncomfortable, and I don't find that it affects my self esteem. I have no problem with people feeling guilty or regretful about things; I think more people should. I don't think it should hurt who they are and what they do, but I think it's impossible to know very great joy without knowing great sorrow. That's what Mariana was about in some ways to me. We have this kind of insipid idea of what happiness is which just means contentment, and that's different from very great joy which always carries risk, and it doesn't last or stay at the same height. To feel the world deeply on both planes is what life is about.

Spark: Revenge and repentance often fall into your stories. How do you feel about these ideas?

Vaz: I grew up around a lot of Azorean people whose feelings run deep, and they run long. There was an incident in my family where a priest talked my aunt's land away from her when she was on her deathbed. Fifty years later, my godmother and I were traveling in the Azores, and she wanted to find him just so she could slap him. I don't think it's a healthy thing. It's interesting for a novelist; it's less engaging for people to put up with the long memory ruling one's life.

Spark: How do you see your role in the world as a writer?

Vaz: Writing is an act of courage. Putting strength and beauty in the world is a fight for what is best in the world. Writing that is deeply depressing still addresses the mystery of who we are. How many people read it amplifies that effect—exerts part of the force that describes the mystery of who we are. I believe that all good writing forwards the world even though it may never see the light of day. Whatever comes of it, it is the rebellion of people trying to make sense of something that doesn't make a lot of sense, and that is an honorable effort always.

Spark: What do you mean when you say that something needs to be said with urgency?

Vaz: Robertson Davies has a quote about what's wrong with most writing. He says that people aren't serious enough, but they're way too solemn. They don't dive into it or make a full commitment to it, and yet, when they get their substitute they're solemn that the world is a joyless place; solemn in a way that he finds laughable. So I tell students to write something that they really need to write. Otherwise why? There's enough paper floating around. The need to speak to the world is what we enjoy when we read. We need to feel that this is the story that had to be told. When you start using your senses to speak to you and to see, when you try to reshape the world and make it new in front of you, that's the beginning of what writing can be also.

Spark: Who are your favorite authors?

Vaz: I think one should read widely. If I had to pick my favorite I would say Joyce. But I read Shakespeare and Chaucer. I love Melville. I read Márquez, Nabokov, Kafka. I enjoy Bruno Schulz and Fernando Pessoa.

Spark: Did Márquez have an influence on your writing?

Vaz: When I read Márquez for the first time, I thought, "Okay, here's something that speaks to me, to the way I live." It showed me that it was all right to see the world how he was seeing it.

Spark: When did you know you were a writer? Did you have teachers who influenced your writing?

Vaz: When I was twelve, I decided to be a writer. For a writing assignment, we were given vocabulary words, and we had to make a paragraph using them. It was kind of regimented, but I remember writing a line that I didn't know where it came from, and I remember getting a feeling that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. You know, "Where did that come from; that was wonderful." I got choked up, and it's interesting that I don't remember what I wrote at all. If I were to look at it now, it would be nothing, but I remember the moment.

And I had good teachers. They were encouraging, and I tried not to fail them. I tried to honor what they had done. I believe in being disciplined, and I like what Flannery O'Connor says, "I believe in inspiration, but I sit at my desk from nine to twelve every morning, so it will know where to find me if it comes looking."

Spark: You consider yourself a writer first and a teacher second. Do you ever find that the process of literary analysis is a detriment to your own writing?

Vaz: No. Never. It's like studying how music is put together. It's the craft of writing. Art and inspiration is another matter, but one still needs the craft; one needs to edit oneself. A writer needs to know how to put stories together, how to shape the inspired image.

Spark: Do you believe in listening to your stories?

Vaz: Yes. I spent four years researching and throwing away drafts of Mariana. I kept going up to page 60, 70, or 75, and it was always awful. I tried to put her in a contemporary story, and she didn't want to be a cameo. Finally, I came home from swimming one night with a splitting headache. I don't get headaches, and my husband said, "What's wrong with you?" And I don't know where the words came from, but I said, "May I talk to you," because we don't usually talk about what I'm working on, and I blurted out, "I think she wants her own book." Then it snapped into place, and I wrote a working draft of four hundred pages in nine months. I finished on the Fourth of July. Sometimes you don't know what the story is saying. It takes awhile, and you think, "What was I doing that year? It's so obvious." Yet, when people talk about process, that's what it is. In a way, it is learning how to listen.

Spark: What is your model for living?

Vaz: Well, I like Isak Dinesen's short story, "The Blank Page." The story that the storyteller tells is about ancient Portugal. A convent of nuns would spin the best linens in the country out of flax, the original seed of which came from the Holy Land. The Royal family would put this linen on the beds of their daughters when they married, and they had a hallway where they put the framed blood-splattered sections that they had cut out and framed. See, the story instantly goes from something that's kind of believable to something that's fantastic. The linen that gets the most attention, the one people stand before in awe, is the one that's completely white. Where silence speaks, that's where a story has truly done it's job. The possibilities of the story are that someone was married off to the wrong person, someone couldn't wait—whatever it is, we are intrigued by what's suggested by the blank page. The highest form is not to describe something and remove mystery but to put a frame around it. And you never spell out mystery. That is the foundation of art and life: how does one shape one's life, to make it a joyful search. And at the inside of it is mystery.

The interviewer, Cindy Slates, is a graduate student in fiction writing in the M.A. Program at U.C. Davis.