The Wonder Before Words
Reyes Ramirez in conversation with Esteban Rodriguez
For many, it’s not uncommon to feel stuck between the place they’re from and the place they want to be, even if they don’t know exactly where that place is. For the characters in Reyes Ramirez’s debut short story collection, The Book of Wanderers (University of Arizona Press 2022), we find a longing and loneliness that continuously prompts individuals to ask how they can arrive at a space where they can truly be themselves. In Ramirez’s worlds, characters explore their cultural past through the eyes and stories of those with a shared history, violence is measured by one’s survival and the attempts to make sense of the ways a body can wield its power over another, and language, as well as silence, becomes an opportunity for self-discovery, all while the city of Houston beckons into its arms any wanderer willing to call everything it has to offer home.
In addition to The Book of Wanderers, Ramirez is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Answers Without Questions (Hub City Press 2023). He has been honored as a 2020 CantoMundo Fellow, 2021 Interchange Artist Grant Fellow, 2022 Crosstown Arts Writer in Residence, and awarded grants from the Houston Arts Alliance, Poets & Writers, and The Warhol Foundation’s Idea Fund. I sat down with Reyes to discuss his new book, the creative process, and how writing, regardless of genre, can forge a path for truth.
Esteban Rodriguez: Thank you, Reyes for your time. I wanted to start off talking about how Houston plays an important role in a majority of the stories in The Book of Wanderers. Houston is the fourth-most populous city in the U.S., and it’s a culturally diverse metropolis that is seemingly ever expanding. At the end of the story “Lilia,” I couldn’t help but linger on the following:
We Houstonians don’t like to get bored so we’re animals of whim, cursed to always wander but blessed to love every second of it. This nature ingrains a forgetfulness in every Houstonian. We love to forget, but can’t. That’s a blessing and a curse. It happens. To remember things in Houston is to become its enemy and its favorite child.
When you initially began writing this collection, did the city find its way subconsciously into your work or did you set out to figure it prominently in each of your characters’ lives? How has being from and living in Houston influenced your writing?
Reyes Ramirez: I absolutely set out to make all my stories either set in or linked to Houston, because it’s both the city I know yet learn something from constantly. Houston, as you said, is massive and diverse and covers so many identities, settings, histories, and clashes of all those elements that any story can be true. There are ranchers, farmers, doctors, violinists, scientists, dockworkers, roofers, hedge fund managers, drug dealers, teachers, painters, cowboys, professors, restaurant owners, pilots, fishers, and maids that can all be stuck in traffic on the same stretch of I-45 at 5PM because one of them crashed into another. On top of all that, Houston contains rural, urban, and suburban elements with access to the gulf while linked to the Borderlands and space. My stories couldn’t happen elsewhere, nor would I want them to, because Houston hosts so many possibilities for stories either set in or linked to a single location. A family of pro wrestlers? Yes! An international journalist? For sure! An airport worker? Without a doubt! A zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter? Why not?
Yet there’s not much of a literary identity surrounding Houston, especially when it comes to Latinx letters at the national level. As I said before, Houston is linked to the Borderlands in that it is often the first major American city with enough economic opportunity to host all sorts of diasporas (for better and worse in terms of possibility and exploitation). I mean, it’s kind of how I’m here. Yet, the complexity of Latinx communities has barely made a blip in the national imagination. I hope to explore Houston because it remains elusive in the American imagination yet contains nearly every aspect of its past, present, and future as a “minority-majority city” in a gerrymandered red state.
ER: As the title so aptly puts it, this is a book about wanderers, about people who are moving (either geographically or emotionally) from one place to another. What draws you to characters who are trying to come to grips with who they are and where they find themselves in the world?
RR: I like to focus on characters who are sure about what they feel but unsure about what to do with those feelings, which is an extension, I think, of what you’re talking about: identity. What does it mean to know what’s wrong or what’s right but unable to change the outcome? Your identity is then relegated to a spectator rather than an active participant in a nation. As the US continues to center the right-wing in its political imagination, you see more and more people begin to question how this nation was founded and for who and what it all means for our collective future. My characters exist in this space where they are essentially nation-less, figuratively and often literally, forcing them into moments of change, growth, enlightenment, anger, sadness, etc. This setting, then, creates situations where people, my characters, must make decisions that can alter their entire lives. And sometimes, the decisions they make (or don’t make) aren’t the healthiest ones. From a White/Western form of storytelling, characters must change over the course of a story. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the character doesn’t need to change? What if the character is trying to hold onto something being taken away, trying to maintain what little they have? I think that’s just as important to explore because often it’s a matter of what can be held onto in the face of change and oppression rather than prioritizing the change itself.
I’m also interested in characters who don’t have the answer but must create one anyways because that’s what I had to do and, I imagine, what everyone else does, too. I’m drawn to those moments because that’s when my characters, and by extension myself, must be creative to survive the situation. For example, the 'main’ character in “Lilia” is confronted with their own bullshit and what is witnessed is them reconsidering their entire reality, their contribution to the world. As a reader, you see perhaps the most important moment of these character’s lives but not its lasting effects (except for a character or two) because therein lies possibility, hope, and despair in both the story and the reader. I hope that results in a bond.
ER: I was really interested in how language (specifically Spanish and English) becomes not only a source of contemplation within a character, but a source of strife between characters. Can you speak more about this and how you view language as an opportunity to access wider truths?
RR: As the son of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, language was constantly a battleground growing up. Spanish in my home and community; English at school and my community. Spanish let me speak to people like me without others knowing what we were saying, but it was either banned or corrected. English let me access information and knowledge I wouldn’t have otherwise, but would inherently render me inaccessible to many people I loved. What would happen, then, is me translating and interpreting English into Spanish, Spanish into English, all imbued with my imperfections, thus creating a new language in my own way with others. Spanglish, in general, is an oppressed language in that institutions often discourage and disregard it, amongst many other languages, but is an inherent development of colonialism when two colonizer languages clash and people adapt. In a way, this is an attempt at erasure of the harmful practices of colonization: dispossessing a people of their communication with each other.
To answer the question, language reflects the conflicts and connections between people, communities, and histories and I want my stories to contribute to that dialogue. The wider truth, perhaps, is that we can all communicate and speak to each other and what’s stopping us isn’t language, because I, even as a stuttering 8-year-old boy, had enough love and patience to navigate between English and Spanish with people I cared about.
ER: A theme that appeared throughout the collection was violence, but more specifically how the characters responded to violence. I thought a lot about Rodrigo’s words to Tomás as he discusses the war in El Salvador in the story “Ni Sabes. Tomás de la Paz”:
“Palabras, Tomás. Words. No hay dignidad or honor in violence. Lo haces and that’s it. You do not fight if you are afraid to die. If you are afraid to die, stay home and die alone.”
Can you speak more about this story and about how conflict, violence, and war emerged as themes?
RR: I want The Book of Wanderers to explore as many facets of Latino/a/x identity as possible, its complexities, nuances, and dissonances. The characters exhibit joy, love, lust, ambitions, awkwardness, ignorance, rage, prejudice, violence, etc. because that’s what human beings do, and I felt that to not imbue my characters with that complexity would be doing them, and myself, a disservice. There’s a harmful trope in the American imagination regarding people of color and their depictions in media and history in that people of color must be respectable, clean, and law-abiding to be listened to or be able to be rightfully heard. For example, for immigrants, there exists a ridiculous standard to ‘come to the United States correctly,’ when it is legal to seek refugee status at the US/Mexico border, that otherwise somehow justifies committing genocidal acts against them through family separations (per the United Nations definition of human rights). How do people define themselves when they face violence everywhere they go? How do generations internalize the violence committed against them for even trying to survive? As the son of immigrants, I cannot fully fathom the violence done to my father and mother by entire nations, whether it be physical, emotional, financial, etc. I inherited that trauma but also that desire to do something about it. I face my own form of state-sponsored violence in my life, such as the erasure of my people’s history, language, and culture in my own and my family’s education, and have often wondered how to undo it all. As Toni Morrison stated, racism “keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being… There will always be one more thing.”
Various characters have parallels in The Book of Wanderers. Rodrigo’s and Tomás’ relationship embody both personal and generational trauma as well as intergenerational dialogues of masculinity, trauma, and knowledge. That quote from Rodrigo ends with “If you are afraid to die, stay home and die alone.” What if home doesn’t exist? In fact, a reader can compare Rodrigo’s journey to Joaquin Salvatierra’s, the main character in a later story, for example. They both face war and violence as children and process them in different ways (albeit in different circumstances). I want to posit the question: what is redeemable? What can be healed? What can we survive? How do we continue? What do we pass on? As the son of a former child soldier, I believe we can heal because we have generations of youth and elders alike who barely survive these traumas in their own ways and have families, hopes, and dreams. If I don’t believe that, then what’s the point? The stories, I hope, explore those themes for us to come to our own answers as a community because: “There will always be one more thing.”
ER: Do you find these themes emerging in your poetry as well? And to follow up on that, how do you approach fiction compared to poetry? Is there a distinction for you?
RR: For sure! My debut collection of poetry Answers Without Questions, due to be published with Hub City Press in Fall 2023, does touch upon some similar themes, albeit in different mixtures of the personal and the grander. For example, the theme of relationships, or lack thereof, between parents and children in The Book of Wanderers is prevalent to further explore the relationship between the nation and individual, histories and the people who inherit them. In Answers Without Questions, that theme is explored more personally yet in a more linguistically playful way to navigate the inheritance of language, history, and sense of self in the face of erasure. Again, it’s all in different mixtures for me when it comes to these two projects. I would even say my next project, a book of essays focused on pop culture, creates a trilogy where I explore my role as participant and witness in the different histories and memes I inherit as a Mexican, Salvadoran, and American, perhaps a role that encompasses creator, mentor, provocateur, victim, and admirer.
Ultimately, I view myself as a writer who plays with language, and everything else is just a container. There’s poetry, flash fiction, monologues, legal documents, etc. in The Book of Wanderers in first, second, and third person perspectives, as well as Spanish, English, Spanglish, etc. A reason for this is because I want the reader to have as much fun reading these stories as I had writing them, and that writing forms are boundaries that are meant to be broken. In fact, in “Ni Sabes, Tomas de la Paz,” there’s a poem I wrote in my late teens that I edited and just slipped into the story.
If I had to make a distinction between my approaches to fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, it's loosely: fiction to play with a truth, poetry to explore a truth, creative nonfiction to deconstruct a truth. Even then, I’m not so sure. I suppose I could take my several-page poem inspired by the first Mexican American astronaut and turn it into a short story, but I don’t know if that would work as well as a narrative. Or take my essay about Speedy Gonzalez and make it into a poem, but then I wouldn’t know how to show my math as effectively. I guess I could take any of my work and just make a photo or tv series. It’s all just music waiting for the right instrument for me.
ER: I absolutely love your ideas of the genres as they relate to the way you approach them: fiction to play with a truth, poetry to explore a truth, creative nonfiction to deconstruct a truth. From a craft point of view, how do you start the process of writing a story, poem, or essay? What do the struggles and triumphs look like?
RR: Aw, thanks! But even so, those can be porous because truths can be processed in different ways from different entry points. For example, the act of watching films shows up a lot in my work. In The Book of Wanderers, Aransa, the main character of “The Many Lives & Times of Aransa de la Cruz” obviously, watches films and we, the reader, process the films with and as her in the form of these pseudo flash fictions. In Answers Without Questions, there’s a poem titled “Being High in a Movie Theater on Westheimer is My America” that kind of speaks for itself. In the collection of essays, there’s plenty of criticism of American cinema from my viewpoint (you could argue they are all inherently my viewpoint, but again, there’s varying levels of playfulness vs. exploration vs. deconstruction happening). Ultimately, the truth I’m trying to pierce with these works, that drives the language and its container(s), are: the degrees by which one can escape the self, if the escape is possible, and why there is a desire for the escape itself.
All of which is to say that starting projects is probably the easiest part for me because the containers, for the most part, are already built. I may walk outside and see a bird fly out from my apartment’s assigned carport and notice its nest nestled between aluminum beams. The start is the wonder before words, I suppose. Then that could become a poem exploring the idea of home from both my and the bird’s consciousness; that could become a paragraph in a story about someone who will return home a different person that day; that could become a think piece or essay about how the bird and I experience itinerant homes on land we do not “own.” I then consider how my language can best capture any of that on varying scales of intimacy, imagination, and voice. There are languages and crafts for the novel, the short story, the poem, the essay, etc. established by others before me as well as work being published now. The fun is thinking about how my language will fit, or not, into all that.
I guess the hardest part for me, then, is choosing what I want to do with those languages and my own: subvert, contribute, hone, clash, complicate, parody, all, etc. which requires lots of research, lots of reading, and lots of meditation. The struggle is living up to that decision. Like, for the life of me, I have not been able to write about beer to my liking. I’ve read books/articles/reviews, watched videos, and drank beers of all kinds but I still can’t write anything beyond comparing a beer to another food(s). For example, I drank this stout brewed to taste like a Choco Taco and the best way I can describe it is a hard chocolate milk with the consistency of melted ice cream with a lingering on the tongue akin to canola oil. Can that just be the review? Can that be a poem? Beer reviews in the form of poems? Prose poems? Should I mention the statistics of alcoholism in Latinx communities? The history of the stout? The rise of craft beer in Houston? The brewing process? Deconstruct the equally ridiculous and delicious idea of the Choco Taco? The contemporary acceptance and playfulness of the idea of the taco itself despite America not being welcoming to those who created the taco? The purpose of a liquid replicating the experience of a solid? Is it that serious? I don’t know! That’s the best my language and writing can do… for now.
ER: Lots of people don’t like favorites, and I definitely have started finding myself in that camp. But what was the most enjoyable story to write for The Book of Wanderers? And by enjoyable, I don’t necessarily mean that you experienced a sole feeling of joy, but that you felt a sense of accomplishment—despite how difficult it might have been to write—when you were done with it.
RR: Oh, man. Each story presented its own challenges and joys. The earliest stories were completed about 9 years ago when I was about 23 years old, an incredibly different writer and person than I am now but still holds a spirit of rebellion and passion that I’ve honed a bit more since, I hope. The latest stories were completed about 3 or 4 years ago, before I turned 30, but still a person honing language and narrative. I guess this all to say that the idea of accomplishment has changed so much within the context of this collection that I oscillate between a grand feeling of success for making it this far and utter disgust of what I’d written at such an elementary level in the larger scope of my career. Obviously, the joy wins out or else I wouldn’t be doing this!
The best answer I can give is perhaps “An Adventure of Xuxa, La Ultima” because it’s one of the later stories I’d written up to a certain point. I think it’s also the longest story in the collection, other than “The Three Masks of Iturbide Villalobos” which I’d cut from around 90 pages into the 7 or so in The Book of Wanderers. I mention that because I’d edited “...Xuxa, La Ultima” down, but not as much, to fit it for the submission word count of Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology (2021). “...Xuxa, La Ultima” had been written as both a stand-alone story and part of a larger arc for the character that could be continued in a novel, whereas “...Iturbide Villalobos” had been whittled down so much because I didn’t like the other 80 or so pages. In other words, I noticed I was getting more accurate in my expectations of storytelling. I remember struggling to fill a 2500-word story that could make cohesive sense. Now, I was leaving things out on purpose. It was then that I realized I’d somewhat mastered my version of the short story: complete yet full of potential.
When I put together The Book of Wanderers, I placed “...Xuxa, La Ultima” last for various reasons, but one of the biggest is because that story let me see the potential of the other stories, that I’d left out so much of my other character’s lives as I did with Xuxa. If I saw Xuxa’s story as a novel, then why not Aransa, Joaquin, Ricardo, Ximena, etc.? It’s now both a fun yet overwhelming feeling to write new stories, imagining what I’ll have to leave out. If I don’t want to leave anything out, then could it be a novel? I think Xuxa helped me see the vastness of all my stories, that the struggle now is how far or intimately I want to take a character and their reality.
ER: What do you hope the writer and person you will become in 10 years would say about the writer you now?
RR: You know, I did that recently since one or two of the stories in The Book of Wanderers were at least started about 10 years ago as I began my MFA. To that Reyes, I said: Shit, bro, you’re kind of ass at writing and technically an adult, but you’re just starting out and you’ve barely even scratched the surface of your potential. But you kept going when I needed you to. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.
In ten years, I hope that Reyes says: We’re always beginning. Everything you’re doing leads to another beginning. Everything I’m doing is going to lead to a beginning. The work changed and opportunities came and went. But everything we have is because you loved your craft, your family, your community, your people. For that, we’ll never reach the end afraid.
