Yalitza Ferreras is a recent Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. Her writing appears in Best American Short Stories 2016, Colorado Review, and the anthologies Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and Daring to Write: Contemporary Narratives by Dominican Women. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Yaddo, Djerassi Resident Artists, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and Voices of Our Nation. An excerpt from her story “You Must Be This Tall” can be found here. It appears in the July/Aug 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “You Must Be This Tall”?
I wanted to write about a young girl and her “fun dad,” and how their relationship shifts as she is on the precipice of adolescence. Serena’s close alignment with her father gives her a front seat to various forms of male privilege. Her disdain for her mother comes as a result of the friction she comes up against when she senses that traditional gender roles means that there are certain expectations of her that she doesn’t agree with and doesn’t want to adhere to. She is at the age when she begins to push back but doesn’t have the autonomy to be able to do so effectively within her particular family dynamics. I’m really interested in how children perceive and start acting out traditional gender roles and the ways in which adults are complicit in enforcing these ideas. I also wanted to write a story featuring a young person who experiences a reckoning with her actions, at an age where she doesn’t fully understand what a true reckoning is. Serena is also at that tipping point when she sees the impact of how she moves in the world.
Your protagonist says, “I loved lying like I loved hot dogs and chocolate.” Can you share a bit about writing a character who savors an opportunity to spin the truth? Did she steer the story in a different direction than you first expected?
Part of the fun of writing the story was to experience lying with impunity through my protagonist. I wanted to be in the mind of someone who is at that age where it’s still somewhat cute and harmless to do so. Serena knows it’s wrong but not exactly how wrong or what the consequences are. Of course, children can sense when something is amiss, even if they can’t exactly name or understand what’s going on, so she uses lying to exert control over the various precarious situations her parents are in. I also wanted to explore the way parents navigate the endlessly demanding task of imparting difficult information to their children in an age-appropriate manner, especially when they are in the midst of their own moral quandaries. Serena is not privy to the subterfuge, but she feels it and wants to get involved! It’s a little bit exciting for her.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
My day job as a graphic designer has been the greatest influence on my writing process. I think the artful arrangement of information and visual elements has always appealed to me. I often throw up (in both meanings of the term), various elements on the page then move them around.
One of my frequent tasks is creating a logo to tell a story with one identifying image. It is akin to using a metaphor to express an essence, to convey a meaningful experience in the most direct, yet nuanced and intuitive way. I often write with an operating metaphor in mind, which helps me find the structure of the work.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
A famous writer once told me: “Whatever is wrong with you is what’s wrong with your writing.” To put it in, shall we say, gentler, less shaming terms . . . What are you struggling with in your life? What are the patterns you keep repeating? For example, I try to do too much all the time and then get totally bogged down and stressed out. I then have to prioritize and simplify in order to have the clarity and stamina to proceed—and therein lies my revision process.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I am working on The Four Roses, a novel about the ambitious Altagracia, a poor young woman who immigrates from the Dominican Republic to Spain in the early 1990s, seeking to make art amidst her struggle for survival. The narrative traces the development of Altagracia’s visual style as she experiences living in Spain as an Afro-Latina immigrant, and how the desire for civic engagement through protest and activism influences artists and their communities. I am also revising stories for a short story collection.