10 stories from a 16 year old girl whose twin sister is taken in a violent act to a woman in Cuba who finds her deceased brother's Bones have been stolen ten stories and the search for freedom I'm Anne bocock and welcome to between the covers it is such a pleasure to welcome Patricia angle her previous book infinite country was an instant New York Times bestseller her novels have won major Awards and the praise for her writing includes adjectives like this powerful Illuminating breathtaking riveting her new book is a collection of 10 short stories the title is a far away world welcome thank you so much for joining me today thank you so much for inviting me to be here you have received such glowing reviews and such wonderful praise so I'm reading your work and the one word that keeps coming back to me is Storyteller you are a wonderful Storyteller so I want to know who told you stories growing up oh I love this question question because it's true I grew up on stories I come from a very large family a very creative family there are a lot of musicians and artists in my family but because my family came from Colombia to the United States very often through that experience the only thing you have to hold on to your Homeland are your stories and because you've had to leave so much behind that's often our greatest inheritance so my stories came from all around me from my grandmother who was a writer from my grandfather who came from Austria from my parents who immigrated to the United States and all my aunts and uncles who had their own stories inside this larger family story so I was surrounded by stories you are genetically predisposed to being a Storyteller there there's no question the book is a far away world it's a collection of ten stories they are linked and the theme would be migration the Latin diaspora talk about that as a collection if you would well the stories in the far away world were written over the past 10 years or so while I was writing other books but short stories is my first love perhaps maybe even more so the novels I love that they're just like micro worlds and you can get in deep with some characters for a short time before you move on to something else and these stories are all United in that they explore different characters from very different lives who in some way or another are looking Beyond where they are are dreaming of something larger or are aching for something that they've left behind in some way so they're they're United in that kind of Yearning a lot of times sacrifice love um and all sorts of compromises I think that short stories would be harder than a novel because it's compressed into however many words or Pages or paragraphs and you you have to get it done in that small time frame yeah they are you could say just as hard or harder each story whether it's a short story or novel presents its own challenges um it's just a different experience with when you're reading a short story you dive in deep quickly it's like a you know quick love affair whereas a novel is a sustained relationship with a book that takes much longer um you know to to get through in this book this we are talking about the human race which is migratory and and frankly for survival the human race has had to migrate most of us have an immigrant story in our ancestry but I think what happens is that over time over Generations the language Fades the stories fade as a writer why do you think it's so important to tell these stories I think we all know that when stories are lost or forgotten they just disappear right and perhaps we forget lessons that somebody in our lineage already learned and we just it's like starting from scratch but it's true that all of us have a history of movement somewhere in our lineage maybe it's so far behind us that we've lost the connection to it and those like me for example who are who are the child of immigrants we have that story very close and it's still very much alive and active in our life condition um but but that's not to say that doesn't exist within everybody somehow and the longer our memory extends well the more power the more knowledge and the more Humanity we contain immigration in this book it is complex now the story of immigration is complex anyway but what I gather from reading for most of your characters it's a tug of war they are wanting something better but then in some cases feel like they are losing part of themselves in the process is that correct certainly my experience as a witness of immigration from different sides throughout my life has been my observations have been that it's a very nuanced and very complicated condition we have this idea in the United States presented by the media and you know different sources of information that information that immigration is like walking through a door the door closes and that's it you're here you've arrived and and the the old country is sort of lost behind you somewhere in fact it's quite different there's a lot of complicated feelings around it and the fact is most people in this world would choose not to leave the home that they love the family they love the community that knows them and loves them in order to start over in a place that is where they know nobody where they have no resources where they don't speak the language and a place that is more often than not not very welcoming nobody would really choose that if they didn't have to so I've always tried to write into that space of discovering what motivates different people to make those very hard decisions and embrace the whole picture that is of course the desire for something better but also the love and appreciation and respect for what came before that was so well said and my take away from some of your characters is that immigration does not start and stop at the border it is ongoing it is a process and for some of these characters it is life long sure and as a result of the modern world everything we benefit from in terms of Technology we're able to stay in contact with um you know places beyond our borders much easier which keeps connections alive perhaps in ways that we weren't allowed to do before my parents generation they were limited to very expensive phone calls that could not happen very often or letters that may or may not arrive right now we have email we have WhatsApp we have text I mean WhatsApp has changed the world really we have travel that's more affordable and and easier ways to move about the world so of course this brings up this notion of trans diaspora which is not just that you leave a place but that you can go back and maintain a relationship and a connection to a place that you've left behind so yeah the the condition the immigrants condition is an ever-changing one um and it's uh it's complex and and it's quite beautiful and I hadn't thought about the evolution and how technology has has played a part but what that is that that's really quite important let's talk about setting and travel and where your stories take place they are all over the map and I mean literally they are all over the map did you do physical research have you been to many of these places yeah I would say I've been to all the places that are where the stories are set all right so let's talk about where they are okay well there are there are stories set in the Northeast in the New York New Jersey area which I know well there are stories set in South Florida which I also know well and there are stories set in Colombia which is my parents Homeland and there are three stories set in Cuba where I spent a lot of time when I was doing research for my novel of the veins of the ocean so those stories sort of generated from that period when I was spending a lot of time there and I ask this because you really have an eye for place and I for Geographic detail whether it is a town or a neighborhood and in one of the stories it is simply a church but you in words you can really make us feel like we are there and I didn't know if that came from you're seeing it and feeling it and experiencing or you just a fabulous writer um thank you well that's something that's important to me as a reader certainly as a reader I like to um feel that the the author whose hands I'm in in my reading experience has a firm understanding of the place that they're writing about and because I write about specific communities I'm always writing for them because I want them to feel that I showed their their Community the respect of getting to know it well getting details right there's the artistic part of it which is really you just want to transport a reader so that they have a vivid and realistic reading experience but the other part of it is being responsible with the details and to to show the people who for them that's home the respect of getting it right I think respect is the right word and in many cases place can be as important in these stories as the characters yeah absolutely I wanted people to get a sense of how beautiful your writing is and what a great Storyteller you are so I'm going to let you choose and if you would set up the paragraph I mean I believe you're picking from the first story in the book and let us hear from you sure so I'm going to read from the first story which is called Aida and it's a story about twin teenage twin sisters one of them goes missing and through the learning about how she's gone missing you learned that these two daughters um really feel that they are responsible for keeping their parents who have sort of a troubled marriage together so I'll read a paragraph that speaks to that Aida and I considered ourselves their marriage counselors it was like each of our parents had an only child I was my father's daughter and Aida belonged to our mother when the fights became so bad we weren't sure they could make it back to each other on their own Aida and I would assume our roles I'd find Our Father alone in his study hunched over his desk or slumped in the leather reading chair staring out the window at nothing Aida would go to their room where our mother was always on the bed lying fetal in her nightgown I either would tell me that our mother would often ask her who she loved best and I either would declare her Devotion to our mother and say that if our parents ever split Aida and our mother would run off together to Paris or Hong Kong Aida would always tell me this part laughing because we both knew she would never leave me and I would never leave our father that was our trick that was how we kept our family together that's beautiful thank you for sharing that thank you for reading it and I I love any story that has to do with twins this one was not what I expected and it was quite tragic and heartbreaking and I'd like to look into a couple of the other story lines in this book one of the stories uh aguacero did I pronounce that agua yeah thank you okay stand corrected there are two strangers they both have traumatic pasts they're at a bus stop I believe where they meet each other for the first time and it just shows like how a random meeting can change your life talk about that story please yeah well I said it was a story set in New York City um and uh and it aguacero means like orange a heavy rainstorm so there's these um two strangers in New York who in order to get out of a heavy rainstorm that's come on they duck under the awning of a of one of those like cigarette shops that you know exist in Midtown Manhattan and they end up you know having a very casual superficial conversation but to escape the rain they duck into a coffee shop and it leads to um sort of a strange relationship they are they are strangers who are both avoiding very painful things in their lives and making big decisions and they find a momentary refuge in one another that's not at all romantic it's you know not even quite platonic it's sort of something else but it's very healing for both of them and you you know become a part of that trajectory one of the other stories which is the first one that that you read Aida there is a violent incident there are twin girls I am wondering if the trajectory would have been different if this wasn't an immigrant story well I don't know um it's just that story is set in New Jersey New Jersey suburb where really you know um immigration is not really a part of the plot or the theme in any way you that you just happen to learn through the course of the story that the father is French and the mother um is the the daughter of a Colombian Diplomat so she's spends her life sort of traveling about the world and because of their parents sort of Cosmopolitan nature these two girls are just a little bit strange for their typical Suburban Town they're just a little bit you know out of place although one fits in much more than the other so it's not really so much about immigration it's just sort of about how um you know some ways we fit or don't fit into the worlds that we exist in you you find that even within that family the parents don't quite fit with each other and it's kind about finding your place in places that you have choice but to exist in yeah I felt like the the surviving daughter had felt like it was her responsibility now to keep the family going yeah that's very often the case you know in in a difficult a marriage or family Dynamics the children feel a sense of responsibility that story actually came to me because I saw one of those documentary television television shows and it was about a family's daughter who had been kidnapped on her way to a rock concert she you know she had been walking on a road everyone saw her she was there one minute and the next she was gone and so through the course of this show they interviewed the family members and I just saw how much pain this family was carrying and just talking about their daughter who had disappeared and that stayed with me you know about the family that lives on right and and that's where the story came from I wanted to write about the family when the family that's barely hanging on to begin with is hit with something so massive it is a beautiful painful story you said you wrote this over 10 years the these different stories so they were written at different times but as I'm reading it I'm thinking how particularly relevant they are now have we seen a shift in the perception to immigrants and immigration in those 10 years that it took you to write these stories um well I don't know each story contains its own world in the sort of written in its own terms um and of course the world has been changing you know parallel to to the writing of these stories and I wrote three or four other novels in the meantime so I've always been exploring different things but these stories are really just about people and they're just about people grappling with things that everyone deals with which could be the loss of family members or with a love that is slipping out of your grasp or just wanting something better for your children and I think those are you know Universal experiences what was first story that you wrote in this in this book Fausto which is the second story in the collection my first book is a novel in short stories it's called Vida and I wrote Fausto very close to the time that I was completing that book and Fausto is the story of set here in South Florida and it's a young couple who are Crazy In Love sort of their whole Community is kind of skeptical of them and thinks you know they're going nowhere in their lives and their only dream is to get married and have a big wedding just so they can show everybody like look at us we're getting married and just to carry out that little goal they get themselves involved in some big trouble quite a bit of big trouble yes I don't think it gives much too much away to say that they get involved in you know drug trafficking sort of in one of those peripheral ways not really you know head-on drug trafficking but they're one of the Little Movers in the larger operation and you see what it does to them which of these stories was the most challenging they're all challenging every story is like a puzzle while you're writing it and it asks its own questions and you've got to find the answers so that's kind of the magic and the Mystery of writing a short story um maybe one that I struggled with longer Fausto took me many many drafts actually I should say but another one that maybe took me a bit to figure out is one of the more unusual stories in the collection called The Book of saints which is told in two voices the voices of a husband and a wife um and it is structured at very different pivotal points in their relationship from their meeting until where they are now um and that was story was a lot of fun to write because again I had these two opposing voices telling their version of the same story in different ways but it took some time to figure out as far as things being a puzzle is it also a puzzle when you structure a collection of short stories I mean you don't just go well here at 10 I'm putting them in is is there a progression yeah that's a great question and I know a lot of writers really labor over that you know the order of the stories I'm a lot more intuitive I kind of go with my guts so there's no you know I couldn't even tell you how they're really organized I really just kind of tried to imagine the reader's experience of going from one to the other and it's really an emotional map that guides you through these stories more than anything else I know you're bilingual are there phrases words better said in one language than another yes absolutely there are there are things that simply don't exist in one language and they might in another um which I've always found fascinating because sometimes you don't have an accent you don't there are ways for example in English things that we all feel that we can't quite put into words yet the words might exist in another language and how fortunate will we would be if we knew those words to describe what we're feeling so that's one of the great things about being bilingual or trilingual or whatever so there are there are some splashes of you know other languages in this book I like that that you said there are like words we can't come up with you're absolutely right yeah well done you win for the best title of a book ever and the title is It's not love it's just Paris I'm telling fabulous title okay when did you write that book uh it's not love it's just Paris is my second book it's a novel um I have to say that was not my original title the original title is House of stars and the line it's not love it's just Paris is a line from the novel that one character says to another so my editor at the time thought you know that would make a better title so we went with it and that was published back in 2013 and it's set in Paris and and it's sort of explores that period in Life or it's young people abroad studying where they're just full of Fascination yearning for adventure there's a love story it's trying to figure out who you are as an adult at the turn of the Millennium and kudos to your editor when you wrote infinite country it became an instant New York Times bestseller so that's fabulous but does that mean extra pressure I don't know it might and maybe I'm not aware of it because when you're a writer it's just you alone with the page every single time the last book had its own life and its own trajectory it's um and this book will be something else but if there's pressure I try to resist it just so I can really be authentic to my creative process and getting the work done Patricia we've talked about the book The far away world in the few minutes that we have left I just want to find out a little bit more about you first one the favorite place you have ever traveled to oh wow that's a difficult one um fortunately I've had the opportunity to travel a lot I think I've been to something like 50 countries but I have to say probably my favorite most special place to go to is to my parents country it's Colombia because of course that's um we still have so much family there it's an absolutely spectacular country with beautiful landscapes and so much ecodiversity but I always I always even though I didn't grow up there I feel a sense of home there Feel Home what's a place you have never been to but you want to oh so but you've been to 50 so there may not be that many left um I really want to go to Alaska and well that's just one there are so many places that I would love to go to but I would love to go to Alaska what's the first book that you remember reading that you could not get out of your mind very many I would have to say if I look back the books that arrived in my life around age 14 15 I think that was a pivotal time in my reading life and really informed my tastes and who I became as a writer one of my favorite books that I read around that time for the first time is called the four chambered Heart by anaisnin you were reading that as as a team my mom okay I have to say my mom um confiscated my um um a nice and Henry Miller books couple times but somehow I always recuperated them but she never took that one away from me and and I loved it we know that you teach as well as right what is something that you have learned from your students oh I think the secret to teaching is always being adaptable and allowing space for learning from students I have incredible students this semester and well what if they they've certainly taught me that the world has changed since I was I was young they're right out of high school many of them but um to keep trying keep experimenting sometimes I get set in my ways too and they they sort of you know make me shake that off and and try try new approaches of writing myself and the the final one that we have we are in a situation now where books and or being banned in schools and reading lists are being critiqued in a couple of of words your thoughts well and we know you recognize nin as a kid so yeah um you know I think that there's certainly book Banning is nothing new right perhaps we're more aware of it now but there have always been banned books um there's a great danger in the silent thing and allowing silencing of voices different from your own so we have to protect that um and at the same time we also need to be careful of allowing violence to exist in on the page in a way that persecutes and preys on vulnerable communities but books are are not the enemy Patricia ingle's new book is a far away world thank you so much for sharing your time with us thank you thank you so much I'm Anne Boca please join me on the next between the covers [Music] thank you foreign [Music]