Poured Over: Cristina Henríquez on The Great Divide

By Jenna Seery / March 9, 2024 at 6:00 am

“I’m not here to tell the story. I’m here to find the story…”

Cristina Henríquez’s new novel, The Great Divide is a deeply meaningful, character-driven narrative that brings momentous history to new life. Henríquez joins us to talk about writing historical fiction, her family’s connection to the story, her influences and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Topoff recommendations from Mary and Jamie.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                   

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.        

Featured Books (Episode):
The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
When We Left Cuba by Chanel Cleeton
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host Poured Over and you know, The Book of Unknown Americans Cristina Henríquez is, well, first novel for some of us, not technically her first, but it was really a novel that put her on the map in a different way. And now, she’s written a historical novel called The Great Divide. And we’re going to Panama in 1907. And you know, Cristina, as I was digging around, prepping for the show, there were a couple of interviews you did where you said, you were working on something new. And now I’m dying to know, because these were all around, sort of 16, 17, 18 after Book of Unknown Americans had come out. And you’d had some stories published, and you were like, Yeah, I’m working on a thing. And I’m wondering was The Great Divide the thing that you were talking about.

Cristina Henríquez

it may have been the thing, I was working on a different thing before The Great Divide. And the different thing that I was working on, utterly failed, it’s somewhere in my computer, probably never to be looked at again. But The Great Dividewas the book I had been wanting to write, okay, for, like 15 years. So even before The Book of Unknown Americans, I’ve been carrying around this idea, just generally writing a novel about the Panama Canal. And it took me a really long time to get to it to actually put pen to paper. But when the other thing that I was working on spectacularly failed, it was the only other idea I had. And I thought finally, like, maybe now’s the time to try to actually do it. And that seemed very scary and overwhelming, because it was such a big kind of epic story. So I just spent a whole bunch of time reading, researching before I could actually kind of find my way into, yeah, then it took about five years to actually write it after I started in earnest.

Your dad is Panamanian, Panama, has popped in other ways in earlier work for you. But I mean, I know I was saying this to you before we started taping, I didn’t know Panama had been part of Colombia, because no one ever mentioned it to me until I read it in your book, The canal, obviously, huge feat of engineering, like not a small thing. I mean, you’ve got locks that move up and down, like the whole thing. But no one’s ever really talked about the people the way that you have, and you sort of have three main characters, right, we’ve got Omar, Ada, and John and we are going to obviously dance around major plot points. But can we talk about those three characters and why you decided on them? Because I feel like you sort of knew that you needed to have multiple POVs? I think you’re really comfortable with multiple POVs as a writer, but who are these folks? And what are they representing for you?

I actually didn’t know at the beginning, I needed so many points of view. Yeah, it really so as you said, I mean, the canal, you know, is the one thing that many people associate with Panama, you know, it’s like the defining kind of feature of Panama for many people. And I just wanted to tackle it and get inside of it in a different way. Which to me meant, you know, everybody also hears if they hear about the Panama Canal, it’s the greatest engineering feat of all time. But it’s like what else? What’s beyond that? And for me, as a novelist, what’s beyond is always the characters. That’s what’s interesting, like I write fiction to kind of try to understand, you know, what we’re doing here as human beings. So I wanted to think about what would it be like to live through this monumental moment in history, but just as an ordinary person. And I started with Ada and Omar first, and that was all the novel was, and it’s so Ada is this young, 16 year old girl from Barbados, who comes to Panama trying to earn money for her sister who needs a surgery that they can’t afford. And Omar is a boy who lives a very solitary existence growing up in Panama, and is looking for some kind of like connection and community. And when the canal project starts kind of in his own backyard, you know, it’s like, a great reason to go work on it is he’s going to meet all of these people from all of these countries from all over. I mean, like, there were like 97 countries who had people who came and worked on the canal, he’s going to meet all of these people and be like in community with them. And that sounds exciting to him. So he goes to work on the canal. And eventually the two of them intersect and meet and have a friendship that grows over the course of the book. And it really just started with them. And at the end of that draft, I thought I had the book, like, I thought I was like, okay, good. I’m done. I’m done that I wanted to write. And I showed it to. Well, I showed it to my then editor, who essentially had like one note, which was like, it has to be bigger. And I had been to figure out, how does it become bigger, it can become bigger. You know, if you’re a novelist, it can become bigger, because the span of time can increase, it can become bigger. You know, just for me, this was the solution by including more people like pulling more people into the fold. So I started thinking about who are the other characters that exist here. And Omar? Like I knew already that he had a father that had been mentioned, of course, in the book, but actually never even named, like, I hadn’t even gone that far. It was such a sketch. It’s kind of funny that I thought it was done because it just really wasn’t, it was so far from done. But when I started about almost bother, I was like, Okay, who is he starting to figure out his whole backstory? Like, what are his motivations? And then understanding that maybe he is not happy with Omar working on now. And that it’s this source of tension between them? You know, eventually, like, little by little, that’s like, Okay, who is Ada sister? Who is her mother, like, starting to branch out from those two central characters, and then little by little, the novel just kept unfolding. And then it sort of became a process of like, like, how do I know if I’ve gone too far? You know, like, I just kept like, bringing more and more characters under the tent, it was like, Oh, now you’re gonna hear the point of view of this, like, like a coroner, for, you know, one paragraph where you’re gonna hear the point of view of like a doctor, it was just sort of like, where do I stop, and one of my rules to myself was to not actually stop to just keep following it wherever I went. And so that is how I ended up with a book that then had all of these like, different voices and perspectives. And then, you know, at the end of doing that, I was like, Oh, of course, that was the way. Like, that’s how the book had to be. And it couldn’t have really been any other way. I think in order to encapsulate the richness and the scale of that story, it had to have all of those voices, but I didn’t see it at first.

What I didn’t also fully expect to was how many people came from places outside of Panama, I’m not talking about the Americans, obviously, the Americans have a huge place in the story. But again, Ada is from Barbados, she’s not the only person from elsewhere. There are also other kinds of workers, the range of people who migrate because there are no jobs anywhere else. And they have to come here like this is the best they can do to support their families. I mean, Ada keeps the cook where aid has employed is not found in NATO, let’s just say that. not fond of her at all has her reasons, but not fun to her. But it’s as if you’re talking about not just colonialism, but patterns of migration. Right? Like, I think there are folks who when they think of an immigrant novel, they think, oh, people coming to America. It’s like, well, yeah, people can go to other parts of the Americas to start with or people can emigrate to Europe, like, we’re not the only place where people show up. And it was one of the things I really did like about this book, was just seeing who was going to show up next, and what they were going to bring to the story. And John, sort of the third piece, right, we’ve got Ada, we’ve got Omar, and then we’ve got this American doctor John, he’s really trying to figure out he knows why he’s there. He wants to eradicate malaria. He’s got a little bit of a backstory, which, for storytelling purposes, we are leaving out of this conversation. But would Ada and Omar have met, if not for the American presence, right. Like, yeah,

It’s an interesting question. I mean, the point you’re making about it being an immigration novel, in a sense, right? Like that also occurred to me as I was writing it, I set off and I thought, Oh, God, I’m writing something completely different from my last book. Like it’s total departure. This is gonna be so fun and interesting. And then, like, midway through, it occurred to me like, oh, no, actually, I’m writing a book with a lot of the same themes. Again, you know, which are themes of immigration, home community, belonging, all of that stuff kind of rose to the surface again, in this book, and in fact, you know, Francisco who is Omar’s father, who’s native Panamanian. Like sees the Americans and calls them immigrants and thinks of them as immigrants. And that was borne out in my research in the literature. That was how people from Panama would refer to Americans who are coming to Panama for the canal purposes. And so that was also interesting to see. But yeah, then you have John Oswald, who’s this scientist, he’s like, the foremost expert in mosquitoes. I had to do an enormous amount of research about mosquitoes learned more about mosquitoes than I ever thought I would. And he comes to Panama, because he’s going to hopefully eradicate malaria. This is at a time, so 1907, this is just after yellow fever has actually been eradicated. And he feels like he sort of missed the boat, right? He missed, like the big moment of being part of this kind of historic turning point in history. So he’s at least coming to do take care of malaria. He does. So he thinks it doesn’t go exactly as planned. But yeah, I think then, having him I mean, there’s like a pivotal moment where he interacts with Ada. There’s a moment that’s at that same moment where Omar is in the picture. And I’m trying not to give too much away. But, he’s sort of like the bridge in a way between them for a minute. And yeah, I just think that all of those perspectives ended up being necessary as what I learned.

And part of it too, I mean, going back to something you said about John and yellow fever and wanting to eradicate it, like they had the technology to eradicate yellow fever, right, we get that off the table. We’re working on the Panama Canal, which is huge. And, you know, an undertaking that had not really been seen before kind of thing. So here you are on the precipice of technology changing so much. And it’s really jarring. It’s really, really jarring. And I mean, the consequences. When you look at how everyone’s approaching it, right? What are the consequences? What really does all of this mean? So structurally, when you’re sitting down, right, you’ve got sort of an idea of where you’re going, your characters have revealed yourself, now you’re not leaving anything out, you’re still going to structure the story, you’ve still got to bring us through. And I want to talk about craft for a second because this is not a small thing. I mean, you’re alternating voices, you’re alternating moments, you’re keeping everything moving. And yeah, there’s that paragraph from the corner. And that’s a really effective paragraph. And it’s really effective, because where it shows up in the story. And that’s kind of all the guy needs to say, right? Like, we didn’t need a chapter from him. But it’s, yeah, when people hit it, they’ll know you’ll know it when you see it. But yeah, let’s talk about structure for a second and how you’re creating this world and not letting the research turn this into a history book. Because that’s also not what you’re writing.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, structure is everything. I think when you’re writing enough, right, like, if you can, when you find the structure, you feel like you’ve unlocked something, I was sort of writing with structureless, like, I was, like, very aimless for a very long time. And I was just, I have like a general philosophy, which is like, I’m not here to tell the story. I’m here to find the story. And so I sit down, and I’m always like, every day, kind of just pushing ever outward from whatever the last sentence was, but more in the spirit of exploration than in the spirit of like, you know, maneuvering anything. And I just kept finding more and more things. So then I just kept following more and more things. And then it became sort of like this unwieldy, you know, it’s like, okay, now I’ve got all this stuff, but what do I do with it? Where does it go? Like the eternal question, it was, like, you know, or I would find something really interesting in the research that I was, like, determined to include somehow, but it’s like, where does it go? And so that was always my question as I was going through, and that, you know, speaks to the structure, and how do you finally structure a book, I mean, the first chapter, which is Francisco just alone on his boat, and sitting on the water, he’s a fisherman, and he’s looking out and he’s trying to imagine what he’s heard people say, which is that ships will one day sail through the middle of Panama, and he just sort of can’t believe that that’s actually a possibility. And he’s trying to envision those ships. I mean, that chapter came much later. For example, like I didn’t write chronologically, I just had a bunch of stuff. And then I went back and tried to figure out like, Where does it all go? And it’s, it’s, you know, it’s like, sort of, in the same way that a lot of these characters are like, digging through mountains. To build the cap canal. I sort of felt the same. Like I was like excavating this thing and like digging and just trying to like find, and sometimes scaling mountains in order just to get everything where it goes. But yeah, I did have, I wrote the whole thing in notebooks by hand. And every once in a while I would stop. And I would write like an instruction to myself. And one of those instructions was you are not a tour guide. You know, as much as there were so many things that were interesting that I wanted to include so many parts of Panama that I wanted to show, I always tried to remind myself characters, characters, characters foreground that, you know, follow the story. And if it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work. It just not everything can be included. So, yeah, that was one of one of the things that I always tried to keep in mind that I wasn’t a tour guide that it wasn’t a textbook, it’s a lot of work. And then, you know, when I’m writing it all by hand, the structure seems more nebulous. Because it’s all just a notebook pages that are kind of crazy. And like, everything’s all over the place I wrote, like, diagonally like it was unlined notebooks. So everything was like diagonal, and there were arrows everywhere. And I was writing down the sides of margins, and it just looked, I mean, I guess it looked like my brain on paper. But that’s not always helpful than when you’re trying to like, order it into a book. So then eventually, I would move things over to the computer. And, you know, it’s just that laborious process of like, moving this here and moving this here moving, that they’re cutting this whole thing that you really loved, and now it’s gone. And the structure is always, always an issue.

So characters guiding you though, right, like character is the thing that’s driving the narrative. Does that mean you’re reading for character to when you’re reading, not necessarily for research, but just, you know, you’re living your life and reading a book?

Yeah, even when I’m reading research, for research, I’m reading for character in a certain way, right? I’m, I’m like, I’m looking for the interesting facts and statistics. And you know, you need some of that stuff. Or sometimes I’m looking for something very specific, I’m looking for a street name, or, you know, something like that. But oftentimes, especially in the beginning, when I was just sort of getting the lay of the land, I’m reading, trying to think that and you could see in the margins of the books that I was reading, I’ll write notes, like, a character could do this, you know, or this could be, it’s always like about the situation and what the characters maybe could go through.

Your dad came to the States in 71, to go to college, your dad is Panamanian. And one of the things we’ve talked about in past interviews, too, is like, you know, and this is not unique to your family. But obviously, getting stories out of our parents is not always the easiest thing. And I’m kind of enjoying this idea of you spending lots of time in Panama over summers when you were small, not really speaking Spanish, kind of watching what the adults are doing paying attention absorbing all of this stuff that would later get used in a novel. And I’m just wondering, like, as your dad read the book, has he given you any thoughts on sort of the essence of the fan?

My dad was my right hand man to this whole thing was sort of like my unpaid research assistant. Every time I had a question. I was calling him he was looking things up for me. He was contacting museums in Panama and organization at one point, like I had a draft. And I was like, I would love to read this like, and there’s a few scholars within this area of like Panama Canal research and studies. And there was one very notable one, her name is Melvin Lowe, they guten she lives in Panama. And she works at this museum and this organization, dedicated really to like amplifying the experiences and remembering the experiences of West Indians who worked on the canal. And I wanted to somehow contact them, I think I sent in a general email to their like, info, email, you know, address. I hadn’t heard back from anybody. And I was sort of bemoaning this to my dad. And the next thing I know, he like, I didn’t know he’s gonna do this. He called the museum and ask them, he was like, my daughter’s writing this book. And she needs to talk to somebody. And can I got a phone number of Melba? And they were sort of like, what, like, who are you? You know? And he explained a little bit more and somehow somebody gave him Malibus phone number. And then he proceeded. This was all happening without my knowledge, right? He proceeded to cold call her like on a Sunday, and she miraculously like picked up the phone. And then he explained the whole thing again, my daughter’s writing this novel, and she agreed to Meet with me over zoom. And talk to me about this book. It was the most amazing thing. So then he, you know, he’s calling me and saying I got Melvin’s phone number, you can contact her set up a zoom. I was like, what? How did that even happen? But he, he was amazing in that way that he was always so supportive. And he even said to me, just recently, because we had had this conversation, like midway through writing it, he’s like, Did I ever tell you I worked on the canal? And I was like, wait, wait, why? Like, you knew what I’ve been writing about? And you just decided to drop this now. And he, you know, certainly not in the construction years. He’s too young for that. But he had worked on the canal in the summer after high school, like dredging division. And like, I had never heard that story. And he just said to me the other day, he was like, isn’t this interesting? And that you’re writing this book? And you keep asking me these questions. And it’s like, we wouldn’t have had these conversations. Otherwise, you know, and I think that is something that has been really special about writing it is the way that I’ve been able to connect, not only to my dad, but you know, to my family in Panama, like my cousin was running around making photocopies for me and delivering things to people and sort of everyone’s kind of been involved in trying to get this book off the ground. That has been a really like cool aspect of it that I hadn’t expected.

Do you have a better handle now on sort of who your family because I mean, obviously, and I’ve done this to where you’re just plopped somewhere else for a summer and you’re just your eyes get really big and you eat a lot and you just watch everything, right? But you have some pretty great stories about your grandfather, who sounds like a complete character. And it sounds like everything sort of revolved around him like Do you have a better handle on him now? And can you sort of tell people what he was about and who he was because I had no idea that he was this sort of very big figure in Panama.

Yeah, my grandfather was a little bit. He was a larger than life kind of character, person, I mean, but he had like this whole kind of character to him. My grandfather was a writer. He was a journalist first for many, many years, he had a radio program, which was really sort of like he was doing like radio political op eds. For like 30 years, based off the popularity of that program. He became mayor of Panama City for a year then he was in Panama for a long time, he was a senator. And you know, he was always just very outspoken, very political, had a lot of friends, they would when I was growing up, and I would, you know, we would be sitting in my grandparents house at lunchtime, and they would just leave the front door open. And people would just sort of stream in and out. And my grandmother was always serving everybody food, and my grandpa would take his work shirt off, and he’d just be in his undershirt. And people would just come in, and he would just tell stories, and like, talk to people and entertain people and engage with people. I have a special photograph, just that I took one time of me going there. And he’s just sitting in a chair. And he’s reading like Garcia Lorca, like he was always reading. I think any kind of writing that I have in my blood is probably traced back to him, you know, he was special. And when, like when he died, there were like, I think two or three heads of state that like came to his funeral. Like he was a very sort of known figure in Panama. And that was part of what helped my dad on the cold call. He like, said he dropped my grandfather’s name, I think, maybe, like, opened the door a little bit, I think thinking about him. And I think it’s not so much that I know any more about him now than I did before I started writing this book. But I do feel and I feel this generally, in every time I write about Panama, which is partly why I think I write I write about Panama, which is that I feel like the spirit of my family, like come closer to me. And I feel myself. I’m closer to Panama. You know, I grew up going there. I’ve been going there since I was eight months old. But as you pointed out, you know, I went there without knowing Spanish there was always like, a little bit of a remove. I grew up in the United States, even as much time as I spent there. And so I think by writing about Panama and invoking some of those things, it’s a way to connect me to all of that.

Do you know how your grandfather felt about the American presence in Panama? I mean, I assume he’s left volumes and volumes of papers, but like, do you actually know?

That’s I don’t know if he’s left volumes and volumes of papers. This has just occurred, me or I my parents are going to Panama at this I said to them, I said, maybe what we need to do is go to the National Library and see what’s archived there of his work, because I have a short story collection that he wrote in Spanish, and it’s on my bookshelf. But beyond that, I’ve not read any of his actual writing or listened to any of his radio programs. I don’t know how we can find them. So maybe we’re going to unearth them. And that would be really exciting.

That could be a fun project. That could be your next book.

I don’t know.

Yeah, I can see your dad hovering in the background of that one, too. But I’m also thinking in general, like, you know, as an American, my entire understanding of Panama, it really is centered around the canal. I mean, we’re just not taught a whole lot about Central America, outside of, you know, the questionable things that the US did for a really long time. I mean, if you look at Noriega, right, it’s Yeah, we did a lot of stuff. I’m trying to choose my words, carefully.

No, no, I think that the reason that people associate the canal so strongly with Panama, besides the fact, obviously, it’s called the Panama Canal. But it is, as much as it’s a part of Panamanian history, it’s a seminal moment in American history, or the history of the United States. So I don’t think it’s any accident that that’s the thing, that as Americans, as people from the United States, we know about Panama, so much, the fact that we don’t know the full story of it as a different kind of matter, but just knowing that it exists, and that it’s tethered to the United States history in some way. I think that’s something that people generally know. But yeah, there’s so there’s so much more, as you said, that, you know, that Panama was part of Colombia is not something that a lot of people know, on the canal project itself, the fact that there were workers from so many different nationalities, I think is not something that people know, the fact that the Canal Zone, that entire space around the canal was so racially segregated, is not something that people know, you know, and so those are all sorts of things that I hope, again, through characters whose story, you start to, like, understand about this space, and that time, you know, not in a didactic kind of lecturing way. But just as the course of the novel unfolds, you start to realize, oh, this is actually what it was like there.

Yeah, like that metaphor you were using earlier of excavation, and just sort of examination and not necessarily manipulating the characters of the story to do what you need it to do. I mean, you’ve been writing for a while you have an MFA from Iowa, which, of course, is one of the best programs out there if you are going to do and I mean, Ayana Mathis comes out of Iowa and Justin Torres comes out of Iowa, like, and that’s off the top of my head. And of course, I’m missing. Oh, Angela, Florida, it comes out of Iowa. I mean, there are some really interesting writers Marilynne Robinson teaches there.

She was my teacher.

So we might have to talk about because she’s, she’s pretty amazing and has a really distinct worldview. Right, I get excited, just sort of thinking about her work.

I have a friend of mine made a bracelet for me, that says like, WWMRD, what would Marilyn Robinson do? Like, I’m always like, Marilynne.

But the idea that you have this much freedom as you’re figuring it out, right? Like you, you do not sit down, you don’t outline, you’re not, you don’t necessarily have the spine of the thing, right, until you start working. How does that come out of an MFA program? I mean, I thought the whole point of going away for a couple of years to do nothing, but the work is to do nothing but the work. Right. And then here, you are saying, well, you know, I have this idea. And I’m just going to noodle for a little bit and sort of the characters lead me through. How do you balance that? How do you make sense?

Well, it took a long time to get to that style of work. And I think, like when I was came out of Iowa, I mean, I had an amazing experience there. And but I came out of Iowa, writing short stories, because that’s what I had been versed in while I was there. I had learned by that point, to stop having so much control over what those stories would be. So I there was a point in my like, early writing career, maybe even pre Iowa, where the way I was writing stories was just like having idea. Think about it for a while think, Okay, this is the beginning, this will be the middle, and this will be the end and then sit down and write that story. And then, at some point, in graduate school, I sort of made a conscious choice to try it differently to have a different approach. And I decided to write a sentence without knowing anything that was going to happen after that sentence. And then to just write a second sentence that responded to the first sentence in some way. And if you’re doing it, like if you’re on the right track, then the first sentence has some kind of questions embedded in it naturally, that you need to answer in the second sentence, not that the first sentence is interrogative necessarily, but you know, if you say he walked, which in the sentence can really be as simple as that. It’s like, well, who is he? Where is he walking? Why is he walking, right? You have to start answering those kinds of questions. And you don’t stop to think about it necessarily, it’s not like, at every turn, I’m stopping, asking myself thinking, you know, it’s a lot of it’s just based on instinct, you just kind of keep writing building it out. You’re like making a path, but you’re laying a stone one at a time, and you’re building the path at the same time that you’re following it. And I started writing stories like that. And I think that was kind of the way then that I could eventually get to the place where I am now, which is to have the faith, right, which is what it takes to write without knowing where you’re going right, without any kind of structure or any kind of outline, I believe that that’s a better way somehow, because it will give you what you need, if you pay attention to it. And then, in the later stages, after you have all of this material, that’s when you can start plotting, planning, shaping, reshaping, making it feel purposeful, and whole and round, you know, all of the things that you want to make it feels like satisfying fiction, that can all come later, but in the generative stage. I think for me, what I’ve found is that it’s important to kind of know, actually as little as possible, and just let it showing itself to me on the page.

In addition to Marilynne Robinson, who are some of the other writers who’ve made you, Cristina Henriquez.

Is that impossible to say, isn’t it? I think everything is. I mean, I can tell you the books that have like, knocked my socks off that have like, meant something new or has felt like, whoa, that I will think of fiction differently after that, right. And then maybe not the books that people expect. I remember reading Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme. And just being like, you know, sort of a life changing kind of feeling. I remember when Pastoralia first came out, like when the story came out in the New Yorker, and I had a job at the time, I was sitting at my desk, and I read that story. And I just like ran down the hall, to a friend who also was a reader. And I was like, you have to read? Yeah, what is this? You know, that kind of thing? Yeah. I mean, I love Marilynne. I basically, if she wrote like a grocery list, I would read it. And like I read any case, there’s a nonfiction writer who I really love. Maybe you love this. So I just think her writing she again, there’s something in her writing that feels very exploratory. She’s always sort of like probing searching. And I think I respond to that in her work. I mean, I’ve told this story many times, but the first time that I read anything from The House on Mango Street, which is I was I didn’t read it until I was in graduate school. But when I read that, that certainly opened, if not a door, like a whole hallway of doors for me, and gave me permission to think right about things that I didn’t know, people wanted to hear about or cared about in any way. So that was a big one. I mean, Slaughterhouse Five is like, one of my favorite books of all time, like, you know, these are like, I don’t know if there’s a lineage that you like, if there’s a direct line that you can draw from those things to my work, but I mean, I just read, I know you did an interview with Paul Harding. I mean, I loved This Other Eden, you know, like, I learned approximately 58 new words for reading it was like, What is he doing here? But like, that’s why I read, like I enjoy plot, but I actually feel like mostly I read for language. I just I want and I want something someone to like break something open and in even the smallest way, I just want it to feel like, oh, that’s new. That’s interesting. The book that was my companion, as I was writing The Great Divide was The Known World by Edward P. Jones.

I love that book. I mean, I just love everything that Edward P. Jones does.

Yeah, same. And I kept it, it was like, on my desk, and every morning, I would read, like three pages of it, just enough to feel like nourished by it. And then I would turn to my own writing. And many of the things that he does in that book, like the flash forwards that he’s able to achieve, so that you can kind of feel the end of a stroke of a character arc. Are things then that I learned and was able to try to do in The Great Divide. But yeah, I mean, to me, that book is a masterpiece.

That’s like, we can do that with books in a way that you can’t necessarily do in other forms of art, right? Also the interiority those are the things and I read for language first, absolutely. Like, I don’t need to like characters, and I don’t necessarily need stuff to happen. All of these things are a bonus. But for me, it just it starts with the language. And I think language is the thing that we without language, you can’t really capture time. And interiority in a way that is special to books. The idea right and Harding actually, This Other Eden is a really good example of this, right? Like he’s got that epic sort of Melville, biblical August Wilson Piano Lesson kind of thing happening, right? And all these different levels. There’s a little Jesmyn Ward happening to like, he’s nodding to all of the places that you would think a book like This Other Eden would nod to? And a man of sentences, right, like, yeah, yeah, they’re crazy.

And like, I will, sometimes I will, like, be reading a book, and I will stop myself. If the language is just so beautiful, I will snap myself and read it out loud, like those few sentences used to, like, hear them. Or if the choice is so audacious, like in the known world, there’s a part where it goes into the point of view of like, the mule for like, one time. And I’m just like, why is this happening? And I love it so much. And I wonder like, like, how, how does that work? And like, why, you know, like, I’m always trying to learn stuff like that from other writers, I think, you know, or like, I’m looking at a sentence and I’m thinking to myself, Oh, I would have stopped this sentence here. So why does this sentence go on? For, you know, four more clauses? Oh, it’s because it does this one, it keeps going on. So that’s to learn from, that’s to me, like the joy, the joy of reading and writing is like, just that of like, getting really into the weeds of a specific sentence. And, you know, we, you talked about language, like, I think I cannot get, find my way into a story or any piece of fiction that I’m writing, unless I can hear the language of it. Like right now, I have a vague idea for the next thing, whatever the next one, but it’s just like, so big. And I told my husband the other day, I said, I it isn’t coming yet, because I can’t hear it yet. Right, you know, and say have the actual words. I just can’t find my way into it.

You know, I’m looking at notes I made while you were talking about, you know, everything from Barthelme down through The Known World, and it’s like, well, voice, right, you and I are talking about voice and voices, the thing that you can’t lose hold, like, if there’s no voice, there’s no swing for me. Right. And one of the things that you do in The Great Dividethat’s so interesting is how you create the sort of overarching voice out of third person, multiple narrators. And yet, even though everyone’s bring it like there’s some there’s some secondary characters, there’s a foreman, there’s a spouse, like, there are some people who they don’t need to pop more than they do. Right? Like Ada’s dad, right? It is mom. It is mom has a suitor. All of these people and yet, we’re always pushing forward, right? We’re pushing forward in time we’re pushing forward and story. And the voice is really wonderfully present. Yeah, and we have all of these different POVs. And, I mean, that’s what I think of when you sort of rattle off everything from Barthelme, Saunders to Slaughterhouse Five I’m like, yeah, it’s voice. Cisneros. It’s voice it’s all like, the voice has to be authentic voice. And yes, I mean,Slaughterhouse Five is essentially a fantasy, a sci fi, whatever you want to call it, it is its own thing. But it has a deeply authentic voice that belongs only to Vonnegut only to that book kind of thing. And I think that’s kind of cool. If you think about how widely you could read if you chose to, you could learn a ton.

You know, it’s endless. I know, this is why you walk into a bookstore, and it’s like heaven.

Yeah. And it’s kind of hard to ask the question I’m about to ask, given everything you’ve said about well, I’m excavating as I go. But I still feel like it’s possible as the writer to be surprised, as you’re creating this world. And I’m just wondering, if you’re willing to talk about any of the surprises that happened, if we can do it, actually, without giving away any story?

I think we can. Some of it, some of it was those kinds of large scale surprises, like things that I even really know, you know, that people don’t know. And that I was learning along the way to. Some of it was that sort of at the historical kind of level, were things that were surprising to me, some of it was very small things that were surprising to me, but a lot of it the best surprises as a writer are the surprises of story, you know. So I mentioned that the book starts with Francisco, this fisherman, Omar’s father is sitting alone on a boat trying to envision this world that he just seems so implausible to him that it will ever exist, you know, how are they actually going to sail through the mountains of Panama, right in the middle like that, boats will never come through ships will never come through. So it starts with that. But then there’s this moment, I remember I had this day where this writing day where there’s a part later in the book that was like, he’s able to see, he’s able to envision all the things that he couldn’t. And when that happened, it wasn’t something I had planned. It wasn’t like I thought, Oh, this, this is a plot point that needs to, you know, occur at some point for the book to feel satisfying to readers. It just happened. And it was surprising to me that suddenly Francisco could see this, but like, it sounds so crazy. I think it sounds weird to people, not writers, if they haven’t, like gone through this practice themselves, maybe it because it sounds, I think to people like Well, you’re the author, like just make it happen, or don’t make it happen. But I think if you’re really have this kind of intimacy, and you’re in tune with the writing in a different kind of way, then it isn’t that you’re in charge of it, necessarily. And so when it happened, and he was able suddenly to like, envision a whole new world that he hadn’t been able to envision, you know, 150 pages earlier. That was actually surprising to me, but in the best way. Like it was like I wrote that scene of than him like being able to see all of this. And I was just like, Well, that was like a magical writing day. Like, that’s the kind of stuff you’re hoping for, you know, where it feels like something beyond you is working in a way that makes everything come together in ways that you couldn’t have planned, really.

So, the flip side of that is something that you and I were talking about briefly before we started recording. And it’s something that happens at the end. And obviously, I’m not going to spoil the end. But something I thought was going to happen between a couple of characters, actually, let’s say you zigged when I thought you were going to zag, right? And you just sort of said, well, that was a controversial choice. And I’m trying to figure out if you and I can talk about this without giving anything away, because part of me is just like, well, I’m kind of bummed to hear it was a controversial choice, because to me, it felt organic. It felt like the only I was so pleasantly surprised when I hear you say, Oh, it was so true to the person who does the thing. And it just it sounds like it’s the exact it’s either a piece of what you just described for Francisco’s father, or it’s the complete opposite. And I’m not entirely sure because obviously, you know, it’s your head though for me.

For me, it was always the thing that you’re referring to was always a natural outgrowth. Okay, this character, that was like, that has to be and then there was some pushback from various people who were reading, you know, I’m giving the book to people getting feedback from readers. And there were a number of people who thought it should go on the up direction. And I sort of like listening to them trying to understand that receive it, take it in, or also just felt very adamant. Like, no, like, this makes much more sense to me. And if I go the other direction, I felt like it went into some kind of trappings and pitfalls that I just didn’t want to get into. Like, it just became a different thing. But yeah, I just didn’t want it to become that. And so part of it is me. But when I say didn’t want it as I think it isn’t so much my like, authorly ego not wanting it, I think it really was more like, this is the outgrowth of all this foundational work that I’ve already done. Like, this is who this character is. And for me, when I’m listening to that character, it makes sense that this thing would happen.

Did writing this book change you, did writing The Great Divide, change you as a person, as a writer.

I think so. I think I was so stuck before I started writing this book. And I really felt like, a little bit scared, a little bit frightened of like, am I gonna write another book? Like, what will happen? You know that everyone, I think you’ll always have that, right? Like, even right now. I’m like, What’s happening next? I don’t actually know. Will it happen? Who knows, but I think I was so stuck. And then to come from that feeling, to writing this book that I’ve described this before. But this is really true, it was the most joyful writing experience of my career. I think that can’t help but change you. You know, I felt just so engaged with the thing that I get to do, which is like this dreamy thing. I mean, it’s amazing to me every day that I get to wake up and do this, right. And I felt like so energized by it. And I felt so full of like, I don’t know, face for again, what sort of what’s next? You never really know. But I it made me feel more like, I know that everything’s gonna be okay. You know, if I had that experience, I can have that experience again, maybe. So yeah, I think it did, it did change me. I also will say, though, that the other way that it changed me is like, I finished it. And I was like, I am never writing a historical novel again. It’s just so much you get so like, it was a lot, it was beautiful, and wonderful and amazing to learn all of this stuff, but part of me just wants now to write something that has no basis in like any kind of reality history. Like, it’s just like, I just want to rely on my imagination and see what happens. See where that takes me. But the other thing I think, is, I will never write another draft on a computer again, I think the experience of writing by hand is part of what made it joyful. Because there was this real I mean, the only way I can think to describe it was like an intimacy between me and the page. You know, I didn’t my computer was nowhere in sight, my phone was nowhere in sight, I would just wake up in like, pre dawn. And I would have a turn on the light and have my notebook and a pen. And I would like hunched over the paper. And I was just felt like so close, physically close, but like spiritually close to the story to the characters. And it was such a pleasure to write that way. And I just, I don’t think I’ll go back to writing on a computer, or, you know, in those early stages, eventually when editing, it’s on the computer.

But you know, that seems like a really great place to end the show because I also I know you and I could keep going but I do like that image. Christina, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The Great Divide is out now and The Book of Unknown Americans of course is available in paperback if you haven’t already. Thank you.