Finding Common Ground

Debra Thomas eloquently tells the story of millions of immigrants in her upcoming novel LUZ.  She has worked with immigrant communities in Southern California for decades, is an immigrants rights activist, has toured with Amnesty International to the US/Mexico border (speaking to people of both sides of the border, including Border Patrol agents).

Finding Common Ground:

Writing Across Difference in the Era of American Dirt and COVID-19

As I sit at home during the coronavirus crisis, contemplating an essay on writing across difference, I am struck by the fact that, right now, we are all having the same experience.

No matter what race or religion, class or culture, no matter what political beliefs, we are all facing an identical uncertainty. What is going to happen. . . to us, our loved ones, our jobs, our community, our country, to the entire world? We don’t have to imagine what our neighbor is feeling. We know. This is a shared experience. In our isolated homes, we may be speaking different languages and saying different prayers, but we all have the same fears and anxiety as we wait to see what these next few months will bring. 

A shared experience. That was what I was working toward as I wrote a novel about a young Mexican girl named Alma whose father disappears after crossing the border to work on farms in the US.

This is a story about her journey from southern-most Mexico to the US to search for him. Along the way, Alma finds first love, encounters great kindness and profound cruelty, and experiences the dangers of border crossing. Ultimately, she struggles to make a life with her infant daughter, Luz, in Los Angeles.

I have never experienced any of this directly. In fact, I am not Latina. But three decades ago, I was moved deeply after hearing in the news, week after week, about the deaths of migrants in the desert. Since I worked with the immigrant community in Los Angeles as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, I began to inquire and listen, read and research.

I got involved locally as an immigrant rights advocate. Years later, it was these experiences that led me to write, striving to create an imaginative world that resembled closely my character’s physical and cultural world. 

At the heart of the story I wanted to tell was a deeply rooted, shared experience that I didn’t have to research or imagine—and that was love of family. Everyone’s story begins with the desire to belong, to be loved, and then to protect and provide for loved ones. Most immigrant and refugee stories are based on a desperate need to protect and provide for family.

This is something we can all relate to, no matter where the story is set. 

So this was my hope: that I could ground my story in a daughter’s love for her father and a father’s devotion to his family and, through that most basic shared emotion, take my readers on Alma’s journey.

Beyond being a border-crossing story or a young Mexican girl’s experience, my novel, Luz, could carry itself as a story of family connections: of the heartbreak of losing, seeking, and, ultimately, finding family. And with this common ground, I hoped my readers would connect more deeply to the immigrant experience. What daughter, what father, wouldn’t go to such lengths? 

Was I thinking only of white readers? No. I was thinking of anyone, of any color or class, who might be moved by Alma’s story. Anyone who might connect with her reasons for searching for her father and for her father’s reasons for crossing the border to work on farms. Anyone who might come to care about this daughter and that father and the characters she meets throughout her journey north. 

Was it my story to tell? I am not Latina. I am not an immigrant. My answer: It is a story I was moved to tell. One that has stirred something in me, partly because of my Italian grandparents’ immigrant experiences and because of my care and concern for my students and friends from Mexico and Central America. I felt a fierce connection that drove me to write this novel and to persevere for many years to see it published. 

I began writing Luz in 2004. As an unpublished writer with no author platform or impressive connections, I struggled to find an agent and get it published. By 2010, after coming close (a few editors in NY requested and held onto the full manuscript, but ultimately passed), I set it aside. A few years later, I was encouraged by writers I admired to revise and try again.

By 2018, with revisions done, I was ready once again to seek publication. That is when I was advised to consider a hybrid publisher, She Writes Press, an increasingly successful independent women’s press. It would involve money on my part, but also a larger percentage of royalties. Importantly, they offered the same distribution as a traditional press. I submitted my novel, Luz, and was immediately accepted and scheduled for publication June 2020. 

My joy and excitement were tempered by every writer’s worries about putting themselves out there. How would it be received?

Would people order it, read it, like it, hate it? I was riding that rollercoaster of emotions like all debut writers.

And then American Dirt came out, a novel about a mother and her son fleeing violence in Mexico and trying to cross the US border. It was on every list of most anticipated books for 2020, and then Oprah chose it for her book club.

Of course, my little book could never compete with Jeanine Cummins’s novel. She was a seasoned writer with a huge fanbase and an enormous advance from her Big Five publisher.

Come June, would anyone want to read another story about a young woman trying to cross the border? My novel was quite different from American Dirt in many ways, but still, some might see it as another border-crossing story. I was concerned.

Then the controversy exploded as Latinx writers began to review American Dirt and rage. And with that, a whole new concern arose for my novel’s imminent release. Would I be subject to similar criticisms?

The best thing that came out of the American Dirt controversy was to expose the inequities in the publishing world and to call attention to the #ownvoices movement.

In 2015, Corinne Duyvis, a YA writer, created the hashtag on Twitter to focus on books with diverse characters that were written by people with similar identities, thus “own voices.” Myriam Gurba’s critique of American Dirt was an earthquake long overdue, as she voiced the anger felt by many Latinx writers that stories like Cummins’s were told poorly and inaccurately with stereotypical characters. Her assertion that no Latinx writers were given the monetary advance or the huge pre-publication fanfare that Cummins and other mostly white writers often received spurred an important conversation that reverberated among authors and throughout the publishing industry. 

While that conversation was happening, there was also a concern about silencing writers, like me, who sincerely wanted to write about important topics in the world that involved settings and cultures beyond our immediate surroundings. Terms like “cultural appropriation” and “trauma porn” were being used to describe American Dirt, implying that Cummins had taken advantage of a situation or culture for her own gain. The broader implication was that this could be said of anyone writing about a culture that’s not their own. 

In my heart, I knew that somewhere amidst all of this was a common ground where writers can write whatever stirs their passions, as long as it is done well with authenticity and respect. I was thrilled to hear the words of writer Reyna Grande, speaking to Cummins during the American Dirt panel with Oprah for Apple TV: “When I read American Dirt, I never once questioned your right to tell this story. I think storytellers can write any story that speaks to our heart as long as we do it with honesty, with integrity, and also do it responsibly. I believe in freedom of expression. What I don’t believe in is these institutions that silence some voices while elevating others.” Honesty, integrity, and responsibility. Those three words gave me comfort and hope.

  Another writer who spoke to the topic of writing across difference was Daniel José Older. 

In “12 Fundamentals of Writing “The Other” (And the Self),” he wrote that research is a very small part of the process, only the beginning, and that the writer must be aware that there are own voices who tell this story better, voices that have been ignored, or silenced, or given minimal reception. If, after confronting these truths, the desire to write persists, then the writer must acknowledge how inept he/she is, “admit to yourself that you’re not good at this shit, and to be conscious in the way that you create these characters.” This speaks to Grande’s honesty, integrity, and responsibility. 

But Older said something else that gave me pause. “When we create characters from backgrounds different than our own, we’re really telling the deeper story of our own perception.” While this is clearly the case—we are perceiving via our own experiences—I also see this “deeper story” in relation to our common ground.

We are all connected. Like trees that communicate beneath the surface and strive to help each other so all can thrive, we are one humanity. If at our source there are shared experiences, then these stories of our own perceptions touch on what the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called the Deep Truth. If, and only if, these individual perceptions are grounded in Grande’s three precepts of honesty, integrity and responsibility, then these personal perceptions are also our common perceptions.

They convey something deeper than mere thoughts, opinions, or judgments. They convey the best part of our humanity, based on love, compassion, and hopefully even agape, a genuine concern for the welfare of all beings. 

But what a task to take on. How can we determine if we’re being honest enough? 

Responsible enough? And just what does integrity mean?

Rebecca Makkai, wrote a successful novel, The Great Believers, about the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s, though she never had AIDS. She is not a gay man. In fact, as she once wrote, she “was born in 1978 and spent 1985 reading about dinosaurs.”

So who was she to write about AIDS in the ’80s? In “How to Write Across Difference” Makkai answered this question, concluding that the challenge of writing across difference made her a more careful writer and, more or less, saved her book. Much like Daniel José Older, she insisted writers be upfront about why they’re writing on their chosen topic (honesty), that they go the distance in seeking out facts and truths and making it a broader story (integrity), and, finally, that they seek out what is often referred to as sensitivity readers to be certain nothing has been missed, especially when writing about things beyond a single writer’s limited knowledge and experience (responsibility). 

When it comes to writing across difference, Grande, Older, and Makkai gave us steps to follow and virtues to aspire to, encouraging us with the mandate that in being a responsible creator we will be better writers, but none implied that we will succeed easily. I have reevaluated my own writing process using each of Older and Makkai’s statements, including seeking out a reliable sensitivity reader, and while I’m reassured that I’ve been a responsible writer, the final test will be in my readers’ hands. 

Which leaves me sitting at my computer in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis as I anticipate the release of my novel Luz in June. I’d like to believe that I am not naive when I speak of common ground and deep truths.

Maria Popova, in her weekly on-line feast, Brain Pickings, once stated that “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”

I’m confident that my belief that it is possible to root deeply into the heart of a culture to find common ground and write across difference is based on both hope and critical thinking.

I don’t know how my novel will be received. While I’ve been reassured by my highly respected mentors and by my publisher that my writing is genuine and that my characters are not stereotypes, I still have my fears and concerns. I have striven for honesty, integrity, and responsibility and delved into the depths of my perceptions with the hope that I have found common ground. But only time will tell what these next few months will bring.

—

Originally from upstate New York, Debra Thomas has lived in Southern California for most of her adult life. She holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s in English from California State University, Northridge, and attended the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She has taught literature and writing at a Los Angeles public high school and English as a Second Language to adults from all over the world. Her experience as an advocate for immigrant and refugee rights led her to write Luz. She is currently at work on her second novel.

LUZ

Alma Cruz wishes her willful teenage daughter, Luz, could know the truth about her past, but there are things Luz can never know about the journey Alma took to the US to find her missing father.

In 2000—three years after the disappearance of her father, who left Oaxaca to work on farms in California—Alma sets out on a perilous trek north with her sister, Rosa. What happens once she reaches the US is a journey from despair to hope.

Timeless in its depiction of the depths of family devotion and the blaze of first love, Luz conveys, with compassion and insight, the plight of those desperate to cross the US border.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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Category: On Writing