By Jael Montellano
The sound crackled down my grandparents’ skylit stairway to me, then a child listening to cascañuelas chirping in my grandmother’s bedroom, while I stood awash in wonder at the undiscovered life of the adult above me. My grandmother didn’t only dance flamenco; she exhibited her tap and ballet shoes to me proudly when I asked about her long-ago life, her veined and marked hands scavenging them from a buried corner of her closet where they had been forgotten. She posed, clacking the castanets in her hands, twirling in her house robe, wrists exposed. What passions transpired through a body that it could move in such rhythms which were unfamiliar to me? I thought. Pre-pubescent, I could not understand but longed for the moment when this mystery would unlock itself to me. I stared transfixed at the black-and-white photograph of her twenty-year-old self in a ruffled flamenco dress.
When I received the chance to read Alex Poppe’s Duende, I did not hesitate to contact her. It was a delight to converse about the craft of writing, our shared passion of flamenco, coming into womanhood through the filter of dance, and to revisit my own girlhood memories through her newly debuted book.
Duende is a novella about a girl who discovers her truth through flamenco. Lava is an American sixteen-year-old of Spanish heritage raised in Detroit coming of age under the harsh reality of the disintegration of her family. She gets unceremoniously shunted off to Sevilla under the care of her aunt Lola, a flamenco dancer and her mother’s cousin, when her addict father relapses and is re-jailed, and in Sevilla, Lava learns flamenco. There she flourishes, and rails, in the same way flamenco storms from sinuous movement to startling stillness. Who is Lava to you? Did you revisit your own girlhood in shaping Lava? What did you hope to capture in writing her story?
I write beat by beat, starting over at the top of each writing session, rewriting as I go along, so I didn’t plan Lava. Rather, she revealed herself to me. I couldn’t hear her voice in my head for a long time, so the early versions of her story were radically different: dystopian, a character on the run in a charred cityscape. I had her name, which hinted at the roil underneath her inscrutable façade, but I didn’t yet know her story.
I worked with youths for many years, and I am fascinated by how adolescent girls develop their sense of identity and self-respect in cultures that devalue them or usurp their agency. Adolescence is a tumultuous time for women; our bodies are revolting, our physical maturity may sprint past our emotional maturity, leaving us ill-equipped to process the wrong kind of male attention from males intoxicated on privilege. The denigration amplifies when adolescent girls are not white: a 2021 study by the American Psychological Association shows that Black teens are disciplined in school more harshly than white teens. This same inequity exists in how unsolved rape, murder, and missing person cases are pursued. So often, cases of missing girls fade from the public’s attention, especially if the victims are not white, and the perpetrators remain at large to re-offend. Lava is mixed race, which is subtly stated in the story.
The missing girls are on the periphery of Lava’s attention, adding to her feeling of dislocation and dis-ease. Some of us grow up feeling dislocated in our birth families. I wanted to explore how a character soothes dis-ease and how we create families from the people with whom we feel kinship.
Your descriptions of Sevilla and flamenco are so vivid, as a reader one feels the sting of the bleaching sun, smells the verbena and jasmine threading through the Alameda, hears the echo of the rhythmic claps and foot taps as though you too sit at the peña. What was your process like as you approached writing about Sevilla and about dance? How do the two creative mediums of dance and writing marry for you and how do they separate?
I did a lot of research, returning to Sevilla to live during my breaks from the university where I was teaching. I studied live performances, often scribbling barely decipherable notes in the theatre’s dark. I re-watched videos of dancers, writing down what I saw, conjuring imagery to match the emotions evoked during a performance. I did research at cultural centers and flamenco museums throughout Andalucía, studying flamenco’s history. I interviewed dancers, singers, and guitarists, to learn their journeys. At one point, I toyed with having Lava be a flamenco guitarist because female flamenco guitarists are rare. I learned how to clap some of the flamenco rhythms to better understand a song’s structure. Then, I let all that research go.
I listened to Lava, to what she had to tell me. A lot of my fiction is deeply rooted in place, so I walked Sevilla, listening to the city’s soundscape: the rhythmic gallop of horses-drawn carriages competing with the machine gunfire of flamenco heels pounding the pavement. I watched how sunlight imbued the pastel-colored buildings lining the Guadalquivir River in a sherbet glow. How the sky turned an astringent pink at sunset. How in high mornings, the sky was a Windex blue, backdropping a fireworks explosion of violet bougainvillea.
I do not dance flamenco, so I can’t speak about dance as a creator. I know what it evokes when I watch it and what it releases when I do it. Both informed my writing. Watching flamenco can sometimes approach the spiritual; this is duende, a soul communion between the performers and the audience on a primordial level. This understanding of flamenco lurked in the background of my mind while I was writing.
I was an actor before I became a teacher or took my first writing class, and that discipline informs how I write. Academy award-winning actress Sally Field once described her acting preparation as a metaphorical exfoliation of her skin, removing layers of deadness to open herself up so she could feel and then act/react in a scene. I bring a similar sensibility to writing. I may not have experienced that which I fictionalize, but through imagination and embodied cognition, I feel an emotional truth as I write. The emotional truth fuels the imagery, which sets the mood.
At the beginning of new work, I create a persona narrator, a container or construct to give Alex, the writer, distance from the I of a story. This distance allows me to change chronology or other facts from which I fictionalize. Crafting the persona narrator is similar to crafting a character from a script. I flesh out a three-dimensional personality whose job is to reveal the characters. These techniques were learned at The Writers Studio in New York.
Your novella is organized in chapters titled after flamenco dances, tangos, sevillanas, fandango, siguiriyas, soleá, taranto. Tell me about this choice, how you came to it, what it means in regards to Lava’s development and the craft obstacles you encountered telling this story in a non-linear way.
Crafting a non-linear structure was a creative goal for this project. I set out to write a story that could be read starting from any page, going forward or backward. That didn’t work. Then, I tried Rabih Alameddine’s approach of writing a novel of first chapters, which also failed. I decided each story section, with the exception of the prose poem midway through the novella, would start with a derivation of the same line. I wanted the chapters to be able to stand alone as satisfying narratives while informing one another so that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. I had to make sure each breadcrumb trail of clues led to a satisfying answer without being repetitive or obvious.
I wrote trusting the reader to make connections while, at the same time, accounting for the fact that he/she/they might not. For example, some readers will know who the person disappearing young women is by the end of the novella. If readers miss those clues, they can still follow the main narrative. Not knowing who is disappearing young girls works on a secondary level: I intended it as a societal critique because too many cases of missing girls go unsolved, especially if those who are missing lead unconventional lifestyles.
The chapter names come from the different palos, the distinctive sets of musical forms within flamenco. Palos are defined by the rhythms and emotions in each form, so I named each chapter after a palo connected to the chapter’s theme or mood. For example, the soleá is considered by some to be the “mother of all palos,” and motherhood is a theme in that chapter. Astrid and Lava deepen their friendship by dancing the sevillanas. With regards to mood, the siguiriya is used to convey trauma, suffering, and heartbreak, emotions which permeate the siguiriya chapter.
My biggest craft obstacle was not “speaking” the languages of flamenco or Spanish. I was studying and learning about flamenco as I wrote, fictionalizing from research by way of connecting to the emotional truth of each beat. I spent more time with locals in Seville than with expats, but because my Spanish is fledgling, we spoke mostly in English for interview purposes. Ironically, I ended up interviewing four guitarists but no dancers.
Lava and the reader discover Lola in the same way, through seduction and mystery; from a distance, watching and desiring, but never having. I’m fascinated by the seduction as equally as I am by what remains unsaid on the page, which is that Lola is a flame. To touch her is to burn. Lava, despite her age, seems to recognize this, and orbits her but ceases, towards the end of the story, her reach for her. Why do you think Lava does this? While this is not in the scope of the story, how do you envision their relationship maturing into Lava’s adulthood? [WARNING, spoilers follow in this reply.]
Lava is betrayed by Lola. The sevillanas chapter comes second in the book, but the last scene of it, where Lava and Astrid spy on Daniel, takes place chronologically much later in the story. In that scene, Lava realizes her first love is having sex with Lola, which is hard to forgive or forget. Compounding this conflict is that Lava lives in Lola’s house, eats her food, and learns flamenco from her. Lava keeps her distance for her own survival.
The rejection and abandonment intrinsic to Lola’s other betrayal cuts Lava. If she can’t be loved by her mother, Lava wants to be seen, which is impossible. Lola will always center flamenco in her life. Lava realizes this between her first public flamenco performance and attending the feria with Estrella.
Lava is cognizant of the underbelly of Lola’s flamenco-fueled lifestyle, which given her upbringing, is not something she wishes to emulate in her own life. Lola is an outsider whereas Lava yearns for a place/family to belong.
There is also competition between the two, mirroring the conflict between modernization and the traditional world playing out in the gentrifying streets of Seville. Who knows what kind of dancer Lava will become although I don’t see her eclipsing Lola as a flamenca. Their future relationship strains until it completely breaks, and they become strangers sharing the same blood. Lava eventually returns to the US.
“Flamenco is a way of life,” Estrella, one of the later characters in the story who becomes something of an ancestral figure to Lava, says. Duende is dedicated to Roberto Reyes, the guitarist. Who was Roberto and what was his contribution to you as a person, as a storyteller, that led to this impassioned telling?
Roberto was a flamenco guitarist who played the New York flamenco scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I met Roberto much later in his life in a bar in the gitano quarter of Triana, Seville. He was in his seventies by then, small, thin, always with his guitar strapped to his shoulder. He brought me into the flamenco world, introducing me to places where locals would go, wilding into the pre-dawn hours, singing and dancing flamenco. He explained some of the flamenco rhythms and showed me how to clap them. He explained the division between the gitanos and the payos, which I gave to Estrella’s character. Many nights after a performance, (he would always be in the company of plenty of singers and guitarists), he’d bring out his guitar and start playing. People would gather in a misshapen circle, singing, clapping, accompanying him. He opened flamenco up to me in a way I doubt I could have done without him. He died in February, 2021 from COVID-19.
Your bio reads as its own fascinating multiverse of stories, all of the shades of Alex Poppe like a kaleidoscope. You have several works out this year. Tell us about them and about what is of interest to you at the moment that may inspire your next projects.
That is really sweet of you to say. Thank you.
Jinwar and Other Stories came out in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8 by Cune Press. The lead novella tells the story of a nameless narrator (to represent all women) who is brutally raped by her ex-commanding officer in the marines. When she reports him, she is dishonorably discharged. Addicted to Xanax, she starts working in a hotdog truck shaped like a penis during the Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, during which he was credibly accused of sexual assault. From there, the narrator goes to northern Iraq and then on to Jinwar, a real-life, all-female village in northern Syria, built on Ocalan’s ideas of ecology, equality, and sustainability. The rest of the collection takes place in the Middle East and is themed around gender-based violence, dislocation, and identity. Although I have never served in the military, this collection heavily draws on my experiences living in the Middle East.
I have an essay coming out at the end of the year in an academic text, my first. My essay explores writing from research, how I fictionalize from documentation, published by Routledge.
I am working on a memoir-through-essay of my time working in Iraq and the West Bank. Reoccurring themes include sexual violence, motherhood, female subversion, privilege, displacement, ego, and resilience. I also weave in the topography of northern Iraq, its various cultural groups, Kurdish politics, and a commentary on international education. After I finish this collection, I plan to write a comedy.
Alex Poppe is the author of four works of fiction: Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022), Jinwar and Other Stories by Cune Press (2022), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019) and Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017). Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and commended for the Baker Prize, among others. Her non-fiction was named a Best of the Net nominee (2016), a finalist for Hot Metal Bridge’s Social Justice Writing contest and has appeared in Bust, Medium’s The Startup, and Bella Caledonia among others. She completed her third and fourth books of fiction with support from Can Serrat International Art Residency and Duplo-Linea De Costa Artist in Residency programs. In 2021, she was thrilled to be an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she began working on a memoir through essays about her time working in northern Iraq. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol-packing Kurdish hit men, she writes. www.alexpoppe.com
Raised in Mexico City and the Midwest United States, Jael Montellano is a writer and editor based in Chicago. Her fiction, which explores horror and queer life, features in The Selkie, the Columbia Journal, Hypertext Magazine, Camera Obscura Journal, among others. Find her on Twitter @gathcreator.