Artist Interviews: Charlie Vázquez, Author, Poet, People-Connector, Bon Vivant

1.     What have you learned by watching Youtube videos this week?

Funny you should ask that. I use YouTube for both entertainment and research (sometimes they are the same thing!) and last night I investigated the “urban fantasy” literary genre, as people close to me have told me that my fiction could be classified as such. One of the writers interviewed explained how “the dark forests” of older literatures have been replaced by even darker urban spaces, such as foreboding alleys and subterranean environments.

This transition and the need for it fascinate me.

And that a major distinction between classic fantasy and the new more brazen urban style is that the urbanized genre permits a lot of space for sex in the plot, whereas in the older style sex was nearly taboo or just omitted. So now my imagination is really unraveling! I began writing my next novel, which is set in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and as I started out as an erotica writer and drifted away from that to explore other things, all the threads are coming back together now.

2.     How did you connect with Puerto Rico?

I connected with Puerto Rico later in life, in 2009 actually, and stayed on the western coast. During that trip alone I saw San Juan, Arecibo and La Cueva del Río Camuy, Quebradillas, Aguadilla, Rincón, Mayagüez, Cabo Rojo, Boquerón, San Germán, Sabana Grande, and Ponce. We almost made it to Juana Díaz where my father was born but didn’t quite make it. And most of those places have since become locations for a series of short terror stories I’m developing alongside the new novel.

The Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos Febres called me in 2011, regarding her Festival de la Palabra, and how she really wanted to bring programming to New York. So I met with her and José Manuel Fajardo, the programmer, and was hired to coordinate dates in New York after the San Juan dates wrapped. I’ve since made numerous friends on the island that have helped me to reconnect to it Puerto Rico in various ways. I connected to Puerto Rico, in short, through writing and my love of literature.

3.     What is your favorite music to write to?

I like writing in silence, as much as New York City will allow me. But when I do play music it cannot have vocals. Symphonic music, electronica, I’ve used before.

4.     Describe your favorite writing and why this appeals to you (novelists).

This is a tough one because I read all over the place. But to give you an example of one style I like, I’ll refer to the great Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon. What I love about his style of writing (20^th century) is how he, with such filed down economy, can paint a scene, the characters in that scene, and the feeling that permeates it, in half a paragraph. He’s just genius.

I’ve read about six or seven of his Inspector Maigret Parisian crime novellas and novels in the past and recently came across one of his more better known “romans durs” (hard novels) called The Strangers in the House. The romans durs were existential and dark forays into the crime itself and the characters surrounding it, but also of the narrator’s psyche.

That’s how I like my fiction. Thrilling. Not just in the tone and voice that can make it tantalizing, but the philosophical threads that keep it feeling fresh for years to come. And that’s why so many 19^th-century novelists will never go out of vogue, because life and the world keep recycling our miseries and anxieties and Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, and Melville will always have something eternal to teach us about our own humanity.

5.     What are your 3 favorite rituals to ignite your creativity?

Walking, reading, riding the subway. I do all three a lot!

6.     What did you wake up loving today?

Me desperté amando la primavera, darling. And life.

9.27.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

Riding the train from one end of the 2 line to another, you see a little bit of everything: Haitian church goers, Hassidum, Wall Street executives and protesters following their footsteps, young families headed to the lesser known nooks and crannies of Bronx neighborhoods and me.

As I sit peacefully thinking about what best to do with the hundreds of pages of writing I've accumulated, I glance to my left and notice a woman immersed in a book. I think of how many bits of information her brain must ignore to accomplish the task of following a plot.
I return to the New York Times to read an article about drug cartels and their control of a town and extortion plots and I imagine many must consider legalization of drugs to be the best option.
There would be a transition period while drug dealers get used to wearing suits and not carrying a gun while they visit hospitals, buying hospital staff monthly lunches to insure when a sluggish patient needs a crack sample, the grateful workers will reach for their brand of crack.

I fold the paper neatly to peruse later. And wait for the show.
On the train, there's always a show.
A Chinese woman walks into the car, pushing a cart. She plops herself down between between reader and writer.
We look up and make eye-contact, above the head of the Chinese lady, like synchronized swimmers.
The Chinese woman fidgets and lunges at the map and sits down again all the while exuding a diversity of funk heretofore unknown to man.
But you can't make assumptions.
She might be completely sane and have no sense of smell or she may have ingested some herbal medicines, which can make one smell like a donkey for a couple of hours or she might have some physical malady.

We, reader and writer, stand, again synchronized, and bemoan our seatless state during a non-rush hour rush hour.
The Chinese woman, her mission accomplished, unpacks some things from her cart and luxuriates, having inherited a whole subway bench to herself -- a rare event in a city where size 24 often crams into size 6 slots.

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