Biography
Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic after a self-imposed exile from General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. When her parents became involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic. They returned to the United States in August of 1960, four months before the founders of the underground, the Mirabal sisters, were brutally murdered by the government. [They are the subject of her novel In the Time of Butterflies]
Alvarez was 10 years old when her family returned to the United States, and she had a difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and learning English. She was homesick and faced alienation and prejudice. “I consider this radical uprooting from my culture, my native language, my country, the reason I began writing,” Alvarez has said.
Biography
When asked why she wrote In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez said that “being a survivor placed a responsibility on me to tell the story of these brave young women who did not survive the dictatorship.” In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictional account of the murders of the revolutionary Mirabal sisters. The book has alternating first-person narratives from the three martyred sisters and the fourth surviving sister, Dedé. Alvarez says she wrote the book as a testament to these remarkable women who “have served as models for women fighting against injustices of all kinds.”
Many of Alvarez's works are influenced by her experiences as a Dominican-American, and focus heavily on issues of immigration, assimilation, and identity. She is known for works that examine cultural expectations of women both in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and for rigorous investigations of cultural stereotypes.
Biography
Alvarez earned her undergraduate degree from Middlebury College in 1971 and a master’s degree in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1975. She taught at various schools including Phillips Andover, the University of Vermont and the University of Illinois. She became a professor of English at Middlebury College in 1988 and has been its writer-in-residence since 1998.
In 1989, Alvarez married Bill Eichner, an eye surgeon whose humanitarian medical missions have taken him to many Third World nations. Alvarez and Eichner started an organic coffee farm modeling sustainable methods in the Dominican highlands. Profits from the 60-acre farm go to the Alta Gracia Foundation, which promotes literacy programs for the local population.
In recent years, Alvarez has expanded her subject matter with works such as In the Name of Salomé (2000), a novel with Cuban rather than solely Dominican characters and fictionalized versions of historical figures.
Publications
Fiction
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1991.
In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1994.
Yo!. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1997.
In the Name of Salomé. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2000.
Saving the World: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2006.
Afterlife: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2020.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2024.
Publications
Children’s and young adult
The Secret Footprints. New York: Knopf, 2000.
A Cafecito Story. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2001.
How Tia Lola Came to visit Stay. New York: Knopf, 2001.
Before We Were Free. New York: A. Knopf. 2002.
Finding Miracles. New York: Knopf, 2004.
A Gift of Gracias: The Legend of Altagracia. New York: Knopf. 2005.
The Best Gift of All: The Legend of La Vieja Belen. Miami: Alfaguara, 2009. (bilingual book)
Return to Sender. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2009.
How Tia Lola Learned to Teach. New York: Knopf. 2010.
How Tía Lola Saved the Summer. New York: Knopf. 2011.
Where Do They Go?. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016.
Publications
Poetry
The Other Side (El Cocko), Dutton, 1995
Homecoming: New and Selected Poems, Plume, 1996, reissue of 1984 volume, with new poems
The Woman I Kept to Myself, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004; 2011
Nonfiction
Something to Declare, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998 (collected essays)
Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA. Penguin. 2007.
A Wedding in Haiti: The Story of a Friendship. 2012.
Storytelling
Wikipedia:
Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. The term "storytelling" can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to disclose the narrative of a story.
Storytelling, intertwined with the development of mythologies, predates writing. The earliest forms of storytelling were oral, combined with dance, music, or other performances. In religious rituals, storytelling often has a prominent educational and performative role.
The Aboriginal Australian people painted symbols which also appear in stories on cave walls as a means of remembering the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art and dance; these stories gave understanding and meaning to human existence through remembrance and enactment. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.
Storytelling
Wikipedia:
Folktales often share common motifs and themes, suggesting possible basic psychological similarities across various human cultures. Other stories, notably fairy tales, appear to have spread from place to place, implying mimetic appeal and popularity.
Groups of originally oral tales can coalesce over time into story cycles (like the Arabian Nights), cluster around mythic heroes (like King Arthur), and develop into the narratives of the deeds of the gods and saints of various religions. The results can be episodic, epic (as with Homeric tales), inspirational, and/or instructive (as in many Buddhist or Christian scriptures).
With the advent of writing, storytellers recorded, transcribed and continued to share stories over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Oral stories continue to be created, improvisationally by impromptu and professional storytellers, as well as committed to memory and passed from generation to generation, despite the increasing popularity of written and televised media in much of the world.
Storytelling
How Stories Connect And Persuade Us: Unleashing the Brain Power of Narrative, NPR, April 11, 2020, Elena Renken
When you listen to a story, whatever your age, you're transported mentally to another time and place.
"We all know this delicious feeling of being swept into a story world," says Liz Neeley. "You forget about your surroundings," she says, "and you're entirely immersed."
Depending on the story you're reading, watching, or listening to, your palms may start to sweat, scientists find. You'll blink faster, and your heart might flutter or skip. Your facial expressions shift, and the muscles above your eyebrows will react to the words—another sign that you're engaged.
On functional MRI scans, many different areas of the brain light up when someone is listening to a narrative, Neeley says—not only the networks involved in language processing, but other neural circuits, too. One study of listeners found that the brain networks that process emotions arising from sounds—along with areas involved in movement—were activated, especially during the emotional parts of the story.
Storytelling
How Stories Connect And Persuade Us: Unleashing the Brain Power of Narrative, NPR, April 11, 2020, Elena Renken
As you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller, says Uri Hasson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton. When he and his research team recorded brain activity in two people as one person told a story and the other listened, they found that the greater the listener's comprehension, the more closely the brain wave patterns mirrored those of the storyteller.
It's as though, "I'm trying to make your brain similar to mine in areas that really capture the meaning, the situation, the schema—the context of the world."
When we read, brain networks involved in deciphering—or imagining—another person's motives, and the areas involved in guessing what will happen next are activated, Neeley says. Imagining what drives other people--helps us see a situation from different perspectives. It can even shift our core beliefs, Neeley says, when we "come back out of the story world into regular life."
Solid information in any form is good, "but that's not necessarily enough." A vivid, emotional story "can give that extra push to make it feel more real or more important." If you look at the times somebody's beliefs have been changed, it's often because of a story that "hits them in the heart."
Storytelling
From Science Daily:
For thousands of years, humans have relied on storytelling to engage, to share emotions and to relate personal experiences. Now, psychologists at McMaster University are exploring the mechanisms deep within the brain to better understand just what happens when we communicate.
New research published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, suggests that no matter how a narrative is expressed--through words, gestures or drawings--our brains relate best to the characters, focusing on the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist of each story.
"We tell stories in conversation each and every day," explains Steven Brown, lead author of the study, and associate professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour. "Very much like literary stories, we engage with the characters and are wired to make stories people-oriented."
An important question researchers set out to answer was how, exactly, narrative ideas are communicated using three different forms of expression, and to identify a so-called narrative hub within the brain.
Storytelling
From Science Daily:
For the study, researchers scanned the brains of participants using fMRI and presented them with short headlines. For example, "Surgeon finds scissors inside of patient" or "Fisherman rescues boy from freezing lake."
They were then asked to convey the stories using speech, gestures or drawing, as one would do in a game of Pictionary. The illustrations were created using an MRI-compatible drawing tablet which allowed the participants to see their drawings.
Researchers found that no matter what form of story telling the participants used, the brain networks that were activated were the "theory-of-the-mind" network, which is affected by the character's intentions, motivations, beliefs, emotions and actions.
"Aristotle proposed 2,300 years ago that plot is the most important aspect of narrative, and that character is secondary," says Brown. "Our brain results show that people approach narrative in a strongly character-centered and psychological manner, focused on the mental states of the protagonist of the story."
Storytelling
From Story League:
. . . we know that information by itself is detached, often boring and easily forgettable despite its supposed importance. But when you wed information to the structure of a story, this changes. Vanessa Boris and psychologist Lani Peterson point out that details shared through stories are retained far longer and much more accurately. This applies even in a business context.
At its core, stories seek to establish connections with us, the audience. They seek to incite emotions by putting us in the perspective of the characters. They establish familiarity, which allows us to immerse ourselves in the narrative, and through that we can absorb and retain important details found within. A Harvard Business Review by Paul J. Zak mentions that empathizing with the characters “motivates people to engage in cooperative behaviors” thereby instilling the message to be sent across.
Other stories take it a step further, imparting important lessons, whether moral or practical, but always relevant to the target audience. These can be seen most especially in mythology and fables, which have withstood the test of time and are still shared to this day.
Storytelling
From Story League:
. . . we know that information by itself is detached, often boring and easily forgettable despite its supposed importance. But when you wed information to the structure of a story, this changes. Vanessa Boris and psychologist Lani Peterson point out that details shared through stories are retained far longer and much more accurately. This applies even in a business context.
At its core, stories seek to establish connections with us, the audience. They seek to incite emotions by putting us in the perspective of the characters. They establish familiarity, which allows us to immerse ourselves in the narrative, and through that we can absorb and retain important details found within. A Harvard Business Review by Paul J. Zak mentions that empathizing with the characters “motivates people to engage in cooperative behaviors” thereby instilling the message to be sent across.
Other stories take it a step further, imparting important lessons, whether moral or practical, but always relevant to the target audience. These can be seen most especially in mythology and fables, which have withstood the test of time and are still shared to this day.
Storytelling
The Power of Story, National Geographic,
Stories are hardwired into our very biology. Our brains arrive filled with all the cognitive machinery needed to comprehend stories and share them with others. We are storytelling organisms that use narrative structures to organize our thoughts; because we use stories to recall facts, our knowledge is based on stories themselves. Little wonder, then, that our knowledge of early man shows evidence of storytelling—it was there from the start.
Since the origin of humankind, we have used stories as a way to entertain, inform, inspire, and provide cultural continuity. Storytelling emerged long before the written word, which on its arrival helped stories to grow and spread even further.
Much like our ancestors telling stories around a communal fire, Explorers come back from their sojourns with a tale to tell. Unlike legends of yore, their stories are grounded in scientific fact, but told with as much heart as ever.
MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction
The Rail-Splitter Surprise: Abraham Lincoln and the Presidential Election of 1860
Storytelling—Video
Women's Leadership Lab at Stanford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB7FfKPMZvw
The novel—summary (NY Times)
The best stories live within us long after the final word; characters and places continue beyond the lines on a page. Yet the image of all the unfinished, unsatisfying, impossible stories we leave in our wakes haunts the writer as well as the reader. And with more than 20 books published across a three-decade career, no one may be haunted more than Julia Alvarez.
The hero of Alvarez’s seventh novel, Alma Cruz, is a writer from the Dominican Republic who has come to the United States and created a literary life, beginning with critically acclaimed books about the motherland and evolving into a chronicler of life in the U.S.A. (Longtime readers of Alvarez’s work will recognize her own trajectory, from her early classics like “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies” through poetry, memoir, children’s books and more.)
The famous author has always wrestled shadow and sunlight, laughter and agony, into tales that sometimes felt like ghost stories. Readers knew to seek the truths behind the narrative — to find sorrow in the funniest scenes, or the unexpected outburst of joy in a somber one. Of course, I am speaking about Alma Cruz. (But also, Julia Alvarez.)
One day, Alma decides she has had enough with the fame game, the big career and its ups and downs. She comes to a lovely conclusion: It is time to return to the homeland she fled, and she will take all the drafts of her unfinished or unpublished books and lay them to rest there, giving each a proper burial. She buys a plot of land and begins to build a graveyard.
The novel—summary (NY Times)
As the book accelerates, the characters seem to become their own novelists. They rewrite their lives, they revise their histories, they reinvent their ongoing myths even as Alma is planning to bury her own stories in their troubled, sacred earth. Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories travels from Vermont to the Dominican Republic, from literary fame to chosen retreat, from modern American writing to a profoundly Latin American tone. [It is] lively, joyous, full of modern details and old tall tales. Any reader with roots and ancestors in other lands lives in a multiple-narrative story, one that we try to share with everyone, though we have to translate it. Yet we also go back to the ancestral home, and find ourselves translating our Yanqui life as well. Which story is the truest?
This often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac novel begins with a simple exhortation, in English: “Tell me a story.” It ends on a melancholy and evocative note. Spoiler alert: Another single line, this time in Spanish after the last page concludes, announces, “Este cuento se ha acabado.” (This story has ended.) A definitive slam of the door.
Note: she burns the boxes before burying them, all except those belonging to Beinvenida and Manuel.
The novel
At the end of the novel, Alma has died and Pepito is in charge of her literary treasure. The cemetery has been opened to the public and the characters housed there rise and move about.
Tonight, one of these unstoried will be leaving, her tale soon to be published by a rising star, a professor turned novelist. Every night there has been less of her as she undergoes draft after draft. She wants to be left untold, the bliss of anonymity.
Doesn’t anyone consider that the most popular of epitaphs is REST IN PEACE?
She strolls on the arm of an older man in a Panama hat who is trying to console her. Now people will see you. Now people will understand. He himself would give anything to trade places. To be relieved of the burden of the secret he carries with him. He feels better already having shared it just with her and the groundskeeper.
So, come with me, the fading woman says, we’ll find a place for you in my story. But outside their own narratives, these characters are not in command. Perhaps this scholar writer, whoever he is, will give you a happy ending, the man in the Panama hat encourages her. No more Bienvenida. We will have to call you Despedida.
The novel
At the end of the novel, Alma has died and Pepito is in charge of her literary treasure. The cemetery has been opened to the public and the characters housed there rise and move about.
He chuckles at his own joke, as he often did in his unfinished story. Hasta luego, he calls out to her. Till we meet again! Until then, the swirling waters of oblivion will keep one from the other, the known from the unknown. For these, the nameless, unseen, anonymous, there are no gaps on shelves where their tomb-tomes might go, no eyes misting over at their approach, no minds transformed by their example. No one pines for their stories, no one even knows they are there for the telling. But no matter. Who would want to go back to narrative form? Back into the living stream to be reborn in distortion in the minds of readers? A few linger, the clingers, the aggrieved, holding on to that hope. The ones with scores to settle or burdens to release. Not a fate to be desired, shackled again, contained and restrained in chapter and verse.
And how long does it last anyhow? Eventually, storied and unstoried join in mystery. Nothing holds anyone together but imagination. Trust us, they would say if they had the words. We should know. We have died. We are in love with everything. (pp. 236-237)
The novel
From review on NPR
Alma wants peace for herself and her characters. But they have their own agendas and, once buried, begin to make them known: They speak to each other and Filomena, rewriting and revising Alma's creativity in order to reclaim themselves.
In this new story, Alvarez creates a world where everyone is on a quest to achieve a dream — retirement, literary fame, a steady job, peace of mind, authenticity. Things get complicated during the rewrites, when ambitions and memories bump into the reality of no money, getting arrested, no imagination, jealousy, and the grace of humble competence.
"Writing for me is a way of self creation. " Julia Alvarez
The novel
From Interview on NPR
We talked about the selves we don't share with the world — or that the world doesn't let us share with them — and how we can find freedom in giving those selves a voice.
About her poem, "The Woman I Kept to Myself"
Every time I want to touch bottom in myself, I return to poetry. I feel like poems are where I am meeting up against the silence. I'm trying to understand and give word to feelings that are yet to be brought into language. I wanted to touch on those moments where there's a little enlightenment or a little awareness. It doesn't have to be about something big or important, but those little things you keep to yourself — selves that you keep to yourself — and give us language to understand them.
In writing this novel, Alvarez is "fictionalizing" herself
Cast of characters
Alma: a successful writer and novelist who inherits a plot of land near her hometown in the Dominican Republic and buries there her unpublished, unfinished manuscripts.
Pen name: Scheherazade—storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights
Consuelo, Piedad, and Amparo: Alma's three sisters. Dr. Manuel Cruz is their father.
Brava: sculptress who creates the statuary in the sculpture garden
Martillo—lawyer
Cast of characters
Bienvenida Ricardo Trujillo: wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo
Cast aside by him when she was unable to produce a male heir. He takes a mistress Doña Maria who does give him a son. Although he promises to take Bienvenida back, he doesn't.
He returned when he thought he had cancer, she was his "lucky piece"
She had daughter Odette, whom he later took away from her
She is one of the primary storytellers
Joaquin Balaguer—Bienvenida's cousin, el Jefe hires him as spokesperson
Cast of characters
Manuel Cruz: another of the cemetery's primary narrators
a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
Alma's father
As a child, creates Alfa Calenda, an imaginary world, with his mother
Has daughters
Has an affair with Tatica, the cleaning woman at his office, which he regrets.
He has her deported, but provides support when she is moved into a convent for dementia. His daughters find out only after he dies.
The guarded, daughter-proofed stories he dished out over the years turned out to be impediments to the deep country of whoever else it was he was. (pp. 203-204)
Cast of characters
Perla: sister to Filomena, married to Tesoro, has 2 sons, George Washington (GW) and Pepito, whom Filomena considers "her baby"
They are feuding, haven't spoken for 30 years but keep each other's phone numbers
Perla stabs Vitalina Lopez, Tesoro's mistress, and her child, arrested by police, expelled back to DR, where she's jailed for a time .
George (Jorge) Washington (GW) and Jose Tesoro, Jr (Pepito): Perla's two sons
When Perla is jailed, GW sides with his father in condemning her, but Pepito sides with his mother, hires a lawyer to get her deported, and visits her In DR. He's become a college professor and writer, ultimately executor of Alma's literary work.
Perla refuses to talk about what she did. The counselor reports:
But only when they can tell the story of what has happened to them do they begin to heal. (p. 227)
Cast of characters
Filomena: groundskeeper for the cemetery, one of the novel's primary narrators. She gains entrance to the cemetery initially by telling a story through the voice box at the gate:
Filomena shrugs. So many of the things that have happened in her life—forgotten incidents, feelings she never before put into words—all this and more Filomena has been confiding to the voice box, in small portions, rationing out her life, holding back, afraid she might run out of the stories. But after decades of silence, there is a lot to tell. (p. 69)
Filomena understands the haunted doctor, the heartbroken ex-wife of a dictator, better than the people in her own life! (p. 205)
Quotes
Let’s go to Alfa Calenda
Alma once had a friend, a writer, who for years before she died, relatively young, was always talking about this one story she had to write down. Over the course of their thirty-plus-year friendship, Alma’s friend became quite famous, winning major prizes, garnering important interviews, awards left and right. A TV movie based on one of her novels was in the works with well-known names even Alma, not a big Hollywood person, had heard of. And yet her friend dismissed these achievements as “incidentals.” The real deal was this one story that would not be hurried.
The story possessed her. She could reel off its characters, complete with their names and histories. Periodically, they compelled her to go to one or another part of the world: a gravesite in Sweden, a fishing village in Liberia, the outer islands off South Carolina where she bought a house and lived for a spell. These characters had secrets she was listening for, and the reception was better in some places than others; their voices would break through, until she’d lose the connection and it was time to move on to some other place.
Quotes
Alma receives news that her friend has died, with speculations about the cause. She concludes:
What killed her friend was that novel she could neither write nor put aside. Alma vowed that when the time came, she wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to her. (pp. 10-11)
We both know, Alma reminded her friend, that we don’t get free until we write our stories down. (p. 9). She quoted a passage she often used to rally her students stuck on a piece of writing:
“If you bring forth what is inside you, what is inside you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside, what is inside you will destroy you.” (p. 9)
Alma was weary of explaining that a novelist should not subject herself to the tyranny of what really happened. She herself couldn’t always separate the strands of real life, as it was called, from pure invention. Her own life, parts of it, happened so long ago, she wondered if she’d made them up. (p. 18)
Quotes
When an old person dies, the library is gone.
Quotes
Late morning, Filomena is on her knees, scrubbing la tinaja—a large earthen jar; with its lid askew, it tends to accumulate leaves and bird droppings inside. She is finishing up the jar when she hears a voice coming from the white plaster head above the spot where the second set of boxes that would not burn are buried. The woman’s head is unsettling: the neck, like a stem, rising out of the ground; the hair arrayed around her face like the petals of margaritas young girls pluck to learn whether their novios love them or not. Words are scribbled across the mouth like thick black thread stitching the lips together. (pp. 74-76)
Quotes
At the end of the novels, two of the "buried" characters speak to one another; Manuel to Bienvenida:
The happiest moments of my life were in the past. I was a ghost before my time.
She laughs, trying to inject lightness into that sad thought. And for you? she asks. What was the happiest time of your life?
I always believed it was that month in Nueva York when I was madly in love with Lucía. But that love brought me so much heartache. I sought happiness with Tatica but that, too, led to more heartache. It was the end of Alfa Calenda as I had known it. The stories that were its air and sunlight and substance vanished.
Sitting in that nursing home, watching the snow fall, those blond aides attending to me, I devised a whole theory: happiness is not a static state. Happiness is circulatory. If you stop the flow of blood, what happens?
The patient dies? Bienvenida guesses.
Exactly. By keeping myself to myself, I stopped the flow. (p. 214)
Questions discussion
Where this for comes from
My fascination with the creative imagination, writers, and what they write, starting with Shakespeare:
(Midsummer Night's Dream)
. . . The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing,
A local habitation and a name . . .
By telling their stories, writers give their characters life;
Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet, Marriage Portrait
Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt
A. J. Horowitz novels
Kate Quinn (Rose Code, Alice Network), and other historical novels based on fact
Questions for discussion
What book or character haunts you?
Questions for discussion
One reviewer, about the setting of the novel in a cemetery, commented that walking through a cemetery and reading the headstones, you see only the name and pertinent dates. But you know that the person buried there has led a much fuller life that you know nothing about. The headstone doesn't tell their story.
Alma’s Bienvenida was closely modeled on the real-life Bienvenida except that Alma supplied all the thoughts, feelings, details that the historical figure hadn’t left behind. Isn't that exactly what historical novelists do?
Next week
Background on People of the Book