Vermont author Julia Alvarez started to pen her 23rd book — Alma once had a friend, a writer, who … — when the threat of Covid-19 momentarily stopped her.
“Being older, there’s always a sense of, ‘Will this be my last work?’” the 74-year-old self-described aspiring “elder” recalled in a recent interview. “During the pandemic, a bright light was shone on all of us now termed ‘the vulnerable.’ Suddenly, my demographic was endangered.”
Even so, the onetime Dominican Republic student turned professor emerita at Middlebury College returned to crafting her novel about a similarly aged retired woman of letters ruminating on what to do with a lifetime of unfinished rough drafts.
… To close a story, the old people back home would utter a chant. Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. This tale is done. Release the duende to the wind. But how to exorcize a story that had never been told?
Then in an all-too-actual plot twist, Alvarez’s retina detached from one of her eyes. The Weybridge writer endured two surgeries. After, her sight remained clouded as she struggled to continue her work in progress.
… So, it’s a true story, not like you made it up? It was a question readers often asked. 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.
Slowly learning how to navigate her new visual reality, Alvarez went on to finish the book, which she has titled “The Cemetery of Untold Stories.” Set for release in English and Spanish this week, the 256-page work has already landed on several most-anticipated reading lists, including those of NBC’s “Today” show and The New York Times.
“Mystifying, compelling, and often wryly funny,” the trade publication Shelf Awareness has summed up the novel. “Julia Alvarez delivers a lyrical, thought-provoking meditation on truth, complicated family narratives, and the question of whose stories get told.”
For the author, it’s also a way to live out the closing line of one of her favorite poems: “Practice resurrection.”
‘Looking for narratives to help us’
From the beginning, Alvarez has written books she hasn’t found anywhere else. Fleeing the Dominican Republic at age 10 after her father was part of a failed plot to overthrow its dictator, she turned her family’s experience into the semi-autobiographical first novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.”
“When I was sending my manuscript out, there was no such thing as multicultural books,” she recalled of her 1991 story, which is told from the perspective of a female Caribbean immigrant.
Alvarez, who received this country’s National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2014, has built a prolific career by writing novels, nonfiction and poetry that fill other gaps.
When the Addison County resident began translating for Spanish-speaking migrant farmhands who moved to Vermont at the turn of the millennium, she saw how locals and Latinos struggled to understand each other.
“Everyone was befuddled,” recalled the author, who illuminated the issue in her 2009 novel “Return to Sender.”
When Alvarez went on to mourn the deaths of her parents and sister, a query whispered in her mind: “Where Do They Go?” It became the title of Alvarez’s 2016 children’s book addressing the emotional effects of such passings.
“It struck me that the older you get, the less answers you have,” Alvarez explained. “People think writers write things because they know things. I write to understand and make meaning of what I’m up against in my own life. I want to figure things out. Writing is how I find my way.”
In a recent Literary Hub roundtable on “Writing ‘Women of a Certain Age,’” the author noted how life was full of “bardo, in liminal, in-between states, neither caterpillar, nor butterfly, with the jury still out on who or what will emerge or not emerge at all.”
“Bardo states are ripe for fictional picking,” she continued. “That said, I confess they’re not much fun to live through! All that confusion, commotion, the abyss opening at my feet. So, it actually can be fertile writing time, as I’ll do anything to get myself out of there.”
And so, with the arrival of Covid-19 in 2020, Alvarez began her latest book.
“More and more I felt this ageism in a lot of literature, where the elders were signing their wills and dying on the first page and then the story really gets started with the young people,” she told VTDigger. “As I grow older, I’m interested in truly complex and vital older women protagonists. As our baby boomer generation ages, I think more of us are looking for narratives to help us make meaning of this time in our lives.”
In “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” the character of Alma, like Alvarez, is a writer facing her later years with voluminous files of unfinished work.
… The problem was the writerly impulse was still inside her. And if she didn’t bring it out, would it destroy her as it had her friend? It wasn’t like she had a choice. But one thing she could choose: after spending decades giving characters’ lives a shapely form, Alma wanted to close the story of her own writing life in a satisfying way.
‘If you’re lucky to live long enough’
Alvarez’s new novel spills with questions. Whose stories are told and whose aren’t? What’s fact and what’s a figment of a writer’s imagination?
“When you tell a true story, it already contains the elements of fiction,” the author said. “You’ve got a point of view, i.e. your own. You’re highlighting some characters and ignoring others. And each time you tell it, it gets revised.”
Alvarez, for example, asked her sisters to recount the day they fled their former homeland.
“One told the story of how a car came up and we all crawled inside and we had to push it down the driveway so the secret police wouldn’t hear it,” the author said.
The rest of the family laughed. They knew that was a scene from “The Sound of Music.”
“We saw it soon after our emigration,” the author said. “That movie captured something about how my sister felt about the terror, so it became what happened to us.”
In Alvarez’s latest novel, the lead character buries her unfinished work in a cemetery in hopes of laying it to rest.
The author didn’t have to think hard to create those discarded stories.
“I lifted pieces from my manuscripts that never made it to fruition,” she said.
But just as those seemingly forgotten pages have found new life in the book, the thoughts and feelings they embody rise at the end in unexpected ways.
“There’s a saying often quoted by protestors: ‘They tried to bury us — they did not know we were seeds,’” Alvarez said. “Stories never die. They wait in silence to be told.”
Calling the result a “finely crafted novel,” Kirkus Reviews notes “her gifts for glowing prose and powerful narrative are still strong.”
With compromised vision, Alvarez will limit her coming book tour — although she’s set to appear in Manchester, Middlebury and Montpelier to support local independent bookstores in her home state, where the onetime child of the Caribbean has warmed to the cooler climate.
“People say the two places are diametrically opposite, but the cultures and value systems of both remind me of each other,” she told this reporter in a 2012 interview. “Vermont is a small-town state where helping your neighbor is still so important. People think I should be in Miami or the Southwest, but I can’t think of a more Dominican state than Vermont.”
Alvarez went on to note how the Vermont Institute of Natural Science offered thanks when she and her husband, retired ophthalmologist Bill Eichner, planted their former 60-acre Dominican coffee farm with shade trees.
“The Bicknell’s thrush that summers in the Green Mountains winters in those trees,” she said. “Even the little bird knows we are connected.”
Yet as spring returns, Alvarez’s flights of fancy now require prism glasses and a slower pace.
“It’s changed my life,” she said of her sight issues. “But as one doctor told me, ‘Julia, the eye is not going to get better, but you will.’”
The writer has found similar inspiration in lines from Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”
… Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts …
She especially appreciates the poem’s conclusion: Practice resurrection.
“Those of us who live in a four-season state like Vermont know about that,” she said. “After the blast of winter, these light-filled days come about and the robins are back and there’s little tiny snowdrops on the lawn. As you get older, little deaths happen all the time — if you’re lucky to live long enough and survive them.”
That’s why, when you ask Alvarez if she’ll keep writing, her answer is emphatic.
“Am I breathing?” she’ll practically shout. “I might have to change how I do it, but this is not my last book, or so I hope. I’m not yet ready to join my characters in the cemetery of untold stories.”
