When I first met Ananda Lima—at Sewanee Writers' Workshop back in 2022—we were delighted to discover that we both lived in the Chicago area. Over the next couple years, I had the pleasure of hearing her read excerpts of what became Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, a book that breaks the boundaries of both form and genre. I could say it's "about" a writer who meets the devil and writes him a collection of stories that are, as the marketing copy says, "both impossible and true." But this poignant, haunting text defies easy explanation. It contains intricate architecture, surreal premises—in one story, a woman eats tiny people she purchases from a vending machine—and deep meditations on family and home, as the writer travels literally and metaphorically between Brazil and New York.
Ananda will be embarking on a wide-ranging tour to support this book, and Chicagoans can see her in conversation with debut author Puloma Ghosh and I at Women and Children First on June 21st.
This interview took place at a little Italian restaurant outside Chicago, where we chatted over pizza (cheeseless for Ananda!) and salads.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Jami Nakamura Lin
I love this book's structure—you include individual short stories, surrounded by an outer interstitial frame about the unnamed writer of the stories, who has this relationship with the devil. The frame comments on the stories, and the stories comment on each other in a metanarrative way. Do you conceptualize this as a novel, or a different kind of form?
Ananda Lima
I saw it as a short story collection for a long time, but some people are calling it a novel. It's somewhere on the continuum between a short story collection, a novel-in-stories, and a novel. I like things that are hard to categorize.
I started writing the individual stories during my MFA. I was also writing a novel that was completely different, very traditional. I was having a hard time with that novel—it was accessible, people enjoyed it, but I was not having fun with it. At some point I was like, the only way for me to make this work is to have a metanarrative of somebody making fun of this novel—a writer or a commentator. But then I forgot about the idea completely. The idea of the meta layer came back much later, when I was talking to my editor about this book.
The most time was spent investigating how thin or thick the outer frame about the writer had to be. The more I wrote, and the more dense it became, the more the frame took over and the book became a novel. And I thought No, I'm not going to go all the way to the novel. I wanted this to be more porous between the stories. It had to be a little sparser. I did a lot of writing and cutting and going back and forth until I got to a place where readers can understand the frame but not want to know everything about the person in it.
I love meta layers as a reader and as an editor. I love realistic novels, but there's an artifice in pretending that this is not a book that somebody wrote. I find it very interesting to think of the reader, the writer, and the whole context. For some people, this is very enjoyable to read, and for some people it is not. Some people just want to have a great time in a made-up world, which I really respect and like too. But for me, I find it so joyful when I see the meta and I see the craft.
Jami Nakamura Lin
That [joy in craft] is fully on display in one story, which takes the format of workshop feedback—it consists solely of a teacher and classmates' criticisms to a writer's story, without providing the writer's story itself.
Ananda Lima
That was so fun. Workshops are just a funny thing. They're very helpful sometimes, but there's very weird aspects. Sometimes it's a little bit like a cult. You sit there and hear all the bad things about you and say, Okay, thank you. I also wanted to give this experience of hearing a story without getting the story. I would visit a writing program and sit in on workshops without having read the story, but then I found myself having opinions about the story. Or I'm afraid of horror movies, so I read the summaries. So I wanted to do that—that you find out about the story only through the feedback.
Jami Nakamura Lin
You're afraid of horror movies—do you consider this collection to be horror?
Ananda Lima
I didn't initially. I only found out it was horror from my publisher. I thought that was so cool because I'm such a wimp. When I got that classification, I started reading more about it. I just wasn't familiar with how the labels work.
I have one friend who is an editor, and she said that the horror reader welcomes discomfort. I just love that. That's my reader. It's funny because I tell people, My book is horror! I was so surprised! And they're like, Well, what is it about? And I'm like, Well, there's the devil. There's a person who eats people. They're like, Yup, that sounds like horror.
Jami Nakamura Lin
What drew you to the figure of the devil as a main character?
Ananda Lima
Years ago, I had the idea that I would write a story about the devil as kind of a regular guy. But over the years, I started reading about the devil as a scapegoated figure that gets blamed for everything. Real people make bad decisions or decisions that are good for themselves but bad for other people, and they blame the devil.
That concept is very similar to how they blame groups of people. The figure of the devil is very much used in similar ways to how minoritized people are used. Sometimes it's explicitly linked—they say, This group is in cahoots with the devil. Sometimes they're not linked, but they're just treated in the same way.
The other thing is that I started reading a book by Adam Kotsko, a political theologist. He traces the history of the devil from medieval Christianity to when it got secularized. How the concept is used today in neoliberalism—even if it's not religious—is the same idea and the same approach. The devil is a very twisty figure.
I was not trying to put any of the research in the book. There are people who are writing this scholarship and are very good at it. I don't need to repeat them—I can just tell people to go read them. I just took the spark of interest and let the character be its own character.
Jami Nakamura Lin
This book takes place in a very specific social, political, and cultural moment. It talks a lot about the effects of the pandemic, about DACA, about Trump. You don't explicitly mention former Brazilian president Bolsonaro, but I felt like he was also haunting the whole text. You can see the effects he and his politics are having on some of the characters and their familial relationships.
Ananda Lima
The climate of having both Trump and Bolsonaro at the same time was such a big part of my world as I was writing this. I thought, so many people wrote about them already, and they say it better than me. I don't need to repeat the stuff that is out there. I could just let them live in this world.
Those two create such a tension. It's so visible, so loud, and they behave so absurdly. It felt very absurd all the time. I think that really fed into the book.
Jami Nakamura Lin
Did using this more speculative framework give you a different way to talk about those things that are absurd? One of your lines in the frame goes: "sometimes this immigrant writer talks about migration, and wonders if she shouldn't. Sometimes she doesn't write an immigrant story, and wonders if she should." It speaks to the false binary of expectations, and I wondered if writing in this speculative mode provided a different option.
Ananda Lima
That's exactly right. It really allowed me to do what I wanted much more. I feel like the speculative things are fun and interesting in themselves, but I also think it changes the rules and destabilizes the reader. You can throw people off and claim the way the story is told. I'm very interested in autofiction, because of the meta thing. But I always wanted to troll it a little bit—to make it obviously fake. The devil really helps with this. I make the writer very, very similar to me, but then I throw the devil in there.
One book that does something similar but on a different scale is A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, about the CIA in Jamaica. If you make something realistic, people are going to argue about details. People are going to say, this didn't really happen this year, or this person wasn't there. But he throws a ghost in there, and then it's like, What are you talking about? There's ghosts there. Why are you arguing about these little factual things? Obviously it's fiction. But everything else is very well-researched. I love that effect, where you make it close to the truth, but then throw in some ghosts so you can claim the story.
Jami Nakamura Lin
One of my favorite stories is "Antropófaga," where the woman eats people from a vending machine. Can you tell me more about the background of this story?
Ananda Lima
There's a Brazilian movement from the 1920s which had a manifesto called the Cannibalist Manifesto. They had the idea of cannibalizing whatever you wanted from European culture, and processing it into your Brazilian identity. It was this idea of the colonized eating the colonizers, but in practical terms, it was a lot of absorption and digestion of culture and making it our own. Which I think is very true for an immigrant person in a different context.
I didn't have that idea in mind when I came up with the story. I just came up with the first sentence, and then suddenly I realized, I have a cannibalist story, and it was such a delight when I realized I was referencing this history. In the story, you don't need to know any of the background, but I really like that connection.
Jami Nakamura Lin
There are some similar themes and repeating icons that appear both in this book and your last poetry collection, Mother/land. How is it different for you to explore ideas in fiction rather than poetry?
Ananda Lima
It took me some time to understand how to translate how I felt about a project, to decide if it is poetry or fiction, but now I have an intuitive understanding. When I have an attraction to an image or an idea or a phrase, I have a good feeling of whether it's going to be poetry or fiction.
If I'm going to write about myself, people I know, or situations I've been through, it usually ends up being poetry. And when they are very big subjects, poetry leaves more space for me to not say those things but for it to still be about that thing.
In fiction, the reader is more on a journey through a tunnel you're taking them through. You constrain them a little more. Poetry is more like you let your readers loose in a field.
Being a poet really helped my fiction, because I learned how to play and how to leave spaces for the reader to fill in. I understood the joy of form. I also learned that it's okay if your audience turns out to be small! This is very useful because then you can do your own thing.
Jami Nakamura Lin
You can tell from every page the joy you took in writing in it.
Ananda Lima
There's difficult content—linked to what is happening in the world—but I decided early on that this was going to be a fun book. I decided I'm going to do all the stuff that I like, so I had a great time. It helped me deal with the difficult things in the world, in that I was combining that fun with the subject matter, and that was a very good thing for me.
FICTION
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
by Ananda Lima
Tor Books
Published June 18th, 2024
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