Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (A Tor Book, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program and currently serves as a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
Leslie-Ann Murray
If there were awards for book titles, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil would win in a landslide. Your book title is inventive and audacious. It alerts readers to expect a wild and playful reading experience. Tell us about your book, and all of its cheeky layers.
Ananda Lima
It is a short story collection, with individual stories that stand alone and at times interact with the meta-framework. The meta-frame is this writer, a Brazilian woman who met the devil in her twenties at a party and spent the night with him. She and the devil kept in touch, and a friendship developed between them. She writes the stories for him. You know, I’m a poet as well, and I use many poetic conventions such as the use of space to help me structure the book. It helps me convey the important topics that are covered in the book—immigration, the pandemic, and racism, without it coming off as an academic essay. These poetic devices open up the stories and provide a space for wonder.
Leslie-Ann Murray
Throughout your short story collection, the unnamed Brazilian writer repeatedly encounters the devil, who feels more like an artsy bro from Brooklyn, rather than the ghoulish entity we all associate with evil. Tell us about altering the symbolic iconography of the devil.
Ananda Lima
I started reading about the devil as a figure, and I became interested in the concept of the devil throughout history. I wanted to write about the devil as a regular-ish person, and once I started writing about the devil that way, I just let him be whoever he wanted to be. Eventually, he became his character. Sometimes, people who are suffering immensely use the devil as a figure to make sense of their suffering, saying, “This is so evil. A person could never do this to us,” so the devil is to blame for these things when in reality things are very complex, and there’s an internal evil struggle within everyone. As you say, we cannot outsource it to the devil, and this is one of the reasons I made him ambiguous.
Leslie-Ann Murray
You know, in Trinidad and Tobago where I’m from, our annual Carnival features the devil as a character in the festival. In this temporality, the devil is a lot of fun. He dances, drinks, and parties until dawn. He’s a benevolent person during these times, but as soon as the Carnival season is over, the devil retreats to his position as the source of all things evil and punishing. Does Brazil have a similar folklore with the devil?
Ananda Lima
That’s so great. We don’t have that in Brazil, but in the northeast of Brazil where my family is from, there are these chapbooks with music and poems, and the devil shows up in these stories. The devil always looks cute and kind of evil, but not super scary in the drawings. There’s a lot of fun in these stories and usually, the devil tricks a person, or a person tricks the devil. There’s a joy in embracing this figure and its sinister vibe. Whenever I tell people the title of my book, they are shocked, and a bit horrified. I giggle a little bit because there’s a lot of play within the book and its title. After all, we are talking about dense subjects—race, immigration, and the pandemic, but then here’s the devil, and this level of absurdity, which is not subtle at all.
Leslie-Ann Murray
In the story, “Idle Hands,” the writer is reading over the feedback she has received from her creative writing workshop. The feedback is based on their preferences and idiosyncrasies, and not the actual structure and goals of the story. “Idle Hands” highlights the subjectivity of feedback and criticism in general, and that our concept of what is a good story or a bad story is strictly based on our peculiarities.
Ananda Lima
Oh my gosh, yes. This story was so much fun to write because of the meta-layers—it’s a story within a story within that story within that story. The writing workshop in an MFA program has such a weird structure and setup. I spent a whole year in my program where nobody liked anything I presented. They were very confused about my characters, the settings, and the metafictional aspect. Slowly, I realized that all the weird books I liked, they didn’t like. It was very difficult to sit there for a year with them not liking anything I wrote, but they were respectful and very considerate. It gave me the room to accept that not everybody is going to like the type of things that I’m writing, but I have to write for people like me. Before I used to judge my writing, and I used to think my ideas were probably boring for readers because I assumed they wanted action and high stakes in a book. But I let go of the idea of pleasing everybody. Now, I’m like—this is interesting to me, so it is going to be interesting to somebody because I’m a person, just like anybody else.
Leslie-Ann Murray
Throughout our conversation, you mentioned the importance of play in writing. This idea is a radical inverse of how we talk about writing in our culture. We continuously link it to a solitary, isolating, and sometimes depressing task, but we rarely talk about the joys and magic of writing.
Ananda Lima
There’s this idea of struggling and having a hard time with being a writer and writing. That’s true sometimes, but also sometimes writing is fun. People are very different in how they work in general, not only in writing but in regular life. I’m a very positively motivated person, and I have to find that spark and that joy for me to write. If I’m going through a difficult writing time, and I don’t have some parts figured out as yet, I find something in the writing process to play with. Being a poet has taught me how to find joy in playing with language, form, images, and descriptions. I also allow myself to be free and explore what comes on the page.
Leslie-Ann Murray
Writer and activist, Arundhati Roy, who wrote The God of Small Things, once said, “Sometimes I feel novels are also being domesticated. Too beautiful, too contained, too well crafted. Like products. They must not lose their wilderness.” Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is wild, untamed, layered, and dynamic because you went against the rules.
Ananda Lima
Yes, we have a lot of forces, not like an evil person, but a lot of systemic things dictating how we think, how we produce, and how we read. As a writer, there’s a lot of pressure to produce. When you’re learning craft, you’re also learning implicit marketing, and it homogenizes your writing. I let my book be whatever it wanted to be, and I did not focus on making it more marketable. I thought this book was way too weird, and if anybody would buy it, it was going to be a very small press, and only a couple of people would read it. But I am here with a book about stories I wrote for the devil, so I’m letting myself write what I want.
Leslie-Ann Murray
Finally, when I read your book, I kept thinking about Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection, “Create Dangerously the Immigrant Artist at Work.” In the work, she said, “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” How are you creating dangerously?
Ananda Lima
Even though I’m so meek and a wimp as I’ve been saying, giving myself the space and the openness to go where the book wants me to go is creating dangerously. Also letting myself live in a world of binaries can be dangerous, and this is good.
