Questions, Curiosities, Obsessions: An Interview with Analía Villagra by AJ Jolish

This month I got the chance to interview another member of Split Lip’s Magazine’s editorial staff! Analía Villagra is an assistant fiction editor as well as a top-notch writer in her own right. Analía Villagra’s work appears in Colorado Review, Ecotone, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. When she was four, she dressed up like Dorothy from Wizard of Oz and ran away from home. Luckily, her dad found her before she left her block. You can find her online at isleofanalia.com.

 Analía and I chatted over email about tarot, temporality, and the perfect places to read.

AJ Jolish: What stage of your life have you felt was most inspiring and full of creativity for you, and why?

Analía Villagra: No time like the present! I don’t think I’ve really had eras that are more or less inspiring than others because, for me, creativity isn’t about being struck by sudden ideas; it’s about having ongoing questions, curiosities, obsessions. So whether I’m on a whale-watching boat surrounded by hundreds of dolphins leaping from the shimmering sea or in front of my laptop looking for a formula error in an Excel sheet, there’s always a lot to wonder about. (To be fair, I was super seasick on the boat and I really love Excel, so maybe those two moments are not as stark a contrast as they seem...)

AJ: That’s a really healthy way of looking at creativity! I often struggle with writing when I don’t feel burning inspiration. I always forget that once I start, I find something to say. Speaking of shimmering seas, where would you say is the most beautiful location you’ve ever been? 

AV: I love desert landscapes. On a family trip when I was a teenager we drove from east Texas to the Grand Canyon, and I was absolutely captivated by the mesas that we passed in New Mexico and Arizona. Two years ago my husband and I went to Death Valley National Park, and it was stunning—the immensity of it, the colors. There’s something really peaceful about being so small and insignificant in the middle of a place where vast, geological time is on visual display.

AJ: I totally agree. One of the items on my bucket list is to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats. Like you, I’m interested in the immensity—I’ve always wanted to be so embedded in something that it’s all I can see in any direction—as well as the thrilling disbelief I’d feel that the whole area was once underwater. 

Here’s an odd question: If something you own was one of the only artifacts a future civilization discovers about our time, what would you want it to be and why?

AV: Well, if I’m responsible for what little a future civilization knows about us, I hope they find my books! But I think it would be pretty fun if they found a tarot deck. I have a deck that I don’t use much, but it’s illustrated with folklore from around the world. Even in the future people will tell stories, so I feel like they would intuitively understand the images and get a decent idea of our mythologies. Or maybe they would take it more literally and assume our lives were nonstop excitement. Either way, a fun message to send to the future!

AJ: I love that answer! I was just gifted my first tarot deck for my birthday last month. The way I use it is mostly internal—I look at the cards and observe how I react to the different suggestions and interpretations. 

AV: That’s pretty much exactly how I use my tarot cards too. I like to do a three card draw: situation, obstacle, advice. The cards are never surprising; it’s more like a friend calling me on my bullshit and forcing me to acknowledge the challenge or unproductive thought pattern I’ve been avoiding. I’ve never really been a spiritual person, so tarot feels more like a structured way to talk to myself than it does to a spiritual practice.

AJ: Switching gears: One of my favorite classes I’ve taken in college so far was about timeline experimentation in short stories. Your latest publication in Ecotone, “In the Pines,” does a dazzling job of exploring the relationship of two siblings through the years. Tell me more about the process of writing that story, and how you use temporality in your work.

AV: Thank you for reading it, and I’m so glad the question of time stood out to you! I’m pretty obsessed with time right now. For this story, I knew I wanted to play around with how to move through a narrative in a way that would mimic the fragmented and unreliable quality of memory. At some point I got very interested in Gregory Bateson’s double-bind theory (which is essentially “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”) Bateson was writing about schizophrenia in the 1950s, and I have no idea if that concept is still in use in psychology, but I found it to be a useful framework for thinking about why the characters were or were not telling each other things. What happens in the mind of someone who needs to, and yet cannot, face something; for whom the choices before them are contradictory? How does that fracture play out? 

And then of course there are the pine trees and the beetles. Moments when human time butts up against non-human time are so fascinating to me. We just exist on such a radically different scale than trees or insects (or microbes or oceans), and yet we crave sense-making, we want to understand them. In addition to time and memory, which I continue to explore in my work, I’m very interested in the process by which we come to understand these things and make meaning of the incomprehensible.

AJ: I really felt the intent to capture the experience of remembering as opposed to a more detached strict linear structure. Our minds don’t work in a straightforward, logical way, and I love when writing incorporates that. I also relate to having one theme stuck in my head as I write circles around it. Do you find yourself writing with specific people from your life as inspiration? If so, do you show them the piece?

AV: ​​I don’t tend to write fictionalized versions of specific people. I draw inspiration from them, but it’s more piecemeal—a gesture from this person, a hobby from that person, an actual conversation or an interesting interpersonal dynamic I’ve noticed. The characters have no relationship to the real people. My fiction is suffused with my life (how could it not be), but there’s rarely a character I can point to and say, “that one’s me, that’s my sister,” etc.

More than worrying about people I know seeing themselves in my fiction, I wonder what I am exposing about myself when I share my work, with any readers. I don’t think I am alone in this. Even if you don’t write autofiction, the emotional truth of a story is definitely coming from the writer, and I think there can be an unsettling feeling of exposure anytime we share our work.

AJ: You’re definitely not alone in that feeling. On a similar note, I’d like to ask about your experience working with other writers and editors at Split Lip. When did you join the staff? Any favorite parts?

AV: I joined Split Lip as a fiction reader in May 2020, and the SLM fam is just the warmest, most generous community to be part of. In the words of the great Vin Diesel...all love, always! My favorite part of being on staff is discussing the work in our Submittable queue—our readers and editors are so smart and thoughtful, and I appreciate the care everyone takes with the work we receive.

AJ: My favorite part about interning here so far has been learning from the staff how to really ruminate on a piece. The discussions in the comments always help me see another angle. Other than fiction submissions, what are you reading right now/what’s your favorite thing you read recently?

AV: I’m so glad you are finding your SLM experience interesting! We’re so grateful to have more eyes in the queue. Earlier this summer I read Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein. The story is structured around the disappearance of a wealthy landowner in a town in Trinidad. The voice is captivating, and the whole novel is this chilling balance of beautiful and brutal. I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft. It’s a series of fragments, so there’s no plot, but it’s like being dropped into this cozy, contemplative space to ponder travel and history. And I am forever catching up on a backlog of literary magazines; I am in the middle of last fall’s issue of Southwest Review, a fabulous horror issue!

AJ: I’ve also been reading horror recently! Bunny by Mona Awad blew my mind–I spent a few lovely hours laying on my back on the floor of my room listening to the audiobook. Do you have a specific perfect reading spot? Does it change depending on genre?

AV: I don’t have a particular reading spot. I’ve always liked the idea of reading outside, but the truth is I usually find it too difficult to focus, even when there is nothing happening! Just the sun and the breeze and a little bird hopping around…too distracting.

AJ: I either have to be doing three things at once plus an audiobook or else I’m so engrossed in a paperback that just about anything could be happening around me. When I’m writing, though, I have to be 100% focused and I always need to finish a full draft all at once. What does the process of writing a story look like for you?

AV: That’s a very big question, and every time I feel like I have figured out the perfect formula for producing a story it turns out the next project is different. Generally speaking though, for me stories start with a line or an image that I find suggestive or evocative, and the story spirals out of my desire to untangle that line or image. I definitely draw on an existing set of themes or preoccupations that interest me, but I can’t sit down and say, for example, “I want to write about loneliness.” Instead, I start with a moment that feels lonely and start asking myself: who is this person, why do they feel lonely right now, what got them here, where are they going?

AJ: I relate to that–I have a lengthy list in my notes app of phrases and images I’m struck by, with a few I’ve written poem after poem about before finding the right fit.

As a final question, what’s your favorite snack food and why?

AV: My go-to snack is Corn Chex, no milk, just dry cereal. Maybe a little boring (though sometimes I jazz it up with chocolate chips), but the crunch is very satisfying.

 AJ Jolish (@Ziskayt) is at this very moment probably embroidering while listening to an audiobook. She is an intern at Split Lip Magazine and a rising junior at Scripps College. Her work has appeared in The Scripps College Journal and The Agave Review.