On her next project, currently titled Stories Of My Teeth
It's a novel that I wrote in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. So for a series of months, maybe four or five months, I wrote sort of chapbooks, much in the early-20th-century style, that I sent to the factory. They were printed there and handed out amongst the workers. And they would read the pieces out loud and comment [on] them and criticize them. And all those session were recorded and then sent back to me here in New York. And then I would listen and write the next installment and so on. So it's a very different procedure.
I mean, I had no idea what I was gonna write about when I started writing. I wrote a first installment just to make initial contact with them. And the first time I heard them reading out loud, I was struck of course by the variety of voices and accents, and some very colloquial forms of saying things. And I started picking those forms up and bringing them into the novel.
I think — I mean, this novel would have been impossible without the collaboration of the workers. They weren't just listeners. They really helped me build it.
Read an excerpt of Sidewalks
translation
Mexico City
writing
New York