By Millicent Borges Accardi

Ananda Lima wears many hats: a poet, a fiction writer, teacher, mentor, and translator. She is the author of the recent book, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books,2024) and the poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), which won the Hudson Prize.  Lima holds an MA in Linguistics from UCLA as well as an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. This fall, she is the Flagler Storytellers Author in Residence at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.

Her work has been featured in publications such as The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, and Electric Literature. Lima has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago.

The New York Times Review of Books describes Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil  as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction” and Reactor says Craft has “Surrealist, spooky, sexy tales that are completely unpredictable and utterly fascinating. Using a unique blend of horror and literary weirdness, Lima’s work discusses what it means to belong (or not) in another land, to search for home, and to discover who the devil might really be.”

Originally from Brazil, Ananda Lima now lives in Chicago.

In this interview with Millicent Borges Accardi, for the Portuguese American Journal, Ananda Lima reflects on her emigrant/immigrant experience and how it has profoundly influenced her writing. She delves into the concept of home away from home – the delicate balance between feeling at home and being an outsider. She also explores the complexities of identity, capturing what it means to be a writer, a daughter, a lover, and a friend. 

Q: Your new book of fiction called Craft: Stories I Write for the Devil, has been called “strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry.” What four words would you use to describe the book?

A: Maybe: strange, meta, trippy, heartfelt.

Q: Your work discusses belonging, and not belonging to another land, and the home search; how does that relate to your own experience?

A: This is very much a book thinking about the experience of being an immigrant, home, and belonging. Those are themes that are very present there. It is also about an immigrant artist. It is about a person being very much an immigrant, but not being reduced to that.

The immigrant is also a writer, a daughter, a lover, a friend, and a thinking person who likes to think about things not related to immigration at all. I wanted to present a complex picture where that search for home and belonging and being were immigrant were very present, but also not reductive. That felt so true to me. And I think the meta layers of the book allowed me to do a lot with that complexity, including addressing these thoughts of not being reductive directly. It was very fun to combine some of the things I love in art and literature, like playing with a meta reading of the work, with the experience of being an immigrant in particular. It allowed me to have a lot of complexity in the book. 

Q: Publishers Weekly states that Craft “connects to some of the cruelest portions of the human experience with uncommon warmth and wit.” Was that your intention?

A: Definitely. I loved how they described it. Even though this is a work full of fabulist / speculative work (the devil, humans coming out of vending machines, ghosts from the future), I was very much engaging with the real world in writing it. It has been a period of a loud type of cruelty. Even things that have always been there, or have been present for a long time, became very loud, the loudness of the politics of which Trump is emblematic. It was very present in my mind as I was writing.

One of many examples was the videos and images of very young children, separated from their parents, sleeping in those thin metallic plastic thermal blankets in detention centers. Those images haunted me and were very much one of the drivers behind one of the stories. The book engages with that cruelty, finding ways to look at it without succumbing to despair. It has compassion for all of us living through these times. That is where that “warmth” in the quote comes from, I think. It engages with cruelty while also allowing space for humor, art, and awe. There is a lot of love and heart in it, even while engaging with suffering.

Q: Are the stories considered horror or surreal or both?

A: The horror classification was completely unexpected to me. I saw it when my publisher (Tor, an imprint of Macmillan) sent me the Marketing materials. I thought it was great but also hilarious because I am such a wimp!

I cannot usually watch horror movies, for example. I get too scared, then can’t turn the lights off in the house, can’t be alone, etc. So I felt pretty cool. While I was writing the book, I thought of it as literary fiction with speculative elements. And that is what it is too. I feel like it is a book difficult to classify (which I love). I love that it brought me into the world of horror and there is some of that in it too, I think.

An editor friend speculated once that the decision to classify it as horror may come from the fact that the horror reader is open to and seeks discomfort. And this book has discomfort. But it is also literary. I have seen it described as magical realism, auto-fiction-like, literary fiction, meta, surreal, horror, and I say, all of the above. It is not a typical more traditional type of horror. There are no super scary parts (no jump scares). I think the world we live in, which is very present here, is the scariest part to me.

Q: The title Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is intriguing because it harkens back to Scheherazade, who spun tales to stay alive, night after night. Were you thinking of that story when you were crafting Crafts?

A: Yes! One Thousand and One Nights was one of many works that I felt I was in conversation with. That meta layer, the stories. And I think it interacts nicely in that there is that danger, that need for stories. It plays nicely with the idea of danger in a bargain with the devil (though it doesn’t go in the expected direction in my book).

Other works I felt I was talking too a little bit include The Hour of the Star and The Master and Margarita, but there were many more. It was a joy to feel like I was engaging somehow with these beloved works as I wrote.

Q: How important is humor in horror stories? Is there a place for horror and humor to live side by side?

A: I love it that the humor emerged from these characters and stories. I don’t usually know how to be funny or tell jokes myself, so it was a delight.

The type of humor I ended up having turned out to be something I love as a reader, especially when harnessed in an intentional way, which is what I tried to do here too. Mostly, there are whimsical parts with some humor, but not necessarily often a laugh-out-loud humor. What that does is it creates this pleasant tension that is not released with a laugh. It stays with you as the reader and builds. That tension then interacts with other tensions in the text.

In general, I feel like humor and horror, and in the case of this book, more often, humor and sadness work so well together. It can be disarming, comforting, a source of tension and pleasure that allows you to say difficult, sad, important things in a way that reaches your reader.

Q: What an opening premise: At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true. How did you come up with the idea of recording/writing stories for the devil?

A: A long while ago, I had this idea of writing a devil character as a regularish guy, maybe a bro of some kind, who sleeps with a protagonist in her twenties. I didn’t have any specifics, and it was just one of many ideas that I had floating around all the time. I kind of forgot about it for years.

At some point, I started reading about the prevalence of concepts in seemingly secular ideologies that were inherited from religious ideas. In particular, I started reading a political theologist (Adam Kotsko) who writes about how Medieval religious values morphed into some neoliberal values. He also wrote a bunch about the evolution of the figure of the Devil from Medieval times until today. It is a fascinating history full of twists and turns involving the creation of a character and narrative about him, the political uses of the figure, the logic of damnation, punishment, and the demonization of groups of people. It is a very rich figure, and some of the themes I encountered reading about the devil were so fitting for the stories I was writing (including the meta storytelling and the current political climate). It was fascinating, but I realized that my way into the writing was not through the facts I was learning.

Other people had already written wonderful scholarly work on that, and my attempting to repeat those things would be unnecessary and make poor fiction. I decided to let my character live as himself. When I started writing, the old story idea came back. And the devil was so charming and fun to hang out with. It ended up becoming the leading story and frame for the book.

Q: Have you seen a ghost?

A: I don’t believe in ghosts, and I am a super secular person (no spirits, ghosts, and other mystical practices, life after death, etc. for me). This is not the case with every writer who writes about ghosts: I have encountered some wonderful, very intelligent, and talented writers who write beautifully about ghosts (or whatever thing considered supernatural) and truly believe them. It is just not me. Though, as I said before, even if I do not believe it at all, I still get super scared if I watch a horror movie, which I find fascinating. Like I have zero belief that the creature in the movie exists, but I feel I still can’t be alone in a room if I watch the movie.

Q: Is there an excerpt that best represents the book? Can you share it here and explain why you selected it?

A: I think it is hard to pick just one excerpt, but here is one that has a lot of the ideas in the book in it (it has references to 1980’s-90’s horror movies Gremlins 2 and The Fly but also some very covert references to late 1920’s Brazilian Modernism (Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago):

I thought of how the green in steaming hatching gremlin cocoons looked like the neon-green light coming out of the pod in the promo poster of The Fly. I thought of myself sitting there, my body filled with American proteins. American water. American sugar. The alcohol taking over my brain and liver. I remembered reading that it took ten years for a human skeleton to be completely replaced through cell renewal. I had American bones now. I’d thought I was the eater, but America had been eating me the whole time, from within…

Q:  When did you emigrate to the US? What brought you here?

A: I was born and grew up in Brazil until a little after high school. My whole family is Brazilian. Both sides of my family came from Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil. I first left the country for Australia, where I lived and worked for a bit and did undergrad. I came to the US on a full scholarship to do PhD in Linguistics at UCLA. At some point, as a graduate student, I met my now husband. We got married, so I stayed here instead of following my initial plan of returning to Australia. I ended up changing my mind about the PhD Program (very late into it) and leaving with an MA, but I was already married, and we decided to move to NYC together, so I stayed.

Q: Do you have a favorite place in a Lusophone country?

A: It is very difficult for me to pick a favorite anything (book, movie, food, and place too). But I can say some places that I love. I love Salvador in the state of Bahia in Brazil. Such a beautiful city full of wonderful art and nature, and food and all the great things. I love Lisbon too.

And I love, in a weird way where I cannot help but see its faults, my home town, Brasília. It is such a strange, beautiful place—a vision of the future from the past. I highly recommend Clarice Lispector’s writing on Brasilia. That also reminds me of Oona Patrick’s essay on Lisbon, which is after Lispector’s essay, which I highly recommend too.

Q: Your previous book, a collection of poetry called Mother/Land is said to exist on the intersection between motherhood and immigration. Can you talk about your relationship to place, others, and identity that are explored in the book?

A:  Mother/land engages with these themes very directly, and it plays a lot in formally reproducing them. There are bilingual poems that use well-established repeating poetic forms (e.g., the pantoum) but use (mis) translations instead of repetitions. The book engages very lovingly and deeply with identity, place, migration, lineage, and motherhood. It captured two huge ruptures/ reconfigurations of identity: migration (I wasn’t an immigrant before I left Brazil) and motherhood (I wasn’t a mother before I had my son) and how they intersect and influence one another.

My experience of being an immigrant changed in complex ways after I had my son. Some ways are too complex to articulate here (which is why I wrote the book), but for example, even though I lived here for many years before having my son, it felt more potentially temporary. I felt more separate from the US and its history. When my son was born here, it was as if I became a part of the fabric of US history too. I saw that history was mine too. The book explores that and other related themes.

Q: How does writing in English versus Portuguese differ for you?  

A: In Mother/land, I wrote in Portuguese a lot (though the book is mainly in English), but that was very intentional, in the same way as I might use a form, think about meter, etc. in a poem. But when writing prose or even poetry where I am not engaging with bilingualism, English is more natural to me. I think that is just because it is the language I am immersed in.

There was a summer a few years ago where I spent one month in Lisbon followed by one month in Brazil. Then I started writing more in Portuguese again. I think that is because that was the language surrounding me. Sometimes, when thinking about specific memories or times, the words come in Portuguese. But for the most part, things come in English. 

I still have a very hard time with spatial prepositions, though (in, on, at). Like I know the gist of the difference, but I don’t have that strong intuition a native speaker has. Other things are rhymes are different for me. The boundary between the short a and e sounds is very tenuous to me. As a poet I like playing with these things about myself, enjoying my own little ESL grammar. As a fiction writer, I mostly just revise carefully and ask my husband and son for help (“is it in, at, or on?”) when needed.

Q: What other Luso poets/writers do you admire?

A: As with the favorite place question, I have a hard time remembering all my favorites and always leave many important people out. But here are some writers I admire: amazing contemporary writers: Bruna Dantas Lobato (whose gorgeous book The Blue Light Hours is about to come out, and I cannot wait), Flavia Stefanni, Camila Santos, Ana Maria Gonçalves, Katherine Vaz, and so many more. 

Q: Any new projects?  

A: I am working on a novel set in the Midwest (including Chicago and rural Iowa) involving an amnesiac ghost, time (including deep time), and midcentury architecture (including a hidden portal in a midcentury building). I am also working on a poetry collection called Parallax about vision and perspective (and the parallax effect in vision, physics, etc.).

Q: For PAJ readers, do you have readings or events coming up?

A: I have a lot of events this Fall, but a particularly fitting one is this conversation at the Center for Fiction.

Q: Was there something you wanted to talk about that I did not ask?

A:  These are amazing questions that cover so much. Thank you so much! So grateful to you!

Book Details

Title: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

Author: Ananda Lima

Publisher: Tor/Forge

Publication Date: June 18, 2024

Language‏: English

Hardcover‏: ‎122pp

Available@Amazon.com

 

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Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Through Grainy Landscape, 2021 (inspired by Portuguese writings) and Quarantine Highway. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, CantoMundo, California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant, and Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal). She serves as a mentor in the AWP Writer 2 Writer and Adroit summer writing programs. She also curates the popular Kale Soup for the Soul reading series.