INTERVIEW: A. M. Sosa
And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes
A. M. Sosa
Algonquin Books
An interview with Tomas Moniz
About a year ago, my former editor asked me if I knew A. M. Sosa, a writer from Stockton, and I was like: No, should I? He calmly put both his hands on my shoulders and simply said: Yes, you should. A few months later, my new editor sent me a manuscript, not for any reason, no blurb request or feedback question; she just said: I think you’ll appreciate this.
A. M. Sosa’s debut novel, And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes, did not disappoint: it’s a novel about curses and childhood, about college campuses and sweltering summer streets in Stockton, about violence and healing. The novel shatters narrative conventions, employing various POVs as well as footnotes and even screenplay formatting. I was dazzled by Sosa’s experimentation and control. It made me want to rework my own writing, offering examples of different ways to approach narrative and storytelling.
I am thrilled to now be able to say that I do know A. M. Sosa and I truly do appreciate the time I was able to spend with their writing. I was even more delighted when they agreed to let me interview them about their work and their process.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tomas Moniz: In the novel, there’s a curse the father puts on Christian (the main character), “cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos," raise crows and they’ll take out your eyes. And the epigraph is a Rage Against The Machine quote. I’d love to hear how both of those reflect the energy and attitude you brought to the book or the trajectory of its development.
A. M. Sosa: I was thinking of a curse as an affliction, a psychic colonization of another's mind. To make someone believe something about themselves, that makes them less than. I grew up knowing about curses, about the evil eye, so I was thinking a lot about this aspect of curses, the literal, as in someone cursing supernaturally, but then also, getting cursed, as what happens when say, you have a shitty parent. The psychic state that can put you in, what a shitty parent can make you believe about yourself, the lies it can make real, that to me is just as much of a fucking curse.
And so the quote: I was in 5th grade when I first listened to RATM. First music I ever loved. So thinking about that, and the curse, coupled with the epigraph, it's a whole lot of a “fuck you” attitude. And that's what anger can give you, what it can alchemize toward, a force powerful enough to stop believing all the negative shit people will put on you. I don't have a lot of respect for most authority, in part cause of how I was raised, what I've seen authority do. The novel I think is a big fuck you to anyone who wants to tell you how to be. Fuck anyone who would try to put you down. I sincerely believe in the power of education but I also believe sometimes you just gotta let a stupid motherfucker know, they can fuck the right off.
TM: The book definitely has that energy. There’s lots of interesting craft choices you made and one of them is the use of a second person POV. Tell us about what it was like to spend so much time in that narrative position. What did you learn about writing, about your characters?
AMS: Each individual chapter is trying to do a different thing, so the second person changes over time. The first chapter, I wrote the first few pages in first person present, but. after finishing a first draft of that chapter, I realized what effect I wanted that story to have, and so I made it future perfect.It made it feel inevitable, helpless, like a curse; there's nothing you can do about it, and coupled with the second person, this feeling of depersonalization/defamiliarization, where you know yourself only from the outside, that was part of what growing up felt like. A violence of being in someone else's control. Very little agency. And growing up, no one wanted to hear what this little mocosito had to say, adults would literally laugh, make fun of me for trying to speak up, speak my mind, and that doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
The second person can have a different valence. It can be an act of self protection, an act of one's own agency, to not feel as much, to guard against what is happening, Using the second person in the third section of the novel, when Christian is an adult, thinking about how a person internalizes, and adapts to their environment, it felt like the right move.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, people like to say everything becomes a nail. I guess, but also, you can get pretty fucking crafty with a hammer. Learn to give a hug with a hammer, so to say—before realizing you can put the hammer down.
TM: That’s so beautiful. I love that your book is set in Stockton. I feel like I also write about my town Oakland and the Bay Area in ways that celebrate its beauty and complexity but also highlight some of the conflicted feelings about hometowns. So I’d like to ask you a two part question: if you had to be a tour guide to Stockton, what two places to go to get a sense of it?
AMS: I never read a book in 4 years of high school, and I graduated. Ditched a lot too. Anyway, the community college here was a place of a lot of hope for me. It was an intention making space, and people are there really fucking trying to educate themselves, to better themselves. To me, being around that, physically and psychically, I found really beautiful.
I'm proud to be from Stockton. But honestly, as a kid, all the things that I internalized, the hopelessness and misery that was percolating all around me, the younger you are, the easier it is to push all that aside, to still have fun. That kind of tension, between knowing and ambivalence, about a place like that being home, and home being somewhat hostile, it felt perfect to me.
TM: Do you have any rituals to help you write? Do you have mentor texts that you return to when you get stuck?
AMS: I write from my bed. I find it hard to concentrate otherwise; gotta be super comfortable. I guess the other aspect of that is that I'm alone. Silence is pretty important for writing. But also, I tend to split about half of my first draft writing between my phone and my laptop, and never do first drafts on Word, seeing all those squiggly lines is way too distracting.
When I'm working on a piece of writingI do it on a note taking app. I have a few folders for one liners, observations, shit talking, little lines of dialogue that'll come to me throughout the day. Years ago, I heard it described as going fishing. It keeps me in a space of creation, but also it's very informal, loose, helps remind me to not get overly serious. I’ll add to that adage about no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.:no fun for the writer, no fun for the reader.
Mentor texts, there's a lot, but to name a few: Fiebre Tropical by Julian Delgado Lopera—the use of Spanish in that novel was very liberating. The first chapters of The End of Eddy and Close to the Knives by Edouard Louis and David Wojnarowicz respectively. There's an intensity there that I admire. I've flipped through different sections of Woman Hollering Creek and Last Exit to Brooklyn for the structure, the play in rhythm. [Sandra] Cisneros builds and builds, from play, to a kind of somber sorrowful wailing like of la Llorona. And Selby, that's as close to screaming with your head on fire as I've ever read. Goals I guess. And while pretty different stylistically, I reread Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. The staying, moment to moment… shit I hope some of that rubbed off.
TM: I want to circle back to one thing you said: you can hug with a hammer. So as we close, what are the tools you have and how are you using them to hug? What are your goals? Next project?
AMS: Laughter, joking around, being silly. Being at ease. Relaxation is a skill, and one I always hope to be getting better at. There's a lot that still gets to me of course, but being an easy presence, a light, that's definitely a way of hugging, and something I've been improving at. And just like talking shit, we don't always have the privilege to play, but fuck being serious all the time. These days I talk the most shit with my mom. She tells me on most days, quiero pelear—“I wanna fight”—and we joke, play at being mean with each other. It's very fun. I feel very lucky that I get to do that, be that way with my mom.
I'm not very good at having goals. There's dreams, but if I shared, maybe then they'd just be goals, and that's not very fun. In terms of the next project, it's still very new, but there are all these ideas I've been having for a while, and I'm starting to write in a notebook, as I do research on arson, pyromaniacs. And I still got all this other research I gotta do, on serial killers, and climate change, and aliens. I guess here's a goal: I wanna get fucking wild in the writing. To have even more fun. Wanna do whatever the fuck I want in the writing and make it work. Wanna make myself and anyone who reads it smile. Be a source of fun.
TM: I love the phrase getting “wild in the writing.” And to end: how do you feel about curses now?
AMS: Curses... oh man, you know, I think maybe I talk a big game. I would tell people to fuck off, but I don't like actively spewing hate, don't want to be in a negative head space, personally and for the writing. I think that took me as far as it was going to years ago. I'll leave the cursing to the Etsy witches.
