The Assay Interview Project: Ana María Caballero
April 1, 2024

Ana María Caballero is the author of A Petit Mal. She has an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University and a B.A. in Romance Studies from Harvard University. An artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, Caballero rips the veil off romanticized motherhood and questions notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Art Writers Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant. In 2024, she became the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and has sold the first digital poem via live auction in Spain. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited as fine art at museums and leading international venues, such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, bitforms, Office Impart, Poetry Society of America, Gazelli Art House, New World Center and Times Square. The author of five books, she's also one of the founders of digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse. Though she grew up between Miami and Bogotá, she currently lives and works in Madrid.
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About A Petit Mal:  A Petit Mal is about Caballero’s son’s sudden onset of seizures. This work takes multi-faceted stabs at the nature of emotions, of illness, of health, of faith, of loss. Stabs that elicit fresh meaning by mixing the muscle, the marrow, of words.  Although A Petit Mal follows the narrative arc of a family’s collision with disease—from symptom to diagnosis to treatment to prognosis—the text plunges its readers into an exploration of multiple alternative methods of healing and the spiritual implications therein.

​Part medical memoir, part lyric essay, part narrative poem, part photographic study, but, throughout, a page-turner, Caballero is especially relevant to contemporary audiences interested in wellness, not as yet another banner, but as a committed, practical approach to life.
Julie Marie Wade: Today I was reading the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day, as I always do, and was struck by this statement from featured poet Snigdha Koirala in her author note: “So much of what we need to say we can only say by bending language.” Immediately, I thought of your debut lyric essay collection, A Petit Mal—which is also a memoir, which is also an illness narrative—and of the striking, even sui generis, ways you bend language in this volume.

There is a quality to your language in this book that is hard to describe—cryptic, compressed, pared down to essence—and when I read Koirala’s statement, I thought, That’s it! Ana is bending language, omitting something to amplify something else. I hear it everywhere, but here’s one example of what I mean: “Boy as filter, boy as other, boy as same, same as mother, as father. Boy as filter, at once, of all that is part, of all that is other.”

So let’s delve right in: How did you arrive at the diction and syntax for this book, the idiosyncratic style of storytelling? How does the how of your sentence-making (fragment-making) fuel the what of this story?

Ana María Caballero: Thank you, Julie, for your boundless generosity. I’m so delighted to be in conversation with you about A Petit Mal as you are, in many ways, its doula.

My book tells the story of my son’s sudden onset of seizures. When his seizures broke out, I began living an intermittent life, interrupted by his convulsions. Thus, the book’s convulsed form is a faithful representation of my experience. At night, I’d stay up after a seizure passed and write about what I witnessed, when I could have been getting sleep my body desperately needed. This book demanded itself to be written; it was a catharsis. It flowed out of me in this fragmented form, seismic.

My text eschews the question mark—you will not find a single one in its pages—because the entire book is a question. By omitting this punctuation mark, I draw attention to the importance of asking, even when we know that, ultimately, no satisfying answers to our most profound interrogations can be found. My book posits that to ask, to invoke, to probe, without the expectation of a response, is an act of faith and love, one that is sustaining in its own right.

Certain passages of my work omit non-essential articles and pronouns, thereby emboldening the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives that pin down my narrative. In her essay “Why I Write,” Joan Didion affirms: “All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of the camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” My purposeful use of grammar does precisely this: brings the events taking place around me into sharp focus so that I, together with my readers, may take a tighter, a deeper, a more meaningful and, thus, more fulfilling look.

I also believe our minds and our memory exist in fragments. On top of that, our lives have become deeply interrupted. We’re bombarded by information coming at us from different directions. The very act of readership has evolved. I believe readers relate to modular, fragmented texts in an intuitive, emotional way.
 
As artists, we need not, nor should, cater to this, but I do believe that purposeful engagement with contemporary readers enhances their connection with story. The graphs that I include, the pictures of my son and of the equipment used, and the screenshots of the little games he played on my phone while we went from treatment to treatment—all these visualized moments help construct the emotions of the story.
 
The way things write themselves within me is very rhyme heavy, even with prose. It's something that I’ve recently allowed myself to embrace. I used to disregard my strange diction and try to dull it down, but now I lean into it. With this book, I went all out. This is me, this is my style, my voice, this is what I've been working to find, this weirdness.
 
Ana, I celebrate “this weirdness” in your work, and I do indeed connect with it in a deeply “intuitive, emotional way.” In fact, I talk with my undergraduate students a lot about the transcendent power of art-making, particularly within creative nonfiction (such a capacious category—more like a honeycomb than a genre!) The reader doesn’t have to be just like us to enter into our experiences, as rendered on the page, and feel not just moved but deeply implicated in what we have lived and witnessed.

And I felt that way reading your book, reading as someone who is not a mother, as someone who has not witnessed an intense and protracted illness of a loved one, let alone a beloved child, and yet I felt invited into your depictions and reflections on this experience as if they were my own. That’s how intimate A Petit Mal is.

Now this “rhyme heavy” sensibility you describe, and also the fragmentation and omission of certain articles and punctuation marks, is part of what I consider to be poetic compression: doing more work with fewer words, in less space on the page. In my mind, I picture it like springs. Your poetic diction and syntax are tightly coiled, so each sentence/fragment has a reverb to it, like sitting down on a bed that instantly bounces. And I assume that you are employing some of the very specific skills you have honed as a poet in order to work this way.

Could you share how your poetry education—in classes, as an avid reader, et al—informs your craft in creative nonfiction? You’ve published poetry collections in English and Spanish, and now your full-length English poetry debut, Mammal, has won a national prize and is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books in 2024. Could A Petit Mal have been written as poetry? How would it be different? How does a multi-genre writer such as yourself transpose literary keys according to the dictates of each project?

I owe my understanding of the infinite range of possibility within creative nonfiction to what I’ve learned in your classes. I never thought I would publish a book of prose before taking your graduate courses introducing hybrid forms and lyrical essays, which instantly drew me in.

In a providential twist of fate, I was actually your student in a seminar on hybridity when my son’s seizures were first diagnosed. I wrote about this experience wildly, savagely, for an assignment, which later became the first chapter of A Petit Mal.  What we read also teaches, as you know. I am an avid reader of experimental writers, ones who don’t quite fit within any boxes, such as Maggie Nelson, Clarice Lispector, Jenny Offill. I consider them all to be my teachers in poetry and in prose, alongside you.

I think the fact that I was invited to walk comfortably and unencumbered between lyricism and prose in your classes allowed me to give myself the permission to be as experimental as I wanted to be as I wrote my book. I also didn’t write A Petit Mal with publication in mind, at least not initially, which allowed me to be as liberal in my explorations as I needed to be.

This book wrote itself within me and erupted onto the page as a form of catharsis. I understood what I was living in retrospect, as I read my written words, which I consider an extended prose poem, one in which the experimental and the schematic construct each other, much like how Western and alternative medicine had to come together in my son’s healing process.

It’s difficult for me to assign a genre to my writing. Certain works require line breaks, others don’t.  Regardless of its anatomy, the flesh of my writing remains largely unchanged—poetic compression is present both in my prose and in my poems, as is playing with scripted grammatical rules.

I love that you ask if A Petit Mal could’ve been written as poetry because it was just longlisted for the Electric Book Award, in the Poetry category! So perhaps it already is a poem.

Currently, I’m deep in the writing of a new book in Spanish, one that takes its inspiration from Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch.  It’s a series of “cortadas” or modular, braided, fragmented texts that accrue into a story. I feel like this is where I thrive, in the iterative process of exploring thought to construct the narrative of an outward facing life.

Congratulations, Ana! I’m thrilled to hear that A Petit Mal is begin recognized across genre borders for its literary excellence, and this of course reminds me of the way Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) is described as both a book-length poem and a series of lyric essays. It is also, notably, a book which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry the same year. I recognize the both/and-ness of A Petit Mal as book-length poem and collection of lyric essays, too, and celebrate all recognition it receives in and beyond these categories.

I’d like to ask you about being a bilingual speaker and writer, someone fluent in both English and Spanish. Is there an analogy here between being fluent in multiple genres? Do you find the languages coalesce in your consciousness in a hybrid way? Perhaps I’m really trying to ask: How is the experience of writing in Spanish in a literary context different for you from writing in English in a parallel literary context? Are there craft elements of composition that you feel naturally lend themselves more to one language than another? Specifically, what can you do in your new series of cortadas, writing in Spanish, that would not be possible—or as possible—if you were working in English? Most of all, as the author of multiple books in English and Spanish, how does the language in which you write influence the structure and style of the text you create?

I feel like each language flows through the world of our minds with its own anatomy—its own system of movement and of stasis. When I write in Spanish, I can access certain parts of myself and my past that are simply not available in English, having grown up in Colombia, and vice versa, having lived my adolescence and young adulthood in the States. In accessing each of these separate but colliding parts, there is a chest of emotions, memories and narratives that suddenly become available, complementing each other as I go back and forth between languages.

I also love exploring different rhyme structures—Spanish is a wordier language, with more complementary terms required to construct its ideas. But it’s also simpler to rhyme, so this allows for a rhythm that propels it forward, with cadences, pauses, musicality all its own.

As you know, intertextuality weighs heavily in my work. I need to incorporate the words of others alongside my own to feel true to the way my mind functions. When I write in Spanish, I incorporate the work of writers who’ve nourished my native tongue. I love paying homage to them.

You know, when we first met—I think it was in 2017 when you began the MFA program at FIU, and you enrolled in the Graduate Poetry Workshop I was teaching—I was struck by how naturally it came to you, this idea of writing “under the influence” or “in the spirit” of other writers. You were so humble, willing to learn from any and every writer you encountered in the class, including your fellow students, but equally, you were confident, unafraid to take risks, unafraid that learning from other writers would limit the originality of your work.

I tend to believe that the most receptive learners tend to make the most inspiring teachers.

As it happens, you’ll be coming up for your thesis defense in spring 2024, and one of the requirements of that process is to submit a proposed course title, brief description, and reading list for a class you’d like to teach. We don’t presume that all our graduating MFA students want to teach or will pursue a career in teaching, but we ask them to at least entertain that possibility.

What do you think about the prospect of teaching, specifically creative nonfiction or hybrid forms? How would you design your ideal creative writing classroom? Would you imagine for us here a course title, brief description, and reading list that you’d offer your students based on your own evolving journey as a writer within the realm of memoir and lyric essay?  What are three specific prompts or exercises would you extend to your students that you have found generative in your writing life and/or that are inspired by the work in A Petit Mal?

I can’t believe it’s already been six years since we met, Julie! I remember walking into your office and feeling like I’d found my place, my home. And that is how I feel when I am inside a book I love, like I am home. Writers like Anne Carson, Clarice Lispector, Jenny Offill, Sharon Olds have sustained me my entire life; invoking them feels like communion, like giving thanks—I don’t see it as reductive in any way, shape or form.

I would indeed love to teach one day and inspire others as you have inspired me. My dream course would look like this:
 
Unexpected Visions of Home in the Work of Contemporary Groundbreaking Writers:
 
In this survey course of recent works of literature, students will read texts that boldly reconstruct notions of family and home. Brutal honesty and transcendental mundanity operate in tandem to construct narratives that break free of all molds. Students will be expected to come to class eager to discuss the assigned reading with their classmates. Collaborative, creative projects that respond to the reading list are encouraged.
 
Reading List:
Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson)
The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Marguerite Duras)
The Lost Daughter (Elena Ferrante)
Near to the Wild Heart (Clarice Lispector)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Satan Says (Sharon Olds)
The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
 
One of the most inspiring generative exercises I’ve encountered is the hermit crab, or the borrowed form.  Stealing prosaic formats and rendering them poetic really speaks to my rebellious, irreverent side. Another prompt that I love is that of constructing a braided, fragmented essay in which various narrative threads weave in and out, gradually building upon each other. Finally, I also really love the haibun. The way that a block of text is punctuated by a haiku at the end is very suggestive, very delicate. It’s a form that says, “Maybe I don’t really know.” I quite respect its humility.
 
All these generative prompts entered my writing life thanks to your classes.
 
Ana, I’d like to close this interview by asking what advice you have for writers who are looking to challenge themselves (further) in the self-referential arts. Your book, A Petit Mal, is expansive in form and indeed blurs genres, but it is also distinctly recognizable as a memoir that chronicles a painful and vulnerable time in your family’s recent history—in your life as a spouse and a parent, in your son’s life experiencing seizures and bodily threat as such a small child. 
 
Writing family, writing illness, writing our love for others and our fear of losing them, is hard intimate work. Not all creative nonfiction is memoir, certainly, but all memoir is a form of creative nonfiction writing that attempts to bring memories to life on the page, that poses the question “how can I make my lived and witnessed experiences both accessible and potentially transformational to others?”
 
On the writing side of things, what should aspiring memoirists know, do, and refrain from doing, in service of their art? And on the author side, what strategies and recommendations would you offer to those seeking to publish their endeavors in memoir—both individual essays/chapters and book-length manuscripts?
 
It’s not easy to write about the truth of our lives, especially when this truth involves people who are close to us. I’ve had a few very difficult recent encounters with friends and family in which my writing generated a deep discomfort. I was even accused by a close friend of having used her as material. This was very hurtful as I considered her to be one of my dearest friends, and our lives were intertwined.
 
Writing is not optional for me. I am impelled and propelled to write about how I experience my life. I have done so since I was a child. Perhaps I could keep my words buried in the bottom of a drawer and not work hard to publish them, but that is not my nature. I also want to share. To give.
 
I find it hard to tell other writers what they should or should not do beyond the over-trodden clichés, which are nonetheless true.
 
If writing is within you in a way that hurts, let it out.
 
Not everyone will understand or support your endeavors to write: allow them to step aside. What survives is the word. Is the book. Is the page. What survives, and will let you survive, is your work.
Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History (New Michigan Press, 2023), and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize. Forthcoming in 2024 is The Mary Years: A Memoir, selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the 2023 Clay Renolds Novella Prize.

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