The Porch has been fortunate to work with the brilliant poet and fiction writer Ananda Lima for several years: She has taught several classes for us and was the final judge in the poetry category for the Porch Prize 2024. We're thrilled to welcome Ananda back to Nashville on July 15 for an event at the Bookshop, in celebration of her most recent release, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil. She'll be in conversation with the writer Fatima Kola.

Ananda is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago. She's the author of the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft: Stories I wrote for the Devil is her fiction debut.

Ananda was kind enough to answer questions from Meredith Moore in advance of her visit to Nashville.

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Meredith Moore: Tell us a little bit about your career as writer and how you got to where you are. 

Ananda Lima: So, I think I’ve always written but kind of secretly. I had this life when I was younger that was in linguistics and non-creative writing, but I always wrote. But it wasn’t until later in life that I revealed that to people. First, that came out as fiction writing, but soon poetry took over. I did an MFA in Fiction, but I think I wrote more poetry during that time than fiction! Over the years I wrote a bunch; I have a poetry collection, Mother/land. But fiction continued slowly, and now I have my book coming out, Craft. I always do both, poetry and fiction. 

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MM: Did you always write fiction as well, or are you new to it?

AL: Yes, I was always writing fiction, and I thought I was a fiction writer, but then I would get these lines, like when I was running or something, it was like ‘Ah, that's a good line!’ And then I would try to write a story, but the story was all crappy, and just the line was good. That's when I realized: No, no, no, this is poetry. So it just really came to me and it kind of took over. I think poetry is the most natural. But I also never stopped writing fiction, just slower… so many words! 

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MM: As a multigenre writer, is it always clear to you what themes, stories, or ideas you want to relay in poetry versus fiction? 

AL: I feel like I don't really think and decide, but naturally by now I have a very good idea of the form. When it’s something that's close to my personal life, like literally, it's usually poetry; something that's a very big subject, and harder to isolate, like history, is also usually poetry, because the space and the sparseness allows me to say partial things that reverberate. The medium works for me for these things, the close and personal and bigger subjects.

My fiction is more focused, the story is more of an episode or situation, more prose, and usually the fiction is not super close to my life. There are things that happen, but it’s not like I literally did those things. I feel like it's because I need the space to talk about it. The breathiness of poetry, the breath, allows me to talk about things that are closer, while in fiction I need a little bit more of a handle on the subject matter. It's funny because even though it's not close to my life, I love playing with the idea in fiction that it may be even though it isn't. But in reality the poetry is closer to my life and the fiction isn't. 

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MM: How long did you work on Craft? Did you know what it would be when you started writing it? 

AL: I worked on Craft for a long time, and I didn’t know for a long time. When I went into my MFA, I came with a novel that was just not going to happen. I feel like it was a very traditional structure, and it was fine but it was like, ‘Oh I'm not having a lot of fun with this thing’. Then I started writing short stories both to do more fun things that I was more excited about and do very weird, meta things, as a playground, and also because I needed to deliver something! And short stories are very friendly for an MFA, so I started writing this story separately, but because a lot of them had this meta thing, I was like, ‘Oh, these things are working very well together’. So I started feeling they were together in a very close way—and then the devil came up and I thought "this guy has to be there throughout," because I really liked him! So it came together with time. I would say I got a feeling after a couple stories that they would work together early on, but to find how they would be structured took a while. It was also very fun. So you're, like, laughing when you put it together! It was very fun to find that frame. It came together the way it is now very slowly over time. 

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MM: Do you have any advice for new writers about what it’s like to debut? 

AL: There's a couple of things! One, I think it gets very busy when you're about to debut, and the mode changes. It goes from a very private thing to a lot of people looking at [the work] and talking about it, and it starts getting out in the world even before the publication date, and also you're very busy with practical activities like talking to people, writing essays, whatever. So you get very busy. Don't be too hard on yourself about how much you're writing or wonder ‘will I ever write again?’ It's fine to take time to nurture your book. I would say: If possible, before you debut, start a new project so that you have that as the writing part, because you have a big public part, like the schmoozing and getting out there part. Have the private new project going before the debut so you can always fall back to that and feed yourself as a writer with your new project. Having said that, it's very important you don't put a lot of pressure on the new project. It's just play. 

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Don't be too hard on yourself about how much you're writing or wonder ‘will I ever write again?’ [before your debut book publishes]. It's fine to take time to nurture your book. I would say: If possible, before you debut, start a new project.

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MM: If you could choose one person dead or alive to read this book, who would you choose and why?

AL: That's hard! I think there’s a lot of different people that I just love, but I would name two: One is Caetano Veloso, a singer who was in the Tropicalia movement in Brazil. I just love him and I feel like this book is a descendant of this Tropicalist movement in Brazil, so it’d be fun because it’s part of the lineage that he was very involved in. And then Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote The Master and Margarita, because I love his devil so much and also the metastructure of the book. It feels to me like a book that someone had fun writing.

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MM: Closing remarks?

AL: Even though there are difficult parts of Craft—there's always challenges you have to figure out as a writer it was exceptionally fun [to write] because there were all these moments where you are like, yes, I love that this is happening! So I hope that people have fun reading it too! 

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