Kate Vieira is a writer, a writing teacher, and a writing-studies scholar. Her academic books are about writing among undocumented immigrants in the U.S. (American by Paper, University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and writing in immigrant families in Eastern Europe and South America (Writing for Love and Money, Oxford University Press, under contract). She'll be reading at Intersections 2018: Writing from Planet Earth on April 22. ALL Review recently talked with her about writing, parenting, and the human need to create a home.
What first drew you to writing about immigrant experiences?
I’m from a Portuguese and Lebanese immigrant community on the East Coast, so I was always around stories of elsewhere or stories of before, always kind of swimming in different accents. And when I was a kid, my family moved away from that community to the white suburbs of Dallas, Texas, where it turned out I was the one with the accent. So I got a small taste of what it might be like to immigrate.
Leaving your community, being separated from family, and encountering a new, potentially hostile environment—that’s kind of the story or theme that circulates in my life.
So the other day I was giving a talk for middle schoolers at a young author’s conference in Waukesha. And I brought the first “book” I wrote, in third grade. It was about an alien from “trouble planet” who everyone thought was a boy, but was actually a girl, and who didn’t fit in and was actually rather brutally exploited until finally—finally!—the mothership came and took her home. I didn’t notice until I was preparing the talk that this “book,” that I wrote at 9, bore some resemblance to my academic ethnography of undocumented immigrants in my home community, published two years ago.
The exploitation, the alienation, the human desire to create a home—these are the things that haunt me, that make me write.
The urge to publish is like the next step, the feeling that there are things about these experiences that I desperately want other people to know, that injustice should be documented.
How has your approach to the topic changed over the years?
So I’m a scholar of writing studies, which means I’m not only a writer, but also someone who studies how writing is used out in the world. For my scholarly work, I’ve been interested in how immigrant communities use writing to create a sense of home. Now, what this has looked like has gone through several phases, which in my head I attach to phases of my daughter’s growth.
In the first phase, I was really interested in how immigrants used language. I was hoping for a possibility that their native languages and dialects could be of use to them in the United States. This was my dissertation. I wrote it pregnant.
In the second phase, I realized that for the people I was working with, language was not as important as legal papers were. When you’re under a threat of deportation, when you’ve risked your life to cross a border, that is the central thing. Languages can be learned. Political persecution is a more pressing matter. So this turned into my first book, American by Paper, which looked at how people used writing in hostile legal contexts. I wrote it birth to two.
The third phase was more hopeful: Here I was interested in the potential for immigrants’ writing to promote learning and love. So in my second book, Writing for Love and Money (which I’m hoping will be out in 2019), I wrote about how families separated across borders used writing to communicate with each other and to make a better life. So I did ethnographic research with left-behind family members in Brazil (my daughter came with me there at age three) and Latvia (age five) and with migrant families here in Wisconsin (age seven--she hung out and played with the kids).
There is also a 3.5 version, too, which is my in-progress divorce memoir, Fieldwork, which takes place in Latvia. I first met my ex-husband in Latvia in 1999, and I returned there immediately post-divorce in 2014, five-year-old daughter in tow, to do field research for Writing for Love and Money. In the memoir, my “research question” becomes my mid-life crisis question: What happens when families separate? The memoir offers a narrative answer.
To tie in the memoir to the rest of my work: I’m interested in the rupture caused by migration, separation, abandonment—and how people (myself included) can use writing as a kind of connective tissue, as an act of love, as a practice of healing, to guide us as our circumstances shift.
How do you balance writing and parenting, along with teaching and travel?
Hahaha. Sorry. Balance?
Seriously, though, our situation is that my daughter’s father is not in the picture, despite the best efforts of Dane County Child Support, so I have a delicate and deeply ritualized structure in place with lots of moving parts. The name of one important part is GRANDMA. And I’m so grateful for affordable and safe after-school care (Hi Ms. Laura! We love you!) and for in-school care and for friends and for research assistants who format my bibliographies and otherwise order my chaos. God bless you all.
Also I compartmentalize the hell out of my life.
First off, if I don’t write, I’m a crappy parent (and a crappy human being). So I’m an early riser: I do some stretching so that my back doesn’t cave in on itself, meditate so I know what to write about, journal to empty whatever extraneous shit has piled up in my head during the night, then sit down to write. Somewhere in there I get my daughter to school or if it’s the weekend, set her up with some cartoons. Sometimes I have 30 minutes. Sometimes it’s a couple hours. It’s sacred.
I don’t really talk to my daughter (or to anyone) much in the morning. I make her a little face on her plate out of fruit (banana nose, blueberry eyes, depending on what we have), so she knows I love her, and then I disappear into my head.
I sometimes (ok lots of times) feel guilty. Then I remember that the guilt is just the patriarchy talking and tell it to STFU. I also guard my time with my daughter pretty fiercely. I don’t work in the evenings or on the weekends. That is our time to irritate the bejeesus out of each other, read to each other in the bath, and/or watch The Voice.
Also we live in a very small apartment in Eagle Heights and I have a high tolerance for dirt. So you know, timesaver right there.
Anyway, so the workday is for teaching. And the teaching. The teaching feeds me. I have the privilege to work with a group of students, graduate students and undergrads, who are doing such fabulous and committed work in the world. They are studying the writing of manual laborers, immigrant mothers, hip-hop compositionists, African-American computer coders, the list goes on. I’m moved by their writing, their teaching, their questions, their big open hearts and minds. They are kind of continually upgrading me. So all of that filters in to how I raise my daughter and how I write myself.
But travel is what fills my cup, both as a writer and a parent. I love learning and speaking new languages. I love being foreign. It just makes me feel alive and young and new. And I’m blessed that my daughter feels the same. She has been with me to Colombia, Brazil, Latvia, and all over the U.S. for academic conferences. She has puked in the backs of cabs, also in airports, also in hotel rooms, a few times in airplanes. She has rocked out with me to an impromptu Reggaeton concert in a plaza in Bogota. She has slurped borscht by my side in Eastern Europe. Girlfriend is game. She helps me see the place I am in with these fresh, kid eyes. Honest to God, I can’t imagine a better travel partner, and I feel so lucky that my life has given us the opportunities to share these experiences together.
So to get back to your question, when I first read it, I immediately thought of the verb to manage, as in managing time. But actually I don’t necessarily think of my life as management. I think of it more as using all the resources I’m privileged to have at my disposal to live the biggest life I can.
Where do you turn for inspiration? Which writers have had the biggest influence on you?
I love work that addresses the body, that plays with form, or that just has beautiful sentences: Recent loves include: Zinzie Clemmons’ What we Lose, Carmen Maria Machado’s The Body and Other Parties, Sharon Olds’ Odes, Valerie Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. I also love a good mystery/thriller. Amy Gentry’s Good as Gone and Tana French’s In the Woods. I kind of want to put Zadie Smith’s Swing Time in this category, too, because as a reader, I was just kind of kept hopping until the end. Ooooh, and young adult literature, too! I read it on my own or with my daughter—it reminds me what story is all about.
As a reader, I live for this process of being witched. As a writer, I play the game of trying to figure out how particular spells were cast. Also, looking back on this list and extending the witch metaphor, it turns out I’m inspired by books by women.
Do you think living in Wisconsin has shaped you as a writer at all? Living in Madison?
I was just thinking about this last night when my daughter and I were having cheese curds at the union after being BLOWN AWAY by Claire Vaye Watkin’s reading in the Elvehjem Building on campus. Cheese curds. Badass literary reading. Wisconsin.
I’ve found so many opportunities to be fed as a writer and writing teacher here. When I came here in 2003 from Texas, I couldn’t believe there was an explicitly feminist bookstore right in the center of town. Now I work side by side with the rockstar creative writing faculty in the English department. I’m not one of them, but they have always been so encouraging, so full of good human advice.
Beyond the UW: The Chippewa Valley Writer’s workshop in Eau Claire turned me on to regional writing and taught me so much about craft, working with young writers at Centro Hispano has helped me experience poetry in a whole different way, the Arts and Literature Laboratory makes me feel like a writer among writers, and Mystery to Me is such a cozy reading home.
Yeah, Wisconsin has been good to me. It’s nurtured my words.
You’ve recently been awarded a Fulbright. What will this mean for you?
The FULBRIGHT. I’m still pinching myself.
In the short term, the Fulbright means that my daughter and I will be in Manizales, Colombia for five months where I will be working with Colombian colleagues to study the potential for writing to promote peace among young people touched by Colombia’s decades-long civil war. I’m so grateful to ICETEX, the Colombian funding agency that co-sponsored the grant, and to my Colombian counterparts for accepting me on their research team. I can’t wait to learn from what they are doing.
Long term, the Fulbright is the first step in a new direction in my research that focuses on young writers and peace. As part of this new direction, I’ll be leaving the UW English department. I’ve accepted a position as the Susan J. Cellmer distinguished chair of literacy in the UW department of Curriculum and Instruction, where starting in fall 2019, I’ll be involved in the secondary English Education program, working with future high school English teachers. This position provides an opportunity for wide outreach and research, which I hope will help to really get at the potential of writing to promote social justice.
But back to the Fulbright and to my writing life: It also means there will be material from which to write a second memoir. I have a title and an opening scene all worked out.
You’ll be reading for Intersections 2018: Writing from Planet Earth at Olbrich Gardens on April 22. This event touches on issues of migration and the environment. Why do you think writing around these issues is important right now?
This morning on my drive I was listening to La Movida, the Madison area’s Spanish language radio station. And the immigration program was on, where an immigration lawyer comes on the radio to try to make sense of what this administration’s impulsive and cruel immigration policies mean for everyday people. Today under discussion was: the new quotas for immigration cases to be decided quickly, the national guard being called up to police the border, and the status of DACA.
It struck me anew that at this moment our collective humanity is at stake. I believe that writing, as a dialogic process that makes meaning between readers and writers, is one way to re-humanize our relationships. To put this less academically, I believe writing can be a channel for love.
