Rarely have I been so moved, awed, amused, satisfied, and softly startled by a debut, but The Only Sound Is the Wind, the gorgeous new fiction collection by Pascha Sotolongo, is a deft, accomplished, utterly fearless book of short stories that seamlessly meld the mundane and the transcendent, the daily grit of realism with unusual, even surreal elements. And the writing is exquisite, the observations funny and wry.
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The book’s passions and preoccupations—injustice, loneliness, loss, and how we face those painful parts of life with creativity and courage—will appeal to so many readers, especially those who have ever, as Pascha herself puts it, “found themselves among the powerless, the invisible, the suppressed, the undercompensated, the marginalized, the victimized, the lonely,” or “anyone who has suffered deeply and/or been afraid.”
Deeply Latina, deeply Cuban, deeply Floridian, and deeply embedded in the Great Plains—where Pascha lives and works as a beloved university teacher of literature and writing—this book contains multitudes and worlds.
Born in Florida to a nomadic life, Pascha Sotolongo is an award-winning writer who has published short fiction in Narrative, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Pleiades, The Normal School, and many other literary journals. She is currently at work on a memoir about attending college with her parents and a novella-length fable set in western Nebraska.
As leaves begin to turn gold and drift downward, it’s my great pleasure to get to ask Pascha about The Only Sound Is the Wind.
–Joy Castro
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Joy Castro: This is a gorgeous collection: elegant, mature, sensuous, rich with social critique, and painful in the very best way. It’s also wrenchingly sad and often drily humorous. At the line level, it’s exquisite: a master class in sentence variety and sensory imagery. Most importantly, it’s wonderfully readable and provocative.
Can you talk about how the collection came together for you?
Pascha Sotolongo: Oh, thank you for those kind words. Readability is really important to me. The collection came together over the course of about five years of writing stories that responded, in some way, to the “pandemic of loneliness” I kept hearing about. The WHO and others were expressing concern about humanity’s difficulty forging human connections, despite our much advertised (and lauded) digital connectedness.
The collection came together over the course of about five years of writing stories that responded, in some way, to the “pandemic of loneliness” I kept hearing about.
Add to that incidences of meeting people who were clearly experiencing this firsthand, and I began to feel sort of haunted by this lonely vision. I was a sometimes-lonely only child. We moved a lot—as many as five times a year—so one day I’d have tons of friends, and then poof, we’d move again, and I’d have none.
I know how material circumstances can work against the best of intentions. So that background may partly account for why this subject got my attention in the first place.
I kept writing about it, and one day, author, Raul Palma, with whom I was working at the time, said of my stories, “I see a collection taking shape,” and he was right. I had not yet realized what was happening, so, the focus was there, but it was more organic and unconscious than intentional.
JC: While rich with eclectic allusions to pop culture, The Only Sound Is the Wind is also a collection steeped in poetry: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Neruda, Robert Graves, and more. Can you talk a little about the influence of your scholarly PhD in literature (rather than the more typical MFA) upon your work?
PS: That’s so interesting to consider. Of course, I’ll never know how earning an MFA, or not attending college at all, would have shaped my writing. All I know is this one path, and I’m incredibly grateful for it. I wrote poetry as a kid but spent most of my time outdoors and was not a voracious reader. Then, in ninth grade, I dropped out of high school to work full time ahead of college.
So, reading for nearly a dozen years as I earned my BA, MA, and PhD felt like a privilege, one I was never assured I’d have. My head full of authors and their words tends to explicitly pour some of that into my writing, as your examples note, but what’s difficult to identify is the role all that long, wide reading and study has played in my sense of narrative overall.
I like that I’ve read as much pre-contemporary literature as contemporary. You and I share an admiration for the fiction of Katherine Mansfield, who was writing about 100 years ago. One of the first speculative pieces I ever read was a little-known short story by W.E.B. Du Bois called, “The Comet.” Without my PhD, I doubt I’d have found that.
That may sound small, but I think it’s emblematic of the opportunities the PhD gave me to be a curious reader and scholar first, distilling everything for the fiction I did not then know I’d write.
JC: I’m awed by the craft of these stories. Yet I’m even more struck by the care with which you wove them together into a true larger narrative, creating an order and a structure in which each subsequent story elegantly, lightly picks up threads from the previous one and develops the latent themes at which the previous narrative had only gestured. The elegance, subtlety, and delicacy of the organization is so impressive to me, your stitches so nearly invisible.
Was that pattern always there as you composed, or was it something you lifted to the surface as you shaped and revised the collection as a whole?
PS: Oh, sequencing a collection! It can be so intimidating. The order and framing were not there from the beginning, though I had noticed my characters’ reactions to felt solitude falling into two categories I ultimately called (leaning into sound) sustain and release.
Another way to frame this comes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: the kind of “loneliness that can be rocked” by a body clinging tightly to itself, and the kind that roams. Doesn’t she say that beautifully?
So the stories separated in this way, but only after all but two were written. I had not written to that structure or concept. Full group in hand, I wrote the titles on index cards, laid them out on the living room floor, and rearranged them until the order seemed governed by an internal logic that included micro-connections from story to story and the emotional arc across all stories.
With one exception, that order wound up holding. My superb editor at W.W. Norton, Helen Thomaides, ultimately suggested reversing the order of the last two stories. I had initially ended with “Spot the Stations,” but she found it a bit flippant for the final note in a collection that is not, on the whole, flippant. I think that was a smart call.
JC: I think so, too. I’m fascinated by the solitude, isolation, and loneliness—quite different but related states—that permeate the book, and how beautifully the stories thematize those states and are even structured by them. Rather than external conflict and dialogue, for example, many of the stories are primarily driven by a specific character’s silent determination to make positive change—or to forge an intimate connection—against considerable social odds, with results that often go quite brutally awry.
The stories are mostly very quiet; we dwell in one character’s internal world as they go about their plans and meditate upon their motivations. Dialogue, when it happens, tends to be painfully banal and disappointing for the protagonists—almost not worth their while. Can you talk about how solitude, isolation, and loneliness factor into your own process as a writer?
I think of all writing—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—as communication first, and that denotes a kind of communion, so in that sense, writing is anything but a lonely or isolated act, but as communication it is strangely delayed.
PS: Joy, I seem to recall that at some point you set about training yourself to write just about anywhere, in nearly any circumstance, and I’ve always admired that focus and discipline. When pressed, I too can write amid noise and distraction, but not particularly well. I’m working on it! I absolutely prefer a quiet room and closed door (partly because I read my writing aloud a lot and don’t want to disturb anyone).
It should be said, as your question implies, that not all isolation is lonely, and not all lonely people live alone, so the “vision” itself, as translated into narrative, can be really nuanced. For me, writing is isolated work that somehow (miraculously?) does not feel lonely.
I think of all writing—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—as communication first, and that denotes a kind of communion, so in that sense, writing is anything but a lonely or isolated act, but as communication it is strangely delayed.
What an act of hope it is to commit words to a page in the belief that at some point down the line, someone somewhere will read and value them, and as Edwidge Danticat says in Create Dangerously, it may even cost them something dear to do so. Writing is a marvelously optimistic enterprise even when what gets written is not.
For me, the real challenges of being alone with your words are the ones Anne Lamott lays out in her wonderfully candid Bird by Bird chapter, “Getting Started.” It can be tough to quiet the gremlins of chaos telling you your writing is no good, that you should clean out the closet, or mop the floors, or catch up on laundry—anything to quell the fear that what you want to say isn’t worth saying.
JC: Yes—and the leap it takes to overcome that fear is as difficult, in a way, as some of the boldest, wildest choices your characters make, like the protagonists of “The Moth” and “Butterfire.” I love the way you concretize the often-only-internal act of choosing bravely and risking everything.
As a daughter affected by father-loss, I was struck by the several father-daughter dyads that exist in the work and the tenderness with which you depict them. Can you walk us through your goals with capturing those relationships?
PS: This could be a limitation of my own reading, but I’ve not encountered nearly as many father-daughter relationships in fiction as I have father-son and mother-daughter. Not that I set out to fill a gap, but I write stories I’d like to read. I think all writers are conscious of being their own first readers.
My father died young, and his death left me reeling, so I think there is also that in my writing that tries to bring him back in a way. Sometimes this move is overt and sometimes kind of oblique. I suppose I’ll never stop mourning his loss, so lingering among such relationships is almost compensatory.
I definitely get why the daughter in “Chicory” cannot walk away from that man. She doesn’t handle her situation particularly well, but I sympathize with her and understand his hold upon her. My father was incredibly charismatic, and though we clashed at times, I was always sort of under his spell and had to be careful of being overly influenced by his hopes and dreams. It could be tempting to let them supplant my own.
JC: Surreal aspects of many of the stories—a clone, humans who give birth to cats and dogs, a woman who walks into the sky—might prompt some readers to label the collection’s approach magical realism, though it seems to be working more closely in the vein of what Carmen Alemany Bay, professor of literature at the University of Alicante in Spain, has dubbed “ficción de lo inusual,” or “fiction of the unusual.”
As she explains, women writers from across Latin America such as Mónica Ojeda, Mariana Enríquez, Daniela Tarazona, and Samanta Schweblin have used elements of the unreal in their fiction to sharpen readers’ sensitivity to what is true, particularly regarding social conditions and gender, which certainly play major roles in your work. Such fictions of the unusual “present situations,” according to Alemany Bay, “in which the reader is the one who finally decides whether or not [a particular thing] is possible.”
Do you see your work participating in this larger aspect of the literary zeitgeist? If so, can you talk about why this approach speaks to you as a Latina writing in the United States now?
PS: Thank you for this question, for all these generous, brilliant questions. Such a gift!
And what an honor to imagine my work participating in this literary zeitgeist. I’m chronically early to meetings and deadlines, but in bigger things, it feels like I’m always late to the party.
So while I wasn’t influenced by these amazing writers, I have in recent years grown quite enamored of Samanta Schweblin, Claudia Ulloa Donoso, and Cristina Rivera Garza, among others, but as to influences—that is, why and how I came to write such unusual/inusual stories—I have to point to fairy tales, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, and The Twilight Zone, a show that was before my time but re-ran throughout my childhood.
But those are influences that came after something else, something foundational that was baked into me. How can I say it? My grandmother told “supernatural” stories about her life in Cuba in the same manner that she might say the store was out of her favorite brand of rice. She told them straight. She believed them. I listened and very much wanted to believe her, largely did…and still do. So, there’s that.
And then there is this metaphorical piece—this capacity for life to feel so surreal, so out of control strange, maddening, frightening, frustrating that the only way to truthfully represent it is through the fantastic. The fantastic then relays not just what happens in a story, but how those events are experienced by the people in them.
The fantastic captures all of this—the facts and the feltness—but instead of telling, “She felt as if her life had become unreal,” or even showing someone feeling this, the experience transfigures into a fantastical event. For examples from my own collection, an outwardly invisible trauma manifests as a vampiric cat or giant moth or magical weed. And in that way, a rich truth emerges.
The fantastic captures all of this—the facts and the feltness—but instead of telling, “She felt as if her life had become unreal,” or even showing someone feeling this, the experience transfigures into a fantastical event.
Anyone who has found themselves among the powerless, the invisible, the suppressed, the undercompensated, the marginalized, the victimized, the lonely, etc., anyone who has suffered deeply and/or been afraid and then looked up at the sky—just that—likely knows this surreal feeling. It is no coincidence that Latinas, in particular, have been writing this way. One of Donoso’s stories, “Little Bird,” ends with a woman feeling quite successful about a job interview the reader knows has gone badly.
But she feels good because (without giving away too much) she has brought something back to life. Her reality in that story is almost an alternate one, almost supernatural vis a vis the way the world is typically thought to work, but it is a truer, more powerful one overall, and this is what unusual narrative can do. It can show us, through image and sensory detail, the facts and feelings—the soul—of living in this cruel, bizarre, breathtaking world.
If my writing does any of that, I’m thrilled.
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The Only Sound Is the Wind by Pascha Sotolongo is available via Norton.
