Not too long ago, Katherine Vaz read to our class and many other her newest work, Below the Salt. After reading Our Lady of the Artichokes, a collection of short stories, one of her other books, it was interesting to see how her writing techniques and thought process could carry on throughout her work. In both stories, she showed the struggles of families and how they survived them.

She explained to us, “I wrote for about a year, stuff that was so terrible that I threw it in a box.” It was almost nice to know that a top-notch author could encounter writer’s block, like the way I’m sure many of us do too.

Vaz continues to read to us an excerpt of her latest work. It uses a lot of detailed words describing a man named John imprisoned with his mother in the 19^th century. Feeling trapped and despair, they look to music and each other for inspiration and happiness. John is soon sent to fight in the Civil War. Vaz conducted extensive research to get the facts right and add her emotions of sympathy toward the ones who fought in that war. Through a well descriptive narrative of a man Vaz created, she was able to portray her sentiments on the war. Vaz explains, “the story just came to me.” She knew she had to write something about them, all the struggles and emotions families of that time faced. Her brilliant work did just the thing.

It was the first reading I have attended and I was pretty excited to have the opportunity to join in on Katherine Vaz’s reading of her fifth publication, Below the Salt. Even as I had planned to arrive about ten minutes early, the room was already packed and there were no empty seats. I didn’t want to sit out on the benches because of the distractions but it was the only alternative other than sitting on the floor.

As the audience finished up on their refreshments, the 29th Harman Writer of Baruch College gave an introduction of herself and her book, which is based on the time of the Civil War. Similarly to one of the books we read by her, Our Lady of the Artichokes, there is a religious point of view that she incorporates in the story. Below the Salt, from what we can tell by the excerpts she chooses to read to us, is about a woman and her child who are exiled because they chose to not convert to Presbyterianism.

Our Lady of the Artichokes by Katherine Vaz – Image found on Google

Vaz decided to write the book in the point of view of John Olves because he grew up in jail with his mother. She is a great believer in “the feel of the place on your skin,” which she finds important and compares it to how “you can’t just read about what the wind feels like when it comes across the prairie”. She spent half a year in Jacksonville so she could put herself in the shoes of the character to feel for herself what it is like, and therefore, get a better idea of how things apply to her characters in terms of who they are.

Vaz’s reading was full of metaphors and descriptions that painted a picture in my mind. My first experience at a reading was great, followed by a question and answer session. In this session, Vaz explained what she went through to write this book, which took eight years, and how much research she had to do, which is phenomenal and very admirable.

Image found on Google

The gold of Katherine Vaz’s writing lies within her powerful metaphors. Strikingly unusual, her style takes her readers deep into their own imaginations. Though an experience within itself, reading Vaz’s stories draws a magnifying glass to only one pulley within the intricate mechanism of her thinking. To see the big picture, one has to close his eyes and listen.

When Katherine Vaz began reading excerpts from Below the Salt, her raspy voice was quick to convey the solemn tone of the story that was about to unfold. “They ate nothing but the music of birds”, she described the starving Trinidadian prisoners with a pain in her voice. Each word, pause, and breath revealed just how deeply she empathized with the characters that she had given life to. Through meticulously weaving in combinations of figurative language, she built a beautiful relationship between a mother and son who escaped a life of imprisonment and found a new land of erratic possibility and happiness. Though the processes of growing older and immigrating produced inevitable changes within her characters, Vaz was able to keep them grounded. As the family found a haven in New York, traces of their despairing past reemerged when they started to ponder about their future. In a heartwarming moment, the mother said that she would continue to caress her son even in death. Her body would transform into cobwebs after being consumed by spiders, and if her bleeding son walked through them, she would make his pain dissipate. With a moderate pace and a clear effort to enunciate each word of her story, Kathrine Vaz drove bizarre yet beautiful images into the mind of her audience.

In the following Q&A session, Vaz admitted that her talent of building a labyrinth of metaphors is also her biggest weakness. Looking into the distance and evidently thinking back to a prior conversation, she revealed that she must remind herself not to “hang a tassel off every sentence”. Her well-developed tone and self-monitored style is the icing to a cake well layered with research. With a smile on her face, Vaz recounted her time of travel in Illinois, the main setting of her story, and the challenging pursuit of information about John Alves, a soldier from the American Civil War. Even with the necessary information and inspiration, Vaz’s creation of Below the Salt spanned eight years. In a response to an aspiring writer, she said that the biggest challenge of creating a full story is developing a story line, and then asking yourself “how do I make it blossom out?” Even her speech, it seemed, was packed with dazzling images. Some were breathtaking and fantastical, while others were crude and funny. As her hands demonstrated shaking the figure of an upside-down saint, the audience burst with laughter at hearing how the Portuguese chastised their holy-figures for being disobedient.

The air of solemnity turned into one of relaxed conversation as Katherine Vaz explained how her experiences resulted in a varied and surprisingly realistic array of fictional stories.

Image provided by disquietinternational.org

Katherine Vaz, the 29^th writer in residence of the Harman Writer program, came to Baruch to speak about her 5^th book, but also her writing in general. Her writing was full of imagery and metaphors. Speaking of “eating music”, she described the mother pleading for help in a dignified way. The character in her new book is described as “consuming the birds song” from within the jail; an extremely fresh and vivid metaphor describing the woman’s distress.

She told the story of a family moving to the Midwest. “In the beginning was New York. The Midwest would be a haven of jobs and shelter. Here praising God is action.” Her writing flows beautifully well and invokes and incites the reader’s and audience’s imagination and memory. Vaz confesses the difficulty she had when writing the war scenes. However, the reader would be totally unaware of her clumsiness as her writing flowed beautiful even in her war writing. She describes the men “crying out for their mothers, always their mothers.” The savagery of war is illustrated by her portrayal of wild animals eating and attacking the bodies of men. She depicts the battle horses as “dreams of flight”, with their sleekness and regality saying, “any horse, after all, is evidence of God’s artistry.”

During the Question and Answer session Vaz was asked many questions by aspiring writers. Some of her advice included, “There is not good time to start [writing]. Commit to writing, 15 minutes in the morning.” This advice mirrors the same advice I’ve received from almost all my English teachers. It seems that by habitually forcing yourself to write something down each day, we eventually come up with something that we want to pursue and refine.

Katherine Vaz also spoke of different words of wisdom she tries to keep in mind every time she writes. The first quote she spoke of was by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “People tire of magic and want the real.” I especially enjoyed this quote. The simplicity, yet veracity of the statement resounded within my very being. We don’t want to be fooled, but told the truth. Humans don’t like be tricked.

She also tried to follow the advice of Percy, “The feel of the place on your skin”, especially in describing the wind of Jacksonville. Vaz stressed the importance of research in developing a character’s persona. Her Portuguese roots and Catholic background helped form a strong foundation for all her writing. Katherine Vaz’s unbelievable ability to take an audience through an experience was absolutely wonderful.