Northwestern University Alumni

Transcript:

MAX: Welcome back to Northwestern Intersections, a Northwestern Alumni Association podcast. We'll be talking to alums about their career paths and the lessons they've learned along the way. Our guest today is Marie Arana, author and literary director at the Library of Congress. She is a prolific writer and editor with leadership experience at major literary institutions from Simon and Schuster Publishing, and The Washington Post, To the National Book Festival, and the Pulitzer Prize selection committee. 

Her books have won critical acclaim and her newest book, LatinoLand is due out soon. We will dive into all of these topics and more in this edition of Northwestern Intersections. Marie Arana, thank you so much for joining us. 

MARIE ARANA: Oh, it's such a pleasure, Max. Thank you for inviting me. 

MAX: Absolutely, we're so happy to have you, and we've got a lot to talk about. I first wanted to congratulate you on the new book and I'd love to talk about that in some detail. But first, let's look back at your time at Northwestern. What did you study and what brought you to Evanston? 

MARIE ARANA: I was a Russian major. I studied Russian language and literature. I came to study Russian. It was not as if decided along the way. I had been studying it since, I was in the-- I think it was the eighth grade, seventh or eighth grade that I started, in school back in Summit, New Jersey. And what brought me to Evanston was, I only applied to three colleges. So strange when you look back, now, everybody applies to (LAUGHING) 15, 20 colleges. I only applied to three. I applied to one as a drama major. I applied to a second one as an opera-- musical opera major. And I applied to Northwestern in Russian. 

And it was sort of like a life career decision, which I made at the age of 17. I came at 17, turned 18 my freshman year. And I just made like a career decision. It was not going to be drama, it was not going to be music, it was going to be Russian literature. I'm so glad that I did. I had visited Evanston in high school. I went to visit a friend and my friend's family took me along. And I just fell in love with the campus. I fell in love with the whole place. It was so-- from New Jersey to Evanston, Illinois was such a change, just a change in character. I mean, the character of the country was different. 

Much friendlier, you know, people weren't snide [LAUGHS] as we tend to be on the East Coast. I just loved it from the very beginning. And it's so physically beautiful with the lake and the library. And the Russian department was very small. I had three people in my class, four people in my class. It was a great experience. 

MAX: So it sounds like you could have had a lot of different pathways even going into college. When you left college and you got your first job, was it expected? What it a surprise? 

MARIE ARANA: Graduating with a degree in Russian language and literature, your options were, OK, you're going to go to graduate school and really, really hone down and get down with the subject, or you're going to take a job that uses Russian. The only people who were employing Russian speakers at the time was the CIA, and I decided instead that I was going to study linguistics so that I could broaden the field, get some more languages in there, broaden the field, and then not be so narrow in Russian. I loved studying. 

I had the most wonderful professor at Northwestern, Irwin Weil, who was a very famous Russian scholar. While I was thinking a lot about my career at the age of 17, by the time I graduated, age 21, I was sort of wanting to broaden my field. I then started to study other languages, study linguistics. But my education at Northwestern was really, really fantastic. I mean, I could have done drama at Northwestern, right? Great drama school. I could have done music. Great music department. But the Russian department was very, very special, very small, and it was intense. It was lovely. It was really great. 

MAX: So obviously you made the right call. You've become an incredible author and editor. Was there ever a moment where you thought about going a completely different route with your career? 

MARIE ARANA: Oh, yeah, there was a moment, in fact, when I was doing my graduate work. I did my graduate work actually in Hong Kong. I studied Chinese after I studied Russian. And then I threw myself into sociolinguistics and was teaching for a while. And teaching wasn't the career for me. I knew that right away. But I was thrown a project in the middle of being at the University of Hong Kong. I was thrown a project to put together a book from a symposium that we had put on in the linguistics department. 

And that electrified me. I loved putting together that book. It was wonderful to edit it, to conceive of it, to edit it, to brush it up, to be in contact with everybody who had written a paper for this symposium, and then to actually write the introduction, and to present it, put it in context. I loved that and I knew that when I went back to the states, I was going to look for a job in publishing. 

MAX: Talk to me about those first experiences in publishing. What drew you into the company that you selected? 

MARIE ARANA: Well, I found a ad in The New York Times. [CHUCKLES] At the time, that was how people found their jobs. I found an ad in The New York Times that was looking for somebody who could speak Russian. Now, this was a throwback for me, because I had already studied all this other stuff in the interim. But I could do that. So I put down "Russian" along with apparently 499 other people. 500 people applied for this job. I didn't get that job, but this is a lesson. 

That resume was sent around, shopped around the rest of the publishing company. This was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishing Company in New York. And they shopped all the resumes around, just in case there was something in there that somebody found interesting. And sure enough, somebody found interesting that I was basically a Spanish speaker also, because I was born in Peru. and I was raised bilingually, that I did know Russian, and that I was interested in a really entry-level job. I was coming in from the bottom. The thing is that, in publishing and book publishing, you come in the bottom with great credentials, but you are promoted quickly. 

I mean, that's the whole thing. You may be sitting as a receptionist in a publishing house, but you will be handed a manuscript to judge. And you'll be given big responsibilities even as basically a grunt in the company. And those opportunities are terrific because, if you perform, you get promoted. And so I was really lucky. I threw myself into that work and I was promoted pretty quickly. I was an editor within, I would say, a year and a half, almost two years of being there. I was made an editor, so that was great. 

MAX: So I've got a couple of questions about your time as an editor, but one that really interests me is looking at the time you've spent as a reviewer and a judge for literary contests, whether it's the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, when you're an editor or a reviewer, what do you look for? What makes a work stand out as exemplary? 

MARIE ARANA: Well, it's really interesting, Max, because during that time that I was doing linguistics, the time that I was living in Hong Kong, I was reading up a storm. All I did was read, which is actually the best education for an editor, for somebody who wants to go into the field of a professional literary person, is just reading. There's nothing like it. You can't be taught, really. I mean, you can be taught to edit, to copy edit, but you can't be taught taste, right? And what teaches you taste, and what teaches you that ability to discern good literature, or just interesting literature, or just the genre that you're looking for, is to read that genre or to read broadly. 

I read very, very broadly because coming out of a Russian major, which was pretty specific, I went into just reading everything I could get my hands on. I read a lot of British literature, a lot of American literature, a lot of stuff that was coming out at the time, a lot of stuff that I felt I had never read and was a classic. And by the time I came out of it, I had definite notions of what I liked, and what sounded good to me, and what sounded enduring to me. And that's one of the most important aspects of what you do as an editor is to not only to select what's going to sell, what's going to be interesting to people who are out there right now, but what's going to endure as well, if you're really into literary fiction, which is what I wanted to be in, literary and fiction and nonfiction. 

So that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for, first of all, something that I haven't read before, something that opens my mind, something beautiful to read that has a sort of musical quality, an enchanting style, and something that's going to endure. So those are the things that I look for. And there are a million ways you can find that in literature. You can find that in history books. You can find it in historical fiction. You can find it in literary fiction. You can find it in genre fiction, and mysteries, and science fiction. So it's just a matter of the breadth of your taste. When I first started, because I was thrown a lot of things all the time, just do this, do that, do this, do that, I really enjoyed being somebody who wasn't specifically in a genre. 

MAX: So this actually transitions perfectly to my next question. How did you get going from editing to becoming full-time an author? 

MARIE ARANA: So I was an editor for quite a while at Harcourt Brace and then at Simon and Schuster. I left from quite a literary house. Harcourt Brace was very, very literary, very sort of exclusive taste. They publish so many Nobel Prize winners. And to Simon and Schuster, which was far more commercial, more basically shooting for bestseller list. But it was an incredible education and it's a wonderful publishing house. In fact, it is my publishing house now. What happened after that, I went to the critical side. 

After creating books, I went to criticizing books because I took a job at The Washington Post as a book review editor, the editor in chief of the book review section. And my job then was to judge the publications. And whereas I had been very, very sympathetic to the author, hard work writing a book, you know? And you want to give people benefit of the doubt. It's a humongous effort. And I remember when I first started, my colleagues thought I was too soft, because I really was like, oh, well, I could see the effort this author was making. And I said, no, no, no, no. You're not supposed to say "the effort." Does it cut it or does it not? [CHUCKLES] Sort of thing. So I did that for quite a few years. 

And then in the process of working at The Washington Post, the editor, the executive editor, recognizing that I was Hispanic. It was the first time anybody paid attention to my latinidad, my being Latina. But at The Washington Post, the executive editor came down at one point and he said, you know, you speak Spanish, you were born in Peru, we've got a huge Latino population here. I know you're the books editor, but can you do some feature writing on the Latino population? And I started to do that. I loved that. I loved that even more than anything I had done before. I loved writing. I loved writing about identity and about communities. 

And so I decided to take a sabbatical to write a memoir because I hadn't really thought about where I had come from, who I was, who that little girl was who emigrated at the age of nine. I hadn't really thought about it, so I paused my job to go off. I asked for a leave of absence and went off for six months and wrote my first book, which was American Chica, which was a memoir. And that transition changed everything. I didn't want to do anything but write after that. I was sucked into several jobs along the way, whenever I paused and after a book, but writing became my true love. 

MAX: This is actually something that you mentioned a little bit earlier, being involved in multiple genres. And this has been the case not only for you as an editor but as an author as well. How do you decide a topic for a book and what's your process like for starting writing? 

MARIE ARANA: I'm very eccentric in this. I know this from having been an editor that you want an author to really become number one in whatever subject they're doing. But you want them to build within the same route so that you can-- basically it's a commercial thing, right? You want to be able to promote them to that readership. I had a very kind literary agent and very kind editors who let me go all over the place, because I started with a memoir. Then I went into fiction for two books, and then I went into history. And now I've gone into with LatinoLand, which is coming out very soon, it's reportage, really. It's really a sort of journalist's bird's-eye-view of a whole population in this country. 

So the way that I select is, it's always with something in mind, which is, I'm trying to draw attention to the Hispanic personality, the Hispanic story in this country. I think there's so little known, even though we are, every year, burgeoning in population, in numbers. It's just tremendous to me. When I was nine years old and came to this country, the only Latinos I saw were my brother and my sister in school or in the community. And now, New Jersey is full of Latinos, full of Hispanics. Chicago is full of-- and there were, I think there was one person from Argentina at Northwestern whom I knew while I was there. And now, of course, there are tons of Hispanics at Northwestern. 

But even though this population is huge, the American public is really not focusing. The American public has been for quite a while now very red team/ blue team, Black and white, very binary. And I'm just trying to crack that a little bit by saying, hey, we're here. 

MAX: Even after all of these books you're putting out, LatinoLand, which is coming out, which is fantastic. It has to be just an incredible amount of research that goes into all of these. How do you stay energized after going through so many detailed, advanced research projects? 

MARIE ARANA: Yeah, this was a toughie. When I wrote the biography of Simon Bolivar, the papers, I mean, this is a story that's 300 years old, and it very spread out, and very concrete. And there are libraries full of material and letters on this personage. And it was very, very nicely focused. And he was dead as could be, so there was nothing else to find out, really, I mean it was all just interpretation. 

But in this story, LatinoLand, this is a very malleable population of 63 million people out there who are from different parts of Latin America with different kinds of heritage, with different kinds of races. There is not one race, I mean, it's every color. And my mission here is really to say, hey, we're here. We're not paid attention to too much. I mean, when you publish a book, when a Latino publishes a book, it gets put in the bookstore under Latin American Studies and everybody says, oh, well, that's Latin American stuff. Well, no, it's American stuff. I mean, we are. We've been there, many of us, particularly the Mexican-Americans in this country, have been here from before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. 

So that's my mission, my challenge. The skipping from either a memoir, to fiction, to history, to journalism is all really with the same idea. 

MAX: And I'm glad that you mentioned Bolivar because I think that's what people picture as quintessential history. It's a person who lived a while ago who's no longer alive, let's analyze their life. And the new book that you're working on, it's a living, evolving story. It's probably going to change a ton between now and 2050, 2100, whatever it might be. What was different and what was challenging about writing a story that's kind constantly evolving? 

MARIE ARANA: Yeah, it was a huge challenge, Max, because I did 237 interviews, interviews all the way from-- (CHUCKLING) yeah-- from people on the street, construction workers, menial workers, to executives of huge corporations, senators, musicians, movie stars. And right down to domestic workers and gardeners. It was huge. It's something that you can only touch on. You can only-- I call it a sweeping portrait because there's no way it is a comprehensive portrait. We're all very different. But the idea is to get across that aspect of our being as different as we are. 

That this concept, that we are a voting block, or that we are isolatable as people think we can be, is poppycock. But that project, when you're trying to tell the history, you're trying to tell the geography of the population, because you can be from the Caribbean and be Latino, and you can be from the mountains in the Sierra in South America, or you can be from the jungle in Peru or Brazil. So very, very different aspects. But that was the point. I mean, the point is to say, look at this extraordinary canvas that we are. And we have many things in common. I mean, we generally speak Spanish. We generally have isolatable qualities that unify us. And we feel in certain ways unified. It's a bazaar. I mean, nobody feels they are a Latino when they come here. They feel they're Brazilian, or Argentine, or Mexican, or Puerto Rican. 

But nobody feels they're Latino until they land here and they're told they are. And then it's like, oh, OK. Right. And it's that sort of imposed unity that's kind of wonderful and different. 

MAX: So we've talked a little bit about your books. I also want to talk about some of your other responsibilities. You currently are the Inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress and you also direct programming for the National Book Festival. How did those come about and how do you manage all of these different conflicting responsibilities? 

MARIE ARANA: Thank you for that question, Max. Yeah, it's sort of serendipity. This is how things happen in the world. I happened to be at The Washington Post. One of the top managers at The Post-- one of the person who is into community affairs and is making sure that we're covering the Metropolitan area as we should-- had this bright idea to have a book festival. So The Washington Post Book Festival, right? The LA Times has one. The Miami community has one. Good cities, big cities with good readerships have a book festival. So The Washington Post was thinking about that. We were flying all over the country looking at festivals and seeing how they work so that we could do that. 

Well, I'm coming back from one of these visits to a festival. I step off the plane and I hear Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Laura Bush announcing alongside the Librarian of Congress that they want to do a book festival. And I'm thinking, oh, my god, the White House and the Library of Congress want to do a book festival. What does that make us, The Washington Post, trying to do a book festival? There's no way the city can champion two. So I immediately asked The Washington Post representative for this effort, called them up. I got in touch with Laura Bush's office. I got in touch with the Librarian of Congress and I said, we want in. 

And so from the very beginning of the National Book Festival, The Washington Post was a sponsor and it was very heavily invested in it. So from the get-go of the National Book Festival, even though I was with The Washington Post, I was involved. And the way that I was involved was, I was-- because you have so much contact with authors and writers as a book review editor, because you're constantly not only reviewing books, but you're also assigning books to review to other authors, right? So you know Joyce Carol Oates, you know the time Toni Morrison. You know these people because, not only are you dealing with their books, but they will review books for you. 

So the Library of Congress was calling on us at The Washington Post to help with the contact of all the authors. So from the very beginning, I was there, sort of involved in just selecting some of the authors that would be featured. Eventually, when I left The Post to write books, the Librarian of Congress, then I was actually doing my research at the Library of Congress and the librarian literally knocked on my door and said, when you finish this book, I want you to come work for me. So I ended up working for him for the National Book Festival and running the book festival at that point. And then one thing led to another and I was made the Inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress, which was enormous fun. Because the Library of Congress is the largest cultural institution (ENUNCIATING) in the world. 

It has an extraordinary collection, extraordinary history. I could bring to it was, the currency of contemporary publishing and contemporary works. You know, knocks everybody cold on the collection front and on the history front. But on what's current today, and what are people reading, and all of that sort of stuff, I could bring that to the library. And so that was really fun setting up department called Literary Initiatives in the Library of Congress. So my whole life, as you can see, which started with that little book on a symposium at the University of Hong Kong, it's pretty straight-thread, right? It's all about books. And it's every aspect of books, producing them, editing them, criticizing them, honoring them, celebrating them with prizes and such, celebrating them at the National Book Festival, and then writing them myself. 

MAX: What's the best piece of advice anyone has given you? 

MARIE ARANA: I guess the best advice that was ever given to me was by my mother. And my father also said the same thing, in a different way, in a different language [LAUGHS]. But basically, when I was very, very little and I would want things or I would admire things, my mother said, you go out and get it. And it wasn't going to land on your lap. No one's going to call you up and say, you want to be a books editor? You want to be a literary director? No one's going to call you up and say that. You go and get it. I remember as a little girl, going out and getting a ballet lesson, because my parents weren't going to say, here's a lesson here and here's a lesson there. 

That has served me so well in terms of publishing books and in terms of my own finding subjects to write about. That concept of, you've got to go out, and go through the weeds, and beat down the grasses to get to that thing that you want. And you've got to find it yourself, and you've got to have some ambition. The advice that I would give others is, yeah, throw yourself into something. Find out about it. Don't be so selective. And I find that my young friends, some of them are looking for the very specific thing that will suit them, when in fact, they may discover things along the way just by bumping into them. Basically, the hardest thing about a career is just showing up. 

MAX: I've been really lucky to interview and talk with some amazing authors from Northwestern as a part of our fall programming for the Northwestern catalog, which is our alumni author database, which has now over 1,000 books, which we're very excited about. And I've asked this to a few different people: Are you happy with the state of reading in the US? 

MAX: I hear so much being at the Library of Congress, where people really worry, for instance, about the state of literacy in this country. It should be a lot better than it is. At the same time, I think that reading has never been proven so valuable as during the pandemic. I mean, the upsurge has and the upswing has been enormous. Given time and given solitude, that is our sort of default position. Books are basically your salvation in a way, your lifeboat. And I love that. That Is really rewarding for someone like me. 

MAX: What is the most challenging thing you've ever done in your career? And what are you most proud of? 

MARIE ARANA: Oh, boy, that is such a hard question, Max. My goodness. The most challenging thing I've done in my career is write a book. There is no question about it. Start a book. And I mean, every bit as much a book of fiction, which everybody says, oh, that must be so easy. I've got so many ideas. But really, truly writing a book is a tremendous effort. When I finished my first draft, or whatever, when I look at what I've written in a given day, it's horrible. It's awful. It's a mess, as Vargas Llosa or a million other people, really great writers, Toni Morrison said. You know, it's a morass. You produce a miasma in the beginning. It looks like slop. 

And then you hone it, and you hone it, and you hone it, and you hone it. And that work, which is hard work, chiseling, and to get it down to some sort of perfection that sounds right to you. I mean, some people read it aloud. Is it poetic? Is it musical? Am I saying something important? That is hard work. Those are the hardest things I've ever done. The eight books that I've written, really, really hard. Aside from my children, of course, I would say I am most proud of the way that I have been able to support other writers I admire. This is a huge thing for me. 

I've gotten to the point from producing other people's books, to judging other people's books, to now I just want to shine a very bright light on people who really, really do this work well. So throwing a festival where I can lift writers up, or giving a blurb, or just pointing to a book and saying, I'm really proud that I've reached a certain promontory where maybe I can help somebody get some attention for the good work that they've done. 

MAX: Are there any Northwestern shout-outs that you'd like to give? 

MARIE ARANA: I definitely want to give a shout out to the libraries. The library system at Northwestern is amazing. I spent so much time studying in the library. I think that that prepared me, in a way, for ending up at the Library of Congress and looking back at Deering and saying, my gosh, that was a really great library. And I spent so much time in it. I really enjoyed being in the Waa-Mu Show when I was there. That was so much fun and it was so creative. And if I didn't major in drama, it was a tremendous outlet. I loved it. So a shout out to that. And a shout out to that incredible professor of mine, Professor Irwin Weil, who was a professor of Soviet Modern Contemporary Literature at the time. He was an inspiration. 

When I was made Alumnus of the Year back in 2009, he came up and introduced me. Such a great-- I can't tell you the feeling, having your old professor, so many years after graduation, introducing you and saying kind words about you as a student. Was great. 

MAX: What is the best and/or most important book you've ever read? 

MARIE ARANA: The most important book I've ever read, I would say, would be the first book that blew my mind when I was a kid. That book was actually something that I never specialized in, or that didn't necessarily obsess me for the rest of my life, but it just knocked me off my chair. And that was a book of horror stories. It was, oh, my gosh, it was a combination of Edgar Allen Poe and just every scary story that you could think of. I just fell in love with reading at that point. I wanted to scare myself silly. That was just like the biggest goal in my life. 

MAX: This has been so much fun. Marie Arana, thank you so much for joining me. 

MARIE ARANA: Oh, such a pleasure, Max. Thank you for having me. 

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