How did you become a writer?
I began writing a novel, eventually called Bibliolepsy, when I was around nineteen, and my decision to work on a novel, I think, was my beginning as a writer.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
Filipino writers are key for me, above all—I am obsessed with Jose Rizal. I wrote a whole book, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, in some way to resurrect him—to give him homage and to imagine him outside of his stature as the national hero. He’s actually a novelist, but Rizal’s figure is installed in practically every town plaza in the Philippines, for his martyrdom that led to the revolution against Spain. In my novel, Raymundo Mata, I tried to imagine him as an artist, as someone who maybe, who knows, revises—an idea about Rizal that is actually blasphemous for Filipinos, as he is so encased in the amber of our idolatry. On the other hand, the idolatry has legs, has substance, so we are lucky that our most revered person is a poet. Writers like Nick Joaquin, Estrella Alfon, Franz Arcellana, Wilfredo Nolledo are just a few Filipino writers who gave me my cue to write fiction. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fyodor Dostoyevski were also key writers when I was kid—I began 100 Years of Solitude and could not get up until I finished it. Dostoyevski’s mix of politics, philosophy, radicalism, and art is indelible. More practically, I read Jorge Luis Borges in this postcolonial, deconstructive way—in my novels, I use his philosophical ficción structures of inversion, doubling, and narrative modes that mimic infinity as a way to interrogate coloniality, identity—questions of who writes the story and the layers of history, self-making, and power that lie in our acts of narration. I read Poe and detective stories and Nabokov in this way, too—in a postcolonial, deconstructive way. I think I also read John Barth in that way—his Sot-Weed Factor and so on. He was my writing teacher—and I wrote to him from the Philippines because I was very drawn to his narrative experiments. In terms of the sheer pleasure of the sentence, and of words, I go back to the Irish—James Joyce is very important to me—I see him as a postcolonial writer, taking English back from the English. And the words of poets—I was in love with Sylvia Plath as a little girl; I love Lorca, Rilke. I loved the poems I had to read in college—they made me think of rhythm, of beats. Shakespeare, Donne, Gerald Manley Hopkins. All of them really. I still think of poetic beats when I write sentences. I read Henry James, Austen, Proust, and Virginia Woolf to think about narrative discourse and time. They’re hugely instructive and pleasurable. And every day I am haunted by the stories of Kafka. Later I read Joaquim Machado de Assis—Barth, my advisor in grad school, told me to read him, and I think the structure of my novels still owe a lot to Machado de Assis. I think I have read every single book by him translated into English—I have multiple translations of Dom Casmurro. Living in America, I began reading a lot of black writers—as a kid growing up in Manila, an English major, we did not read black writers in school apart from Chinua Achebe (only one novel, Things Fall Apart) and James Baldwin. My childhood education was very colonized by British literature, actually. So this is a rich source of thought for me right now. I love the theorists: WEB Dubois, Kimberle Crenshaw, Toni Morrison’s essays, Baldwin, of course, Christina Sharpe, Nikole Hannah Jones. I am sad that I did not read Zora Neale Hurston as a child. Lastly women writers are very important to me in my current books—Elena Ferrante, Edna O’Brien. I’m rereading Estrella Alfon—right now I’m reading and teaching mostly women.
When and where do you write?
I write my first drafts in the summer, outside, on a garden lounge chair in our home in western Massachusetts, beginning with coffee in the morning until I cannot see anymore. I revise anywhere, and obsessively.
What are you working on now?
I just finished a novel that was at first about two brothers in the Philippine-American war but turned out to be all about my mom! Very weird. I’m still revising it. But the next book I’m looking forward to is set in the 1880s, most likely beginning and ending in Venice. It’s about a murder of a wife by her artist-husband, with Freud as a minor character in the background, plus Russian anarchists, Filipino revolutionaries, my usual suspects. It will be narrated by a woman, with a Wuthering Heights structure—there’s an intimate outsider who tells the whole story. In any case, I already have a Heathcliff—the Filipino hero and the great artist, Juan Luna, who killed his wife named Paz. So it is Wuthering Heights, but with Filipino radicals plus Freud.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
I enjoy writing very much. It’s why I first began to write—when I wrote Bibliolepsy, it was just fun. I write because it makes me happy—it gives me joy. I don’t understand when people think writing is a hardship. It’s certainly not easy—but it is what I look forward to all the time, every day. It’s true that personal circumstances have made me stop writing—in fact for years. I stopped writing between 1998 and 2005. Literally. I could not write in the years immediately after my husband died. But I don’t think that was writing block. It was grief. So I don’t think I have experienced writing block in the way people seem to explain it. The fact is, in 2005, when I got back to writing, when I found myself being able to work once again on a novel, it was just sheer joy to know I could in fact return. I cling fiercely to that joy. I’ve kept that joy like a vow.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
John Barth, my advisor at Hopkins, always used to say—grist for the mill! Meaning, everything you do, read, smell, see—everything is grist for the mill, a source for writing. I think of that all the time.
What’s your advice to new writers?
I think one should find that joy and pleasure in writing. That has been key for me—that to me writing is a pleasure. That’s why I do it. And when my writing is not a pleasure—I think there’s something wrong with the novel. So I keep working on it until I find where the pleasure is in the writing of it. Basically, I claw my way to pleasure. When I find that—the pleasure in the writing—that’s when I know the structure is right, the voice is correct, and so on. So pleasure tells me something about my art—it makes me revise, rework, reconsider. I mean, when I don’t have that pleasure—I won’t publish that novel, it is not any good. Every novel I have published comes from that joy—from the fun of art. My advice to new writers would be to write with joy—find that joy, and make that the reason for writing. I think, if you don’t find joy in writing, you should not do it. It’s a very basic human thing, I guess—we should choose joy in life. If writing does not do that for you, then it’s not a bad thing to do something else—in fact, it might be a good thing to seek joy instead. I think it is more important to seek joy than to be a writer. Life’s too short.
Gina Apostol's fourth novel, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers' Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Dayton Prize. Her third book, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.
