Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
June 15 LITM: Ananda Lima
Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024), and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021, winner of the Hudson Prize). Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers and will be a fall 2024 Flagler College Storytellers Author in Residence. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program and currently serves as a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers. She has an MA in linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in creative writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Ananda Lima: I have a very hard time remembering exactly or picking a favorite, but I think what made me a reader was a combination of things: a library of books my aunt left in our house when she moved to the U.S. and the collection of vinyl records that lived alongside it (especially music by Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil), reading Machado de Assis at School, soap operas, 1980s and ’90s American movies, the stories my aunts shared with each other, full of private jokes and insights (some which I came to access, some I never did).
Some authors/books I love that come to mind: Clarice Lispector, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Rachel Cusk, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Mona Awad, John Keene, Ashley Honeysett. There are many more, but these are some I love.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Lima: No! I always wrote, but the possibility that I could be a writer didn’t even occur to me until way late. I was an adult, not even a young adult. It didn’t occur to me even though I was already a writer the whole time.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Lima: Maybe the simple request to write back was the greatest advice in there? I can’t pick one thing, but I learned a lot through letters: How closeness needs tending, but not constant tending, and how the written word can linger with you after you read. How writing is for you and for others. How a letter is a way to convert time, care into a physical object you can send to people. The writing is part of it but it’s also the physical object.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book. How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Lima: This book is about a Brazilian writer living in the U.S., curly hair, her name may start with an A, who is writing the stories in the book. She meets the Devil at a Halloween party in 1999 and sleeps with him. It is just that one time, but they keep in touch and meet throughout her life, as she writes these stories for him. The stories themselves are stand alone stories, but they interact a lot with this meta layer in very fun ways. They include a ghost front he future, Americans coming out of vending machines, and more (including the Devil). There is a bit of the absurd, including some surreal things and the absurd of everyday life too. It is playful and it has a lot of heart. It is my weird baby, and I am so happy it is about to be out in the world.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Lima: I can’t remember many stories involving mail right now (I am sure I will after the interview is over). Here is one: When I was much younger, a long distance boyfriend sent me chocolates. They somehow never made their way to me and were returned to sender. The thing is, once they reached him, we had already broken up. It wasn’t a super long relationship. The breakup was somehow too brief, but also with the length of the time we were together and the distance, I didn’t know what exactly we should have done differently in the break up and why I thought something was missing. So he wrote me a note telling me about the chocolates, saying he was eating it with his roommates now. I think it was meant to make me jealous (he had these gorgeous roommates), maybe a little bitter on his end, like I was willingly missing out on these great chocolates. On his end, I think he was saying, “Too bad for you!” But on my end it came out sweet, and also he sounded okay. Somehow the chocolates provided closure for both of us, even though our perceptions were very different. He got to be mean (he wasn’t really mean), and I got something sweet and ending.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Lima: So many great things, but I love “Sentences” by Meredith Talusan. It is meta, fun, funny, and so smart. I love the style, too, it’s a part of the story and working in multiple levels. I loved reading it.
