By Amaris Castillo
There is beauty and heartbreak in everyday life. And it’s in ordinary life and Newark, New Jersey, that Annell López finds much inspiration. I’ll Give You a Reason – López’s debut short story collection – is culled from a deep creative well that melds both.
The stories, which won the Dominican writer the 2023 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize from Feminist Press, explore the lives of immigrants and first-generation Americans in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood. Each story carries a character and voice as distinct as the previous one. In “Great American Scream Machine,” readers meet a young woman who’d just learned the truth about her status after finding her birth certificate. In “Bear Hunting Season,” a widow tries online dating for the first time. In “The Fake Wife,” a Marine veteran meets a Dominican woman at an all-inclusive resort in Boca Chica and takes her up on a business proposal.
In I’ll Give You a Reason López brings us richly-built stories that interrogate and explore topics such as immigration, colorism, sexuality, gentrification, and the American Dream. The majority of them lingered a while after I reached the end. López, who was born in the Dominican Republic and later moved to Newark with her family (and now lives in New Orleans), is also preoccupied with the city. Her collection is set in Newark, and López includes it in her book’s acknowledgements page: “And to the city of Newark, you welcomed us and gave us a home when we lost everything,” she writes. “My heart will always belong to you.”
Ahead of her book’s April 9 release, López spoke with the Dominican Writers Association about the inspiration behind I’ll Give You a Reason, how she approached Newark as a character, the American Dream, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Congratulations on your short story collection. What inspired this novel?
I’ve been inspired by the city of Newark for a long time, in many different ways. I think that Newark and places like Washington Heights and these immigrant hubs are so interesting because people leave their homes, and then rebuild their homes in this other location. It’s not quite like their home, but an approximation of it. I’ve been really fascinated by the idea of that, and by migration in general.
I tend to feel inspired by the mundane. The ordinary, everyday life, to me, feels inspiring. A lot of the stories are very ordinary lives, [about] people dealing with life in itself. A couple of stories do seem a little more risky, but the majority of them are dealing with life as it comes. I find inspiration there. If you look close enough, anything can be inspiring.
Your book is the winner of the Feminist Press’ 2023 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Can you tell us about the moment you won and what this award means to you?
I submitted my collection to the award. Funny enough, I missed the initial email that they sent to me, telling me that I was a finalist. It went to my spam folder, which was insane. But fortunately, they contacted me again to let me know that they had already emailed me about being a finalist.
It took a little while to learn that I won. I was a finalist for a little while, and then I went from being a finalist to moving on to another round of judges. I was waiting for months to hear the official news. I was hoping that I would win it. And when I got the news, I was just over the moon.
I’ll Give You a Reason explores many themes – among them body image, Blackness, gentrification and colorism. What draws you to these topics?
I feel like those topics are important. I think that colorism is something that is important to talk about, and that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable talking about. So is body image. So is sexuality. So is religion. These are sometimes heavy topics that are difficult to write about, but I think that they are important to explore.
As I was writing the collection, I also wanted to document a moment. I wanted to document, ‘This is where we are in terms of society. This is what our world looks like. This is a reality of our world.’ And I wanted my fiction to reflect that moment in time, almost to serve as witness. It seemed, to me, almost impossible to write about our current world – or stories that would take place in our current society without touching upon those really important topics. It seemed unavoidable.
Your stories are set in Newark, New Jersey – which I understand is where you and your family settled after leaving the Dominican Republic. It is in some ways its own character in your book. Can you describe your approach in depicting Newark on the page?
I wanted to give a panoramic view of Newark, so to speak, and so I always envisioned the city being a character in the book. I wanted to portray that character from different angles. There were moments in which I had to be like, ‘OK, we’ve already heard it from this angle... If we’re looking at it from the angle of immigrants and how they feel when they arrive, what if we explore it from the angle of someone who moves to the suburbs away from Newark and has to return? Or what if we explore it from the angle of white gentrifiers moving into Newark, and having to discover it for the first time?’
I tried to look for different entry points to the city and think of: This is what this character sees, and this is what this other character sees. It was a joy, but it was also a challenge. I pushed myself to write one of the stories from the point of view of a white man, because I felt like it was part of the panoramic picture of Newark that I wanted to show. This is what the city looks like for this person… Those were some of the challenges, where I was like: How else can I push myself to get a more layered and complex image of this place that is so misunderstood? But overall I had a great time writing about Newark.
There are 17 stories in this collection. Each is so sharp and has a distinct voice. How did you stitch this collection together?
I came to Newark as the thing that will tether everything, so I knew that at some point being in the city would inform either the way that people act, or would inform people’s actions. But at the same time, I didn’t want to tell the same stories over and over.
I wrote stories. Some of them didn’t make it. In the winning manuscript that I first submitted to Feminist Press, there was one story that didn’t make the cut. I proposed one story that appeared in Guernica, and that also didn’t make the cut – even though it was published by Guernica, which is cool. And there were a couple other stories that I added after I won the prize, that I asked my editor to let me either rewrite or let me add to the collection. When it came down to organizing them and finding the order of the stories, that became a little more challenging and like a project in and of itself.
I want to talk about the pursuit of the American Dream, which is one of the themes you touch on in your book. The American Dream is something that many immigrants aspire to. Others see it as a myth, as deceptive and impossible. What message were you hoping to deliver to readers by touching on the American Dream?
Thank you for that question. Definitely for some people, it’s a myth. And then for some people, it’s a reality. What I wanted to get at is that, for some people, it’s not a choice. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to decide what it means to us and we can say, ‘Oh, this is a myth. This is not real. This is not worth pursuing.’ But for a lot of people who have been forced to leave where they’re from, it’s almost like you have to have this blind faith. Because otherwise, it invalidates everything you’ve been through. It’s like, sure, you can believe it in your heart perhaps that it is a myth, but you still pursue the myth because what other choice do you have?
I think that being from the perspective of having to leave a place – for my parents, for myself because I was 14 years old when I came to the US and I was very much aware of the process – it’s like, yea, I don’t know that I believe in the American Dream the way that it’s sold to people. But also, I could never judge my parents if they chose to believe in it if they don’t have a choice. Because if they don’t believe in it, then why did they do all this for? Why would they uproot their entire lives, make all the sacrifices? Leave the place where they were born, the family they love?
The message is that, fiction or not, the American Dream or the pursuit of it, is something that some people can choose – and some people just don’t get to choose. It’s the hand that’s dealt to them. They have to, either to protect their heart or to protect their pride. They just have to pursue it.
I’m curious to know if you feel as though this achievement of you publishing your first book, and winning this amazing prize. Do you see that as a piece of that American Dream?
I do and I don’t. Funny – I had a conversation with my parents a while ago in which I was like, ‘Maybe if you hadn’t brought us into this country, I wouldn’t have written this book and it wouldn’t have been out.’ And my dad said to me, ‘I don’t believe that for a second. I think that you would have written a book and it would have come out no matter where you were. Whether you had stayed in the DR, or whether you had been here in the US.’
So I don’t want to say that I would have never had the possibility of writing or publishing a book had I not become an immigrant. But at the same time, it is a little bit of an American Dream sort of experience. But it’s not tied to that. It’s not tied to that, even though I am an immigrant and it is meaningful that way. But I want to believe that it could have happened to me elsewhere.
You have a story in your collection titled "Jászárokszállás, Hungary, or Newark, New Jersey, or Anywhere, USA" that centers on a Black woman reflecting on the fetishization she’s been subjected to over her lifetime. What inspired this particular story?
That story is somewhat based on a bit of reality of having had some of those experiences. Not all of them; it is fiction after all. But I, along with many women of color, Dominican women, Black women, have been fetishized. Sometimes it’s a physical thing. Sometimes it’s an accent. Sometimes it’s a hair texture thing. But it has happened, and I wanted to write a story about that. It was more like I had something to say, and it’s less having a story to tell. So it was tricky. But I wanted to say something. And so I came up with this story, and I knew it was going to be short from the beginning… It was one of the first stories that I wrote, actually. I wanted the feeling to be gut punchy. But I knew that it had to be brief for that. And I wanted the readers to enter this cycle of this sort of behavior.
Did any of the stories challenge you or forced you to unlearn something?
I think they all challenged me and taught me things in many different ways. I think that the story titled "The Other Carmen" forced me to be critical of, in this case, the character who is of Dominican upbringing. She’s very vocal about, 'In my Dominican family, I am this. And this other character is that.' I felt like I was putting myself out there by saying that and feeling like somebody’s going to call me out for saying this. So that part was a little challenging as I was writing.
What do you hope readers take away from I’ll Give You a Reason?
I hope that readers enjoy it. I hope that they enter these stories and feel like they were a slice of life. I hope that they have a better understanding of these lives, because I know that they’re characters but in many ways they are mirroring what the world looks like. And I hope readers can connect.
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Visit our Bookshop to preorder a copy of I’ll Give You a Reason.
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About the Author:
Annell López is a Dominican immigrant. A 2022 Peter Taylor fellow, she has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops, and her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. López is an assistant fiction editor for New Orleans Review and recently received her MFA from the University of New Orleans.
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Amaris Castillo is a journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Lowell Sun, the Bradenton Herald, Remezcla, Latina Magazine, Parents Latina Magazine, and elsewhere. Her creative writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms be Like..., and most recently in Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, "El Don," was a finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. Amaris lives in Florida with her family. You can follow her work at amariscastillo.com.