Lotus Corner: A Conversation with Author Justin Torres
Lotus: My first question is, what is your preparation process for readings like this? If you have anything.
​
Justin Torres (JT): I mean, I've been on the road for a long time, so at this point it's fairly routine, yeah, I don't. This one's interesting because I've been talking about Blackouts for the last year or two, and I haven't really been talking about We the Animals. And this one I'm going to talk more about We the Animals, so it'll be like a blast from the past. And I wonder, I used to have a kind of, I wouldn't say a schtick, but I guess I would say a schtick, but mostly it's been forgotten, so it should be kind of fresh.
Lotus: Do you ever anticipate any challenges with reading to a student audience, that's different than, you know, an adult audience?
JT: I mean, I really do think of you as adults, so I don't think I change what I say at all based on whether I'm talking on a university campus or whether I'm talking on some other venue. I think that in general, I enjoy talking to students more because usually the questions that I get, I don’t know. They're less pretentious and more, like, honest, I think. And like, just this is, kind of my direct reaction to this text. Yeah. And then it's kind of interesting to work through that and talk about and to kind of learn what people are responding to.
Lotus: So our second question is, when did you know you wanted to become a writer, and who or what do you think influenced you most in this decision?
JT: You know that's a tough one. I don't think that, I didn't grow up in a way that anybody was like, You should be a writer. It just wasn't, just wasn't kind of the jobs that were available or that I understood, I didn't think of it as a job like I knew I loved books, but it never occurred to me, like, I hope people write books like people, you know, my mother worked in like, a brewery, you know, like people had jobs that they did with their bodies and hands. I didn't, don't know it. I knew that I wanted to be an artist in a kind of vague, uninformed way that seemed very appealing to me. I wanted to be a painter. I was terrible at it. I really tried. And it was much later in life that I was kind of your age, a little bit older than I'd always written but, but I started to take it really seriously, and I could have put it at the center of my life, and even then, I don't know that I really believed it was gonna happen.
​
Lotus: Okay, so for our third question, We the Animals has been made into a film and Blackouts won the National Book Award for Fiction. Congratulations! How does it feel seeing your work, that was once just an idea you had, become so successful and turn into something so publicly influential?
JT: I love this question! Yeah, it's a trip. It's a trip. I mean, We the Animals was such a slow burn, it was, like, I got good reviews and things when it came out, but it was kind of over the years that it started getting taught, and people kept teaching it. And then kind of a new generation had read it, when they were in school, started teaching, and it was kind of like this, it's this kind of ever-building thing. The influence just kind of kept spreading, I guess is what I want to say. And that was nice, but it also allowed me to keep up with it in a certain sense. You know what I'm saying. Yes, it was a bit of a shock at first, and then it was like, Okay, well, I know how I feel about this. Blackouts happened instantaneously. And before the book was out, it was on the list because they read the books before. And so I don't know. It was weird. It's a shock. It was, I still don't know how I feel about it. I mean, I love it. I recommend it, like National Book, or like, do it, but it's a lot of exposure, I think. One of the first things I did after winning was I got off all social media because I found just this whole new level of people wanting to get in touch with me. And, yeah, there's a lot of projection that happens with these things, but it's like, I'm like, I'm the same schmuck I was, like, the hour before it was announced, but to the world, I'm suddenly nationally recognized. It takes me second to, yeah it’s taking me a while actually, to get comfortable with what gets projected onto that role. But I still recommend it.
​​
Lotus: Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired your two novels?
JT: Yeah, I mean, I write a lot from personal experience, for sure. My first book, I think, was a kind of way of getting back in touch with my family and trying to figure out what happened back there, and using art to kind of make sense of it all. And it was a very private experience. I think I wasn't, I wasn't really thinking about the audience and the reach of it. I was just like for many years, was just me doing this strange little thing, like making fiction out of personal experience with Blackouts. It was much later I realized that I would have this readership. I realized that, you know, no matter what happened, even if people hated it, like a lot of you were gonna read it, it was gonna get reviewed like I was very aware of like that. I was like an author now, I was putting out my second book, and so I thought a lot about getting more of the world, and being a lot more intentional about taking a lot of time to read and read and read and really, just like, expand my own services and references. It was much less a private, personal experience. At that time, I felt like I was trying to make a book that was in conversation with all the literature that I was reading and influencing.
​
Lotus: Many of our readers, myself included, are aspiring writers ourselves. Do you have any closing advice for us, something like maybe you wish you would have had when you started out?
JT: Yeah. You know, it's funny, because you are already so far ahead of where I was when I was around, you know, like, it's like, people ask me for advice, and it's like, it's ironic that I would be giving you advice, because here you are asking very smart questions. And like, should I go to author readings in college? Like, I dropped out. I was really all over the place, I would say, I mean, I think that there's a lot that will get thrown up in your way. Like, if you want to write, if you want to be a writer, there's just a lot, there's financial considerations, there's the kind of, the struggle of rejection, there's just, there's a lot of discouragement that one can encounter in the process. And I think that one thing that I had on my side is that, like I was so broke, so obscure, like I wasn't afraid of poverty and obscurity. Like, I was like, how more poor and obscure can I get? And so I wasn't doing it for any kind of quick satisfaction or any kind of recognition. I just didn't expect it. And so it's been great to have that, but I think that it was, it was in my favor, that I really was just, like, I just want to write and I think that if you can remember that about where that desire first came from, and kind of persevere through, it's not easy, then you get breaks here and there, and it feels good. You know, there are other reasons to be doing it besides recognition. I think that's what I tell my students the most, because a lot of them just like, I'm like, What are you reading? They're like, I'm not reading and writing. But you have to read, you have to want to be part of, like a kind of literary world. And literary conversation has to be more than just I want to get my thing.
​
Lotus: That was the perfect segue, because my last question is, what are you currently reading?
JT: At this moment in time I'm rereading something. It's in my pocket. This is what I was reading on the subway, which is a book called Rent Boy by Gary India. Oh yeah, which is on the cover. I mean, there's a lot of filthy language in here, so I'm not like, you know, read it when you're ready. You're ready, trust me. I think that he died recently, so I've been rereading some of his work, because he was in the 90s. I read that book for the first time in the 90s, and I remember being shocked by it, but I don't really remember anything about it. So I just started rereading it. I'm also reading Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet. Like I've been, I feel like I've got a bit of a gap there. I've read his stuff a little bit over the years, but like, I keep coming up in this kind of moment, and he's such an important poet, I went and tried to read his work. So there's, he has a kind of novel-ish book, he’s primarily a poet. But he has a novel-ish book called The Presence of Absence, which I’m reading right now.
