Edgardo Vega Yunqué was born in Puerto Rico in 1936, and at the age of 13 emigrated to New York City. Though coming late to the party by today’s standards, he’s published extensively: both novels and short stories. His most recent novel, Blood Fugues, explores the ambiguities of racial and national identity, absolute truth and its subjective permutations, and the implacable fidelity of love.

Steven Hansen: Your bio states you knew you wanted to become a writer in 1955, but you didn't publish your first creative work until 1977. I find it hard to believe it took you 22 years to write something publishable. Albeit writing is not necessarily publishing, but what's your story?

Edgardo Vega Yunqué: I came from Puerto Rico at the age of 13. I decided to become a writer at 21 while in Athens, Greece when I was in the Air Force. I wrote English very poorly, so it took me a long time to understand what writing a short story or a novel entailed. While I had read a great deal, I didn't yet have the understanding to be able to write a short story, which in many ways, is a more difficult and demanding art form than the novel.

SH: Did you want to learn to write well in English because you knew you could reach more readers that way?

EVY: More so because I had read a great deal of American Literature and that is what attracted me to writing even though I had read a great deal as well in Spanish. I had something happen to me that was a bit strange. When I was 19 I came home on leave and my sister and her friend were cleaning out an estate in upstate New York. In cleaning out a guest house on the property I found about 500 paperbacks. I put about 300 in two suitcases and brought them home. By luck I had acquired all of what Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Erskine Caldwell, James M. Cain, Pearl S. Buck and many other writers had written up to that time. I also brought home a lot of genre novels: detective, western, science fiction, romance and other types of novels. I didn't know the difference, but I began being able to distinguish between something by Mickey Spillane and William Faulkner or John Steinbeck.

SH: That last part about the difference between Spillane and Faulkner is at the crux of the genre vs. literature debate. What, in your opinion, are the distinctions? And would you characterize your writing as either lit or genre, or maybe a little of both?

EVY: I consider my work literary simply because of style and structure. I'm a purist in that regard. The notion that there should be no distinction between the genre novel and the literary one is one that can't be argued from a populist point of view since so many people in the US feel entitled to believe that their opinion in all things is what is important and carries equal weight. However, I don't think anyone who knows literature will argue that in both architecture and content, the genre novelist is basically not writing the same novel over and over again. Rarely, are genre novels, instruments of ideas. There is no doubt that they’re entertainment, sort of sitcoms and soap operas in bound form. Since the book is traditionally an instrument for learning, my question is what is it that people who read genre novels learn from reading them? Because of the nature of what a book is, something is being learned, and to me what is being learned from formula novels, which is what I call genre novels is compliance. To me that is a dangerous for a thinking society which the United States prides itself in being. The present administration is perhaps proof positive that the US is turning away from that perceived notion. Formula novels produce formula thinking.

SH: What is the 'culture of mediocrity' as it pertains to academia?

EVY: Please forgive me, but did I use that phrase? If so, could you refresh my memory?

SH: I read it somewhere as I was researching you. It could have been the writer writing about you who come up with the phrase. But your genre vs. literature answer and the phrase 'formula thinking' made me think of it. If this line if inquiry is flawed just let me know and I'll change directions.

EVY: No, it's a good question but I can only answer it from my perspective and not from an academic one. We live in a marketplace society and the important thing about a capitalist economy is that goods are manufactured and purchased. Everything, therefore, is predicated on whether it will be purchased or not and not because it is good for the consumer. Some people were shocked that people took advantage of the Katrina disaster and looted stores and carried away TVs and other appliances. Two months later people are attacking each other brutally to obtain x-boxes or some such nonsense at a Wal-Mart. In both cases, even though in the former people were "looting" and the latter group was willing to pay for the goods, both groups were motivated by greed and behaving brutally. Both were motivated by advertising and the need to acquire goods by any means necessary.

Therefore, everything becomes a commodity and most novels are geared to the mediocre consumer who needs to be entertained. Two things: The US does not only overeat but over indulges in entertainment. If the US were provided anymore entertainment it would become catatonic. The other justification is the argument, given often to justify the reading of genre novels, and lately proffered regarding the Harry Potter phenomenon, is that "at least they're reading." Oh, yeah? Another way of looking at it is that the children are being trained to read formula novels so they can be more easily managed.

My argument is not with the readers for they are innocents and purchase goods at the behest of other more powerful entities who have advertising at their command. I know of one writer who has written over 280 novels in several genres, some, which were romances using women’s names. Some people say that he’s a prolific author. That’s like saying General Motors is a prolific auto maker. My argument is with the writer who provides mind junk food. I realize that they have to support families, but at some point it becomes self-indulgent and harms a society that needs minds to be exercised and not aided in becoming culturally obese.

Reading, in and of itself is not a valuable skill, unless content and story are both addressed with equal weight. It's fine for children to be fed fantasy, but adults don't seem to fare much better than children in reasoning and weighing reality. Content within what is read is the important thing. Oral traditions, which do not rely on writing or reading convey information that is relevant. What do genre novels convey? Compliance.

SH: But there are certainly instances where the genre/literary lines blur. Ray Bradbury for instance is mostly thought of as a sci-fi writer, but his novel Fahrenheit 451 and story “There Will Come Soft Rains": are two pieces that will stand the test of time. One reviewer commenting on your novel Blood Fugues said something to the extent that the compelling pacing of your plot owes much to your early noir-type reading. What I'm getting at is, maybe, a writer can get stuck on labels, which are made up to more easily divide the user-friendly sections of some big chain bookstore.

EVY: Oh, there’s no question that I learned a great deal from reading detective stories and there are elements to creating page turners, but the fact that Bradbury or for that matter, Stephen King, can depart from writing the same novel over and over, doesn't mean that there is no distinction between what is literary and what is genre. That some writing "appears" to cross over, doesn't mean that because there is mystery or romance in a novel, that it can be categorized as genre and adopted by people who need facile answers to complex questions. I can cite literary novelists like E.L. Doctorow who wrote Welcome to Hard Times, a novel, which, on a superficial level, can be considered a western. Did he write another western? No, he did not, much as he didn’t write another gangster novel after Billy Bathgate. The difference is the intent of the novelist. In both cases Doctorow was exploring ideas.

That the critic alluded to the dramatic tension in Blood Fugues points to the fact that I told him that I had read detective novels as a youth. This is true, but I will never again write a novel like Blood Fugues. That is a one time occurrence. I want to explore structure and ideas not satisfy the vapid entertainment needs of a public that needs waking up rather than one more pacifier to make it compliant so that it can consume goods that are often not that good for their wellbeing. Very few people have seen the more political aspects of Blood Fugues and that's fine.

I should add that the distinction between literature and genre is quite clear. I have heard people within publishing and outside of it insist in their marketplace mentality, for example, that "Literature" is just another genre. That is one of the worst donkeyisms that US pop thinking has produced.

SH: I think I saw the political undertones of Blood Fugues but chose to overlook them because they were too disturbing. What I'd like to comment on now is more philosophical. Mary Boyle (the Irish matriarch of the 3 generations explored in the novel) spins yarns that can be said to be close to the oral tradition you mentioned earlier, that conveys universal truth better than the literal re-telling of events. Is this something you think modern American culture is lacking?

EVY: Well, Mary Boyle spins yarns in order to create obfuscation, to mislead, not to instruct in an oral tradition although in telling certain stories they’re remembered by the younger people, but always with doubt as to their veracity. But I think you’re right and that this element is one of the most important things missing from modern US society, that is, the notion of family stories passed on. Older people are sort of shunned and shunted aside as curiosities and their knowledge or wisdom has been supplanted by the immediacy of electronically-generated entertainment. We are called seniors which means we’ve graduated into oblivion.

SH: Can a writer help alleviate this lack by simply going about his/her task of writing?

EVY: My view of writing the literary novel is that I'm writing for several reasons. 1) to document what I've seen for political and social reasons. 2) because I’m making an effort to honor a tradition of the novel as part of the humanist dialogue, and 3) for the future in the hope that people can learn certain things. I don't believe, like many so-called progressives, that art can ennoble the people. True art challenges convention. It doesn’t become another tool for the managing of people so that they can behave themselves. I open myself to the charge of being an elitist, possibly the worst charge that can be leveled at a thinking person today in a so-called democracy. It appears we can have elites in the entertainment industry, in sports, and almost any area of society, but not in creativity and intellect since thinking makes us all equal. That is such a crock! Art and literature are for a very select few that have been educated to discern certain symbols and have the leisure to spend the time reading and examining art. All my work is on behalf of people who have little or no voice. While they may never read me for the reasons I’ve mentioned I feel that I’m giving voice to their concerns.

For the rest of the people TV and Films are the vehicles that can reach them. I haven't the youth nor the inclination to make films. If I were younger I might have gone in that direction. And yet most great films are out of the reach of most people. The great works of literature cannot be made easily into films. Very rare. The Hollywood motion picture of 120 minutes is basically a short story and that is why genre novels lend themselves so well to film. What a genre writer may use four pages to describe the conning tower of a submarine, a film can show in 30 seconds. It's nearly impossible to convey the rage and confusion of Raskolnikov and his inner dialogue on film. Also a complex novel takes more than two hours to do it justice.

SH: Many disagree that art is only for a select few. Blood Fugues is art, is it not? And yet I would characterize it as very entertaining, no matter the political and social and philosophical themes it is also addressing. I'm sorry I keep going back to this argument, but there has to be a middle way doesn’t there? Blood Fugues, in my opinion, is a brilliant example of a novel that gives a resounding 'Yes' to this question.

EVY: There is no question that my aim is to create work that will appeal to readers, but I feel like I have important things to say. I use stories to say those things simply because it is an effective way to get across my point of view. By the way, many people have said that art and literature shouldn’t be political. I disagree. Art and literature cannot help but be political. If you shy away from being political you’re simply becoming a non-thinking and uninvolved combatant—sort of like in the category of the collective blindness that took place in Nazi Germany. Any artist who believes him/herself above it all is contributing to the demise of this society. I think a work of literature can be read on several levels. The most basic is the story level. Sadly, most people can only read on the story level, but that certainly is not the most important one. The story level is like the vessel from which you drink. What you drink is the issue. The liquid may not be healthy or exciting, but it could be. Or the story can be the train or plane on which you travel. Who you ride with on those conveyances is important. I certainly don't want to go on a pleasure trip with a boring person. The reason for being on that train or plane is also of importance. Where is the writer taking you? Is he or she simply there to entertain you or is the writer making an effort to point something out about the human condition? A literary novel seeks to create many levels of reading. Like the most basic reader, I write to find out what's going to happen next. I couldn't write something that was boring me.

SH: Your bio says that you work on several different pieces -- be they novels or stories -- at once because your characters are so familiar to you that it is no problem for you to sort them out among different narratives. My question then is, are these characters amalgams of certain mannerisms and/characteristics of actual people you've known. And, if so then, is writing, too, a way to commune with those from your past?

EVY: That is an excellent and very complex question. First of all I’m familiar with them because I make an effort to treat my characters as if they were actual people. To that end they invariably act as if I have little influence on their thinking and actions. I’ve had some experience with theater and the most important thing is to treat actors with respect. You hope they open and give you their best. Because of that you must treat them with the utmost respect. I find that because I'm writing about ideas that concern me it isn't a problem to keep track of the things I'm writing about. If I have a group of friends for whom baseball is paramount on their minds, I’m not going to bring up things extraneous to baseball. I know that our dialogue is limited to that subject. If another group is concerned with politics, it would be foolish for me to bring up baseball. I make an effort to write believable characters so therefore since I don't forget my children's and other relatives and friends' names and their histories and their predilections, the same thing happens with characters. Is there a resemblance, for example, between Fran Romero in Blood Fugues, and Lurleen Meekins Farrell in Bill Bailey? I suppose one could raw parallels between the two, but they're both very distinct characters even though they're both blondes who love their husbands and care for their children.

I think because I'm writing a different novel each time, it makes it easier to keep track of the action and characters. Sometimes I do forget something about a character and confuse it with another, but that is rare. I keep notes of the characters' biography. It’s much as when a mother has to call all her children’s names before hitting on the one she wants to scold. It frightened the hell out of me when that happened and I was relieved when it wasn’t me. She eventually remembered.

SH: You've structured Blood Fugues and your previous novel, Bill Bailey, as musical forms, that one being a “symphonic novel…"

EVY: Well, get ready because I’m presently working on one that is using the blues as its structure.

SH: You've succeeded in pulling this off, at least in the novel I read. What made you think, or gave you the notion, you could borrow the structures of one seemingly disparate art form (music) and make it work in the other (writing)?

EVY: Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to explain that I write from the basis of hearing language. Even though I've taught English composition and creative writing with all their elements, my strength lies in hearing the language in the same way that I hear music. Jazz, which is my main interest in music, is an improvisational music and in emulating that art form, I'm able to understand a theme (tune) and improvise on it. Bill Bailey was in great part written that way and people have referred to some of the passages as riffs or solos. So I don't know if literature and music are such disparate art forms.

I like to experiment with form and it seems to me that writing a novel is more akin to musical composition than the actual tedium to which writing is often reduced. Additionally, literature is the most abstract of art forms since with the aid of 26 rather harmless and insignificant symbols a writer can create dance, music, architecture, sculpture, painting and many other arts. I love that about being a novelist and consider writing also akin to painting. I also believe strongly that there is great musicality in literary writing. That in itself is the most intriguing and satisfying aspect of the novel. I believe that there are novelists whose work is parallel or consonant with periods of music and art. Even when you look at James Joyce's Finnegans Wake you compare it to the music of something like Stravinksy's "Firebird Suite," or perhaps the work of a Picasso or even someone like Jackson Pollock.

SH: Ugh, Finnegans Wake... you're a better man than I. Talk about complex! Don't you need to learn how to speak Irish in order to understand that novel?

EVY: Some knowledge of Irish is helpful, but there are plenty of studies and guides to understanding Finnegans Wake. My ex-wife, who was sort of an amateur Joyce scholar and is the only person I know personally who has read the novel and can explicate it coherently, has said that by 2020 Finnegans Wake will be read easily by children in junior high since the work shouldn't be read linearly, but much as one experiences mixed media or electronic games. While it has a coherence, the work is difficult. By the way, she also reads Joyce's Ulysses every five years in a 24 hour period without sleeping, which she claims is the only way to read it. It took me months to read it and Finnegans Wake I've only read in parts. I’ve read more studies of Finnegans Wake than the actual work. But the important thing is that the novel offers a writer an opportunity to experiment. That it has been sort of co-opted for the sole purpose of entertainment rather than to stretch structural reality saddens me. But that happens with all developments in the arts. My son, Matt, to whom Blood Fugues is dedicated, stopped doing art for a while because everything becomes a commodity. Breakthroughs in art have a life of about three years before they become a way to sell products. He’s right. But it’s important to continue to create.

SH: Toward the end of Blood Fugues Kenny Romero says ... 'perhaps life is about the repetition of stories and our connections to each other.' This resonates deeply with me and I'm wondering if this is not close to the crux of your everyday belief system?

EVY: Yes, it comes from this part in Kenny’s memoir: "I know that I will have to delete this but it’s impossible to build boats and not be near water. Saying so creates a redundancy. Then again, perhaps there are such things as necessary redundancies. I like the sound of the phrase. I think maybe life is a series of necessary redundancies. I recalled being in a coma and thinking of listening to Bach fugues and wondering if perhaps life is about the repetition of stories and our connections to each other."

This resonates with me as well but more in terms of necessary redundancies. Obviously, the telling of stories is important in my life. I spent a great deal of time as a child listening to grown ups tell family stories, gossip, speculation about other people who were inaccessible to us: a prostitute, a priest or a nun, two women who lived alone and into whose house men never entered.

As a child in a Puerto Rican household you were consistently admonished with the dictum: Los niños hablan cuando las gallinas corren bicicletas. Literally, "children should speak when chickens begin riding bicycles" In other words, children should be seen but not heard. Consequently, I often listened to the repetition of stories. At one point I realized that some of my relatives, even though they were telling the same stories, were adding details, embellishments and that dialogue at times seemed longer than the previous time I had heard the story. I think this capacity is at the core of novel writing.

If it is true that there are basically five or six plots and that as the human race we're telling the same stories over and over, each time embellishing on the process, then Kenny's realization about "necessary redundancies" and repetition are our lot as a species. Novel writing, in my humble opinion, has always been a way of rearranging the world so it becomes a little more acceptable, the reality more palatable.

Some people have commented that I tried to tie up the loose ends of the characters in Blood Fugues a bit too neatly. The last part of the book is a memoir written in the first person and it is Kenny's attempt, as a fledgling writer, to organize his thoughts and give an accounting of his family as a testament to their capacity for love and struggle. There is no question that there is tragedy in the world, but people fight through it and still care and love and remember and tell stories in order to show how they came to be and who helped them become who they are. Many people have helped me and I feel fortunate to be able to do this to the extent that I have.