Author Q&A with Juliana Lamy

Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She received her Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. While there, she was also the recipient of the university’s Le Baron Russell Brigg’s Prize for Undergraduate Fiction, as well as the Gordon Parks Essay Prize for Nonfiction. She is the author of You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023). She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the spring of 2023. She really is 6”2, she swears.

Tell us about yourself.

Hi! My name is Juliana Lamy and I am a Haitian-American fiction writer based in South Florida. I am the author of the short story collection, You Were Watching from the Sand. My family fully immigrated to the U.S. when I was three years old, but I have always had a very strong connection to my Haitian heritage (it’s one of the things that has brought me back to Florida while so many other folks are, understandably, fleeing).

I have a complicated, mostly loving relationship with the films of Pedro Almodovar, and I think that much of his artistic ethos, that bizarre-ness, speaks very well to my own (ever-changing) understanding of the absurdity of the institutions with which people of particular identities must contend, and how those identities are made “strange” by those very same absurd institutions (a switcheroo for the ages). I’m also interested in how that strangeness can be continually spun on its axis to better benefit / comprehend / celebrate the following groups: Haitians, Black folk, immigrants, queer folk, and children. 

Tell us about You Were Watching the Sand and how it felt to go through the publishing process for the first time.

You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection of ten stories, that explores the spiritual and material lives of Haitian folk through lenses of humor, absurdity, mischief, and tragedy. In some ways, this collection was an unexpected development for me. I did not write any of the stories within it with a collection in mind. I think that I always had some passing awareness that the stories had “something to do” with each other, but it wasn’t until I sat back and took a look at the work that I’d produced up to that point in my life that I realized how much they had to do with each other. The Pandemic lockdown helped.

I had plenty of time to sit back and look at things that needed looking at. I think that because the collection itself was partially an unexpected development, its publication was too! After sitting with some of the stories that I’d written, and noticing the way that they resonated with one another, I submitted a group of them to Red Hen Press’s Ann Petry Fiction Prize as a book-length work. I was so, so honored to have my work chosen as the winner of that prize; an aspect of the Ann Petry Fiction Prize is publication by Red Hen, and before I knew it, I was holding the physical accumulation of my own creative work in my hands.

When did you attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? What did you gain from this experience?

I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the spring of 2023. I learned a few crucial things during those two years of my life: 

1. In certain parts of the country, and at certain times of the year, it is possible to step outside and feel so cold that you eventually stop feeling cold?! 

2. While I used to believe that I could only write during brief bursts of inspiration and that I had to wait for those moments to come to me, I found that developing a daily structure around my writing, a daily routine, could allow me to write stories that carried the same intensity and soul as my burst-of-inspiration projects. What’s more, developing this daily routine made writing feel like a much more present entity in my life. I no longer had to rely on my weekly or monthly allotment of inspiration to produce (though I still find it super exhilarating to think of a scene while pulling into my driveway and rushing into the house to type it up before I lose it). 

3. I looooooove film. I realized that many of the artistic maneuvers of film – the interaction of long and close shots, the swelling of a musical score, and tangents in a character’s dialogue – were things I loved to see in written fiction. And they were things I wanted to do, skills that I wanted to develop. I remember watching No Country for Old Men (2007), that final scene of Sheriff Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) recounting a dream that he had about his father riding ahead of him on horseback with a horn at his side (pulled from the monologue at the end of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name), and really feeling what literature can do for film and what film can do for literature, and thinking, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

How did your Bachelor’s degree in History and Literature influence your writing? Do you lean towards historical fiction?

I loved my History & Literature major, and I credit many of the instructors that I had with helping me establish a foundation for thinking about and writing about history. Much of my early work, much of which is present in this collection, is not explicitly historical. It is not something that I regret, but I do find it very interesting for what it reveals to me about the way that I begin stories, which is with a now-ness, a present-ness. I sometimes think that I write heart-first with my belly on fire. One of my writing peers in the past said that my writing “feels like a punch in the face,” which is one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten, haha.

I love this method of writing, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve wanted to become – and it is my hope that I have become – more deliberate in hitching my stories to history. What this means is that now, while I’m planning for or writing a story, there is always a concurrent consideration of how that story might be able to speak to history, what might it have to say, and in what voice, and at what octave. One of my favorite stories from this collection is “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” which rests on the cultural and psychic history of zombies in Haitian culture. I love this story because it constantly reminds me of where my writing can go, where I would like for it to go. 

How does your Haitian heritage shine through in your work?

Each of the stories in this collection, whether they make explicit mention of a character’s Haitian heritage or not, is an exercise in Haitian-Creole voice. I call them a throat-clearing, an attempt to sometimes capture, to sometimes recreate, and to sometimes imagine-into the distinct cadences of the Haitian Creole language. There’s a way that because of Creole’s origin as a subversive undertaking of mass linguistic improvisation – the constructed language of the enslaved, who’d been plucked and tricked and stolen from various regions with their own local languages – I attempt to carry forth, in my own way, this improvisation.

What is your favorite genre to write in and why?

The genre that I most love to write into is actually a smooshing-together of various genres. I can best describe it as a mischievous fantasy-thriller, the bones of which are often an absurd narrative circumstance that hovers at the edge of magical realism or magical realism itself. Writing is most pleasurable to me when it is an act of propulsive joy, and it is those genres (or, often the smooshing of them) that set me off with that kind of wonderful energy. I remember sitting down and writing the first draft of “Eli” until my foot fell asleep. I am also of the opinion that in these genres (and I am speaking broadly here), narrative is at its most flexible, its most bendy. You can follow the logical narrative points of your story into absurdity, and then bring it all back to a profound Coen-brothers-style. These are the genres that seem to most embrace fiction as artifice, as a “made” thing that can be re-made and unmade and made fun.

What is your favorite genre to read and why?

At the risk of giving a non-answer, I truly do not have a preferred genre of fiction to read! I was of the cohort of early 2000s kids who were accustomed to being dropped off at the library for a day and just reading my way through as many aisles as I could before my parents came to retrieve me. I could squeeze narrative out of absolutely anything, and this developed in me an expansiveness of interest. I remember reading The Great Gatsby and Love Medicine in quick succession a couple of years ago and feeling almost just as moved by the one as I was by the other (although Love Medicine certainly has a leg up for me). What this expansiveness of interest has also allowed for is an amassing of influences in my own work; I love jumping from horror to comedy to realism to magical realism in my writing practice as much as I do in my reading practice.

Do you have a favorite book or author? What makes that book or author stand out to you?

I certainly do! Here is the triumvirate I’ve been giving to people whenever I’ve been asked this question: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. I always feel a compulsion to name these three works as a trio of favorites, because even as I write this, I still have sense memories of the ways that each of these novels moved me. They’re also each a masterclass in literary vastness and exuberance in terms of lyricism, history, larger-than-life characters, comedy, tragedy… I think I’m due for a triple re-read, actually.

As a judge of the HoneyBee this year, what positive attributes will you look for in the fiction pieces you review?

I am so excited to read through the crop of this year’s submissions! I will be looking for a narrative sound that I can hear clearly, a bit like exploding head syndrome – that phenomenon where you hear a loud, booming sound in the middle of sleep and you have no choice but to sit up ramrod straight in bed and search for the source. This narrative sound can be the voice of the narration itself, the dialogue of characters, or the memorability of characterization. I am not looking for any particular genre, just a fresh, punchy way of telling me what’s what in a period of space and time.

What tips do you have for fellow fiction writers?

Take in narrative wherever you can find it. Imbibe it. Books, movies, TV, videogames, the back of an American girl doll box, anywhere. Try to write as often as you can, but be gracious to yourself when the words don’t come, because they will. Take your art seriously, but do not take yourself too seriously; understand that the roots of creation are some form of delight, some form of satisfaction, some form of joy, some form of mental pliability.

Thank you, Juliana! We’re grateful to you for your willingness to spend extra time with us on this Q&A and for being a part of our contest this year! We are excited about working with you!!

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If you want an opportunity to have your fiction read by Juliana, details about the contest and a link to the submission platform are on our 2024 Honeybee Prize page.