Author Q&A with Andrea Villa Franco

Andrea Villa Franco is a writer and researcher from Bogotá, Colombia. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in Hypertext Review, Americas Quarterly, and Pie de Página. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an International Joint M.A. from the EU’s Erasmus Mundus Program. She enjoys blending genres and experimenting with language(s) in her work and life.

Villa Franco’s flash fiction, Empty Nesting, is featured in Issue 17.

Tell us about yourself.

I like to collect things. Stones from different places I have traveled to, old family pictures, unique books, tickets from museums, postcards. But I also really really dislike clutter. I am drawn to well-placed emptiness, silences. When I imagine an ideal room to sit in, to read a nice book with a cup of tea or chat with a friend, it contains all the emotional richness of that yellowed picture of my childhood home, and all the quietness of a blank canvas. Somewhere in all of that is an analogy to who or how I am as a writer. 

To me Empty Nesting is a story about a parent hoping they have done enough as they prepare their child to leave the nest. Will it be too soon? Will they survive on their own? It’s a cold world out there and all we can do is our best to prepare them so they can succeed on their own. Was this your intention or am I projecting? What do you hope a reader takes from your story?

I like that you bring up intention and projection. Thinking back to this last year of writing, one of my intentions has been to really explore the idea that a text remains incomplete until it interacts with a reader—in other words, until a reader projects their lived experience onto the page. The words are intended to act as catalysts for a projection of sorts. 

With Empty Nesting, there are a lot of omissions. Part of it is a bit of rebellion against writing class mantras about character construction and three-dimensionality, but I have come to realize that one of the reasons I wanted to rebel was to give the reader more room to insert themselves and their own preconceptions into the story. Which is not to say that I didn’t have more details in mind about the characters as I wrote, but I wanted the voice and the gaze to reveal personhood, rather than relying on too many adjectives. 

At the same time, I was very conscious about the type of experiences and emotions that I was trying to evoke with what is present on the page—which is to say, those feelings of taking care of someone (or of being taken care of), the sense of responsibility, the doubt. Love, but also loss. Closeness, but also distance and never being close enough. In Spanish, I think we have a unique word that is well-suited to describe this “taking care of,” which is cariño. 

Ultimately, I’m honored that the story spoke to your experience as a parent—it’s all I could hope for.  

Our memories change with the strengthened lens of experience. How do you feel the narrator may have viewed the memory differently now that his little girl has grown?

This is a question that ties well to the ending of Empty Nesting, as there is a preemptive imagining of how the experience will be remembered someday by the little girl. To me, it provokes a nostalgic feeling, and when I re-read the story, I find nostalgia laced throughout in the sense that time is passing and that it is getting late and the time to make a decision passes, has passed. I go back to the word “preemptive.” Perhaps the opportunity to take care of the nestling or to impart a life lesson has passed. But the narrator’s caretaking of their child has not yet passed, and still the nostalgia of its passing is present. 

I think that nostalgic foretelling is remembered too, later in life. I think it could provoke a sense of vertigo, looking back at the presentiment of a loss that had not yet occurred, but now has. Especially when combined with the present sense of loss and nostalgia. And yet, I think it could also be a happy memory.

Empty Nesting has many poetic qualities. In your bio you say you enjoy blending genres, does that typically mean fiction and poetry or do you have other combinations that you dabble with?

Up to now, the bulk of my creative work has been either fiction or poetry. However, I have always been drawn to a variety of disciplines—from art history and philosophy to astronomy and the environmental sciences. This is how I have ended up as a political science researcher with an undergraduate degree in languages and literature and a MA thesis focused on anthropology and religious studies. 

This curiosity for most things informs both what I write about and how I write, but understanding this is tricky because influence is often unconscious. 

What I am conscious of is that I like to craft ambiance and a sense of place. The writing is often grounded in strong visual elements that I have in mind, and then other sensory experiences are derived from those images. I tie this back to my love for the visual arts. Photography, painting, film. There is a sensory immediacy of an image or a clip, an impression, that writing can’t do. I enjoy trying to translate that experience into writing. 

In our digital age, many of these visual (and acoustic) encounters are mediated through our screens. In the design of documents and webpages, there is suddenly a lot of freedom in how to place and format text. A well-thought-out digital space often tells its story through design. Which also makes me think of video games as a storytelling medium that has shaped my interaction with text. In Empty Nesting, some text is right-aligned, and I feel that my impulse to try that out is linked to the broad possibilities of text placement in software and websites. Graphic novels too, perhaps.  

I’ve gone long enough here, so I’ll wrap up with the thought that once upon a time poetry and narrative were not so strictly severed off from each other. I’m attracted by the oral quality of ancient storytelling; The Odyssey is one of my favorite works. I think sometimes there is a tendency to consider the musicality of language as separate from the meaning it imparts, but I find literature to reveal that musicality and meaning are tightly bound. 

Tell us about how you experiment with language in your writing? What languages do you know? Which language do you think is the most poetic and why?

Poetics, what is poetics? Hard to answer, but what I am sure of is that I do not think there is a language that is more poetic than the rest. Each has its unique rhythms, melodies, what linguists call prosody. 

I really enjoy discovering the special poetics of the different languages that I learn; there’s something about internalizing the musicality and structure of language that reminds me of dance. Like dance, language feels best to me when I can recur to instinct, and even improvisation, in making choices in expression. This tends to require a good foundation of the “boring stuff”—the grammar, the phonetics, syntax.

I think this is what poetics means to me. And just like dance can sometimes mix genres, it’s fun to experiment across languages. I like mixing conventions from different languages to bend language to its limit. It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s not always successful, and that’s ok. 

My native language is Spanish, but I learned English very early in life. My third language is French, which I have been learning on and off since childhood, but only feel like I’ve “mastered” recently (but not really). I’ve dabbled in German and Japanese before. Lately, it’s been Portuguese. 

What do you think of when you hear, “the good life?”

A life that is lived. 

Listen as Andrea reads a snippet of her story, Empty Nesting:

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Thank you, Andrea, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A and the audio recording. We’re glad we were able to connect and we wish you the best with life and all your writing endeavors.