Part one of a two-part interview:
Jane Alberdeston Coralin is a Puerto Rican poet whose work has been published in literary magazines and poetry anthologies throughout the U.S. and Canada. An alumna of Cave Canem, a writers' organization for poets of African descent, Jane has performed her work in arts events and mentored writer's workshops in schools throughout the East Coast. Her poetry collections, Waters of My Thirst and The AfroTaina Dreams, are still in circulation. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript called Songs of a Daughter's Make Believe. She just completed her doctoral studies in English at Binghamton University in New York.
My blessing in knowing her is I have come in contact with poetry of heartbreaking beauty, but in addition, she is another co-author of Sister Chicas. Her Taina is self aware, whip smart and a deep dreamer, just like Jane herself.
Describe your odyssey in becoming a writer. How does Latin and female identity influence your work? What would you say are your major influences, both personally and in a literary sense?
It's wonderful how you begin with the word "odyssey"; most of the time it's felt like I've been on Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch crab boat, rolling on the waves wishing for a full net. It's a type of wishing that happens with me too, a wishing for what I think is the right word, the best image, the loud line that will carry the story forward.
I am the cliche: the writer that started way-back, fourteen and pimply and unpopular. I had one friend, also a closet writer. We started writing Harlequinesque romances together. Lots of boys and horses. Only later, at eighteen, depressed and lonely in Long Island, far away from my mami and her Puerto Rico, did I learn to write truly, as in about my life, the things I understood and knew. And I could only get to that point through the vehicle of poetry. But I was a language novice; though I viscerally understood poetry's power, I hadn't yet grasped all the tools, the glorious avenues that poetry drives.
So, again, I floated on the waters, 'til I arrived in Washington DC and was warmly welcomed by the poetry community. I started reading at a dive called 15 Minutes on 15th Street NW DC. A long Amtrak train ride waited me at the end of that night, but I knew it was the only way I could get to know people and kill the shy girl within. Monday nights I was there, sipping back Sprites with lime, scratching through wrinkled sheets of poem, waiting to be called on stage. Later, I found my community at It's Your Mug, a poetry cafe in Georgetown on P Street NW in the '90s. Imagine a room so filled with people it was warm in the winter, as if a hearth were burning in the corner. But there was no fire except for the flames coming out of some of the most political and dramatic poetry in the city. And the poets got me -- they got my images, they got my song -- they appreciated my life living on the fence, on the cusp of self: Americanness, blackness and Puerto Ricanness. I didn't see myself as a prism, but as a broken thing.
This was my new story to tell; not because it was hip or cool in 1995 to be Latina in DC. This was my story to tell because I'd come to a point where my Latinaness and Blackness were speaking to each other. Narratives in my family long buried were suddenly crawling their way up and out of me. I heard my grandmother in Julia de Burgos's "Rio Grande de Loiza." Poems from Martin Espada, Marjorie Agosin, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and others were guides for me to move into the cave where the stories hide.
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