Palm Latitudes Reading Group Guide by Veronica Liu

A Seven Stories Press READING GROUP GUIDE

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1. Kate Braverman says that Palm Latitudes “flagrantly disobeys the (male) rules of a novel.” What do you think she means by this? How does she attempt to accomplish this goal, and do you think she is successful? 2. Palm Latitudes focuses on three very complex female characters. What are some of the key issues concerning Francisca Ramos? Gloria Hernández? Marta Ortega? How does each woman’s narrative resolve these issues, or leave them unresolved? 3. Which character did you find most compelling and why? Which was the least? 4. Do you feel Kate Braverman successfully conveys the Latina experience and spirit to the reader? What might be the difficulties in intimately depicting characters of an ethnicity different from one’s own? 5. How does Los Angeles as a setting serve the major themes of the novel? Do you think a locale necessarily influences the mentality and mood of its people? Give examples. 6. Name some of the concurrent themes running throughout the different narratives, and examine how these themes serve to unite the characters in the book without their awareness. Why do you think Braverman chooses to bring her characters together in this manner? 7. Marta Ortega says, “To tend one garden is to birth worlds.” (130) What does she mean by this? How does this idea apply to the book as a whole? 8. When Marta’s brothers tell her of their desire to sail on a raft back to Mexico, she believes that at that moment they “most clearly perceived the fundamental nature of the world.” (212) What nature is she alluding to? 9. Upon finishing the book, what do you think the “palm latitudes” are? Is this a place where you would want to live? 10. With Palm Latitudes, Kate Braverman set out to write a book “about women and for women readers.” Do you think she succeeded in

accomplishing this objective? Do you feel that this is a book that can only be appreciated by women?

AUTHOR INTERVIEW Palm Latitudes has been described as a book that “resists classification.” Was this an intentional aim on your part? Palm resists classification because it was my literary aim to write a “millennial” novel, to use words and blocks of words in a new way. I wanted to write a book by a women, about women and for women readers. It fragrantly disobeys the (male) rules of a novel. The novel is composed of poems. It’s a quilt of a novel, with the fabric being poetry. I selected words for their female resonance. I wanted to feminize English. I wanted to tropicalize English I wanted to find female sounds and rhythms, a whole other geography, fragrant, lush, hot, pagan. A language indigenous to California, which has a different diversity and history and geography from Eastern United States. The color spectrum is different, the relationship to nature and god. Your novel centers around three archetypes of female struggle: a prostitute; a housewife; and a matriarch known as “la bruja del barrio”, or the witch of the neighborhood. What do you feel the responsibility of a feminist writer is today? Has that feeling changed since Palm Latitudes was first published? A feminist writer explores issues of gender, what it is to be female, to experience a female universe with female boundaries and possibilities. Of course, feminism isn’t as plausible today as it was twenty years ago. Women wanted a revolution and instead they got Oprah Winfrey. Los Angeles is as much a character as the three female protagonists in your book. Could you describe your relationship to the city, how it influenced you as a child growing up, and how you view it today? Growing up in Los Angeles was a profound experience in being marginalized. LA was hardscrabble, raw, a frontier outpost. From a literary point of view, LA was a ragged renegade village where people could barely sign their names. The inhabitants were considered sub-literate. It was frustrating, being a serious artist in LA. The isolation, the hostility of the natives and the New York culture. It was also an anomaly of beauty. The raped tropics. The abnormal seductive colors. Los Angeles was a gorgeous atrocity. Los Angeles was dream talk and rumor. Coyote howl, bits of desert salt. I was a poor girl in a savage distant place and I looked to literature as a mode of legitimacy. The city was being built as

I grew up. The freeways were still beanfields; there were fish in the bay. We were credible. We thought they were building the city for us. Los Angeles was a failed experiment. It used to graze sun-dazed and stupid. Now it has teeth and it’s malicious. As an accomplished poet and novelist, how does poetry influence your novels, and vice versa? Do you feel the two are ever mutually exclusive? Poetry is my natural state. But poetry was too formal and specialized, too rarified and other worldly, with rules I felt genetically incapable of. So I adapted my poetry to give the illusion of prose. I wrote dialogue and interspersed it between poems, particularly in my early novels, which are written around set pieces of pre-existing poetry. Instead of publishing 40 poems as poetry, as a document only several hundred people will read, I publish 400 poems disguised as a novel that thousands read. It’s an aesthetic act of insurrection. Poetry and fiction are increasingly mutually exclusive. To be an intellectual, one used to have to know a bit of poetry. Now such knowledge is no longer expected or even tolerated. The mainstream of intellectual culture has amputated poetry from its collective repertoire. Even literary novels barely survive. How would you like readers to approach Palm Latitudes? I would like my readers to read Palm Latitudes out loud. I write incantatory prose, which is words and phrases constructed around sound and rhythm, meant to be read for the ear. If you write silently, then one idea will naturally lead you to another idea. If you write for the ear, one sound will lead to another, words chosen not for their intellectual content, but for their poetic content. Not written, but rather composed. Writing for the sound and rhythm, rather than the obvious eye coherence leads to surprises, to choices that are more unpredictable and improvisational. Is there anything you would like to see your readers explore specifically in a group atmosphere? My characters in Palm are creatures of Los Angeles. They are Latinas at the millennium. Their intelligence makes them global, post-historical. Perhaps women are always at the margin, all women. Perhaps women, all women, inhabit a barrio of the sensibility.