10 Questions for Julieta Vitullo
- By Edward Clifford
I should ask my mom if the blue-plaid, pleated skirt I wore for a few years in my childhood was an off-the-rack item or if she made it in her sewing class. When I first got it, I would reserve it for special occasions, but as the novelty wore off I started using it as a daily garment under the school uniform, a white smock worn by every elementary-age public school student in Argentina.
—from "The Pleated Skirt," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote my first piece when I was six, on a school notepad sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment where I grew up. It was called “El libro perdido” (The Lost Book) and told the story of a boy who lent his favorite book to a friend, and of his friend who didn’t return the book. The boy felt betrayed. I don’t know what else, if anything, happened in the story, and I lost the notepad, but for me this is enough as an origin story: a lost book, a lost story. I’ve been writing variations of this ever since.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Everything I read from childhood to young adulthood has profoundly shaped my writing and my life: Mark Twain because of the adventures; Julio Cortázar because of the disruption of strangeness into the everyday; Jorge Luis Borges because of the universal fantastical motives; Gabriel García Márquez because of the family sagas and the intricate details; María Elena Walsh because of the poetry, the boundless imagination, and the lives of animals and inanimate objects brought into the world of humans.
What other professions have you worked in?
In addition to writing, researching and translating, I’ve been a teacher for most of my life. I’ve taught language, culture, literature and film to people of all ages and demographics, from middle school to high school, from a prep school to a school in a shanty town, from college students to senior citizens.
I was also a clerk at the Judiciary Branch of Power while I went to college in my native Buenos Aires. I spent most of my work days inside the labyrinthian archives of the National Electoral Court, which held the names of all of the country’s electorate. That experience inspired the novel I recently finished revising, La huella de tu nombre (The Trace of Your Name).
Today, in addition to writing, teaching and doing freelance work, I’m also the resident playwright and dramaturge at eSe Teatro, Seattle’s first and foremost Latinx theatre company.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I’d been carrying the memory of the events I describe in “The Pleated Skirt” not so much as a heavy burden but as a sporadic aggravation, a topic of conversation that would come up from time to time in therapy or with the people closest to me. It’s hard to talk about my inspiration without actually naming the thing that happened. Writing a nonfiction piece is a deeply intimate act. Even after the piece gets published, the act remains intimate. I’m comfortable writing about “the thing” that happened in a nonfiction piece, disguised as the grown woman and the child in the story, who are one hundred percent me and yet not me because they’re characters in a piece. And yet I’m not comfortable discussing “the thing” in a more public setting like this interview, so I’d leave it here.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Buenos Aires, where I was born and I lived until my mid-twenties, is a place I continually return to. Most of my creative nonfiction takes place there and my fictional characters often gravitate towards that city. There’s also a beach town called Pinamar, where I spent most of my summers growing up. I think the seed of most of what I write was planted inside me very early in life while experiencing life in those two places. Even though I’m getting close to having spent half of my life in the U.S., those places will always be home to me because that’s where I go back to when I write and when I dream. I try to visit those two places every year not just because all the family and friends I left there, but because they’re reference points for almost everything I wish to write about.
The Pacific Northwest, where I’ve lived for the last fifteen years, is also a big influence. Not so much the people who currently live here but something that happened a long time ago, a certain essence that this place still carries. I think that essence is in the air, smelling of salt water and lakes; it’s in the bright green of the ferns and moss; it’s in the image of a nurse log; it’s in what I continue to learn about the precolonial history of this place and in the history of the European settlement, a history that often sends me back to search for the traces of my own history in the Argentine pampas—my own European and not too far removed Native ancestry.
I write both in English and in Spanish—I go back and forth and there isn’t a genre I favor in one language or the other. But no matter what language I write in, those are the places I often go to.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
When I’m eager to write I can write in any setting, in the silence of my home or immersed in the noise of a café. If I’m tired or struggling to focus, I often play some soft instrumental jazz (Bill Evans is my go-to when I can’t come up with other ideas). I recently spent days listening to many variations of Dimitri Shostakovich’s “Waltz Number 2” because I was writing a couple of scenes in the novel I mentioned before (La huella de tu nombre) in which Blanca, one of the main characters, whistles that melody while she walks the hallways of her workplace. The main narrator remembers hearing her whistles and describes them. I couldn’t have gotten the feel for those scenes without the incessant repetition of that piece in my loudspeaker.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I go through phases. Normally I try to write very early in the morning before everyone wakes up. Black tea, phone off, silence. But life often gets in the way of that ritual, so I just write whenever.
I usually type but if I’m working on something new, I may handwrite first. Last year I got myself a 1973 portable typewriter because I was tired of staring at screens. I later acquired two more typewriters and ended up creating dozens of typewriter art and poetry pieces.
Over time, long-distance bus rides have become a tradition. I’ve been inspired to write on long distance bus rides, or about things that happened or I thought of while traveling that way. In fact, I wrote my last short story, a fiction piece called “El regalo de Navidad” (The Christmas Gift) while traveling on a bus in the pampas, from Pinamar to Buenos Aires. Sometimes all you need is a journal and a few hours on the road.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
A dance that blended all the dance forms I’ve ever tried—ballet, contemporary, tango, salsa, swing – and allowed me to translate emotion straight into artistic expression with as little mediation from the intellect as possible. Not that there’s anything wrong with the intellect, but sometimes I wish I could give my ever-active mind a break.
What are you working on currently?
I’m revising the beginning and end of the novel in Spanish I mentioned before, rewriting a short story called “Hamlin Park” in the third person after advice from a friend, and putting down ideas for some new stories I hope will form a short-story collection. I’m also casting the play Two Big Black Bags, which I wrote in 2019 and will direct this fall with eSe Teatro in Seattle.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and Chief Seattle and the Town that Took His Name, by David M. Buerge. I also just started The Runaway Restaurant, a debut short story collection by a colleague from the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop, Tessa Young.
JULIETA VIUTLLO is a Seattle-based bilingual writer, playwright and dramaturge born and raised in Argentina. She holds an MA in English and a PhD in Spanish from Rutgers. She’s the protagonist and co-script writer of the award-winning documentary La forma exacta de las islas. Her literary work was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Into the Void, The Normal School, The Fabulist, Hawaii Pacific Review and The Massachusetts Review. She’s a resident playwright and dramaturge at eSeTeatro, and eight of her plays have been presented in Seattle, including the most recent Fermín’s Great Book of Dreams, a fantasy play for all ages. This fall she will direct Two Big Black Bags, her play about a veteran of the Malvinas/Falklands war who undertakes a magical journey across the Americas. In 2022, Julieta launched www.PoemasEternos.com, a typewriter poetry and art project that she hopes will continue to enrich the world of her prose and theatre. More at www.JulietaVitullo.com
