The look is strange because reality is strange. Unknown people wait to be treated in the emergency room, rodents will dominate the world, if a deer stabs you in the eye, the curse of a sequin, a domestic hell behind the blue glow of social networks. The garden hides the sordid, like that ear on the grass at the beginning of Blue Velvet. Gringo stories (Galaxia, 2024) looks at the United States of America from amazement, intuits its deep substance from the supernatural, succumbs to extreme meteorological phenomena. The second book of stories by Lara Dopazo Ruibal (Marín, Pontevedra, 1985) was born and developed precisely in the heart of the empire. She did it for two years, under the prestigious master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa. She was almost certainly the first author in the Galician language to take it.
“They were surprised by the fact that he wrote in Galician,” Dopazo tells elDiario.es. She refers to professors and classmates of the MFA Spanish Creative Writing, which she attended between 2021 and 2023. The vehicular language was Spanish, but everyone knew that she used another language, her books are in the center’s library and during her American stay , his Claus eo scorpionof poems, was published translated into English, in a bilingual edition. “Maybe it’s my impression,” he adds, “but I have the feeling that it is easier for people from the United States or Latin America to accept something like this than for people from the Spanish State itself.” The stories, in any case, were presented in Spanish to the master’s work sessions. Then the they workshopped.
The neologism meant subjecting the writings to the judgment of students and teachers for an hour and a half. At first it could be uncomfortable, because the analyzes were in-depth, without too many hot cloths. “Writing is something super solitary and suddenly you expose yourself to others,” explains Dopazo, “but if it is done with a certain amount of affection, it is very constructive.” The author, later, was free to incorporate or not incorporate the criticisms, suggestions, warnings. Which, in any case, never alluded to the style of the writer, if the separation is possible when talking about literature. “No one gave you tricks. The advice was technical and always within the internal dynamics of each text. It’s not like an introductory literary workshop in which you learn to write,” he clarifies, “everyone there already knows how to write.” A scene is not believable, in a certain section a structural problem emerges, the coherence of that character does not fit. “The workshops made what you wrote grow,” he says. And there arose almost all the Gringo stories by Dopazo, which he finished off in a literary residence of the Xunta de Galicia on the Illa de San Simón (Redondela, Pontevedra), a Francoist concentration camp during the Civil War.
Writing in a country of unleashed nature
“I had a very clear idea of where I was going, but the truth is, it was easy to get lost along the way. I went down into a corn field, or what was left of a corn field, because it was all mowed,” he writes in Mol (translated “soft”), “and the earth, dry, very dry, screaming for a little water, and I felt like saying ‘don’t worry earth, it’s going to rain for you soon’.” A tornado speaks. The story is at the same time a journey amazed by the dimensions of the territory and the most complete synthesis of one of the themes of the book: unleashed nature. Snow as the end of the world, the fog that, like in that old John Carpenter film, takes over individuals. “For me it is difficult to answer what unites these stories, but there are elements that I recognize: the presence of the supernatural, obsessive characters and a lot of animality, which is a trademark of the house,” he points out.
It is because it is present in his previous works, in the narrative-driven poems collected in Claus eo scorpion (Espiral Maior, 2018) or in The axolotl and other tales of beasts and water (Galaxy, 2020). There is also, although to a lesser extent, the supernatural. that in Gringo stories It helps him build a geography that is not that of fantastic literature, but one in which the supernatural is integrated into the everyday. That’s what’s disturbing. “As Galicians it shouldn’t seem strange to us,” he says, “at least in the past, the supernatural was normalized in our culture.” To a vermello block house, Reptilian either you dikes These are some of the examples included in the volume. Also Brooklyndistressing and claustrophobic, like a late modernist rewriting of Allan Poe but with the sabotaged right to housing in the background.
Most of the stories take place, of course, in the United States of America. “But not in just any United States, in the deep United States,” he asserts with reticence. Iowa belongs to the incommensurable Midwest, which encompasses 12 States and some 58 million inhabitants. That is the landscape, and the countryman, that caused Lara Dopazo the “sense of constant estrangement” that, she herself confesses, acts as the glue of gringo stories. “It is the position I adopt as a narrator, but I was also a foreigner in the United States, my position as a person was that,” she points out. A certain poetic look – not lyrical – just completed the tone.
The weakened story tradition
“My poetry is very narrative and, when I started writing prose, my first attempts were lyrical. Not anymore. The stories are very narrative,” he says. The thread that sews together his writing is the will to investigate: “I seek to answer questions.” Now, the fertile American tradition of the short story, from Poe to Lydia Davis, breathes in a prose that, for the moment, does not give in to the temptation of the novel. “I never say I won’t drink this water, although at the moment I am not writing a novel. I miss the story in Galician literature,” he laments, “I don’t know if it is due to the authors or if it is an editorial decision. Perhaps we opt for the novel because we identify it with the “normal.” I have the feeling that fewer story books are being published.” Dopazo recognizes itself as indebted to the Galician writers who practiced it in the 60s and 70s, from Carlos Casares to Méndez Ferrín or Ánxel Fole. Samuel SolleiroGreat white shark (Xerais, 2012) -, Manuel Darriba –Elephant (Xerais, 2018) -, Ismael Ramos –Easy part (Xerais, 2023) – or Antón Dobao –The tiger in the mouth of the lizard (Xerais, 2024) – have revitalized it in recent years. Gringo storiesalien and dark, a place where the line between the real and the strange thins until it almost disappears, feeds that current.
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