Interview with Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of “Art Above Everything,” and Rey M. Rodríguez

Most Institute of American Indian Arts students, teachers, and staff do what they do because they have a calling, despite having no idea what the outcome will be. 

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, in her upcoming book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, asks the same question that many of us ask: “Is Art Enough?” Elizondo Griest then takes the reader on a journey to many parts of the world, including Rwanda, Cuba, Iceland, New Zealand, Qatar, Mexico, Romania, India, and many more, to explore through the lives of some amazing women artists and reflect upon whether it is enough, even with all of the pain and sacrifice creating art may entail.

Elizondo Griest is an extremely well-traveled author from the Texas/Mexico borderlands. She has written many books, including, Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; All the Agents and Saints; and her new book. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, VQR, The Believer, BBC, Orion, and Oxford American. 

Her work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Princeton University, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities, and she has won a Margolis Award, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. 

She is currently a professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Elizondo Griest, and she has performed in many capacities, ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department. 

It is our hope at Storyteller’s Corner that readers, especially those who have decided to live a creative life, will gain comfort from her new book and also from this wonderfully touching and reflective interview. After reading both, we believe you are likely to conclude with a resounding “Yes!”, as she has, that it was worth all of the self-doubt, sacrifice, and hard work, but not for the reasons that you may have thought.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, thank you so much for being interviewed by Storyteller's Corner of Chapter House, the literary journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

It's such an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

We're so excited that you permitted me to read your book, Art Above Everything, before its release. How did you get into writing? And why do you write?

It was seeded by my father. He was a drummer for a U.S. Navy jazz band that traveled the world. For my bedtime story, he would take a globe and spin it around and tell me a story from wherever his finger landed. That's how well-traveled he was in the world.

Interesting.

Yes. He had the most extraordinary stories. Witnessing my dad in performance, and knowing what his music did to me internally, got me thinking about art, too. The impulse to create was seeded in early childhood. My quest then was to figure out my art form. I didn’t pursue music because it seemed like a dude’s domain. All my dad's bandmates were dudes; his students were dudes; so was everyone on MTV back then. And I was terrible at every other art form I tried: sculpture, drawing, ballet, theater, choir. 

The person who discovered my form was the same person who discovered my dad’s: my grandmother. She slid a wooden spoon in Dad’s hand when he was like three years old, and he just went to town, smacking all the pots and pans in the cupboard, entertaining himself for hours. She bought the drum set that he played until the day he died. 

She ignited the art-spark in me when she showed me where she had been keeping all of the letters that I had been sending her since I could first grasp a pencil. She lived in Kansas, and I grew up in South Texas, so we only saw each other in the summer. When she told me that my letters kept her company, it touched me, because I had this sense, even as a child, that my grandmother was lonely. Her husband got shot in the foot in a gun accident when he was younger, and couldn't walk, and because of that injury, he spent most of his life in the basement, coming up only for meals. And he wanted elaborate meals, like chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy and biscuits, exactly at noon and five. So my grandmother lived around this man's stomach, always having to stop what she was doing and rush home to prepare his meals. Observing this as a child gave me a lifelong fear of domesticity. It made me fear marriage! It also made me feel good that I was giving my grandmother a sense of another world. 

So I started taking my letters seriously. I paid more attention to the way things looked, sounded, tasted, and smelled because I wanted to infuse my letters with another world. We exchanged letters until she died, just a few months before I left for college. There, I studied journalism, which honed my storytelling. I also studied Russian, and in January 1996, I flew to Moscow as an exchange student. That began my life as a traveler. While there, I took the same kind of observational notes that I used to put in my grandmother's letters, only they instead went into a journal that eventually became the basis for my first book, Around the Bloc. So that’s how this all got started.

Thank you for sharing. Why do you write?

You could boil all six of my books down to a single inquiry, and that is: what is enough? The first iteration was, Am I enough? I'm half Mexican from my mom’s side, and half white from my dad's side, and I’ve been on a lifelong quest to understand what it means to inhabit this nepantla, this space in between two cultures, two countries, two languages, two families. That is what led me to move to Mexico when I was 30, to build a deeper connection to the ancestral land that mystified me. That’s how my book, Mexican Enough, came to be. 

Then I moved on to: Ya basta, enough is enough, or social justice issues. All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands investigates the ramifications of having an international borderline slice your ancestral land in two. I compare the lives of Tejanos in South Texas with the lives of the Mohawks of Akwesasne, who are bisected by the New York and Canadian borderlines.

Fantastic.

These two communities are living parallel existences, from language loss to loss of land to abhorrent discrimination to devastating environmental tragedies. In my hometown, Corpus Christi, we're surrounded by 15 miles of petrochemical industries that have created cancer clusters in the neighboring communities. Akwesasne, meanwhile, is surrounded by Alcoa, Reynolds, and GM, companies that for many years dumped PCB-laden waste into the rivers where the Mohawk fished. The Mohawk used to be a fishing people. Now, they can no longer eat the fish from their streams. Pollution killed their cattle industry. They can't even grow gardens because the land is so polluted. But they don't want to leave, because it's their ancestral land. Just like we don’t want to leave ours, down in South Texas. So… ya basta! Enough is enough. 

My new book, Art Above Everything, asks the question: Is art enough? Can it constitute a fulfilled life? Is it worthy of giving the entirety of your life to? That's an existential question that has haunted me after spending the bulk of my adulthood living for these books.

What I find wonderful about your book is that when I was growing up, I could never find a book like this. I could have used this book when I was growing up, because you wouldn't see a Latina writing about these issues, traveling the world, seeing these types of things. It’s a window into a world that I think men and women both need to have the conversation about. I recently did a review of Somos Xicanas, edited by Luz Schweg, and I found the same thing: reading all the poetry and essays of women was so life-affirming for me.

And it was transformative, because I could learn things that I would never explore, especially as a man. Which leads me to ask, how did you conceive of the idea?

Because you do have this framework of is art enough? How did you come up with the framework? Did you conceive it as each chapter would be connected to the next and then knitted together?

I started down the path of “most resistance” in 1999, when I returned home from abroad and got a good, responsible job with the Associated Press in Austin, Texas. Well, first there was a probationary period of 6 months, and then I got offered a “job-job,” with health insurance, dental insurance, and a 401(k)—all the things you're supposed to want. 

The problem was, I had already envisioned my first book. Throughout my probationary period, I would work on Around the Bloc for an hour or two before my AP shift, and then again for an hour or two after I returned home, and then I’d write all weekend long. Basically, I was attempting to be a full-time writer and a full-time AP reporter, working 80 to 90-hour weeks. Zero income was being generated by the book, but that is where I found all my fulfilment. 

So when I was offered the “job-job” after my probationary period ended, I made the radical decision of taking the path of most resistance. I said no, and moved back to my childhood home in Corpus Christi to live rent-free with my parents so I could write Around the Bloc instead. And that became, like, a 15-year habit of continuously saying “No” to jobs and relationships and other opportunities that would have made my life logistically easier, so that I could keep traveling and researching and writing these books. Only when the financial crisis of 2008 hit, and I lost all my speaking gigs, and became truly frightened about my future, did I pivot by going to grad school, which set me on the path to becoming a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  

Once I moved here to Chapel Hill, I was locked in a fixed location for the first time in adulthood. Previously, my books had been fueled by location. I had moved to Moscow and to Beijing to write about it, moved to Mexico to write about it, and moved near Akwesasne to write about it. That is what travel writers do. Place is our primary subject. Suddenly, I needed to find a subject that occurred in many different places that I could visit for a short time only, like spring or winter break. 

Interesting.

When you make art your life, signs become very important—little signs that arise from the universe that say, ‘You're on the right path, kid.’ I call them angel screamers. So, I got one when I did a writing residency at Sangam House in 2014. It was held at Nrityagram, where Protima Gauri Bedi, an extraordinary classical Indian dancer, had built an entire village dedicated to this dance, just outside Bangalore. The only inhabitants of this village are women, and what these women do is dance throughout the day and into the night as an act of love, of devotion, of being. To dance Odissi is to dance as a spiritual practice. 

You achieve spiritual fulfillment through this divination dance. And that was my angel-screaming moment. I had traveled to Nrityagram to work on my book All the Agents and Saints, but I put it aside to interview those dancers about the nature of artistic sacrifice and fulfillment. And then every summer thereafter, for the next decade, I would travel somewhere different to interview another woman who lived entirely for her artistic pursuit. Women, I came to call “art monks.”

You were wonderfully successful because definitely themes that run through, even though the characters and settings are so different. But I did have a question about a term that you use throughout the book. What is an art monk?

I started calling myself an art monk twenty years ago, when I was living in Queretaro, Mexico. My roommates there had a hard time relating to me, spending as many hours as I did, writing all alone in my room, and not having a partner. It became a joke, like: “What do you expect? I am an art monk!” 

I started taking this term more seriously when I began doing residencies at Lebh Shomea in Sarita, Texas, a 45-minute drive north of the border. The Catholic Church built a house of prayer there, where you could stay for like $15 a day. The catch was: you had to take a vow of silence to stay there. Two canonized hermits lived on the premises, women who took vows of silence in the 1980s and hadn't talked since, except for the Word of God. They stayed in their cabins all day praying for the souls of the world. They prayed for people they would never meet, never encounter, and they prayed for them deeply. 

This fascinated me. I started reading up on hermits and desert fathers, and others who had taken spiritual vows of silence in the onsite library. Then one night, it occurred to me: how is what they're doing any different from what I'm doing? I'm also working in my little cabin in total silence, on behalf of people I will never meet. 

The hermits and monks had taken vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and I had, too! My writing made ridiculously little money; I was rarely involved with anyone romantically; and I was wholly obedient to this muse that was driving my life. So that’s when I started identifying with this idea of being an art monk. After visiting Nrityagram in 2014, I decided to write a book about it.

You went to Iowa for your MFA, right? How was that experience?

I went to Iowa kicking and screaming. I did not want to go. 

That's the best way to apply to a program, too.

Yes, it is.

You're more likely to get in because you have nothing to lose.

Exactly! I didn't understand why I needed to get a degree in a genre I'd already written three books in—I thought I was ready to be a teacher myself, and just needed the certification that said so. But my very first class at Iowa was ‘History of the Essay,’ and when I heard what the professor was saying, I was like, woah. I had zero background in this genre. I had never read Didion, never read Baldwin, I had never even heard Montaigne’s name! All the nonfiction books I’d read were directly related to the subject I was writing about—never foundational to the genre itself.

Fascinating.

Teaching is a huge responsibility. You need to have a foundation of very deep reading to be a reflective, thoughtful, helpful teacher. So: I did not want to go to Iowa, but once I got there, I realized I did need to be there. I also made extraordinary friends there whom I love with all my heart to this day. 

Now I do want to get into the book. What is your process for writing nonfiction, because it feels like you have a very specific process as to how you interview people? I feel a certain kinship with you because I love interviewing people, and I'm very curious about people. What’s your approach to how you do your magic?

First and foremost: research. Art Above Everything was almost impossible to write, because every chapter featured a different person, only one of whom I’d met before, a different country where I’d never been before (except Mexico), and a different art form I knew nothing about. No knowledge gained in one chapter transferred to the next, so the research was immense. 

Like the chapter on Wendy Whelan. The only thing I knew about ballet was from the classes I took as a 5-year-old. So, to prepare for interviewing one of the greatest ballerinas of the last century, I spent six months watching her performances on YouTube and reading the hundreds of articles and reviews written about her. And then I had to think about the context in which she created her art, which sent me down another research rabbit hole, as there had been a major #MeToo incident in her company that ousted the long-time director, and I needed to know about that. 

That’s why each chapter took like a year. Another writer with the same amount of time and resources could have probably written multiple books. But I found that level of research necessary to write meaningful questions that led to the deepest possible conversations I could have with each subject during the time we spent together. 

You talk about reciprocity in terms of what you get from writing. You feel less alone. It feels like you gain so much by entering into these worlds. It feels it's immeasurable. I can't imagine how much you grew as a person meeting these people, because each one seems more extraordinary than the next. I mean you're in India, and then, you know, you're in Iceland, and then you're in New Zealand, and then you're in Mexico. So many countries. But how did you change as a person?

The major change that occurred to me over the course of writing this book was getting diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I lost my reproductive organs. I lost my hair. I lost my book tour for All the Agents and Saints, which I had also invested an entire decade of my life into researching and reporting. I was so hungry to share the story of the border and what was happening to the people there, that it devastated me, not being able to have those conversations on tour. 

But amidst all those losses and the general fear and anxiety of being ill, I also entered a period where I became almost giddy with elation that evolved into a gratitude that remains the dominant emotion I associate with my cancer experience today. And that gratitude was: thank god I had lived my life exactly as I did, and made the choices that I did, because if cancer was my exit off the planet, I knew I had eeked out every experience and joy I possibly could have by devoting my life to traveling and telling the stories of the people that I encountered. 

That's why this book is so special. There are so many beautiful moments. But the one that is very beautiful for me is in the chapter called “Art is Unzipping Your Body.” You were at a belly dancing festival in Havana, and you're concerned about the way you look in the mirror, and then you see the person dancing next to you, and time stops. The way you both are communicating. It's not through words. It's almost telepathic.

Three months after I was released from cancer treatment, I met Tiffany Hanan Madera, an extraordinary belly dancer in Miami who is considered the mother of Cuban belly dance. For years, she traveled to Havana with CDs and coin belts and taught a group of young women who eventually founded Cuba’s first belly dance troupe and school. In 2018, they hosted a festival that drew 100 belly dancers from all over the world, so I flew out, too. Arriving there, I was bald, I was neutered, I had lost 20 pounds to chemo, I was gaunt, I had massive scars on my chest and abdomen. I had spent the last six months of my life at a cancer hospital, where everyone looked like me, and suddenly I was in Havana, surrounded by phenomenal human beauty. 

Everyone was a total knockout—so much, that I completely forgot how I looked, until this one workshop on hip signatures, where I was put in front of a mirror. It was shocking to see how I now looked, and so upsetting. But a Cuban dancer saw me. She saw how I suddenly froze. She made eye contact with me in the mirror and showed me how to move again. I looked down and saw that her abdomen was totally scarred, too, from a recent Cesarean. We then began to dance in synchronicity. 

Belly dancing originated with fertility cults in the Middle East hundreds and hundreds of years ago, with women dancing around other women in labor, to guide their movements. This dance is rooted in drumbeats, in my dad's instrument, in my first instrument. Belly dance connects us all. 

Yes, what I love about that story is that it is the moment when you saw your beauty.

Thank you for saying that.

I mean, it's just poetry. It was very emotional. It was beautiful. So I have to talk about Sandra Cisneros. How does she fit into this book?

I met Sandra on my second day at the Washington Post in the summer of 1995. I was a college intern, and completely terrified.

Yes.

My first assignment was to write about the new awardees of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant. I was so intimidated, thinking I would be interviewing astrophysicists. I went to the fax machine and, as I watched the list print out, I was like—I'm going to have to talk about math, I’m screwed! 

But the first name I saw was Sandra Cisneros. I could not believe my luck. I called her minutes after she hung up with the foundation, when she was still processing this life-altering news, and interviewed her on the spot. We were both just jumping up and down, celebrating her success. So that was how we officially met. But she had long been a defining influence in my life. 

The author biography on the back of her books used to say: “She's nobody's wife and nobody's mother.” As a young Chicana feminist, that felt like a mission statement. It was a bold declaration of freedom. 

So Sandra was the first person I wanted to interview when I started dreaming up Art Above Everything. I interviewed her over dozens of hours in North Carolina as well as at her home in San Miguel de Allende. She's the best interview ever. For one, she is absolutely hilarious. And two, she is eternally wise.

She sounds very funny. What surprised you once you got to know her so personally? 

She is the archetype of the artist living entirely by her art. Her home in San Miguel is incredible—basically an art monastery. She always said that her ideal writing environment would be a monastery with a nightclub on top, and that is what she has created there.

Exactly!

What was truly special about our interview in San Miguel was that I had just bought my first house, a condo, when I arrived there. I hadn't yet closed on it, but I had already put down an insane amount of money, and was freaking out about it. I had previously been engaged to a violinist, and we’d had a devastating end to our relationship and canceled a wedding to which 200 people had been invited, including Sandra. 

I'd been living in a crappy apartment for years and years because I’d been waiting to merge paths with someone else before investing in some place nice. But after my engagement was called off, I looked around my crappy apartment and thought, this cannot be my life forever. But it was hard to morally, ethically justify spending so much money just on myself by buying that condo. That was the real gift that Sandra gave me. We don’t just need a room of our own, but a house of our own. She helped me realize: my books were worthy of being written in an art monastery, too!

Sandra has long been a madrina to me, and she has made me think about being a madrina to my students and to other writers as well. Sandra doesn’t have kids, but has still managed to have a profound legacy and a profound lineage. Spending time with her has given me the spiritual anchoring that I have needed in my life as a woman, as a writer, as an artist.

And did it give you a space just to give yourself more grace?

Grace is actually something that I take very seriously. One of the beautiful forces that has entered my life since moving to Chapel Hill is Won Buddhism. One of mainstream Buddhism’s guiding philosophies is, All is suffering. Won Buddhism came about in Korea during the war, when everyone was already deeply suffering, so they reconceived that philosophy to, All is grace.

Wonderful!

How can you look around at all the suffering in this world and instead, see it as a form of grace? The head monk at the Won Buddhist Temple here in Chapel Hill gave me that quest when I got diagnosed with cancer. She implored me to view everything through the lens of grace. That became my daily meditation, All is grace, all is grace, all is grace. 

Grace is what got me through cancer. Grace is what saved my life. 

Obviously, this is a very hard moment to see grace in, the one we are living now. Yet, philosophically, it is the road we must walk to find alignment. Only grace will lead us there.

So I've taken a lot of your time. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge your father’s passing. I'm so sorry for your loss. I was reading the last chapter of the book, remembering my father and thinking how wonderfully you capture his last moments and what he means to you. It is so beautifully written. So that was one thing. 

But I am curious because you only interview women, how do you define women for the purposes of your book? James Baldwin, for example, defines manhood not in the terms that we usually define manhood; he simply defines it as love.

Given that misogyny is increasing around the globe, there isn’t enough attention given to the wisdom of women.

To teach, especially in moments like this, your book is a powerful reflection on women who are fighting for their essence. I see art is an exploration of our essence. It is what we must do with our lives. We don't have a choice like what you have to done with yours—to live your full self.

I realized through writing this book that art is freedom. I am interested in women who are fighting to be free. How I define a woman is anyone who defines herself as such. If you believe yourself to be a woman, that is enough for me. For this book, I wanted to explore what it means to be a woman when our basic freedoms are being undermined or attacked throughout much of the world, particularly here at home. How can our art set us free?

It's interesting because Mexico, which is often perceived to be so machista, seems to be such an exciting place right now for women. You have a woman president and a legislature that is 50% women. They're giving pensions to women who were homemakers. There are these sparks of hope.

Is there anything that I missed that you want to say about the book? There are so many things that I would love to discuss about all of the different women you covered, but readers will just have to buy the book.

If any of this speaks to you, I want to say you are not alone. I cannot responsibly recommend this as a lifestyle choice because pursuing art is an impossibly hard path. But if you have already chosen this path, I want you to know that you do not walk it alone. There is a global congregation of artists who have made this exact same decision. And we have all drawn the same conclusion, that art is indeed enough.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. I have enjoyed it immensely.

Gracias!

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. 

Photo credit: Alexander Devora