Kathryn Campo Bowen, author of “There is a man named Rómulo Prudencio Reyes and the truth is,” interviewed by Erica Frederick
Interviewer’s Note: In the months leading up to the release of Salt Hill 48, our first BIPOC-only issue (due out in fall 2022) we’ll be featuring pieces and interviews from our past contributors of color, each of them immensely talented. August’s web feature, Kathryn Campo Bowen’s “There is a man named Rómulo Prudencio Reyes and the truth is” was first published in Salt Hill 47.
Salt Hill: “There is a man named Rómulo Prudencio Reyes and the truth is” deals with a kind of haunting in that past secrets seem to be fighting their way into the present. How does this theme work throughout the story?
Kathryn Campo Bowen: Secrets, especially family secrets, can act as a conduit for compassion, I think. Because I love you—the logic goes—I am withholding this painful or potentially painful truth. Of course, friction materializes when the impulse to conceal is confronted by a need for knowledge, or an impulse to connect, and the initial altruistic intent fails to translate. In that way the tension of deception, of the self or others, ideally yields both tragedy and comedy.
SH: I was so compelled by the interior spirals that Nathan, the narrator, goes on. A different writer might have avoided that. What led you to this kind of character?
KCB: Ha, I suppose the story does go there, doesn’t it? As a mixed Salvadoran-Anglo journalist, Nathan provides a hyperbolic and (hopefully) humorous way to explore the boundary between cultural reverence and commodification or even fetishization, while messing around with questing tropes. He also serves, for better or worse, as an unfiltered avatar for several of my own anxieties: existential, ethnoracial, professional, etc. On a more craft-y note, I’m coming to believe that neurosis can provide a useful centripetal force for stories, something of an internal momentum.
SH: Nathan’s approach to Spanish is also sometimes as neurotic as he is—words and phrases get broken down to an almost etymological level. Why does he engage with language in this way?
KCB: Like deception, or humor, the hyper-analytical might manifest as a means to obscure pain. And Nathan’s pain—the sorrow and frustration and shame that we see erupt in the latter car scene—flows from his sense of being locked out of his origin story: family, heritage, place of birth, an alienation that Nathan partially attributes to his lack of Spanish proficiency.
SH: On that same note, Nathan’s inability to fully speak and understand Spanish estranges him from nearly the entire city of Miami, as well as from his grandmother. I’d like to hear more about how you’d describe that kind of estrangement.
KCB: That sort of estrangement feels intimately tied to place and personal history. When we meet Nathan, he’s a rookie freelance reporter, freshly arrived in Miami after spending six years in the Bay Area, living—and passing, essentially—in a privileged, predominantly white Anglo milieu. Because he suddenly sees his Salvadoran heritage as yielding a career-launching story, he wants to know more about his grandmother Lourdes, and yet he hasn’t done the requisite work to access that complicated and sensitive history. So we get to watch as Nate, fueled by his twenty-five-year-old ambition, grapples with difference, inadequacy, imposter syndrome, and the list goes on.
SH: While the story delves into Nathan’s inability to communicate on a language level, all three generations of this family seem unable to communicate with each other at all. What makes that kind of basic communication so difficult?
KCB: For the Velasquez family, these basic failures of communication link partly to that complex relationship between suffering and truth, partly to a specific experience of structural and interpersonal violence, of civil war and emigration and exile. With time and new generations that long to reverse earlier assimilatory pressures and understand their antecedent causes, the parental instinct to keep hidden a painful past may begin to interfere with the simplest, most innocuous conversations, those theoretically low-stakes lunches at Panera Bread, for instance. Eventually, in other words, the wounds are probed.
SH: In “There is a man named Rómulo Prudencio Reyes and the truth is,” Nathan is a journalist. Journalism is a distinct kind of storytelling. What do you think is the purpose of journalism—of storytelling in general?
KCB: At stake in any recounting seems to be a salient issue of truth. Is what I’m saying accurate, and/or, does it feel emotionally honest? These notions of veracity or verisimilitude are bound up, by turns, with the questions of who is doing the telling and who gets to tell. In the fictive universe, those inquiries can lead to some fun, gnarly interrogations of reliability and ownership. In actual life, concerns over authenticity may inspire some hand-wringing, which I’ve tried to channel back into my work.
SH: Literature comes up many times in this story—Lourdes and her caretaker bond over Gabriel García Márquez. Who are some of the authors that you keep returning to as a writer?
KCB: This is like choosing a favorite child—but worse! García Márquez is a tremendous influence: his technicolor language and operatic action, those showstopping sentences. So too for Roberto Bolaño, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo: the theatrics and rhythms of their prose. Likewise, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen, also for their pyrotechnic rendering of consciousness, the conjuring of compelling moral-ethical dilemmas. Horacio Castellanos Moya and Sam Lipsyte, for their brilliant metering of the profound and the absurd, the transgressive. All of the above for their humor, wry and at times political.
SH: I want to talk craft for a bit. “There is a man named Rómulo Prudencio Reyes and the truth is” is your first published story. Which craft techniques in your debut story best reflect who you are as a writer?
KCB: Certainly those interior spirals, if I can wedge that into the category of “craft.” I wrote and submitted this story before entering a graduate writing program, where, with my exceptional professors and colleagues, I’ve been working to cultivate and refine that technique of diving into a mind, in all of its bizarre complexity. I’ve also (masochistically) chosen to grow this piece into a polyphonic novel, with its attendant opportunities for expansion.
SH: What’s your favorite line from the story?
KCB: I’ll go with the following sentence, which seems to bespeak much of our conversation on deception and writing and pain:
See the eye-flash in which Lourdes’s gaze transmutes once more, this time from indignation to something I discern only later, which is now, typing furiously in a small boarding room in San Salvador—okay, fine, honestly it’s the lobby of a Sheraton, but still, it is in San Salvador, where I am recording all that I have seen so I do not forget the crushing distress on Lourdes’s face, the incomparable misery of immutable mistake, a regret that pincers your heart through your ribs, a sorrow that shuts you up in reverence of the sobering circumstance that sometimes we are too late.
SH: Finally, from a fellow Floridian, favorite Pub Sub?
KCB: I love this. You can take the writer out of Florida, but you can’t take the Pub Sub out of the writer, or something like that. Anyway, I have fond memories of roast beef and provolone, no mayo but otherwise all toppings. It was a different, simpler time.
Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Salvadoran American writer from Miami, Florida. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of California, Irvine. Her stories have been finalists in the Sewanee Review’s Fourth Annual Summer Contest and STORY Magazine’s Third Annual Foundation Prize. This is her first published work of fiction. You can find her musing @kcampobowen.