Category Archives: Katherine Vaz

Katherine Vaz

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This semester, Baruch College’s Sidney Harman Writer-In-Residence Program, welcomed Katherine Vaz, author of Our Lady of The Artichokes and Other Portugese-American Stories. For the duration of the semester, Vaz taught a select group of CUNY students interested in creative writing.

On October 25, 2012, however, Vaz made the time to visit our very own Features Writing class to talk about her writing experience in greater detail. Vaz, who has an impressive resume under her belt, including fellowships, an array of published stories, and awards, always wanted to be a writer. Since the age of 12 years old, she practiced her craft and eventually worked towards where she is today – a successful author.

Getting to where she is today was not easy, however. Vaz describe how much work and practice she put into her writing. In fact, she would set time aside from her schedule just to write.

“I got up every morning and sat at a desk from 9 to noon. I don’t think I have saved one word from all those hours and hours and hours I did, but I was learning how to make sentences, I was learning what words matched,” she said.

Her persistent practice writing soon became the start of her career. Life experiences also added to her talent. Vaz has been married and divorced, lived on both ends of the country, and worked with several companies. She studied in California and was part of fellowships in different universities.

“I started teaching, writing, freelancing,” said Vaz. “I did a lot of, I guess you can call it, woman magazine type journalism.”

For a long time, Vaz lived on freelance work, which was enough to support herself at the time. But she admitted that she would never go back to that type of living.  Instead, she worked on her fiction writing to earn a living.

“I started selling short stories to literary magazines,” said Vaz. “I never had a sense of being downcast by a rejection note. I would just turn right around and send it back somewhere else.”

Her strong will to become a published writer paid off. Before getting to this point, Vaz would be very savvy with her money.

“Instead of going out to eat or to the movies, I would buy literary magazines,” said Vaz. “It was as an act of faith. I bought them because I wanted people to read my articles too.”

“That was my world and I wanted to be part of it,” said Vaz.

In order to get where you want in life, you need to work for it. Katherine Vaz properly displays this notion. If it was not for her dedication, Vaz would not be as notable as she is today in the literary world.

Katherine Vaz Profile

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By Teresa Roca

Standing at the podium, with her eyes fixated on the page in front of her, Katherine Vaz reads an excerpt from her upcoming novel “Below the Salt.” As she reads, the seated audience remains still. No cell phones vibrate. No one shifts in his or her chair. The only sound in the room is of the words that captivate the audience. As she portrays the themes of death and tragedy through these words, she is able to evoke emotion from her listeners. This talent makes her the critically acclaimed author she is today.

“It’s really hard to write fiction that doesn’t have those issues that connect to loss,” said Vaz. “Death is going to happen.”

Growing up in Oakland, California in the late ’60s, the issues of race and the Vietnam War plagued her community. After hearing stories of her grandmother’s death, how her mother was born dead then brought back to life, and experiencing her grandfather’s passing first hand, death has been prevalent throughout her life.

“I don’t think I am unusual or different. I tend to think of death as just plain life,” said Vaz.

“Taking a Stitch to a Dead Man’s Arm,” the first short story in her collection “Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese American Stories,” is inspired by experiences from Vaz’s childhood such as taking the bus to school, forming a friendship of protection with another student, and her relationship with her father. Vaz took her father’s fear of the dark and a family myth to create a fictional story bigger than the truth it came from.

“It’s completely fictional. I am not that character at all,” said Vaz. “That is the thing about fiction, it is not an autobiography, but you do draw on essences.”

Vaz knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of 12. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Vaz would spend her workdays giving herself writing exercises such as copying paragraphs to see the construction and writing short stories in a specific time span. Although she did not save one word from these exercises, this is how Vaz learned to write.

“I can even see the moment where that wasn’t just what I wanted to do, but who I was,” said Vaz.

After years of having her short stories published in literary magazines, Vaz was accepted into the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine in her early 30s. Her thesis, which drew on her past experiences, as opposed to conventional topics, became her first novel entitled “Saudade.” This novel portrays a young woman’s struggle with self-expression in a world with no sound. Her second book, “Mariana,” depicts the true story of a nun who wrote love letters that many people believe to be the most passionate documents in history. This novel received widespread popularity. It was printed in seven editions, six languages and remained on the bestsellers list in Portugal for years.

Aside from writing, Vaz dedicated her time to a teaching fellowship at Harvard University for five years. During that time, she also did a fellowship at Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study.

With a religious family that practiced the catholic faith, Vaz grew up learning about saints and their crucial role in her culture. The use of miracles and religious beliefs regarding saints are two consistent themes found throughout her work.

“I grew up with the stories of the saints,” said Vaz. “They were real people who had miraculous things happen, things phenomenal to me. I realize they’re mythological, but it does introduce the possibility that extraordinary things can exist the real world. ”

Her ability to present old Portuguese-American traditions and catholic beliefs, while understanding the complexities of life, has made her an award-winning author.

She won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her first short story collection “Fado & Other Stories” and was the 2007 winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for “Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese American Stories.”

When asked how Vaz knows that her readers will be interested in the topics she writes about, she replied, “I feel and give weight to what’s important to me, what do I need to get across to people. You explore that and are not confined by having to report this is the way the incident happened. It is not about what I share about myself, what happened to me. It is about what I have in my heart that I manifest in the world, what I want to find as a story.”

Katherine Vaz post

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I am so disappointed that I did not know about Katherine Vaz teaching at Baruch,. That would have been such a great opportunity to read the book, ask questions about it right from the author, and ask the author about some tricks she uses in writing. We had a small chance to ask this writer several questions at the event and next day in class, which was nice.

I read some of her stories and they seemed to me gloomy and sad, as if the writer went through all these difficulties in life herself. In one story, the death of her father was mentioned, and she passed on to the reader a very suppressed, horrible feeling.

Not only is she brilliant at composing the story and telling it to us, but she also knows how to capture the reader. I loved the stylistic devices she uses. She is all about metaphors and similes: for instance, when she writes about the imprisoned mother and son, she describes the mother as very attached to son, hugging him all the time, and she has “hands like ropes,” or “her skin was perfect, soft as an eggplant,” or “eggs smooth as river stones.”

Sometimes she uses two words that do not normally go together, making her own oxymoron: so, in her stories a character can drink a voice, or someone can be scarlet with anger, or the moon can excerpt a round cataract.

This kind of writing is based on the skillfulness of using a word and changing it, so that the reader is stunned, shocked and thus made to remember the author.

I wish Baruch had more opportunities to bring writers like Katherine Vaz so that even those students who miss a space in the class have another great writer to register for.

Katherine Vaz Post. By Mayara Guimaraes

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My life as a writer, Katherine Vaz.
Get Inspired!!!

During her “one and only” semester at Baruch College, writer Katherine Vaz gave the students of a journalism Feature class the privilege of having a private conversation with her. During one hour, Vaz told the class about her personal experiences and her inspiration to write, while giving advice on how to stop a writer’s block.

It all started with a question about the amount of death in her stories. “I think that is really hard to write fiction that doesn’t have issues that connect to loss. But the true theme of most of my stories is how human being find happiness in life, or different ways in which people find happiness, despite the loss they face. Fiction is an exploration of how people find joy and how they connect,” said the author.

Vaz grew up nearby a little town that is known as being the capital of the artichoke. She was surrounded by tumultuous things while growing up, like the Vietnam War, and this influenced her writing. In one of her books, titled “Our Lady of the Artichokes,” Vaz uses many of her memories and experiences to create several of the short stories that composes the book. “When you write fiction you have this germ, that sometimes is real, and it helps you to create a completely fictional story. I see this like instruments on writing fiction stories,” said Vaz.

Friends influenced Vaz by giving her ideas, and some of these ideas have become incredible short stories. “ A friend of mine once said to me, why don’t you write about when you had to ride the bus to go to school? And I did,” said Vaz. Indeed the story, “Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm” is the story of a girl who takes the bus to school, and other things like losing her dad, and getting rid of fear. This story’s title was also inspired by one of the author’s father’s memories.

“ Writing fiction really isn’t about writing about personal things. It is good to have a filter when writing because you might not want to expose the life of people you love, or even yours. I have made the decision that what I draw on is not about the personal moments, but the feeling behind them, because that makes it all very much authentic,” said Vaz.

Vaz said she discovered she wanted to be a writer at the age of 12. But things didn’t just come easily after that. She went to college during the 70’s, and even in this “interesting decade” she made the decision to write three hours everyday, while giving herself exercises in order to learn how to write well.

“ I discovered that I wanted to be a writer in a classroom. I remember we had to write sentences with five new words, which we had to learn everyday. And that specific day I wrote a sentence, and I cannot remember what I wrote, but the sentence almost flew away from me. It was such a moment to realize how the sentence just happened, and how easily it happened, and at the moment I just knew that I was going to be a writer,” shared Vaz. “ I spent 3 hours everyday writing. It was just like an exercise I forced myself to do. I don’t think I have anything saved from this time. But I was waiting for that moment I had in the classroom, when I knew who I was. But those hours were very important, I was learning to make sentences.”
Vaz’s stories in the “Our Lady of the Artichokes” collection are also very much connected with her father. He is still alive and is Vaz’s best friend. Being around him seems to have helped shape the writer’s mind.

“ The idea of sitting around in the middle of six kids growing up, and have the ability to do something beautiful without any need of awarding in the end, is a gift that my father had, and it was so important for me to grow up surrounded by that,” said Vaz.

Katherine Vaz also told the students that when she was making a living by selling short stories to magazines she would buy other literary magazines and books because she liked to think that one day someone would be buying her work, too. “It was my way to give it back to the universe,” said Vaz.

(Sharing this conversation with you today, is my way, to give back to the universe because Vaz truly inspired me, and I know many others like me need to know her message.)
Mayara Guimaraes

Katherine Vaz Assignment: Reflection

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I am very thankful that we had the opportunity to meet and hear from Katherine Vaz in class.

 I attended her reading in the library building and it was exceptional. She is a gifted reader, and has mastered the ability to enchant the audience. I was not originally familiar with her work outside of this class assignment, but I am glad that I had this chance to learn about her work and her novels.

I loved the excerpts that she read at the reading and I did appreciate her comical statements at the event. She made the whole reading come to life. Her story is filled with vivid illustrations and I loved the descriptions. They definitely were captivating and engaging.

It was kind of her to take time from her schedule to come and visit the classroom. I really enjoyed hearing her re-telling of her background and where she came from. Also, I liked most that she took time to share with us the writing routine and practice that she had undergone in efforts to become a great writer. She was relatable, funny, quirky and a true joy. Her stories about Europe were my favorite; they made me smile. Her visit was the highlight of my day.

I truly admire all of the work she has done. I can’t wait to read the work that she will be publishing in the future, for it appears to be one for the books!

Katherine is filled with creativity and boldness that is inspiring. As an aspiring food writer, I hope to have the same love for writing, and for appreciating life. What I noticed and now love about her visit, is that unlike most speakers who often visit to lecture to a class. With Katherine it was different, having a conversation with her had felt like I was hearing great advice and pearls of wisdom from my favorite aunt.

Her pearls of wisdom were very helpful, and was truly welcomed. I often encounter writers block, and she demonstrated a few great suggestion on the best way to recover from one. She noted the times that she struggled with writing, or conveying a thought on a page. I am grateful that she was so thoughtful to answer my question. I valued her advice and her answer was very helpful.

She said that the way to incorporate the right words in a story is by using simple adjectives and taking time to choose my words wisely. I walked away from the lesson that day, realizing that my work has potential and that with practice I will be able to use the write adjectives as a powerful game changer in my writing.

Thank you very much Professor Bernstein for inviting her to class, it was a great lesson.

Our Lady of the Artichokes by Sarah Moi-Thuk-Shung

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Katherine Vaz made a brave leap by including her religion in her writing, since many people are skeptical about discussing any religion. However, Vaz went about writing these short stories with such grace and life that it is hard to focus on anything other than her realness as well as her great imagination. The use of imagery and constant strings of emotions captures readers from the beginning of this collection of short stories until the very end.

While reading through the first short story, “Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm,” I found myself relating to a lot of what Vaz wrote. From dealing with loss to being afraid of the dark. The part about removing the stitch from a dead man’s arm to get rid of fear of darkness was interesting to me because I have heard many superstitions, but I have never heard about that one. The phrase, “Do not wait. Fear nothing.” really stuck with me because fear in itself can be enough to hold one back from pursuing what they need to accomplish in life. It is a powerful statement and a reminder that no one should ever let fear rule their life.

I noticed that much of Vaz’s writing has to do with death and tragedy and I am very much interested to find out the reason why. I am eager to question her when she comes to talk to the class on Thursday. After seeing Katherine at the reading today I see that she looks like a happy and lively person. The mood of her short stories does not seem to match her personality or appearance and that is why I believe she has a great imagination.