The One and Only Julia Alvarez
The One and Only Julia Alvarez
Working with National Medal of Arts medal winner Julia Alvarez since her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, has always been an honor and a joy for us at Algonquin Books. Now, as we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, the American Masters series on PBS is highlighting this trailblazing Dominican American author with the documentary “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined”, which premieres September 17.
Her Books
A Letter from Julia Alvarez about her Newest Novel
Dear Readers,
I’m *excited* (equal parts joy and dread─scratch that─unequal parts dread and joy) to be sharing my new novel with all of you. The Cemetery of Untold Stories is about a writer who is closing down her writing life.
What to do with all the stories she hasn’t had the talent, courage, imagination, or time to tell? When she inherits a plot of land next to the town dump in her homeland of the Dominican Republic, she decides to create a cemetery and bury her boxes of unfinished drafts, thereby returning her stories to the place she and they came from.
But not so fast. Stories have a mind of their own. They will not be silenced. Her characters rise up to tell their true and secret stories. The inhabitants of the surrounding barrio join in with theirs. Before we know it we are in the thick of storytelling land with no end in sight . . .
There’s a saying often quoted by protestors: “They tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds.“ Well, the novel’s version of that is “She tried to bury us; she did not know we were stories.”
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is an exploration of storytelling, who owns the stories, who gets to tell them, what happens to silenced stories and histories. As I grow older, I’m interested in portrayals of older female protagonists, who aren’t just background for center-stage ingenues and young female leads.
Eduardo Galeano, the Latin American writer, once remarked that scientists are wrong when they say we are made of atoms. Really, we are made up of stories. As Alma, the writer in my novel, and her characters, and you will find out, stories never die. They wait in silence to be told. May this novel inspire you to tell yours.
—Julia Alvarez
Inspiration for The Cemetery of Untold Stories from Julia’s Photo Albums
Bienvenida Trujillo
Bienvenida Inocencia Ricardo Martinez Trujillo was the second wife of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from the 1930s to 1960s. Bienvenida inspired the character of the same name in this novel. She is pictured below with her husband in both photos, and they are with Eleanor Roosevelt during a 1934 state visit.
Cemetery Lore
Julia Alvarez spent a lot of time researching the culture of cemeteries, including Monte Cristi Cemetery, where Bienvenida Trujillo is buried in an unmarked grave. El Barón, depicted below, is the legendary lord of cemeteries.
Art that Inspired
Two works by Belkis, a Dominican artist, are among the visual works that inspired Julia as she wrote The Cemetery of Untold Stories: “Pensamientos de Julia” (referencing Julia de Burgos), which hung in her study, and Belkis’s huge life-size figures.
