Julia Alvarez

But the curtains are drawn so the child can't see.

You know, they have a mirror where they can see the other stuff, but I belong to myself alone.

Yeah.

Well, I didn't even know I was going to be a writer.

I didn't even know I was going to go past maybe a few years of high school.

So I don't think I had any ambitions that way.

But the three things that you mentioned about the three panel, you know, who she was.

Who I was, what we were here to do, the past, the present, what I was here to do.

And then the linking here of the making of the faces, the many faces and speakers we become in the poems or stories we write with that same process.

She was creating, you know, her persona.

But, you know, yes, draft after draft.

And maybe there is no face.

No one face.

I think that a lot of the poems in this collection are elegiac.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, a perspective that you get, I think, when you get to be old, as I have, of being able to see things in the three-paneled mirrors of time.

That you can see, you know, you can see her in all her variousness and beauty.

And wondering, you know, was it even a misguided quest to think that you could find just the one face?

Right.

But obviously the question has not been answered for the speaker of who she was, who I was, for that matter, and what we were here to do, you know.