Interview with Angela Garcia (Part 2)
The first draft was the last draft
We spoke with Angela Garcia, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, who is an award-winning anthropologist and author. She is known for her work on addiction, kinship, ethics, and violence, and the ways these are shaped by histories of colonialism. She is also known for her literary approach to ethnographic writing.
In her newest book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost, Garcia draws readers into the hidden world of anexos: informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness that are spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reach into the United States. For many families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, they offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them – the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.
You can read the full interview (Part 2) here.
KVD: What is your writing practice like? Has it changed over time? Did it change from the first book to the second?
AG: Well, it's wonderful to have a dissertation to work from. And in the second book I didn't have that kind of initial draft. [...] I always encourage my students when they're writing their dissertations to begin from the very onset to think of it as a book, to go beyond thinking of it as something that we do to please our committees, or to get a job. Those are very important to do, obviously. But to begin from the onset like: I'm writing a work. This is a work of writing. It's not just a piece of scholarly writing, it's a work.
I have a terrible system where I'm constantly editing as I'm writing, and so in some ways my first draft was my last draft because I was continuously editing it as I was writing it, and my editor at the time said, “Stop doing that.” But I couldn't. And then eventually he said, “Okay, that's your process.” It took me a little bit longer, and I suffered a lot because I often would go back to the very first sentence and read in order to get to the next chapter or even the final chapter – I would still go back to the beginning to make sure that I was carrying some kind of story forward. [...] The first draft was the last draft, and that's just the way I work, and it can be excruciating at times, and it can feel like I'm not making any progress. But eventually the pages begin to build, and there they are.
Right now I have very little time. I did start a new project – two projects, one that I'm imagining as a kind of novella, just to take a little bit of pressure off of myself, [instead of] thinking I have to write a 300-page book, thinking maybe it's a 40- or 50-page something.
I used to write every day when I was really working on the book. But now I'm lucky if I can write 2 days a week, and usually that's only for about 4 hours each time.
I'm a slow writer. It took me, I'm embarrassed to say, 14 years between the first and the second book. But 10 of those years was research. I'm just hoping that I'll be able to carve out and commit to a few days a week, and also… I went to Russian River, and I rented a cabin, and I just went by myself, and I brought some wine and some food, and wrote for 3 days, and that was my quiet monastery that I was trying to recreate for myself.
KVD: Well for some people twice a week for 4 hours actually sounds like quite a lot of writing that can be done. So yeah, it really depends, I think, on the project.
AG: Thank you for saying that, because I always feel like Oh, my God, it's not enough time! When I was writing the book I was maybe doing 3 hours every day, Monday through Friday, and giving myself a break on the weekend. And now I'm like, Oh God, I wish I had that availability! So I need to figure something else out.
RP: That leads me over to the next question. In your chapter on “the experience,” you describe this writing experience almost like a breakdown healing or catharsis. We want to ask you, what is cathartic writing? Could you tell us more?
AG: Well, that definitely was a cathartic practice, and I think part of what enabled catharsis to happen in the process of writing was all of the other things that contributed to that experience – not eating, not sleeping, being with others, taking these walks through the forest, being reprimanded… for these groups it's almost like a system to bring someone to that point of utter collapse. And that happened to me there.
But there have been other quieter moments of catharsis, particularly when I was writing the memoir – aspects of the book where I was reaching deep into some very painful places, and I would sometimes write something and just break down crying and realize that I had hit a nerve. And I wanted to stick with the nerve that I was hitting, and allow myself to explore it to its fullest. [...] I found myself at many points of the writing process for this last book breaking down and needing to step away and take a very long nap, or just cry. [...] Crying is something that I unfortunately feel like I do too much of when I'm writing, but it is a wonderful way of letting go, and I think writing can be that space, too.
But there's writing to the point of breaking in “the experience.” That was the goal. And when I'm working, I don't know about you, but if I hit a groove I won't leave my computer, sometimes 8 hours can pass, and time stops in those moments of what I feel is like cathartic writing most of the time. It's very laborious and difficult, but when I'm in that space of what I've come to understand as a cathartic writing practice, time does go away. And my kids would be knocking on the door like, “Mama, come eat something!” and I would be like, “No, I'm in my… I'm here, and I'm letting it all out.” And it feels really hard at the time. But then there's this tremendous sense of release, and I had a lot of moments like that in this last book.
I'm writing about “the experience” now. I'm writing about that kind of writing practice that I did in that therapeutic setting. I'm thinking about what can we learn from it as writers? Because it was such a powerful modality of writing, and one of the things that I learned was the sense of community that supported the practice of writing, supported me writing through the night. That nocturnal writing practice kept me awake, kept me going, and I think that as professors, as mentors, we can be in that role, albeit very differently. But to have writing be more of a collective practice, too, to me was also very cathartic, because it took me away a little bit from the loneliness of the experiences that I was writing about. And I felt a sense of community during “the experience.” And I'm trying to figure out, how might I be able to cultivate that for myself and for others? Taking the lessons that I learned from “the experience” into a more everyday practice. And I've pushed myself to try to replicate the writing through the night. It hasn't worked. It's just not the same, but what is the same, I think, is those long extended periods of writing where time does stop. And then eventually you come to some kind of end, and you just break down. And that does happen for me a lot. It does happen.
[...]
I'm trying to think about what “the experience” can afford us in terms of thinking about our own ethnographic writing practices, and the importance of community. People are hungry for community, I think. “The experience” is one version, and there are so many others. I think we need to be really deliberate about creating those spaces.
Angela Garcia, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, is an anthropologist and writer. Her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and PEN Center USA’s University of California Exceptional First Book Award. Her second book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, was published by Farar, Straus and Giroux in 2024.