In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 197.
In my debut story collection, I’ll Give You a Reason, published this month by the Feminist Press, I was interested in exploring how place influences people and reflects the sociopolitical climate and culture in which they exist. My characters live and breathe the Ironbound, a largely Latinx and Portuguese immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. The sensory details—what my characters see, hear, smell, and taste—reinforce the perspectives of these often marginalized immigrants and first-generation Americans as they navigate their hyphenated identities, searching for joy, connection, and the elusive American Dream.
As they move through their neighborhood, my characters might smell the sulphuric, industrial fumes from the local power plants. Because they live in the Ironbound, my characters are cognizant of their immigration status and how it limits their upward mobility. They attend crowded and sometimes under-resourced classes to learn English and acquire American citizenship. They stand in long lines to wire money and send packages to their family members in their countries of origin.
Yet my characters also see other working-class folks congregating on sidewalks, waiting to be picked up for a construction shift. They hear English as a foreign language, often spoken with various accents, particularly Spanish and Portuguese. They might crave the taste of sweet pastries, salty fried foods, and imported tropical fruits from their native countries. They know what it’s like to feel adrift and homesick, so they decorate their homes and cars with the flags of their countries. They celebrate holidays from their native lands as if they still lived there. These are what give them joy.
The Ironbound and the particular community that lives there shape my characters’ sometimes hopeful, sometimes bleak outlook on life and their desire to pursue their versions of the American Dream. I use interiority, in addition to sensory details, to show how my characters embody what it’s like to be from this working-class immigrant neighborhood. I focus on the intimacy of the ordinary because those details feel like real life. For instance, my characters know parking will be a nightmare because the neighborhood is small and congested. My characters feel how densely populated the neighborhood is when they’re forced to drive around hopelessly looking for parking. When I wrote these stories, I wanted my readers to feel my characters’ frustration: the panic of nearly clipping someone’s side-view mirror as they squeeze through narrow, one-way streets. The desperation of weighing whether said characters can even afford one more parking ticket. I wanted my readers to understand why my characters’ eyelids grow heavy as they take on the Sisyphean task of circling neighborhood blocks looking for a spot after a twelve-hour shift at work.
As writers, it is our job to capture setting in a way that feels authentic. This is only possible with characters who see, hear, smell, taste, and embody, through their actions and attitudes, what it is like to be in—and from—a particular place. Sometimes these details are not particularly beautiful. Sometimes they are incredibly ordinary. But that’s what makes them real. The best representations of setting ground us in concrete reality, but they also are imbued with characters’ attitudes. They explore, deeply and thoughtfully, the relationship between person and place. They do not stop at description; they evoke a feeling akin to familiarity. How our characters react to the mundane can be much more telling of that environment than anything else. Therein lies the intimacy that makes setting come alive.
Annell López is a Dominican immigrant. She is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the story collection I’ll Give You a Reason (Feminist Press, 2024). A Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review’s Adult Writers Workshops, she has also received support from Tin House. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Brooklyn Rail, Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, Refinery29, and elsewhere. López received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel.
Art: Jimmy Woo