Illuminating Collective History With Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones
The intersection of ecological and colonial trauma
TW Managing Editor Neva Talladen interviews Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones, author of The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History. In this episode, Neva and Claudia discuss the process of writing a memoir from the perspective of people who have experienced ecological and colonial trauma. Claudia, her family, and the people of Puerto Rico live with the aftereffects of multiple hurricanes hitting their island. They are also locked in a colonial relationship with the United States, which limits their ability to have agency over their own well-being, especially after the hurricanes. The Hurricane Book explores how the violence of hurricanes and colonial powers affect the collective history of the Puerto Rican people.
Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones is a writer from Puerto Rico whose poems and short fiction have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, wildness, Ambit Magazine, Radar Poetry, and other publications. In 2019, she received an MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she also taught poetry to undergraduate students. Her chapbook, Bedroom Pop, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded a Letras Boricuas Fellowship by the Flamboyan Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation. Her full-length debut, The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History, was published by Rose Metal Press in October 2023. Claudia lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In this powerful debut, Claudia pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, overheard conversations, and flash essays. Organized around six hurricanes that passed through the island with varying degrees of intensity between 1928 and 2017, The Hurricane Book documents the myriad ways in which colonialism—particularly the relationship between the United States and the island—has seeped into the lives of Puerto Ricans, affecting how they and their land recover from catastrophe as well as how families and citizens are bound to one another.
Through accounts of relatives, folklore, and necessary escape, Claudia illuminates both the tenderness and heartbreak of bonds with family and homeland. Moving seamlessly from the personal to the political to the environmental, she takes the reader through her own experience of family dynamics, mental illness, and substance abuse—and their long-reaching echoes—all against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s struggles and beauty. An attempt at a colony’s etymology in a time when it is perpetually embattled by natural disasters, crippling debt, and the mass exodus of its people, The Hurricane Book is also an invitation to see the realities that many don’t want to see—a refusal to stay in the dark about ourselves or our collective history.
In this week’s episode, Neva and Claudia discuss the process of writing a memoir and how it affected Claudia’s life. Claudia found that writing a memoir, especially one with such heavy content, was emotionally taxing. While writing and researching for the book, she was met with personal traumas that she felt herself as well as what her people felt because of the hurricanes. She found that she had to give herself grace while writing because it was a painful experience. However, she also shares her opinion that one does not have to be completely healed to write about one’s own trauma. It’s necessary to go through the healing process, but complete healing may not be possible, so writers should write about their experiences regardless.
Neva and Claudia also discuss the publishing and marketing process. Working with a smaller publication meant that Claudia would be assigned a smaller marketing strategy for her book. So, to help boost her sales, she adopted her own marketing strategy and promoted her book through her social media accounts. She mentions that before the book debuted, she thought about her social media strategy constantly. She considered selling books both for herself and for her publisher as well as the fact that family members and people mentioned in the book would eventually read it. Even though she changed some of the names, the people mentioned would know who they were. Yet, that did not change the content of the book. This was a fact that she came to terms with before and during the debut.
Tune in to hear more about The Hurricane Book and Claudia’s writing process.
Such important work. Thank you for sharing it.