Washington Square. On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with Benjamin Clabault, whose story the Mothman and La Llorona will be in our Summer 24 issue. Hey there, Benjamin.

Hey, how you doing?

I'm doing awesome because I'm here talking to you. So that's a good time. Tell us about your story.

Yeah, so this is a story that I wrote, or started writing about a year after moving to West Virginia. So I've been living in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, which is my wife's hometown, for about three years. Years. And then from there I got into the MFA program at West Virginia University, and we packed up and moved to Morgantown. And then I noticed, you know, I think when anytime you move, you're noticing similarities and differences from the place you were and the place you've moved to. And one thing I noticed was this mythical creature, La Llorona, was a very constant presence culturally in Guatemala. And then here in West Virginia, we have this cryptid, or being called the Mothman. I'd like to hope that at some deeper level, there's all these complicated, nuanced things going on in my brain that help me decide what to write about and that give me inspiration. But on a very basic level is also just, huh, Laurona Mothman. Why don't I put them together in a story? And then I also, I don't write a whole lot of fantasy. And it never really occurred to me to have those two mythical beings or creatures, like, actually on the page in a physical sense. But I'm very interested in why mythologies take hold or how people interact with those mythologies in their everyday lives. And so that's why I came up with the idea to have this little boy, Kevin, working these two creatures or beings from these two cultures that he's grown up with into his own world of kind of comic book fantasy. That was the original idea.

How did you decide to use comic books as a backdrop?

Oh, I don't know. I think I was just thinking of what a child might do with these legends he's received. Right. So I also, you know, my. My wife is from Guatemala. I'm from Massachusetts. So it occurred to me, you know what? At the time, we wanted children. Now my wife is actually pregnant. So we were wondering. I spent a lot of time wondering what Is that kid's worldview going to be like drawing from these two quite disparate cultures? So I was just imagining, you know, somewhere like a comic or his creative output, if he goes on to. I'm sure every child is creative in one way or another. Whatever he creates in the world, he's probably drawing from these two different worlds in these two different ecosystems of mythology. And it strikes me that something like a comic, maybe. I'm actually not a reader of comics.

That was going to be my next question.

They're just so culturally relevant. So it occurred to me that it might happen upon that as a way to express himself.

For sure. I think they also lend toward more the visual. So by using the comics in there, it invites the reader to think about what these two would look like.

Yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't even thought of that.

But absolutely having read the story, that was the first thing that came to mind for me was trying to imagine what they would look like. Talk a little bit about what you were saying about the two different cultures because you were in Guatemala and now you're in Massachusetts and those seem very different to me.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm in West Virginia now. I grew up in Massachusetts and then, yeah, spent about three years in Guatemala after previously having lived other places in Latin America. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think a lot of my work now has been focusing on where those two cultures meet because that's where my family meets. Right. So, you know, the relationship between my wife and myself and then the life of our kids is going to be all on those like, cultural borderlands in a sense. Right. So there's just a lot of differences regarding, of course, religion, the effect of materialist capitalism on somebody's worldview, I guess. Of course. And that's one thing, thinking about the creatures or beings in the story. La Llorona is. Has been a very important cultural presence for God knows how many generations in Mexico and in Central America. Whereas the Mothman's a more recent phenomenon. And where most people in the American culture encounter him is through the movie with Richard Deer, with the Mothman Festival, where you can buy all sorts of Mothman trinkets. So it's just this interesting kind of arena to look at those differences.

Talk a little bit about the culture around the Ya Lorona. Tell us a little bit about that character.

So primarily in Mexico, but then now also in many parts of the Spanish speaking world, Guatemala, of course, and also the southwestern United States, there's a belief in this woman Who? I mean, the way I encounter the story is her children have died. Reading up on it, it seems that often in the story is that she's killed her children out of some sort of jealous rage because she's upset that her husband has cheated on her, I think, is the myth as it's most commonly told. But then she now walks the streets at night, wailing for her dead children. Right. So she says, you know, looking for her children, her child. I think the number of children depends on the myth. There's many different variations of it, but people in communities where there's this legend think that if you hear her at night, it means that she's out there looking for her children. And interestingly, the closer she sounds, supposedly the farther away she is. Whereas if she sounds very far away, she's actually quite near, which adds a little bit of a haunting element to it, I think. And then. But then that myth has showed up in a lot of music in Mexico and Latin America. There's a fantastic horror movie that's kind of a political horror movie called. I think it's called Lady Rona by Guatemalan filmmaker Bustamente, I think is his name Jair Bustamente. Also fantastic movie that ties that myth into a lot of the political history of Latin America and Guatemala specifically, with people who have lost their children because of the conflicts there is.

She's meant to be someone that people should fear or to be sympathetic for. How do people typically respond to her?

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, people typically fear her. I think if she's there, you hear her, it's bad news. Right. But that was one thing that was interesting about having the story that I wrote framed from the perspective. Well, from the perspective of the father. But it's. A lot of the mythology plays out through the lens of the child's imagination because I kind of didn't want to have to do a ton of research or base the story entirely on the way these myths present themselves and like, the most common iterations of them. I kind of thought what's interesting here is how this child, who's had this very unique upbringing, how he develops in his own mind a concept of these different ideas and how that reflects his multicultural background. Right. So his seeing his identification of Llorona with his grandmother is not, I think, how that myth would typically be understood. But that was kind of my point.

I hope, for sure it adds another layer to the story and shows that the child has, you know, moved out of the original, like myth and is creating their Own meaning from it in their new context, I think, is one of the things that makes the story more than just, you know, surface level. It had said that cultural layover. Talk a little bit about the Mothman the way it is, like originally out in the world, and then we'll kind of think about how that idea came into the story.

Cool. Yeah. So, I mean, my first encounter with the Mothman was just hearing him reference when I came out to West Virginia and thinking, who the heck is this Mothman? He sounds interesting. I want to get to know him. That story comes out of a sequence of bizarre events in the 1960s, early 1960s, in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where people were just reporting, seeing this giant, black colored winged figure. And there was multiple newspaper reports that kind of started making the news all in. Originally in Point Pleasant, but then spread throughout the country, apparently, and people were scared. I think he was pretty much seen as a purely negative force. Then about a year and a half or so after the sightings began, a bridge over the Ohio river connecting West Virginia to Ohio collapsed. And there reportedly were sightings of him, like around the time of the bridge collapse. And many dozens of people died. It was a huge tragedy. And at that point, people started wondering, okay, did the Mothman cause this? Or was the Mothman warning people that this disaster was going to happen? Since then now, like I said, there's a festival in Point Pleasant. There's just a lot of paraphernalia. I mean, I was in Seattle and I saw a Mothman mug for sale somewhere, like a little trinket shop I thought was interesting. So it's kind of become this modified lore. But the original story is that he was first unequivocally bad. Then we don't know. But then. So again, in the story, I thought it'd be interesting to have this family create their own take on it. That I was imagining a father telling bedtime stories to his son and is probably more likely, if he wants to talk about this figure in the first place, to give it a more. Make him more of a hero than a villain.

It's interesting, I think, because the son did the same thing with the Mothman, kind of recreated the character the way that they needed that character to be. Talk a little bit about how this particular story fits in with your other work. I know you're an MFA student working on an MFA in fiction, and so you must be working on other projects. Are those similar to this one or different?

Yeah, I mean, so I've. I'm wrapping up a novel project now that explores, you know, American expats in Guatemala. So it's definitely, again, that same cultural borderland space that I'm inhabiting and trying to parse through and looking at beliefs and mythologies and how that all wraps up, especially in a multicultural context. I also. I have just completed another short story that is about political violence, which is something that was kind of an afterthought in the story, actually, which seems straight, the story, you know, the Mothman and the Arona. Because I just needed a plot basically, for all these ideas that I had in mind. But then I realized, oh, here it is. Here's the plot that brings all these ideas together and taps into something I'm thinking about all the time also, which is the nature of political violence, the nature of political force, and the immovability of political force. So I'm writing another short story that also have finished another short story that looks at that in the context of the Roman Empire and their policy of crucifying enslaved people, when one. If an enslaved person were to kill their master, the rest of the slaves in that household were also killed. Which is a horrifying fact and horrifyingly played out at times in the history of the Roman Empire. And I've been looking at that as this way of understanding of how supposedly civilized societies justify really grotesque incidences of political violence. So. And in a way, I guess that does tie into the Mothman and Lerona story in the sense of the state doing what it do and having the power to do.

So how much influence was your experiences in Guatemala and the. The way that you're seeing the state and the politics and the way that politics can impact everyday people?

Oh, it was huge. Definitely. I mean, I can speak most assuredly from my own perspective, which of course is very privileged perspective. I was not ever myself an immigrant from Guatemala trying to come here, but. But just with my wife. We were in. In Santiago, in your hometown, and wanted to come to the States for all sorts of reasons, partly so I could pursue an mfa. And she wanted to experience living here. And we just decided we wanted to move back to the States. And it was interesting as an American citizen. And we've got, of course, a very strong passport. We feel like the world is our oyster, in a sense. Yeah, we can go to Cuba for a bit. North Korea is off limits. But generally we sense that we can go where we want to go in experiencing that sense of, huh, we can't go live in the United States right now. And it took forever with the visa and we, of course, had to get engaged so that we could get the visa. And there's a lot of complications. And, you know, people still ask now, like, oh, well, you know, will Rosa's family come to visit? And they, A lot of Americans struggle when I say no, they can't. You know, most Guatemalans can't just qualify for a tourist visa to visit the United States like that. So just that experience of, I mean, the lack of freedom to go where one wants was something I profoundly noticed for the first time when I was living over there.

Yeah, for sure. Talk a little bit for anybody who's wondering what that experience would be like for a Guatemalan who did want to travel, what steps would they have to take and what barriers would they encounter.

So basically, I mean, just to put it in stark terms, the US Government doesn't want people coming over on a tourist visa and then staying. Right. So the assumption is if Guatemalans or Central Americans in particular in general, were given carte blanche to come over on tourist visas, people would potentially stay to work. Right. So therefore, if somebody from one of those countries, you know, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, countries that have a lot of immigrants that come here, they need to prove. They need to prove that they're likely to return home at the end of their visit to the United States, which usually in practice that means property, owning property or having some sort of job with a steady, with a contract, basically that proves that you have to go back to work, which I would assume the majority of people in those countries don't have either of those circumstances. You know, I mean, especially, you know, housing. Oftentimes it's intergenerational homes. So younger folks don't have their name on the title or the deed, the property. Right. And then jobs, a lot of informal work, you know, artisan work or not many people have a contract that says, I'm going to be working at this job for X number of months or years. Right. So in practice, you know, and somebody in, I think what's the standard situation for a Guatellan family has very, very little chance of getting a tourist visa.

To come to the US Listening to explain all that really echoes back to what you were talking about earlier with your stories and the way that political influence kind of like simmers in the background.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was initially in my undergrad. I studied. It was called Social Thought and Political Economy. So my initial world was social sciences, and I kind of migrated to more of a literary ecosystem intellectually. But, yeah, that's definitely. I can't Help, but have it be present when I'm writing.

For sure, yeah. Talk a little bit about the novel that you said you were working on. Is that part of your program requirements?

Yeah. So hopefully it will be my thesis for the program, which is nice to have a project that's in relatively solid shape. I don't know if it's good, but at least it's almost done. It's a project or the novel is about an American ex, an American who's kind of non conformist, I think you'd call him a hippie. And like many of the expats who go down, especially younger, go down to live in some of these like, lakeside communities in Guatemala. He has this idea of reconnecting with spirituality and I think what most, what a lot of readers would assume kind of as a problematic relationship with the. With the community he's joining. Right. But then he's also a complicated, interesting guy and then he disappears. So the novel is looking at how both his ex girlfriend, who is an American, and his current partner, who is a Guatemalan woman, are A, trying to find him and then B, reconciling their different worldviews and their different understandings of who he was as a person as they try to find him.

That does sound good. How far into it are you?

There's a draft done. I'm in the revising process now, which I thought was. I mean, I've done a lot of revising already, but I thought the revisions were going to be pretty quick. And then to be honest, I think I was reading In Search of Lost Time when I wrote a few of the early chapters. So a lot of my characters, the first person narrators, are talking like these French aristocrats, which isn't what we didn't. So I'm having to iron out a lot of things syntactically. But it's just hopefully a few months away from being pretty much done in Dustin.

How do you think you'll know when it's done?

I think the story is pretty much done. I don't think anything that's not happening now is going to happen on the sentence level. I just read it and when something seems off, I go, oh, darn. And I was hoping that wouldn't happen very much. And so I went through what was going to be my last read through and I was like, oh, darn, oh darn, oh darn. And I stopped and told my wife, like, yeah, it's going to be a few months, not a few weeks. Darn. That happens sometimes.

How many words Is it?

Ooh, somewhere in the 90,000 ish range, I think.

Okay. And how long did it take you to write the first draft?

Probably a little over a year. It comes in spurts, so I actually write more during the vacations, the summer break, and I have other freelance work going on, but I have more free time during the summer than I do when I'm teaching as part of the MFA program I'm in. So I plugged away at a little bit during my first year in the program and then finished the draft last summer. So about half the draft was written in the space of three months because that's when I finally had time to write for two to three hours every day, which is where I really needed, what I need to do to really feel like I've got the momentum to make serious projects and make serious progress on such a long project.

Yeah, a year. That's a long time to be with one story. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the teaching you do. You said that was part of your program.

Yeah, so I teach undergraduate composition. So English101, English102, the intro comp classes that the undergrads have to take.

And what do you like best about teaching those classes?

Ooh, I like. I mean, I think when you see students writing really, really well, and then you come in the next day in class and you see them with a book in their hands and you realize, like, ah, there's a connection there, you know, I think it's kind of an ironic thing maybe to say as a writing teacher, but one of the things I'm realizing is that writing teachers can only do so much, and the students who are the best writers are the ones who read the most. And I think our job as teachers is often, is to encourage people to read often and to read carefully and to read thoughtfully and then apply that same type of thinking to their writing.

Had you done teaching before this experience?

Yeah, I was a teacher for a while of English as a second language, so I taught a bit in Mexico, a bit at a school in Boston, which is a fantastic experience. There are students from all around the world. So that was like a very. As you can probably tell, I'm very enthused by just multicultural settings and what happens when all these different ideas from different parts of the world come together. So that was a really cool time and place, but that was a very different type of teaching. Of course, teaching, especially, like a lot of elementary classes. So teaching people with no English to say, you know, hello, how are you?

Do you Feel like those experiences were more, maybe more personal because you get to know the people and you're talking with them compared to the composition. You know what? Maybe.

Yeah, I would say so. I think also, to be completely honest, the English as Second Language students were thrilled to be there. They were spending their own money to be in the course, whereas some of the undergrads.

Yes, they're there because they have to be.

Yes. They're not English majors. If they're English majors, they would have tested. They wouldn't have had to take the intro comp course in the first place.

Right, right. Yes, they're there because they have to be. And that. That does.

And they're great. They're great. But they're.

Yeah.

A little less enthusiastic sometimes.

Yeah. Is there anything about the teaching that surprises you that you hadn't expected to happen? That does.

Yeah. I'm trying to decide if I should say what I was going to say, and I'm just going to say it. I think you can tell that a lot of students and a lot of young folks don't read as much as they ideally would. You know, so sometimes I am surprised by what seems to be an unfamiliarity with the written word. And so that's why, like I said, I think most what we can do is encourage people to read, to get people to see that reading is a valuable use of time. Because you. I mean, I don't know. I don't know enough to know whether or not it's just that writing is actually quite hard or if it's is especially hard when you haven't encountered the written word on a regular basis. You know, and I think if people are reading mostly very short things, you know, I mean, social media captions or whatever, as opposed to books or little or even just newspaper articles, you know, what's the difference between just a headline on a phone versus actually reading the entire newspaper article? It's the amount of absorption of text is a lot different.

So, yeah, it is very different. What I was thinking about when you were talking about, you know, just looking at a headline and maybe scanning the first couple lines of a news article is that when you have something printed, you know, like a newspaper or a magazine or even a book or whatever, when you look at it, you can assess it real quickly and see how long it is, and you can kind of in the back of your mind make some assumptions about it. But when you're looking at it online and all you get is that first line, it's hard for your brain, I think, to really engage it in. In the same way as your brain does engage with something that you're holding and you can see the whole thing. That's just a theory I kind of cooked up in the past couple of months.

That makes sense. I do a lot of reading on my Kindle. Just because I was in Guatemala, especially during the pandemic, I didn't have the ability to get physical books. But then when I came back to the States and started going to the library and getting physical books again, I was like, this is the real deal.

And it is a very different experience to me. It also seems really different. Yeah. What kind of stuff do you. So we were talking about how the importance of when you're a writer, that reading feeds the writing. What kind of stuff do you like to read currently?

Oh, so I try to read very widely. I do read mostly novels, as it turns out, though, so it's probably not a coincidence, even though I try to read more widely than that. I went through a phase where I was reading, you know, the classics because as a. Not being, you know, not being an English major, when I came to the MFA program, I was really worried that I was going to have this huge gap. So I read, you know, basically anything that I imagined being on an English college syllabus anywhere. And that was really rewarding. I really enjoyed, I mean, some of these books that you hear about being these dense, unreadable tomes. I'd open them up and I'd say, you know, Tolstoy's hilarious. You know, like, I really enjoyed a lot of those. And then now I guess I could plug. I've just read this book called. Actually, it hasn't been translated in English yet, but it's called the Tarantula. I would assume that'll be the English title as well, by Guatemalan writer Eduardo Helphon. Some of the most brilliant fiction I've encountered a long time looking at historical memory and personal memory. And he's somebody with an incredible life story and just somebody who writes very dense fiction that brings so many different concepts into it without seeming too complicated. I think that's real skills. When writers crystallize all these complexities into a very readable and sensible package, which is something he does really well. So it's Eduardo Halfon.

Nice. Well, thank you for that recommendation. I wanted to kind of backtrack a little bit to something you said about not having a writing or English background and going into the mfa. What made you decide to pursue an mfa?

That's a good question. There are kind of well, first I guess let's talk about maybe decide to try writing fiction seriously. So I a was really into politics, but I mean, the social sciences, I should say. Like, I was really interested in trying to use social sciences as a way to figure out how the world works. And then somewhere along the way, I started realizing that a lot of social science uses numbers or assigns value to things that probably are impossible to really ascribe value to, and then uses those values to try to identify trends and thereby to understand the world. And that's great. But I kind of realized as much as that is interesting and useful, there's something that interested me more in getting right to the particular in the way that storytelling lets you do, in the way that narrative lets you do. And looking at something that maybe isn't scientifically verifiable but is certainly there because you can feel it with something kind of deeper inside yourself. So a I saw literature as a way to understand the world in a way that made sense to me. And then also I have always been creative. I used to write songs and sing, and then I was pretty bad at singing and I was pretty bad at playing guitar. So I realized writing would be a way to continue. The part I was kind of decent at was the writing. So I was like, oh, maybe I could leave the guitar and the microphone behind and just write. And then as far as doing an MFA program or applying to MFA programs, I hadn't in hard because I don't enjoy. I didn't like the idea of being like having my writing life institutionalized, if that makes sense. But then I finally decided that the benefits would outweigh any negatives and they have tenfold. Just having a writing community, having lots of people in my life with whom I can discuss literature and writing has been one of the best things that's ever happened to me.

Absolutely. I think that's absolutely. One of the great things about MFA programs is surrounding yourself with other people that are interested in reading and writing and you can talk to them. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, thanks a lot. We're looking forward to hearing more from you in the future. So if people want to stay in touch with you, you've let me know. They can find you on Twitter. Okay. That's awesome. Well, thanks a lot for stopping by and talking with me today.

First, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College to find out more about our writers, community and literary journalists. Visit lcc.edu.wsl. writing is messy, but do it anyway.