Ever felt driven mad by an issue until you could no longer sleep, but didn’t know how to share it?
You might just learn a thing or two from PEN International President Jennifer Clement, author of several acclaimed books and key speaker at this year’s San Miguel Writers’ Conference in Mexico.
Approaching urgent and controversial issues in an enthrallingly lyrical style, Ms Clement draws you into beautifully woven tales that shine with intricate details about their multi-faceted characters, rather than presenting cold, hard facts as part of a grim tale.
Writing about current affairs in the form of fiction doesn’t mean that her work involves any less in-depth research though, quite the opposite.
“What the reader reads is a very small amount compared to what went into writing the book,” Jennifer Clement says.
Her latest book, Gun Love, took her a full seven years to research and write. For two years, Ms Clement even received the daily local newspaper from a particular area in Florida to get a feel for the area her story is set in.
She describes the final work as the tip of the iceberg.
“I’ve been to the NRA twice, I’ve interviewed survivors of massacres, like for example some of the kids that were in the Batman movie [the 2012 Aurora shooting], and just all kinds of research and interviews.”
“None of that ended up in Gun Love, but I think the book sits on it. It sits on that research.”
While there is no shortage of tragedy, Gun Love is void of judgement, instead finding light in even the most grotesque situations.
But how is that possible? How can you turn something horrible that keeps you up at night into beauty?
“I go to these themes through the door of poetry,” says Ms Clement.
“That means that in the greatest darkness to try and find light, in where there is profanity to try and find the divine, so that where there is ugliness I place beauty. That is my poetical intention.”
That doesn’t mean that Ms Clement’s personal views on the issue aren’t strong.
“I find it bewildering, this gun culture in the United States,” she says.
“It’s hard to understand and I find it also completely immoral, because it’s such huge business.”
After all, the trafficking of firearms across the southern border is a prime source of income for many domestic firearms retailers in the U.S.
In 2013, the University of San Diego did a study that found that 47 % of U.S. gun dealers would go out of business if no firearms were trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico.
But exactly that sense of personal bewilderment and anger can drive a story, with Ms Clements believing that authors often write out of a sense of distress.
Both of her most recent works, Gun Love and Prayers for the Stolen, a book about Mexican cartels that are stealing young girls from the mountain communities in the state of Guerrero, were born out of a deep sense of upset.
“In my case I would say that at least these last two books of mine were written from a lot of pain, something that really hurts me on some level,” she explains.
“I mean to have little girls stolen in Guerrero,and then all this gun violence and the way it’s affecting Mexico.”
“I’m horrified about what’s going on here now. And the guns play a big part in what’s going on here now.”
In view of this, isn’t it hard to leave one’s personal opinion behind and focus on beauty instead of the horrors of what is happening?
Anyone who’s ever participated in a Facebook discussion about controversial and complex issues would know better than to hope for impartiality.
But for Ms Clement, her opinion no longer matters when she writes fiction. All that matters is what her characters would perceive, think and do.
“In Gun Love, it’s Pearl’s story and it’s Pearl who’s speaking. It isn’t Jennifer Clement who’s speaking,” she says, referring to the book’s main character.
“She takes over in this mysterious way that happens when you write. Many, many writers talk about this happening to them and I can say that it happens to me. I sort of hear her and I kind of let her speak.”
“Of course, I am making decisions as the writer, but they are not decisions of that kind, where there is sort of a message.”
To ensure that her book was not pushing readers in a particular direction, she even gave it to a fellow writer who is also an avid hunter and gun enthusiast.
“I said, can you just read this book and make sure it’s okay if you’re hunter reading it. And he said, yes, it was okay,” she says.
And just like the characters in her book took over and started telling their own stories, setting and location also weren’t pre-planned but rather evolved with the writing process.
“A lot of people think that maybe I chose Florida because it has this reputation of being very exotic and full of strange people. But actually that’s not the reason.”
“I chose Florida because I wanted very much, and I didn’t know this until into the writing, very much the spirits of the native people to be in my book.”
The fate of Native Americans during European settlement plays a subtle but important role in Gun Love, accompanying the main characters through songs, references and prophetic encounters, because Ms Clement says the destruction of their culture is inextricably tied to American gun culture.
“One thing that’s very clear is that no native indigenous population has ever been able to win against guns,” she says.
“So guns were what, wiped out the native population of the United States. And many of those were in Florida. They walked the Trail of Tears to try and get away. And so in Gun Love, the Trail of Tears is discussed and appears.”
The Trail of Tears refers to forced relocations of the native population from the southeast of the United States to west of the Mississippi River after the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830.
The act was designed to steal attractive land from Indians that European settlers wanted for themselves.
Marched westward at gunpoint, many thousand Native Americans died on the arduous trek due to disease and exposure, or were shot opposing the theft of their traditional territories.
This story was produced for the San Miguel de Allende annual Writers’ Conference in Mexico.