Poet, author, and essayist Julia Alvarez built a legendary career telling varied, vivid stories of the Dominican American experience, beginning with How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of Butterflies (1994). Her latest novel, Afterlife, is out now from longtime publisher Algonquin Books.

How did you choose Algonquin as a home for your work?

Oh my gosh, I wish I could say I’d chosen them! Thank God they chose me….My agent, Susan Bergholz, sent [How the García Girls Lost Their Accents] to I-don’t-know-how-many publishers—she’s told me in the past, and I think I’ve blocked it—13 to 20, they all rejected it. Then this little indie publisher down in Chapel Hill took the book. Shannon Ravenel and I worked on it for four years. It was lucky that there was this editor, at that time, willing to take a chance. I arrived at the cusp of Latino, Latina writers being “discovered”—using the verb with quote marks, like Columbus’ “discovery’ of America”—when we’d been right here all along. Algonquin was a small publisher paying attention in ways that maybe bigger publishers, following the old paradigms, weren’t.

And you’ve continued to work together over many years and many books.

I feel very loyal to who they are and their philosophy. They don’t just look at the data of, how much did we sell, is the book doing well? They’re interested in following a writer’s trajectory, and I respect that because it’s what I do as a reader. Once I have a favorite writer, [their latest] might not be my favorite book, but I’m interested in the imagination, the skill, the talent, the personality, and perspective that wrote it. I’m interested in that writer, how they think and put stories together, so I follow them. It’s wonderful to get that from an editor, too.

Has the “why” behind why you write changed over the years?

It has, definitely. For so long, I was trying to be a part of the bigger conversation—like Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America”—someday I’ll be at that table, someday I’ll be part of that large circle of literature and not pushed into the kitchen of minor writers. Part of the gasoline was to prove myself. The word sounds very Christian somehow, but to “redeem” the sacrifices that my parents, as immigrants, made so my sisters and I could have the education and life they wanted for themselves….Not that those aren’t still drives in me, but now I have a different perspective. As Ruby Sales said, I have [“hindsight, insight, and foresight”]. I’m not just looking ahead and at the present, but behind. It’s 360-degree vision. I’m asking myself, what are the perspectives I can share now?….If [my] earlier books helped [Latinx readers] navigate their way as they came of age, what are the books that will help map the elderhood? I think stories help us to understand the different possibilities. What are the stories of an older Latina? What does that mean to be an elder storyteller and a kind of hybrid person, no longer in the country of origin and somehow living here and part of this culture, too? What are the things I see now that I might not have seen before, and what stories are left in me to tell before I go?

How would you introduce Afterlife to potential readers?

It is kind of a book of Job, but it’s a particular woman, an English professor living in Vermont, recently widowed and retired. Many of the things that have held her life together are now gone, and she sees things happening around her, in society and in nature, that make this an elegiac time. I guess you could say it’s about a person living in the world we’re living in, right this moment. She’s trying to figure out what her life will look like after the life—afterlife—she’s been living has vanished. In some ways, it’s about when things have fallen apart and you’re living in a broken world, how do you go on without losing faith in others or yourself? How do you not succumb to a smaller, simplified version of yourself? How do we hold on to open-heartedness and connection and hope? I want my readers to feel the impact and force of all the losses that surround us but find in that brokenness the possibility of beauty and redemption and love.

Megan Labrise is the editor at large; hear more of her conversation with Julia Alvarez on the Fully Booked podcast.