Thirty-one years into a writing life that has refused to settle into anything resembling a genre, Renaldo Vega's sixth book is being read — and argued about — in places his earlier work never quite reached. It is, he says, both the longest essay he has written and the same essay he has been writing since his father died. He would prefer the second framing.
You finish a book and immediately seem to disappear for a year. What is that?
I do not trust the version of myself who has just finished a book. He has too many opinions. He thinks he understands what he just made. He is almost always wrong. I have learned to wait for him to leave the room before I do any press.
The new book is being described as a meditation on inheritance. Is that the right word?
Inheritance is not the wrong word. It is also not the only one. I would also accept furniture. The book is about furniture in the broadest sense — what we sit on, what we are sat upon by, what our parents left us that we did not ask for and cannot return.
You write only on legal pads. Why?
Because I cannot edit on legal pads. The pad punishes hesitation. If I cross too much out, the page becomes unreadable, and I have to start the page over. That keeps me committed to my sentences before I have learned how to be ashamed of them.
How long have you been working on the same essay?
Thirty-one years, give or take. My father did not finish it. I am not in a hurry to either. The essay is not a problem to be solved. The essay is the room I live in.
You said once that the American problem is treating memory like inventory. What did you mean?
I meant that we count things rather than dwelling with them. I meant that we move quickly past what should detain us. I meant that an inheritance is not a list. I am not sure how to say it more usefully than that.
What are you reading right now?
A book of letters by a French nun I had never heard of. They are full of small grievances and a few astonishing sentences. I keep her in my bag. She has been dead three hundred years and she is showing me up.