My Interview with Ingrid Winston

v When were you born?
v I was born in 1964.


v I read that you were born on Roatan. How long did you live in Honduras, and is Roatan the only place you lived in Honduras?
v Roatan is the only place I have lived in Honduras, and I lived there until I was 3.


v Did you move straight from Honduras to the U.S., or did you live somewhere else also?
v We moved straight to the U.S., to Staten Island, New York.


v What was it like growing up in Honduras?
v I left at too young an age to have enough memories to answer that question. I grew up in the U.S., and I lived here as both an American (because of my neighbors and school friends) and as a Honduran (because of my family and the sizable Honduran communities in Staten Island, Roxbury, and Miami). What I know about life in Roatan I learned through my experiences here in this country with those from Roatan who had created a community here in the U.S.—the food, the music, the religion, the family histories, and so on.


v What was it like to transition from a Spanish speaking country to the U.S.? Was it difficult?
v For the people of Roatan, there is only a cultural transistion, not a linguistic one because Roatan is an English-speaking Island, though it belongs to Spanish-speaking Honduras. So the people of Roatan speak English at home first and then learn Spanish when they get old enough to go to school. When I first came to the U.S. in the 1960s, I had never seen a TV, an automobile, indoor toilets, and so on, but that was back then. Today, Roatan has all of those things and more. The big difference between Roatan and the U.S. these days is, as always, the pacing of things. Roatan is slow and familiar. Things move slowly and everyone knows you and your family—the island is not very large. The U.S. is fast-paced, of course, and somewhat impersonal.


v Why did you leave Honduras?
v My parents left for the economic and educational opportunities that America offered.


v When did you begin writing?
v I have always written because I have always read. Few things make me sadder than students who say, “I want to be a writer, but I hate to read.” My earliest memory of writing and of thinking about becoming a writer of books came somewhere around 3rd or 4th grade. In 6th grade, I wrote the school play. At home, I wrote stories for and with my four younger brothers—we all loved reading and writing. My first serious attempts at writing came around junior high when I met a generous English teacher who agreed to edit my work for me in exchange for reading the classics in literature, which she loaned me. By senior year I was hanging out with other students who wrote. In college, I had a shoe box filled with stories and half stories that I had written. I majored in English. Then, later on in grad school, I earned the MFA in Creative writing.


v How do you decide what to write about?
v I write to understand. When things trouble or confuse me, I write about them so that I have a better understanding of what is actually going on. My latest novel, ALL OR NOTHING (Akashic 2007), is about gambling addiction. Read that book and you will see what I mean. My first collection of stories, CHURCHBOYS AND OTHER SINNERS (Carolina Wren Press 2003), explored the relationship between man, God, and carnal desires.


v When I was researching Honduran writers of African or Caribbean descent, it was very difficult to find information. Do you have any idea why that might be?
v There are not many of us, and most of us young ones have not made our marks yet. It becomes easier to be researched when others have actually written essays or theses about your works. Furthermore, black Hondurans are pretty much invisible. You see, on the island of Roatan there is another and more famous group of Afro-Hondurans, who are called GARIFUNA—they speak an African language, not English or Spanish (of course, they learn both of those languages to survive on the island). There are many books written about the GARIFUNA, their language, and their traditions. I am not a GARIFUNA. I speak English. My people, former British slaves, are called BAY ISLANDERS and we live in Honduras on the bay islands of Roatan, Utilla, and Guanaja. There are relatively few books written about BAY ISLANDERS. There is another reason that, perhaps, we are not better known and researched—we do not write about the Latin American experience because we are not Latinos despite the Latino culture of the place where we are born—we write about the Caribbean experience in a fashion that is similar to the Jamaicans, Bahamians, and Trinidadians. Remember, our first language is English not Spanish.


v Do you think it’s difficult for Honduran writers of African decent to publish their work in Honduras? If so, why?
v I could not answer that question because I have never tried to do that. My feeling, however, is that it would not be too difficult to do. In fact, the Honduran Chamber of Commerce in Miami has contacted me several times to host events and whatnot.


v Have you ever faced any discrimination in your writing career?
v Racial discrimination? Sexual discrimination? Ethnic discrimination? I am not sure if I have experienced any of these because I am so good at what I do (a little bragging) that people tend to like my work—they focus on the work and not on me. Let’s see, I had a white agent tell me once that my characters were not “black” enough. I am still not sure what he meant by that. I have had editors tell me to change my characters from “black” to “normal.” I have had fans and editors question my sexuality because so many of my earlier stories (in Brown Sugar 1, Brown Sugar 2, Brown Sugar 3, Brown Sugar 4) were written from a woman’s point of view. One email said, “Are you a woman? Is ‘Preston’ like a name for a woman? Or are you a gay male? I am not trying to offend you, but you write very well as a woman. You seem to know what you are talking about.” I had trouble selling a story that I thought was great, so I changed the protagonist from a black male to a white male and sold it right away—now that is no sign that I had faced racism or discrimination because maybe the story just worked better with a white protagonist. At any rate, I didn’t worry about it. I just cashed the check. These days, I publish pretty much whatever I write because I am becoming better known, I have more connections in the writing world, and my skills as an artist are continuing to grow.


v Did you ever experience it while in Honduras, and how does it compare to racism in the U.S.?
v No.


v I read that you would like to become one of the most famous Honduras writers out there. How do you want to accomplish this goal?
v That was a joke that I told someone a long time ago and somehow it got printed on the internet, and now people take it seriously. That is not a goal. How could that be a goal? Now they’re even altering the wording. What I actually said was this: My goal is to become the most famous Afro-Honduran American writer ever to graduate from Florida International University with an MFA in creative writing. Get it? Get the joke? I already am the most famous Afro-Honduran American writer ever to graduate from Florida International University with an MFA in creative writing. No other Afro-Honduran American writer has ever attended the school, so that makes me # 1. Get the joke? How many Afro-Honduran American writers from Florida International University do you know? And if by chance you do know of another one, I am sure that I have published more than him/her so far.


v Where do you see your writing career going in the future?
v My goal is to become the most famous Afro-Honduran American writer ever to graduate from Florida International University with an MFA in creative writing. That is just a joke! Just a joke!!! Hahahaha. But to get back to the question, I imagine that my serious literary work is going to be read in colleges and high schools. Some of my work for popular audiences has already been optioned for film, so it is only a matter of time before you see my stories on TV or in the movie theaters. It would be nice to write a major bestseller and make lots of money. However, for a writer such as I, success is not measured in dollar bills, but in a job well done. In short, my writing career will see me taking on greater artistic challenges. Currently I have been shopping around an Edgar Allan Poe-like short story collection and the full-length novel THE FAITHFUL, which is the complete story of 16-year-old Elwyn and 40-year-old Sister Morrisohn, whose illicit affair began in CHURCHBOYS AND OTHER SINNERS. I have completed a novella called THE MAN FROM IOWA, which is the story of a murderer who gets religion, turns himself into the police, and then seeks forgiveness from society and the family of the boy her murdered. You can find my latest short story in a collection called LAS VEGAS NOIR (Akashic 2008)—the story is called “Crip.”