Jo Reed: Welcome to Quick Study, the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. This is where we’ll show stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life. Sunil Iyengar’s the pilot of Quick Study. He is the director of research and analysis here at the Arts Endowment. Hello, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Hi, Jo.

Jo Reed: So, what’s on the docket for today?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, well, today, instead of talking about a single research study in detail, I thought we could maybe look at the very concept of research into the arts, and maybe talk about differences in methods used. So are you ready for a meta episode, Jo?

Jo Reed: I actually love meta conversations--

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> That’s good.

Jo Reed: -I'll be honest with you. <laughs> The whole idea of research into the arts is a very interesting one, and sometimes a fraught one.

Sunil Iyengar: Right, and I know this is a short podcast, so I'll just go <laughter> over some things that really leapt out at me. Well, so, this idea of talking to you about this came about because over the last few days, Jo, I've had the pleasure of speaking at or attending various events about research practice and policy, whether it’s the arts and health, arts and education, or even the arts and resilience among military and veteran populations. In each event, as it turns out, the discussion veered into something our chair, Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, calls different ways of knowing.

Jo Reed: Well, parse out what the chair means when she says different ways of knowing. That can mean many different things to many different people. 

Sunil Iyengar: Sure. So we’re talking, in a way, about epistemology, right, or theory of knowledge behind what we mean when we say research in the arts. So I'm just going to sum it up this way, in the social sciences, we rely for a large part on both quantitative and qualitative methods, using the scientific method to collect, analyze, and interpret data about phenomena. But typically, the kind of research that tends to drive policy decisions has been grounded in statistics, in sort of the quantitative side, as you know. You've heard me say a lot before in previous episodes about research design, such as randomized control trials that attempt to show cause and effect.   

Jo Reed: That, of course, can be really tricky when it comes to the arts, and measuring its impact on people.

Sunil Iyengar: That’s exactly right. So, now, in the arts, those methods, sometimes the steep difficulty of mounting those kinds of studies, and collecting that kind of data about something so multi mobile as the arts, sometimes that’s been viewed as a barrier to generating social change, or support for arts ecosystems, nationwide. So, there’s a longstanding debate, some would say maybe even going back to the ancients, as to whether artistic, creative, and cultural dimensions can be measured with numbers, and whether we can construct anything like a value proposition with numbers alone. So in this debate, I think the answer’s more or less settled. I mean, the answer is no, we can’t communicate the full range of arts and cultural vitality in the nation, or in communities, or even on an individual level with numbers alone. Now, that may seem a little counter to what you’ve heard me say <laughs> before, Jo. I’m the research director here,

Jo Reed: I was about to bring up, yes, that you research into the arts. Go on, carry on, please.

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, right. This isn’t a subtle subversion here or something.  I do believe actually, as a research director, that most things can be measured in some way. If we don’t know how to measure it, it’s because we lack the instrumentation, or the theories to develop that instrumentation. But let me just go further, oftentimes we speak of stories, photos, or videos, and so-called anecdotes as being supplemental to statistics, you know what I mean? Like typically, in reports you’ll see photos, or maybe a little vignette or something, to put what’s called a human face on these things. By the way, I don’t like that cliché, by <laughs> the way, you would “Put a human face on something.” <laughter> I mean, whatever kind of face are you going to put on it?  On quantitative data, right? But what we’re seeing increasingly is heightened interest in having the riches of storytelling, or photography, or videography, or dance, or music, or theater, having those elements brought to the fore, to bear in the very act of data collection or interpretation. In other words, it’s a way of viewing artistic products and processes as central to the research enterprise, sort of coeval with other types of research methods in the social sciences. I just want to be clear, Jo, I mean, this merging of methodologies, traditional social science methods and artistic practice has a long way to go before we arrive at a place where we can say we have an acceptable threshold of evidence uniting both approaches to inform policymaking, but we’ve begun to see some hints of this in public discourse. 

Jo Reed: Okay, let me interrupt. Can we unpack this a little bit, and can you talk a little bit more about this and give some examples, so I know what you’re talking about?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm looking around, we and other federal agencies have supported research, actually, that treats the arts not just as the subject of research but also as a means of collecting or interpreting data. For example, AmeriCorps, that federal agency is supporting a study at the University of Nevada that’s using the qualitative research method called photovoice, which involves communities, and taking and interpreting photographs for the purpose of analysis. In this case, they’re working with high school students, investigating complex problems due to environmental injustice and climate change. But most recently, the NEA has awarded a grant to researchers at Providence College in Rhode Island to use photography, again, and stories, to illustrate and examine the role of arts and artists in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the city of Providence. Looking at things like how the identities and responsibilities of artists and community leaders have changed after a period of time, and how the arts can help communities reimagine the future. But there’s still other studies out there, and we’ve also seen the use of techniques such as Laban movement analysis, which is the analysis of dance patterns, typically in relation to factors such as psychological or social-emotional wellbeing.     

Jo Reed: This is reminding me of the work that we’ve been doing through Creative Forces.

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, right. I think, in fact, the most high-profile example of arts as research from an NEA perspective has been that research, through the initiative Creative Forces, NEA Military Healing Arts Network. The researchers, Girija Kaimal, Melissa Walker, and others, examined a series of masks that were created by service members suffering traumatic brain injury. So the team identified key themes that surfaced in the artwork, and they coded these themes for the purpose of comparing them with clinical measures of post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety in service members. You can find that study on the Creative Forces National Resource Center, for those of you out there, Creative Forces NRC dot arts dot gov. The results are really fascinating. I’ll just mention, finally, that our sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities has supported pioneering work in the digital humanities, which is a field that often applies sophisticated algorithms to measure different aspects of textual content and narrative. So that definitely should be taken into account as well. But you know, Jo, it’s important to note that of all the arts research methods I've given, and many others, all of these can be used to strengthen quantitative data collected or analyzed in other ways. Almost without exception, the types of data collected through arts-based research methods can be converted into quantitative data. So just as we often say the arts are not frill, the same could be said for these methods in relation to their social scientific counterparts. 

Jo Reed: It would seem that this approach actually broadens not just the research but who participates in the research.

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, and kind of prepping for this conversation, I was asking myself “Well, why else are these methods important?” If we’re not satisfied oftentimes with some of the traditional quantitative-driven studies alone, and we also acknowledge the need for qualitative data, but how can arts-driven methods help? Well, I think they give an opportunity for artists and communities to engage directly with research. You would think that research about the arts would be useful to engage not only community members who benefit from them but also artists and artmakers. It really reflects diverse voices wherever they can enrich hypotheses, data collection analysis, interpretation, and reporting. Lots of things have been said, as you know, Jo, about the differences between the arts and the sciences, but when you think about it, artists and researchers share the following traits. I mean, they’re curious, they explore and innovate, but they also like to slow time down so we can encounter things more fully. 

Jo Reed: I like that, slow time down so we can encounter things more fully. That's really a kind of lovely way to look at it. We forget to do that. We’re just rushing onto the next thing and taking that moment is really important. Sunil, thank you, I really look forward to hearing more about this.

Sunil Iyengar: Appreciate it, Jo. Thanks.

Jo Reed: That was Sunil Iyengar, he’s the director of research and analysis here at the Arts Endowment. This has been Quick Study. The music is “We Are One” from Scott Holmes Music. It’s licensed through Creative Commons. Until next month, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.  

Music Credits: “North Carolina Breakdown, traditional, performed by Michael Cleveland, from the album Flamekeeper.

“Orange Blossom Special,” composed by Ervin T. Rouse, performed live by Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper,  IBMA World of Bluegrass, 2013.

“Black Mountain Rag,” traditional, Michael Cleveland jamming with Doc Watson, Dan Crary, and Tim O'Brien. Backstage at the 1993 World of Bluegrass Awards Show, included in Robert Mugge's 1994 film Gather At The River: A Bluegrass Celebration.

“Bright and Early,”composed and performed by Michael Cleveland with Audie Blaylock, Jesse Brock, and Jason Moore, from the album, Let Her Go, Boys.”

“Tall Fiddler” composed by Tommy Emmanuel, performed by Michael Cleveland and Tommy Emmanuel, from the album, Tall Fiddler.

“Tarnation,” written and performed by Michael Cleveland and Bela Fleck, from the album Tall Fiddler.

Jo Reed: That is the bluegrass virtuoso fiddle-player and 2022 National Heritage Fellow Michael Cleveland playing North Carolina Breakdown.  And from the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed

Born legally blind in 1980 in Southern Indiana, Michael Cleveland first picked up a fiddle when he was four, and it’s fair to say the rest is bluegrass history. Known for the speed, intensity, and sheer artistry of his playing, Michael combines a real knowledge of and reverence for earlier bluegrass fiddlers while pushing the music to new places. If you ever wonder how to stay rooted in a tradition while expanding and innovating it, I’d say give a listen to Michael Cleveland. Let me rephrase that—you should just listen to Michael Cleveland—full stop.  He is one of the great fiddlers of his generation—Michael has been recognized 12 times as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s “Fiddler of the Year” and was inducted into the National Fiddler’s Hall of Fame in 2018. That same year his recording Fiddler’s Dream was nominated in for a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and he won it the following year for his album Tall Fiddler.  I spoke with Michael Cleveland last week and while the recording has a couple of slight audio glitches—it’s a great conversation with a true master. Let’s listen

Jo Reed:  Michael Cleveland, so many congratulations on being named a 2022 NEA Heritage Fellow. You have played with so many Heritage Fellows-- Del McCoury, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Jerry Douglas, Andy Statman, have you played with Ralph Stanley or Wayne Henderson?

Michael Cleveland: Yeah. Well, I know Wayne. I got to meet him here in the last few years and I did get to play with Ralph a few times.

Jo Reed: Now, you’re one of them—you’re a National Heritage Fellow and you’re absolutely one of the younger fellows ever to receive this award and I wonder what the award means for you.

Michael Cleveland: Well, it’s truly an honor and I’m very thankful to have been chosen and to John Kay and a lot of the people here in Indiana who have worked really hard to make this happen for me. I’m totally grateful and I’m still finding out all the people who have won this award and to be in a list of-- with those people like Ralph, Andy Statman-- Andy is a great friend of mine and one of my musical heroes-- Jerry Douglas, Bill Monroe, I mean, I never would have dreamed.

Jo Reed: Michael, you come from a bluegrass family. They didn’t play, but they sure loved and supported the music. What are your earliest memories of bluegrass?

Michael Cleveland: I’d say my earliest memory of bluegrass would have been just being in the middle of a bluegrass show because my grandparents went to bluegrass in Indiana all the time. As a matter of fact, you’re correct, none of my family play, but my grandparents got into bluegrass a few years before I was born. So, my grandparents started a show that eventually turned into a bluegrass association that met every second and fourth Saturday of the month in Henryville, Indiana there were other shows going on in Madison, Indiana and Scottsburg, Indiana. So, when my grandparents weren’t working their show, they’d be at all the others and they would take me from the time I was about six months old, apparently, and so, I don’t know that I can remember not being around bluegrass. It might be easier to put it that way.

Jo Reed: Michael, I have to say and I’m really embarrassed to say this-- I hadn’t realized that Southern Indiana was such a hotbed for bluegrass. Talk about that vibrant bluegrass scene when you were growing up.

Michael Cleveland: Yeah. A lot of people don’t realize, but Bill Monroe lived in Indiana and Bill Monroe ended up buying a park in Brown County, Indiana in a small town called Beanblossom and he made that into one of the biggest bluegrass festivals in the country and that started around 1966, but even before that, I think he bought the Brown County Barn around 1952, ’53 and they would have shows there every weekend and then around ’66, ’67 is when they started having the bluegrass festivals there every year and they have one in June that ended up eventually going about ten days and then they’d have another one in September around the time of Bill Monroe’s birthday and that would be like a weekend thing. So, you had those. You had the Beanblossom Festival. There was a ton of bluegrass and there was a ton of great musicians here. A lot of them never did go out and play for a living or anything, but they could have and they all had families and real jobs and all that kind of thing, but there’s a lot of bluegrass around this area.

Jo Reed: Well, it’s hard to make a living in music. Let’s face it. You were born completely blind and your parents sent you to the Kentucky School for the Blind when you were quite young. Can you talk about the experience of going to school there and what that school did for you, both personally and professionally?

Michael Cleveland: Well, yeah. So, I guess I should have went to the Indiana School for the Blind because I live in Southern Indiana, but the deal was Indianapolis is about 100 miles away and Louisville was about 20, 25 miles away and my parents didn’t really want to send me that far to Indiana and so, my dad worked at Pepsi. My dad was a truck driver and he had a friend named Gary Miller, who became my legal guardian and that was the way that I was able to go to the Kentucky School for the Blind and the school-- going to the School for the Blind helped me a lot in the sense that I was around other people who were visually impaired dealing with the same things and to see how they excelled and did pretty much anything they wanted to do, that was huge for me. But I never did necessarily like school and I never did-- I don't know. I was always thinking about music. I did pretty well in school. I didn’t flunk out or anything, but my head was always in music. But,  you’d go to the school Sunday night and you’d stay in the dorm until Friday and then you would go home. You would go home Friday and then Saturday and then you’d be back on Sunday. So, that was pretty hard for me to get used to it because I’d never really been away from home and I was four years old when I went and obviously, I know now it couldn’t have been easy for my parents, but yeah, that was kind of hard to get used to.

Jo Reed: I can bet it was. I was sent away to boarding school when I was twelve and it was hard at twelve. I can only imagine it at four. But the school had a really rich music program, didn’t it?

Michael Cleveland: It did. Sorry, my computer is yelling at me.

Jo Reed: That’s okay.

Michael Cleveland: It did. At the time, like yeah, it had a strings program, which is what I started on and then also had band-- we had a great band, man. At one point, we had a band that would play all the pep rallies and stuff -- it was a great rock band and then we had strings and choral and about everything else you could think of and so, I figured out I wanted to play the fiddle. I’d heard somebody play “Orange Blossom Special” and that just rocked my world and I knew that I had to learn how to play that song, if nothing else, and I don't know what it was-- thinking back on it now, I don't know if it was all the train sounds or obviously the speed of it. I’ve always been a big fan of that and just the energy of bluegrass. I think that’s what always did it for me, the energy and the intensity in which people play. So, yeah, I started when I was four and I started taking classical and the Suzuki Method is what they taught. So, that’s a great way for kids to learn who are just starting to play, but the main thing that it did was we all learned by ear, even learning classical. So, it was great for me early on to-- it was great ear training to be able to listen to that stuff and try to figure out what was actually going on and yeah, so, that’s kind of how I got started.

Jo Reed: Well, I didn’t realize that because of an early illness, you have an 80% hearing loss in your left ear and I wonder how that impacted both your learning, but also your playing today.

Michael Cleveland: Well, I’m not sure. It’s kind of like when people ask you “How do you think your blindness affected your music?” or anything else. I was going to play regardless of whether I could hear in my left hear or not. I was just bound and determined to do it. But yeah, I don't know. It’s definitely challenging, even now. Now that we have a sound man and we have in-ear monitors, it doesn’t really matter too much where I stand, but if I’m sitting in with somebody and playing, I prefer to be kind of on the left side or the right end of the stage looking at it from the audience point of view to where everybody’s on my right and one of the guys in my band said one time that he thought that’s why I played so far is just because the fiddle was right under my left ear and he thought that if I had it on-- if I had hearing, that I probably wouldn’t play as hard as I do and maybe so, but I do like that aggression, that intensity. So, I don't know. It’s very interesting.

Jo Reed: It certainly is. Was the school opened at all to you playing bluegrass? I know they taught classical, but they also had various other music programs as well. Did they encourage bluegrass?

Michael Cleveland: Not really. I think a lot of it, they did have my best interests at heart, but, the music teacher that I had had probably heard a bad example of bluegrass or whatever and they really didn’t want me playing it and they thought it was going to hurt my playing and the rest of the people in school, they just kind of looked down on it. It’s like bluegrass, it was like some kind of a joke or something. Until I got to be about 16, 17 years old and started doing more and more things and they figured out “Oh, yeah, this might actually be real.” I think what happened is I had entered this contest for Very Special Arts. It was an organization that showcased people with various disabilities and they had a contest that you could enter and I ended up winning that and one of the things they asked me to do after I won that contest, they asked me to do some local things around the Louisville area for very special arts and they were going to meet before Congress in DC and they asked me and I took my friend Brian with me and we went to DC and before and after the meeting, we played like a couple tunes while everybody was walking in and a couple more while everybody was leaving and so, we played before Congress and for whatever reason, the teachers at my school, all of a sudden, it was a big turnaround. It was like “Oh, yeah, this might actually be real. He might actually do something.” But in their defense, I do know there’s so many musicians out here and there’s so many people trying to do the same thing and sometimes, it really doesn’t even matter how good you are if you’re not at the right place or at the right time and so, I get the fact that they would say “You need something else to fall back on.” So, I do understand that side of it.

Jo Reed: In terms of the culture of bluegrass music, this is a music that’s really passed down and taught within communities. Isn’t that correct? It seems like there’s a music-- there’s no us, there’s no them. There’s such little separation between the people on the stage and the people in the audience.

Michael Cleveland:  Yeah. That’s one of the great things about it is that I mean, you can learn bluegrass. So much of what you learn and what just about everybody learns is just from being there, being in front of somebody playing the lick you want to learn and that’s the cool thing about this music is all the people on stage. I mean, you can meet your favorite bluegrass stars. If you’re at a bluegrass festival, most of the bands will be set up, have a merch table or whatever and it’s very easy to talk to these people and then night after the shows are over, there’s usually a lot of jam sessions going on and you probably run into some of the people you see or you watch on stage in the jams. So, that was something that I really liked about the music is that you could go up to your hero and most of the time, they would tell you exactly how they did whatever it was and I don’t think you can get that about any other kind of music.

Jo Reed: Well, tell me how you learned bluegrass. So, it wasn’t happening at your school and your grandparents were taking you out to lots of festivals and they had a great collection of bluegrass. How did you actually learn it?

Michael Cleveland: Well, it was a very slow process. The school, it was weird. Like, they didn’t want me playing bluegrass, but they did have these books of fiddle tunes that you could learn, which are pretty much bluegrass. My teachers showed me a simple version of “Boil the Cabbage Down,” which is one of the first tunes and one of the simplest tunes you could learn starting out playing fiddle, “Boil the Cabbage Down,” “Old Joe Clark,” A nd so, I think I only knew maybe those two tunes and I’ve been playing for three years at this point. It’s probably two years before I got going playing anything. It was pretty slow. So, once I got to where I could play real simple versions of these tunes, I just started going-- we were going to all these bluegrass shows anyway. I just started taking my fiddle and there were a lot of people around that took time to show me what they knew and this has always blown my mind and I’ve never been able to figure it out. So, the best bands that would come to the bluegrass shows, I could always stand in the background and play and I know I was god awful. I was just god awful, just trying to learn how to play, a little kid scratching around and I mean, the best bands would let me play with them and the worst bands would let me play with them, but the mediocre ones, no way. I never did figure that out. So, anyhow...

Jo Reed: But you were a baby at this point.

Michael Cleveland: Oh, yeah.

Jo Reed: You were what? Seven years old, maybe.

Michael Cleveland: Probably so.

Jo Reed: Yeah. You’ve always talked about how you’ve always been curious, always eager to learn about the fiddle and ask questions and learn the history of a song, to unravel it through the people who are playing it now but who they learned it from. You could have been a bluegrass historian. I mean, you still could be, for all I know. Talk about why that was so important to you.

Michael Cleveland: Well, I was already very interested in the music. But when I was about 12 years old, I played a festival, a fiddlers gathering in Battle Ground, Indiana and one of the guys that helped put it on, Dave Samuelson, who I didn’t really know at that time, he came up to me and he said “You know, I’d like to give you some music sometime that I think you need to listen to and I said “Okay, that would be great,” and I didn’t really think too much more about it, So, I thought “Well, I’ll probably never hear anything from him again,” and then I played another festival a few months later in Northern Indiana and here he was and he had a big box of tapes and now, this guy was sighted. He had a box of tapes that he had braille labeled. I mean, we’re talking probably 15, 20-something tapes the first time and it had everything from the first recordings of ”Orange Blossom”,”Sally Goodin”, all of the classic little tunes. It had Will Monroe, Earl Scruggs live radio shows, opry shows that you wouldn’t hear. I mean, you don’t buy this stuff. Then there was Stephane Grappelli, Joe Venuti, all the jazz fiddle players, and not only was it the music. The thing that he did was before every recording that he played, he would talk about it and he would say, “Listen to this part of the recording, and you’ll hear the same thing that Chubby Wise played on this Bill Monroe recording, that he actually got from Stephane Grappelli,” or “ I know you like Bobby Hicks’s playing, but listen to Del Potter and you can tell where Bobby Hicks got a lot of his stuff.” So, I think Dave Samuelson is responsible for me getting into all the history of it,   That right there, truly grateful to Dave for opening so many doors for me.

Jo Reed: Well, Michael, you learn a song and there’s learning the notes, but then there’s the heart of the song, the essence of the song and also the heart that you bring to that song. I’m curious how you learned about bringing your own heart into the music.

Michael Cleveland: Boy, that’s a very good question. How I learned that.

Jo Reed: And, I don’t even mean if it was a conscious learning, but just allowing yourself to do it perhaps.

Michael Cleveland: Yeah, well music has always been-- if it was something I was really into playing, I don’t think I ever had any trouble expressing that, but I know what you mean. I’m not saying that I automatically started doing it, and that’s a very good question.

Jo Reed: Right, because when you’re a kid, it’s like, “Wow, I got the song right!”

Michael Cleveland: And you play it like a robot. Yeah, oh I know. Just thinking about it right now, all the people that I was around playing bluegrass, they all kind of had their own personality and I always liked listening to the different fiddle players, the local fiddle players, and hearing how they played. That they listened to this record and they learned it. But, I guess what I’m trying to say is bluegrass is not a written music. Even though you can buy tablature. I guess I was always used to being around bluegrass people and how they played and how they were different from each other and they’re all pretty much stylists. So, I guess that’s the thing. If I had just played classical music, I would have probably had a much harder time doing that, but me, I think just growing up around people who never did learn by music and all they did learn was by ear or by watching other people. They put their personality into the music by pretty much no other choice, you know what I mean?

Jo Reed: It’s just so much a part of the music itself.

Michael Cleveland: It is and that personality, but I guess if I had to put my finger on it, I think just being around those people, because I have worked with classical violinists who tried to get into bluegrass and they can play it. The stuff that they play in classical music is way harder than a lot of what we do, but the bowing is different and the expression is different and that’s what-- that’s the same kind of deal. You can hear the notes and it’s definitely the tune, but you can tell a big difference and it’s just something, I don’t know, that you develop over time.

Jo Reed: Well, how old were you when you began playing at festivals?

Michael Cleveland:   Well, so as far as being up on stage, that was one of the things my grandparents’ show and all these other shows around here. So I was on stage I think the first time, a band got me up on stage to play my one song, “Boil the Cabbage Down” that I knew, I think I was about six or seven and then I started going to contests around the time I was seven, eight, nine, and so I would play on stage at those. Yeah, I guess I went to a couple bluegrass festivals early on, but mostly just local stuff and then I went to Bean Blossom. My grandparents took me there when I was nine and I got to play with Bill Monroe. They had this thing called the Sunset Jam, where they would set up some microphones by this oak tree and anybody who was in the park who wanted to play with Bill Monroe, they could do it. So, I did that and I guess those were about the first things that I did that was really outside of just the local stuff here around Henryville. Then probably the first real big thing where I was, I guess, maybe introduced in a way to the bluegrass community was when I was about thirteen. A guy named Pete Wernick called me and Pete was the banjo player in a great bluegrass band, a very popular bluegrass band called Hot Rize and he was also the, I think, President or Vice President of the International Bluegrass Music Association. Pete had read an article that somebody had wrote in The Washington Post that basically said that bluegrass was dying. There were no kids getting interested in the music and Pete decided he wanted to prove that article wrong, so he was looking for a band. He was wanting to put a band together of kids around twelve, fourteen, fifteen years old, something like that. He, I guess, had heard of me and then he had the guitar player, Cody Kilby, and the mandolin player was Chris Thile and then Josh Williams on the banjo and my buddy, Brady Stockle [ph?] from here in Indiana played bass. He put together this band of kids and we played the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards Show and it was a pretty big deal because everybody was there. IBMA, International Bluegrass  Music Association Awards Show is considered the biggest night in bluegrass. So, you had everybody from Alison Krauss to Jimmy Martin to anybody you could think of sitting out in the audience, and so I would say that was the first time that I actually played in front of a lot of the bluegrass community and then that was recorded on a video. Some of that was released on the video called “Gather at the River.”  I guess that was some of the first things.

Jo Reed: And, is that where you met Doc Watson?

Michael Cleveland: Yep. Yeah, right after the awards show, my dad and I were walking around and of coursethis is the first time I had ever been to anything this big and all the people who I listened to and dreamed about meeting or playing with were all in this venue, and so I was like a kid in a candy store and just running around everywhere and we were looking for jams. My dad and I went into this big bathroom and in this bathroom was Doc Watson, Tim O’Brien, Dan Crary and all these people just jamming in the bathroom. My dad, I think, asked them if I could play with them and they said, “Yeah, sure.” I remember I wanted to play Black Mountain Rag with Doc, and we played it exactly like it was on that record and it was like, “Wow, here I am playing Black Mountain Rag with Doc Watson.” So, yeah, we got in about a thirty/forty minute jam session and they just happened to be videoing for this documentary and so that was-- even-- when I started playing with Dale Ann Bradley when I was about eighteen and really started going to all these places, I found out how many people had actually seen that video, because I had people coming up to me, like, “Man, I saw you on that video with Doc.” I still have people, to this day, “I got you on a video at my house playing with Doc Watson.”

Jo Reed: And, you’re talking to somebody else who actually saw that too. I mean, aside from your playing, which was extraordinary, what I kept thinking was, where did this kid get this confidence? You were so confident.

Michael Cleveland: I was so stupid. I didn’t know any better. <laughs>

Jo Reed: You came to the attention of Alison Krauss and she brought you to the Grand Ole Opry and you were thirteen, correct?

Michael Cleveland: Oh yeah.

Jo Reed: Tell me about that experience. A, were you nervous?

Michael Cleveland: Yeah, I guess I was.  We had went to see Alison Krauss at a local show and talked to her for a little bit and she had seen me play the performance at IBMA. She had just been made a member of the Grand Ole Opry.  So, then I don’t know how long after it was, but I came home from school one Friday afternoon and the phone rings and I pick it up and this voice on the other end said, “Hey Michael, it’s Alison.” I said, “Alison who?” She said, “Alison Krauss and the band and I wanted to ask you if you would play the Grand Ole Opry with us on November 27th.” I’ll never forget, November 27th, 1993, that’s when it was. I went, got to go to the opry, hang out backstage, I mean, see Bill Monroe, Alison and the band, they were picking back there.   I think I was just wired. I don’t think I was nervous. I was wired. I think I drove everybody nuts that day. It was a blur. You’ve got all this anticipation leading up to it, and it’s still this way. Whenever you play the Opry, you play one or two songs and it’s over like that, but man, I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget that first time and man, I’m very thankful to Alison Krauss for making that happen for me.

Jo Reed: Well, you graduate from high school and you decide you’re going to play professionally. You’re extremely lucky because your parents are very encouraging without being pushy and that is a great balance, and you played with Dale Ann Bradley as you said and then Rhonda Vincent and I’m curious what you learned about playing in the same band consistently and about being a professional musician from them, as well as how to play to a crowd.

Michael Cleveland: Yeah. Well, playing with Dale Ann and playing with Rhonda were great in a number of ways, one of which musically was how to play in keys like E flat or A flat or C sharp, keys that guys don’t normally sing in that women, their voices tend to work better in those keys, depending on what the song is, obviously. And, so being able to learn how to play in those keys and to really back up a singer, to play what fits a song versus throw in every lick you know in there, to look beyond that and find something that complements what the singer is doing without being in the way, and so that’s one thing that I learned and then playing with Rhonda, Rhonda is great at working a crowd and knowing what the audience wants at any given time. And, so with Rhonda, you might have a set list written out, but it could change at a moment’s notice. Those were a few things I learned and then there’s just the fact that when you play in a band with four or five other people, everybody’s got their own personalities, everybody’s got their own quirks and things like that, so you just figure out not only how to play the music and how to cut the gig, but to get along and be around five other crazy musicians.

Jo Reed: Well, you came out with a solo album in 2002. What were you, all of twenty-two, twenty-one?

Michael Cleveland: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Called Flamekeeper. So, first, Flamekeeper, that obviously is a word that means something to you because it’s also the name of your current band. What attracts you to that name?

Michael Cleveland: Well, that name came from the President of Rounder Records, which was a label that that album came out on and he suggested that name. And I think it fits because we were, and we still do pay tribute to the people who set the standards of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, Flatt Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, Stanley Brothers, and people like that, but what we’re doing more now is we still play that way, but we also add our own elements to it and try to take it in sort of a new direction at times without losing those traditional elements. That’s very important to me. So, as far as Flamekeeper, that’s what it comes from. It’s not necessarily just fiddle music. It’s bluegrass music and paying tribute to the people who created the music but yet still adding your own personality and elements and energy to it.

Jo Reed:  You formed your own band called Flamekeeper in 2006. What did you want to do with your band? What did you want to do as a leader that you weren’t able to do as a band member?

Michael Cleveland: Well, that’s a very good question because I never really wanted to be a band leader. I had definite ideas about music and how it should go and how it should sound and I knew the music that I liked to play. What actually started it was that Dale Ann wasn’t working a whole lot and summer was coming up. I think this was, like, 2005, 2006 and she didn’t have a lot of dates and I wanted to play. I had released that Flamekeeper album and “Ragged Edge” and then “Let Her Go, Boys.” All those albums were on Rounder and these all came out while I was playing with Dale Ann. So, you could say, even while I was in Dale Ann’s band, I had these other albums that were apart from that and they won some awards. So, they had gotten some recognition through the bluegrass community. So, around 2006, when we didn’t have a lot going that summer, I was talking to some of the guys who had played on the “Flamekeeper” and the “Let Her Go, Boys” album, Audie Blaylock, Jesse Brock, and a great bass player, Jason Moore and the thing that made those albums is not just my playing, but the way those guys played. You go listen to “Flamekeeper” and the “Let Her Go, Boys” and listen to the groove. Listen to how those guys played together and and it was a great band. I got in a jam with those guys and it was just like a spiritual awakening. It’s like, I didn’t know music could be that tight, that together.  So, that’s kind of how it started. And there was a guy that we started working with, Jim Rowe who was a booking agent. He saw this Flamekeeper band play a showcase and he came up to me and he said, “This is what you need to be doing, right here,” and so he started booking us. Naturally, there were a couple of changes in players because not everybody could do it. and so yeah, that’s how the band got started.

Jo Reed: For you as a player, can you talk about the differences between jamming, rehearsing, performing, and recording?

Michael Cleveland: All right. Well, I mean, to me, a jam is kind of a free for all, you’re just playing. You’re playing for fun and a jam is usually where some of the best music happens, because there’s no pressure in a jam and everybody can hear really well in a jam because you can stand in a circle and you don’t have a PA system that may or may not be a factor in whether you can hear or whatever. So, you’ve got everybody in a circle or whatever and playing and it’s the greatest thing in the world.

Jo Reed: Is it your favorite way to play?

Michael Cleveland: Yeah, I think so. Now rehearsal, you’re going to play the same song a lot, over and over and over again and you go through each part of the song that’s not to your satisfaction and you play that part and work on it and figure out how to improve on it.  You play the stuff until you can play it in your sleep.

Jo Reed: I guess it’s different from recording. With recording, you have to be much more on it because it’s studio time and all the expense involved with the producer, etc.

Michael Cleveland: Well, see, the thing is, recordings, yeah you do have to be on. I mean, you do have to know it and be able to play it, but man, studio recording is easier now than it’s ever been. It’s so easy now to fix things and most of the time now when you record, you might have the band all in the studio but everybody’s separated. So, you all play on headphones and you’ll be in your space, so you can hear each other, but what this enables you to do is to be able to fix individual parts. So, in that way, recording is much easier in some ways.

Jo Reed: And, what about performing?

Michael Cleveland: Well, the best way I know how to describe a performance, because it’s totally different energy. It’s like you work and you practice and you get it to that point where you know the music and where you’re comfortable with it and then you get out on stage and whatever happens, happens. That’s the best way I know how to describe it. But, the energy of the crowd, that’s the big thing on stage. When you hear the crowd really getting into it, yeah, that’s the best feeling in the world and that’s what can take it to another level. If the musicians, if everybody’s playing good and feeding off each other, the sound’s good, you can hear what you’re doing and the crowd’s really into it, there’s no better.

Jo Reed: I need to talk about some of your other awards, the International Bluegrass Music Award, Fiddler of the Year twelve times, Flamekeeper won Instrumental Group of the Year seven times. I mean, you’re being voted on by your fellow musicians. That has got to mean a lot to you.

Michael Cleveland: It does, yeah.

Jo Reed: And, then you were nominated for a Grammy award for Best Bluegrass Album for Fiddler’s Dream and then you won in 2019 for your album, Tall Fiddler. So, first, let’s talk about winning that Grammy award and what that experience was like for you.

Michael Cleveland: I was really hoping that I would have a chance. I thought I had a pretty good shot at it, but you never know. But I remember when my name was called, it’s like it almost didn’t register. I just sat there and I got up there and I was shaking like a leaf. I was pretty shook up. I think I got up on stage and I really, I thanked people who weren’t even on the album. <laughs> I had a whole list of names and people to thank and everything and man, practice it and all that in case something happened and then once I got up there, man, that all just went out the window. I was just blown away.

Jo Reed: I was going to say, well the people you had on that album was extraordinary. I mean, you had Del McCoury and the McCourys, you had Jerry Douglas, Bela Fleck, Tim O’Brien. It was a who’s who of bluegrass musicians. How did that album come together and how did you choose what to play and who to play it with?

Michael Cleveland: A lot of albums for me come together slowly. Sometimes I have a complete vision of what the album’s going to be or whatever, but most of the time, it doesn’t start out that way and it starts out with a song and you hear one song, maybe somebody sends you a song or you hear something. In my case, the Tall Fiddler, I just downloaded a Tommy Emmanuel album, because I like Tommy’s guitar playing. His very first song on it was a fiddle tune and I could tell, even though it was just him playing it on the guitar, I knew it was a fiddle tune, and that was the Tall Fiddler. Come to find out, reason Tommy wrote it, and who it was written about, was a great fiddle player named Byron Berline and Byron was a legend in bluegrass fiddle. We recently lost him And so I heard that and I thought, “Man, now I know that’s a fiddle tune, I wonder if he’s ever recorded that with a fiddle player,” and then there were other songs that the band and I had been playing and I got to write a song with Bela Fleck, which I never thought I’d be able to do. Yeah, it was a very fun album in the sense that playing with so many people. It was almost like a jam session.

Jo Reed: I definitely will, but I think we’re going to try and get it up in the next couple of weeks, so I will let you know. When it comes to music, I’ll talk to you about what music we can learn. How much music do you write yourself?

Michael Cleveland: I’ve written quite a few things. It’s probably something that I should do more.

Jo Reed: Do you like writing music?

Michael Cleveland: I do. It’s kind of like for me, I have to get my head in that space because I’ll get into playing if the band’s playing a bunch out on the road and I’ll be all into that and I record a lot at home on other people’s music. People will send me tracks to play on and sometimes, it’s not conducive to writing tunes. A lot of times, it’s so weird for me. Sometimes when I’m not trying to write a song, like I’ll get a piece of something in my head and think, “Man, that’s really cool,” and that’s usually how it starts. Very rarely has it worked out that I’ve sat down and said, “Okay, I’m going to write a song.” I can usually come up with something, but the best songs for me, maybe you’ll wake up and you’ll have something in your head, like a little piece of a melody line or something and it’s very important to record all that and that’s one of the things that I found, man you can record those voice memos. I bet I’ve got ten million voice memos on my phone, just little pieces of songs. Some of them I haven’t done anything with and a lot of times, I like to go back and find those and see if I can make something out of it, but yeah, writing is something I want to learn more about and do more of -- just writing with other people and see how they go about it. Like, Bela Fleck, I mean, it’s just endless ideas. “Okay, you don’t like that idea, how about this? See what you think of this,” and it’s something totally different. But yeah, that’s kind of my writing process, I guess you could say.

Jo Reed: Looking forward, I wonder what you might have to say to younger bluegrass musicians as they’re learning this music.

Michael Cleveland: If I had to say anything to somebody trying to learn bluegrass or to get into music, is I would say first and foremost, it’s got to be fun. It’s got to be something you enjoy doing and to really be good at it, music or anything else, it’s got to be something that you just can’t not do or can’t not think about. Like, I’ll bet, if I’m not playing music, chances are I’m thinking about music.  But, the thing is, to have fun and never lose sight of you and back to what we were saying before, your personality, what you put into the music. It's very important to learn the songs and how they go and the fundamentals and the correct way to play the music, but at some point, you’ve got to have you in there. If you can do that, then in my opinion, you’re a musician.

Jo Reed: My final question, and we’ve talked around it a lot, but I wonder for you on a very personal level, what does bluegrass music mean to you?

Michael Cleveland: Oh, man, that’s a hard question. It shouldn’t be. Bluegrass music to me   is community, is family, is energy, intensity, and so many other things. Bluegrass music in general, I mean, it’s my life. It’s all I ever wanted to do and all I think about.

Jo Reed: I think that’s a great place to leave it. Michael, thank you so much for giving me so much of your time.

Michael Cleveland: Thank you.

Jo Reed: I really appreciate it, and so many congratulations.

Michael Cleveland: Thanks. It’s truly an honor.

Jo Reed: That was bluegrass fiddler and 2022 National Heritage Fellow Michael Cleveland. You can keep up with Michael at Michael Cleveland Fiddle.com and here’s a heads up: we are celebrating all of the amazing 2022 National Heritage Fellows on November 17 when we’ll premier a film that documents their extraordinary work. Check out our website arts.gov for more information as the date approaches. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps people to find us.  Let us know what you think about the Art Works podcast and suggest someone we should speak to by emailing us at artworkspod@arts.gov   For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed, Thanks for listening.

Michael Cleveland: If I had to say anything to somebody trying to learn bluegrass or to get into music, is I would say first and foremost, it’s got to be fun. It’s got to be something you enjoy doing and to really be good at it, music or anything else, it’s got to be something that you just can’t not do or can’t not think about. I’ll bet, if I’m not playing music, chances are I’m thinking about music. But, the thing is, to have fun and never lose sight of what you put into the music. It's very important to learn the songs and the fundamentals and the correct way to play the music, but at some point, you’ve got to have you in there. If you can do that, then in my opinion, you’re a musician.

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed…today we’re continuing our celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month by revisiting my 2021 interview with novelist Marisel Vera.

Marisel Vera:  I have always been a storyteller because my mother was a storyteller.  My mother was always telling me stories about growing up on a mountain in Puerto Rico.  She would talk about the spirits that roamed in the mountains and how she didn't believe in them because the church said not to, but yet she would tell these stories, and other people would tell these stories, and I was always a child that listened to stories. So I think that just from the very beginning my life has been shaped by stories and storytellers.

Jo Reed: You just heard author Marisel Vera. I wanted to revisit my interview with not just for Hispanic Heritage month but also as Puerto Rico is assessing the wide-spread damage recently inflicted by Hurricane Fiona, her historical novel “The Taste of Sugar” is sadly current.  Marisel’s novel pivots on another devastating hurricane that ravaged the island at the end of the 19th century within a year of American colonization. “The Taste of Sugar” centers on the lives of a couple, Valentina Sanchez and Vicente Vega small coffee farmers in the hills of Puerto Rico.  The confluence of these external events causes the couple to lose their farm and join 5,000 other Puerto Ricans on an arduous journey to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations. Lured there by the promise of a prosperity in return for hard work, they soon find themselves captive laborers in a strange land.  “The Taste of Sugar” is a compelling and eye-opening epic story, and yet, a deeply intimate one that traces the transformation of Valentina and Vicente as they mature and grow and their relationship evolves and strengthens. Here’s Marisel Vera to tell us more about her protagonists.

Marisel Vera:  Well Valentina and Vicente meet when they're both very young, Valentina is 17, not even 18, and she comes from the town of Ponce in the south of Puerto Rico, and it's a very cosmopolitan town, and she has certain advantages, she's middle class, she's always dreamed of having some of the advantages that her friend Dalia had, going to Spain and Paris, and beautiful clothes, and Vicente comes from the mountain in Utuado, his father is a coffee farmer.  So when they meet they come from very different lives but they have a connection, even though he's pretty honest when he meets her and tells her, "No, you know, I'm a coffee farmer, but we don't have that kind of money."

Jo Reed:  Yeah.  It's very interesting in how she grows tremendously from a silly little girl to someone who can just face anything and do it with dignity.

Marisel Vera:  Yeah.  I thought of her as many of the women in my family who have high dreams and had to endure very hard times because that was their lives.  So I hope that she would grow up to be strong, and she did, and I knew that she would because she had to, she had to.

Jo Reed:  What inspired the book, Marisel?  I'm curious how you began.  Was it with the history or was it with characters?

Marisel Vera:  I always begin writing with something I want to say, and then I think about who will tell my story.  So when I learned about these 5,000 Puerto Ricans going to Hawaii in 1900 to 1903 to work in the sugar plantations I thought, "Oh my god, what was happening in Puerto Rico that Puerto Ricans would leave their home during that time before plane travel and go so far, and did they ever come back?"  So that's what I wanted to talk about, and then I thought, "Okay, who's going to tell my story?"  And I always want to have a woman telling the story, and because of the period that the novel's set in I knew that I had to have a man because their lives would be so different, and I was lucky that I was able to place Vicente in Utuado growing coffee because that's where my own ancestors came from, and for me if I could somehow place my characters where my ancestors were it's a gift that I give to myself because while I learn about their lives I can imagine my own ancestor's lives, and while I was working on "The Taste of Sugar" about the Puerto Ricans who went to Hawaii I learned so much history, I learned that it was the first exodus sponsored really by the governments of Puerto Ricans to get them off the island because there's no work, they lost their land, and better to get rid of these people, they're a nuisance, and have them go somewhere else where their labor is needed.  So through this story and through this history that I learned, I understood that the novel wasn't just about this first exodus of Puerto Ricans having to go to Hawaii and losing their land, but I learned that this novel was really about colonialism, Spanish colonialism, 400 years of it, and the beginning of U.S. colonialism.

Jo Reed:  Well, as you mentioned you tell the story from multiple perspectives. We see the world through Valentina’s eyes sometimes, through Vicente’s eyes, sometimes we have letters between Valentina and her sister Elena, and then there are moments of omniscient narrator who’s describing events. How did the structure come together for you?

Marisel Vera:  I think of it as really just I was creating a world, I was creating a Puerto Rican world of the period, and also a world with diverse characters because unless you're Puerto Rican I don't feel like the reader would know the Puerto Rican culture or Puerto Rican characters or the Puerto Rican world.  So I looked at it like that, and I knew that it had to be peopled with all these various characters to give the reader a really full feeling for the world.  Basically I love being a novelist because I get to be the creator, like God, and that is just a fantastic, thrilling feeling that I could just create from nothing these characters, and some things were very intentional like the letters, the letters are really important between Valentina and Elena because I needed to send Elena to San Juan because I wanted her to inform the reader when she informed Valentina about what was happening in San Juan.  I didn't want to write actual scenes or chapters about certain things, but I wanted it to come through in the letters.  Like for example when Elena wrote Valentina about the bombing of San Juan I wanted to write it her saying it in this letter so that the reader could know what she felt when this was happening.

Jo Reed:  This novel is about a lot.  Do you outline?  Do you know the story you want to tell?  I mean you have the idea, but do you know where the story's going to go before you sit down and actually write it?

Marisel Vera:  No, no.  I always try to outline but it so boring-- I think it's boring. <laughs> Yes, plus I feel like if I outline then I already predestine my characters, and I don't want to do that, I want them to take me where they need to go on their journey, I want to be along with them on their journey, so that's my process, and it's a problem when it comes to structuring the novel because in the middle of the novel they're on a boat going to Hawaii, and that's the first thing that came to me when I was writing, and that's the middle.  So it's always a problem when I go back trying to figure out, okay, how should I tell this story?  But I like letting my characters lead me where they need to go, and also people always show up in my books, unexpected people.  I could be writing about Valentina today, and then next thing I know she has a cousin that came to tell her story or something, and it's just so fun to have all these people just show up, and then when I'm writing them, they're telling me their story, I'm listening, and I'm writing it, it's a joy, it's a joy.

Jo Reed:  Oh, it sounds like it is.  Can you tell me a little bit about the research process because that had to have been formidable.

Marisel Vera:  Oh yes, especially when I really started working on the novel I would say it was around 2012, I worked on it a little bit 2011, and with the research, but when I really started deep into writing it and thinking about it, it was 2012, and by that time-- and I had already amassed like a copy of all the newspaper articles from Hawaii from 1900 to 1903 that mentioned the words Puerto Rico or Puerto Ricans.  So that was really helpful because I learned about how Americans in Hawaii thought about Puerto Ricans even before they came.  Another thing was a friend of mine, a professor, one of her students, she wrote to the University of Puerto Rico and got a copy of this book that was printed in 1899, and I wasn't able to request it from any other library because I think they're the only ones that had it.  So somehow she got it. It had a report from every mayor in every town in Puerto Rico, like 72 towns or something, about what happened after hurricane San Ciriaco.  So they all were required by the U.S. government to give a report of how many houses were destroyed, how many people died, and so these mayors-- they wrote details about what happened after Hurricane San Ciriaco, and that was really helpful to me when I was trying to create the scenes of the hurricane to make it real. I read nonfiction memoirs in Spanish and English, newspaper articles in Spanish, of that period in Puerto Rico there were a lot of newspapers, and it was really helpful for me to get a feel for the way people lived, the way people thought during that period.  So it was just a treasure trove because I don't just write about the facts, but I try to also have the language, the rhythm of the language of the period and how people talked, and that is helpful to me also when I write, to get their voices and also the music of the period.  I also come from a strong Puerto Rican family where a lot of Spanish was spoken and is spoken, and even as a small child I was always listening to the rhythm of the way people talk, because you can tell so much by the way people talk and the rhythm of their voices, and I want to distinguish my characters by using rhythm in their voices so that I don't have to say their names before the readers start reading about them, they might know who they are, and that's a big challenge let me tell you, but one that I take on. <laughs>

Jo Reed:  Well the language also pivots into Spanish, and you don't provide translations, and I have no Spanish, but I found I could figure it out and when I couldn't I just looked up the words which is easy <laughs>.  So that had to have been a decision though to do that.

Marisel Vera:  Yes.  Yeah.

Jo Reed:  Walk me through that.  Is that about having that rhythm of language that you were just referring to?

Marisel Vera:  Yes, and I think that I felt more confident in this second novel, "The Taste of Sugar" than I did in my first novel. I live in two languages so I felt more comfortable embracing that in my writing, but writing is such a way hopefully that my reader, like you said, you got the gist of it, and if you didn't you looked it up, and so I really embraced my Puerto Rican-ness, and my Puerto Rican gaze in "The Taste of Sugar," and going forward I'm going to do that, and I know I've had a lot of complaints from some people about the Spanish, but you know what?  This is my voice, and this is the way I'm going to write from now on and, you know, so be it.

Jo Reed:  Well the other thing you certainly explore in the book, you make it clear that this is a man's world.

Marisel Vera:  Yes.

Jo Reed:  The women are not passive, but they have to move very carefully. You just thread these needles so well, showing and demonstrating an exploitation of people, but at the same time they're not just victims, wherever they can have agency they grab it.

Marisel Vera:  Yes.  Well I don't see my characters as characters, I see them as people, and I think when you see your characters as people you understand that they're complicated, maybe not completely evil, or completely good the way people really are, and so that is the way I write them.  I write them as real people, what would their passions be, how could they work in this world?  I know with Valentina I understood the male Puerto Rican world very, very well because I grew up in that world in Chicago.  I was born in Chicago, raised in Chicago, but my parents were Puerto Ricans, and I always joked around like they raised their four daughters like we were back on the mountain in the 1950's in Puerto Rico, and it was tough, but I know that it was hard for my mother who grew up a mountain-- she didn't like living on a mountain, just like Valentina. So I think about my characters as real people, and that is what makes them real to the reader.

Jo Reed:  And you also are very clear about the very casual racism.

Marisel Vera:  Yes.  That is something that is still going on in Puerto Rico today, and I wanted to address that because some Puerto Ricans like to say that Puerto Rico isn't racist, and no, that's not true, and also my colorism is a deal, you are complimented on the color of your skin often, if your hair is straight, and I wanted to put that in there because it's part of our culture, it's part of our history, and I feel that we have to recognize it in order to change it.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, that's exactly right.  And you do it in the same way you talk about colonialism and about colorism or sexism, it's not didactic, it's through the lives of these characters in the book and how it resonates and what they go through on a daily basis, just what their lives are on a daily basis, and nobody's stopping to say, "Hey, men are always in charge."  Men are just always in charge.

Marisel Vera:  Yes, yes, like with Valentina, when she is wondering, "Should I tell my husband this thing?" 

Jo Reed:  And this thing is an unwanted sexual overture from someone.

Marisel Vera:  Yes.  And she's wondering, okay, what are the consequences if she tells him, somehow she'll have to pay for it, most likely-- she thinks most likely she will. Women are put in a position where anything that is bad that happens to them could be their fault because they did this, they didn't do that, and I think that when you tell stories like this people get it, people get things when you tell it in a story that compared to when you read it as a nonfiction fact, because people really care about other people, especially one-on-one.  Just like when I thought about, okay, the story about 5,000 Puerto Ricans I thought, "Nobody's going to care really about 5,000 Puerto Ricans."  They're going to think, "Wow, 5,000 Puerto Ricans, that's a lot of Puerto Ricans."  But if you can tell the story through the viewpoint of this couple who have to give up everything, for Vicente who has to give up his dream of being a coffee farmer, the thing he wants more than anything in his life, and he has to give it up because of what's happening in his country, then people care that Vicente had to give up his dream, and they care that Valentina doesn't feel comfortable about telling something that she would like to tell her husband.

Jo Reed:  The hurricane, San Ciriaco in 1899, bears uncanny echoes to Hurricane Maria, but I know you wrote this way before Hurricane Maria, but it still must have been shocking to you-- I mean as it was shocking to all of us-- but you having written this about something that happened over 100 years ago, and you're seeing mirrored today.

Marisel Vera:  Yes, I went around saying, "Oh my god,"   it's just like Hurricane San Ciriaco.  It was unbelievable, and Hurricane Maria ripped up the coffee trees, and in the same area as Hurricane San Ciriaco.  It was just something.  One of my uncles lives in Utuado right now in the area that Hurricane Maria devastated, and Hurricane San Ciriaco over a hundred years ago, and it was just something, you know, another aunt they didn't have water, they didn't have electricity, one of my aunts didn't have water for seven or eight months, and the way that the United States government was so slow to help Puerto Rico, just kind of mirrored some of the telegrams and the letters that I read from the charity board that was in charge of sending food or giving food to Puerto Rico in 1899.  One of the last telegrams that this major got, he was in Puerto Rico, and he was in charge of the food that was coming and where it was going was that, you know, "It's been a year already, by the end of October no more food because it's not our job to feed Puerto Ricans."

Jo Reed:  In many books the hurricane would have been the culmination of the story, or it would have been the force to get the story moving.  In "The Taste of Sugar" it comes in the middle to set the second part of the book into motion. 

Marisel Vera:  Well I knew that I had to write about the U.S. invading Puerto Rico in 1898 because these two events were what caused the exodus to Hawaii, it wasn't just Hurricane San Ciriaco.  The first part of it was the U.S. invasion, 1898, they come in, the U.S. government devalues the Puerto Rican peso by 40 percent, and they changed the taxes so now there are property taxes, and before there weren't property taxes, before people were taxed on their labor.  So these two big things and other changes that the Puerto Rican government made including buying up the land, once the Puerto Rican farmers lost it, very cheap and selling it to like corporations.  So they buy up the land, and then there's this hurricane, and so more people lose their property, and these two events are what caused the first exodus of people going to Hawaii.  So I needed to write about that, and I wanted to write before the U.S. invasion because I also wanted to write about Spanish colonialism because Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony for 400 years. 

Jo Reed:  It is an epic as I said when we started this conversation, and the book also just evokes the sheer physical beauty of Puerto Rico, its lushness.  There were moments where I felt like could smell the air as I was reading it.

Marisel Vera:  You know, I said before, I was born in Chicago, and my father worked in a factory, and there were six kids.  So unlike some other Puerto Ricans we didn't get to go back to Puerto Rico every year to visit the family, but when I was 18, and my sister was 17, we saved from our afterschool summer jobs so that we could go to Puerto Rico for the first time because my parents always talked about it, and our relatives, and I had this image in my head about how Puerto Rico looked, and I was always very, very connected to the Puerto Rican culture, you know, with the music, everything, I loved it from my very, very beginning of knowing myself as a person, and so we fly to Puerto Rico right after I graduated from high school, and the moment I stepped off the tarmac, I felt this connection with Puerto Rico.  I looked and there were the palm trees, and then later on I went to where my parents grew up in the mountains in the country, and I just feel like these are my roots, it's calling me, and I could just close my eyes right now and describe the feeling that Vicente felt because that's how I felt just looking at the palm trees.

Jo Reed: Tell me about growing up in Chicago….was there a strong Puerto Rican community there?

Marisel Vera:  Oh yeah, I grew up in the Humboldt Park, and that was Puerto Rican community.  In fact right now the governor of Illinois signed a bill, so this two-mile area of Humboldt called Paseo Boricua from Western and Costner is going to be called Puerto Rico town.  So yes.

Jo Reed:  How cool.

Marisel Vera:  A very, very strong connection to Puerto Rico.  Chicago is the town that during the 1950's there was a big exodus of Puerto Ricans, Operation Bootstrap was the name of the program, monosolaobra [ph?], and they came to Chicago to work in the factories, and my father came during that period, my mother came a few years later.  So yes, Chicago has a very strong Puerto Rican community, very vibrant.

Jo Reed:  So Chicago really felt like home. You didn’t feel like an outsider.

Marisel Vera:  Oh no.  I mean yes, now I can, but when I was growing up it was very difficult growing up Puerto Rican in Chicago because you really didn't belong, people didn't want you here who weren't Puerto Rican.  You lived in two cultures.  You were not Puerto Rican enough at home, not American enough out.  So it was very difficult, very difficult for a teenager.  You're already, you know, please, mixed up or insecure as a teenager, and then you grow up in two cultures, and very hard for my sisters and me as Puerto Rican girls because my parents were so strict, and they raised us like we were growing up in Puerto Rico.  So that was a challenge growing up in the late 70's.    And one of the reasons that I wrote "The Taste of Sugar," and it was so important to me as I was writing, I realized that it wasn't just a story about the history of Puerto Rico and these Puerto Ricans who went to Hawaii, but it was sort of like a discovery of my roots, my Puerto Rican roots.  It was a chance for me to claim being Puerto Rican, and a gift that I thought would be not just to myself but to my peers, my sisters, Puerto Ricans like me who didn't know our history, because this is what happens when you grow up belonging to a colony, your own history of your own ancestors is not taught.  The history that's taught is the one of the colonizer.   So my parents didn't know their own history. And I know that I'm achieving my goal of having this novel "The Taste of Sugar" be a celebration of us Puerto Ricans and the Puerto Rican culture because Puerto Ricans are telling me so.  And people thank me for writing this novel, and I knew it was necessary because I needed it for me, and as a reader I was always a great reader from a very small child, I looked for myself in books.  I mean you don't need to find yourself in books, but it would be nice if you found at least one book where you saw yourself, and when you don't see yourself you feel that erasure of not being seen, you're not seen, and people are telling me that for the first time in their lives they feel seen.

Jo Reed:  And that's so important because god knows we read for many reasons and one is to learn about other people and people who are different from us, but boy it's so important to see yourself reflected in books too, especially when you're young.  I wonder if you think a writer of an historical novel has a particular set of obligations to the reader?

Marisel Vera:  Well I know that I felt it when I wrote "The Taste of Sugar" and that is why I was meticulous in my research.  I felt it because I knew this was going to be the first time that a lot of people learned about Puerto Rico, the first time that a lot of Puerto Ricans would learn their own history especially Puerto Ricans reading in the English language or raised in the United States like I was, and I was meticulous, and I have to say that since the publication I have had Puerto Rican historians reach out to me and tell me, "Oh my god, how did you do it?  How did you get all this history in, and it's accurate?  How were you able to do it in a story?"  So yes, for me, I had this need to be correct.

Jo Reed:  And you produced a novel with a bibliography.

Marisel Vera:  Yes, and that's just a small one of all the things, and you know why I did it?  I know it wasn't necessary in fiction, but I wanted to give credit and also a little bit of shine to some of the books and some of the articles that really helped me, but you don't know how many books or articles I read, and I couldn't write it down because if I kept track then I wouldn't be able to write a novel because <laughs> that takes time.

Jo Reed:  You'd be doing footnotes all the time.

Marisel Vera:  Yes, and you know that's not my thing.  I'm a novelist, but if your book really helped me I want to honor it.

Jo Reed:  "The Taste of Sugar" came out during the pandemic, which had to have an impact on the way it was presented, the way it was rolled out. 

Marisel Vera:  Oh my god, it was bought in 2019 I think it was in April or something, and in July my editor gave me feedback, and it needed to be in by a certain time, because they wanted it to be published before the presidential election.  They thought that I wasn't going to get a lot of exposure because everything was going to be about the presidential election, and I was going on vacation with my sisters to Italy.  I'm like, "I'm going on vacation with my sisters for two weeks.”    But so I took it with me, I printed it, and I took it with me, I worked on it on the plane. And then there's a pandemic, and it's like, "Oh my god," but they decided to go forward, and no physical events, and what I decided to do was to use my advance to hire a personal publicist because I knew if people don't read your book, forget it.  That happened with my first novel, nobody read it, I don't think anybody reviewed it, but I was really lucky that some really important people read my novel and gave me really great reviews, so I'm blessed, no complaints.

Jo Reed:  Finally, tell me how story-telling has shaped your life.

Marisel Vera:  I have always been a storyteller because my mother was a storyteller.  My mother was always telling me stories about growing up on a mountain in Puerto Rico, She would talk about the spirits that roamed in the mountains and how she didn't believe in them because the church said not to, but yet she would tell these stories, and I was always a child that listened to stories.  So I am totally shaped by storytelling.

Jo Reed:  And I think that is a good place to leave it.  Marisel, thank you so much, and again I just can't express my admiration for this book and tell you how much I liked it, how much I learned, and how much I cared.

Marisel Vera:  Thank you so much.  I really, really appreciate you.

Jo Reed: Right back at you!  We were revisiting my 2021 interview with Marisel Vera—she’s the author of the novel “The Taste of Sugar.”  And you can keep up with Marisel at Marisel Vera.com.  You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow Art Works wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple it helps people to find us. And as always, we’d love to know your thoughts about the podcast—send us an email at artworkspod@arts.gov. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Marisel Vera: I have always been a storyteller because my mother was a storyteller.  My mother was always telling me stories about growing up on a mountain in Puerto Rico.  She would talk about the spirits that roamed in the mountains and how she didn't believe in them because the church said not to, but yet she would tell these stories, and other people would tell these stories, and I was always a child that listened to stories. So I think that just from the very beginning my life has been shaped by stories and storytellers.