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The following conversation took place in real and constructed time.
ANGIE CRUZ: ¿What is your first experience with Callaloo; when was the first time you heard about it?
NELLY ROSARIO: All hearsay, calls for submissions.
CRUZ: ¿This was when you were at Columbia or MIT?
ROSARIO: [R.U.E.-Resist the Urge to Explain. When writing dialogue in fiction, resist deliberate exposition.]
CRUZ: ["I will tell the truth because writing dies when we lie" (I am paraphrasing Gabriel García Márquez, via the playwright, José Rivera.] Confession: I admit it . . . the fact that you went to MIT blows my mind. I'm sorry, no matter how much you play it down, it's still a big deal. You can use both sides of the brain, moving in and out of the left and right in ways that astonish me.
ROSARIO: Thanks, but it's not playing down-I just never bought into this idea of the brain being split in two. I just follow what interests me. But about Callaloo . . . I rarely submitted because a novel in progress isn't portable. Publishing seemed light years away at the time. I'd flip through Callaloo back issues and liked that there were so many different voices, a nice cross-section, and of course, the themes. And you, ¿when were you Callaloo-deflowered?
CRUZ: I remember seeing Callaloo when I was at Binghamton, an undergrad. It was on the shelf of one of my professors. I loved the spine, its white with black lettering, and when I pulled it out, there was always that beautiful artwork on the cover, and you're like, "¡So this is where black writers get published!" I never sent anything to them-it was too early on for me; it was intimidating.
CRUZ: Many of the writers I was reading in school were also writing for the journal, and I enjoyed the interviews, which reminded me that authors were human. But the first connection I had with Callaloo aside from just reading the journal was when Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Consuelo López-Springfield edited the Dominican Issue.
ROSARIO: Yeah, I remember that, Summer 2000. I was excited that it was so hefty. Not just some little Brugal tourist pamphlet or something. I still have the issue, still going through it because there's...