Rebe Huntman
Author Interview - Rebe Huntman
Author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle
A daughter’s search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba. In this dazzling and lyrical debut memoir, the author reimagines the classic pilgrimage quest as she is drawn into the mysteries of the gods and saints of modern-day Cuba. Interweaving the story of her search to reconnect with her mother, 30 years after her death, with the search for the sacred feminine, Huntman leads the reader into a world of séance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and dance, which both resurrect her mother and bring Huntman face to face with a larger version of herself.
Author Interview - Rebe Huntman
Author I draw inspiration from:
My Mother in Havana has many literary godparents—Toni Morrison, for her gorgeous blending of the spiritual and the mundane. James Baldwin, for the rigor of his intellectual inquiry. Lyricists like Lia Purpura and Eula Biss and Brenda Miller. And memoirists like Cheryl Strayed (Wild), Helen MacDonald (H is for Hawk), and Doireann Ní Ghríofa (A Ghost in the Throat), whose memoirs braid excavations of grief with a parallel quest that allows them to transform that grief. Of those memoirs, Wild was the book I studied most consciously as I wrote My Mother in Havana, patterning my structure—in which chapters begin on the pilgrimage to Cuba—after the way she begins each chapter on the Appalachian Trail. This clear linear narrative created the scaffolding around which I could then fold memories, research, story, and inquiry to weave a multi-layered, lyric memoir that sweeps across time and space and thought.
Author Interview - Rebe Huntman | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
On the sofa with my cat in my lap; bonus points if it’s cold or rainy outside and we’re all under a blanket.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
I’m thinking of Marla from Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons! She is one of tens of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers who sprout wings, scales, and talons; leave a trail of fiery destruction in their paths; and take to the skies in what would become known as the Mass Dragoning of 1955. I picture the two of us in an elevator, Marla’s great wings straining against the cage of its walls, her breath an uncontainable flame as she exemplifies how we each might trade our small skins for the mightiest, most luminous version of our selves.
Author Interview - Rebe Huntman | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
It’s difficult to separate my origin story as a writer from my life as a Latin dancer and choreographer. I am drawn to the physicality of language: the way it moves, like the body in dance, allowing us to capture the way the world comes at us as more than one thing. It is this in-betweenness that drives My Mother in Havana’s narrator as she moves between the worlds of Ohio and Cuba, between the spiritual practices of Santería and Folk Catholicism and Spiritism, between the stories of her biological mother and the stories of Cuba’s spiritual mothers, Our Lady of Charity and Ochún. But the link between dance and writing is even more literal when it comes to this book, for it was when I first visited Cuba in 2004 to collaborate with native choreographers that I was introduced to the dances that celebrate the Afro-Cuban gods of Santería and the divine mothers that stand at their center.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
Hardback: I love the unapologetic nod to the analog—thick pages held between cover and dust jacket; the way the weight and heft of the volume underscore the preciousness of its contents.
Paperbook: If the distinguishing virtue of the hardback is its physicality, then the virtue of the paperback is its ephemerality—the invitation to throw a story into a bag and take it wherever you go; annotate its margins in pencil or marker; turn each pages before it fades.
Ebook & Audiobook: Call me old school, but there is an intimacy I feel when I hold a book in my hands that I don’t experience when I’m looking at a screen or listening along: the ability to feel the weight of pages as I make my way through them; to touch favorite passages with my fingers, or even hold them close to my cheek.
The last book I read:
I’ve been on a mythic, feminist, fantasy spree, reading and re-reading Madeline Miller’s Circe and Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons—books that, like My Mother in Havana, invite us to open ourselves to the power of magic and miracle, and to step into the largest version of our selves.
Author Interview - Rebe Huntman | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
I like to move between paper and computer, marking up each draft by hand before inputting my edits onto my laptop, then printing and marking up that new draft, and so on, until weeks or months—or in the case of My Mother in Havana, years later, I have a finished manuscript!
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
Circe! I can think of nothing better than spending time cultivating magical herbs and spells and exacting revenge on men who don’t know how to behave themselves.
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
If I weren't an author, I’d be a ceramicist or a weaver. A photographer or oil painter. A performance artist or an anthropologist. There are so many creative paths, and it would be so much fun to try them all!
Favorite decade in fashion history:
1920s: I’m a sucker for feathers and beads!
Place I’d most like to travel:
No matter how many times I travel there, I’ll always want to return to Cuba. With each visit, I deepen my love for its spiritual traditions, its art and history. I nurture friendships with loved ones I’ve come to know as family. I’d like to visit Iceland and Norway and Sweden to research a book I hope to write about the Norse worlds of runes and dragons. The Shetland isles and Vietnam and Bhutan call to me. And of course, there is always the lure of Paris and Rome with their museums and outdoor cafes. And Mt. St. Michel, a place I have dreamed of since I was a child.
My signature drink:
Seltzer water with a splash of cranberry juice!
Favorite artist:
Zaida del Río and Alicea Leal are contemporary Cuban painters whose work I adore! Their subjects are feminist and fantastical, colorful and technically impeccable—as if both women were supremely aware of the dance between the spiritual and the material. And I love the work of Matanzas, Cuba painter, Adrián Gómez Sancho, whose painting “Anunciación, la gran ofrenda” graces the cover of My Mother in Havana. In the painting, an otherworldly hand extends an offering of sunflowers to the divine Cuban mothers, Ochún and Our Lady of Charity. The gesture mimics the act of writing, which for me is always an offering. It is an act of saying I am here. This is what I stand for. This is what I find beautiful. Important. Worth paying attention to. And there is a gesture in reaching out to the world through that act of attention and saying: Won’t you pay attention alongside me? In writing My Mother in Havana, I wanted to create an intimacy of standing alongside my reader, of sharing those things that live in my heart and bones: the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Folk Catholicism and Spiritism and the power of those spiritual practices to help us find our way back to our lost beloveds. A way to know Cuba—not through the masculine lens of pirates and revolutionaries, Hemingway, and classic cars, but through the radical lens of the sacred & the feminine. An invitation to push past the five senses to claim a more mythic life. Find our way back to those things we understood clearly as a child. Chase those ancient rhythms of conga & shekere into a world of séance and pilgrimage, sacrifice & sacred dance. I wanted to say: Look at these great spiritual mothers, Ochún and Our Lady of Charity who connect us with the deep & long story of our lives: both of them as real as the woman sitting next to you on the bus, and as mysterious & vast as the deepest river of your being. A feminine path to the divine that has been largely buried in today’s rush toward materialism & consumption. A soft voice in our ear reassuring us that everything IS going to be all right.
Number one on my bucket list:
Honestly, what I most look forward to is creating more work—novels based on the stories of my grandmothers. A work of fiction that dives into the worlds of the Nordic gods. But first, I have a poetry collection that is almost ready to find its publisher. Like My Mother in Havana, the poems are a cinematic exploration of the forces that collaborate in the shaping of what it is to be woman. Unlike My Mother in Havana, the settings of that inquiry widen to include a kaleidoscopic catalog of Midwestern bowling alleys and 1950s burlesque clubs, mermaid meet and greets, a dead mother’s tour through 1980s Russia, and, of course, the mother saints and goddesses of Cuba. Tentatively titled Zinnias in My Mother’s Vase, the collection is both a container for wildness and a portal between generations—an invitation to join the author as she and the concentric circles that bloom from that central eye—ancestors, role models, & ultimately that ineffable, unnamable force that animates life itself—weigh in on the feminine body. Is it object? Is it vessel? Or is it a cosmos both contained by & too vast to be contained by any vessel?
Find more from the author:
@rebehuntman (Instagram)
@rebehuntmanauthor (Facebook)
About Rebe Huntman:
Author Interview - Rebe Huntman
Rebe Huntman is a memoirist, essayist, dancer and poet who writes at the intersections of feminism, world religion and spirituality, and the author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle. For over a decade she directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. She collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and on Fox and ABC. A Macondo fellow and recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence award, Rebe has been awarded grants and fellowships for her work on My Mother in Havana from The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA Artist Residency, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Both e’s in her name are long. Find her at www.rebehuntman.com and on Instagram @rebehuntman.
