Q. & A. with Professor Daniel Frost
Daniel Frost is one of the creative forces behind fósforo, Holy Cross’ journal of Hispanic inspiration, now on its sixth edition. As the director of this unique publication, Frost solicits and selects creative work to run in the journal, edits and designs. We had a chance to talk to Frost about the new issue, his passion for Hispanic and Latino cultures, and more:
Q. What do you hope readers will get out of this issue of fósforo?
A. This was our travel edition. We featured work by students who had studied abroad with Holy Cross in Spain or Latin America, professors looking back on their time in other countries, and Foreign Language Assistants from Spain and Latin America who had come to spend a year here with us. It’s a collection of sketches that provides sparks of insight into how our cultures relate. We also brought together a number of pieces not explicitly linked to travel, but which still get at the heart of the experience of ‘leaving home,’ as it were, to be part of something new. It’s in these cases that I think that the edition gets most interesting. Reading a piece about getting the news of your mom’s cancer, or a poem about the explosive miracle of a kiss, reminds us that writing can be a form of travel, a way of living in someone else’s world for a bit before closing the book and coming home. As Professor Estrella Cibreiro says in her introductory piece, some journeys are made word by word rather than step by step.
More generally, I hope that readers of fósforo will see that Spanish is not such a “foreign” language in the end, nor is the “Hispanic world” somewhere over there, south or east of us on the map — or for that matter, down the hill in the neighborhoods of Worcester, where SPUD students go. Many people on campus speak Spanish natively and write in it naturally, and others come to love it through travel, reading, and study. Which is to say, that Spanish language and Hispanic creativity are right here among us, part of who we are as a community. We’re all on the same map, after all, and I see fósforo as a way to explore it. I hope that fósforo will help to change the way that Spanish is seen, not so much as a requirement, a skill to be learned in the classroom, but rather as a voice, a means of expression, a creative force, with its own texture and lyricism.
Q. What are your future plans for the journal?
A. I think that the local emphasis is central to how fósforo will grow. fósforo is supposed to be a forum (we play on the word “forum” (foro) in the Spanish title) where Spanish can be heard and Hispanic culture explored as a source of creativity. I would like to see the journal expand concentrically, bringing more and more voices from around campus — faculty and students from other departments, for example, as well as administration and staff (I know, for example, that there are quite a few stories and homegrown recipes floating around the staff at Kimball. I’d love to see them). I’d like fósforo to be a way to break down some of the boundaries that bind us to our disciplines, to our studies, to our office, to our job description, as a means to see better how we relate to one another here on campus. From there, I’d like to see fósforo spread outward more consistently to the Consortium colleges, as well as to Worcester cultural institutions such as the Art Museum and Centro Las Américas; I’d like to have alumni contribute their voices — in fact, the 2010 edition will be an alumni edition, and I hope we can get a wide range of submission from our far-flung former students, faculty, FLAs, and staff. I’d like to make fósforo a major regional resource for publishing quality artwork, thought-provoking insight, and challenging ideas related, however broadly, to Hispanic themes. Our biggest obstacle (besides funding — unlike publications like The Purple, we operate year to year by fundraising efforts and depend on the ongoing generosity of departments, agencies, offices, and other organizations around campus) is breaking free of the sense that fósforo is always for someone else: that it’s exclusively for Modern Languages folks, for example, or exclusively for students, exclusively for the academic side of the house, exclusively for Spanish speakers, etc. Anyone who has been inspired by Spanish or motivated by some aspect of Hispanic or Latino culture is welcome to submit, in English or in Spanish. Artwork, too. If it can be reproduced on a page, we’ll consider it.
Q. What inspires you in terms of Spanish-language literature and art?
A. That’s tough to answer, but I’ll say that one important aspect is the experience of getting outside the familiar exploring the edges of my world in relation to others’. I realize that I might just as well read 21st-century U.S. literature to do that, but ever since I studied for a year as an exchange student in Venezuela, I’ve been caught up in the worlds of García Márquez, D. F. Sarmiento, Benito Pérez Galdós, and others. Through them, and over the years, I’ve grown increasingly interested in how we use language to construct the world — not so much to imitate it, or to capture or reflect it (all of which, as Plato or Stendahl or Octavio Paz would say, are important parts of art) as to construct it. For example, I think of the Great Plains of the U.S. and the pampas of Argentina. They are two vast flat expanses of land, but the differences between them are as much cultural as geographical. Two very different nations have been built on them, and an important element in each nation’s development has been how its artists have looked to the plains for ways of imagining the nation’s future. Texas is another prime example: is Texan statehood a triumph of U.S. ideals or political trickery? The answer is undoubtedly somewhere in between — and it has a lot to do with what language you speak. I like that speaking Spanish, speaking another language, allows you to look at things in more than one way. It’s one way to get out of one’s own head and into the world.
