What does survival look like if it comes at the expense of freedom? How can we build safe places in an increasingly unstable world?
These questions are at the heart of two new books by authors Leni Zumas and Cleyvis Natera. Zumas’s book “Wolf Bells” tells the story of an intergenerational group home determined to make a space for people who fall through capitalism’s cracks.
Natera’s book “The Grand Paloma Resort” tells the story of staff at an exclusive Caribbean resort as they navigate class, race and colonialism. OPB’s Allison Frost spoke to Leni Zumas and Cleyvis Natera at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Today we bring you a conversation about the costs of capitalism, the way family and community can build a sense of safety, and the relationship between freedom and survival. OPB’s Allison Frost spoke with the authors Leni Zumas and Cleyvis Natera at the 2025 Portland Book Festival about their most recent works. Natera’s book is “The Grand Paloma Resort.” Zumas’s novel is “Wolf Bells.”
Allison Frost: I want to talk about “Wolf Bells,” the main character Caz. She’s a former musician and she has created this intergenerational group home, in part to take care of her mother, but in part to take care of everyone she could. This character is so vivid. Her backstory is so rich and beautifully, beautifully woven into the present moment, and one part of her history, an important part is her history with substance use disorder and having gone through residential treatment. So I’d love to jump right in with a reading about that on page 61.
Leni Zumas: Yeah, she’s a 63-year-old woman who in the late ‘70s and ‘80s was an almost big deal as a feminist punk rocker in a band and she went to rehab and treatment and this moment is her looking back and remembering her time at a halfway house.
“‘I’m happy,’ her mind said. They cooked your meals, told you what time to wake up, gave you fresh sheets and a new little soap every Monday. People asked you how you were feeling and never scorned you for feeling bad, for having trouble living in the world because everyone at the lodge had this trouble. You talked to whoever sat by you at dinner or stood smoking on the same porch you were standing on. You could ask questions too intrusive and hear answers too revealing for the regular world. ‘My husband gave me gonorrhea.’’ When I was 19, I killed a field hockey coach and a DUI.’ Then you were free to drift away to your room, or it would be time for the next meal, or another resident would barge into the conversation.
No danger of being stuck across a cafe table trying to come up with things to say and wondering how much more time had to pass before you could leave. When you met someone for coffee in the regular world, you were expected to stay an hour at least, but what about the people you only had half an hour’s worth of talk for? Ten minutes’ worth, five minutes? Caz enjoyed many good five-minute conversations at the lodge. Crunched together for months on end, you felt affection, even love, for people you barely knew. Others who had come to scoff but remained to pray. It was this feeling, the happiness of accidental sideways, all comers kinship, she had hoped to replicate when she started the house.”
Frost: All comers kinship. So tell me more about the house for those of us who have not had a chance to read it.
Zumas: This is an old sort of Victorian house on a bluff near a municipal elevator that quite closely resembles the one in Oregon City, although it’s not specifically set in Oregon. I imagine it as a place… I started thinking about the real-life phenomenon of retirement homes, welcoming younger residents who could live there for free if they hung out with the older residents and kind of contributed to the life of this place, so addressing financial precarity as well as loneliness.
When I was conceiving of this book, I wanted to create a similar place where, in this house, there’s a disabled vet from Iraq who lives there. There’s some people who are in their 80s. There’s a couple of women in their 20s who have a lot of debt from going to college. It’s a place, again, it’s a lateral kinship. It’s not about biological reproduction. It’s really about forming other kinds of community.
Frost: And you mentioned this, but as far as the geographic place of the novel, it does feel Northwestern. It felt Oregon-y to me, but it really could be anywhere that’s a couple hundred miles from the ocean. Why did you make the choice to leave the place unnamed?
Zumas: Partly it was I had set my last book “Red Clocks” in Oregon. I thought, gosh, let’s move from the coast to the mountains, but also, I really wanted to remove as many markers of place as I could to kind of increase the idea that this could be anywhere and maybe you should be everywhere. In this case, it’s someone using a house she inherited, so someone who had privilege, and even though she has very little cash right now she was able to have a place to house like 15 to 20 other people. I felt like if it was too specific, I don’t know, I just didn’t want it to be.
Frost: I liked how it could be anywhere and if you didn’t have the whole conversation about the history of the house being the sea captain, it really almost could be anywhere. I mean, in the United States anyway. Well, let me turn to you, Cleyvis. “The Grand Paloma Resort” is set in the Dominican Republic in a fictional place called Paloma Falls. Can you describe the place that Paloma Falls is based on?
Cleyvis Natera: Buenos días, let me start off by saying. This is my first time in the Portland Book Festival. As writers we have these moments where you just feel like I’m doing all right. So when I got accepted to the Portland Book Festival, I was like, I’m doing all right. So it’s lovely to be here with all of you. Thank you for taking time out of your weekend morning to spend time with us, and thank you, Allison. I’m a huge fan of Leni and this book is amazing, so I also feel really honored to be sharing space with you.
Zumas: Likewise, Cleyvis.
Natera: So I was born in the Dominican Republic and I migrated when I was 10 years old, and we didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, so it wasn’t until after I graduated from college that I started going back to the Dominican Republic and at that point already I wasn’t making a lot of money. I was like an entry level person but I was already making a lot more money than most of my family and so I ended up going back to my country often, spending some time with family and then time at the resorts, and very quickly I realized that there’s very different resources in my country that were not always available to local people.
I decided to make it a fictional place because Paloma Falls has quite a charged history that is based on the Dominican Republic. But also more broadly I was thinking about the Caribbean, just that region of the world, and so I would say that it is a conglomerate of both places in the Dominican Republic that have had quite an impact on me because of their beauty, but also some of the dynamics that are just really ugly, about both colonialism in the United States and in the Caribbean.
Frost: And physically, the geography is just blush, right, though, it’s beautiful. I mean you’ve got the beaches, especially where you’ve got the fictional Paloma Falls, it’s just like it’s a paradise…
Natera: It is.
Frost: In some ways, if you have enough money.
Natera: The thing that I think is really amazing about going to the Caribbean, I mean how many of you have been to a Caribbean island? Not enough people, you’re missing out. Something is missing out from your lives, let me just say that, OK? It is an absolutely stunning place and to humble brag a little, like one of the things I love to do is to travel the world. I’ve been to Singapore and Bali and Bora Bora and Hawaii, and I can tell you the Caribbean is by far the most beautiful place. Take it from me, I am not biased at all.
One of the things that I really realized when I decided that I wanted to set this book in the Dominican Republic is that I really wanted to somehow be able to bring to life what I know about the region and it’s really how stunning it is, especially in the Dominican Republic because you have this lush tropical forest that’s right up to the beach, and it’s really kind of stunning when you see the water and it’s crystalline and the sand is white and it’s just really gorgeous. So for me, setting it in this lush environment, in this beautiful place, and then having this resort which is meant to be like a multibillion-dollar structure made of glass, to also bring about that starkness of what happens when you bring this kind of luxury spaces into the natural environment.
Zumas: It makes it even more stark and interesting how the book begins with these two sisters who work at the resort and they’re trying to leave, right? When I started reading and there’s all this beauty, but these main characters are trying to get out.
Frost: And I will say you definitely sold me it, it instantly went to my top five, the next five places that I’m gonna travel to when I get to do that again. I wonder if you would set it up, getting us into sort of the narrative and the structure of the Grand Paloma Hotel, and if you would read just the little part about safety, from an email that went out to the guests.
Natera: The book opens with an email that is a welcome email for the guests that come to stay. The guests that are getting this email are people that are in the hotel for seven days, which is how long this book takes. It’s a seven-day book. So I’m gonna read a small section of it called “Safety”:
“At the Grand Paloma Resort, our number one priority is to keep you and your loved ones safe. A few tips: don’t leave the resort grounds. If you must leave the resort, do so accompanied by one of the resort’s companions. There are legal consequences and steep penalties for the consumption or sale of illicit drugs. Kindly note that only registered guests are allowed on hotel premises. Unregistered guests cannot be added to an existing reservation.
The U.S. Department of State has urged caution when traveling to the Caribbean destination and has recently issued a Level 4 advisory in the Dominican Republic. Claims of civil unrest, violent home invasions, armed robberies, sexual assault, and homicides are common. Our resort has never experienced a single incident of violence. There is no safer place to rest, play, and work than within the confines of the Grand Paloma Resort, but it is important to be safe. Anything you wish for is within your reach on our resort grounds. There is no request we will not fulfill. We offer a remarkable elevated guest experience every time. Hope you have a lovely stay with us. Welcome, you parasites. Your team at the Grand Paloma resort.”
Frost: You talked about who the Grand Paloma Resort is meant for. I mean, it really is uber rich, right? The bracelets that tell you that you belong are $1,500 U.S. dollars, and the opulence, as you mentioned, glass and just ridiculousness of expense, is very much in contrast to the workers, where the workers stay miles away, and so there’s also this incredible dichotomy of the very rich and the very poor.
What’s interesting, I thought, is the other resort. There’s also another resort besides the Grand Paloma Resort, six hours away, where the staff quarters are on the grounds, not as fancy, but on the grounds. You’re setting up sort of hierarchies within hierarchies, and I wonder how intentional was that, and did you want to set that up to reflect the political situation as well?
Natera: Yes, I mean, one of the things that I was thinking a lot about, because I started writing this book during the pandemic and at the time my debut book, which you know I had been writing at that point for over a decade, and my agent and I were just about to send that into the market when the pandemic happened. And I am like a very caring person. I was very worried about the world, but I also was like I cannot freaking believe that now that my book is finally about to go into the world and maybe sell, we couldn’t do anything.
The whole publishing market had come to a complete standstill, but aside from that personal cost to me, like as a human, right, and just this dream and this aspiration of being a writer, I was also working a full time job at the time and I was pretty high up in an insurance company where I had been working for my entire adult life. And I live in a suburb, and one of the really interesting things that happened to me, because of where I lived, is that in my neighborhood, nobody was getting sick from COVID.
We actually had a group of concerned moms and parents who were trying to get the schools opened up because they were like, nothing is happening, you’re disrupting our lives. And then 15 miles away, where my family still lives in Washington Heights and in Harlem, thousands of people were dying every day. I had an uncle who passed away from COVID. I had two aunts who were on ventilators, and I was the person, me and my cousin Jackie are the two people who are more educated and so we were the ones calling to deal with the doctors.
It just became to me really interesting, as I started writing this book as short stories, I think part of the impulse was for me to think about hierarchies in space and what does it mean, really? There’s a part of me that I think, as I’ve changed my class, there was a part of me that was just like, well I get to go on nicer vacations. I guess to have a nicer car, and I just think that there was a time during the pandemic where I realized that class doesn’t just give you nicer things, it really impacts your level of humanity, right? Like the level at which society has been set up to either serve you or to use you, and so for me it was just really important as I started really thinking about this book, to think about the space and to think about hierarchies within my own country because I just think the Dominican Republic is a really complicated place.
I have a really tough time, as someone who is a U.S. citizen and who travels back, managing the complications of the level of cruelty that we have against Haitian people and then also the kindness and the beauty of people there, it’s just really difficult to balance it. So when I travel to the Dominican Republic, and I noticed that resorts just kinda have it all built in, it’s like you can’t escape class in a resort, especially in a resort that’s meant to cater to rich people. And so I wanted to show both within the Grand Paloma Resort is very stark, because at one point this resort decided they weren’t gonna invest in their employees, so the employees live in deplorable conditions.
Then there’s another resort where we have one person who travels to that resort with a family and he realizes that something is wrong with his resort because it’s the same conglomerate, like why do people have AC over there and meanwhile they don’t even have running water in their resort for the employees? So I thought it would just be an interesting way to activate for me some of the concerns that I was thinking about when it came to class.
Frost: And a lot of the story is driven by events, by the two main characters who are sisters, Laura and Elena, and there’s so many other great characters in the book, but just since those are two central characters, tell us a little bit about their relationship.
Natera: I love these two sisters, they’re terrible people. These two women, they’ve had tough lives. Laura, who’s 27 years old, has worked really hard. They lost their mother when Laura was 14 and Elena was 4, and their father’s just not a reliable adult. So Laura had to take on a mother, a parent role very early, and she hustled her way into this resort and started working there. When we meet her at 27, she’s been working there for a decade and is the highest-ranking employee for locals, which is middle management, but for her she might as well be the CEO, she has all the power in the community.
She’s someone that has worked really hard. Her dream is to get off of this island because this is not an island that treats Afro-Latinas well, and she wants to get the hell out of there and she’s enabled her younger sister, through her hard work, to have a really different upbringing. Elena is a babysitter, so they’re both workers, but because Elena is a babysitter for the super-rich, she’s always staying at these penthouses. And even though she’s staying in this tiny room in the back of a penthouse, she’s never been hungry like her sister, she’s never been deprived of just basic needs because she’s grown up from the time that she was 6 or 7 years old in this resort. She’s also been educated in a global academy, which is where the wealthiest executives’ children are educated.
So these two sisters, even though they both have the same goal which is to get the hell off of this resort and to get the hell off of this island, the way that it manifests is very different because Elena is an activist, she’s really trying to unionize the workers in the resort, she’s trying to rise up against the terrible treatment of Haitian laborers who are being swept up in raids and mass deported. I just wanted to create a dynamic with these two sisters where you know they love each other and you know that they both want the same thing, but the way their mindsets are just completely different in the way they think that they should go about it, especially when it comes to their obligations to their community.
Frost: And I know you said they’re terrible people, but they’re also terrible people that are so human, and I grow to love them both. I mean, it’s really remarkable. In both of these novels, “Wolf Bells” and “The Grand Paloma Resort,” there are children in jeopardy, and I’d like to ask you both a little bit about that, but Leni first. In “Wolf Bells” there are just the two children, but they drive the action of the narrative in addition to having their own interior life. Who are Nola and James to each other and how did they end up on the front porch of the house?
Zumas: Yeah, so Nola and James are cousins. Nola’s almost 13. James is 8, and they’ve both been in the care of James’s mother because Nola’s mother is incarcerated and James’s mother loses custody of them, basically because she’s poor. The water gets shut off in her house and a sort of series of events leads to them being taken into the foster care system. They encounter some abuse there and their experience, much like a lot of kids in the foster system in Oregon, which is under-resourced and overcrowded.
Kids are sent to stay in motels for really long periods of time sometimes, or they’re sent out of state to like behavioral health clinics just because we, the current system, does not have the resources to take care of them as they deserve to be cared for. James is also autistic, he’s non-speaking, and the people who are meant to care for him cannot care for him, not through any fault of his own, but because of ableism and ignorance, basically.
So his cousin Nola is like, screw this, I’m getting him out of here, so it’s Halloween night, she dresses up as a ghost and puts a sheet over them and has James, she kind of gives him some of her medication so he’ll sleep and she puts him on her back. And she knows Caz, who runs this house, because she’s her music teacher, and so they show up and want to find refuge at this place.
There’s an Amber Alert out for them and so people are looking for them and one of the things that drives the book is what happens to this little community when they enter and how the various people at the house feel about their presence. Kind of much as you’ve been talking about ideas of safety and who gets to feel safe and who does our society find so disposable that they’re kind of left to their own devices in a lot of ways.
Frost: And Nola, like Laura, were both put in this impossible position of taking care of someone younger that should not have really been, in an ideal world anyway, at all their responsibility to take care of. That should be the parents, the adults, not the 14-year-olds. As you mentioned, we do get to know James’s mother, Nola’s aunt, her name’s Stelle, and we get to know her. She is a character, but she’s always sort of remembered, in almost every case, through Nola’s internal thoughts. She does seem very sympathetic, someone who mostly lost custody of her son and her niece through some choices, but a lot of bad luck and, as you mentioned, systemic injustices and inequities. I wonder if you could read from the chapter “Eula’s Room.”
Zumas: “Nola woke up disoriented, frowning at the light blue walls, the swooped curtains. Then she remembered. So many other people lived here that someone might have changed the boy by now. His diaper was usually fat with poop first thing in the morning, and it made her think of the Golden Girls’ house where there was always someone around to talk to, even if the person insulted you during the conversation. There was always a nest to return to after thrills or heartbreak, even if the furniture seemed super uncomfortable.” I’m a big fan of the Golden Girls.
Frost: They get some good play in this book.
Zumas: “Out on the lanai, you could nap, grill steaks, or sit wistfully under moonlight, secure in the knowledge that you are not the only one. That was a TV show, not life, obviously. Nola didn’t think life could really be like television, but she did think television helped you get through life. It was what you did when you didn’t know what to say or how to be. It was Stelle having a laugh attack when Sophia on the Golden Girls said, ‘Maybe that cheap toupee you’re wearing retains heat,’ and rolling from the couch to the floor and James climbing on her back to help her laugh more.
Stelle and her sister, Nola’s mother, had matching dolphin tattoos on their biceps. Still do have, not dead, one side of Nola yelled. Always remind them, your cousins, they’ll be less likely to separate family members. Don’t lose him, Nola. Whatever happens, you can’t lose him. Promise me. They wouldn’t have been in this situation if Stelle had behaved herself, Nola thought, but it also wasn’t really her fault.
A different doctor from the one they normally saw had thought the blue birthmark on James’s back, which he’d had his whole life, was a bruise, even after Stelle explained that it wasn’t, and the doctor reported possible abuse to CPS. That combined with the teeth brushing problem, combined with the water being shut off due to lack of payment, combined with Stelle’s witness to the caseworker had led to their removal. You can’t lose him.”
Frost: Why was it so important to make Stelle really more of a victim? She made some choices, but for the most part, it really, it was a system, it was a systemic failure.
Zumas: Well, an important reason for that – so I also have a son who’s autistic and not speaking – and I am sometimes really [beep] to the people at like the Medicaid office or certain kinds of doctor’s offices or some certain kinds of bureaucratic hoops that we have to jump through to get him care that he deserves. But because I’m middle class and because I pay my heating bill, because I have a job that gives me health insurance, my son wouldn’t be taken away from me in the same way. And it’s not because I’m a better person, it’s not because of anything that I’m particularly doing, it’s just because of the resources that I have.
I was thinking about what you said about calling people on behalf of like your aunts who are in the healthcare system. It is so freaking hard to get care for people, as many I’m sure of you in this room know, and I just keep thinking right now about SNAP benefits and we have a [beep] president who’s telling people like I want you to go starve to death, even though we have the money to pay for your food. So in this book, it was really a place for me to think about, OK, we have systems and some of the institutions are imperfect, but it wasn’t written to be a dig at the foster care system. It was written to be like, how can we help each other and take care of each other better? Just to ask that question.
Frost: That really comes through.
Natera: And can I add something? One of the things that I found really true to life and Leni, I have so much admiration for this book, is that… And I think most of us know that there is this kind of truncating that happens to childhood when you’re growing up with less means. And I think that sometimes even wealthier people, like I know wealthier people that have to grow up fast, for different reasons, but it’s kind of shocking to me the maturity that Nola displays and the level of care that is required just to survive.
I think that that’s something that for me, I felt so moved by your book and I thought that it was so true to my experience and the experiences of people I know. When the system is really built to benefit the privileged, we still survive because we have to, right? We grow up faster, we learn to be savvy, we learn to be suspicious of adults, and I just thought that you nailed it. So I was really grateful for that.
Zumas: Thank you, Cleyvis.
Frost: Leni, when you were researching the book, you mentioned this, doing some research into these kinds of intergenerational houses. I’m wondering how widespread were they, and what you said you mentioned one in Oregon City, but can you give us a sense of how common they are? Are they becoming more common?
Zumas: I think they are. The place where I’ve found the biggest proliferation of them is Northern Europe and Scandinavian countries, which also have socialized health care and some other things that we don’t have in this country, but I think that this is starting to catch on here. I know of a couple of places in Seattle that are doing this, and also more broadly not simply like, OK retirement home, younger people, but there’s conceiving of sort of multi-generational housing communities where a priority is put on having lots of different kind of families live there and not simply have it be like oh, you have to have kids or you have to be of a certain income level. I mean, there’s a long history of people trying to do that but I think there’s so much emphasis put on the nuclear family household and you live in this isolated house, and if you’re lucky enough you have a garage or you have a car, when there’s so many other ways to live, right?
So many ways that don’t also involve a lot of people who live in their nuclear biological household are harmed by the people in that household, even though those are the people who are supposed to take care of us. I don’t have any wise solutions or anything from, especially not from my research, but it’s more about asking the questions of like, hey, let’s look at how people are trying to reimagine community and concretely, not just like, we’re in a community, but what does that look like? How much does it cost? Do people share bathrooms? Who cooks, you know, that kind of thing?
Frost: Well, I think it’s important to just mention that this is not something that you made up, this is something that is happening, and I don’t know if it’s happening more and more, but it’s interesting that you suspect it is happening a little bit more and more, because as a solutions journalist, one of the things that I find very rewarding is to highlight responses and solutions to problems that are already happening.
Not good ideas, not think tanks, but hey, this is actually happening and it seems like this model is in contrast to, certainly as you said, keeping with your biological family, but also in contrast to this corporate model that takes people out of their families and puts them in a retirement community which those are not nonprofits. I mean maybe there are some nonprofits, but mostly these are corporate entities that make money. I’m just wondering, what do you think of this response, solution, structure, as a viable alternative to what we’re doing so often now?
Zumas: The question of viability is hard because, I’m thinking too of, Cleyvis, you describing the sort of creation of these super wealthy sanctuaries, that are like, OK, you’ll be safe here no matter what. I love just the list in the email of like there’s murder, there’s drugs, they’re you know, like…
Frost: But not here.
Zumas: But not here. So I just feel like we’re so entrenched in this capitalist logic of some people will be safe if they can pay for it, that I don’t know, as we sit here today, I don’t feel like hugely optimistic actually about it. But what I do feel optimistic about or at least attuned to is the desire of a lot of people, and it’s one reason I like living in Portland, because I feel like a lot of people here are trying to figure out how can we practice mutual aid, how can we protest, how can we resist some of this logic, even if it’s… Or not even, I don’t want to say even, just in the small daily ways, right, because so often, as you said, there’s huge problems that if the solution has to be huge and massive and widespread all at once, that feels impossible, but if the solution can partly be changing how we act toward other people or changing how we deal with the resources that we have, then I think it is possible. Maybe there is a little hope.
Frost: Cleyvis, back to “The Grand Paloma Resort.” There are so many different children that are in jeopardy, mostly girls, all girls in jeopardy, and the idea of safety, as we talked about that was set up at the beginning, gets immediately turned on its head right away. There is a tourist child that has been harmed, on the younger sister, the babysitter Elena’s watch, and I wonder if you could read from the heated exchange between these sisters about halfway through, through chapter 5. And is there anything else, more details that you wanna tell about the situation leading up to this or the status of the girl who’s been injured.
Natera: So at this point in the book, you learn that the tourist child who was harmed is fine. So as a reader, the tourist child is fine, we had a curandera who came and was able to really get the child out of immediate danger.
Frost: Curandera? Can you repeat that word?
Natera: Oh, the curandera is like a local healer. I’m like, don’t you all speak Spanish here? What’s happening here?
Frost: I read the book, so I knew, but…
Natera: So the local healer came, the curandera, and worked on the tourist child. So as a reader, you know and Laura knows that that child is fine.
Frost: Elena does not know that though.
Natera: Oh, Elena, yeah, you’re so good. See, the thing that’s really hard about being in front of people who haven’t read the book is that I’m like, how much mystery do I need to get you to buy this book?
Frost: This is only chapter five. There’s so many great chapters to follow. Yeah, you have to read the whole book for sure.
Natera: So yeah, so I mean the whole thing is that Elena is reckless. At this point we know that Elena was taking ecstasy when she was taking care of this girl. She’s having a really tough time as a 17-year-old, navigating the injustices of this world and every time she tries to do something to fix it, it blows up in her face. So she just feels really frustrated by the adults in her world, by everybody. I think her own frustration has led to a fatal mistake, and her older sister’s really trying to figure out how to get her younger sister to grow up.
She feels she’s entitled, she’s spoiled. And again, she’s like her mom, so she’s like, how do I get her to wake up and become an adult? So in this section they’re still in the resort and Laura is seeing her sister, instead of doing what she told her to do, which is to stay by the tourist child, she sees her by the pool, so she goes to get her.
“Frustration consumed Laura, her body hot, her mind hot. All she had wanted for more years than she could count was to find a way off this resort, away from her infernal country of birth, but Elena was ruining everything. She smacked Elena hard across the face. Elena didn’t react, so Laura smacked her again, but used the back of her hand this time. Laura’s bracelet reached Elena’s face first, scratching her cheek. It reddened instantly.
Pablo, shocked, was momentarily speechless and then concerned that guests had witnessed the incident, whispered, ‘Laura.’ Laura turned from Pablo. Embarrassed, she brought her hand to her forehead, aghast. ‘Parasites? Really? When are you going to grow up, Elena?’ Laura hissed. You hit me? Elena thought. Laura couldn’t believe she’d hit Elena either, of all the promises she’d made to herself as a child to not raise a hand to hurt another human, most of all, the person she loved most was at the top.
If their friend Pablo had not been there, had not whispered, shouted her name, she wasn’t sure she would’ve stopped at a slap across Elena’s face. It had been right there underneath the surface, that impulse to punish the person she loved most. With disgust at herself, she feared she’d inherited the worst qualities of her dead father. Laura quickly composed herself and smiled in the direction of the guests closest to them, but it was obvious that the handful within viewing distance hadn’t caught the exchange.
Without missing a beat, the guests squinted behind their aviator glasses and oversized frames into ultra-thin phones or glared into laptops as they spoke into headsets about why the projections for this quarter had been this far off, solving work crises that had to be tended to right away that required they work during their vacations. Laura exhaled relief that the incident had escaped notice. She had to get a grip. Pablo gestured toward the scratch on Elena’s cheek. ‘You all right?’, he asked. Elena touched her face absentmindedly and didn’t respond. Her sad big eyes contained so much feeling. With her bravado and her place among the young people as an organizer and an all-around [beep], she often seemed older, more serious, more put together. ‘If you only knew,’ Laura said, thinking about the child and Vida, maybe she had gone too far, but Elena’s behavior warranted an extreme response, even if that response filled Laura with shame.”
Frost: Thank you. I wonder if both of you would just comment on this whole… one of the things that makes these two books, they’re not the same at all, but there’s definitely some, obviously some parallels in themes. These characters are not the beneficiaries of capitalism. I mean they are definitely, capitalism has not treated them well, is not treating them particularly well. And I’m wondering if what your main characters might think about if they are capable of experiencing freedom in the system or if survival is all they can help, they can really hope for? You first, Cleyvis.
Natera: I love this question. I feel like I’m thinking about freedom all the time, especially these days as an immigrant in this country with everything that’s happening and the cruelty that we’re seeing take a hold. I’m not sure when people think it started, but I feel like it really became injected into the bloodstream of this country during the pandemic, like I do think that there was something that happened to us when we witnessed the scale, and we realized that the people that were the most affected were poor people, that somehow that collectively there was this move that happened I think with employers especially and big corporations that were like, well we can’t stop the world, so it’s maybe there is a cost, like some people are disposable.
And I don’t know, I think with Leni’s book, I was thinking a lot about this idea of mutual aid and even just what you were talking about a moment ago, Leni, that I think one of the things that I’ve realized, because I have been a beneficiary of capitalism in my job. I mean my god, the kind of money I was making, it makes me upset now that I’m a writer, because I’m successful and I’m like, I miss those bonuses, man, it was sweet.
And one of the weirdest things that I had as an experience in my life was that the insurance company where I was an executive was also the administrator of my mother’s workers’ compensation and my mother got injured as a home health aide and became unable to work and I went to, with my mom, to one of these hearings and I had got my mom a lawyer and my mom doesn’t speak English very well. And so I’m sitting there and it was so crazy because my mom, they had halted my mother’s medical benefits, so she couldn’t go to see the doctor.
Then during the court hearing, my employer – it’s a different side of the company but it’s the same company – they were saying that since my mom hadn’t been to the doctor for the month she hadn’t been, she couldn’t be injured because if she was injured, she would have gone to the doctor. But she couldn’t go to the doctor because she didn’t have insurance, and my mom didn’t even know. And let me just say that my mom at the time was getting $300 a week.
That was her workers’ compensation payment. I remember sitting there and it was really surreal, because I had just gotten a bonus that was probably more money than my mom had made in 5 years or something really obscene. And I remember being in the moment, being like, some people are meant not to survive. It’s the reason why I chose that word, parasite, it isn’t unrelated, some of us it isn’t, despite, it’s like because of these people who suffer at the bottom. And so I just I think about capitalism all the time and I think about this idea of freedom and how it’s intertwined with health, how it is intertwined with our well-being, how for some of us even just the idea of how am I gonna eat, how am I gonna pay for my rent becomes like a preoccupation every day.
And then for others of us, if you get high enough or you know how to navigate or you’re lucky enough to inherit wealth, you never have to think about it. It gets easier, like my husband and I now, we’ve made enough money that the money is making money. And I’m in the middle class, like I’m not… And my mom is still struggling to pay her bills every month. So to me I just think this idea of who are the true beneficiaries of capitalism, how do we rethink within our own communities, right, how we can take care of each other, because I just don’t think that unless there’s like this kind of radical demolition of the entire system, that we’re gonna be able to get a system to work for everybody evenly.
Zumas: Yeah, here here. What I’m thinking about as I’m listening to you is hyper vigilance and people who have to constantly be aware of keeping danger at bay, or where the danger is, or whether it’s you walk into a room and you have to know where all the exits are because you have PTSD, or you’re aware that that day you need to figure out like how to make this amount of money in order to get your needs met.
And in fiction, one of the things I think fiction can do that very few other artworks, kinds of art can, is really go into interiority and create a complex, layered, deep space for characters to be in their own heads. Which is, I think, a kind of freedom that everyone, and dignity, that we all kind of are born to have, right, is like the privacy of our own minds and how we are thinking about our situations. One of the things that gets taken away if your mind constantly has to be thinking about where’s the danger, where’s the danger, like what do I have to do next?
I think fiction – this is gonna sound a little cheesy but I actually believe it – can restore that sense for the reader of like, yeah, everyone in this book, or the people in this book have very complicated inner lives and are not simply the sum of the ways that they have to be vigilant because they’re getting screwed over, right? So taking things out of a set of data points and putting them really into interiority and desire and the ways that we all are looking out onto the world.
Frost: Caz has, it seems like she’s thinking about freedom and survival in different ways throughout the book and it seemed to me that sometimes I felt like she felt that she was completely free. She was doing this her own way, making her own rules, and then other times when she has to give less and less of a budget to the person who’s buying the food, then she’s sort of in survival mode.
Zumas: And I’m, yeah, and I’m thinking that’s kind of one of the inherent, that reflects the inherent structure of capitalism that is not an equal distribution of wealth.
Frost: Were you thinking about her in terms of survival versus freedom?
Zumas: Well, I guess I’m thinking about freedom too in terms of the built environment that we all operate in and there’s a quote in this book, one of the characters quotes the late philosopher and anti-capitalist David Graber talking about the hidden secret of the world is that we made it this way and we can make it differently. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the general idea, that it’s not that there’s naturally some people are going to be happy and fed and others aren’t, that’s actually a product of how we have, and by we I’m just talking about like everyone through human history, especially people who have been in charge of history.
And that’s really a thing to, I don’t know for me in my own life that’s something I really try to keep in mind and not naturalize or essentialize the logic of how things are, because we can make it different. And that’s, I think, the mandate.
Frost: We’re running out of time, but I just want to, I wanna ask you a question that really was bothering me. First of all, “Wolf Bells,” if you could just describe what that physically refers to, and then I have a guess about who’s wearing the metaphorical wolf bells, but I’ll save that for after you answer the question.
Zumas: One of the characters is a Greek woman who is a Holocaust survivor, and she is thinking about in Greece when her grandmother’s village, they had a practice called “wearing the bells,” where human beings would strap on bells and make a lot of noise to surround a flock of like a herd so that the stragglers in the herd, the sick ones, the old ones, the young ones wouldn’t be picked off by wolves, and so that was kind of a practice. The reason I called it “Wolf Bells” is actually I’m obsessed with Virginia Woolf, and her married name was Woolf. Her sister’s married name was Belle, so I’ve always just thought like “Woolf Belle”, like how can I use that.
Frost: Bravo.
Natera: Nerd alert. Nerd.
Zumas: Totally, but that’s the practice that I named “Wolf Bells.”
Frost: So I was trying to figure out who is it that’s wearing the metaphorical bells, and I just couldn’t come up with an answer. I just didn’t, I kept trying it on with all the characters and I’m just wondering, is it sort of a choose your own adventure kind of thing like it’s whoever you think it is, or was there an intended answer?
Zumas: That’s a great question. There was not an intended answer. I would invite whoever reads it to come up with their own answer.
Frost: Thank you so much. I so appreciate Cleyvis Natera and Leni Zumas. Thank you so much.
Zumas: Thank you, Allison.
Natera: Thank you. Thank you.
Miller: That was OPB’s Allison Frost in conversation with authors Leni Zumas and Cleyvis Natera in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
