“An Intellectual Architecture”

A conversation with writer Carina del Valle Schorske on research, profile writing, and voice.

I don’t remember the first piece of Carina del Valle Schorske’s that I read, but I remember that I loved it, tweeted a quote and a link to it, and then we were following each other. We met up for dinner in San Juan in 2019, and ever since, I’ve been reading her essays with eagerness and excitement: Truly, no one else writes like her, and I’ve always found it fascinating how she retains her voice even when writing for big publications. We talked about that, her research process that she likens to “feeding the compost” of her mind, the material realities of the writing life, and language. This is a conversation that all writers will find a lot of inspiration in—I know I did!

After the paywall below, you’ll find the audio, video, and the full transcript.

Carina: But these are examples of little conflicts, and then there's always conflicts with how much Spanish do I get to use and how? Different magazines are differently loyal to their own house style, and I struggle with magazines where there's a really strict notion about how that magazine sounds. I'm always more interested in the voices of individual writers than I am in the voice of a publication. To me, that's not a voice. Voice, to me, is inherently an embodied and individual phenomenon, so when you talk about the voice of an institution, that's to me like saying a corporation is a person. We know that isn't true, and we know that the soul of writing is in the voice of the writer. There's a limit to how far I'm willing to go to adapt myself to institutional norms.