Ruben Reyes Jr.

·58 min·5 clips

Ruben Reyes Jr. explains why his parents never spoke about El Salvador's brutal 12-year civil war.

The conversation starts close to the listener. Mitzi Rapkin frames First Draft as a trip into one writer's mind, with craft as the way in. She also looks back a little. The show has reached its twelfth anniversary, and she has been searching through more than five hundred interviews for conversations that changed how she thinks. Then the episode narrows in. Rapkin turns to "Variations on Your Migrant Life," a story she finds visceral and personal because it speaks in the second person. That you does a lot of work. It puts the reader nearer to the child at the story's center, and the nearness is uncomfortable in the right way. The structure will not let the reader coast. It works like one of those children's books where each page sends you toward another choice, except here the choices are departures, refusals, and danger. Mommy may leave. Papi may leave. Both may leave. The boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, is still in El Salvador while the adults decide who goes to America. His grandmother becomes the place he can land for a while. When both parents are gone, the story turns toward the coyote, the route through Mexico, the trains, and the risk of dying on the way. Still, the form keeps offering exits. Does he go forward, or does he not? Rapkin treats that design as more than a clever structure. She follows how point of view, page turns, and danger make the pressure of a migrant life hard to dodge.

As heard by us

A branching migration story uses page-by-page choice to make uncertainty feel intimate, unstable, and consequential.

Ruben Reyes Jr.'s conversation with Mitzi Rapkin keeps the pressure on how a story's shape can hold feeling. In "Variations on Your Migrant Life," the choose-your-own-adventure form follows a boy in El Salvador as his parents leave for America in different combinations, and as…

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Want a literary choose-your-own-adventure where every page turn makes migration feel unstable and immediate?

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