A Steel Magnolia

Five years ago, at the age of 30, Ivonne Lamazares decided to learn how to ride a bicycle. As a girl growing up in Cuba, she didn’t have a bike, and besides, she says, “I felt inadequate about physical things all my life.”

As an adult, Lamazares thought about bicycles again after friends would suggest that she and her husband, Steve Kronen, join them for a spin around their neighborhood. She was embarrassed. So on a kid-size bicycle on the sidewalk, Lamazares gripped the handlebars in a death lock, and Kronen grabbed the back of the seat and ran along beside, holding her upright. After three days and several miles of practice, she had it.

“She would just concentrate and do it,” recalls Kronen, gritting his teeth in imitation of his wife’s resolve. “That’s her modus operandi in life. Once she gets something in her head, she just goes for it all out.

“She does that with writing, too. She says, ‘This is terrible, I have no talent.’ But she will do it. And her writing is beautiful, subtle, rich. But she bitches about it the whole time.”

As a writer of fiction, Lamazares is also a beginner. She has completed only two pieces, both short stories, both published in obscure university reviews.

Nonetheless, in literary circles there is already a buzz about Lamazares. Last year, after looking at just 40 pages of manuscript, Houghton Mifflin Co. got into a bidding war with Simon & Schuster over the rights to publish her first novel, and finally signed Lamazares to a contract that includes an advance of $30,000.

She has written a little more than 150 pages of her book, a coming-of-age story of a girl in 1950s and 1960s Cuba, during and after the revolution. She has a working title, “Storm Captains,” a reference to a popular, late-’60s Cuban television show. And she has a deadline: March 1.

She has taken a leave of absence from her job as associate professor of English at Miami-Dade Community College, where she has taught for 12 years. She and Kronen--a poet who makes a living as a massage therapist--are using the first installment of the advance to pay a baby sitter to watch the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, Sophie, several hours each day so Lamazares can work in the bedroom-turned-study where she writes first drafts in longhand on a lined tablet.

“Publishing is not a science,” says Houghton Mifflin Editorial Director Janet Silver from her Boston office. “You pick your shots, and acquire books for which you have a passion. I’m very excited about Ivonne. She has a wonderfully strong and unique voice that is at once childlike and unsentimental.”

Talk about Lamazares began more than three years ago, when Kronen persuaded her to accompany him to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a literary summer camp for wannabe novelists and poets at Tennessee’s University of the South. There Lamazares was paired with best-selling novelist Russell Banks (“Continental Drift,” “The Sweet Hereafter”), a professor at Princeton University who is so taken with her work that he offered to mentor her.

“What I saw was an intimacy, almost a physical intimacy with language,” says Banks. “I think you can spot that in a writer before anything else. That’s the part you can’t teach.”

Lamazares’ submission that year was a short story that she has since abandoned. But when Banks read those few pages he recognized that Lamazares had a tale to tell--and a gift.

“Very rare,” says Banks of Lamazares’ talent. “I teach one semester a year at Princeton, and you almost never see it there--maybe once every two or three years. And students, being younger, usually don’t have stories to tell. Ivonne does; that was clear, too.”

Also impressed by what she saw at Sewanee was Mary Morris, a novelist (“House Arrest”) and professor of fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. “I saw a voice that seemed to me absolutely clear and sure of itself in a way that transcended almost any student manuscript I’ve ever read,” says Morris, who has been teaching for 25 years. “There was a clarity of language, a compassion for her characters that was so unusual. She is perhaps a new voice in Latina American literature.”

All of this attention has turned up the pressure on a woman who has yet to complete her first book, which she is writing in a language, English, that she didn’t even begin to speak until she was 14 and new to America.

“I still can’t explain this,” says Lamazares. “It’s like being in a car that’s out of control, going somewhere you never expected to go. It’s disconcerting.”

Gail Hochman, Lamazares’ agent, says her client has been swept up “in a fairy tale, really. Books are not selling, publishers are cutting back on writers and advances, so in the context of a terrible market, she’s having a nice, smooth ride.

“Of course,” Hochman adds, “the book is not finished.”

In its latest draft, Lamazares’ novel begins like this: “One day Mama said life was about to start and ran off to the mountains as a volunteer guerrillera. No one knew exactly where she had gone till she came back pregnant on a burro.”

The themes of the book are abandonment and betrayal, and although the story does not exactly parallel Lamazares’ own family history, it is suffused with echoes of it. Mercedes Lamazares died in 1965 at the age of 25, when her only child was 3 years old. After giving birth, Mercedes developed a painful bone cancer that kept her confined to bed in their decaying home in the Old Havana section of the Cuban capital, but Lamazares does not remember that. She has no memory of her mother at all.

Lamazares’ father, too, is a childhood phantom who did not live with his wife after Ivonne was born, and left Cuba for the U.S. when she was 6. They later met again, but the reunions did not take, and Lamazares has not seen her father for years. She was raised by her grandparents.

Born in 1962, Lamazares was schooled in math, science and the evils of American-style capitalism in bare-bones classrooms hung with portraits of Che Guevara. She describes her education as rudimentary, riddled with political sloganeering. Yet she was a reader, and a Spanish translation of Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” sparked her imagination.accent,off

Lamazares left Cuba with her grandparents in 1975, and after a few months in Spain, settled into a low-rent apartment in Hialeah, Fla. She had been a ninth-grader in Cuba, but without any English, she was placed in the seventh grade here.

Lamazares says she became obsessed with mastering English. “I practiced my accent by doing a lot of singing along with the radio,” she says.

After high school, Lamazares went on to Miami-Dade Community College, and then to Barry University in Miami, where she earned a degree in English. While working as a writing tutor at the junior college, she enrolled in a program that led to a doctorate in higher education.

She met Kronen at a poetry reading eight years ago, and in their partnership he was always the writer in the family and she was the aspiring writer. That disparity began to dissolve when Lamazares realized that in poetry she had been toiling in the wrong literary vineyard. “I had started to read Steve’s poems by the time we were married,” she explains, “and realized that he was the real thing. As a poet, I just didn’t have it.”

After seeing her fiction at Sewanee, Morris introduced Lamazares to Hochman, an agent with the New York firm of Brandt & Brandt. Hochman, too, was captivated, finding “a musical prose that I just fell for immediately. You get a lot of information in paragraphs without being told you are being fed information. There is a huge life force, a positive spirit in the characters.”

Each morning, Lamazares listens to 15 minutes of an audio book “to get my ear,” as she says, and then reads for another 15 or 20 minutes, often turning to favorite works she thinks of as her touchstones: Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” or the stories of Flannery O’Connor. The sound of language--her second language--primes her mind for the workday ahead.

The work in progress is not autobiographical. Mercedes Lamazares was not a guerrillera, did not become pregnant by a rebel cook and was not the irrepressible adventurer that is the fictive mama. However, Lamazares’ first novel is her story, told in the voice of her alter ego, Tanya, a girl longing for stability in a world where everyone is forever leaving. “I always wanted to tell the story of a mother betraying a daughter, and then the daughter betraying the mother, at least emotionally,” explains Lamazares.

“For years I think I told myself that my mother didn’t love me, and that was the reason she left. In a way that was more bearable than trying to understand why God would have allowed her to die.”

Writing is a solitary calling, but plenty of outside advice penetrates the sanctuary of Lamazares’ study.

“Throw everybody out of your head,” Russell Banks tells her. Says Morris, “Write what you want to read.” On a Post-it note stuck to the wall next to her desk, Kronen has written a five-second pep talk: “This is your first novel. You are figuring it out as you go along. You will figure it out.” She reads it often.

“If she writes a wonderful book, things will fall into place,” says Hochman. “The publisher will sell it to a book club, and sell the paperback rights. I’ll send it to 10 or 15 agents who handle foreign rights. I’ll find a Hollywood agent to handle it out there. And the lack of a track record in the marketplace is great. She’s a new discovery, and we get to launch her.”

The contract, the money, the pressure, the attention--all can take a toll on a marriage. For months now, a new collection of Kronen’s poems has been bouncing from one university press to another. The rejection slips are piling up. But even if Kronen does succeed in bringing out a second book, a poet’s reward comes only in prestige from a very small circle of readers.

“When all this happened to Ivonne, I said, ‘Geez, I’m being eclipsed here,’ ” Kronen says. “But that feeling only lasted 24 hours.”

“I warned you that you would feel eclipsed,” says Lamazares. “It’s the money issue. But you keep me from going crazy with this, this . . . this mystery, this impulsive mother, and how the narrator is going to deal with her and find her way.”

“One of the things I’ve learned,” says Lamazares, “is to give up some of my conscious control over my work. So this morning I sit here and work on this scene, and I don’t know when I look at it tomorrow if any of it will be any good. I need to have faith in the process.”

“She plots everything out,” says Kronen. “That’s why writing the novel terrifies her. It’s not fully plotted.”

“That’s it,” Lamazares agrees. And then she adds, unclear whether she is talking about the novel or about life, “I just don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”