In Dino Enrique Placentini’s novel The Invasion of the Daffodils, a young boy named Chico Flores finds a crate of daffodils washed up on the cove of an island. He and his brother plant the bulbs, and the daffodils, hungry for growth, proceed to crack foundations, destroy buildings, and even, for an exhilarating and often terrifying few months, flip the Island’s social order.
The Invasion of the Daffodils is a story about community, family, the coming of age of a gay boy in a cloistered community, and the impacts of change. “This novel is really interested in change, its inevitability, who loses, who wins, how you capitalize on it, how you run from it, and its connection to loss,” Placentini told me during our conversation.
I sat down with Dino in the dappled shade of some oak trees at a coffee shop, where we talked about omniscient narration, gardening, the importance of gossip, and his love of Toni Morrison and monster movies.
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Anna Mebel: The novel is set on an unnamed island, where everyone is in everyone’s business. What is it about small towns that makes for such good gossip, such heated disagreements? Do you think small towns are microcosms of the world or their own strange ecosystems? Both?
Dino Enrique Placentini: When I was writing, I liked the fact that I could make the Island its own character, that I could contain all these stories in this community. It's actually based on Catalina Island, which is one of the Channel Islands. My dad's family is from Catalina. We used to go there all the time, and my parents met and fell in love on Catalina. For me, it’s a place of stories, a place that my imagination latches onto, so I decided to set the novel on an island like Catalina, but not Catalina. I wanted to make it my own.
The containment of an island also felt useful to me when I was constructing the story. And, as I started exploring this place and imagining its history and its people, I realized what a good choice I had made, because I was able to imagine this entire community. The story is centered around a single character, Chico Flores, and his family, but the Island and the community are characters too, which is why the prologue starts with the community as opposed to with Chico Flores.
AM: Is the novel based on any real-life gossip or family lore?
DEP: There's a lot of family lore. I'm not the first person to say this, but I think writers are like magpies.
AM: We love to steal!
DEP: Well, I think things leave an impression on us, and you don't know what that’s going to be. The family stories stay with you, and, often, they're strange things. And that becomes material— resources—when you're writing. So, yes. Quite a bit of family lore.
My mom's family were migrant farm workers, and they were left out of the history books when I was growing up and learning about California. The history books I was assigned at school didn't talk about the migrant farm workers who were feeding the state, so my understanding of that history is all family lore. My grandmother had certain healing practices that she practiced on me and, apparently, cured me when the doctors couldn't when I was a child. There is a lot of stuff that historians or realists might leave out of the story, but to me, that's history, that’s my history. So, yeah, family lore was super important, even the way my family told stories, which was exaggerated and wonderful and very dramatic.
AM: Gossip is so important, because it gets at what’s between the cracks, what’s left out.
DEP: The narrator of the novel is an omniscient narrator, but it was important to me that this narrator is not an authoritative voice. The voice tells us how some people say this, other people say that. I think that gossip and speculation is how we construct truth. I also like the idea of a narrator who is just relaying things and not necessarily authoritatively saying, this is the case, you’ve got to accept my worldview.
AM: Why did you choose to set the novel in the 1950s?
DEP: Thinking about the Island during the Korean War gave me a useful question. We’re used to thinking about the fifties as a quiet time, this time of complacency—and then everything explodes in the sixties. But that’s not really the case.
The fifties were a time when these incredible seeds of change were sown. You had soldiers coming back from World War II who had been on the farm in Iowa all their lives but were gay. They had no idea that other gay people even existed. Then they go to war, and they find—okay, there are other gay people. They come back to these ports—San Francisco, New York, LA—and they decide, well, I’m not going back to Iowa. So many of the soldiers decided to stay and to form community.
You have soldiers of color who come back from this horrible war where they have fought for this country, and people are saying, let’s go back to the way things were. And they say, no way. That’s how you get things like Brown vs. Board of Education. You get a lot of people pushing for change. The Civil Rights Movement was really starting to speed up in the fifties. So this novel is really interested in change, its inevitability, who loses, who wins, how you capitalize on it, how you run from it, and its connection to loss. These questions sparked the novel.
AM: What kind of research did you do to get a feel for what a queer character would have experienced coming of age on this remote island in the fifties?
DEP: I based a lot of it on my own experiences of being a young gay boy. I also talked to my cousin who came of age during the seventies on Catalina. I did a lot of talking to people, talking to folks who grew up in small towns. My character, Chico, encounters gossip and anger, but he finds understanding too. I did some reading about what some of the soldiers experienced, coming back from the war. There’s a great book by Allan Bérubé called Coming Out Under Fire. In the book, he talks about men who were gay and lovers during the war. People saw it and understood it. Not everybody, but some. One of the great things about coming out is that, when you come out, abstract homosexuality—queerness, transness, whatever—becomes specific and personal. You’re going to respond differently to a person than you are to an abstraction.
AM: We’ve already talked a bit about the omniscient narration, but I was really struck by its wildness, how it moved from character, even to the plants (the daffodils, of course, but also the Flores family agave plant). What was your writing process like? Were you always set on telling this story in this mode?
DEP: I was, actually. I love this sort of roving omniscience. One of my very favorite stories is a Joanna Scott story called “Concerning Mold Upon the Skin, Etc.” She uses an omniscience that roves very promiscuously, even within paragraphs, between a father—this lens grinder—and his daughter in 17th century Delft. And, of course, Mrs. Dalloway is one of my very favorite books. There’s something very generous about omniscient narration, such great interest in characters. I always had the intention of using this roving omniscience, giving sentience and voice to plants, rocks, animals. I learned a lot looking closely at Joanna Scott and Virginia Woolf, at how they transition from one character to another, from one filter to another.
AM: Desire is such an important driver in the book. There is desire for money, for a better life, for sexual fulfillment, taboo desires, desire to grow and bloom. Desire is a thread that goes between the characters. How did you conceive of the characters and all their knotty, subterranean desires?
DEP: With the characters, it came from delving into their interiorities. With the flora and fauna and the island, I think it comes from being a gardener.
AM: That makes so much sense!
DEP: I’m very much a gardener. I see the plants lifting their leaves or petals to the sun. And part of gardening is weeding. There’s always a struggle between what’s deemed a weed and what is allowed to grow. There are these networks among trees, and they cooperate with each other. Not only do you see plants competing in a garden, but you also see them cooperating.
AM: Because we do have access to so many perspectives, we see the unflinching racism of the white characters towards the Mexican American characters in the book. What do you think is the value in depicting racism in contemporary fiction?
DEP: There’s a lot of value in it, for several reasons. A lot of the characters’ racist perceptions are fear based. I hope that by depicting their fears, we can come to an understanding of those characters and what drives them. This is one of the nice things about the roving omniscience. There is a scene in the novel in which a priest, Father Meathy, is interacting with Rita Flores at a restaurant where she’s serving him. The perspective flips back and forth between them. You see his assumptions, and you see her trying to understand his assumptions and maybe having some of her own. In the scene, you get to see where these assumptions are coming from and the effect they’re having on these characters. It results in deep miscommunication, ultimately.
It's important to share your characters’ flaws and dark sides, because that’s how a writer can develop empathy for those characters. It’s also a way to recognize that we all have these flaws. I love writing asshole characters, because it lets me tap into the asshole in me. And I don’t think that when you’re depicting crappy behavior, you’re excusing it. I don’t want the reader to pass judgment on the characters. I want the reader to empathize. Being crappy is as deeply human as being generous.
AM: When one of the Mexican American characters (Raul Flores) returns from fighting the Korean War with a significant injury, the whole town treats him like a hero. A white character tells him his sacrifice in the war has made him “a true-to-God real American!” What does it take for those of us who are othered to become “real” Americans?
DEP: I think offering that moniker is a way of encouraging folks to do things that you want them to do: go to war, sacrifice for other Americans. When it comes down to the wire, the folks labeling Raul don’t come through. It’s very easy to call someone a hero, but then they often get ignored afterwards. A lot of vets experience that. But really, what do you mean when you call someone a hero? What are you saying is heroic about them? And then, how are you treating them afterwards? How are you really supporting them?
AM: When the daffodil bulbs are washed up at Sucker’s Cove, the place where it seems like all of the Island’s secrets and magic are uncovered, they are ready to seriously wreck shop on the Island. While writing, what came first, the daffodils or the Island? The Flores family or the daffodils?
DEP: All of it came at once, in a way. I imagined a young boy, at this cove, and a crate of daffodils washing ashore. I knew the daffodils were going to be a problematic, invasive species.
AM: Why daffodils?
DEP: Daffodils are my favorite flower. They look like lions, but they’re also this congenial, cheery yellow color. I didn’t pick orchids, because they’re already scary. If you look at an orchid, it looks like it’s going to eat you. All those tropical plants are carnivorous looking.
The Flores family came a little later as I started developing the narrative. I realized that the boy had a bullying older brother, another brother at war, a sister who was taking on all the responsibilities of the family, an autocratic father who was also failing, and a grandmother who was bitter about getting older.
AM: The grandmother, she’s really the gardener of the family. She’s the one who both tends and destroys.
DEP: I really love Buey-Buey. So many stories, especially stories that involve people of color, have a wise, seer older-person character who is there for support and to give a little bit of advice. I wanted a grandmother who had some teeth. She had her own desires and her own anger. I don’t like the coddling, condescending treatment of those kinds of characters, of any kind of character, really. Buey-Buey wants her youth back. She’s jealous of her grandchildren, and that feels more realistic to me. Not every grandmother is baking cookies, supporting everything you do. Like everybody, they have feelings, dark and light. She holds things together, sure, but that’s not all she does.
AM: What books and movies were in the back of your mind as you were writing this novel?
DEP: My great American writer is Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye blew my mind when I was a kid. I also love Louise Erdrich, Virginia Woolf, and Bohumil Hrabal.
I love A Hundred Years of Solitude, but those characters are archetypal, mythic almost. And then you have Virginia Woolf who delves so deeply into her character’s interior life. I wanted to fuse those two things. I wanted something that had the sensibility of Marquez but the intensity of Woolf. Toni Morrison does that, and I keep going back to her. One of my scenes in the novel is very much in conversation with a scene I found problematic and disturbing in her novel Home.
That said, it’s funny that you mentioned movies, because I was thinking about this movie called The Thing from Another World while writing. I loved Channel 5 Monster Movie Theater when I was growing up, which is where I saw it. The monster in the movie is a plant creature. The movie is from 1951, and my father saw it growing up on Catalina. He went to see the movie at the Casino, which had a movie theater. He has a memory of getting ditched at the movie theater, just like Chico does in the novel, and coming home in the dark, along the seawall, terrified, imagining that the “Thing” was coming after him.
AM: How has teaching creative writing impacted your writing process?
DEP: I feel like my writing has gotten so much better because of my teaching. I teach “reading as a writer” classes, where we look under the hood of a great work over the course of four weeks. It means I’m going back to the masters, looking closely at books like A Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon. I also feel like you can learn a lot from other artists. I started in visual arts, and I believe you can learn a lot about economy from narrative painters, about space from dancers, about diction and syntax from singers and musicians. And I learn so much from my students. Writing a novel can be a feat of endurance, like a marathon, so having that community helped me make it from one aid station to the next.
