Nita Noveno’s Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that explores the obscured past of her Filipino immigrant father, who arrived in the United States in 1928. Alternating between Noveno’s own coming-of-age story and imagined chapters from her father’s life, the book fills the gaps between what was known, remembered and left unsaid. Blending personal and historical narratives, Mud on the Moon considers how family, memory and identity are shaped by the stories passed between generations.
Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and is the founder and host emeritus of the New York City reading series Sunday Salon. Her work has appeared in Mãnoa, Identity Theory, Brink, Hippocampus, The Hunger, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City and The Margins, and elsewhere.
For My Reading Life, Noveno spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Dominic by William Steig, about a dog who packs up and leaves home for an adventure in the forest. Looking at it again now, I see he leaves a letter for his friends before setting out, which echoes the letters to readers in my own book. And his journey echoes too: my father’s, my own, even the writing of the book itself. Something about the adventure, the mystery, the curiosity, and the humor drew me to this dog. I still laugh at the moment when he joyously smells everything in nature, including animal droppings. He was my spirit animal and fellow adventurer.
What book helped you through puberty?
Honestly, comic books. From about eight to thirteen I devoured Richie Rich, Archie and the Gang, and DC superheroes, especially Wonder Woman, wherever I could find her: comic books, the TV show, all of it. If any character helped me through those years, it was her. Beyond that, I was drawn to the natural world. My father subscribed to National Geographic, and those magazines always captured my imagination.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Anything by James Baldwin. When I was helping pack up our family home to sell, the house my father built, I came across a report I’d written in my early teens on the civil rights movement and the march. Around that same time, I remember finding my name on the card in the back of a library book about the civil rights era and Martin Luther King Jr. It surprised me to see my racial consciousness in this country already forming, alongside my experience of growing up a daughter of Filipino immigrants. Baldwin would have made me curious even if I hadn’t understood it all. His authenticity, insight, and perspective would have been so different from anything else I was reading, and completely eye-opening at sixteen.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. A novel in verse, a collection of essays, a memoir braided with theory, a memoir woven with myth. To me they are perfect examples of energetic, original, ethical writing. They are books that light something up and then blow it open.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The same four. Carson, Baldwin, Nelson, and Kingston each break form in their own way, and their work informed my consciousness and creativity. They expanded how I see and feel the world and write about it. I’d also add Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, which was a delight to read. Moving through narrative’s many possible shapes, you become a gymnast, and she’s your cheerleader on the page.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Serkan Görkemli’s Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, Radhika Singh’s Earthly Playing Field, and Maxim Matusevich’s Six Trains of No Return. All three authors read this spring at Sunday Salon NYC, the series I founded, so my nightstand doubles as a Salon afterparty.