Talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mirta Ojito

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It was the fall of 2012, and I was one of maybe 10 students in Mirta Ojito’s Reporting on Immigration class at the Columbia Journalism School. I sat in the front row every morning. I regularly set up camp in her mango painted office in Pulitzer Hall, and I wrote an extra story on the election in Jackson Heights because I was obsessed with Mirta, and wanted to be her star student.

I discovered this Pulitzer Prize and Emmy-winning journalist in 2005, when she published her first book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus. I was 19 years old and had my mind fixed on a Cuba career, and Mirta Ojito was one of the three Cuban-American authors whose work I learned by heart. Sitting in her journalism class seven years later was a wild, wild dream, but to have maintained contact with her and to have been an early champion of her latest venture, a first novel titled Deeper Than the Ocean, has been an honor of my lifetime.

She’ll be at Tombolo Books Monday, 7 to 8 p.m., to talk about the new book, and her career.

Mirta Ojito was 13 when she decided to be a journalist. She was in Cuba and her neighbor introduced her to a man who had just been released from prison. He told Mirta that he had been beaten and abused by the Cuban government in prison, and Mirta did not believe him.

“At the time I was unwilling to believe these things as I am now,” she told me over a Zoom call from her office at Telemundo in Miami, where she is the Senior Director of News Standards. “So I said to him, prove it. And he pulled up his shirt and showed me the markings of a bayonet. And after that someone said to me, ‘you should be a journalist.’

“I don’t think I began to see myself as a writer with a capital W – it was more of a progression. I went from journalism to non-fiction and from non-fiction I thought I would try to write fiction, and it was great to see where your hands take you! One moment you’re not even thinking about something and then the magic happens. And the journalism connection – that when you’re touching the keyboard, you better produce something and produce it fast. I cannot overstate the importance of my journalism training.”

I learned of Mirta’s first novel last summer when she and I met for lunch at Books and Books in Miami. What struck me most was the joy in Mirta’s face when she announced: “it’s fun to make stuff up!” I could not help but think about the Columbia Journalism School and the regimented training that we both underwent in New York. In journalism, she told me, “when you say the moon was out, you better be sure the moon was out!” She emphasized that, for her, writing fiction is incredibly liberating.

But Deeper Than the Ocean does not float far from Mirta’s fierce journalistic training, exact voice and ethics. It is a multi-generational story about family and migration, and at the center is the historic sinking of the Valbanera, a Spanish steamship that crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Islands. Known as the “poor man’s Titanic” and en route to Cuba, the Valbanera sank near Key West during the hurricane in 1919.

The Valbanera and the 488 people who perished aboard were the seed for Mirta’s novel. She discovered the event from a coffee table book she found in Key West in 2006 while promoting Finding Mañana. “After I finished reading the book, I was very taken by the story and the fact that I didn’t know anything about it. I don’t think I was thinking about the literary possibilities. I remember looking out the window at the sea and thinking, that is a graveyard. And I was very taken by that.”

Mirta did not have to do much on the ground reporting for the novel, but she relied heavily on the historic reports from the shipwreck. Like the journalist, she remained true to the facts to give this shipwreck its rightful place in history, but like the novelist, she allowed an idea to guide her to the story.

“I had an idea of this woman and it was an idea that would not let go. It was a vision of a woman in a mauve dress running through a ship looking for her daughter. So I jotted it down. It was kind of like a muse – like when you’re in the shower and a really good line comes into your head, or if you’re taking a walk and all of a sudden you know how you’re going to start or end the story,” Mirta told me.

She also told me that writing this novel was super fun. It incorporated the theme of migration that Mirta has covered heavily in her career as a journalist while giving her the freedom to build characters from her imagination, basing one on her maternal grandmother Catalina, who she never knew.

I have to thank Mirta for never failing to teach me. I learned more about the silkworm industry, mulberry trees and the Canary Islands through her first novel than I ever would have expected. And I too had to thank her for making Cuba relevant again.

“Of course!” she said in a voice I would recognize sooner than my own mother’s.

Mirta Ojito will be in conversation with Kathleen McGrory, a former investigative editor and reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. McGrory is an editor for the New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship program.

Admission to Monday’s event is free, but RSVPs are recommended at the Tombolo Books website.