Julia Alvarez REAL Flights OF IMAGINATION.

• Author: Jacques, Ben

Straddling two worlds, this Dominican-born author weaves stories that reflect harsh political and social realities while affirming life's beauty

IN THE LAST CHAPTER OF In the Time of the Butterflies, Dede, the only Mirabal sister to survive the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's brutality, dreams of going to North America to see the red leaves of the sugar maples. For Dede, who must bear not only the loss of her sisters, but the burden of telling their stories, the blazing leaves foliate an inner landscape. Symbols of life's transience, they also suggest a sanctuary from the sad, tropical lushness of the Caribbean.

For Julia Alvarez, author of the acclaimed fictional account of las mariposas--and three other novels, four books of poetry, two children's books, and a collection of essays--the maple leaves are more than symbols. They are the autumn markers of her home in Vermont. Writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, she has studied and taught there, met her husband, built a house, planted trees. She has been a fellow in fiction and poetry at the college's Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. And she has written her novels there.

"I feel a deep connection to this place, but also a sense that it's not really my place," says Alvarez. "It's like falling in love the first time and the second. There's a difference. There's not that deep, first-love connection to the land and country. But maybe that's a good thing. It makes you more tolerant, and keeps you on the outside, which is a good thing for a writer."

Alvarez's first love is linked to the world of Dede, to her own childhood in the Dominican Republic, and the struggle for freedom. Like Dede, she is the second of four Sisters. She, too, became the storyteller. Born in 1950, Alvarez was ten when her father, who had joined the underground resistance, fled with the family to New York.

In a series of poignant poems in The Other Side/El otro lado (1995), Alvarez tells of the family's sudden flight, "The night we fled the country, Papi, / you told me we were going to the beach."

When they landed, however, it was on a distant shore. Freed from Trujillo, they were also free from everything they loved, the encompassing family, the Caribbean landscape, and above all, the comforting language. In "Exile," father and daughter find themselves before a Macy's display window, staring at a mannequin family outfitted for the beach. Beside the blond girl wading in beach plastic stands "the handsome father, slim and sure of himself, / so unlike you, Papi, with your thick mustache, / your three-piece suit, your fedora hat, your accent."

Still fearing the unexpected knock on the door, the family moved to Queens and tried to fit in. They put a sprinkler on the lawn. Papi obtained New York credentials to practice medicine.

"Put English words in your mouth," Julia Alvarez's mother tells her daughters in the poem "Sound Bites." These are the years before bilingual education, or multiculturalism, and she knows they must master English to survive. "Give yourself over, girl, / to the blond, blue-eyed possibilities / so that even as a brown-haired, / olive-skinned spic chick, / you can click with the gringas." Which her daughter does, vowing linguistic revenge as she runs from the taunts and stones of schoolyard toughs.

As Alvarez mastered the new lingo, she sensed her arrival in a whole new world--one less friendly, but with exciting possibilities. In this new world she also found an escape from old world restrictions of gender and class. She would later write that she had landed not so much in another country, but into English. She is fond of quoting the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz: "Language is the only homeland."

Always a lover of stories, Alvarez began writing seriously in college, winning prizes for her poems at both Connecticut...