Interview with Panama Writer William Friar: A Traveler’s Guide to Authentic Connection

🌍 The Moment That Changed Everything

I sat cross-legged on a cracked concrete floor in Casco Viejo, sweat tracing cold paths down my temples, listening to William Friar describe how Panamanian chicha loses its tartness if fermented more than 48 hours—and why that detail matters more than any museum plaque. That wasn’t in my itinerary. It wasn’t in any guidebook. And it was the first time in six weeks of solo travel I hadn’t felt like a spectator. This interview with Panama writer William Friar didn’t happen at a café or press event—it unfolded over shared arroz con pollo, a rain-soaked alleyway, and three days of walking without maps. What began as background research for a cultural piece became the quiet recalibration I didn’t know I needed: how to move through a place not as a collector of sights, but as someone learning to recognize rhythm, pause, and untranslatable gesture. If you’re planning how to meet local writers or cultural practitioners in Panama—or anywhere—the most reliable method isn’t email outreach or festival schedules. It’s showing up where life happens, staying longer than feels comfortable, and accepting that ‘getting an interview’ is less about securing quotes and more about earning the right to ask questions.

✈️ The Setup: Why Panama, Why Then, Why Alone

I arrived in Panama City in late March—a shoulder season pivot after canceling two European trips due to overlapping flight delays and unaffordable last-minute fares. My budget was tight: $42/day average, including accommodation in a shared room near Calle Uruguay, local transport, and food. No rental car. No pre-booked tours. Just a worn notebook, a fully charged voice recorder, and a single objective: understand how contemporary Panamanian writers document identity in a country shaped by canal treaties, Indigenous sovereignty movements, and rapid urban expansion. I’d read Friar’s essays on La Prensa and his bilingual poetry chapbook Corazón de Agua, which wove Ngäbe oral motifs into cityscapes of Albrook and San Miguelito. His voice stood out—not as an expat interpreter, but as someone rooted in both the soil of Chiriquí and the syntax of Panama City slang.

My plan was straightforward, if naive: locate his known affiliations (a literary collective in El Cangrejo, a university guest lecture schedule), send polite emails, wait. I booked a week in Casco Viejo expecting to ‘do interviews,’ assuming access would follow credentials. Instead, I spent Day One watching street vendors rewrap plantains in banana leaves while tourists snapped photos of the same colonial archway—twice. By Day Two, I’d walked past the Centro Cultural de España three times, scanning bulletin boards for event flyers, each time noticing how staff glanced at my notebook but never made eye contact. The dissonance wasn’t hostile—it was calibrated distance. I wasn’t being excluded. I was simply irrelevant to the daily flow.

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Rain Broke the Script

On Day Four, thunder cracked low over Ancon Hill just after noon. Within minutes, rain fell so hard the cobblestones in Plaza de Francia turned black mirrors, reflecting fractured light from shuttered balconies. I ducked into Café Rincón, a narrow space smelling of burnt coffee grounds and damp wool. The barista, a woman with silver-streaked braids and no name tag, slid me a mug without asking. ‘¿Tienes paraguas?’ she asked, nodding at my soaked backpack. I shook my head. She pointed to a corner shelf stacked with mismatched umbrellas—‘Tomar uno. Devolverlo cuando puedas.’ Take one. Return it when you can.

That small exchange anchored me. Not because it was extraordinary, but because it required nothing from me except acknowledgment. No small talk. No transactional gratitude. Just participation in a quiet system of trust. Later, under that borrowed umbrella, I wandered east toward Mercado de Mariscos—not for seafood, but to watch the rhythm of bargaining, the way fishmongers tapped scales twice before quoting price, the way older women tested octopus tentacles with thumbs, rejecting any with dull skin. And there, near the stall selling bollos wrapped in bijao leaves, I saw him: William Friar, sleeves rolled, helping a vendor rearrange crates of guanábana. Not posing. Not performing. Just lifting.

I froze. My journalist brain screamed: Approach now. Get credentials ready. Ask for 20 minutes. But my body stayed still. Because in that moment, I realized I hadn’t earned the right to interrupt. I hadn’t learned the grammar of this place yet—the pauses between sentences, the weight of silence, the way ‘ahorita’ means ‘in a while��� not ‘right now.’ So I bought a bollo, thanked the vendor, and walked away. Not to retreat—but to relearn how to enter.

📝 The Discovery: Three Days Without an Agenda

The next morning, I returned to Café Rincón. Same barista. Same mug. This time, I ordered café con leche and asked—quietly—if William came in often. ‘Sí. Los miércoles y viernes. Pero no para hablar. Para escribir. Y para escuchar.’ Yes. Wednesdays and Fridays. But not to talk. To write. And to listen.

I went back Wednesday. Sat two tables away. Watched him fill three pages in a leather-bound notebook, pausing often to watch the light shift across the church façade opposite. He didn’t glance up. Didn’t acknowledge me. I drank my coffee slowly, noted how he stirred counterclockwise, how he folded his napkin into a triangle before setting it aside. On Friday, I brought a copy of his chapbook—bought secondhand from Librería Nacional’s used section—and left it on the empty chair beside him with a Post-it: ‘Gracias por los bollos. —A traveler learning to wait.’

He found me at Mercado de Mariscos Saturday morning—not at the fruit stall, but at the tiny heladería tucked behind the main entrance, where the owner served helado de nance in reused glass jars. ‘You left the book,’ he said, handing me a jar. ‘The nance is tart today. Like good chicha.’ We sat on plastic stools. No recorder. No notepad. Just conversation—about how translation flattens the weight of “yeguas” in rural speech (not ‘mares,’ but ‘women who carry water uphill at dawn’), about why bus routes in Arraiján change every rainy season, about how his father taught him to identify edible fungi by smell alone. He spoke Spanish with English cadences and Ngäbere loanwords—never explaining, just weaving them in. I listened. Asked only when something felt genuinely unclear. Took notes only after he’d left.

The ‘interview’ happened Tuesday—not in a studio or office, but on a wooden bench overlooking the canal at Miraflores Locks, as cruise ships glided past like slow-moving islands. He brought two thermoses: one with strong black coffee, one with ginger-infused chicha de arroz. ‘People think interviewing is about extraction,’ he said, pouring. ‘But real understanding starts when you stop needing answers. When you accept that some things aren’t told. They’re shown. Or withheld. Or grown in silence.’

🚌 The Journey Continues: From Interview to Immersion

What followed wasn’t a polished Q&A. It was scaffolding. William introduced me to Elena, a Garifuna storyteller who ran literacy workshops in Colón; to Mateo, a self-taught cartographer documenting informal transport routes in San Miguelito; to Doña Lupe, who taught me to grind corn for arepas using a stone metate—her hands moving with a certainty no YouTube tutorial could replicate. None were ‘contacts.’ They were people William trusted, and whose time he wouldn’t waste on superficial requests. Each introduction came with context: ‘Elena doesn’t speak English, but she’ll teach you the Garifuna word for ‘listening’—it’s not a verb. It’s a posture.’

I adjusted my pace. Slowed my note-taking. Learned to spot the micro-signals of openness: a slight tilt of the head when someone paused mid-sentence, the way elders offered agua de pipa before speaking, the rhythm of shared laughter that meant ‘you may stay a little longer.’ I stopped photographing everything. Started sketching textures instead—woven palm fronds, rust patterns on abandoned rail cars, the curve of a chichería doorway. My budget held: hostels remained $12/night, buses $0.25, meals $3–$5. But my definition of value shifted. A $0.50 ride on the metrobus became valuable not for speed, but for overhearing teenagers debate reggaeton lyrics in Spanglish and Ngäbere. A $1.20 empanada mattered because the vendor remembered my order on Day Three.

One afternoon, William took me to a community garden in La Boca, where residents grew yuca, oregano, and medicinal herbs on reclaimed landfill. As we dug holes for seedlings, he explained how the project started after the 2017 floods—not as ‘resilience programming,’ but as neighbors sharing tools and surplus seeds. ‘Policy documents call it “participatory urban agriculture,”’ he said, wiping dirt from his brow. ‘We call it no dejar que la tierra se olvide de nosotros. Not letting the land forget us.’ That phrase stuck. It reframed everything: tourism wasn’t about seeing places, but about refusing to let places forget you existed—genuinely, respectfully, without erasure.

🌅 Reflection: What This Taught Me About Travel and Myself

This interview with Panama writer William Friar didn’t yield soundbites for a blog post. It yielded recalibration. I’d entered Panama treating culture like content—something to capture, package, and export. What I learned was that authenticity isn’t mined. It’s tended. Like the garden in La Boca, it requires consistent presence, humility about your own ignorance, and willingness to do unglamorous work: showing up, staying quiet, returning the umbrella.

I discovered my impatience wasn’t logistical—it was ethical. I’d conflated efficiency with respect. Asking for ‘20 minutes of your time’ assumed time was neutral currency, not something deeply contextualized by labor, family duty, or historical mistrust of outsiders with notebooks. William never asked about my passport or plans. He asked what I’d noticed about the light at 4 p.m. near the canal. What scent lingered after rain in Casco. Whether I’d tasted chicharrón made from free-range pork. Those weren’t small talk. They were litmus tests—measuring whether I was observing, or just scanning.

And I learned my biggest blind spot wasn’t language—it was listening. Not just to words, but to silences weighted with memory, to gestures that carried generations of negotiation, to the way a story changed depending on who was present. In Panama, I stopped trying to ‘get the story.’ I started asking: Whose story am I allowed to hold? And how do I carry it without distorting its shape?

💡 Practical Takeaways: Woven Into the Journey

These insights weren’t theoretical. They shaped concrete decisions:

• ☕ Local cafés > tourist hubs: I skipped the Instagram-famous spots in Casco Viejo after realizing the best conversations happened where regulars gathered—Café Rincón, El Gato Negro in El Cangrejo, the heladería behind Mercado de Mariscos. These spaces had no Wi-Fi passwords posted, no English menus—just consistency and routine.
• 🚶 Walk without GPS: I disabled location services for three days. Got lost repeatedly. Learned street names by their smells (Calle del Cacao = roasting beans; Calle del Jabón = coconut soap vendors). Disorientation forced attention to detail—crack patterns in sidewalks, variations in door paint, the pitch of children’s voices playing rayuela.
• 📚 Read locally, not just about: Instead of travel guides, I bought secondhand copies of Panamanian novels (Los días de la semana by Carlos Oriel) and poetry (Entre las piedras by Erika Sánchez) from Librería Nacional’s used section. Their rhythms reshaped how I heard spoken Spanish—less formal, more lyrical, full of dropped consonants and rhythmic pauses.
• 🗓️ Build buffer days into budgets: I allocated three ‘no-plan’ days—not for rest, but for organic connection. One led to joining a neighborhood baile folklórico rehearsal; another to helping sort donated books at a community library in San Miguelito. These weren’t ‘experiences’ I booked. They were invitations extended because I’d been seen, repeatedly, in the same places.

None required extra money. All demanded time—time to sit, to walk, to wait, to return. And crucially: time to accept that some doors remain closed, not from exclusion, but from necessary boundaries. William never shared his personal email. He gave me his collective’s mailing list—a threshold I respected.

⭐ Conclusion: How This Trip Changed My Perspective

Leaving Panama, I didn’t carry a folder of polished quotes. I carried a notebook filled with sketches of doorways, phonetic spellings of unfamiliar words (“tuná”—not ‘tuna,’ but the fruit of the prickly pear, eaten with lime), and the exact shade of green in Doña Lupe’s cornfield at 6:17 a.m. The interview with Panama writer William Friar taught me that depth isn’t measured in minutes logged or contacts exchanged. It’s measured in the quality of attention you offer—and whether that attention is returned, even silently. Travel no longer feels like accumulation. It feels like alignment: aligning your pace with a place’s pulse, your questions with its capacity to answer, your presence with its need for reciprocity. I don’t seek interviews anymore. I seek thresholds—and learn to stand quietly at them, umbrella in hand, until the rain lets up.