Interview with Jennifer Maritza McCauley by Rey M. Rodríguez

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is an Afro-Latina writer, poet, and university professor. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in prose, Kimbilio, CantoMundo, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds an MFA from Florida International University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri. She has received awards from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, Academy of American Poets, and Best of the Net. She received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and Big Moose Prize (Black Lawrence Press) in fiction, and was longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize and the Reading the West Book Awards.

She has been on staff at Pleiades (Fiction Editor, current), The Missouri Review (Poetry Editor, Contest Editor), Origins Literary Journal (Poetry Editor), Gulf Stream Magazine (Staff), and Florida Book Review (Contributing Editor.)

She is the author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, the short story collection When Trying to Return Home, and the poetry collection KINDS OF GRACE, published this year, and the book she and I discussed in the interview below.

She has led workshops at the Yale Young Writers’ Workshop 2023, Yale Writers’ Workshop 2024, Inprint Houston, Reading Queer, Miami Book Fair, and other places, and she previously taught creative writing and literature at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Dr. McCauley joined the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Creative Writing program as an assistant professor in the fall of 2024.

McCauley has been called a poet who is “reshaping the poetry landscape” by Pop Sugar, Elle Magazine calls her work “powerful”, Latinx in Publishing recommends her work, Hip Latina listed her as an Afro-Latina writer who discusses the “duality of [her] identity.” Electric Literature says she is a Puerto Rican writer who tells “new stories”, Leyendo Lat Am says she is a Puerto Rican writer to “read right now” and the Columbia Daily Tribune said she “can write her way into and out of any situation, style or genre.”

Jennifer Maritza McCauley, welcome to the Storyteller’s Blog of the Chapter House, the literary journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts. It's such a pleasure to have you as part of the blog. How did you get into writing?

I've been writing since I was a little child. As early as I can remember. My mom gave me the Bernstein Bear books and I became obsessed with them. And after I read them, I decided I must be a writer. I didn't even know how to read at that point, but I used to try to figure out what the authors were saying and write down my own little stories. When I learned how to read, I was writing little books, and I gave them to my mother, and she would read them. So I was always writing. I was writing when I was in high school. It was my hobby. It was my kind of escape and way of getting away from the world. I thought that I was going to be a doctor because my dad is a doctor, and he pushed me in that direction. But I went in a different direction, and we ended up having a conversation about changing my life direction. And he ended up supporting me after some admitted struggle. So I was like, Okay, and I took a risk, and I went to do an MFA. I wanted to go to either New York or Miami to become a writer, and I didn't know where to go. So it was either New York to Sarah Lawrence or it was to Miami, the University of Miami, or Florida International University. I ended up picking FIU. I went there and I kept writing, and I wrote a thesis, which was a novel. I did my PhD in Columbia, MO. I wrote a dissertation which was a short story collection, so I kept writing most of my life. I didn't give it up when there were many times when I thought, should I just give up this ridiculous thing? But I just kept going. It’s probably a sickness, honestly, haha.

Why did writing click for you? What was it about writing?

I loved visual art, and I loved writing. Those are the two things that I love the most. I was always drawing, and I was always writing, but I felt that I had a lot in me that I wasn't able to communicate the way I wanted to when I was speaking. I was a very quiet kid. I was a bit sequestered. I stayed to myself, so I expressed myself through writing. So I think that's why I went to writing and art. I could express myself that way, but I felt like the completeness of how I wanted to express myself was in writing.

Was there a particular teacher who helped?

I had a teacher named Mr. Jose Aires, my high school teacher. He called my mom after he'd read one of my writing samples, and he said that I think that your daughter could go into writing. And then my mom thought about it and reflected that all that girl does is write in her room all the time. He responded that I think that she could pursue this as a profession. He gave me great feedback. Sometimes the feedback was nurturing. Sometimes the feedback was more critical. Sometimes the feedback was complimentary. He was a huge mentor in my life. He made me feel I could become a writer, I’ll never forget him. He even came to my reading last year for my last book. When I was in school I didn't see Black women or Latina writers in the classroom. I never saw them. I had to go seek those writers out on my own. I thought: where are we? Why aren't we in the classroom? I was constantly thinking about this. Mr. Aires opened up my eyes to Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. I already knew about Toni Morrison, but he introduced me to so many writers who I wanted to know more about, so I always give so much credit to him. Geeta Kothari in undergrad was fantastic. She was the reason I went to pursue an MFA. I went to my advising office and the advisor told me just how hard it was to get a job in creative writing. They told me I had to publish books and get a PhD and even then it was too hard. They said it's an almost impossible thing. So you might want to do something else. And I remember leaving that conversation feeling so defeated and feeling, Okay, I can't. There's no way I can do that and then Geeta Kothari stopped me as I was walking out, and she said, “Oh, I meant to talk to you because I was reading your writing, and I loved it.” And she said all these beautiful things to me. I didn't know that was how she felt about me. And I told her, “Thank you so much.” And I told her that I wanted to get an MFA but I didn't know if I could. She's said that I absolutely could. So it's because of her encouragement that I went in that direction. So if you’re a teacher encourage your students! It might change their lives.

Wow!

Yes, those teachers helped me, absolutely.

And when you did the MFA what was that like?

I liked it. Miami was a different experience for me. I grew up in Pittsburgh, in the suburbs, and then I moved downtown to the city's university. Miami was a huge culture shock. I had never experienced anything like that city before, and being an Afro-Latina in Pittsburgh and the suburbs, I didn't see a lot of people like me. When I went to Miami everybody looked like me, and a lot of folks got my personality, and they were speaking Spanish, and they sounded like my mom, and I saw I was like, Oh, my goodness, this is my place. So I was thrilled being there. But the MFA program was challenging, you know. There are a lot of things that you have to navigate that aren't just going to class. And that's relationships with your peers and friends and relationships with your publishers and family and finding an agent. And your relationship with your writing is a huge thing. So I had a very good experience, extremely edifying, and I would do it all over again. But it wasn’t easy. I had fantastic teachers and a great cohort. But I think that I grew up during my years in Miami. I think that's the biggest thing because I had been a very sequestered person until I went to Florida. Miami was a whole new world.

And when you say sequestered, what do you mean?

I was a quiet person. My Dad wanted me to stay in the house most of the time, because he believed there were dangers out there, and he wanted to protect me. So I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to get out of my little place unless I was copping rides from friends when I was a teenager to go to anime meet ups and even in early college I was at home a lot of the time. So I didn't have that opportunity to be by myself until I went to Miami.

Now you were free.

Yeah. In Miami I was free, and I didn't know how to navigate it. It was such a huge city. I love it so much, but I don't think I was ready for it. Now I understand it. Back then I didn’t. But the MFA was fun.

I feel certain cultures are extroverted.

Yes, I think that might be true.

Latinos can be very extroverted. I am speaking generally, of course.

Ha, that might be true too. When I was in Pittsburgh, I was quiet. But when I was in Miami I was almost obnoxiously loud around my friends.

That's so awesome.

I was always showing up to everything and talking a lot and probably annoying people. But I think it depends on where you feel comfortable. In other spaces, I barely talk. In Pittsburgh, I’m more quiet. But Pittsburgh is still close to my heart. My family's there, so I still have a foot in there. In Miami, I’m loud.

And how did you decide to go from the MFA to the PhD?

Firstly, I was looking for a job. It was very difficult to adjunct and to make money in Miami, but I always had a dream of getting a PhD ever since I was in high school. Weirdly, following in my dad’s footsteps without following in them at all: I always wanted to be Dr. Jennifer Maritza McCauley. The second reason I went was because I wanted to delve more into literature and craft theory. I thought a PhD program would let me get into the nerdy stuff that I wanted to get into. I also wanted to produce another book, because in my MFA I wrote a novel. But I wanted to write another book in my PhD, so that's what I ended up doing. The program offered me a nice package, too, which helped, and it was in Missouri, where my family was at that time. So that's why I went.

Oh, I see. Great.

It started off as a family decision because my brother was in Kansas City, where I am right now.

And that's only two hours outside of where the University of Missouri is. So I thought that I would be able to see him more often, but then he left. Now I'm back in Missouri. As I said, for me, family is really important.

Now you're back.

The state won’t let me go.

The reason I asked for this background information on you is that it's important to tell this narrative that you can make a living as a writer.

Absolutely.

There are PhD programs out there (and even MFA programs) that will offer you money to study.

Oh, absolutely. Both Miami schools offered me funding and that was very attractive. And if someone's offering to pay for your education and your passion, I mean, you go.

All right. Can we start talking about your poetry book, “Kinds of Grace”?

Absolutely.

Fabulous. I love the title. It’s so intriguing and inviting. The idea of grace to me is so powerful. And so what was the inspiration for the title?

So it came from the poem, “Kinds of Grace.” It is about a baby shark that winds up on the shore, and a crowd comes around to look upon it. They debate what to do with that baby shark. To save it or throw it back into the ocean. It’s a poem about the grace that is afforded by letting that shark go. It is a transcendent grace that's afforded. The baby shark is saved after all of the machinations of the crowd, including their supposed love or hatred. The shark is taken back into the ocean. So I thought that that ability to be taken back into yourself and to be taken back into something much greater than yourself after you've been through a difficult time is a type of grace, and that's kind of grace I was aspiring to write about in that poem. And then I realized that there were so many different types of grace in the book. So then I gave the collection the name of the title poem.

It was almost a dream-like idea of being near the shore and coming, and then going away. So that's powerful. Did you start the book with that poem?

I started with “Because Tigers Never Lose Their Stripes.” I wrote that for Jasminne Mendez, who's a fantastic Houston-based poet and she put together an Afro-Latinx issue for Acentos Review, and she asked me to write a piece. I wrote it and then I put it to the side because I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I wasn’t ready for another collection. But then more poems kept emerging. “Apagón” was the next one. But I didn't know the throughline for the book. I didn't know if I was going to have a collection. I would write poems for solicitations, and then I would just let it go. But I didn't know I had a book until many years later.

Really?

Yes, at one point I didn't know I had another poetry book in me at all.

Is that how it works?

Yes, I mean for me. It was similar to my first book in that it came out on a small press that gave me generous creative liberty. This book I started technically in 2018, with those 2 poems [“Apagón” and “Because Tigers…”]. I set it aside for 2 years, and I came back to it, during the pandemic, I still didn't know what I was writing about until probably the year until I finished it. And then I went back to edit, and then I put the manuscript together and sent it out.

That's great. So help me, what is grace to you?

To me: grace is transcendent. It's a transcendence that exhumes you, that shakes you from shame, and it's something that goes beyond yourself. It is something that whisks you away from guilt. I think that grace can sweep you away from limiting situations, whether that’s embodied in God or in an abstraction greater than you, like love for a friend.

And is it tied to grief?

Yeah, I absolutely think that grief can be tied, but it doesn’t always have to be. This is my opinion. It doesn’t always have to be tied to grief, but I think that they're twins. If you are experiencing grief, shame, mistakes, or pain, then, grace, isn't that far away from you.

Tell me a little bit more just about forgiveness. I feel like we need more grace and forgiveness of ourselves and others.

Yes.

But we don't necessarily have the tools to do it.

That's so true. We have to forgive ourselves for not having the tools to do that. The language. You know.

Yes, I love this idea.

We were not all taught exactly how to forgive, how to navigate the world with grace, and how to navigate the world with love. I'm definitely still working on it, and I know that my parents were great, but they were still struggling with it. Systemically, we're not often told that it's a good thing to forgive people. Often, you know revenge or being cruel to people who have been cruel to you is more popular. But there's something beautiful about grace, and about giving grace to yourself. I don't think you can give grace to somebody else without giving it to yourself. If you can forgive somebody, but you're still blaming yourself for the same thing, then you're never going to fully be able to give grace to that other person.

So there's a type of reciprocity?

Yes, there is but there are some things that you have to be okay with not forgiving people for. I don’t think you should ever feel compelled to give grace. It is enough to forgive yourself for not forgiving someone else, too, if that makes sense, especially if someone has been terrible to you. And if you're working so hard on forgiving them, but the act is damaging you, then give it up! Then it’s time to just love on yourself.

It's almost like a wave trying to protect yourself in terms of knowing that you are good enough. A wave bends and forgives while still moving forward.

Yes! Oh, my gosh, yes, that's powerful, that's good.

Okay, so how? How do you craft the poem, “Kinds of Grace?” How do you build that poem?

It's in couplets, but that's all I really wanted it to be. In this poem and in this book, I want it to be at my emotional seat. So I wanted it to be mostly free verse. I wanted there to be a climax, and the climax was when the baby shark got swept away. But I wanted to stay very close to the climax. I didn't want there to be sort of denouement or anything like that where there's a kind of I'm tying it all up. I wanted it to end as close to the climax as physically possible. So to end it right there. So that's kind of how I was thinking about constructing it. But I'm still a fiction writer. I think about things in a story a lot. So, I still think about the Freytag’s Pyramid. And I'm thinking about exposition. And what's the inciting incident? And what's the climax? What are the dynamics of the poem?

Are you more of a fiction writer than you are a poet, or are you both?

I don't know. I get the question all the time, and I don't honestly know. I started writing fiction. I started writing short stories when I was 7, so I guess I could say I'm a fiction writer first, but I started writing poems to my mother when I was 8, so…you know.

Wow!

My mom has a whole book of poems that I've been writing her since I was a child. From like my childhood up until last year, she kept every single poem. So you can trace all of them over the years. I guess I've always been doing both. But creative nonfiction is something that I steer away from. I've published a couple of essays. But it's not where I am drawn to creatively, but I admire those that do. I love reading it. It's not what I write.

When did you call yourself a writer?

Oh, that's a great question. I remember the exact day. It was my senior seminar at the University of Pittsburgh. It was my last class, and Cathy Day, who was our instructor, said, “If you write, you're a writer.” She also gave a great talk on making sure writers adhere to their personal vision which I keep as part of my pedagogy. I didn't think I was allowed to call myself a writer at that point because I hadn't published anything, and I was young. It was just my hobby and I was taking classes for it. But she said, “if you're a writer you write,” and I never forgot that. And my dad reiterated that to me. He said that, “You can't call yourself a writer without writing,” and I was just like, well, I write all the time, so maybe I'm a writer. So then I started using that term.

I love that. And I think there's a certain amount of grace in that, isn't there?

Yes, absolutely.

You give yourself, grace, to call yourself a writer.

I love that. That's fantastic. Yes.

Let’s go back to “Tigers Won't Change Their Stripes.” I felt the poem was so strong.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Was it hard to write this poem?

It was easy to write this poem because it was in response to somebody saying some shit to me (sorry). It came out immediately, in one attempt. I went back and edited it multiple times, but it came out in one sitting.

Really? Does that happen often?

In my short story collection, “When Trying to Return Home,” I had a story called, “Good Guys.” It is about a bunch of guys who are posturing to be chivalrous men, but in reality, they're not. I wrote that all in one sitting from 10 o'clock at night until 2 o'clock in the morning. I went to sleep and then I woke up, and I was like, what did I write? What was that? It took me 3 months to edit, but it all came out at once. So every once in a while I'll write things that just gush out. But then, after the next day I'll wake up and I'll be like, Okay, you need to do so much editing.

Do you feel like things are just revealed to you?

Absolutely. Writing for me is my emotional calling. For fiction, I have a more structured brain. But for poetry, if there's an emotion that I want to crystallize, then I will go to poetry immediately.

Okay, then, now, I have to ask you what is poetry? I interviewed m.s. RedCherries and she's reluctant to call what she does poetry. She feels what she does is more storytelling than it is poetry. But because you know, you have to put a book on a shelf. You have to call it something.

Right.

So to sell her book she was almost forced to call it poetry. She told me when you're Indigenous you don't need to be told how to tell stories. You've been telling them for centuries. So I'm curious what is poetry to you?

This is such a great question. I wrote this quote down because I was thinking about this question a lot myself. So Emily Dickinson says, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” ( L342a, 1870). That’s so true! Poetry doesn't need to have perfect line breaks or use ridiculous figurative language or sensory detail to nail a certain point. And there's free verse and formal verse and all that. But the idea that Emily Dickinson was talking about is that you have this sort of immediate emotional response to poetry, and sometimes it's inexplicable, and sometimes it makes your whole body shake and writhe, and sometimes you feel nothing, and sometimes you feel everything. That’s poetry. I agree that it's almost inexplicable. It is something that evokes a strong emotional response through the use of line. It's something that just overwhelms you. It consumes you. It evokes something sort of primordial in you, and that's when I know I'm reading poetry.

I'm simply stunned by your answer. I felt what you just said WAS poetry. That was great. I'm going to reflect on what you said here for a long time. I'm at the stage where I feel like the only thing that I want to write is what I must write.

Hmm. Yes.

It's such a gift to write.

Yes!

I didn't realize it, but this whole other world can open up through writing. Thank you for that definition of poetry. That was great. Moving on, please tell me why you inserted art into your poetry book.

I decided there was something else that I wanted from this book after I'd finished it. I thought because it was so focused on the self and the mirrored self that it needed more. Not just doubling. The work is also focused on family and community and I wanted to bring my family and community into the book. My cousin, Maritza González Cintrón, is an incredible activist, poet, and artist since she leans toward visual art. She's won awards and all that, but she also helped numerous people during Hurricane Maria. She was invested in helping people and I’ve always looked up to her. So I think that inspired me to reach out to her. Her art is so much about the beauty of Puerto Rico, and how much it means to her. And my relationship to Puerto Rico was something that I was working through in “Kinds of Grace.” I thought she would be perfect to provide the art for it, so I just asked her for some of her art, and she gave it to me. And Carol Ward, who does the weavings, is my mother-in-law. I thought that having her involved with my book would give it even more weight. Having her as part of the book added this other emotional layer to the work. The poem is so much about family and ancestry, that seeing those ties visually to family and ancestry, whether you know they're connected to me or not, might continue to forward the themes of the book.

How does Puerto Rico fit into your narrative?

It’s embedded in who I am. My mother is Puerto Rican and I feel her ancestry deeply. She was born in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico and a lot of my family lives there. I grew up going there when I was a kid, and I went there a great deal when I was an adult. Even so, I always felt a sense of estrangement, even so I felt a sense of warmth and comfort. So those dueling feelings

were something that I was grappling with my entire life. So this feeling…when I’m in Puerto Rico I feel like I'm with my family. I'm with my people. I feel at home, but then I'm also Black and American, and I'm different from everybody else, and I don't look the same as everybody else, and you know everybody has a different approach to language than I do. This dichotomy I grappled with. But Puerto Rico is everything. It's everything. It's in my mother. It's everything, and my mother is everything to me. So it means everything to me, by an extension. It’s very special to me.

Beautiful. So I want to go back to the poems. Let’s discuss, “Lost in Montjuic, After Losing.”

Nobody ever asks about that poem! I love that.

I've lost people, and I still see them. The poem resonated with me so strongly. I felt you captured a poem that I wanted to write. Can you just give me a little background on it?

I was in Barcelona, and I just suffered a personal loss, a relationship, and it was painful. In Montjuic; there are these coffins. They're all stacked on top of each other, and they're clear. It’s very interesting to see them. It’s almost like seeing a file cabinet of dead bodies, and they're all clear. I've never seen anything like that in my whole life, and it just overwhelmed me because I thought about my mother's side of the family. We have family I’ve never met in Spain, and Corsica and all that, and I was thinking about my father, my grandfather, who had passed away, a long time ago, and I was thinking about the people in my life. All those I loved, who I had lost, or the people who had been family members, who I'd lost, and I thought about all those losses, and it just overwhelmed me when I saw all of those boxes.

And then that's when I wrote that poem. It wasn't really a poem that was meant to be to be about one person. It was meant to be about all of the people I had lost. But thank you for asking about that. I don't really get that question a lot.

I thought it was great. You write, “When you loved a body and lost it easy / You'll see the damn thing everywhere / in every soft, smiled face or seraphated city sculpture. But look!

I love the way you put the word “look” in a separate line. It’s just a great poem. Okay, let’s move on to “Baggage.”

Yeah, my mom loves “Baggage.” My mom always laughs at that poem. She always thinks it's a funny poem. And I was like, Yeah, I guess (?) it's funny. So what happened in “Baggage” is exactly what happened. I was walking around and I saw these flower petals and I was just like, Oh, what a beautiful day! There are flowers on the ground! And I saw this blue jay, and I thought that it was picking up the flowers in its beak, and I was like what a beautiful poem that would about this beautiful bird. And then I look down, I see that the bird had toilet paper in its mouth, and it wasn't a flower. And I was like, yeah, that's exactly what my poem actually would reflect. That's a more accurate description of the way things would happen, right? I thought it was a symbol for all the stuff that we carry around that we often think are these beautiful things. But then we look at them a little bit closer, we realize it’s just nothing-stuff, or that the thing we treasured didn't have that same significance that it should have had. But that last line in the poem, I thought, man, I’ve been through some rough stuff. But it's still mine. I still own those experiences. So that's what this poem is about.

Beautiful. So all experience is valid?

Exactly. They're still yours. So regardless of what they look like, they're still yours.

That's profound. The hard things are still meaningful.

Yeah.

And maybe they're more precious.

Yes.

When you don't even really think there are.

That’s a wonderful way of putting it.

Talk to me about the poem “Retribution.” That title doesn't feel like grace.

It's definitely a little bit far away from grace. I wrote it for myself but also because John Madera put out a very cool call for Puerto Rican poets and writers. It’s about folks saying painful things about you. Are you being interpreted by the world in certain ways, potentially negative ways? You say.I’m this, you say I’m that. You say all that and yo, I'm hearing all of the things that you're saying. I'm aware of them, so I'm not ignorant to them. However, I don't give a shit because I know who I am. And if you can't understand who that is, and if you aren't interested in it, then that's it. Boy, bye. It was meant to be an empowering poem, from a Black woman's perspective.

Hmm! It does tie back to grace in the sense of knowing your own grace.

Yes, that's amazing. Yes.

You need some sort of protection from the misogyny and the racism.

Absolutely. Thank you.

You have poems in here like “Apagón.” But you tell me it's to honor those lost in Hurricane Maria. The event was horrible. I don't even know if it was told appropriately or with enough understanding. And then with the President throwing paper towels to desperate people. It was so disrespectful. Tell me about this poem.

It is about my relationship with my mother and my cousin Maritza; my middle name comes from her. My pen name is Jennifer Maritza McCauley, but I always have used Maritza because, for one, there's another Jennifer McCauley, a poet. But the other reason is that Maritza is a precious name to me, because she is my cousin. She's impactful, powerful. My mom named me after her. So the poem is about my relationship with her. And it's about my relationship with my mother. The things happening in Puerto Rico before Maria and when I went after are too difficult or painful to fully name. I get chills just thinking about them. Seeing those images of my mother's home place ravaged and then being there before and after. It was really painful personally but it also felt like an inutile kind of pain because it’s doused in privilege. So I was describing that feeling of helplessness and also giving honor to the island and all the beautiful things that are on the island. It can be painful to lose those things, but also those wonderful things about Puerto Rico are still going be there, no matter what happens to the island. You know that one hundred percent. I believe that there's still going be a Black woman dancing bomba. There's still going to be a jíbaro walking up the mountains. There’s still going to be someone selling piraguas. There's still going to be people dancing, singing, celebrating, and fighting. That's still always going to happen.

That's true. Thank you. In other poems, you address issues of mental health. And so how does that fit into the kinds of grace?

I realized I couldn't write this book authentically without writing about mental health. If it's not true to me, or I don't feel it, or I don't like it, I'm not going to put it out. I'm not going to finish it. That's just the way I am. I had been hospitalized for a little bit right after my PhD. And that was a shock to me, because I had been working really hard on the PhD. I'd been doing really well, you know everything it seemed like it was going fine. I got the degree, the pandemic hit, and then everything became overwhelming at once. And then, before I knew it I was hospitalized. I had PTSD from all those things that happened in that hospital. So it ended up becoming this whole thing. It may seem like I addressed it a lot in the book, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. But that plays into some of the ramifications of generational trauma. So there's a poem called, “In Daddy's House.” It is about the rules that your parents give you to survive. Not all those rules they give you survive are great rules, and some of the rules are really to survive, but not necessarily rules to make you a mentally well person.

Hmm.

So that played a part in it. Of this collection, the generational trauma, systemic trauma, sexism, racism, and the impact that can have on an individual are addressed. And just the need to, you know, go through programs or be a writer, or just try to achieve your dreams. You wonder: why am I doing all this? You realize: for other people AND myself. I also talk about mental health in “Diagnosis.” It is about how to deal with navigating the world as a Black woman.

And you're your mother's daughter.

Indeed.

I love it.

Thank you. I appreciate that. My mother is a big part of the book. Her and my husband's ability to deal with my mental health conditions also play into the work. And I wanted “Wedding Day” to be there at the same time as “Isolation Room.” The “Isolation Room” poem was the darkest poem, and it is the climax of the book. For me personally, it was Isolation Room [that was the climax], because that was the most painful rockbottom moment for the speaker. Yes, there can still be joy after that. So I was able to have a wedding. And more importantly find love within myself and with others. But then there's still also the lingering pains and things you deal with. So that's what I was trying to express through the poems on mental health.

I thought it important to discuss a wide, ranging gambit of ways to react to mental health disorders.

And it's so important to be able to talk about these issues, because this is life. And it's important to give people the knowledge that you can get through the other side of it.

Absolutely.

And then, in a in a strange way, it might even be a small gift, because it makes you stronger and more resilient that you can go through all of that. It is a double-edged sword. Nobody wants to go through it. But if you do go through it there's hope on the other side. People need that hope, and that's what's powerful about the poetry that you write because it's wide-ranging and filled with hope. I mean when you write, “My mother asked what I'm talking about, and I ask her why I keep burning the rice, and she gives me the instructions to make gandulas proper. Don't get ahead of yourself, she says. Use pepper and sazon just enough.” And the way you end the poem, “when I eat my food later. I think she's right. It tastes just fine.” In the poem, you're trying to do everything correctly. You don't know that doing everything “correctly” is not really the correct thing for you.

Yes. That was a wonderful reading of that, too. Thank you for saying that. Yes, absolutely, you want to burn the rice. If you don't burn the rice, it doesn’t have that sabor. I read that poem a couple of time in person and other Latinos are just like, Oh, yeah, we have that in our culture.

And if the crunchiness adds to the flavor. You need to make “mistakes” like “burning” the rice.

It does. It is really good.

You need the crunchiness.

My grandfather used to make little balls out of the rice.

That is incredible. Now, tell me about “Four Days Before the Wedding.”

So I wanted to count down to the wedding, even have the speaker question if it would happen, so maybe there’s an accidental layer of suspense in those poems. Some of these poems I wrote for myself, and I realized that after I published them, weirdly. And I was like, okay, I wrote poems that I wrote for myself, and I now have them in the book. I guess that's fine. Anyway, I wanted to say that the happiest moments of your life can be in conversation with the worst. You can go through these terrible things, and it's okay to still find love. You’re allowed to find love. You know, it's okay to still find romantic love and familial love and parental love. It's okay to let people help you. I think that's what a lot of this book ended up being about, too. It was allowing yourself to be helped, because I think, there's so much in the very beginning, in the first half about, oh, I can do this on this and that. I’m empowered. But then as it goes forward I examine what does it really mean to be empowered. In the second half I examine what do you do when you don't feel empowered? And what do you do when you need help. And what do you do when you need to reach out to someone? And sometimes it can be a great blessing to have somebody that can lift you up when you're in pain. So I think the wedding was like the culmination of having a person in your life who's there for you when you're frustrated and in pain.

And there's grace in all of that, right?

There's grace in all of that. Yes, I love that.

My wife and I, we have two boys. I was always there for the ultrasounds. So in “Lying” I'm in that room with you. This poem is profound at so many levels.

Yes, and as far as I know I don’t know if I can have children so this was an ultrasound about something else. I didn't want mental health to be just a surface-level problem in the book. So what I describe in that poem really happened. I was just going for an ultrasound and the doctor was able to pick up that I had anxiety just from my heart rate, and I was just like, oh, I thought I was just chilling, being fine. I thought I was doing great. I thought I was just sitting here having a good time, but then he was just like you have anxiety, don't you? And I was like, Oh, no, you can tell. Okay. Then he was like, and do you have something else? And I was like, Yeah, I have. Yeah, I have several something else. So what ended up happening was my husband just started comforting me, and then my heart rate went down, and then I went back to normal and then he was just like, Okay, as long as he's there. Then you can be okay. And I was just like, you know what? That's actually a beautiful metaphor for a relationship. That the heart doesn’t lie, it knows when it needs to beat. I try to do things by myself all the time, and try to get it done and try to do my own way. But I still need help. Sometimes, I need someone to comfort me too. I think, perhaps selfishly, so many of us feel that way. That we just need a leg up from someone who cares.

I love that. And that's grace. Thank you for such a beautiful interview.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall his poetry will be published in Huizache. His other book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, IAIA's literary journal, and Los Angeles Review.

Photo by Jesse Biehn