Memoirist and
novelist, Joy Castro, has been, of late, quite prolific and you, dear “La
Bloga” reader, you have the privilege to receive the many gifts of her multiple
publications. Before 2012, Castro
was known most for her beautifully written and searing memoir, The Truth
Book. If you haven’t read it, I strongly
encourage you to get yourself a copy.
It has recently been re-issued with a beautiful cover from University of
Nebraska-Press (click here!).
I
want to share the last line in The Truth Book.
It won’t give anything away from the memoir. I’m copying it here because this very last line in her
memoir is almost a preface for her subsequent publications. She writes: “You try to be decent and
treat people gently, knowing that they, too, have their scars and madnesses
that, like yours, do not show.”
The themes and symbols of scars, madness, empathy, and ethical behavior
continue to develop within the genre of the two literary mystery novels she has
published.
Castro’s first
novel, Hell or High Water, published in 2012, has already garnered a number of honors, most recently, the
2013 Nebraska Book Award. And last
spring, Hell or High Water
received 2nd place in the 2013 International Latino Book Awards in
the genre of mystery fiction.
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| German publication of Hell or High Water |
As well, a
translation of Hell or High Water
has been published in Germany and translations of Hell or High Water and her newest novel, Nearer Home will be published in France by
Gallimard. Hell or High Water has been optioned for film or TV by a
team of producers that includes Zoe Saldana. Both thrillers are also available as audiobooks, read by
2011 Audie Award Finalist, Roxanne Hernandez! Orale!
For more on Hell
or High Water, click here to read my interview with Joy Castro from last year when the book was
newly out. Now we have the second
installment of the Nola Céspedes series: Nearer Home,
and it is promising to be just as, if not more “thrilling,” tighter, and quite
the nail biter. As well, Castro
has continued writing memoir pieces and her second nonfiction book, Island
of Bones, is now out
from University of Nebraska-Press (click here!). Island of Bones
received the 2013 International Latino Book Award (for inspirational
non-fiction in English) and it was a Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary
Award for creative non-fiction.
Montes: First of
all, congratulations on the latest recognition for Hell or High Water and the French translation and
publication also for Nearer Home,
and the PEN and Latino Book Award for Island of Bones.
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| A PEN Center USA Literary Finalist |
Castro: Thank you so much. A lot of attention is coming to the
books now, and I’m grateful. I
hope it helps them reach the readers who will love them. I’m excited that the
thrillers are being translated and published abroad, so readers of German and
French will have the chance to read about a Latina fighting crime in New
Orleans.
Montes: Yes, very exciting! Enfolded within the mystery genre that
Hell or High Water follows, there is a coming-of-age narrative. Would you say, Nearer Home continues
the bildungsroman or are you making a departure?
Castro: Though Nola is 27 in Hell or High
Water, she still has
some growing up to do. Most of it
has to do with facing elements of her past that she has avoided. She accomplishes that in the first
novel (and it’s implied aftermath), but her growth continues in Nearer
Home. It’s not as dramatic, and I
think she’s reaching a good place, but her process of growth won’t stop.
I think that’s
true for most of us. Unless we’re
stuck and stagnating, we keep growing and learning and changing throughout our
llves. I don’t know if those
changes can be called “coming-of-age” anymore, but sometimes the process feels
just as humbling and difficult as when we were young. The difference is that we’re held accountable by society;
we’re expected to know how to act like responsible adults. Unfortunately, one look at the news
will show how often we fail at this.
Montes: Yes—and the focus of these kinds of
failures are highlighted within what may seem disparate worlds in Nearer
Home. Nearer Home turns its attention to the world of
academia as well as the world of horse racing, thoroughbreds, and political
figures. Tell me about your research preparation.
Castro: I’ve been teaching college for over 20
years now, so academia is familiar to me.
I grew up loving horses, and I had a pony when I was a little girl—a
wild pony that my parents bought for $20.00 in rural West Virginia. I tamed her—to an extent; she still bit
and bucked and kicked—and rode her bareback in the hills there. It was a good time in my life. I was already a voracious reader, and I
read a lot of books about horse training, horse racing, and so on. When Affirmed won the Triple Crown in
1978, I had newspaper clipping taped up on the wall in my bedroom. I cried when I grew too tall to be a
jockey. In college in San Antonio,
I worked at a stable for a while, mucking out stalls and grooming, just to be
around the horses. Political figures,
I knew less about. I read a lot of
newspaper and magazine profiles of political figures to get the gist, but I
still worried that I’d make Senator Claiborne, my fictional character, a
caricature. I’m not sure I
succeeded in making him fully real.
His wife, who’s actually fairly pivotal to the plot, remains offstage
throughout the entire book.
Political wives have it rough.
I wanted to leave her in peace.
Montes: Many of the secondary characters that
appear in Hell or High Water
return in Nearer Home. What is your process in their
development this time around?
Castro: I like to imagine how people change
over time. For Nearer Home, I just listened to what I’d established
in Hell or High Water
and then let my mind wander. The
characters usually told me how they’d evolved. That sounds a little mystical or woo-woo, but that’s how it
works. I just relax and
listen.
Montes: Unlike Hell or High Water, Nearer
Home is divided not only
by chapters, but days of the week.
Why?
Castro: As a scholar of
literary modernism, I became very interested in the representation of
time. James Joyce famously spent
hundreds of pages chronicling a single day in the life of his protagonist
Leopold Bloom; other modernists experimented similarly. I’m interested in the way we perceive
time, how it shrinks or elongates according to the experiences we’re having.
Hell or High
Water unfolds over a
period of one month. With Nearer
Home, I wanted to try a
tighter time-frame and see what that compression did to the action and
character development. I’ve
outlined a future Nola Céspedes novel that takes place within twenty-four
hours. These are crime thrillers,
though, so I don’t want to get too precious about it.
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| Bourbon Street, New Orleans |
Montes: Your sense of detail and description is
so lovely. For example, when you
describe Chloe’s hair, you write:
“the browned gold of ice tea on a sun porch.” Great stuff.
Tell us your process in avoiding clichés in descriptive writing.
Castro: I’m not sure that I do! Thank you. I try. I just
revise and revise and revise. I
reread with a cold eye and try to be ruthless.
Montes: Yes—revision is key. I also want to ask about your craft in
creating good solid dialogue. For
example, the dialogue scenes with Bento are done so well. What is your process?
Castro: I listen to the characters. When it’s going well, the process feels
like dictation. Often, though, it
doesn’t go well. Dialogue is hard
for me. I revise dialogue the way
I do everything else: read aloud,
listen for rhythm and realism, and cut, cut, cut.
Bento is unique
in the books, in that he’s a highly educated expert in his field (coastal
geomorphology), but English is his third language, and he knows it primarily
from the classic literature he studied in school. As a result, his dialogue is a little stilted, a little formal. It’s an odd mix of mistakes and
unexpected flourishes.
Montes: That comes through splendidly. And what of another secondary
character: Fabi? She is a Chicana who is wealthy and
materialistic, a “well meaning liberal,” or as Nola says, “Fabi, our Chicana
Princess.” What is your definition
of a Chicana and how did Fabi come to be?
Castro: With Fabi, I wanted to create a
character different from typical depictions of Chicanas as domestic workers and
farm laborers. Similarly, the
protagonist Nola—contrary to stereotypes about Cuban Americans (as
well-to-do)—grew up poor in the projects.
I was interested in exploring the diversity among Latinas and creating
something surprising. There are
two definitions of Chicana that seem to be in cultural use. One simply means a Mexican American
woman. The other is politically inflected and includes the sacrifices and achievements of the Chicano Civil
Rights Movement. The character of
Fabi is ironic. She has always
been cosseted, yet enjoys claiming the cultural cachet of El Movimiento without
having worked or suffered for it. She wasn’t even born at that time. Because of this, she’s a little bit of
a comic character, but I still wanted her to be sympathetic, too; she has good qualities as well.
Montes: Was this an easier novel to write from
the first?
Castro: Yes. With Hell or High Water, I was learning how to write a
novel. It was my first attempt,
and I floundered around. It went
through many, many revisions and took about four years, whereas Nearer Home took me only a single year to write. I had a much clearer sense of what I
was doing. It also helped that I
knew the characters well by that point: I wasn’t making them up from scratch.
Montes: What did you learn, then, during the
writing of Hell or High Water
that you were able to further develop or avoid in Nearer Home?
Castro: Plot. I had a terrible time with cause-and-effect, with
action—again, perhaps due to my training in modernist literature, in which a
few reveries and an epiphany equal a story. I love that mode.
It’s lovely. But it didn’t
quite work in crime fiction, so I had to learn—the hard, slow, foot-dragging
way—how to plot.
Montes: Who is your audience for Nearer
Home?
Castro: I wrote the books with a Latina
audience especially in mind, but my thrillers are for everyone who enjoys crime
fiction. If you’re fond of New
Orleans, then you’ll enjoy them—and if you know New Orleans really well, then
you’ll enjoy finding the couple of mistakes I made. Readers have written in to let me know where I goofed.
Montes: Even if you’ve lived your whole life in
a place and write about it, some readers will still want to say something about
their own perspective of place.
Hopefully, they have been kind and decent!
Castro: Yes, they have. They care so much about New Orleans
that they want me to get it right.
I appreciate that love for the city and that love for detail.
Montes: Do you feel more comfortable now,
having written two mystery novels, and do you think you will continue writing
in this genre or will you try another?
Castro: I do know now that I can finish a
novel. Five years ago, I didn’t know that. So yes, I think the process has built my confidence as a
writer. My current project is a
new novel, and I’m in love with it.
Short stories, though, were my first love, and I’m revising a book of
stories now. It’s called HOW
WINTER BEGAN, and a wonderful press has offered a contract for it. (I’ll be discreet, since we haven’t
signed papers yet.) I’m very
excited that it will be in print.
I’ve been working on it for years.
Montes: So you are not working on another Nola
novel?
Castro: I’ve outlined books 3 and 4 of the Nola
Céspedes series, and I received an offer for a third installment. I declined it, though, for the time
being. I’m currently working on a
stand-alone psychological thriller.
The protagonist is a Chicago Latina with a hidden past. When I finish it, I plan to go back and
write books 3 and 4. I think about
them a lot.
Montes: It’s exciting knowing that we will have
a mystery set in Chicago with a Latina protagonist—a Midwest Latina
mystery. Orale! What advice do you have for writers of
mystery?
Castro: Love the form. Read widely. Bring your whole self to
the project; be honest on the page.
Revise, revise, revise. Be patient. Remember that crime fiction is the
genre of justice, and you can bring your political concerns to the story. That’s the same advice I’m still giving
myself.
Montes: There is the writing, and then there is
the selling of a book. Describe the
selling of one’s book, the responsibilities: it’s challenges and successes. How well has Hell or High Water been doing and what will you do
differently or the same with Nearer Home?
Castro: Authors are asked to promote their
books aggressively, maintain a social media presence, give public readings,
visit book clubs, and so on. I’ve
done those things for both books, and I’ll continue to do them. I especially love visiting book clubs;
the warmth and kindness are so moving.
Readers don’t realize what a gift they give back to authors. Both books have been doing fine,
sales-wise, though neither has become a bestseller. It takes a lot of work from both the publisher and author to
break a book out, and some luck is involved, too.
They’re reaching
their readers. What the publishing
industry knows is the word-of-mouth, person-to-person, one friend to another,
is the best way of selling books, hands-down. That organic, passionate buzz is something that all the ads
in the world can’t create. So I
hope people will love the books and tell their friends about them, and that
word-of-mouth will give them a long life.
Montes: Describe your audience reception. What has surprised you or intrigued you
regarding reader reactions to your work?
Castro: The passion. Readers really seem to love the books. They get very excited when they tell me
how shocked they were by the ending of Hell or High Water – how they never saw
it coming, but when they went back later and reread, they could see all the
clues. That’s a great thing for an
author to hear. I always love it
when I hear from Latina readers:
“I feel like you wrote this book for me.” Because I did.
Montes: What else would you like to tell our
“La Bloga” readers?
Castro: A lot of people in the mainstream book
industry still believe that we, as Latinas and Latinos, are not a worthwhile
market segment. You’ll still
occasionally hear, “Latinos don’t read.”
Though this mistaken sentiment is changing, it’s still out there, and it
affects editors’ decisions about whose manuscripts to purchase, publish, and
promote.
So I’d just
remind everyone how important your choices are. When you buy a book, or request a book from your library,
you make a difference.
Montes: Yes, so important! Thank you, Joy!
Castro: Thank you for taking the time to ask
about my work.
Montes: No need to wait,
dear “La Bloga” readers—get yourself a copy of Joy Castro’s works now! Add one of her titles to your book club
list, to your own private reading, to your curriculum list for teaching. Sending you all buenas energias for a
most lovely week!
Joy Castro BIO: Joy Castro (click here for her website) is the author of the memoir, The Truth Book and the New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water and Nearer Home. Island of Bones, her collection of personal essays, is a PEN Finalist and the winner of an International Latino Book Award. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Seneca Review, North American Review, and The New York Times Magazine. Publishers Weekly calls her new edited collection, Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, "a must-read." She teaches literature, creative writing, and Latino studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and she is on Twitter at @_JoyCastro
