SOME SEEMINGLY RANDOM EVENTS

By guest essayist Jennifer Silva Redmond

My mom was born in 1940, to a Mexican mother and an Anglo father, in that far-flung part of Mexico now known as East LA. Her parents divorced when she was young, and my mom split from my own Anglo dad in 1968, when I was seven. We all spent a few years in the hippie beach town of Venice, which I still consider my hometown, then Mom took us kids traveling around Europe, since my dad worked for Pan Am. That sojourn was followed by two years in Northern California and Oregon. We moved to San Diego when I was eleven and soon settled in the barrio of East San Diego.

I got into reading and writing very early, which lead me to reading scripts and doing theater as a preteen. At 14, I did the first of two plays at the Old Globe Theater, then went to a local performing arts college on scholarship, after testing out of high school at 16. I enjoyed studying acting, especially the summer school quarter at a campus just outside of London, but was sick of school by then, so I moved back to LA at 19 and started auditioning. I lived in Venice, waited tables in Santa Monica, and got (very) small parts in Hollywood.

My dream was to be a Broadway actress so I accepted a nanny job that took me to New York City. Once there, I became a “Californian,” which of course I’d never thought of myself as before. Once they heard where I was from, people would ask, “Then why are you here?” I could see their point—the extreme hot/cold that is NY’s weather, the indifferent concrete jungle of Manhattan, the cold, crowded beaches and lakes of the rest of the state. I got cast in an eight-month touring show in Florida, which felt more like home, with its acres of orange orchards and long white-sand beaches.

By 1989, I was a 28-year-old aspiring actress, back waiting tables and doing way-off Broadway shows. On a short trip home to San Diego for the holidays I met my old boyfriend Russel Redmond. The timing was right and he proposed and, even more important to me, he followed me to NYC with his grandmother’s ring. But one snowy day in March, we came up with the idea of kicking off our marriage with a three-month honeymoon sailing to and around Baja California’s Sea of Cortez. We got married in San Diego and soon set sail on his 26-foot sailboat across the ocean border, bound for Cabo.

My experience in Baja to that point was limited to day trips to Tijuana and weekends in Ensenada. Sailing was a new world, too; I had spent only a few weeks on the boat in a marina when we set off on that first 1000 mile journey south. The life-changing voyage was full of firsts, like my first time on solo watch enroute to the Islas San Benito during which my mindset went from wary paranoia to a kind of cosmic acceptance in four hours; my inner and outer awareness grew with every nautical mile.

We stopped in Cabo, beat our way up to La Paz, then continued north into the Sea of Cortez. I traded auditions and lunch shifts for wandering empty beaches, exploring cactus-covered canyons, and snorkeling with curious dolphins and colorful reef fish. After three months, we had not begun to see all Baja had to offer, so we cinched our belts, ate lots of rice and beans and fresh-caught seafood, and spent nine more months sailing turquoise waters and making friends in the plazas, markets, marinas and fish camps of that desert peninsula.

I quickly fell in love with Baja and its people, in small towns and fish camps, and in the capital city of La Paz. Along the way, I discovered, or rediscovered, my own Mexican-ness. My Spanish improved in the supermercados of Loreto and La Paz, at stops at the tiny tiendas of scattered fish camps, and the frequent trips to immigration offices. My daily journal writing evolved into stories, poems, and essays. To my amazement, I found that doing theater was not the only way for me to be creative and share my emotional inner life with the world. By the end of 1990, I’d chosen a pen name that included my grandmother’s maiden name, Silva, and started to become the Latina writer I am now.

I began editing for other writers in 1996, and in 2000, started working for Sunbelt Publications, a San Diego publisher that specializes in Baja and Mexico. In 2011, knowing editing was my calling, I gave up my days in an office cubicle writing budgets and grant proposals, and went back to working directly with authors. Me going freelance also allowed us—since Russel was teaching at San Diego City College by then—to continue exploring the West Coast on our sailboat during summers. By 2017, we both were working 100% online. I’m still Sunbelt’s Editor at Large, so I have the best of both worlds.

Over the years, I sold some short nonfiction pieces to magazines like Science of Mind, Sail, and Cruising World, plus anthologies that included A Year in Ink, and Dime Stories, which kept me believing that I had a future as a writer. I was especially thrilled to place a piece of short fiction in the anthology Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature. There I met Daniel Olivas and Melinda Palacio, who both wrote for La Bloga. My husband and I wrote three screenplays together, set in Arizona, Mexico, and California, which kept us traveling to locations to get the feeling of the places just right. We rewrote one of them, El Camino Real, as a short film which got made and even played at a couple of film festivals.

These seemingly random events all led me to start rewriting many of the pieces that began as journal entries so long ago. Soon, I had a rough draft of a memoir of my first year at sea. Being an editor, I kept revising and rearranging the manuscript as we sailed north to San Francisco in 2020, and on to Washington’s Puget Sound in 2022. Luckily, I found the perfect publisher who found me the perfect editor; eventually they said it was time to stop rewriting and publish the book. That memoir, Honeymoon at Sea: How I Found Myself Living on a Small Boat, is published by Re:books of Toronto, Canada. I couldn’t be happier that circumstance made me an “international author,” since I have led such an international life.

If you want to follow us on our ongoing sailing adventures—yes, the honeymoon continues!—here is the link to my Substack, Honeymoon at Sea. To buy/pick up my book at an indie bookstore, or order online and support an indie bookstore, click the link on bookshop.org. You can also order the book at Sunbelt, and see their other cool books and maps and everything else under the sun, at Sunbelt Publications which is a great way to support a small publisher and a regional book distributor.

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Jennifer Silva Redmond is a writer and freelance editor from California, whose memoir Honeymoon at Sea is coming out from re:books of Toronto. Her essays, articles, and fiction have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, and on sites such as Brevity. She is on the staff of the Southern California Writers Conference and San Diego Writers, Ink, was prose editor for A Year in Ink volume 3, and co-founder of the critically acclaimed Sea of Cortez Review. Formerly editor-in-chief of Sunbelt Publications, Jennifer is now its editor-at-large. She lives with her husband Russel, an artist and teacher, aboard their sailboat Watchfire, somewhere on the West Coast of North America.