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.
* * *
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.
