Q&A: Caron Garcia Martinez

by Angelica Escalante

“Corazón,” a dark and generational telling, appears in our new Spring issue of Grace in Darkness. Author Caron Garcia Martinez agreed to share more about the story and her writing with readers.

Let’s charm the reader for a bit. When did you start writing and why?

I wrote my first poem when I was eight. It was about my cat, Calico Jane. I've also always kept journals ever since I was young, I think in an effort to make sense of my experiences as I lived them. So I just found that writing was a very natural way to express myself. And I think I’ve spent a lifetime wondering if I deserved to call myself a writer. I think that’s a topic for a lot of writers. I’ve now gotten to the point where it’s just as natural to me as the way that I breathe or work. It’s just a part of my life.

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I’m sure the readers would agree that they’re glad writing has become such a natural part of your life. In this new Grace in Darkness anthology, it seems that language really drives the force in your story Corazón. Cora, our main character, is always thinking about how to process her world through words. I’m curious to know what literature inspired you to look at language differently, if any.  

It’s an interesting question because when I’m drawn to literature it’s very much about the writing, the word choice, and the syntax. I’m naturally drawn to some of our Latinx inspirations, and the way they use language in rich ways, such as Isabel Allende, Rudolfo Anaya and Luis Alberto Urrea. A book I read early was called “Under the Feet of Jesus,” and it was about Mexican migrant farmworkers, written by Helena María Viramontes who, like me, grew up in Los Angeles. She went to Garfield High School like my mom, and the language is almost poetic and sensual. You feel it in your gut as your mind is processing any sense of plot.

I feel that way about the language in Corazón. This story is very deliberate with certain word choices used and the way you presented a multilingual narrative. Are there times when in your writing you've struggled to choose which parts of the narrative would be most potent to include in Spanish rather than English?  How do you usually decide?

My main audience is English speaking and I never want people to see the language as a barrier to understanding the emotion I am trying to convey; so at first it’s tricky because in some ways you would imagine that Cora is probably having these conversations in
Spanish with her mom. Or that Cora’s mother is speaking Spanish to her and then she’s being a rebellious teenager and speaking English back. I just felt that conveying a sense of the human being informed by another language and culture was important to have every so often. I wanted to highlight particular words that were dangerous, or the opposite, affectionate, or that needed to be named and really couldn’t be. There’s always that respect in a latinx family where you’ve got the mother and father, and then the children underneath them. So here’s a situation where Corazón is kind of starting to take on the boldness and agency of being a female in this new culture. And yet her mom’s her mom, so she can’t be too fresh. She can’t confront her too much. So in some ways using the language choices in Spanish here and there were a way of connecting her to her mom and to the story.


What was the inspiration for having Corazón take place in D.C.?

Corazón is a character that is a mixture of some of my students’ experiences. I’ve heard some of them confide in me the difficulties of their unclear identity, and I’ve loved language whether it be in conversation or in writing for the ability to come to terms with those struggles. To name them so we can see them. I have a little bit of frustration that we’re at American University, we’re in Washington D.C., but we’re kind of in a bubble. We’re in this beautiful, leafy, part of D.C. and there’s so many stories. There so much pain and grit that I wanted to tap into in an area right by the Capitol Building. Northeast, Southeast, those areas where we don’t really go. We don’t really appreciate and give those struggles, those people, a voice. And some of my students have been Miguel, the tutor in the story. I imagined being a teen on the receiving end of this earnest person with the really nice plaid shirt volunteering in a D.C. neighborhood, and I wanted a little bit of that tension too.


You already can tell without being explicitly told that it’s a very different kind of D.C. than we see in other literature, and I appreciated that.  

I think if you’re a writer, you want to give voice to people who don’t have voices. I very much had the purpose of the project in my mind as I wrote the story. I wanted it to be based in D.C. which has its national repercussions, its paradox of rich and poor, voiced and unvoiced. I wanted it to come from AU and what I’ve learned from my students, the “Me Too,” that anger of “I’ve had it. I’m drawing a line,” that’s happening in this nation and in social media. So I thought, “It’s got to have a certain edge to it. It’s got to have some darkness.” This is Grace in Darkness.


This story has a lot of culture and layers of familial dysfunction. You being a mother of three sons, I wondered if your experience in motherhood made writing scenes where a child is being harmed difficult.  

What a great question. I mean I think writing about parenting is difficult, period. It’s such an emotionally fraught experience. It’s exhilarating and horrifying and utterly heartbreaking. You know, it will test every skill and character trait that you think you have. Everything you know. And I think it’s interesting that you brought up me having three sons. I am part of this this “Me Too” world. I am a girl, a woman, a sister, and a daughter. Some people have said to me, but you don’t really know what this is like because you don’t have a daughter. And I reject that categorically. Number one because I think anyone can identify with other people if you have a heart for that, regardless of gender. Number two, I feel that as a writer I have a sense of empathy and compassion and imagination that we all have to [be able to] imagine that experience. Number three, like many of us, I’ve been in Corazón’s scary shoes, but I don’t have to have that daughter, because I am that daughter, and I can write that scene. And then yes, of course. Every scene I write that somehow involves parenting draws on that experience.


Along the same vein of you being a mother and writing from Cora’s point of view, was there a decision to keep Espe, Cora’s mom, as limited of a character to us as possible?  Was that a conscious choice?

Yes, I had to learn the hard way that in a short story you really need to focus on one person’s point of view, whether it’s first person or limited 3rd person. I wanted this story to unfold through Corazon's experience. So it’s so fraught. If I were writing a novel, I might consider going into another point of view. Almost like a duet, looking into Esperanza’s voice. But in this form it served the story to really exclusively be from Corazón’s point of view.


I think the moments where Cora started to slip into a different language was when the tension was realized for me. There is this line that I absolutely love when Cora says that she wonders for the first time if growing her vocabulary might in fact be a mistake because it’s just more ways to name things that are bad around her. In Corazón, there is a very subtle clash of cultures going on. While Cora’s mom is immigrating from her country to provide a better life, Cora is also trying really hard to not make the same mistakes as her mother. I wanted to know what influenced your decision to depict a clash between generations.

Of course, yes, as a mother there’s so many things about Espe’s choices that I wanted to justify. At the same time I was very mad at Espe, and yet she brought Cora and her sister to the States. How great was that? So she’s complex, but I wanted Corazón to be
wrestling with her complexity and us to see her through Corazón’s own eyes. And also because that’s how teenagers are interesting, right? They have their own perspective. Cora wants to have a job, but mom won’t let her have a job. She wants to be able to take Eva, [her sister], away so she’s safe. You know, there are many ways that she’s just so mad at her mom, and yet respects her and loves her.


These characters are so of the moment and accessible to audiences right now. You talked a little bit about the novel coming. Anything else in the works?

I’m working on a longer historical fiction piece where I’m very much in another century, with the patriarchy and struggles of that time. It’s placed in Mexico so the cultural pressure is even stronger. The novel evolved out of stories my abuelita told me about growing up in Sonora, Mexico in the early 1910s. I've loved imagining the stories into something complex and troubling that is universal for today. There’s possibly a nonfiction memoir that I’m marinating in my head. I was a runner-up for a Father’s Day contest. It was for a national drug rehab non-profit and [the theme] was “When I think of my father I...” My father was a doctor in Northridge, first generation and a success story, but he was in a terrible car accident and got hooked on narcotics. When his doctors, who were also his friends, cut him off from his pain meds, he started shooting heroin. He eventually lost his medical license. My mom went back to working full time as a nurse and my parents’ marriage fell apart. It’s my life, but I’ve had reasons to tell it a couple of times in the last year, and people look at me like they’re astonished. They’re like, “You need to [tell this story]--what else happened?!” I don’t necessarily want to write a story about myself, but I think it could be the entry point to tell it as the child of an addict, and a teacher, and a writer. So I’m trying to figure that out. I would have to make decisions about where the story begins and ends and whose story it is.


I agree that there’s value in sharing this story. There’s an untold side of first generation stories and the amount of pressure that success entails which we don’t see enough of now. Corazón touches on this tension, too. We, as readers, are used to seeing the narrative of finding oneself, but we hardly read about what happens once things go right for our characters. Surely reality can’t be that perfect, especially for those of us who carry the “first generation” label.

Yes! There is this layer of the immigrant dream and the shame he [my father] had because he had beat the odds, and he had been able to dig deep and find incredible success. So that’s really interesting for me to explore in the future.


I know that I’m a fan and will be looking forward to more work from you soon. Is there anything else you would like to add about this new publication?  

I’m in awe of my fellow writers that are included. There’s so much talent. I really hope that we can get the word out. It’s an indie book, small press. I hope we can really ignite and get a readership going, because we are in the moment and speaking powerfully about the grace of women in darkness and their journey into the light.


Find “Corazón,” along with other stories in the Spring issue of Grace in Darkness, available now.