 When you have two wonderful personalities and people, you know this conversation and this program is going to be really good, entertaining. We're going to talk about what are we going to talk about? Writing groups, literary support, existing stereotypical Latinx representation. We're going to have some readings. We're going to ask each other questions. This is going to be incredible. But first, I want to thank all of you on Zoom and YouTube. And we have some people here. Thank you for taking this journey with us as we start to have programs back in the library. For us, we're proud to have good people, good local artists, writers, creators to go along with us and to do this with us. For Latinx Month for Viva, we're proud to have the Massette Michelle. I should have had in the background some other programs coming up this month. We have a lot of Viva Latinx programs. October is also Filipino American History Month. But enough of me. Let me start with our land technology. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramayitash Thaloni peoples, where the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramayitash community. Thomas Moniz is a father, writer, teacher, and performer. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the Penn Hemingway debut novel 2020 Award, a finalist for Lambda 2020 Award for Bisexual Fiction, and a finalist for the Forward Review Indies Award. In July 2019, he released a chat book, All Friends Are Necessary, and shortly after that, he joined us here in this room. A chat book, All Friends Are Necessary with Mason Jarprez. He edited Rad Dad, Rad Families, and the kids' book Collaboration Colaboración. He is an artist affiliate at the Headland Center for the Arts 2020-2021. He's represented by Eleanor Jackson, Avgano, Carlson, and Lerner from the Literary Agency. That's Thomas. Michelle Cruz-Monzales is an English professor and author of the memoir, The Spit Boy Rule, Tales of a Chicana in a Female Punk Band, which is taught in colleges and universities all over the US. She has essays and fiction in anthologies by Putnam, P. M. Press, Steele Press, Ann Marie Kagan, and she's published in Me Too. She recently completed a satirical novel about near-future California that secedes from the US and forces intermarriage between whites and mecanos for the purpose of creating a race of beautiful, intelligent, hardworking people, and she is currently at work on a screenplay. I can't wait. I'm going to kick it over to you two, Rick and Mary. Thank you for having us here. We're really happy to be in person and on YouTube. Hello, YouTube and Zoom and everything. I know, right? It's nice to be, you know, I appreciate the last year and a half being able to connect on Zoom and things like YouTube. It's really nice to be in a room with people. So thank you for coming. We're going to have our casual events tonight. We're going to start off with a couple short readings from Vic Amelia. I think you're reading from what? The Spit Boy Rule. And then I thought we would just kind of have a conversation about some various topics. Obviously, if there's any, we're good and spontaneity, so if any questions come up in our conversation, feel free to jump on the end. Otherwise, we'll kind of end if anyone has anything else to add to it or say, we'll go from there. All right. I'm going to go ahead and start the readings. I'm going to read from, it's a chapter I haven't actually read before. It's one of these chapters I wrote this book and it was initially a bunch of short stories. And so in the editing process, I had to kind of add a level of backstory to the characters. And so it comes from one of these chapters. And all I think you need to know is that the main character one is with his boyfriend, Jared, and they're having dinner with one's daughter, Stella, and who's working on her application to colleges. And I'm still traumatized for doing that with my own daughter. So I put a lot of that into here. So anyway, I think this will fit our evening conversation tonight. So Stella says, this is about her application into college. I wrote about being the child of teen parents about you and mom. I'm not sure what's the point of the piece that teens should or should not have kids. She says neither. The point is the perspective it gave me, Stella said regret. What perspective is that I asked today? I tried to show how I learned things like empathy and non-conformity in patients. Patients with us, me and your mother, I asked a bit too defensively. She says, you have to be a little bit cavalier about kids 18. I can't imagine how right now, probably a good thing Jared whispers probably cavalier, that line and smirking. Why not write about being chicanx, I ask. I know I'm showing off a little bit and my daughter nods in approval with my use of the word, but I can't quite imagine my father hearing that word yet. So it doesn't feel right to say it loud because I'm not. Not really. How are you not really? You're half. I'm half white too. Jared has Obama's half white, but he's black period, right? But I don't really fit in with the other Latinx students in my school. I can't speak Spanish. I feel like my roots are something I learned about from a book or from grandma. That's your father's fault. I can teach you any time you want to speak Spanish, Jared adds who speaks Spanish better than I do. Shut up. I say eyeballing him. Dad, what could I say? I'm pocha, a mixed-race white girl, a product of American colonialism and culture on Asia. I feel like I'm faking it. Ham, Jared says. Yes, you should say exactly that. But to be honest, and this is a bit of honesty from one symbolic pocho to another, we're all fronting a little bit. We're all learning about who we all want to be and who we are. The difference lies between fronting and lying, especially to ourselves. You can't front on yourselves, on yourself. I want to get off this subject quickly speaking Spanish and family. So I say you wrote about me and your mom. What did you say? I'm stuck, actually, because I feel like I don't know anything about you guys as young parents. I try not to sound irritated when I say, well, you could just ask us. Stella immediately then sits upright and takes up her laptop and says, okay, fine. She asks, how did you and mom fall in love, even fall in love? I say, falling in love is easy. I say, staying in love is the word. And I still love your mother. I do. I just, you know, needed something else, something different. I don't know how else to explain it, obviously. But you needed to see men. She gestures in this game show kind of way to Jared, who in a game show kind of way bows. I look to her, I look at her like, I can't believe you said something bolder. She back, she looks back at me says, don't try and deny it. I say, yes, that was some of it, but not all of it. Your mom knew about me, man. Okay, stop. No, I say loudly and a bit too darkly. I wasn't really angry, irritated for sure. But something in me, something in me feels hot and urgent. I say, you want to know about me, about your mother, that you have to learn to listen to the whole story. You have to see your parents as people too, like you, as hard as that is. And I'll stop there. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. This issue of Spanish comes up, you know, and it is, it is, you know, at the heart in some cases of Latinx representation and writing. Sometimes people who have been gross, who have been Spanish, don't always feel like they can claim it. Not claim even being Latinx. And that's kind of what this, this section of my memoir is about. And it's from a chapter called My Body and Mind. And I'm just right here. Although I looked quite different from the rest of Spidboy, my ethnicity did not come up with a conversation, not in the Bay Area. In the 1990s, people were still trying to be colorblind, to not see race or to pretend not to see it as the face may be. It wasn't polite to talk about race. And so I didn't really talk about it. But one conversation sticks out in my mind. What's your name? We had just played a show and a friend of Karen had come to see us play. Well, some, as I said, it was an unusual question. Your last name has been Zollis. Are you Mexican? Yeah, I am. I didn't know that. I'm sorry to Karen's friend who was blonde and pretty. What do you mean I asked? It seems like I should have known that before I was doing the play. That's before you know you're a punk band. I never thought of you being all of you being anything other than that. Oh, yeah, I said. I feel bad. She reached out and touched my knee. I didn't know what to say. Identity is so important that I didn't even see it. See you. I just saw Spidboy. I don't think that's uncommon, I said. It's just easier to see the short hair and the clothes, I guess. Well, I'm not going to do that again. She said it's not right. After so many years of race and class ridicule that I endured growing up into long fiddling in was important to me, but fitting in into the punk scene, the way I did then created whole other problems. Conforming to the non-conformist punk ways of hearing mostly to the punk uniform, I had lost something along the way and I began to experience rumblings of this content that I didn't quite understand. I secretly listened to the rom-stats and sang along holding long sad notes to words that like rom-stats, I only vaguely understood. I knew that my identity was the root of my confusion and discontent, and so I began taking Spanish classes at a local community college while I could fit them in after work. Learning to speak Spanish had been a lifelong dream. As a child, someone had given me a red hard cover of Spanish English dictionary naively. I thought if I read it every night before bed, I would become bilingual like the rest of my family in UCLA. Later, living in the Bay Area and not being able to speak Spanish began messing with my head, and you'd feel an effort not going. I sometimes avoided going to the Mission District in San Francisco because while I was working super hard to fit into the punk scene, playing in bands, going to shows, volunteering at Blacklist and not always feeling totally accepted or understood helped really out of place in the Mission where it seemed like everyone spoke to me in Spanish and the raffle when I couldn't respond. Learning to speak my family's language even a little that I was able to speak after only a couple of semesters of college Spanish provided some relief and helped me to come out as a person of color. Thank you for that. It was nice to read for my another minute. Great, same. That was good, that was good. So, I definitely don't know the points and things we want to cover, so I'll kind of jump. We'll go back and forth like that, and if you have any big to add or questions in it, please feel free to bring them up. So, one of the things I think we had talked briefly about was, and this is a nice segue from our writing into kind of like the literary and the role models that we have as writers or as readers, and not necessarily even in the writing community. I want to maybe want to speak to a couple of those. My literary role model? Sure, yeah. So, early on as a reader, a young reader, I read a lot of dystopian literature like 1904 and Margaret Rat was Henry's tale. I'm still totally obsessed with dystopian literature. I went on to write dystopian novels. But in the 90s, in the time period that this book was written about, I actually was reading a lot of Alice Walker then. I read probably every book that I could get my hands on that Alice Walker wrote at the time. Being a Latina, Shikana who doesn't speak Spanish at all. There was something about, I just felt really connected also with very, I live in a small town. There weren't that many other people I know. There weren't that many. There were like two black kids in a whole high school, but somehow I just felt rather connected to the African-American experience. So, I've read a lot of African-American literature. I think I also just wanted to learn about people who would get from me that had similar experiences. That was very comforting. I didn't have to deal with the Spanish stuff. And then later on, I started reading a lot of Anastasia and some of these tales. But they're great role models for published writers and such great writers. But I didn't go to Mexico until 1986. I'm not a fluent Spanish speaker. I don't know anything about Catholicism hardly, or corn goddesses. It just wasn't my experience. The third generation Mexican-American, the third generation Shikana. So my experiences, which I now realize I need to write about in order for them to be written about, so that people who think that being Mexican would like some of this stuff, experience, is the experience of a person growing up in California who's not writing well, who's third generation, who's fully Shikana, which is a whole different thing than who's Mexican. I'm married to an extracurricular national and he's like, that's not real Mexican. This is the Shikana version and if you want to eat, that's what you're going to eat. It is a very different culture and it's one that is really like a separate beautiful, totally separate beautiful thing. And it's also a lot of things. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, as you were speaking, was it reminding me of like thinking about like the Latino writers that for me kind of like, because I, again, got the Castillo's, I read those things, I love them, but I was really desperate for stories that were coming from like a different perspective. So I wrote down here Michael Nara, I was a queer detective writer because I love detective fiction at the time, like you know, like Thomas Harris, The Science of the Landscape, we read those, I can still honor those. And so when I came across a Shikana writer writing detective fiction, I was just like, I write everything, you know, and he's the writer now and I really appreciate it. I was like, I'm watching you, but I started with poetry. Is that something that you did as well? I was just like, I felt like that was writing poetry. And that was my first, when I went to Mills to start, I went back to school when I was a little later, so my bachelor's degree, and I felt this was English and free to writing. And I started as a poet, but I was the, you know, I was in spit boy and I was, I wrote about a little less than half of all the lyrics. And so like, I was always a writer and, you know, short form, lyric writing is very similar for poetry. You can get away with a lot more lyrics though, you know, being a lot simpler. So I did, I did read a lot of poetry because I was writing a lot of it early on for sure. And I wrote a lot on the Shikana. That's what I was thinking about too. And that's funny because we both teach in, I taught on a point that you do teach in point there, which is program in community colleges and like Jimmy Santiago Baco was there constantly. And I just remember loving the narrative about Mass D'Emanenti, and he also having those kind of like, the beauty of poetry was so important for my own writing later on. As I started to think about the kind of stories I wanted to tell those, those moments of parenting, I mean, to the sea between men and friendships and stuff. So like, yeah, those, I did appreciate poetry for me on that particular department. Early on as a writer, when I started writing prose that I thought that I had to write about the urban Shikana experience, like I really, I wrote several short stories that I was trying to capture this version of me that wasn't me. And the stories never work. Well, why didn't they work? Because I just, that wasn't my experience, you know, and I, you still need to bring what you know to fiction as much as you can to render it. You can really feel really real and, and for people to connect to, even people who are different from you are going to connect when you write in a really real place, right? And we all know that. It took me a while to learn how to do that. I had to start writing memoir first before I was able to do it in fiction. Well, the, maybe this brings up the next point I wanted to bring up, which is about the experience of being artists who've taken non-traditional avenues towards the publishing that we've been doing, because I think both you and I come from different, well, similar ones, but not, we didn't go directly from high school to college, or I'm not sure if that's your experience, but what was the message of mine? To an MFA program and then writing to publishing. I got this novel, I didn't, I know it's not what you did as well. So once we did a little bit I started at City College, I was in a company, City College, San Francisco, I went to a company and dropped out after a month, collected a couple of those stamps that you gave and then dropped out. And I went back to school later. Well, I wanted to say, you know, you, you, you posed this question, but why don't you start? Because what I was thinking about was like as, as Chicanos, we, there was no other way but a non-traditional rather than a Chicano writer. I mean, there just isn't. Yeah. So what, what, how did you start out? Um, that, you know what, I came, I did a lot of like the self-publishing zine community. That was where I started. And I don't even know why I, I feel like as a, like I said, as I was a young parent, and I had, there was not a lot of community, and I was in Santa Barbara at the time. And somehow I came across a zine that was, I don't even know what it was about anymore, but it just, it just, it just gave me the opportunity to think about, um, what I wanted to do because I was, I was writing on my own, but I was never considered ever publishing anything. And, oh, you know what it was, it was hit mama. That's what it was because I was looking desperately looking for like non-traditional ways to parent my son differently than the way I was paying parented. And so it became a zine of hit mama and this other zine called the future generation. And these were all those parenting ones, but they were of course, you know, women. And so I was really wanting to try and figure out how to kind of talk about parenting my son and parenting as a father. And so that's kind of where I did it. And I just started publishing zines in that kind of, not even, and I say publishing means like the stateling and like trading and like, you know, spending $47 and printing them and making, I don't think I made zero dollars in the first like 10 years of putting up my zines and stuff. So that was kind of, and that's how I started. And from there, I mean, that's, you know, doing the hustle work of getting the zines into bookstores, tower records, I think I brought them too as well. I bought, I grew up in the tower records, bought the first 40 copies. I was like, I felt like I was a best seller. I was like, man, things are going far now, right? But yeah, that gave you access to like this kind of like, you know, alternative publishing, which also taught me about regular publishing, but it also probably because this is similar to like me writing punk lyrics and putting out punk records and having that audience, it probably gave you opportunity to practice in what could be considered shouldn't be, but what could be considered in a lower stakes way, right? Yeah. Well, it also gave me a certain like, probably fake confidence of like, I could just put it out and it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be approved by anyone. And I think there's a certain sense of like, for me, I gained a sense of like, my story, stories worth sharing with other people. Because then the best thing was that then people would, you know, give me their zines and then we'd share letters. And so it really felt like I was crafting my voice and my story on my terms as opposed to with in conversation with other people who were doing similar things. And to me, that benefit, that has been, you know, in some ways, it's now that I'm working, you know, in a little bit more of the mainstream kind of publishing world, it's actually hard to like, it's ready to go out now. It doesn't have to be approved. Let's just put it out. That's, you know, it's that conversation that's important, not necessarily the end part, because we all know we can edit and edit and edit. So in some ways, I think it did provide a sense, a sense of it's okay to not. And you didn't wait around for some Columbus to come and discover you. Yeah, exactly. There we go. That's nice. I like that, right? I said that. It's a good line. There's your feeding. And it's also one thing that's interesting too, I like to say this, because I often get asked about, you know, how I get to write, like, I, and I think that's in some ways, I was just like, I wanted to navigate because I wanted the community, but I realized for me what was important was like, I could do, I could find that community, meeting people like Michelle, doing events, readings like this, that's kind of what I felt like I needed at that time. And so that's just a nice reminder that there's not other ways that come to writing besides the MFA program, which of course, when I met tons of people who have them, Michelle included, you did one as an older student, right? Yeah, I was a returning student in Mills College. I got my MFA there. I graduated in 2001 as an undergrad. I went right back to, right back to Mills and I graduated in 2003 with an MFA in English and creative writing, and they do both. Well, it was really cool because I wanted to prepare you for, for teaching as well, because you know, they know it's hard to be a writer, but I was pregnant with my son when I was 19 now, who, when I first started the graduate program, actually I was pregnant when I graduated as an undergrad, and I had him during Thanksgiving, which feels like a major accomplishment, because I had him on Thanksgiving, basically 25 minutes after Thanksgiving, and then a week later I took him in the sling in the classroom, just nursed him after the sling for the last of your school, and then I had a month off and went right back. So I wasn't, I wasn't a young parent like Tomas, but I, I did have my son when I was in college, it was kind of a trip, you know, getting the MFA, and I did meet a lot of people, but I don't think that, I mean, the MFA did connect me somewhat, but it prepared me to teach writing, and it prepared me to be a writer to a certain extent, but the things that more prepared me to be a writer were writing groups, being in writing groups, joining literary kitchen with Ariel Gore, hit Mama, I mean, she's inspired both of us, and now the two of us are in a writing group with her, and how long have we been in the writing group for? A long time. It's been like five years or something. I mean, we've totally lost track of five or six years or something. The cool thing about writing groups, and you should all take note, you know, writers, is that it doesn't have to be a competition, you know, like what Tomas learned or what Ariel learned about where to publish and how to write the cover letter for so-and-so, or this magazine, or this magazine is looking for, you know, Latinx writers in Ariel, which turn us on to that because she heard it, because she was looking for something else. It is a community in which we can really support each other, and then we read each other's work with all of what we know in mind, and, you know, we're writing group is, you know, such a beautiful, like, non-capitalist thing that we can do, and you know, really support each other as writers, and that probably, I think all the writing group work that we've done together in the literary kitchen has been my avenues to most of my publishing, more than mail, more than, you know, the program I'm still paying for. Now, I think it's really powerful to think about, like, the how the writing group has evolved in various things that we've needed. We've seen each other more, we've seen each other the last. It's been an interesting kind of way to stay in the process of writing, particularly through, you know, obviously, all of us have come through the last year and a half since the pandemic has hit, and it's been a really nice week. Yeah, we, so about two years ago, Ariel lived back to New Mexico, and she was like, well, I guess I can't be in the writing group anymore. We're like, what about modern technology? Remember to state you went or whatever. I guess we didn't know about it. I don't remember. So she started, you know, I think we were using Facebook or something. I don't remember what we were using. FaceTime. FaceTime. We were FaceTime behind her for a while. Then the pandemic hit, and then we all had to zoom in. We figured out how we learned to use Zoom. So, right, you know, you can be in writing groups, just people all over the world now. It was really even better in a way. You know, you don't have to drop out of your writing group, if you want to say. You can do it from anywhere. You can do it from vacation. I think one of us has, yeah. Well, maybe this is a segue to the other question we wanted to talk about, because in writing groups, we've been having these conversations about how to create characters, diverse characters, Latinx characters, characters in our own stories, and so I want to show you just that conversation around our workshop, around that if you want to speak more to that one as well. Yeah, so I've been giving this talk, I'll be giving it again at Las Vegas College on May 9th, for our literary arts festival. Las Vegas College now has an annual literary arts festival. This year it'll be mostly on campus with some events online. And it's, the talk is how to write the other with our appropriation or stereotyping. And I give it to the Tribal Writers Club and they post it on their webpage and right after, like three or four other people contact me right away and ask me to give it to their writing group. And it's a talk I give to my creative writing students, because I do teach creative writing at Las Vegas College. And it's a talk, it's like a version of various things I say throughout the semester to my students. And it is a fraught topic, writing the other and you know, yes, you know, writing and made up largely so you can write anything you want, but should you is a question or when should you or why should you be on the other time when you shouldn't. And it's such a fraught topic that people really want to know more about it. Alexander Chi has a great essay on it called Writing the Other, Something Company Else. I did borrow the title a little bit. And his article is really great. He tries not to give advice. He tries to ask people to ask questions. He poses some questions. So one of, I think the most important questions that he asks is why do you need to ask yourself why do you want to write from this perspective? And do you even read writers from those backgrounds? In other words, do you know anything about people from those backgrounds, like truly, really, like real knowledge, not like I Google some shit. Not just like Google a few things, right? And so I don't know. A lot of the framing of my talk, because I'm very honest about it in the talk of what comes up is that people of color, we have to, we learn to fit in. We learn to fit into the dominant culture. So we have to become insider outsiders and observers. And so it might be easier for us to write people who are different from us, because we have to fit into all these different situations, right? And we have to observe them and figure them all out, right? And see ourselves from other people's eyes all the time, which is really, you know, kind of freaky. And so that creates tension, because then you say to white folks, if you shouldn't write from another perspective, or maybe you should be careful, that creates friction, because then people say, well, if it's just made up, can't do anything I want, it's free country, you know, on and on and on. But my professor, one of my professors at Mel, who was a visiting professor, is Leonard Chang, he writes your screen now. He said, when a student asks this very similar question about why can't I write about Japan and Japanese characters, I just love the culture so much and the girls are crying. I just sat there trying not to make a face. And he said, okay, if you're going to write about people who are really different from you, the most important thing is this, don't eff it up. And I always quote him, because I was like, oh my God, you really railed on this woman. So they had to spend a lot of time thinking about what he meant. And what he meant was, as writers, we have to take responsibility for what we put out in the world. That is our responsibility. If you put it on the page, you have to be responsible for it. And that is a lot of responsibility. And you have to take that very seriously. So that's a lot of what I've been talking about in terms of representation. And I kind of don't want to be the person to give that talk, but I feel like someone needs to do it. And I feel good that they do it in the way that's gentle and fair. And a lot of what I do talk about is something that I really, truly believe. And that is that writing is a spiritual thing for me. And that if you treat writing as an expression of our common humanity, and that is your primary goal, then what, and you want to write about people who are different from you, always come back to that. Always come back to the human body, base characters who are different from you on people who you actually know and who you actually like and bring their humanness to the page. Yeah, that's a nice one. Yeah, I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking a lot about the ways in which it is a huge responsibility. And it's always, it can be obviously a silencing one, like it's because you don't want to make mistakes. You don't want to, but you do need to find that balance between thinking you're risking trusting the story. The answer is not don't write the people of color and invisibilize them. That's not the answer. No, no, it's happy, right? So that's the, that's, and that's, you know, I'm speaking from my own experience writing characters, even in this book or in other books, it's like, it's this constant sense of like self reflection, you know, doing the work of asking best advice I always got was like, what your first choice is in terms of how someone may, let's say, react in a certain situation, then when you revise and come back to it, it's like, is that, is that the, you know, how can you push beyond your initial assumption of how something happens? Like the best bit of editing I got from someone, not this book, it was the previous book I was working on, someone said, you know, you realize that in all your female characters, when you come to get upset, they crack. And I was like, oh, is that true? No, that's not. And I had to go through it and I realized that this is so like, you know, that being upset, getting frustrated, getting angry, these are common things. Now that may be the way in which that I deal with my frustration and anger. So I just kind of put it all on top of these characters or maybe it's just something, your stereotypes I have about characters I'm trying to create. And so like asking those kind of tough questions after you've written the names or giving yourself the space to kind of create the work and then take the responsibility to do the editing. You don't need to get nutted up about it in your first draft. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You don't need, I mean, that is not what I'm, what I'm asking or expecting. And in fact, you know, that could, you know, make you, make you excited about writing. Writing is hard enough already, right? It is. It is a challenge. Oh, you want to talk a little bit about your future projects that I've had a little bit of in your, in your role. Yeah, right. So, well, my, this is published in 2016, but it just came out this year in Japan, which I'm really excited about. Isn't it pretty? And you know, your view of this way is published by a small publisher. It's called Gray Window Press in Japan. So that's very exciting. And I just, I did just finish. There's no Spanish version of this. No, there isn't. I mean, there is somebody who's trying in Spain now, but there isn't. Yeah, there should be, right? So I am working on, I'm doing the last, last, last kind of edits to the Bestopia novel called Republic of California, the one about Mexicans. My write early obsession is definitely Mexicans and punk rock. And there is a punk rock band who smuggles people out of this evil future of California in that book. And I'm also writing a textbook about a linguistic justice textbook that reframes the Freshman Composition course and tries to create a Freshman Composition course that invites the sonics of black and brown where it's able to convey this into scholarly writing in a way that is both implicit and explicit and in a way that challenges standardized editor in English or in graphical technical English. And then, yeah, I wrote a couple of treatments for screenplays. So I'm interested in screenplay writing because I just like the challenge of learning. Since I do have an MFA, like I do feel comfortable trying to learn but like I knew, I like that process of learning a new genre. How about you? What are your next projects? Do you want to? Oh no, sorry. Next projects, I'm curious about this one because I've got a couple manuscripts I've been working on, I've written lots of fun, lots of fun. I feel like I've really been trying to talk about intimacy and friendship. That's kind of where I'm trying to go with this next one. I got a story, it takes place in San Francisco in the mission and it's got an older character and it's got a young woman character and they're just kind of, they're gonna run them through, it's a month in the life of running through the mission so it should be a fine experience. I've been trying to get that nailed down. Yeah, let's go. You do have a question from YouTube. Do you want to repeat it just so they can hear it? They're asking Michelle, do you also write about the parenthood as well? They also said they love the reading suggestions and they love when authors talk about who they read and move the lists of that, but do you also write about... The question is, does Michelle also write about parenthood? You know, I have written about parenthood, in fact that's how Tomas and I, I met. He just called, emailed me and he was like, I'm Tomas Moniz and I do Rad Dad and I heard about you and like, you know, you're in a band, I wanted to know, I heard you, I know you have a child, I wanted to know if you wanted to write something for Rad Dad and so that was like one of the first parenting pieces that I wrote I think and maybe I had written something for, I've written a couple of parenting pieces for Hit Mom magazine which inspired Tomas and but you know I never wanted to, I think early on when I started writing parenting stuff, I actually resisted, even though it was a comfortable thing to do, I resisted the urge to do parenting writing because it is a thing that, like that whole moneyblower thing, like I just really kind of resisted to that and some of that is like my bougie like, you know, heart and the face, probably coming out of me, I'll be honest, you know, I think I had a little bit to do with that but I also just, I don't know, heavy, that's not really what people want. Right, and I think that's one of the reasons I asked you, and it's for me, someone I was really trying to get different voices to talk about parenting because it was such a limiting, you know, mainstream kind of like, someone who was in a band and someone who was, you know, a single parent and someone who was like clear writing, these are the stories I think I wanted to hear about as, you know, trying to be a better parent myself, but then I think I take that whole of us, I think that same type of philosophy and from the stories I'm trying to create, getting characters that are bringing different kinds of perspectives into our stories. And what I wrote about was how I already had one child, right? That was the decision I made, I'm a home child, I think that's what I wanted to write about. I think that is, right? Yeah, although I might have asked you to write about Riot Girl, but I'm a trouble when I ask that. Yeah, that's the funny story, I thought I was a Riot Girl, I wasn't really, I was in a pub band, all women, but I wasn't a Riot Girl. Right, right, my bad, I'm sorry. That's okay, that's okay, we still like to teach you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. Well, we have a few minutes left and so I'm wondering if anyone has any questions in the room or on YouTube? If people want to be suggestions of things you're reading right now. Okay, alright. Yes, I wanted to ask about, are you writing about a relate to adult children? It seems pretty popular to one of the Lord's One's parents. And so anyway, if you've heard about the parenting experience, I was wondering if you have written about that? I missed the first part about navigating adult relationships with adult children. Yeah, that's actually, no, I have not written about that recently, though clearly that's a story that should be, people should be writing about it, so write about it, I'd love to read it. I'm reading about it and I'm living it. Okay, there you go. My son is a very, very hard. So now you were saying that you, when you write, it's always better to start from your personal experience, but do you ever find yourself writing about the main character and putting your entire backstory and then realizing like, oops, this is a mirror. Or the backstories of other people. Or, you know, like, you know, the nations of different people's experiences and like turning those into like one person and combining some of my own stuff. Sure, I mean, like, a lot of my characters have different aspects of my own experiences, but not usually like the full thing, like I'll fix that, fix it on like one part of my experience will be a part of that person's back down. Because it helps you feel closer to the characters when you do that and helps you like start to understand a little more. Yeah, I agree. I do the same thing. In fact, I just like to see my little bits of my own experience or thoughts coming through the characters. That's why sometimes it's tough to have characters that you start writing, you feel that you kind of like, and then you put it in a position of trying to, you know, write characters you make four choices, right? In fact, in this book, one of the hardest things I had to deal with was a couple of scenes where the father is kind of a jerk to the daughter. I was never a jerk to my children. So to have, but to sit in that moment of like, this is a mistake, this person, I can see that this character is making a mistake and not want to write the best version of myself into like all the characters. That's actually what I really struggle with is like sitting and just like, this is a bad moment here. Exactly. With my memoir, like, you have to write, you know, it's, it's not a fiction. So it has to all be true and real, right? It has to have to actually happen. So I was writing about my band members and about me being the only person of color in the punk band. And I didn't want to spoil the band for anybody, but I did want to critique some of the relationships and I didn't want to critique punk. But I realized kind of early on that some of the stories made people sound bad and I was, I look crazy. And it took me a while to figure out like, well, I mean, I thank goodness I have an NMA because you know, one of the most important things you learn is that you have to make fully rounded characters. Even if it's a true story, the characters have to be fully rounded characters. They can be flat and everyone is flawed and you have to bring that out. And then I remember, okay, what were my flaws? What did I do in the band that was annoying? How did I participate in the friction between band members? And I had to like sit down and like make a little list, you know, that wasn't easy. Like I was like me and I could follow people around who are more confident than I was. And it's probably quiet and me and you know, stuff like that. I had to figure out what that was in order to bring that out so I can balance the depiction. A couple of zoom questions. One is, Michelle, do you have a publisher for your dystopian? I do-ish. I have someone who's interested in it and I'm really hoping that they publish it. So, you know, I think I will keep sending it out to until you know, I have made a mistake in the past for thinking that someone was going to take it and that it didn't work out or another book and then not sending it to agents in the interim. And you really should just always be querying people. You never know what's going to happen. What's going to fall through. You never know if there's going to be a pandemic or whatever. So, you should always be actively sending your work out. Even if you think you have a good thing, because maybe for some people that matters because you want to get the best deal or maybe, I think maybe in reality it's less about the best deal. Because publishing isn't super duper lucrative. I mean, unless you wrote American Dirt and that's all stereotypical, lots of people want to read, right? But you should always, you know, just be querying. It's not about so much the money, but it's, you know, just to have that life happen, things fall apart and fall through very easily. So, you shouldn't just bank on one thing. So, yeah, I think I do. I hope I do. And I think I have a good draft to share with that person. Omas, the question is how much of that is lemon water? All of it and none of it. Half of it and the other half. No, it's fiction. And it's, I mean, it's definitely borne by my choices as, you know, my experience, I should say. But I know that was part of the pleasure. And it's always the fraught nature of writing fiction is that as I started, like Michelle, doing mostly nonfiction. And so I knew, you know, what the parameters of the story were that I had to fit in, right? I had to really kind of be honest. But with fiction, it was a little bit more like, I can, I can change things. I can, I can alter the way in which certain characters that I wanted to act, but I can make them act differently. So it was, it was both liberating and a little bit frightening. And, you know, obviously there's got a lot of my experiences in it, but it's not, it's fiction. And in order to move a plot forward, often the characters do have to act differently than the way you acted in your L.A. Given that your son now has a daughter, are there any plans for Rad Granddad? Yes, I don't think they do. I want to do Rad Granddad child book, kid book. There we go, cooperation coming up. Yeah, that's great. Yes. Oh, I want to ask you about writing nonfiction. What advice did you get about protecting yourself legally from the... What advice? I mean, this book, and I talked to the publisher about it, and the publisher was like, I'm not concerned about that. There were a couple of things, and they were like, we're not concerned about that at all. You should worry about it. And I trusted them, and, you know, they have people, so they know better than I do. When you're telling your story, you'll get to be in charge of your story. And yes, it's a fraught thing when you write about real people who are part of your story. I think one of the things that happened to me early on, so I wrote a whole memoir about growing up in Swatland where I grew up, and it's not been published, but I published it all online on a blog a long time ago. And my mom read a lot of it, and my mom is the main character in it, and my mom, you know, suffered with drug addiction for many years when I was growing up. And, you know, a lot of the stories are about that, and I asked her about it once, and we had a really frank discussion. A couple of them, and finally in the final discussion, she said to me, Michelle, everything that you wrote about me and everything else totally happened, and it's totally true, and I don't want you to do anything but tell the truth. And so from my own family's perspective, they have been very, like, my family is not a secretive family, so I think I'm very lucky. I do have friends whose families are secretive, so I think that would be a different conversation. But I think I felt very lucky because I've kind of been encouraged by my family to be honest, and they, I think they, for them, it's healing, but I know that's not the case where it was still attached. Yeah. I have one thing that was funny, because as someone writing about children, like in retrospect, I apologize to my son because I don't think I asked him early on, like, you know, when I was, when I was still just figuring out how to write, and I'd write about my experiences parenting him, but, you know, without his permission to share some sort of, and at some point I realized I needed to clear whatever I was going to write and share about parenting with my children before I made it available to the public. So my daughters have all been able to be like, absolutely, if you're not telling that story. But yeah, unfortunately, my son wasn't able to get that ability, so I learned that lesson by him. Can you find a question? Yeah. Any future projects for either of you that you're working on, you're excited about? You've got your dystopian novel. I'm really excited about that, and I'm really excited about, I'm really, honestly, I'm really excited about the text. I feel like, I feel like, I'm writing it with my two colleagues, my colleague, Richard McDonough Turner and Karen Spur, and I feel like there's a lot of theory about linguistic justice in the classroom, but there is not a curriculum in the practices. And to my knowledge, this will be the first college composition, full semester of college composition essays, and what progression in the field of justice looks like in practice. So I'm really, really excited about it. Yeah, and I think I'm like I said, I've had a really good time and experience, like trying to craft a character who's aging and becoming older and letting things go and dealing with regret and remorse, but also kind of celebrating the kind of survival by getting there. So that's been, and as I'm looking down that path, I'm beginning to say, this is kind of, how do I want to each other? I want to become, you know, the grandparent that I want to be, stuff like that. So that's been my, that's my project right now. Yeah, a lot of older people write about younger people. People we really need to write about our, our elders, you know, something new, or granddad's, red granddad's, exactly. Excellent. Well, anything else from YouTube land or we can wrap it up? And I would say normally we can mingle, but I guess we don't mingle anymore. We can mingle from like, mingle from afar. Social distant mingling. I brought some zines. This is all free. They're from razor cake magazine. I did an interview with the most famous female punker in the whole world, Martin Sorendegi from Los Brudos. So the interview there, this is an interview with me from the magazine. So those are free. YouTube and Zoom are sending claps and thank you for the wonderful time. They're also wondering if the publisher can attend the workshop on writing about the other. I'm going to publisher attend the writing. Yes, go to the Las Vegas College website and it's a nice lit festival and you'll find out more information about the lit festival. I believe that my talk is going to be going on. All right. Thank you so much everyone. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you so much for being here.