 Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute at 57th Post Street in San Francisco. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events, and we're very pleased to welcome you for the first of our Rising Writers Series, Co-Curated by Theodore Joya. Before we begin, I'd like to mention, if you are new to the Institute, please come back on Wednesday at noon and take the free tour of our library, which is on the second and third floors. We have the International Chess Club, which is right down the hallway, and you'll get an introduction to our various programs, which include author events like this one. We have a Cinema Lit Film Series every Friday night. The library hosts a variety of book clubs and also writers programs. And of course, the chess club has ongoing chess classes and tournaments. So we hope that you'll come back, take a tour, become a member, and become part of our ever-growing and vital cultural family here at the Mechanics Institute. So it is my pleasure, of course, to introduce and welcome Ingrid Roja Contreras and Elaine Castillo, who will be in conversation with Carolina de Robertis. First, I'd like to introduce our co-curator, Theodore Joya. Ted is a critic living in San Francisco, and his work has appeared in The Believer, The American Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books, It's That Nice, and Virginia Quarterly Review. The mic just went out. He's currently, are we still on? Are we on? Uh-huh. Yes. Okay. Continuing the bio. Ted is currently writing a book of essays about the evolution of California culture framed through food and art. Oh, two good combinations. Ted is also the former partnerships director of McSweeney's and the curator of the Rising Writers series here at the Mechanics Institute, as I just mentioned. And he is also the founder of the upcoming site Forktong, interviewing food critics on the future of food writing. All right. Well, that's a delicious introduction. So welcome, Ted Joya. Can you all hear me? Hello. Welcome to the first reading in the Rising Writers series at the Mechanics Institute. It's a pleasure to have you all here tonight. My name is Ted Joya. I'm a critic in San Francisco and the curator of the series. The seat for this series began when I first came to San Francisco, and a friend of mine told me that young writers don't live in the Bay Area anymore. That seemed to be the popular opinion. And I came to Laura for the idea for the series because I was dissatisfied with this conventional wisdom and dissatisfied with the way that so many people seem to talk about the Bay Area literary landscape today. So much talk is focused on the past. When people think of San Francisco fiction, they think of the 1950s and the Beats and 2000s and Dave Eggers or some New Yorker vacationing in Palo Alto for a month and writing their caricature novel of Silicon Valley. But nothing, nothing about what it actually means to be a writer, to be a young writer today on the ground in the Bay Area, not 1955, not 2002, but right now in 2019. Right now is actually a compelling, exhilarating literary moment. We've just seen a boom of great first novels by diverse authors in our very own backyard. But it's a moment that goes under discussed too often. And we hope this series can be a forum to explore this question by offering a stage for emerging authors to have that real talk about the issues, anxieties, and inspirations that matter to young writers in California today. One of the problems is California literature defies easy classification. There's no Philip Roth of San Francisco or John Updike of Oakland whose voice defines the area zeitgeist. There's no one voice, there are many voices. And that's why we're here tonight. Because in a strange way, perhaps there's no better representation of the California novelist in 2019, the future of the California novelist than our two speakers this evening, Elaine Castillo and Ingrid Rojas-Contreras. Last year, both published their first novel to critical acclaim, Elaine's novel, America's Not the Heart, was named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many more. And also is probably one of the best opening paragraphs I've read in years. Ingrid's novel, Fruit of the Dunkin' Tree is a national bestseller, was named a New York Times editor's choice, and garnered that most elusive accolade, an interview with Seth Meyers. The conversation will be moderated by the incomparable Carolina D. Robertus, the author of three novels, The Gods of Tango, Perla, and the editor of the collection Radical Hope, Letters of Love and Descent in A Dangerous Time. She's a celebrated translator and one of the Bay Area's most prominent critics and cultural instigators. Named in 2017 by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is one of the top 100 people that are shaping the future of culture. So it's my great pleasure to hand the stage over to Carolina and let the, I'll get out of the way and let you guys talk. Thank you so much, Ted. Thank you, Ted, for that incredibly kind of generous introduction. Thank you so much, Ingrid and Elaine, for being here with me. I can't wait. I'm so excited about this conversation. And I think you both know this already, but I feel extremely passionate about both of these books. And it's been so exciting to swim through them and think about them and have excited conversations with them, about them, and now we can bring it. Here to this stage and to all of these people, every single one of you, thank you so much for coming out here tonight and joining us for this exchange and dialogue and conversation where we can really chop it up and riff about all things. Writing, literature, and Bay Area culture and beyond. Thank you also to the Mechanics Institute for hosting this. There will be time for questions from the audience later in this program. So feel free to start percolating. I notice when that gets said, then people actually percolate and come with those questions. So bring them, let them rise to the top. So, Elena Ingrid, I wonder if we could maybe begin in a place that is maybe a common place to begin in conversations about novels, but certainly something people want to know about, which is like the seed, the beginning, the burning thing that brought you to this book. And I'll maybe frame the question a little more broadly by thinking about one of the things that's meaningful to me as a novelist that I always return to is the great Toni Morrison saying that I'm not a novelist. Saying that novels are inquiries, but they begin with an urgent question. Something that we want to explore, perhaps not answer, but at least dive through and explore. If that resonates for you, what burning questions started this journey? And how did it evolve for you? And you can maybe take turns talking about that. I mean, I think for me initially, well, it started with inquiry and it started with failure in that I had written a completely different book and shelved it, I always say for the good of all humanity. And after that, I think, started writing what became the prologue. So what is still the prologue. So the first words I wrote of the book are still the prologue of the book. But at that point, I thought it was gonna be a completely different book. I thought it was a book that was going to be really mainly set in the kind of 90s Bay Area, told from the perspective of either the woman who tells the perspective of the prologue or a different character. And all of those pages that I wrote were just dead in the water, had no voice to them, had no sort of life in them. And I think it was only, talking about seeds, it was only thinking about a seed for an idea about a story that I'd had, I think years and years ago, sort of maybe when I was in college that came from stories that my dad had told about a cousin who was in the New People's Army, which is the armed wing of the Communist Party in the Philippines. A cousin I'd never met and still haven't met. So I don't know anything about the character in the book, it's not based on her. But these sort of stories of hiding her when the Philippine Army was looking for her. So I think I was just talking to someone about that and thinking more to your point about the question. I think the question might have been sort of if I had known, if I followed that sort of like sort of tantalizing thread or that seed, who would that person be? Or what would that story be? So I think that initially is how the sort of book came alive then. I was thinking, I was a new immigrant to this country and I think I was thinking about how to be as a person. I didn't understand how all the stories that had happened to me before coming, how they could fit into my life here. I think I started to have this experience of going through my days and growing through my life and then having those days of trying to understand my surroundings, being interrupted by these flashbacks of either just traumatic moments or moments of leaving or these very intense sensory moments of what living in Columbia was like. And I think it started to happen the same with the writing where maybe I sat down and I was intending to not write a story about Columbia. And I wanted to write something that wasn't that because it was so much of my lived experience. But it started to happen in the same way where what I was trying to write would get interrupted by these flashbacks. And I think the novel was born in that way. That I was resisting it consistently for many years and it just kept kind of coming and coming and coming until I said, fine, I will write the story. Yeah, so it just kind of, that's the burning, right? The burning part of the burning question, like it kicks something back, it keeps wanting to be there. And I think that's a really interesting thing because it makes you think about a strand that feels like it connects your books. And a lot of immigrant fiction, fiction either by or and or about immigrant characters by immigrants or about immigrant characters or both is that in both books there's very much this feeling that the relationship to setting is so vast and sweeping even when the character is in one place. Like Hiroshima is in the United States. She's in California for a lot of this time. Through memory, we go back to the Philippines, right? Into these like the intrusive memories of her experience with the New People's Army. And then in your book as well, Ingrid, we have an immigrant and then we open in the United States. But then there's this long and this is the journey in Colombia for you to really understand what it is for her to be here today, right? So there's this feeling that the characters carry multiple countries inside their skin, right? There's multiple countries inside one character. How was that for you to create, to portray, to bring sort of like multiple settings into one narrative thread? I mean, I think to some extent it has to be natural because it's also the kind of context that you grow up in. I mean, for certainly that's true for me. I think it's not remarkable to me because that's my normal, I think. In that sense, to grow up with parents who each spoke their own language and then spoke another Filipino language to each other and then have that mixed with English that all of that would sort of exist on the same plane and not be sort of remarkable in any way. And that's an American reality. And I think it's more to the point that we have to sort of expand our notion of what sort of American fiction looks like, what cities are in American fiction that they might not always be American cities because that's not true of all Americans or the people who are living here that we just sort of live sort of unilaterally in this space. And also, I think so much of when we write about setting, I think what's difficult about writing about setting is that oftentimes, especially in diaspora, there are often sort of really big breaks that happen and then people never go back. Yeah, I mean, certainly, I experienced that with my family that there were some members, I knew there were members sort of in the community who I often knew were middle class or our upper middle class, people who could go back to the Philippines regularly. But that was just not a reality for my family, for a lot of people I knew it was sort of like, I mean, I think my mom maybe went back to the Philippines twice in my lifetime until recently where she started going back more. So that sense of a country being completely inside of you but also completely broken away from you and having to toggle what that means is something that I've completely sort of cut out of my life. But obviously you haven't. So sort of I think living in that kind of ultimately hauntedness is how those sort of stories sort of sort of surge out I think of people and then ultimately a fiction too. And you really portrayed on a very intimate level. I mean, I'm not on the linguistic level because your book really is quadrilingual. I mean, you have English, people are speaking Tagalog, people are speaking Ilocano, Pagasinan, right? And you have all these languages. That's a good accent there. Thank you. Well, I mean, and these languages, you know, like exist and sing and speak within the book and that is reflective of these people's lives, this California story, right? And you also write very intimately. I appreciate the intimacy with what it is to switch between languages, to be outside of the language that is actually from your country and people in your family and the different, you know, the intimacy that is a relationship to language, right? Yeah, well, because, I mean, I think people often think, well, all of these non-English languages are foreign only to us, sort of white readers or whatever. But a lot of the languages are also foreign to diasporic Filipino kids. Like a lot of like Filipinx kids don't necessarily speak the Tagalog fluently. I don't. I understand quite a lot of it. And I think if you got me drunk, I would start to speak more of it. But that is the kind of inhibitions go away. And then suddenly, oh yeah, I'm fluent. I just quit after a couple of hard drinks. I just quit English. Something happens. But English is like, nope. Nope. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gone. Yeah. Even to be the who. Juck that. But anyway, please go on. No, but it's, and it's true. So I think for me, it's important to put all of those languages in there also untranslated with gaps because that's just how that community sounds, you know. Well, even on a craft level, I think that makes me think, you know, what I say with students at San Francisco State, right, is that our formal decisions, like, the books are formally innovative in ways that I hope we can touch on. But the formal decisions we make about structure, technique, even style, are at their most powerful when form mirrors content, right? And so, you know, the formal experience of hearing ilocano from the character's mouth and not knowing what it means, that actually reflects the experiences of some of the people in the book, right, who are not on the inside of those languages, even though they're also Filipino. Yeah. I mean, it's very rarely sort of described as a formal choice. Yeah. But actually, this is going to go back to the question that I was going to ask you when we were talking about, like, writing and sort of, I often think, like, writers of color are very rarely asked about formal choices or that use of language is very rarely sort of framed as an artistic choice. Yes. Like, it's always sort of, well, I guess, you know, you want it to be exotic and you're really alienating as a reader. Yes. And it's like, no, that's ultimately part of the art that you're trying to create as well. You're making a formally innovative decision that is reflective of the characters' inner lives and creating nuance and sophistication and an aesthetic experience. Yeah. So you're our first, you know. Ingrid? I had a different experience. I think, you know, my, I was the first immigrant. So I didn't have parents that had, that were living here. And I was just living here on my own. And I was calling back home. And I think the language experience that I went through was very compartmentalized. So that with my family, I spoke Spanish. And then here I spoke English. And I think that I was overjoyed whenever I could meet someone that spoke both. And I think that I got just very excited through just texting with them. But there was, there's all these literary observations that I remember making. I think at some point I was texting someone like, ha, ha, ha. But it was ha, ha, ha. And then it just became j-a, j-a, which is really nice. We write it, ha, ha, ha. Which is funny. But I was trying to say, like, it was the laugh that started in English and then ended in Spanish. Right. And I think those kinds of ways of being in language are so important. But I, and I loved those. But I think for me, in my life, in my day-to-day, it was more just separate experiences. And then noticing how strange my Spanish was becoming to my parents because I was more using English from day-to-day. And so they started calling me like, oh, but you're American now. And it was just that strain of just not using one language more and what that does and how it kind of becomes this third, like, bastard thing. So I think in my book, I was interested in that, too, in just how this, maybe there's a possibility for both languages to kind of become one or echo one another or just make it ungrammatical a little bit so that it can sound more like what I feel like it should sound, which is Spanish. And then you also have two primary voices. The book is told in two voices. It goes back and forth between them. And these are two people with very different life experiences, both living in Colombia and separated by class and other aspects of their life experience. And so I see you also making back to formal choices around language, like syntactical choices in those voices and how you kind of carry them forward. Can you talk about that, like how you brought those voices to life on a sentence level? Because it's very deeply felt. Thank you. With, so there's one character, Chula, who is, she comes as a refugee to the US. And when I was writing her voice, I was just translating in my head. So I would hear her in Spanish. And then I would type it in English. So I was just directly just translating her voice. And with Petrana, who's the other character, and she stays in Colombia, and she's not able to leave kind of like the traumatic situation that tears these two characters apart. Her chapters I had to actually write in Spanish. Because I couldn't, what was going on with her language was somehow I wasn't getting a handle on it enough that I could translate it immediately. And maybe they were too intense. And maybe I needed to hear them in Spanish first and then figure out how they would sound in English. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, even on the formal level, think about that Petrana is the one who doesn't get out. So she never actually comes to exist in English, unlike she did, right? So in a way, it sort of makes sense that she would be created within the Spanish only context of your writing space, inner writing space. That does make sense now that you mentioned it. Thank you. They're just thinking about that in future interviews. But that's the interesting thing, too, about creating a novel is that process isn't always conscious. Is that sometimes you make process decisions. And then later, when the book is already physically here and you're up on a stage in front of some lovely people, you can go, oh, maybe that is why I did that and what it allowed me to open. But we sort of follow our instincts sometimes. There's a balance between I set out intentionally to use multiple points of view because I want this to be polyphonic, because I want it to portray a broad spectrum. And sometimes we don't know why. We just know that all of a sudden we're needing to write in another voice. So maybe you could speak to how that happened for you in terms of were there parts of your process in finding the structure or the approach for making this book happen that were unconscious or you're kind of feeling your way in the dark? Were there parts that you were intentional about from early on? I mean, I definitely did not set out to write a polyphonic book. I wanted to write a very uniphonic book, only that voice, that fun just didn't work out. So I think ultimately what I probably discovered writing this book, I don't know if it's gonna be the same for the next book, is that I have to write just a lot. Basically, I think I have to write the world, which is to say I have to write seemingly the background detail to the grandma detail of the most minute side character so that I know what that world is like, so I know who those people are. And then once I've written that world, then start finding the book that's in it. I hope that that's not always how I have to write because it takes a while and you do lose a lot. I mean, there's a lot of sort of, I mean, I think I wasn't printing it out, but there would have been a lot of reams of paper being yeah, sort of recycled. But so I think that's one part of it, sort of feeling that I had to go to the macro in order to find the micro. But I think also, I think sort of figuring out what voice or what perspective I was going to write the book from. Because I thought, initially I thought I was gonna write the book from the perspective of a character that I autobiographically share a lot of detail with. So I thought I would be very close to this character and sort of somewhat naively thought I would be able to capture that voice. I had no idea what she sounded like. I had no idea how to write from her perspective. And I think it was only when I started writing from the perspective of someone that I actually found really uncomfortable to write from, that I, you know, from a class background why I had no interest in telling her story, didn't want to tell a story about someone who grew up in that type of privilege in the Philippines. But I think that's, I think another thing that I discovered is that that type of discomfort, that type of uneasiness is actually what gave me the kind of freedom to move around. And I don't know if that will always continue to be the case. I just have to figure out characters that I don't want to write about. And then apparently I'll bust out a novel from that. But that's how it worked for this one. Yeah. Just maybe the assumption that writers really write from themselves or are really writing about themselves and characters or that writers should write what they know, what they've experienced themselves and kind of stay in their lane. Do you think that that assumption is stronger for writers of color? Oh, for sure. Oh, 1,000% for sure. Yeah. Wouldn't mean that to be a leading, leading question. You can't be like, you know, I mean. There was really no other answer cut out from that. But I mean, we know this, you know, sort of like white middle-class writers who write about themselves. It's like, wow, groundbreaking, sort of mixing, I bought like mixing forms. It's like auto fiction. It's a new genre. And it's like Maxine Hong Kingston has been mixing autobiography and fiction in ways. And you know, it's just immigrant literature. You know, she's not given the kind of like formal or sort of accolades that, I mean, she is. But I mean, I don't think that the sort of long history of thinking about autobiography and fiction is sort of valorized in our sort of mainstream literary discourse when it comes to writers of color, ultimately probably because we don't value the autobiographies of writers of color. Because when we think about sort of immigrant lives or immigrant narrative, that kind of genre, it's like, well, there's a way of thinking about that, that it's just sort of like, wow, it's not art, you know, that's not, it's not art if you're talking about, you know, a community of Filipinos in the Bay Area. It's art falling in love or, you know, sort of recovering from trauma. It's art if they're all sort of middle-class and in Brooklyn. Then we're really talking, we're getting at the sort of universal condition. And I think it's that, it's that sort of, that our, the posity of our discourse to imagine that people who are not white have universal sort of experiences and also that we should pop, that we really need to dismantle the idea that the universal or the neutral is something that exists. Like these are only categories that really exist to maintain, you know, a certain sort of community as, you know, those are the stories that we all have to consume and, you know, it's just not the case. Yeah. And then there's a layer of queer narratives too, or queer-centered, right? Sure. Protagonists who have that in some aspect of their journey. Sure, yeah. I mean, I mean, you know, the main character in the book is bi and falls in love with a woman in the book and it was important for me to have a queer narrative that was also, I think different from the queer narratives that I'd grown up on growing up because I'm also bi and wanted to see more bi women and especially bi women of color in fiction. But a lot of those narratives were ultimately either white queer narratives or in particular, I think urban queer narratives. And I think there was a lack of, you know, there's a trajectory that it's like, if you come from the suburbs or from rural provinces, you have to go to the city in order to be sort of fully actualized. And that narrative is also true in my life. So I don't have anything against that narrative, but I also know it's certainly not the only queer narrative that I saw growing up in sort of queer people. And I think it was also interesting for me to think about that kind of intersection between, okay, maybe you're queer, but then you're also undocumented and you are sort of dependent upon the benevolence of your family in order to survive. So you can't just go to San Francisco or like find yourself in San Francisco or in LA because like you don't have papers. Like there are huge others sort of factors involved in sort of shaping what you're trying to build as a life. So I think thinking about those types of queer narratives was important for me. But also bringing those layers together into a completely human personal intimate story, right? That's what makes fall in love, so. Yeah, yeah. You could really enter in any of these many points that we've kind of brought to the surface. You could rather than repeat the questions and say like where do you want to jump in to all of that, any of that? Let's see, wow, that was a lot said. I think when I was crafting this book, I was also thinking about stories that I wasn't hearing. And I think that there's, in Colombia in particular, there's, when the two classes, there's like even between like low middle class and just below poverty level families, the experience is so vastly different. Whereas people in Bogota who are low middle class will say that the city is safe and that there's no violence going on. And they will say things like come to Bogota and visit. Like we'll show you a great time, it's safe here. And then someone who has maybe been displaced and lives in these settlements in Bogota will actually see their families murdered either by the police, by the government police or by kind of guerrilla members or paramilitary. And there's a lot of violence that they experience. And I wasn't hearing that. I wasn't hearing that story at all. And the other story that I wasn't hearing is, in the US we pay so much attention to the immigrant story. Like the person who came and where did they come from and what happened. And I was also interested in the story of someone who actually couldn't leave. And what was it that made it impossible for them to leave. So I was also interested in looking at those structures in place so that we essentially people who can become an immigrant have a combination of luck and privilege and people who are not able to leave. What are those obstacles in place? And what is it that is kind of impeding them from just leaving an unsafe situation? But I also wanted to say about this, maybe until readers like stop seeing kind of these stories as exotic and just more as see the universality in these stories. And then I think that that will bring, or yeah, that maybe we'll start to get more formal questions about more craft questions. More craft questions. Yes, yes, absolutely. I wonder whether you would each read us just a snippet of a paragraph, a page so we can hear the voices of the books. And so we've been talking so much about the style and all the exquisite things happening on the sentence level that we can just get a taste. Sure, and then we'll keep talking. I'm gonna read from the first, just the first page. Okay, so this is from Chula's point of view. So she's the one that is able to come to the US. The photograph. She sits in a plastic chair in front of a brick wall, slouching. She is meek with her hair parted down the middle. There are almost no lips to be seen, but by the way she bears her teeth, you can tell she is smiling. At first, the smile seems flat, but the more I study it, the more it seems careless and irresponsible. There is a bundle in her arms and a hole for the newborn's face, which comes out red and wrinkled like an old person's. I know it's a boy because of the blue ribbon woven into the blanket edge. Then I stare at the man behind Petrona. He is off-road and striking, weighing his cursed hand on her shoulder. I know what he's done. And it turns my stomach, but who am I to say who Petrona should allow into a family portrait such as this? On the back, there's a date stamp of when the photo was printed. And because when I count back nine months, it falls exactly in the month my family and I fled from Columbia and arrived in LA. I turned back the photograph to look intently at the baby to register every wrinkle and bulge around the dark hole of his gaping mouth to decide whether he is crying or laughing because I know exactly where and how he was conceived. And that's how I lose track of time, thinking it was my fault that the girl Petrona was just 15 when her belly was filled with bones. And when Mama comes back from work, she does not yell, even though she sees the photograph, the envelope, the letter from Petrona all addressed to me. No, Mama sits down next to me like taking off so much weight. And together, we are quiet and sorry on our dirty stoop on Via Corona in East LA, staring at that fucking photograph. Thank you. I'm gonna read. You guys can help me. I was gonna read, I was thinking of reading something from the first page, but then I was also thinking of reading something that I've never read before that has more dialogue in it if I can find it. I mean, it might be first page just because of... So what are we thinking, dialogue or first page? The dialogue, baby. This is a choose your own adventure. Ted did kind of put out that teaser about the amazing first opening paragraph. Oh, that's right. But that's also a teaser people could follow up on. Look forward to being disappointed, I'm just kidding. Ted, this is on you. So you're a girl and you're poor, but at least you're light skinned. That'll save you. You're the second eldest child and the second eldest daughter of a family of six children and your parents are subsistence farmers. Your mom sells vegetables at the local market and when that doesn't make enough food to put food on the table, you sell fruit and beans by the side of the road. That is until your father manages to get a job working as a clerk for the American military in Guam where he acquires a mistress and regularly sends money back to the family, the latter gesture absolving the first. He returns every three years for a visit which is why you and nearly all your siblings are three, six, or nine years apart in age. On those rare visits, you treat him with rudeness out of loyalty to your mother who neither thanks nor acknowledges your efforts or, for that matter, your existence. Exima ridden you at eight, hungry adolescent you at 12, all your early ragged versions. When you're old enough to know better but not old enough to actually stop talking back to him, your father will remind you, usually by throwing a chair at your head, that the only reason you're able to attend nursing school is because of his army dollars. It's your first introduction to debt, to Utang Naloog, the long drawn out torch song of filial loyalty. But when it comes to genres, you prefer a heist. Take the money and run. Growing up, everyone says you're stupid, you're clumsy, you get into at least one fight a week and even your light skin, while universally covetable, is suspicious. Your father often accuses your mother of having taken up with a Chinese merchant or Japanese soldier or a T-Soy businessman while he was away. Did that happen? You don't know. Is that unknown man your father? You don't know. If it happened, was it your mother's choice? Was it an affair? Or was it a case of a word you won't say? Can't think. A word that drifts like smog through your life and the lives of all the women around you. You don't know. Looking at your own face doesn't tell you. There isn't anyone you can ask. When you're hungry, sometimes you go out into the fields and stick your stumpy arm down the pock marks on the earth where tiny dacoal crabs like to scurry away and hide, your fingers grasping for the serrated edge of the shell. Some days you collect enough to carry home for your mother to steam, using the lower half of your shirt as a basket, but sometimes you can't wait, yanking one out by the leg and dashing it on the ground to stun it than eating the whole thing right there, live and raw, spitting out bits of calcium. Sometimes instead of a crab, you pull out a wiggling frog, but most of the time you throw those away, wash them, hop to safety. On good days, on the days when there are no crabs, no frogs, not even a weak snake, you go around picking deca-grass, the kind that farmers usually feed their horses. You sell makeshift bundles of them by the side of the road alongside the mangoes and the chico. On good days, the deca-grass sells so well, you produce a little side economy that gives you enough money to buy some chocolate, maybe the latest issue of hibagga so you can catch up on your comics. Even though at the end of every one, you have to read the most hateful words you'll ever encounter in any language. Abangan ng susunod na kabanata. I'm gonna look out for the next chapter. Hmm. Hmm. Both so stunning and you both read openings, which of course have the pressure of holding the DNA of the book as well as like pulling the reader in and just even thinking on craft level, opening with a photograph for you in grid. We have this character who is already away from Columbia, looking at the photograph of the person who stayed. So by having these people with this enormous geographic distance, you create an intimacy because she's looking at a picture of her and yet you simultaneously establish that sense of distance because it's the photograph and the person herself is now unreachable. So you're, you know, it's that formerist content, right? You're like building all of that in with just this very simple image and then of course putting in all these hooks of narrative tension, well what is it that this person has done and how did her belly fill with bones and what is the story, right? So plunging us right in and then with you Elaine, the use of the second person, right? The you address, right? Just it has an immediacy to it so complete that the reader is just like forced directly into the consciousness of a person whose life experience they may not share but it's like really deep, right? And then you have this, that metaphor about, you know, the what surrounds women like Fogg, you know, like that image for sexual assault. This is like the strongest metaphors are not only beautiful but also precise, right? And the precision of that is just right in there. Wouldn't you agree? So on craft, another question about craft. As you were writing, what are some of the books that accompanied you? What are some of the books that inspired you? What were you reading either before working on the book or while writing on the book that sparked things for you that opened things up? How did you meld your reading life with your writing life? I think for me, I would say the book that inspired me the most was The God of Small Things by Arun Dathirai. I was so thrilled when I read this book and I think when I read it, I was maybe just a little bit into the novel. I didn't have a full draft yet but I remember reading it and just being so moved by how political it was, how much kind of like historical things that were in the book and how it was that, like the kind of the violence of war, the violence of kind of like an unsettled country with, paired with the innocence of two siblings going through it together. It just, it thrilled me so much. And in a way that I remember like reaching the end of, the very end of the book and then just like turning to the first page again. Like it was that kind of book for me. I was also reading The Old Order by Catherine Amporter. And what else was that? I was reading so much but I think when I was really working on the book, I'd stayed away from many novels and I was reading instead a lot of non-fiction. But yeah, those are some of the, I think most important influences. I mean, I think the book that I probably read, I mean, I read it constantly, I read it and reread it constantly and I'm sure I was reading it. And is Jamaica Concades Lucy? I don't know if people have read that. Yes. I feel like that book, I mean, I would love to have written a spare novella in that, I mean, I feel like that's still the kind of lighthouse for me. Obviously I failed completely. On the slimness. Only on the slimness did you fail. I mean, I think that book, I don't even remember now when I read it or when I started reading Jamaica Concades work but all of her work, Lucy and John, a autobiography of my mother is killer. At the bottom of the river, I'm just like, oh my God. But Lucy in particular I think is one of those that struck a chord. Because I mean, especially I think reading it now, I think I always am so just stunned by her prose, so how she works formally. It's a very spare novella, the kind of precision, the lucidity of her language and then also how sort of prescient and funny and sharp and desperately sad also that book. And angry, I think Jamaica Concades often called angry in a way that is very loaded, obviously for obvious reasons. But there is I think an unapologetic anger in that book in a way that I think for me was incredibly refreshing, sort of I think in a way bracing and I think enervating to see. Cause it's a book that, I think when was it written? Something like 90, I think it was like late 80s, early 90s. And it's incredibly sort of present about for example. Like the relationship between this sort of West Indian au pair and her white employer, sort of it brings out so many sort of scenes that are still delicious about sort of like white feminism and sort of, I mean I think the current sort of like that Elizabeth Warren thing about like, she thinks, thinking that she's like partnated. That also occurs in Lucy. There are all of these sort of incredible sort of moments that for me and I think with every year that I read it, like it almost becomes more and more alive to me. And I think in particular it's just a great, I think one of our best books about female freedom ultimately, I think it's one of our really about a woman and who is also a woman of color, who's also an immigrant, trying to make herself as a person. What that constitutes, like finding people to like fuck, to fall in love with, not really to have a relationship with your mother sort of, the kind of sort of that sort of staggering towards what it is to make a life. And I think for that I think I always return to that book again and again. Part of what you're saying too is the rereading, right? Once you have a relationship to like that with a book returning every time, bring something as writers. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. So part of this series is Rising Writers, California Writers, we're here in the Bay Area and very much in this very rich literary space and community despite what it appears some people seem to be saying, right? It's sort of the thing you can say about what it means to you to be a Bay Area writer or like a California writer if you want, but I'm thinking about like a Bay Area writer in terms of community and working on your book here or living here while launching your book, like just being part of the texture of this place culturally, geographically, just kind of wherever you want to take it. I think we've had such an amazing year, like I love our year. There were so many amazing Bay Area books. Lidia Kiesling, who's I think the, yeah, a coming, she's gonna be here doing a talk. Arruquan, Tommy Orange, there was just like so many amazing books. But prior to that moment, I remember kind of like writing the book and just feeling like I could barely figure out how to stay here. Yeah. There's a lot of effort into, you know, how do I figure out housing and how does that all work out? But it feels so that, yeah, so that's a reality of being a Bay Area writer and just the tension of trying to lead and have an artistic life here when that is maybe not supported by the city as much. And, you know, that paired with kind of the richness that we do have as a community. Yeah. So there's a tension between that very real cultural vitality and the financial reality. And we've also lost so many people through the eight years. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, when I was writing the book, I wasn't living in the Bay Area. I wrote, I was living, I had been out of the Bay Area for about eight and a half years. I was living in London or in England for a long time. And just came back, I came back, I think I came back a month before the book launched, which was, I mean, a lot was happening in that springtime. So coming back to the Bay Area after being away for so long, coming back to sort of my family and community and also coming back to a Bay Area that had changed profoundly. And I'd been back a couple of times. I hadn't been back loads because plane tickets. But it was an entirely different experience being, like I lived in Lupitas, the town I grew up in and the town where the majority of the book takes place. And Lupitas is a town I would have never thought would be in a way gentrified. I was just like, it's always a kind of, ultimately like Filipino, Mexican, Vietnamese town that I sort of, I was like, there's no way, like Lupitas is ever gonna be cool. Like there's a giant landfill. It always smells like shit. Like no one wants to live here. It's not a desirable place to live. And yet, when I came back and sort of was like, oh, well, let's look at, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like if I didn't just spend, like live in perpetuity with my mom, which obviously she would love, what would like red be like here? I was like, what happened to Lupitas? So that, I think, was certainly a shock. But I think, I do feel very much a Bay Area writer. I felt a Bay Area writer even when I was living outside of the Bay Area. I feel very much a South Bay Area writer as well. I feel, and there really are sort of, I think I do feel sort of regional differences. I mean, you know, I grew up in a town like, we didn't have a bookstore. You know, we didn't have any bookstores or chain bookstores. I think we got a chain, I think we got a borders maybe when I was like late in high school. But growing up, it was like library or Goodwill. So there also wasn't a huge sort of widespread reading or literary culture. And yet I did feel like I grew up around a lot of people who were artistic in temperament or were artistic in loads of ways, in ways that maybe the practicalities of their lives didn't allow them to then sort of play out. But I think, for me, I think that's probably the way I sort of think about the Bay Area is also thinking about the kind of Bay Areas that we don't see. My dad worked as a security guard for like a computer chip company. So that's the tech Bay Area. And we see a lot of, that's a Bay Area that we see a lot of. We don't see a lot of the people who are technicians working on the technician floor or the manufacturing floor for those companies or working the nurses. My mom was a nurse, like many Filipino women are nurses. This sort of class of people in the Bay Area, I think we get less shine on. So I think that's my Bay Area, at least. So bringing that to center and plumbing consciousness through fiction of such characters is a really powerful fact. I think assuming that it's center, I think I was spoiled by the fact that I grew up in a town like Mopedis. I was never a minority in Mopedis. It was always a majority minority town. Like it was always, I think something now is like 60-something percent sort of non-white town and sort of like, I think there was maybe one white kid in our class. So I never had the sense that- That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, and yeah. But I never had the sense that like, what I grew up with was not normal. That what I grew up with was not American. So I think it was only, I think it was only, I think at some point in middle school where I, you know, my parents were like, we're gonna be aspirational middle class. You're going to this Catholic school. And then I was like, oh, like, and even that school in the peninsula, I think it was maybe like half white. So that, you know, by standards now, we would say that that school is super diverse. But I remember thinking I was like, there's loads of white people, what? I've never been to rat. Like it was my first encounter with white people, I think ever. So I think for, you know, I think, but what that allowed me is not, you know, not having a kind of knee jerk sense that I have to pander for an audience that I think that I've been taught to assume is universal. Because that audience is not the universal audience to me. The audience that I think of is the audience, like the one that I grew up in. And I would love for, you know, more American fiction to sound like that. Like it doesn't assume that particular audience. Yeah. Absolutely. So moving to questions from the audience. We're ready. Thank you so much to you both for all of those amazing thoughts. And we are continuing the conversation with questions from the audience. So who would like to, there's a mic, I think. Microphone is here. Maybe. Wave and we will give you the mic. Passive voice. The mic shall be given to you. Thanks to both of you for coming in. Just sharing your two novels. So question to you, Elaine, actually. I'm curious about two things. The first I already forgot. So let's go ahead and start with the second question, which is, what role did you have in terms of deciding the title that corresponds slightly with Carlos Bolosan's novel? I mean, initially, the story I always tell is that initially it just started out as a joke, which is, I mean, it is a reference to Carlos Bolosan's America is in the heart, a kind of seminal Filipino text about sort of the experience of largely Filipino and Mexican laborers in the West Coast in the 1930s. And I think whenever I heard America is in the heart, I would always just hear like, America isn't the heart, especially if it was spoken in a Filipino accent. So I think it was always a joke to myself. I was like, I'll have a short story one day that'll be called that. And that is why the last chapter still has the conjunction. So I think it started out as a joke, but ultimately it is a conversation in some way an argument against that book. It's a book that means the world to me. It's also the first book that I ever saw. Rural, like poor Filipinos from Pancasinan. And my mom is from Pancasinan. I never, you know, the descriptions that Bolosan has about his mom or the kind of, you know, the market selling sort of beans at market and being looked down on by upper class Filipinos, that story could have come out of my grandma's mouth. And I'd never seen that in fiction. So the shock of recognition was very alive for me there. But you know, there's also, I think a huge sort of sense of misogyny in that book that is less sort of critiqued and needs to be sort of engaged with when we talk about his legacy. I mean, I don't know if you know, but the America's in the Heart is coming out and is being reissued by Penguin Classics in the spring. And I was lucky enough to write the foreword for it. And so that's, I was, you know, if you get the chance to, you know. So you checked Carlos Bolosan through the grave. I checked him through the grave. Fantastic. I was like, listen. I didn't talk about writers in conversation, right? It's very easy to drag someone who's dead. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So both writers, I finally remembered what my first question was, which is the term immigrant fiction. What role did the two of you have in terms of using that term because I've never heard it before? Too much about what the terms are put around the novel. I know some writers are very sensitive about it. Like they don't want to be called a feminist writer, like a woman writer, a Colombian writer. I don't mind any of those because I feel like I am those things. Like I am feminist, Colombian, now Colombian-American immigrant writer. Like I, you know, just put all those labels and then just say novel. And then, and I'm okay with that, yeah. Yeah, I feel the exact same way. I don't feel that sort of anxiety at all about like, don't pigeonhole me. I mean, ultimately the anxiety comes out of what we were talking about, this sort of desire to be part of the kind of neutral universal discourse and be valorized as that. But I don't think it's in any way a downgrade or in any way apart from literature to be like, yes, it's a novel that's about immigrants and queer people and women. And so I think, you know, I'm very happy to be part of that rich tradition that's part of, you know, American. If anything, I don't think we need to be calling novel, calling fewer novels immigrant novels. We need to be calling more novels like middle class novels or like white people novels. Like we need to actually, you know, incorporate that into our discourse. I have a quick question for both of you. Will your novels be translated into your native languages for native, you know, the native speaking population here or for the Spanish speaking or Filipino audiences? I think my novel has, the book came out and then it was translated for Spanish speaking audience in the U.S. And then it's just been, there's a Spanish publisher that bought the novel and they did their own translation for Spain and South America. And we did edits together for that audience, specifically. And it was very interesting. The translation, well, you know, like when I said I was writing the book and I was doing like a translation in my head. So in a sense, I always think of this novel as a translation, like the original one that I wrote. I feel that is a translation. So for me to read the translation of the translation was a little bit of a mind fuck. And then to read the translation of the translation of the translation. So that was a lot. But it is interesting to see how the language changes slightly depending on where the book is going and what the background might be that people have that they're coming, you know, what their language is and how they need to be met in the book. Well, thanks to the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the second language in the Philippines is English. So a lot of people do, the book is published in the Philippines and people have read it in. And I was there for a literary festival in April, last April, which was incredible. There's a really just incredibly radical and vibrant literary community over there. And so the book exists there and it exists in English. It likely won't be translated into Tagalog or Pangasinano or Ilocano. Although there is a really interesting resurgence and movement there to have more books be in Filipino languages and in regional Filipino languages from all over, which is super interesting. Because then I got to meet sort of really amazing writers that are really fighting to have, you know, their books published in their languages and not necessarily in English or even in Tagalog or in Filipino. So that, you know, it exists in English in the Philippines and it's in translation in multiple countries now also, which is very surreal. I thank you. What an amazing evening, so inspiring. I teach people at San Francisco State to be writers and you're so inspiring to discover voice in all languages and all emotions. I have a question about your craft. I was a major in college and it wasn't until my senior year that I discovered people like Jessica Haggadorn existed and it blew my mind. And I remember trying to have a conversation with my parents about dog eaters and they said, hey, who would want to say that in public? Who would want to reveal parts of the ugly history? And so I have a question about bringing your craft to very intimate places such as family gatherings where you either ask questions in your window, wondering, even though you can at some level, it is not autobiographical, but the burden of feeling that it might be and how you manage that. I just know from my own family, being one of 12 families having grown up in Southern Delaware where you tried to be as invisible as possible, we didn't call attention to some of the parts of our history and it wasn't ever a question practice. So now, I just wonder now that at the public face of being a writer, how do you manage that? And I'd love to hear from both of you because of the political histories in both countries. No, I just forgot what I was saying. Well, so my book, I did base the characters in the book on people in my family and I did tell them very early on that I was doing that. And they're all just such outgoing people. My sister's a Scorpio, my mom is a Scorpio. So they just, they immediately thought that they were the main character. And so then, but it was, I think it was the way to do it because then I kept calling them and I would say, like, what do you guess what your character is doing now? And so I kind of kept them updated on the things that I was putting their fictional counterpart through. And yeah, so I feel like I took them along the right of, you know, what happens when you base something on someone and then it becomes something else entirely. So I think that they were with me on that. And by the time that the book came out, there were no surprises. Like my mother knew that her fictional counterpart had had an affair and she wasn't a great mother. Like she just knew all of these things. And she was, she got, like they all got very excited about it. Like they started to have ideas of their own. They're like, what if, you know, like, what if you do this? Like what if my character does this or that? So it was fun. It was fun to like bring them along. And I felt like they, to them, maybe it's like the language of like soap opera. Like that's what they're, I think we're referencing. They're like, no, like have her slap him in the face. And then, you know, that's the kind of ideas that they were bringing. I love that. I mean, it's just something that my mom was the exact same. My mom was like, oh, this book is definitely about me. Right? And I was like, and then it's like my sexual communist. Who's that? There was a surprise. I mean, I definitely did also, I was in a WhatsApp chat with my mom for a lot of it, asking sort of in the seventies, what did you eat on the street? And, you know, things like that, I was definitely involved. And there are characters in the book that are sort of loosely based on, you know, people in my life, but I think a lot of it is also, you know, especially if you don't have access. You know, in a way it's a little related to something like historical research. If a lot of the things that you're writing about aren't in a lot of books or aren't in a lot of libraries or the details of it haven't been archived because of the politics of the archive, then it doesn't mean you have to be creative about how to sort of essentially populate your world. You know, there are not that many Pangasinan English dictionaries. So I had to ask people who spoke Pangasinan or I had to go on forums where, you know, Pangasinan speakers were talking and gossiping to each other and have to sort of think, read it aloud to myself so I could hear it and go, oh yeah, that's what they're talking about. You know, so I think in that way, you know, that's how I essentially had to involve sort of people in my family to help out with, you know. And then, you know, my family slash, you know, my mom's coworkers, because if I would talk to my, because I was in London, I would text my mom and then my mom, if she didn't know an answer, she would ask all her coworkers who are also obviously Filipino. So they all were also being like, no, no, no, that's not the song we listen to in the 70s. This is the song we listen to in the 70s. So there was also that sense of like community kind of involvement and possession in those aspects, which then ultimately ended up not being that huge in the book. But I think, you know, my family's not hugely literate. So I think it's more the sense of, you know, a normal sense of pride that the book exists. I think there's an incredible love for it. And then I think also kind of respectful like, but you know, you do your thing. And to be, I mean, and I'm good with that, I think. Question here. Hi. So thanks for sharing your story and experience. I think both of your stories, personally, I haven't read either of your books, but I will definitely will be taking a closer look at that. What you're talking about evokes a lot of emotion and evokes a lot of just a lot of heavy, a lot of heavy material, I think. And when you, I think the topic that comes up is a mixture of, oh, white people, or why aren't there more voices like ours or mine being shared out there? And there are reasons for that. Starting with a comment I might have is basically when we think about Filipino people, I'm not from the Bay Area, but I'm from a place where there are a lot of Colombians and we built major cities, we built the places that we're talking of, that we're talking about seeking more inclusion and diversity in. And as a reminder to why it's so important to say, oh, white people have to say that, I think it's important to have that context of like, hey, we built this. We helped build all of this and we play the big role. So the question that I have is that, the question that I have is that, I see that you have certain academic backgrounds, but how can we encourage people who might not have that same structured academic background to wanna share their stories? I think the last question evoked some of what I'm thinking as far as people not wanting to share their stories or people getting into, you mentioned your father being in a different place. I can't imagine my parents having the, just being in a position to get published in the 70s, right? So how today, 2020, 2019, 2025, how do we encourage our story to be shared in a herd more? And yeah. I mean, I was a kid of local libraries. Local libraries really saved me, I think, and gave me, showed me that there was fiction that included people like me in it, and not just people like me, but it included how I found Jamaican Cade, how I found Jessica Haggadourn, you mentioned Jessica Haggadourn and Carlos Bulosa and things like that. So I do think protecting civic spaces like our local libraries is one of the first steps, ultimately, because local libraries are also the places where people who, as you said, don't have access to academic institutions, who don't have access to independent bookstores or can't afford the prices of full-price books at independent bookstores, even used bookstores. I would, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm also just thinking in terms of people, your contemporaries that might have other professional backgrounds, and there's so many stories. I mean, when you talk about Filipinos, you're talking about millions of people every year that leave the Philippines. That's a million stories, right? So how do we encourage people to, I guess... Sorry. To, when I say, I don't know what my question is, but... I'll answer it for you. We're starting this new series called Rising Writers Series, and this is the forum for what exactly you're talking about. Do you want to respond as well? Ingrid? Yeah, Ingrid, do you want to jump in? To this? Yeah. I, you know, I do think a lot about how to encourage young people to tell the stories, and I do, I am working right now. I got a grant from the city to go into a public high school, and I work with immigrant high school students, and I go in for six hours a week and get them to do creative writing. And I think also, as an author, I've also visited high schools, like done readings and visited high schools, and that feels like even just people of color seeing another person of color with a book like is something that does a lot of work, I think, because it's that image of, oh, there's people like me doing this, and you don't always know that when you're young and you have so many things to worry about, and maybe there's stuff going at home, and you have maybe immigration things to worry about. You're not thinking like, how can I tell my story? Like, that's not what is on your mind, but I think it is something about exposure. Like, it is young people seeing that other people doing it like them, and it is seeing those folks in libraries and figuring where they are, and having someone be like, read this, like, I think you'll like this. I think that it's all part of, that is all the work that I think we need to do more of. Well, on that note, I'd like to thank Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Elaine Castillo and our moderator, Carolina de Robertois, for an inspiring and insightful evening, and also encourage you all to come back for our next program with Daniel Gumbiner, which is on April 18th, and we will continue to share our diverse voices, and also wanna thank Ted Joya for co-curating this incredible series, and we hope to see all of you back in a month. Flyers are out at the front, and please join us, there's a little more wine and refreshments, and come meet our authors and buy a book and enjoy. Thank you.