David L. Ulin: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the final California Book Club event of 2023. I'm David L. Ulin, the book's editor of Alta Journal, and I want to tell you a little bit about Alta, the California Book Club and tonight's book, which is Caribbean Fragoza's Eat the Mouth That Feeds You and what you can expect over the next hour. California Book Club is a monthly live book Zoom with each month features a contemporary California writer. The purpose is to think about the modern California cannon. This grew out of an essay that our host, John Freeman, who I'll introduce in a moment, also wrote for Alta a few years ago.
And for the last three years, actually this is three years and a quarter, we've been doing this monthly with a variety of writers. I want to first thank our partners without whom we wouldn't be able to make this work. Our partners on the California Book Club are Book Passage, Book Soup, Books Inc., Bookshop, Bookshop West Portal, Diesel, A Bookstore, Green Apple Books, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, Vroman's Bookstore, Narrative Magazine and Zyzzyva.
We do monthly events for the California Book Club featuring continuous content leading up to each club meeting, and these publications, this content is always free. If you haven't had a chance to read it, you want to take a look. You'll find essays by numerous contributors reflecting on tonight's work, essays about the author and the collection and more. All of this is included in our weekly California Book Club newsletter, which is also free. So sign up please and you will get it and be up-to-date on everything that we're doing at the California Book Club. Also, for those of you who are interested in going into the archives, every California Book Club episode, going back to the first one in October of 2020 is available and can be viewed on our website also for free. So please take a look at those. If you're a teacher, that's a great resource. I've used it myself in many of my own classes.
If you want to know how you can help support the work we do, bringing in-depth articles, essays, and interviews with authors and poets like Caribbean Fragoza, you can simply join Alta as a digital member for $3 a month, or you can become an official member of Alta Journal. For just $50, you'll get a year of Alta Journal, the quarterly magazine. You'll get a California Book Club hat, and you'll also get Alta's guide to the best bookstores in the West, a book that we've published, which is among other things a great last minute gift idea. So please take a look. You can go to altaonline.com, excuse me, altaonline.com/join. I just want to say it's a particular pleasure to welcome Carribean Fragoza to the book club tonight.
I think she's one of the most significant writers in Southern California and in California at the moment. This story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. I'm sorry, I'm having trouble speaking this evening. The collection Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is exceptional and really mind-blowing and genre-busting, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation. So without any further ado, let me turn it over to our host, John Freeman, and Carribean Fragoza for tonight's California Book Club. I'll be back later. Thank you, all.
John Freeman: Thanks so much, David. Welcome, everybody. Happy holidays if they've started for you, happy holidays if they're coming for you. It's nice to be together at the end of this year, a long year, a dark year in some ways. And it's also really great to be talking about Eat the Mouth That Feeds You and Carribean Fragoza in particular. I mean, one of the goals of this book club in getting together was to try to myth bust, if you could, some of the encrusted ideas that cling around California and that all of our best literature tends to explode. And Carribean Fragoza has not only dedicated herself to doing that as a writer, but also as an individual, as a literary citizen, as members of a collective and as an editor at multiple publications. She grew up in El Monte and went to UCLA where she started writing the stories that became Eat the Mouth That Feeds You.
We're going to talk about that. And went on to Cal Arts where she got an MFA. And over the years, she's started the South El Monte Arts Posse, which leads pop-up gallery exhibits, poetry readings and discussions. Vicious Ladies, which publishes pieces by women and non-binary writers and critics of color, mostly based on the West Coast. She's been part of just a lot of really interesting things that are coming out of California, and that's very clear too in this collection of short stories, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, 10 embodied sun-clobbered gothic stories, if you will. But there are also stories about collectivity stories that use the ideas and the power of feminist and queer theory to bring to life, the life that doesn't often wind up in books, whether it's a group of people in an orchard sending up their message to the people that own that orchard in a particular style of balloon, to a woman working in a shop run by a very mean shopkeeper who's in her life she suddenly sees because she hears that woman broken up with over the telephone.
I would say all of the stories are embodied, they're full of discussions of the body and characters live in the body. And you just feel in these stories what it means to be part of various shifting collectives, whether it's The Vicious Ladies, which we'll talk about very soon, or it's part of a family. They're really brilliant stories, funny, linguistically complex, swift, and they're kind of stories that bear up multiple readings. It's a real pleasure to have her here. Carribean Fragoza, please join us on the California Book Club.
Carribean Fragoza: Hi. Thank you, John. Thank you for that great introduction. Hi, everyone.
Freeman: It's so great to have you here. Welcome to the very end of the year, December. I wonder if we can just start right in with this book. I mentioned that you had started writing these stories when you were a student at UCLA. And I'm just curious if you could talk about your state of mind at that time and why you were drawn to short stories, short stories of a gothic-ish feel, and we can talk about that category. What was going on in your mind in that period?
Fragoza: Yeah, a lot was going on. I was an undergraduate at UCLA at the time. I know UCLA is not that far away from El Monte, but it really is another world. The west side is a whole other planet or it felt that way to me. It still does actually whenever I go back, but I felt very alienated and alone a lot of the time when I first got there. And I started working at a campus diner at UCLA. And actually that was the first time I felt not just that I belonged, but I felt like I was in the company of people who cared about me and the people that were there were working class women, Latina women, Mexican, primarily Central American women that would take the bus to UCLA every day to work in this diner. And we would serve really stinky lasagna and spaghetti to undergraduate students at a dining hall at the dorms.
And so I did there what I always did growing up, which was shut up and listen. And I listened to their stories, I listened to them talk, I listened to their gossip, and that was very nurturing for me. So that inspired a story in this book, Crystal Palace, was it Crystal Palace? There was a couple of stories that were inspired by that experience. So I found myself returning to the voices of women and listening to their experiences. And at the same time, I was taking literature classes in Chicano Studies at UCLA and comparative literature classes, and I was so blown away, especially well by two authors that come to mind that would be, first of all, Helena Maria Viramontes, who is a great hero of mine from East LA, who writes these exquisite stories, complicated stories that aren't necessarily feel good happy stories with a great ending where everybody and everything gets resolved, but they're really true to life.
They felt very resonant to my experience and the way I saw the world, and the way she writes about place in East LA was just so energizing and it inspired me to think about my home place, about El Monte with the eye of a writer. And then the other writer that I was blown away from is Jamaica Kincaid. And so she has such a powerful voice, such a critical voice, unforgiving voice. And I found a lot of strength and power in both of those authors and so I wanted to embody that I guess in my own writing practice. And I started writing short stories as an undergrad and then I wrote more of them in grad school and onward into my adult life.
Freeman: In the interview that you did with Alta, you had this statement, "As a child, I discovered a clear and steady sense of who I was that I've only ever lost when I wasn't distant from writing", and I found that so fascinating. It's like you tether yourself to yourself through your writing. And I wonder if you can backtrack from UCLA and the explosion of these discoveries of literature and the two writers you just discussed to that young person that you were. Who were you? Who did you discover you were? And was there some moment or period where you thought, "Ah, this is what I'm for"?
Fragoza: Yeah. So as a child, I remember taking to writing immediately. I have a distinct memory of starting my first journal in the first grade, and it felt like a very safe space for me to express my interests, like New Kids On The Block or polar bears or whatever was my interest at the time, but also my doubts. I had a lot of doubts as a child growing up about my future. I grew up, my parents are immigrants. There's a lot of questions about where we were going to live in the future or a lot of insecurities around where we were going to live and where we were going to go. And then it just felt like, I don't know, maybe a lot of children experienced this, but it certainly was my experience that I felt a lot of pressures from the environment that I was growing up in El Monte.
It felt harsh and also in unforgiving in certain ways. And so I turned to writing as a way to carve a space for myself where I could explore just my inner workings, and I found strength and some power in that that I was able to carry in my life outside of the page. So I found a lot of confidence there. And as you were referencing that interview and what I had said there, it still feels true today. I still feel like when I stray away from writing in a way that feels very truthful to myself and to my experience and my perspectives, even though I don't always know how I feel and what I'm thinking, if I turn to the page, I can crystallize that. And so if I stray away from the writing, I feel untethered and lost.
And so I have to check myself still as a grown person today, like what's going on, and I have to go back to the page and to the writing to parse that out for myself. So I'm grateful that I was able to do that at such a young age. And my teachers, my grade school teachers saw something in me that they supported along the way. I remember my first grade teacher, my third grade teacher, my fifth, I can name these people who actually reached out to me when my book, when Eat the Mouth That Feeds You came out and my first grade teacher reached out to me to say that she remembered me being a creative and strong writer and that I was artistic. And so that was very, I don't know, it was an important moment for me to hear that years, decades later from my first grade teacher.
Freeman: That's so moving. I mean, you mentioned Jamaica Kincaid earlier and one thing I think among many that Kincaid is so good at is describing and re-inscribing how instruction is brought down to Girl, her famous story, 700 words, and there's a whole universe of socialization that's pressed into the language of that story, and yet you still very clearly have enough room for the listener's point of view. And one thing I see you doing in these stories is doing your own version of that. There are a lot of listeners and observers in these stories who are seeing the world as presented to them from Lumberjack Mom, where the observer is very clearly seeing how her mother is responding to the departure of her father, to Crystal Palace, the story you also mentioned in which a woman who's working at a nicest store and has been told how to be and is told that she's a clumsy oaf, then watches her mean boss laid low.
But the thing that's different, obviously a little bit is you have these flights of beyond the realism, which again is you have to put in quotes because what is actually real. But in Crystal Palace, she starts expanding and growing. And it could just be a feeling, but it also could be she's a gargantuan in this. And I wonder if even as a young writer, as that child that impressed your teachers, if you found yourself finding the fantasy hole in narratives and using it to describe how it felt to be you.
Fragoza: Yeah, I was definitely attracted to fantasy. I'm just now having flashbacks of writing fairytales and heroine stories going off on adventures and yielding swords and doing adventurous things. And so that's definitely, the appeal of the fantastic is definitely something that has been with me all along. I'm not sure if that answered your question or if I missed something.
Freeman: No, no. Yeah, and I think in the fantastic, but more especially in the gothic, there are certain tropes and elements that keep popping up in the gothic. Obviously, the haunted house is a big thing, and I would say that one of the haunted houses in this book is the body in its own way, and that's very, very much the case. And one of the stories that I think is really just a standout amongst all of them is "Mysterious Bodies." I was wondering if you could read a little bit from that.
Fragoza: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm still thinking about what you said, the body is a haunted house, that's powerful to think about. So "Mysterious Bodies," maybe I'll just get right into it. And we have, yeah, I can explain more if needed, but I'll read right from the beginning of "Mysterious Bodies."
Angelica felt heavy and petrified as the walls of her belly slowly began to bubble and blister. She breathed deeply to contain the seething crackling little boils, but this time their angry hunger could not be appeased, and they continue to spread and mount, bursting into voracious mollusks, clams and barnacles that nod incessantly at her throbbing meat. They attach themselves to the wall of her stomach and reproduced quickly, spreading out over her intestines up into her lungs. They began to chew into her ribs, crawl up her esophagus. She was dripping inside with salty saliva from their muscle tongues that were also teeth.
She could hear them furiously scraping against each other, blindly tearing into her organs, swallowing her bit by bit into their encrusted shells, anxious to exhaust her modeled innards until there was nothing left, but a dry hole. Reduced to a fragile, extinguished shell, Angelica's emptied body stood silently out in the open against the wind pierced by the sun until finally she flaked into shards and collapsed into the sand. Surrendering to the peace, she completely lost consciousness. Edward saw a transformation take place, but from his perspective, one minute Angelica listened to him go over his day's business agenda, and the next minute she dissolved from her seat onto the restaurant floor like a paper napkin in the wind. Her torta de jamon and papas a la francesa remained untouched in the plastic basket on the table. When Angelica finally pushed open her heavy eyelids through a hazy light, she recognized Edward's face, his eyes, nose, lips hovering over her. But the expression he bore on his familiar features, she could not quite place and suddenly wondered where she was.
Instead of the crackle of hungry mollusks and hissing tide, she began to discern other whispering voices. She realized that instead of a solitary beach, she was laid out on the hard tile of a crowded [inaudible 00:20:25], and she quickly pulled on Edward's sleeve and grappled with his arms and hands to get onto her feet and out the door. Angelica, are you listening to me? The blaring daylight and the roaring street induced a sense of deep calm. Angelica, I don't want you to take those pills anymore. The light had changed, the air had cleared. She was aware of the sound of her footsteps on the asphalt now. All around her, the city vibrated. Did you hear me? She felt synchronized, part of a familiar rhythm, assured that she knew exactly what to do. Angelica, sit down. I'm serious. Edward sat her down on a park bench in a large open plaza, a parade of young cadets rigidly saluted the flag as they passed by.
So I'll just take a pause there. That's the beginning of "Mysterious Bodies."
Freeman: Yeah, that's quite an opening where you've tumble out of her point of view and into his looking back at her and then hers back at him. And that story does something that so many short stories instructors tell you never to do, which is to put multiple points of view in one story. And I wonder why you wanted to do that in particular with this story.
Fragoza: Well, I guess I didn't know that that was a thing you're not supposed to do, and I think not knowing the rules gives you a lot of freedom to just do whatever. And so this is just the way I happened to write this story, but I think, I don't know, I think there's a fluidity that happens or that I allow myself when I write very embodied perspectives, but there's also this interest of mine to move between bodies and to move between perspectives. There's a fluidity there. I guess maybe since you mentioned hauntings, there's something there like the reader can also haunt different perspectives and move fluidly from one character to another. So I'm glad I didn't know the rule at the time because I may not have written it.
Freeman: It is also one of several stories in the book that feel like entrapment stories, if you will. That Angelica has been given these pills that she doesn't quite know what they're for, and Edward has bartered an iguana for them, and it doesn't seem like a really good situation for her. And you tumble back and forth between the two of them trying to figure out what these pills are for, what they're doing to her, what's happening inside her body. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about these forms of entrapment because across the book, these forms of entrapment don't only come from men. In Vicious Ladies, it's a woman who's in a female party collective who has a matrilineal-like relationship with her boss, but also a slight erotic tension with her boss. And I wonder if you can talk about moving through spaces in which your characters, your main characters feel like they might need to escape, and what that means for you as a writer, why you're drawn to those types of stories.
Fragoza: Yeah. I am drawn to those types of stories because that feels true to my experience as a woman and to the experiences of other women that I have known that we have felt, and I'm speaking for myself and I'm speaking for the other women that I've known throughout my life where it can feel like we're in a trap or another and it's society and it's a workplace. It can be the home and it can feel like a collection of problems that need to be solved, or that's at least how I've experienced growing into the woman that I am now where I'm trying to figure out how to, not just how to get out of things, but how to get into things. I mean, how to be a writer? How do I get there if the conditions are A, B, C?
How do I get to be a writer, having grown up in a home where we didn't really have books, at least not in the beginning, and then I did because of scholastic. Scholastic was part of the solution, just a quick plug there. And then growing up in a neighborhood where most people didn't go to college at the time. I think more people do now from where I hail, but it just feels like it's been one puzzle after another that I've had to, I don't know, just figure out. And this puzzle of how does one be a writer in the world while also being a mother, while also trying to have a job and earn money and pay bills and do all those things. It's just constantly a set of problems that can maybe translate into creative projects that I try to take apart in some ways in the writing.
And I guess maybe now that I say that out loud, it feels that way when I start writing stories that I feel like there's a problem, like a puzzle that matters very much to me, and I'm trying to figure it out as I go. And I don't know that I have answers, there's only answers that I come up with. They're not necessarily answers that are applicable or relevant to anybody else, but I realized that that's one approach that I have to writing stories as these problems that need to be taken apart and resolved somehow, at least emotionally, if not actually materially.
Freeman: That makes an immense sense because one of the magics of short stories is the way that they manage to escalate the stakes in over the course of a very short-ish period. And in so doing don't answer questions but pose better ones or new ones through their images and language. And one of the best living examples of how to do that comes in the work of Kelly Link, who is the author of several collections, including Magic for Beginners, which to my mind has probably the single best novella written in America in the last 40 years in it. She's been a Pulitzer finalist, she's a MacArthur Genius Grant award winner. Her last book was up for the Kirkus Prize. It's a huge pleasure to have her here. She's going to tag team in and ask you some questions at this point. Kelly, are you in the audience?
Kelly Link: I am here. Hi. Thank you for that introduction and thanks to the book club for having me on. I love your collection. I think the stories are gorgeous and surprising, and it's incredible the range of approaches and worlds that you move the reader through in a collection that it's not a chunky book, it is a very slender book, but there's a lot of stuff in it. I wanted to ask a question taking off from something you just said, which was the idea of writing as being a process of working through problems, which is I think of short stories.
The thing that pulls me in is I see a problem that I'm interested in trying to figure out, whether it's technique or a question I have about the world. But when you talked about the problem of trying to figure out how to be a writer in the world, which is always a question, I was thinking about the fact that you also, you co-edit a journal. You found it in interdisciplinary arts collective, and I wondered if you would talk just a little bit about that and about what you take back from working as part of a collective, from being an editor and what you take back to your own work when you sit down to write.
Fragoza: Thank you. That's a great question, and thank you for agreeing to do this, Kelly. I'm very happy to be in conversation with you. Yeah, I do a lot of things and people throughout my life have known me as an editor and not as something else, or I don't know. I've just worn different hats and people have known me as different things. And yeah, I've done a lot of freelance journalism and I've learned a lot as a freelance writer. Firstly, discipline, getting things done is something that every writer should learn to do eventually, and I'm still learning how to do that.
But yeah, I think as an arts critic, an arts journalist, I have learned a lot about, gosh, just not just aesthetics obviously and politics in the world and how those things fit together, but just immersing myself into other worlds and other perspectives. And I think that's crucial to being a fiction writer in particular, finding different ways, approaches to entering perspectives and entering worlds. And I think writing about art is an opportunity to enter worlds through the material, through objects. And that has been helpful for me in my writing and writing fiction, in all writing.
But writing about in fiction in particular, I find that by holding objects and places and the material items of the world, I can tap into something that feels alive to me. And it can be a place and it can be a body, it could be different bodies, it can be actual objects. And so I think that's where some of the art writing has informed the fiction writing. I also have an arts collective, the South El Monte Arts Posse, based in South El Monte in my hometown. And that has been, I think of it as a vehicle that my husband, Romeo Guzman and I built together, and that we are continuously building with our collaborators and friends. And it's a weird car that we're always adding things to, and it gets us to different places that we want to get to. And it can be working on stories with the screenwriter from our neighborhood and developing stories around place with him and sharing, this is filmmaker Anthony Solorzano, or it could be thinking about and sharing feelings about world events, specifically Palestine.
And we recently held a community reading of an author, Mosab Toha, Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear published by City Lights, my publisher, and we had this beautiful, we created this space where we were able to share these words and to talk about what's going on in the world and to share our doubts and the things that we're struggling with. And again, back to what I said earlier about problem solving, I'm I guess looking for opportunities and not finding and having to create opportunities and spaces where I can struggle with questions and problems and things that keep me up at night that matter deeply to me and to people around me. And the beauty of the South El Monte Arts Posse, my arts collective, and now our space that we have, CASA Zamora, is that we get to solve or not solve, but work through these problems collectively, which is a relief from the lonely writer life where you're working alone. So sometimes as a writer, it's nice to talk to other people and work through it together.
Link: Absolutely. Thank you. I realize that with short stories, with a collection as you're putting stories together, it's hard for the writer to I guess initially see the things that organize your interests, the things that draw you into story or compel you into certain kinds of thematic material. And so it's not until later until you have a grouping of stories that you say, "Oh, I see. I was doing something here" throughout all of the stories. And as a reader, what I was thinking as I read these was about the way that the fantastic and the peculiar arise out of family, out of family dynamics and how true that feels to me. And it's not something that I had thought about before, but I wondered if you could talk about family in these stories and parent-child relationships and how those become monstrous or fantastical or just strange.
Fragoza: So it did take me a while to see the family and relationships within the family as an important element in the work. I would say pretty late on, I was just writing the stories. And at first I had wanted to title the book Vicious Ladies because I thought, "Oh, these tough ladies, everybody here is powerful". I'm writing about women that are doing very difficult things. And in conversation with Elaine Katzenberger, who I am forever indebted to, I loved working with her, we decided per her suggestion to name it Eat the Mouth That Feeds You.
And that brought a different focus to the themes in the work, especially around family and relationships between mothers and daughters. And it gave me a more nuanced, more complex perspective on my own work to see that through line and to think about how I've been writing about the family in all these different ways and weird ways. And so yeah, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You came as a title later. But yeah, I guess I didn't realize I was writing about the family for a long time and now it's super obvious to me. Did I miss part of... I feel like you asked a great question and then I-
Link: No, I feel like you covered it. And it's a great, I love the story Vicious Ladies. It has, I think a forever special place for me now as a reader. I know that I will reread that story quite often. And Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is also wonderful, and the cover art for the book really that look in the girl's eyes and that title I think tells you some of the kinds of stories that you're going to be encountering here. I was thinking about the thing that you said about Jamaica Kincaid and that the idea of the unforgiving eye, that ability to unflinching quality, but I also feel I can see that in your work. I also see in both your work and her work a real tenderness towards the people who are in the stories.
And it made me think a lot about how for short stories at least, it almost feels as if you're often operating between two opposite poles. And one of those I think feels like tenderness to me, and the other feels like the unforgiving eye in your work. Reading your work makes me think that maybe those two things are actually the same thing, that both tenderness, but also the unforgiving eye is just that ability to look at a person in a piece of fiction and describe them fully in a way that honors them, that's tender, but is also unforgiving in the sense that it's not flattering, it's not going to soften anything. But I wondered, when you were writing about the characters in your story, how do your characters come to you? When you begin a story, do you have a sense of the people who are in it at the start? Do you uncover them as you work? How do you make the people that you're writing in the story?
Fragoza: I usually hear a pretty clear voice, and often I will write in the first person, but not always. And even when I don't write in the first person, I still hear that voice telling a story or trying to communicate something. And thinking about what you said about tenderness, I think that a lot of the voices that appeal to me and that I want to write are coming from a place of perhaps there is tenderness, there's wanting to share something with someone that is coming from a vulnerable place. And I as the writer can see that voice wanting to share that, and I want to bring that forward. And I guess I do uncover as I go along who these characters are. I think when I was a newer writer, I was writing characters that were more directly inspired by real people. But over the years, I've learned to move away from that where I'll still hear a voice and I don't always know where it's coming from, but then it's not a real person that I can see and that I know. It's something else.
And so I continue to develop that and uncover the stories there. But I think what is true over my entire process as a writer is that often these stories are coming from people that want to share something vulnerable, and sometimes that vulnerability also comes with that harshness. I mean, I come from people that can be very tender and can be very tough and can be very harsh. And so I think that that has been, or can be the experience of many families where there's both tenderness and there's even to the point of cruelty, like harshness, and it's a difficult place for many people to live where there's those two things that coexist. And I guess it's something that I return to a lot because I see it everywhere. The family is just such a complicated thing I think for many of us.
Link: I was thinking about the thing that John Freeman said about the body being a haunted house, which I too am very taken with. And I wanted to ask about the last story in the collection in which somebody is haunting their body. They're dead, but they're still haunting their body in a sense. And I wondered if you would talk just a little bit about that story because I also, I love it and I would love to know more about the place that it came from.
Fragoza: Yes. I'm going to break another rule by telling you where it came from because I've heard that it's a rule that you're not supposed to say that you wrote something from a dream, but whatever. I mean, it was a good dream so I wrote it out. And I appreciate dreams like this one, not just because I got a short story out of it, but because it taught me something that I come back to every once in a while. But in this story and in that dream, I was haunting my body as a dead person, but also haunting the family home where all of my relatives are having a party without me. For me, but without me.
And so that was a great experience to write. I enjoyed writing it because it was weird, and just the grossness of some of the scenes, I don't know. It pleased me very much to be weird and dark and zombie-like and ghost-like and have a body that deteriorates and to experience a body from the inside as if you're in a cardboard box looking out at the world through a little hole or experiencing it from the outside, watching your body literally decompose in front of you, I think, I don't know. I thought that was a lot of fun for me to write that out and to also think about just the relationship again with the family.
And I think the weirdness and the shifting of in and out of the body and through the house allowed me to take a fresh perspective on the house and the family home and the family itself. So I think weirdness allows me to take just unexpected perspectives of the world.
Link: I've got nothing against dreams in fiction, and it has a very wonderful dream-like feeling. I love that story.
Fragoza: Thank you, Kelly. And I say it also because I work with young writers, I teach and I've had students share with me in a very embarrassed way that they had this dream, but it was a great story. And I just tell them, "Write it. Just write the thing". I don't know.
Freeman: I'm all for dreams. I have to say, some of the best writers I've ever talked to, including you all here, have absolutely rated their own dreams. One of the uncanniest moments, thank you for those questions, Kelly. We'll bring you back probably right at the end, is obviously when the main character starts walking around dead, can't be heard, and then suddenly one of her cousins or brothers says, "Oh, hey, how are you doing?" And suddenly we realized that this character will actually be visible and then has to go through the rest of the story doing the work, dying from her body in front of everybody. That's a very singular collectivized experience in that it's from her point of view. And Vicious Ladies, which I'm with Kelly, it's just such a absolutely wonderful story.
A clinic and descriptive power, is also a collective experience described singularly. I mean, your main character's in a party group and is feeling trapped and wants to get out and is rewarded for all her work selling at parties by giving, she's given a bike like she's a kid thinking, "What's going on here? I got to get out of this". There is a story in the book which is told in the first person plural, a story which I have to say, it begins with the uncanniest image as well. I think maybe in the whole book, there was a giant flying... Well, do you think you could read from this story? Because I think it's one that really shows you taking a short story to its limit in terms of using a very tricky device and putting it to great use in the sense that using the first person plural.
Fragoza: Yeah. "New Fire Song." I want to read this and I'm happy to read it because I don't get to read it often mainly because, well, you'll see.
We'd meant for the balloon to rise penis first with the large pink balls pushing up from below, like the big fuck you it was supposed to be. Instead, the balls rose like a rubbery cloud that scraped through the gnarl tree canopy with the phallus pointed straight down. But it was a miracle it didn't tear on the pointed walnut branches, so our disappointment dissolved as we saw our pink balloon rise into the vast cloudless sky. We howled laughing. It was their balloon now. With nothing in its way, the pink balloon about the size of a small cow went up and up. The farmers ran from their white wooden houses rifles ready and tried to shoot it down with no success.
We saw their wives peeking from behind the curtained windows. When they brought out one of their sons, a taller and leaner, but otherwise identical version of themselves to fly a drone up there, it merely nudged the thing along. The penis rose slightly and was picked up by a wind current and continued, re-energized on its way. Throughout the following day, the penis-shaped balloon drifted over the flatland, over farms and their various configurations of crops. Eventually, the penis wilted and shriveled and finally got caught on a tall eucalyptus tree near the highway where a murder of crows had taken roost. The birds picked at its flacid rubbery flesh, but then abandoned it when their interest ran out. Their farmers watched the scrappy pink skin hang limply for all the neighboring farmers to see. Though out of respect, their neighbors cast their eyes to the ground or squinted away. The farmers clenched and unclenched their pink white fists bearing their teeth as they talk to one another. Their faces also like fists, open closed, drained of blood in identical power.
So yeah, I just want to share that image with you all.
Freeman: This is set in a walnut grove. And who are the collective we that are narrating this?
Fragoza: Yeah. So it takes place in a walnut grove, and the we is a group of farm workers that have adopted this grove as their home. And they don't leave the grove, they just stay there. And it belongs to the farmers, but the farmers have just moved on to more profitable crops and just leave the walnut grove to its own devices. And really this community grows in there and they're trapped in there. And there's a whole story about how they get out of that trap there.
Freeman: Kevin Phillips, sorry, Kevin Phipps asked the question, who was the other writer you mentioned when we were talking about Jamaica Kincaid, and that's Helena Maria Viramontes, who wrote a really brilliant novel about migrant great workers called Under the Feet of Jesus, which I really hope I would love to have her as part of the California Book Club. You actually wrote a great piece about a book about working on the land by another MacArthur Award-winning short story writer, Manuel Munoz, or I think you sang that book's praises. And I feel like one of the things I see in his work, in Viramontes' work and your work is different ways of coming at an experience of migrant labor on land and working. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about approaching something that can be seen as photorealist territory with a giant penis.
Fragoza: Yeah.
Freeman: What has exploded when you apply that kind of imagery as an entry point to that experience?
Fragoza: Yeah. So I was living in the Central Valley when I wrote that story in Fresno, a land of many writers. And this was, I lived there between 2016 and 2020 during the Trump administration. And it was a time of great fear for many immigrant communities, especially for many groups, but in particular for immigrant communities. And it was very palpable and it was relentless during those years, and it continues to be. And so the experience of looking at this landscape that is so hyper-organized around farms and agriculture was very strange for me to see not having grown up in that space. And seeing that kind of order was oppressive and knowing that much of that labor was, is undocumented and that they were... And have been persecuted in the ways that they have was something I thought about a lot during the time. It was everywhere.
And so I felt also oppressed. Even though I'm not an undocumented immigrant, my parents were. And I understand a little tiny bit of the uncertainty that one feels as a child of immigrants, but this is another thing that we've experienced or that undocumented immigrants experience. And so I wanted to have a subversive gesture, and at the moment, I just wanted something just so absurd and ridiculous and vulgar and offensive, and it was a pink balloon in the shape of a giant penis that I thought would be fun to make and actually set loose. And so often I'll think of ridiculous scenarios that would be fun to do in the world, but then I realized I could get arrested or just different terrible things could happen.
I don't have the time for it. How am I going to feed the kids if I'm building a balloon? So fiction, it becomes a great way to imagine what could happen if some of these things could be done. And so that's where that big balloon comes from, just really wanted to push back in some kind of way. And I mean, really the whole story started with the image of the balloon and a walnut grove that we used to drive by on the 99 all the time, and it looked abandoned. I don't know. But the whole story came from that and just the oppression felt during those four years especially.
Freeman: Yeah. One thing I love about this book is how you write kinship in different ways. You write about family and how family feels using fantastic elements to dramatize family life, but kinship emerges in different ways. And I see that in writers like Maceo Montoya where you can see different modes of bringing collective resistance into fiction, which exists in the real world, but if you write them it can be quite boring if you write a "protest" novel. But if you write a scene like you just did, then somehow the absurdity of what you're having to assert asserts itself in the image. One of the last, we're running short on time, but Cassidy Green had asked something about your language and how each story has a different mesmerizing language, and she was very curious about what inspires your writing style.
Fragoza: Oh, let's see. The writing style. I think, well, speech, the way people speak is one way, but not just copying it directly, but maybe playing with it so that, I don't know, language breaks up in a way that it sounds strange. I'm writing about strange things sometimes, but I think sometimes the language creates those opportunities for strangeness, to be honest. I'm thinking of "Lumberjack Mom" where I just started with the first sentence and then continued from there. And yeah, sometimes just the strangeness of the language in a sentence creates space for strangeness and everything else that follows.
Freeman: I love the first sentence of "Lumberjack Mom," That Spring when the dormant roots and seeds started sprouting and our father stopped coming home, our mother took to the backyard with fervent urgency. From that moment, I was in. I thought, okay, wherever this writer takes me, I'm going to go.
I think we have time to bring Kelly back for one final question. And as Kelly comes back, I'll just read some of these comments. And Noah says, "Carribean, so good to hear from your experiences and of your writing". Leah says, "Thank you for your writing and for sharing your time with us". And Noah also says, "Living in Fresno during the Trump administration was terrifying". Kelly, I want to return to that function that maybe the unforgiving eye is also the tender eye, and just ask for one more round of meditation on what that would mean for how you write a story or how you tell stories about people, either of you to address that. I feel like there's just a world of possibilities in that formulation.
Link: I will say something adjacent to it, which is that years ago when my husband and I talked about starting a press, we knew a lot of writers. And I said, it's going to be really hard. I'm not sure if I can imagine what it'll be like to know somebody like them as a person, but feel that you were not the press, you're not the right editor for their work. And then we started the press, and in fact, that part was very easy, that if you felt you were not the right editor for somebody's work, then you shouldn't publish it. You wouldn't give it the attention that it deserved, or you wouldn't be able to ask the right questions of them during that process. And so I think I have thought of myself as somebody who was fairly tender, especially towards writers, but in actual fact, part of that tenderness I think is being able to assess something and give an honest answer.
And I think maybe in fiction, it's the same, that it wouldn't be tenderness if you couldn't describe something as you feel that you see it. Whether or not you're seeing it the way everybody else does, of course not. But there is I think a tenderness in putting a character on the page or describing a situation with absolute honesty, not necessarily with judgment, but describing something as it looks to you. And that that I feel maybe the less that you do that, the harder the writing becomes, that instead you are falling into cliche or you are moving away from the center of yourself that you write from.
Freeman: I hope someone's transcribing this. That would be a great hippocratic oath for an editor. Kelly is referring to Small Beer Press, which among other things, has published the two volume Ursula Le Guin short stories in the most beautiful edition around. Have you thought about this from a perspective of an editor, Carribean, or do you want to think about it as a writer?
Fragoza: Well, I'm thinking about it now as both an editor because I have edited as a Boom editor, Boom California editor, and also for KCT and other places. But I'm actually thinking a lot about my students I work with, I teach in an MFA writing program at Cal Arts, and I work with graduate students and undergrads too. And I think that, I don't know, I think sometimes maybe it's just among writers, maybe it's just an MFA writing program thing where there can be, or at least there used to be a lot of harshness. There was this idea that you had to be critical in critique, you had to be tough and mean and you had to suck it up. But I guess I approach having worked as an editor as long as I have and as a writer that I want to nurture young writers without, I don't know.
I don't want to freak them out, but I also want to be honest, just as you're saying, Kelly. I want to be honest, and I think I've been learning to do that more, I don't know, just to be very direct and clear about the work and moving it in a direction that is true to what they are envisioning, but also doing it in a way that is nurturing and to a certain extent. Not as a parent, but as a teacher, as an instructor. So I don't know, I guess I was just thinking a lot about my students and how to move them along in a way that helps them become better writers, I guess.
Freeman: What lucky students you have. On the basis of, I presume Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, congratulations for your writing award. All of us who love this book and love your work and love California writing gave up a cheer for you. It's been lovely talking to you. Kelly, it was great to have you here to ask questions and to think about stories and editing. I'm afraid we're running out of time. You've got many goodbyes from different parts of California and elsewhere, and praise for your work. David Ulin is still here, he'll come back and walk us out. But Caribbean and Kelly, thank you so much for this time together. And anyone listening, go get Eat the Mouth That Feeds You and read it slowly and have fun.
Fragoza: Thank you, John. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, David.
Link: Thank you.
Ulin: Thank you. Thank you, John. Thank you, Carribean, and thank you, Kelly. This interview is fantastic and that closing about I guess editorial empathy in some way, the necessity of editorial empathy I think is just a brilliant point. I'll also be pulling that off of the transcript. I just want to remind everyone that the interview is recorded and will be available at californiabookclub.com. Next month we will be talking about D.J. Waldie's book, Holy Land and so you want to be here for that. And in the meantime, please think about the Alta membership at altaonline.com/join, or again, the $3 digital membership. And please participate in a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as we end this event. Take care, everybody. Stay safe and we'll all see you next year. Happy New Year.•
City Lights Books Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza
