Elisa A. Garza
ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?
Elisa A. Garza: Writing energizes me, especially revision. Revising poems can be especially challenging, but it is also the most rewarding and creative part of the writing process for me. Over the years, I have trained myself to get immediately writing when first inspired. I can revise as I go with a first draft, but I usually leave revision for later drafts. I let each version sit a day, a week, however long it needs, and when I go back, I am usually looking at a particular part of the poem that isn’t working well, or refining the language, or changing line breaks. This is the work of poetry.
Last year, I was immersed in writing and rewriting a dozen sonnets about my experience with cancer for a couple of months. They are metered, but do not rhyme, and most of them are written as four feet lines instead of five. Each change to content, line, or words required an adjustment to the meter, and I was very content doing the work because I had a goal, and the structure was the perfect size for each little piece of the story. Also, since my cancer diagnosis three years ago, writing and revising gives me something to look forward to and keeps me busy while I go through treatment. Even when I don’t feel well enough to write, I can think about drafts, prioritize writing tasks, and consider how poems fit together into a collection.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
EAG: I grew up listening to my father, my uncles and aunts, and my grandparents tell stories, in English and in Spanish, about their lives, their joys, their mistakes, and their hard work in the fields picking cotton or tomatoes, or hoeing the rows, or bringing in the cattle. The women, although less inclined and less encouraged to tell stories than the men, told stories about taking care of the children, cooking, quilting, and visiting relatives. I am privileged to continue the storytelling tradition by writing bilingual bicultural poems.
My work has focused on themes of family, culture, connection, and forging a new path, themes that continue in my current writing, with an additional emphasis on understanding how cancer hides in the body, and the natural landscapes that survive in the seams of our urban environments. I also write about the pressure to assimilate, culture clashes, language differences, generational misunderstandings, longing for the homeland, segregation, and opportunity. My bilingual identity is central to who I am, what I write about, and who I write for. I grew up speaking the Spanglish of South Texas and continue to grow my language skills as a Spanish speaker, as a writer, and as a reader. My husband, who is from Mexico, and I chose to raise our daughters to speak Spanish, and I am proud that they are fluent speakers, readers, and writers in two languages. They will not face as much of the struggle to understand and carry on the traditions that I often write about.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
EAG: Telling the truth makes you vulnerable: the truth of racism and sexism, the truth of cancer treatment side effects, the truth of our changing climate. The truth can be harsh and ugly and difficult, but so is life sometimes. Putting raw truth on the page is also a way forward. Writing through vulnerability helps me see something else beyond what is happening, to search for hope, beauty, and a better future. The writing that develops from this process is authentic. When readers ask me, “Did that really happen?” and they believe my answer, I know that I’ve presented something with vulnerability.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
EAG: This is an interesting question in light of the poem that you published, which was based on real situations I experienced. I ignored most of that mean spirited advice, including from people who told me I would never be a writer, or I would never be published, or never (fill in the blank). I just kept reading poets I admired, especially women, and writing, and creating my own voice. That’s the advice I give to other writers: find poets you admire, or that do well the skills you want to grow in, read them, and write. Practice skills and try new things: forms, types of enjambment, imagery, language, whatever you see in your reading and marvel at. And keep writing, no matter what. Use criticism and praise alike to grow. Persistence is probably the most necessary quality a writer can possess. For example, I started writing the poems in my full-length collection Regalos thirty years before the collection was published. I never gave up on finding it a home, and I would advise others to stay with their writing goals through whatever life throws at you. You can do it!
ORP: What do you hope readers (or your audience) will take away from your creative work?
EAG: My first hope is that readers will connect in some way with my work. Maybe they identify with discrimination, or with a cultural event, or with illness, or care for the natural world. Recently, a couple of readers have told me that they cried reading my work, remembering their lost loved ones, or expressed amazement that I can turn the experience of cancer treatments into art. The connection, even if momentary, is what is important, because it helps readers understand a new culture or experience something they haven’t, or reflect on their similarities to the work, and that is what all art aims to do, to build a bridge between people.
I hope that my current project fills an important niche by addressing treatment for triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive disease that affects minority communities disproportionately, often fatally. Most of the literature about cancer, especially breast cancer, has been written by white women. It is my hope to change that, and to offer a perspective where communities of color see themselves in the conversation.
