Vanessa Garcia is a Miami-based novelist, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Much of her work centers on her Cuban homeland, where her parents and grandparents were born. She is the author of incredible essays you can find all over the web and an immersive theater production called The Amparo Experience. She is the dreamer and 3D printer of so many incredible projects. Shade Mountain Press saw the beauty in Garcia’s 2015 novel, White Light, which interrogates one of Garcia’s obsessions, color. What if this character was a color? What would it mean if a chapter is cardinal red? We talk about the inspiration for that novel, as well as her most recent project, a radio play called Ich Bin Ein Berliner. This autobiographical story details her reaction to the fall of the Berlin wall and its rippling effect throughout Cuba. We explode the myth of the solitary writer and the rewards inherent in creating art in a collaborative fabric of creatives. Honorable Mentions: Poet, William Blake FAU Theater Lab Director and Garcia’s creative partner, Victoria Collado

Published Date: February 2, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers.

Kate Martin Williams:

For writers.

Vanessa Garcia is a Miami-based novelist, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Much of her work centers on her Cuban homeland where her parents and grandparents were born. She is the author of incredible essays you can find all over the web and an immersive theater production called The Amparo Experience. And I can't wait to talk to her because it seems like she's the dreamer and 3D printer of so many incredible projects. Vanessa Garcia, welcome to the show.

Vanessa Garcia:

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

Kate Martin Williams:

We're glad to have you. It's one of my favorite things to get to dive into cross-section of someone's work so deeply and then find that I'm in love with all of it. So it's been a really nice couple weeks getting to know your work. So I'm thankful you're here.

I loved your novel White Light, which was a NPR Best Book Pick in 2015, and I'm interested to talk to you about it because we just had a show with Farid Matuk who was talking about cross pollination across art forms. And you being a visual artist and having your hand in so many different projects, I'm really excited to talk to you about it. But with specifically with regard to White Light, your protagonist is a visual artist and she is, the chapters are headed by and have little subheadings at the beginning of the chapter that are names of oil paints. And then you described their sort of features and that color on the spectrum and their associations. So I think I just wanted to talk to you specifically about how your work as a visual artist informs the novel, particularly the form, the novel.

Vanessa Garcia:

Yeah, I mean, definitely with that piece, with White Light as a novel, the central character is an artist, and I, for a long time considered myself side by side, a professional artist and writer. They were happening side by side. And so I feel like eventually the writing sort of absorbed the visual art in a way because I was writing so much and so often. And then I needed to get the visual work and the visual impulse and the visual, everything that happens into the writing. And it not only happens in the actual writing in the frames of the scenes or the characters, but also in saying, "Okay, well what would it mean if a character is a color." If a chapter is Cardinal Red, or what does that mean? There are obviously at that point, not that many publishers that will take you up on saying, "Okay, I'm going to do a full novel in color."

But thankfully there are some independent presses, and in my case, there was Shade Mountain Press was so sort of graceful in the sense of what does it mean for this actual character to really be this character? And what does that mean on the page, not just in writing, but also visually? Because that's not something that's new. I mean, if we think about William Blake or what actual books really are, that's not really something that's new at all. So that was actually super exciting for me to have that click with a publisher that would take me on in that sense. You know what I mean?

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

But yeah, that conversation definitely was awesome.

Kate Martin Williams:

Did you get some nos beforehand where people were like, "We can't handle this."

Vanessa Garcia:

A lot of nos, the writing is amazing. Can it be in black and white? And I thought... Right. For a lot of things, yes, for a lot of things, yes, you can have a lot of frames, a lot of characters, a lot of arcs, a lot of everything. A lot of things that I write, I'm running right now. I can frame on the page in black and white, but that character still to this day, I can't frame her in black and white. You know what I mean? So yeah, I got a lot of nos. And for some reason at that point I was like in my twenties and then later and I was like, "No, I'm going to go for this thing." And I was very determined.

Kate Martin Williams:

Vision.

Vanessa Garcia:

Oh my God. And for good or bad, for good or bad. For good or bad. But thank God for Rosalie Morales Kearns, who runs Shade Mountain Press. And she took me on. She actually called me and she was like, "Who do I have to fight to publish this?" And I was like, "Nobody."

Jessica Cole:

I mean everyone.

Kate Martin Williams:

You're the winner. You won.

Vanessa Garcia:

She's awesome.

Kate Martin Williams:

Do you mind reading something for us, Vanessa? I don't know if it's from White Light or something new or whatever you want.

Vanessa Garcia:

I have something not from White Light, but it's actually funnily enough in black and white.

Kate Martin Williams:

Okay.

Vanessa Garcia:

So it kind of speaks to it. But I'm working on a radio play right now, which is why I have a microphone right now. Otherwise, I'd just be speaking into my computer.

Kate Martin Williams:

But then you look very professional. I mean, really impressive.

Vanessa Garcia:

So pro because of this radio play.

Kate Martin Williams:

It's awesome.

Vanessa Garcia:

It's called Ich Bin Ein Berliner, which means I Am A Berliner. And we might know that because of John F. Kennedy said it because when there was an east and a West Berlin. But this play is about the fall of the Berlin Wall and how it deeply affected me when I was 11 years old and just started crying hysterically in my classroom and not understanding why that was. I just didn't get it. And I was the only one, I was the only child in my fifth grade classroom bawling my eyes out and I had to go to the bathroom.

And I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that is. So this play is an exploration of what does it mean to unpack that moment in my life? And it comes down to me being Cuban American and the fact that I am in my roots from a kind of Eastern Bloc country that people don't think about, which is Cuba.

But in this little moment, I'm just going to describe this commercial that came out in 1984 about Levi's jeans that played in the Soviet. It was played for Soviet kids, so it was 1984, and it's Levi's. It's kind of this awesome commercial, and it is in black and white. It was filmed in black and white. So I just in essence in this part, describe it. So I'm going to do that.

Kate Martin Williams:

Okay. Okay.

Vanessa Garcia:

Let me set the scene. It's filmed in black and white. There's a kid, a young guy, maybe 20 years old, who's coming into the Russian Soviet airport. His bag is being checked by this Stasi looking dude, and the kid's face is like he's shitting bricks. The Stasi officer opens his suitcase, moves his shirts aside, and finds a James Dean book, uh-oh illegal. That's straight up capitalism right there. And he passes the book to another Officer. Verboten. Things are not looking good for the kid. The kid's getting worried. His eyes are darting back and forth, but he's trying to keep it together. It's obvious he's hiding something big, bigger than James Dean. A bomb, a national secret. What is it? The higher up passes by and the officer checking the kids' bags salutes the higher up and lets the kid go, and the kid scared, closes his bag, no words are exchanged, just glances. He's walking home now across the tracks into these horrible Soviet block housing projects. I mean, horrible.

The whole thing is smokey and dark and bleak, gray AF. There are spies everywhere you can feel it. The kid finally makes it to his shithole apartment, and he breathes a sigh of relief. Thank God. It's okay. He's okay. And then the slightest crack of a smile coming through, and he goes to the kitchen table and he dumps the whole suitcase onto it, and there's that saxophone music coming in and among the mess, dumped onto the table, a paper brown parcel wrapped in rope. He opens it, mother fucking jeans. There they are. He flips them around. And Levi's 501 Blues with rivets. Yes, dissent.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh my gosh, that's so good. That's so good. Tell me about more about this radio play, because I saw that it was coming and I want to know more about it and where the idea came from and how you found your way.

Vanessa Garcia:

So I've been thinking about this. I mean, literally my entire life since I was 11 years old, and I'm just like, I didn't know how to write about this for a very long time, but about a couple of years ago, I wrote to a director named Matt Sabil at FAU Theater who I work with a lot. It's a theater lab in Florida, and he was like, "This idea's amazing. I have no idea where or when it's going to fit in, but I love this idea."

So then pandemic hits and everything is kind of a disaster for theater. And FAU Theater Lab, which is all about presenting new plays and new works and interactive work, all kinds of amazing things, says, "We don't want to just do Zoom plays. Everybody's doing. Let's do something that the artist can keep for after and see what we can do together. Let's make radio plays."

Kate Martin Williams:

I love it.

Vanessa Garcia:

And so they commissioned, right?

Kate Martin Williams:

Yes.

Vanessa Garcia:

It's the way to go. And they commissioned radio plays. I was one of those people, and I was like, "Hey, Matt, can we do the Berlin thing?" And he was like, "Oh my God, I was so hoping you would say that." And then we got to play. So he said, "Go write the thing." I did it. We had a workshop last year.

Kate Martin Williams:

Just go write it. It's no big deal.

Vanessa Garcia:

Go do the thing.

Kate Martin Williams:

Do it.

Vanessa Garcia:

But how great is that to have that space during a pandemic to do that?

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh gosh, yeah.

Jessica Cole:

Brilliant.

Vanessa Garcia:

Yeah.

Jessica Cole:

So creative, creative thinking.

Vanessa Garcia:

Totally. And then they had an audience of maybe, I think it was at 65 to 95. Now I'm a terrible person for not remembering that gap of number, which is pretty big. But it was either 65 or 95 people in this Zoom room, and it was received really, really well. And the good thing was that it wasn't just people that knew about Cuba or Germany. It was just like all people that were receiving this thing. So they decided to make it the thing that they were going to produce for 2021.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh, how cool.

Vanessa Garcia:

So it's their main stage.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

But it's radio. And so we have been in the process of making that happen, and it's been amazing, and it's really been a process that even has involved my mom, because I've had to get her to come into this room where I'm talking to you right now to interview her, to get her voice and get her into this play, which is, I'm in it, and I'm not usually in my plays. I acted a long time ago, but I'm not in my plays usually.

Jessica Cole:

But you are. As an 11-year-old.

Vanessa Garcia:

I am in this play, and so is my mom. So it's been a really wonderful journey, and it's actually particularly significant to me because Cuba, the place that I'm actually really connected to that makes me connect to Berlin and that moment of the Berlin Wall is going through a big change right now, and we, I would say are having this big moment of, there might be the first time ever that a Castro is not in power in April. There's a promise that Rual Castro will step down, and if that happens, there's a window of time in which freedom can find its way. But it's a very interesting window. That is exactly the window that happened right before 1989, so.

Jessica Cole:

Right.

Vanessa Garcia:

Yeah.

Kate Martin Williams:

So we're an indie press as well. And so a lot of times we have contact with artists who do a number of things like you do, which is so much fun and a great part of getting to be in the community that we're in here in Houston. And so we have a good friend who we actually published who wrote operas, and we published her book of poetry, and she is ghost writing a biography for a dancer here in Houston. Just all kinds of things. But I think it would be interesting to ask you about, for people like her, and I know there are people at the conference as well who want to know how you just get your foot in the door for these types of things that you seem to have found your way to such cool collaborations and productions, and is there ways that you go about thinking about your next steps or kind of lateral career moves to other art forms?

Vanessa Garcia:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think when I started out, it was just an idea of I'm not going to do anything that does not benefit my craft or does not do the thing that I want to do. And so I never, I always went the route of I'd rather freelance and make whatever I'm going to make than have the nine to five that then bars me from saying, "I'm going to do this or that, or join all these branches." Right? Now, it's sort of one thing leads to the other. If you're kind of very open to the thing.

And I have a company with a partner named Victoria Collado, and the company's called Abre Camino Collective, which means opening paths. And the whole idea is radical storytelling. So how do you take a piece of work and do exactly what we're talking about and cross pollinate it into a million things?

So we do have the Amparo Experience, which is the last big piece that I worked on that went out into the world, which was an immersive theatrical production, which had 23 different ways of seeing it. You could go as many times as you wanted and you would always see something different, but it was also very narrative. So once you have that world built, you can do anything. And that's the thing, once you actually have the world building of the thing, you can say, "Okay, well, this is also..." Because you have character, you have character, you have story, and you have each character's story arc, right?

So, okay, let's make a Bible for a TV show, do this or that with this Ich Bin Ein Berliner, I'm like, there's this amazing thing that's happening right now where it just happened sort of organically where because they want to create a visual component, they've hired a cartoonist to sort of do this visual component because they don't want to interrupt with a lot of things, but you can buy either the audio or a visual component and have this semi on...

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

And then you're like, wait, but we can make a graphic novel if we want and we can do all these things. So I feel like once you realize, for me, the biggest thing is you make this thing own the property and then get people who are awesome to co-own with you. You know what I mean?

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

So that you can make all of these branches because there's no stopping the story once you have the characters and the arcs.

Kate Martin Williams:

That was one of the things that struck me when I was reading your work, and especially the Amparo Experience and thinking about how just dabbling into what you do, it explodes this notion of the solitary artist like you are in such community. I watched an interview that you did with, I guess it's Victoria Collado who directed Amparo. Is that right?

Vanessa Garcia:

Yes. Yes.

Kate Martin Williams:

And she was saying that you found these connections with the actors that they had had to Cuba, and there's all this inspiration that comes out of those collaborations.

Vanessa Garcia:

Absolutely. I feel like for part of my life as a writer, I was like, "Oh, I'm by myself doing this thing, and I have to sit at my computer and write this thing." But then what ended up happening to me specifically is that my sister's an actress. All the people around me were in New York theater at the time. And so I was like, "Oh, wait, there's another way to actually make things, which involves people. This is amazing."

Kate Martin Williams:

I like that.

Vanessa Garcia:

That's amazing. But we also, it's such a delusion that we don't do that anyway because we have super connective relationships with our editors and our agents and our everyone.

Kate Martin Williams:

Absolutely.

Vanessa Garcia:

It's a delusion that we work by ourselves. It's completely not a thing that we do, what I think we do if it's stays in a drawer, but if it's going to go into the world, there's conversations with so many people, audience, editors, publishers, collaborators, in my case, actors who, yes, like you said, they had such amazing stories to add to this narrative about what it means to be Cuban and what the bigger story was. So it's beautiful.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I loved the piece that you did for HuffPost, that love letter to my 22-year-old self, which it was so cool because she wrote it, and then it was actually performed for a comedy show, or I'm not for a comedy show to benefit a comedy trip? Is that right? I forget.

Vanessa Garcia:

Yes. So that was a whole, I wrote it, and then someone read it and asked me if they could perform it. For some reason that particular little thing, sometimes you write things and it takes you forever, and sometimes you're just like, "I'm going to write this thing very quick." And then it's a thing that speaks to a lot of people, so that for some reason, that letter did actually end up speaking to a lot of people, and there was an actress that called me and said, not knowing that I was really in, I don't even know if they knew I was in theater or not but, "Can I do this?" And I was like, "Of course. That's amazing." So she performed it in the end, which is kind of cool because it ends up being a monologue.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, right. It's so interesting to me that you wrote it without even knowing, because when I read it, I was thinking, "Oh, she knew this was going to be performed because it has that kind of rhythm." It has a real monologue kind of feel.

Vanessa Garcia:

Yeah. That's true.

Jessica Cole:

Because you're talking to yourself, right? Because you're giving your old self advice, which I...

Kate Martin Williams:

It's the whole Effing Shakespearean soliloquy.

Jessica Cole:

Right. Oh my God, it's so inspiring hearing you and yeah, Kate and I have to divvy up the work sometimes, but I am so excited to dive into all of your work as well, and so excited for your play. I mean, the radio play, just the, I can't wait to tell my mom that because she of course grew up with radio plays, and it's just such a cool throwback to the '40s and '50s and also of our time, because here we are and we don't always want to look on screens. And I think we're thinking about the visual so much, but there's really a real aural, however to say that word, component to these times and a radio play really speaks to that in an exciting way. I love it. I also am obsessed with the Berlin Wall, and November 8th, 1989, seared, seared into my memory.

Vanessa Garcia:

Right?

Jessica Cole:

Yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

Oh my God. It's real. It's a big thing.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

Yeah.

Kate Martin Williams:

So obviously you were working on the radio play, but is there anything else that was going on in that helped you get through 2020? Because you're, you've got such connections to community, but we've been so isolated. We like to kind of add tools to people's survival kits. So is there someone or something or a writer, something that was kind of carrying you along through this last year?

Vanessa Garcia:

I mean, if I'm going to be totally honest, at the beginning of 2020, which is not the correct response, I was like, I get time to finish all the projects that I was supposed to. Oh my God, I get to just close my door. Nobody's going to bother me? What a horrible response. Horrible.

Kate Martin Williams:

Fair, fair.

Vanessa Garcia:

Ridiculous. But all the things. But actually I did a lot of development of every, I just wrote this note to myself and said, "Finish everything you've started. Finish everything you've started. Finish everything you've started." And everywhere I would see it, because I was like everywhere I would write it. And I also have two kids, one of which came during pandemic time. So...

Kate Martin Williams:

Vanessa, oh my gosh.

Vanessa Garcia:

I think they are...

Jessica Cole:

You're officially superwoman.

Vanessa Garcia:

They are. They're definitely part of the thing, the actual pulse life that brings me every morning and every afternoon and every night. So can't not say that they're not included in that. And also the idea. So one of them is nine months now, and the other one's three years old. Three years old boy, and the girl is nine months. But the thought, I've been writing a lot for kids also. I'm freelancing in the realm of kids TV. And also, I just did a workshop with Sesame Street about race. They're amazing.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh, I didn't even get to ask you about that. Yeah.

Vanessa Garcia:

But my kids and looking at them and being with them and the kind of storytelling that is involved on that level and what storytelling means as a mom and as a human being to that age group is actually very massive. So I've also been thinking about that and thinking about what does it mean even this Berlin play, what does it mean to have an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old come to that? And what does that mean to bring that into education curriculums? And what is storytelling in that sense? And so that's kind of been in my brain also in terms of how we matter.

Kate Martin Williams:

At the same time, you're trying to decide whether you're going to teach your son to say please and thank you to the Alexa.

Vanessa Garcia:

That's right.

Kate Martin Williams:

She wrote a great essay about that too. Oh my gosh. Well, thank you so much for sharing all your time and your talent with us. I can't wait to hear the radio play and also see what's next for you. Thank you so much. It's so nice to meet you.

Vanessa Garcia:

You all are amazing. Thank you so much.

Kate Martin Williams:

Aw, thank you.

Phuc Luu:

Appreciate it. Bye-bye.

Vanessa Garcia:

Bye.

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair.

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole and produced by me Phuc Luu. Our trusty and hardworking intern is [inaudible 00:25:23]. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever podcasts are found.