A native Texan—born in Galveston, raised in Uvalde—Kimberly Garza is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Last Karankawas is her first novel.
Interviewed by Kate Romney
Inscape Journal: To start off our conversation, I read in a previous interview that you said, “I’ll always be writing about those identity questions about family and belonging,” and I’m wondering if you could tell me why writing about those things is important to you.
Kimberly Garza: They’re hugely important to me. I think, currently and personally, these are questions and issues that I don’t really escape from in my every day. Nor do I care to. I don’t want it to sound like a heavy weight I bear, because I’m very proud of the fact that I have this mixed identity, these multiple identities. I like the idea that my work examines that and celebrates it in some ways, even as it picks out the troubles and some of the microaggressions that we deal with, or the issues and dilemmas that we have constantly. It’s also something to be celebrated and to be very proud of, so I like the idea that my work will constantly return to that.
IJ: That’s awesome. What things do you hope other people take away from what you’ve written about identity questions, family, and belonging?
KG: There’s a lot that I hope they take away. If there is someone who doesn’t necessarily move through the world thinking about these questions or wondering about their identity, belonging and being from multiple cultures, or descending from immigrants or being an immigrant themselves, I hope that it inspires and maybe educates them a bit. Just really opens their eyes to this kind of experience. And for anyone who does think about these things, the way that I do constantly, I hope they feel seen. It’s so powerful to feel seen. In media and literature and TV, whatever it was, I have very clear memories of when I read books that were written by Mexican American authors or Filipino authors, and I saw my family reflected in literature, so I hope that for anyone who has this experience similar to mine and hasn’t yet seen themselves in books, I hope that this makes them feel celebrated and glorified in literature, too.
IJ: I noticed that your writing features people with lots of different backgrounds and perspectives, I’d love to know what your process is for portraying those diverse backgrounds respectfully and authentically.
KG: I pull a lot from my own experience, so there is always some aspect of my own understanding and knowledge—even my own reactions to moving through the world in this way. There’s always some of me in there. I do try my best to represent as vivid a world as I can when I’m trying to represent some experiences that are a little foreign to me, or maybe a little outside of my own bubble. In that way, I try to make it as authentic as possible. Some of the characters in this book would be closer to my mother’s experience, who was an immigrant from the Philippines, as opposed to my own experience of being American born. I also wrote some things that were closer to my father’s experience, or closer to the experiences of my grandparents or family members or friends. I do my best to capture that authentically, whether it’s interviewing them a bit or just trying to portray their nuances or their ways of looking at things or their speech patterns, like with the languages that are explored in this book. But also, at a certain point, creativity will take over. I don’t want to capture anyone in their fullest self in any particular character in this book. You can’t point to someone and be like, “Oh, that’s my grandmother.” At a certain point, I just try to create an experience, so there’s also some imagination going on.
IJ: We’ve already started talking a little bit about your book, and I know that it just came out in August, which is very exciting. I noticed that the book starts out with one narrator, that’s a “we”. It’s a group of people. I’d love to hear why you made that decision and what impact you were trying to make with it?
KG: Sure. So this book is a novel in stories, and it started out in its earlier versions as a collection of linked stories. They were much more separate, much more stand-alone. There was less crossover between each piece, less of the characters who would occur throughout the various stories. As I wrote each story, I kind of already knew that this would be something closer to a novel. I wanted to further explore characters like Carly, who’s the main character, and her mother Maharlika. They are the subjects of the gaze of the “we.” There’s the group of Filipino women who are putting on this Catholic festival that we do every year, and those women are looking at them, and I knew I wanted to introduce the characters in this interesting way. I knew I wanted to explore a bit about what belonging means to them and how it might be complicated for someone like Maharlika. And I happened to be in a writing class where we were charged with a prompt that was to imitate a particular voice or style that was strange or new to us. I was inspired by Julie Otsuka’s book, “The Buddha In the Attic,” which is written entirely in first person plural from the point of view of many Japanese women who emigrated to the U.S. as brides. I was really drawn to that voice, and it was something that I’ve never tried to write before. I loved playing with that and figuring out how I could work that into my own writing, and it sort of clicked immediately. I knew which women’s perspectives I was going to write from, and I knew their voices very well, since I’d heard them most of my life.
IJ: That’s really cool! Talk to me a little bit more about using the form of a novel of stories, and why you chose to tell this story.
KG: I love traditional long narrative novels as much as the next person, and I really love sinking into them. Something about the novel of stories, or the collective voice, felt more honest to me as someone who wanted to write a book that was really about a place. This is, in essence, a narrative about Galveston. It includes other places like my own hometown, Uvalde, and my dad’s hometown of Brownsville. There are several locations that circle it, but in the book they always come back to Galveston, where I was born, which is very dear to me. It felt inauthentic in some ways to have only one narrative tell the story of a place like Galveston. So much about our perception of setting and home is just our perception, right? It’s specific to us. My version of Galveston is different from my mother’s, from my father’s, from my grandparents, from my aunts and uncles, and from our neighbors down the road. It really was a nice challenge, but it also felt like the truest way to more fully depict the complex, quirky, and fascinating place that is Galveston.
IJ: I know you’ve written some creative nonfiction essays, in addition to fiction. Which genre is your first love, and how do you decide what ideas are best written in each of those respective genres?
KG: That’s a great question. It’s always really hard. My first love is fiction—it’s always going to be fiction. I don’t think I knew until much later in life that nonfiction could be creative. I grew up knowing that fiction was fiction and journalism was nonfiction. I was a journalist during college and right after, and during that time I would go home and write fiction. When I was writing to get paid, I would write hard news and nonfiction journalism. So, when I come back to creative nonfiction now, it’s really in spaces or in essays or in subjects that I know need to be true. Creative nonfiction is where I’m going to look at the narrative very honestly. Fiction is always going to be my my default—if we writers can have one. I love the idea that I can invent. That’s certainly true for creative nonfiction writers, because there’s some creativity going on there. But in fiction, I’m allowed to take my experiences and place them in the body of someone else. I can reshape them and I can place them in a different setting, and I can change the time period, and I can invent a whole new character who is an amalgamation of myself and other people— people I don’t even know, people I have come up with. That’s always my first instinct. But if I feel the need to just tell my authentic story, tell my truth, and speak to a specific experience, then I lean towards nonfiction.
IJ: I’m curious about when you were writing your book, which you said is a book about Galveston more than anything—it’s a book about a place—why did you choose fiction rather than nonfiction to capture a place that’s so close to you?
KG: I wanted the freedom to play, to create and invent specific experiences and specific people who are moving through Galveston in a way that I never really had the opportunity to. I was born in Galveston but I grew up in Uvalde. I didn’t grow up in Galveston, but that’s where a lot of my family lives. That’s where my cousins who were my age and a little bit older, who were like the cool kids, that’s where they lived. I spent holidays and weekends and a significant portion of my life there. So, I wanted the ability to step into those shoes. And writing from my point of view, that wasn’t going to happen—a nonfiction memoir about me would be set in Uvalde, in the places that I do know very, very well and experienced as a school kid and as a teenager. So, I knew that in fiction I could play with characters and with the different roles they took on, jobs that I got to research and write about. I’ve never been a shrimper, but I got to write about people working on shrimping boats in Galveston. A lot of my family members are nurses, and clearly I am not, but I got to write about those jobs as well. Fiction just allows you so much. So much freedom, but also playing and exploring, which I really love.
IJ: You mentioned this a little bit just now, but I’d love to hear more about what your research process looks like.
KG: For this book, it really varied from chapter to chapter and from story to story. A lot was pulled from my own experiences and from talking to my family members whose experiences and identities were what I was basing a lot of the story off of. There were some exceptions, such as the scene set on the shrimping boat or the scene set during Hurricane Ike, which I wasn’t present for. My family evacuated, and none of us were on the island at that time, so I did my best to look for YouTube videos. Those scenes just felt the most vivid, you know, like this unfiltered version of instances which I could translate into writing. So I found videos of working on a shrimping boat and how the mechanisms work, and I found videos from inside the eye of a hurricane, and videos that showed Hurricane Ike making landfall in Galveston. After that, of course, I read news reports that were as unfiltered as possible so that I could do the translation into fiction. I did amplify those experiences a bit, and any errors are obviously my own because I’m translating it, but I did my best to represent the real experience while still always filtering it through my own voice.
IJ: What is your writing process like, and when and how does your research process filter into your writing process?
KG: You know, my process is really just sitting down and writing. It’s not glamorous, it’s not lovely. It’s not Instagram worthy at all, because I try to avoid it a lot. Honestly, I’ll get distracted like anybody else— I’ll sit down and think, oh, I need to write but I’d rather watch Netflix. I need motivation to just sit in a seat and put my hands to my keyboard. Research sort of helps me launch into that, maybe because I was trained as a journalist early on. So for whatever reason, doing research as opposed to writing the thing feels like a good entry point. I’ll research, I’ll just Google and watch YouTube videos, I’ll talk to people all day and listen to their thoughts or their experiences and record them and make my own notes. I think it’s kind of my backdoor into writing. But once I do sit down to write, you can’t pull me away. It’s hard to get up from the seat and to break out of the zone. So as much as I fight it, once I get there, it’s really satisfying.
IJ: What drives you to keep going with a project? How do you know when you’ve found a project that you want to stick with?
KG: I don’t ever stop until I feel like I’ve told all that I can tell. I’m fortunate enough to have an agent and an editor, and I know that when I feel done with something, I can turn it over to them. I know that it’s not really done, because they’ll have insights and edits and ideas. When I’m telling people’s stories, I don’t stop until I’ve run out of things to say for them.
IJ: Do you ever find that you have too many things to say and have to trim it back down?
KG: Oh yes, I always reach for too much. As a young journalist, I was taught that you’ll always have too much. It’s easier to edit down than it is to go back and re-interview and find more details, so I tend to err on the side of too much. Then I pare it down to what’s necessary, leaving space for what I can trust the reader to imagine.
IJ: You’ve talked a little bit about your experience as a journalist, and some of the ways that training has impacted your writing. Are there any other ways you can think of that your journalism background impacts your writing?
KG: For one thing, I’m always a deadline writer. I learned early on that this isn’t the kind of thing where I can sit and be like, “The muse hasn’t reached me,” or “I can’t possibly write my novel, I don’t have inspiration.” That doesn’t work. If you’re a journalist, you need to turn in a story by 5 p.m., and your editor could not care less if the muse is striking or not. So, I think I always come back to the idea that I have to set deadlines. I have to instill in myself the motivation to say, “No, you’re just going to write, you don’t have a choice, you don’t get to choose if you feel like writing or if you’re inspired to write, you’re just going to sit and write.” I find that is always where I’m the most comfortable and productive.
IJ: I know you teach as well, and I’m curious, what are the biggest takeaways that you hope your students leave your classes with?
KG: I feel like my students leave my classes feeling very sick of me telling them how much I love teaching them and learning from them. There’s a number of things that I hope they leave my classes with. One thing that I try to always instill in them about the writing process is that it’s work. To be successful— to be a working writer—you need to put your work out in the world, you need to send your writing out to try to publish. A lot of us have day jobs, and you have to carve out time to write. In San Antonio where I teach, a lot of my students don’t know much about career paths in writing. These aren’t things we grew up with—we know the military, we know medicine, we know sales. So, I like to remind students that there are many paths they can take towards working as a writer. I want them to understand that there are ways we can put our words on the page and see ourselves reflected in literature, but also, you know, earn a living.
IJ: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ll leave you with one final question: what advice would you give to your younger self?
KG: This is a good question. Well, my younger self was probably more idealistic than I currently am. I think my younger self would be really jazzed about the fact that my book has been published, but she might be disappointed because I don’t have multiple books published by this age that I am now. So, I might have to tell my younger self, we did it! And also, we’ll still keep going. There’s more to do. We’re just getting started.
IJ: I love that. Thank you again for taking some time to chat with me, this was so fun to hear about your process and the things that are important for you to write about. I loved reading your writing as I was preparing for this interview, it is so lyrical and beautiful and I’m excited to keep reading it.
KG: Thank you very much for having this interview with me, I appreciate it.
