Mary Camarillo’s multi-award-winning debut novel, “The Lockhart Women” was published in June 2021. Her second novel “Those People Behind Us” is forthcoming in October 2023. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in publications such as Sonora Review, Citric Acid, Lunch Ticket, and The Ear. Mary lives in Huntington Beach, California.
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Meredith: Are you ever frightened of your own ideas, or what’s inside you? Or maybe the question should be, are you scared of putting them down on the page?
Mary: This is one reason I write fiction. I can give everything to my characters—my naivety and cynicism, my delights and insecurities, all those doomed relationships that I clung to for embarrassingly long periods of time, my questionable emotional investments, my unfortunate decisions—and see what choices my characters make and what consequences they have to deal with.
The three main characters in my first novel “The Lockhart Women” all have pieces of me. The mother, Brenda Lockhart, is judgmental and opinionated, which is one of my hobbies. The older daughter Peggy works at the post office and dreams of being a CPA, like I did. Peggy also overthinks and second guesses herself constantly, which is another of my hobbies. Younger daughter Allison believes that no one expects much from her, so she doesn’t expect much of herself either. That was me too, once upon a time too.
J.M. Coetzee said, “All autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography.” My hope is that readers might recognize small pieces of themselves or human beings they know in my storytelling.
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Meredith: Homeostasis is a concept I learned on my first day of graduate school. It means the desire to revert back to the familiar, for things to remain the same. As a writer, how do you remedy this type of stagnation which can thwart creativity? Or, do you believe there’s a time for it?
Mary: I do find great comfort in having a daily routine. This was particularly important during the pandemic. Days where I get up, make the bed, eat a good breakfast, exercise, talk to a friend, write, read and find something good to binge on Netflix are good days.
I generally write fiction about real people in Southern California—people not connected with the film industry, folks without celebrity and wealth, those of us who work at the post office and shop at Target. I don’t think these stories are told often enough. It’s my go-to topic.
Is this a sign of stagnation? Possibly. My next novel “Those People Behind Us” is publishing in October of this year. It’s not a sequel to “The Lockhart Women” and takes place in a more contemporary time period but it has similar characters and is also set in a Southern California suburban coastal town. (Shameless self-promotion—it’s available for pre-order now, wherever you like to buy books.)
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Meredith: Where you find yourself scared and paralyzed, either of something you are writing, of revealing yourself through the work, or for any other reason, how do you start moving again? And by moving I mean forward, not backwards, as in retreating?
Mary: Writers are often reminded to “stay in the chair” but I’ve learned it’s equally important to know when to get up from my desk when I’m not sure what I’m doing. A few suggestions:
- Get some exercise. Go for a walk.
- Dive into another art form. I especially love interviews with indie musicians and producers about songwriting, performing and being out on the road. I recommend Rick Rubin’s podcast, Broken Record.
- Go to a museum. I’m one of those people who says they don’t know anything about art, they just know what they like. Sometimes the experience of standing in front of a painting, photograph or a sculpture shakes something loose in the brain. The Crear Studio in Santa Ana always has something intriguing on display as does the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
- Unload the dishwasher, pull weeds, or do some laundry. When I get back to my desk I might have a new idea. Or not, but at least I’ll have clean clothes.
- Write something completely different. When I can’t think of a way to start a new story or continue one already in process, I try to write poems. I don’t consider myself a poet at all but I like playing with words and line breaks. I’m sometimes happy with the results and completely thrilled when someone wants to publish them. Red Wheelbarrow Writers is including two of my poems in their forthcoming spring anthology.
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Meredith: Have you ever had to betray your original idea for a piece of writing in order to create the work it becomes? How about your view of yourself as a writer—Have you ever betrayed an image, dream, or hope?
Mary: I’m still somewhat conflicted about my decision to publish with a hybrid press. If you’re not familiar, hybrid publishing falls somewhere in between self-publishing and traditional publishing. I’ve heard hybrid publishing described as “the author makes an investment and the publisher does all the hard work.” This is almost accurate, but I’ve done a lot of the hard work of promotion and marketing the book myself.
I did my best to go the traditional publishing route with my first novel, querying over 100 agents, receiving nice rejection emails, but there were no takers. I thought about giving up and writing something else, which is what some authors do.
I believed in “The Lockhart Women” though and I wanted it out in the world. I realized that even if I found an agent, I would still need to find a publisher. I was in my late 60’s by then and had a sense of not having unlimited time. When the feminist hybrid publisher She Writes Press loved my book, I signed up with them. I realize I’m fortunate to be able to afford the investment.
My publisher is not a “vanity press” because they vet their writers but I know some literary folks still look down their noses at my choice. I try not to not let that bother me and try to not look down my own nose. The publishing world is changing and there are hundreds of ways to get a book out in the world these days.
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Meredith: The Talmud (in one way or another) says something to the effect that “Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow.’” Do you have a personal interpretation for what this means to you and for your work?
Mary: Reading brilliant work by authors I admire sometimes allows an angel to whisper in my ear and lift me up. But too often I’m deflated by a nagging internal voice that sneers—why do you think you can do this? What do you have to add to the conversation? Who needs to hear your voice?
I listened to an interview recently with author Louise Erdrich on the Writer’s Bone podcast where she and host Daniel Ford discussed this kind of discouragement. Erdrich advises writers to always “read past our levels, to read the sublime that we feel might be out of our leagues.
“Read up to the stratosphere,” Erdrich says, “not to help your writing but to understand what writing is, to feel in your writer’s bone what it means to really get to another human being, to connect consciousness with another human being.”
George Saunders in his wonderfully generous Story Club newsletter recently wrote about the importance of finding delight in work we admire, in celebrating “another human being riffing on this thing called life on earth with confidence and playfulness, thereby infusing us with a touch of the same as we step out the door.”
Here’s to learning to trust our own voices, to listening to angels wherever we can find them, and to reminding ourselves to grow, to play, to be confident, and to connect with each other.
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[Thank you, Mary.]
Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash