Literary Mystery Novelists--Joy Castro

Joy Castro's new novel, Come Hell or High Water, qualifies her for both the Literary Mystery Novelists series and the Books of Interest by Writers of Color series on this blog. Castro's first book, The Truth Book: A Memoir, was lauded for its "achingly beautiful voice" by Robert Olen Butler and received critical acclaim. It is now used as a text in a number of memoir-writing classes around the country.

Hell or High Water is a thriller set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Hundreds of registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation have never been found.

The sex-offender story is assigned to Nola Céspedes, an ambitious young reporter at the Times-Picayune, who tries to balance her investigation with taking care of her aging mother, seeing her girlfriends, mentoring a teenager, and meeting a mysterious stranger named Bento.

As her research progresses, Nola is gradually drawn in to an underworld of violent predators--a world she struggles to keep separate from her middle-class professional life.  Raised in poverty by a single mother in New Orleans' notorious Desire Projects, Nola has her own secrets to hide.

Here's the link to purchase Hell or High Water.

Bio

Joy Castro was born in Miami in 1967 and adopted four days later by a Cuban-American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She grew up believing in what Witnesses call “the Truth” and going door to door, but she ran away at fourteen when the home became abusive, finally leaving the religion at fifteen. On her own from the age of sixteen, she raised her son, born when she was a college junior, while finishing school and earning her graduate degrees. Raised to believe herself Latina, she found her birthmother at twenty-six and discovered that her actual ethnic background was quite different.

Castro’s first book, The Truth Book: A Memoir (2005), was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association, and was adaped and excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. In The Truth Book, Castro writes about religion, violence, adoption, ethnic identity, and her father’s suicide, as well as the warmth, beauty, humor, and passion for reading that sustained her.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, her debut novel, Hell or High Water, will be released by St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne in July. Her second memoir, Island of Bones, a collection of creative nonfiction and personal essays, is scheduled for publication in September by the University of Nebraska Press, along with a new paperback edition of The Truth Book with an introduction by Dorothy Allison.

Castro’s additional works include short fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction stories that have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including Cream City Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, and Chelsea.

In 2007, she joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is currently an associate professor with a joint appointment in English and Ethnic Studies and serves as the associate director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies.

How would you describe Hell or High Water for the readers? What was your inspiration for this book?

Thank you, Linda!  Hell or High Water is a literary thriller set in New Orleans in 2008, three years after Katrina.  Nola Céspedes, an ambitious young reporter at the Times-Picayune, is assigned a story on the hundreds of sex offenders who went off the grid during the hurricane evacuation and were never relocated.  At the same time, a young female tourist is abducted from the French Quarter, and Nola thinks the disappearance might be linked to her story.  Her investigations take her into gritty territory. 

My inspiration for the book was the beautiful city of New Orleans:  its resilience, its courage, its complicated history.  I tried to create a protagonist as tough, sexy, and gutsy as the city is.  Hell or High Water is my love letter to New Orleans. Hell or High Water will come out in Germany from Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and in France from Gallimard, as part of their Série Noire.  I think it's cool that it's going abroad.

What's your writing process? What is a typical writing day like for you? Do you keep to a set schedule? What are your writing habits?

When I’m writing the first draft, I write longhand in bed in the morning before I get up, before I talk to anyone or start thinking about my job.  My brain is still full of dreams and music, and that’s the mental space I write from. 

I write a chapter every day, rain or shine, even if it’s awful (and I work from an outline that I’ve hammered out in advance). 

Once I’ve got a complete draft of the book, I type it up, which gives me a first opportunity to revise.  (I work at a stand-up desk.) 

Then I just keep revising and reworking until I’ve got something that’s ready to share.  I don’t keep track of how many drafts I do during this stage; it would be too demoralizing.  I focus on the work and not the counting.

After I get feedback from a few trusted readers and make any helpful changes they suggest, I revise again. 

Finally, my last revision is a read-aloud marathon session, listening for sound, rhythm, and unintended repetition.  I really care about the music of the lines.

Shortly after Hell or High Water debuts, the University of Nebraska Press will publish your second memoir, Island of Bones. What projects, literary or otherwise, are you planning next?

I’ve just finished the manuscript of the sequel to Hell or High Water, which also stars Nola Céspedes and is set in New Orleans.  It will be out in 2013.  We’re still playing with titles; I want BAD SHOOT, but my editor prefers NEARER HOME, which I suggested and do like; it’s an allusion to the Robert Frost poem “Desert Places.”  We’ll see.

I’m editing an essay collection called Family Trouble:  Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, which is a really interesting project with essays by 25 different published memoirists.  Publishing true stories about your family is a tricky thing, and these writers address the choices they made and the fallout they faced.

After that, who knows?  I have a collection of short stories, HOW WINTER BEGAN, that would like to see the light of print, and there’s scholarly project about modernist writer Margery Latimer that’s been on the back burner for a while, so I might start that up again—or maybe there’s another Nola Céspedes novel in my future!

Who were your literary influences growing up? Are there any authors (living or dead) that you would name as influences?

When I was growing up, I loved mysteries of all kinds.  I was addicted to Sherlock Holmes.  I also loved the children’s novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, especially A Little Princess.  I love the way kindness triumphs in her work.  I was also one of those girls-who-love-horses, so I read everything by Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry.

My literary influences generally are Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield, two modernist writers I love, and Milan Kundera.  In terms of thrillers specifically, I’m most influenced by Dashiell Hammett, Dennis Lehane, and Kate Atkinson.  I love hard-boiled voices, and the complexity and layers of Atkinson’s work blow me away. 

Your first book was a critically acclaimed memoir, The Truth Book. What inspired you to write a novel? And why a thriller?

Well, one has only so much life to write about. 

Mysteries and detective fiction have always appealed to me, and I thought, What if?  So I tried it.  It was a lot of fun.

I also think that mysteries are the genre of social justice.  Social justice is something I’m passionate about—as is my protagonist.  That passion gets both of us into trouble.  She’s more mouthy than I am, though.  And she carries a gun.

Do you belong to a critique group of other authors? Do you find it helpful? In what ways?

No.  I was a part of a critique group for a while, and I loved it, but we were working at different paces on different kinds of projects.  After a while, it sort of gently, organically fell apart. 

I do share my manuscript with my agent, Mitchell Waters at Curtis Brown, who’s got a terrific ear and is ruthless, and with my husband, who’s a wonderfully literary reader and also infuriatingly logical, which is very helpful with plot.  And then, of course, I’ve had really wonderful editors at St. Martin’s, Karyn Marcus and Margaret Sutherland Brown, who’ve helped my novels immensely at both the global and line-editing levels.  So I guess they’re all sort of my critique group. 

I have a scholarly Ph.D. in literature, so I’ve had some literary training, which helps.  Teaching creative writing at the graduate level helps to keep my critical skills sharp.

What is your advice to aspiring writers? How important is it for a young writer to be a reader? What would you recommend they read?

Essential.  Read voraciously.  If you’re a young writer, I’d recommend that you read what you desire to read.  You should let your own curiosity and tastes drive you.  You’re developing your own voice and vision, so you should be led by what moves you.  No matter how brilliant someone tells you a book is, if you’re bored, put it down.  There’s no prescribed curriculum.  I didn’t read Anna Karenina until I was in my forties, and the world did not end.  Follow your passion.

What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your writing career? What has been the hardest part about being a writer?

The most surprising thing I’ve learned is that I can do it!  I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a small child.  I’ve always written stories.  Having them published and critically well received is a lifelong dream come true.

The hardest part has been trying to nurture a writing life while working full-time as a professor and raising a family.  I always feel torn.  But now that our son is finished with college and our foster daughter is about to go to college, I’m looking forward to more peace and space. 

I love my job teaching at the university.  Still, if something made it financially possible for me to quit, I’d quit tomorrow.  It’s hard to wear too many hats.  The kind of intelligence you need to navigate an academic community is not quite, shall we say, the same kind that you need to dream up an imagined world and dwell in that world for long periods of time.

The upshot, though, is that it can be done.  If I can do it, anyone can do it.

What Great Fun!--Peregrine Falcons, Germans from Russia, and Tourists at Readings

Amelia Montes and me

I was invited to Lincoln, Nebraska, as a visiting writer by Amelia Montes, director of the Ethnic Studies Institute and professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The visit was scheduled to begin with a dinner with faculty members and graduate students. Ben and I were late arriving because of unexpected road construction delays, so we parked at the hotel, checked in, and ran across the street to the restaurant with Amelia, who was patiently waiting for us.

Even with such an inauspicious beginning, the evening was a stimulating experience—brilliant company and conversation that ranged from crimes of passion in Mexico City to Russian Orthodox monasteries. Professors Joy Castro, James Garza, and Jennifer Garza, and Ph.D. candidate Bernice Olivas joined Amelia, Ben, and me for that very best kind of wide-ranging intellectual conversation that lasted late into the night.

Ben at the Museum of Germans from Russia

The next day, Saturday, was packed with activities. We woke early and were joined at breakfast by our dear friends, Allison and Travis Hedge Coke, who had driven two hours from the University of Nebraska-Kearney where Allison holds the Reynolds Chair of Creative Writing and coordinates the incredible Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Retreat and Festival. Travis was on his way to the airport, and Allison intended to join us for the day’s activities and my reading that evening. As always, it was so much fun to see them and talk with them, even if it was just for a short while with Travis.

Amelia arrived to interview me for a chapter in her book, Corazon y Tierra:  Latinas Writing on the Midwest, Amelia’s critical book on contemporary writing by Latina authors who are writing either about or from the Midwest. I’m honored to be in this book, which is such a fascinating exploration of different kinds of Latina identity. Amelia’s questions were probing and perceptive, and she was massively prepared for the two-hour interview.

While Amelia interviewed me, Allison and Ben went exploring in Lincoln, visiting the Museum of Germans from Russia and the university campus, which has been beautifully landscaped with native plants, always a strong interest of Ben’s and mine.

The old Senate chamber at Nebraska Capitol

We had lunch with a discussion of some of the initiatives both women were working on at their respective universities and the newest work of other writers with which we are all familiar. After lunch, Amelia had a special treat for us—a guided tour through the Nebraska State Capitol. It so happens Ben and I love to visit places like state capitols, but even those who don’t would have enjoyed this tour. Nebraska’s capitol building is a true original. All its components—from floors to ceiling—are pieces of art with symbolic meaning. Just wandering through it would be a delight because of the beauty, but the tour enhanced that with an understanding of the philosophical concepts behind everything. And our tour guide, Jameson, a student of history at the university, gave us such a dramatic rendering that it added to the pleasure.

The cap of our tour was a trip to the rotunda where a soldier’s poignant wedding was taking place. He and his best man were in uniform, and I’ve never seen such a starry-eyed groom. When the couple finished their vows to each other, the groom made his own vows to her three young children that left not only the kids wiping their eyes. We kept hoping he was not scheduled to leave for duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

Breathtaking beauty in flight

The balcony section outside the rotunda offered an incredible view of the whole city. But even better, it offered… peregrine falcons! They nest on the top of the building, and during our whole time out there, the parents flew back and forth, bringing food to their constantly crying children. Of course, this was a great treat for me since I’m such a lover of raptors.

As the tour ended, Amelia announced my reading that evening to the rest of the people in our tour group. This is exactly what I would have done in her place, so it’s interesting being on the other end and feeling embarrassed about the fuss. She was right to do it, though, and one lady said she intended to attend. After all of this, we went back to the hotel to rest and prepare for the reading and book signing.

Reading from Every Last Secret

I was excited about the bookstore where I would read. Indigo Bridge Bookstore is a bookstore, a coffee shop, and a nonprofit community development organization, all in one. This is quite unusual for a bookstore, and I was interested to see how well it worked. Located in the historic Hay Market district, Indigo Bridge Bookstore is cheerful and bright with plenty of customers, so I think it’s working quite well.

Since some people had come for the mystery and some for the poetry, I mixed them in the reading, which worked well—I think because many of the same subjects and obsessions inform both areas of my work. I spoke about Every Last Secret and read from it briefly. Then I read a couple of poems from Heart’s Migration and a few more from my newest manuscript, Dark Sister. We had a lovely audience for the reading, including fellow writers Allison Hedge Coke and Joy Castro, students from the university, and townspeople. The woman from the Capitol tour showed up halfway through the reading, having wandered downtown Lincoln lost and missed the mystery part when that was what she came for, but she liked the poetry so much that she bought both books. It turns out she was a tourist from Iowa. And another woman of obvious maturity declared it was her very first reading, as she bought a book, and she thought she'd make them a regular thing from now on. So I felt I'd done my part for literature that night!

Joy Castro, me, Amelia Montes, Allison Hedge Coke, Ben

After the reading, we went out for a late meal and good conversation with other writers until midnight. So we wandered up to our hotel room, sleepy and happy.

The University of Nebraska has been wise to hire gifted writers, scholars, and teachers, such as Amelia Montes, Joy Castro, and Allison Hedge Coke. Somehow, after having seen the state's quirky but beautiful Capitol building, I'm not surprised.

In other news, I am a weekly blogger for the group blog Writers Who Kill on Saturdays, as most of you know. I have now also joined the group blog, The Stiletto Gang. (Ben said, "You'll have to use a knife for your photo since you can't wear heels.") I will be blogging there on the fourth Friday of each month. I hope you'll come visit me at both places.

I want to bring this blog back to twice a week, alternating between my two series, Books of Interest by Writers of Color and Literary Mystery Novelists, with occasional posts in the series, Balancing Writing and book Marketing, and posts about my own work. It will be a little bumpy for the next couple of weeks trying to get back to that, but then I think I'll be back in the groove. Thanks for stopping by!