of women and salt sneak peek gabriela garcia

JC: What was it like to study with Roxane Gay at Purdue? I had started writing snippets of what would become Of Women and Salt before graduate school, but I wrote the bulk of it during those three years of study. That early belief in my writing meant a lot to me.

But I didn’t begin to take myself seriously as a fiction writer until I got into an MFA program about a decade after working various jobs in music, media, and political organizing, and thinking that my fiction and poetry were something I did on the side and that I probably wouldn’t ever actually publish. Gabriela Garcia: I’ve been writing as long as I can remember-I used to literally dictate stories to my mother before I knew how to write. Jane Ciabattari: When did you first decide to be a fiction writer? And to write Of Women and Salt? Our virtual conversation was west coast-based-she was in Oakland, where she has been situated throughout the pandemic, I in Sonoma County.

It’s a remarkable debut, with the shimmering image of Les Miserables at its core, winking at us from beginning to end. Garcia packs a suite of distilled stories into a mere 200 pages, sliding expertly from one place to the next, one narrative time zone to another, her language fluid and specific enough to carry us along. There are no wasted words in Of Women and Salt. Of Women and Salt, her first novel, centers on multiple generations of mothers and daughters, from a female worker in a 19th-century Cuban cigar factory to her great granddaughter in modern-day Miami, with a powerful side story about a Salvadoran mother who risks everything for her daughter. Gabriela Garcia grew up in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban mother and a father from the small city of Irapuato in Mexico.

Of women and salt sneak peek gabriela garcia