Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the short story collection Graft published by Tolsun Books in 2022, and the author of the poetry memoir chapbook Burn Scars chronicling living through the Dixie Fire in 2021 in the northeastern Sierras. She's the co-editor of the forthcoming Red Flag Warning: Northern Californians Living with Fire to be published by HeyDay Books in spring 2024, and the forthcoming poetry collection the daughterland poems to be published by El Martillo Press. Her work has been featured in the Akashic Noir Series Santa Cruz Noir, PM Press’ All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body, on Upworthy, and Juked, Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She teaches poetry with the Community Literature Initiative of Los Angeles and continues to report on rural communities recovering from wildfire for Feather Publishing. She’s the co-founder of Las Pachuca’s—a Latina theater troupe in northeastern California.
By Matt Sedillo
Photography Courtesy of Ryan Upton
Published 4/24/2023 7:30 AM PST
You are the author of several books now. Some poetry, some short stories, you have been a journalist as well. Tell us what it is about your skills as a writer that allows you to move so comfortably into different fields and disciplines?
I'm the author of one published short story collection. Another I'm currently editing so I can submit it for publication. All my short stories are set in southern California with rare exceptions. I've had four plays I've written, produced and also wrote two documentary shorts. And like everyone from California, I have a couple of screenplays. I think each time you go to tell a story it might need a different medium. Sometimes I do the same story in a poem first then move it to a short story--one time I move it to a play; sometimes I start in a novel and write poems in the voices of the characters. I have a poem in daughterland poems that is actually the culmination of some research I did for the novel I'm writing. You feel for where it's going to find a home and you go with it. Poetry is my home-base and when I'm working on something really personal I tend to head to poetry. When I'm trying to make a statement I tend to head to plays. If it feels expansive, a novel. Etc. Journalism is probably my least favorite but it's how I pay the bills. Also in the last few years I've been able to use journalism to advocate for rural Californians living with the consequences of legislation brought on by non rural Californians. So journalism for me also helps alert readers to small/large causes that I champion.
Everywhere you go you seem to build community. Tell us about some of the local and national communities of writers you are a part of?
Ha. I was born in Montebello and raised for the first few years and then high school in Whittier but I grew up an army brat living in Maryland, DC, Georgia, and then West Germany so I'm able because of that I think to run in different communities and find common ground. I'm as progressive as they come yet I'm attached to several people in the military and that's kind of unusual for a leftist. I've also lived in Northern California for 25 years (both rural and San Francisco where I went to graduate school) so I have many ties there and Japan (I lived in Kumamoto prefecture with the JET Programme (Japanese Exchange Teaching Program). I also belong to an online writing group of sorts. We're loosely based around writer Ariel Gore's literary kitchen network of wayward writers but there's a core of us that see each other in person these days. Our kids grew up knowing each other as well. We used to meet in the summers in the northern Sierras where I lived before the Dixie Fire. I grew up an environmental activist in the Green Party of California so I know people from there. I was raised by a Mexican lesbian mother and had a gay military stepdad for awhile before my mom finally came all the way out and took off with my stepmom for 35 years (who was a nun when they met). My dad was a biologist turned medical doctor. So my background in general is all over the map. Not a lot phases me. In the last decade or so I worked with people in theater in the northern Sierras and with the Listen to Your Mother franchise directing shows and had my own theater troupe I created with one of my theater friends. I'm always glad now that my mom made me so independent and that I was able to travel so much. I have people everywhere that I consider close friends
You are multi-talented can you tell us about the other Margaret Garcia.
The other Margaret Garcia is a badass painter and I absolutely never want to do anything to end up on her bad side. I love her work. I love her attitude. She's somehow old school and on the edge of what's next at the same time. I'm so glad we're friends now. It's an evolving friendship based on wonder and mutual respect. When we finally met at the end of 2022 I felt like we'd known each other forever. We met with big hugs. I've always been curious about the other Margaret Garcia for three decades and I am so happy that my friend Matthew and her husband Rhett were able to conspire to get us to meet. We're talking about doing a project together around climate change and wildfire survival. Her paintings of fire are true to the emotional experience. She likes my poetry. It's a mutual admiration society right now and I love that.
With your collection daughterland you are joining up with El Martillo Press. El Martillo Press is really committed to team building and poetry trouping what has your experience like been thus far with your press-mates?
I love El Martillo Press and my press siblings! My work always fits uneasily between not being academic enough for the university press/east coast crowd but also not really street poetry or slam worthy either ( I don't memorize well). I took an instant liking to El Martillo for being willing to be out there and not sitting back and publishing without promoting. I've always tried to get my voice out there and I appreciate El Martillo Press' fervor. I think the publishers have put together a solid group of poets to work together for the benefit of all. When I met those guys I felt like I'd already known them forever.
What advice can you give aspiring writers?
Yeah, my advice to aspiring writers is to not get caught up in trends or identities that aren't you. Too many of us struggle with that. We're working on something we believe in and whoops, it's not trendy anymore. Or we try and see how we can somehow fit in somehow. As someone of multiple communities I say just do your own thing and eventually people will come around to you if it's good. And don't write things you aren't into because it'll show. But I tend to work on multiple projects at once (no two in the same medium) which is to say I'm editing short stories, dusting off a play, and working on the next book of poems, while researching a novel. I want to work every day but I have to work on what comes to me that day. It's not always the same medium every day. And aspiring writers shouldn't be afraid to try shit and go way out there. I love music and visual art and I try to approach writing like musical composition and painting. I'm always interested in experimenting with language and trying to create something new in that respect. Also don't think you can write a memoir in your 20s. Live a little first.
Matt Sedillo has been described as the "best political poet in America" as well as "the poet laureate of the struggle" by academics, poets, and journalists alike. He has appeared on CSPAN and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.
