Horn. Please give a warm savannah welcome to jaquira diaz. [applause] hi. Thank you so much. Im so happy to be here and its wonderful to see all of you booklovers here and thank youo savannah for your southern hospitality. I also want to thank the savannah book festival and everyone who made thist event possible including sponsors, booksellers. Lets give it up for the indie room. Llers in the [applause] i love you all. Thank you for all that you do for championing writers and supportingng ordinary girls. Because of you i am here so thank you. I want to open with just a little piece that opens the book ordinary girls. It functions kind of like a prologue but not really. Its just a very short section. Girlhood. We were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop on long summer days past the voice on the courts. We were the girls on the merrygoround laughing and laughing and letting the world. Holding on for lives. The girls on the swings throwing our heads back, the wind in our hair. We were the loudmouths, the troublemakers, the practical jokers. We were the party girls hitting the clubs in booty shorts and hightop jordans smoking blunts on the beach. We were the wild girls who loved music and dancing. Girls who are black and brown and clear. Girls who love each other. I have been those girls, homeless and on the run a girl on lifeguard stands behind restaurants on a dustup ends up with the girl throwing down with boys and girls on her older sisters and a punk suspended every year for fighting in the first day of school, kick out of music classn for throwing a char at the math teacher son. Kicked off two Different School buses, kicked out of prealgebra for stealing the teachers great book, a girl that got slammed onto police garber to cops in for the wholele school after a brawl with six other girls. I have been other girls, girl standing before ae judge, girl n a dock the morning after hurricane looking out at the bay like its the end of the world, a girl and a rooftop, girl on the ledge, girl plummeting through the air and years later a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. This is the opening of my book and i will talk a little bit about the inspiration and why i wrote it. This book tookhe about 12 yearso write and it is without a doubt my lifes work. Ordinary girls is about my girlhood in adolescence in puerto rico in miami beach about growing up clear and providing suppression and violence. Spout love in friendship and family, about our parents and how their actions shape us about losing the people we love, about how we are not defined by the worst thing we have ever done and its about my relationship with my mother. Growing up i was at juvenile offender who spent most of her time on the streets. At 11 attempted suicide for the first time. A few months after that i ran away from home for the first time and then i started getting arrested. I dropped out of highhe school, kept running away, kept getting arrested, kept fighting in thehe streets, kept i was also in the middle of the special awakening and would later finally come out as but i couldnt talk about that not anyone not in the early 90s, not in my neighborhood which was marked by and transphobia and targeted attacks on gay people and certainly not my mother. I spent much of my childhood and adolescence pretending to be someone else especially when it seemed like the whole world was trying to erase us. I spent a lot of that time hiding in books, looking for myself and stories and after i became a writer i decided that i would write about people like me girls and women who are black and brown and poor and clear and another about women like my mother away puerto rican woman who didnt know how to raise or protect her black children would spend her entire life struggling with Mental Illness and addiction. My mother was and is a complicatedd woman. She was loving and abusive she help me one minute and then kicked my as and help me again. She was and is flawed and owner paul and confident and strong and loss. My mother was and is deeply deeply homophobic. When i first started writing ordinary girls my mother rarely showed up so i wrote around her avoiding the truth. The truth was painful. The truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about but i wrote about other mothers. My a boil at a black puerto rican woman whoif carried me my whole life and carries me still. She taught me to pray and cook and chainsmoke taught me to keep house taught me everything i know about forgiveness and i wrote about a miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3yearold son and dumped his body3 in a neighborhood coast where i grew up and spent most of her life on death row. And i wrote about my mothers mother my grandmother mercy a white woman who hated the fact that my mother fell in love with and married a black man and that she had as children and or grandchildren were black preacher would later die by suicide. And they wrote about the mythical woman a legend who took her children from their carried them to a nearby river, help them underwater until they drowned and then drowned herself now she looks to the bodies of water looking for her ghost children. I write about all these other mothers, and he mother except own until a friend read the manuscript and after reading about five chapters where is your mother . How come you never mention her and i had to sit down with the book take a hard honest look at the pages, examine my life and all the reasons i had an avoiding writing about my mother. The truth is my mother broke me and the truth is i was afraid to look, too admit to see how much she broke me and how hard it can bend to find my way back to my sofa now easily i could be broken again. I finally decided to ask the question and more than that to ask the question for myself, to answer it, where is my mother . To write about her about her relationship in ways that was honest and examined all the way ways she was real. Arriving from beginning to end took about four years but i had to step away from the book several times and there were many different versions could to see that the writing of this book drained me would be an understatement. I gained weight, i lost weight, my hair started falling out. I had the worst insomnia it, hae had in my life. During those 12 years i lost relationships, friendships and then my grandmother died by suicide. I often needed time away from the book in order to take care of myself and to make sense of what i was doing to interrogate different parts of the book to examine my life that i was living in writing soft fiction for me has never been cathartic. Quite the opposite. Writing this book is the hardest thing ive ever done. What kept mee going . I wanted to write about people who rarely had a home in the literary landscape that i wanted to write about growing up poor in miami and one of puerto ricos cost to rio and all the ways queer puerto rican black girls are hyper invisible and write about my Community Without losing sight of what mattered the most of the people i was writing that were real and they existed and they lived and loved even if the rest of the world didnt see that. When i started writing this book i thought not just about how to write my story of how my story was and is connected to a larger world s and what my place in tht world might be. Im here because i found that place thanks to a group of friends who saved me. I was struggling as a girl, as a woman and later as a writer struggling with how to write about Sexual Violence in a way that was honest, in a way that wasnt just about my experience about a finding something larger about girls about how complicated families lived and fight and love anded i wanted to write it without. Or glory or anger. But also more so than any of my girls im someone who has had access to education in creative writing two fellowships and writing conferences. Its taken a lot of hard work but that doesnt erase the fact that ive had access to all of this and most of the girls in my community havent. The world isnt kind were black and brown girls. And the world isnt kind for black and brown women. Especially when it comes from working class communities and working poverty. These ordinary girls taught me that its possible to make our own families to make her own way they help me believe in love and friendship and hope more than anything after they had girls of their own. Was there girls the taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write thiss book. They helped me see the girl i had been. It helps me remember that there are girls out there who are just like i was that my story was a unique trait all girls no matter their circumstance are vulnerable. This is something we share something that transcends borders and race and class, somewhere theres a teenaged girl whose mother suffers from Mental Illness and addiction just trying to get through the day, trying to come to terms with their sexuality. I would like to mention that maybe seeing herself in this book will make her life a little bit easier. Some of the other things that i talk about inng the book are alo things that were very important for me, things that made me a writer. My father loves books. He was a poet who stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father speaking at the funeral of a puerto rican protest poet and when i saw everybody gathered in celebrating his life people who had read his book, i thought poets were important and that they could change the world i thought, i want that. I also wanted this book to Say Something about access and who gets access to this world of publishing. Who gets to be up here and talk about books and it was important to me because coming from where he came from i always felt that i didnt have enough. It wash. Hard for me to talk abt that and puerto rican history about puerto ricos history of colonialism and its relationship with the united states. I started taking about how to include our history and a memoir in something that was in a history book and how my story is connected to that story. Being puerto rican i think most of us who come from puerto rico feel a connection to the island even after we have left it even if we have never been there which is the truth. There is a saying that a lot Puerto Ricansng know which comes from a poem, i have forgotten his name but it comes from a poem that means i would be puerto rican even if i was born on the moon. I wanted to reach people who would never read about Puerto Ricans are people who wouldnt pick up a history book or people who didnt have access to that history for whatever reason and make some of that history accessible to the general reader, to a reader who picks up a memoir about girlhood and so i tried to talk about the parts of puerto rican history and colonialism that shaped me as a woman and a human being and as a writer. A lot of this influence the kind of writer i became and im always thinking about who i was writing for. In so many ways i felt like this book even though i am i intended to be open and honest than i intended it to be vulnerable, i wanted it to be a conversation with a specific group of people, girls who are like i was certainly Puerto Ricans, black Puerto Ricans and girls who grow up in poverty and for them to understand i wasnt writing about them. I was writing for them. Something that i mention in the book, i was a kid who loved to read and i didnt have money for books. I went to the library and asked the libraries to give me books. I Read Everything they put in my hands everything they put in my hands were books that were written about white people and for white people and i thought to be a writer you needed to be white and so i wanted them to understand and to see the book and understand that isnt real and that we exist and that it is possible. There were other parts of this book that kind of shaped me and at the time i thought about while i was writing how it would make sense to the story. One of them was the baby lollipop that i talk about which happened in 1990. There was a toddler found in our neighborhood in miami beach and at the time they didnt really know where the toddler came from , just that they had found his body and that he had been tortured. I saw this story on the news and took over the 24hour news cycle at the time, i was a kid and because it was on the news and on every newspaper and everybody in the neighborhood was talking about it we all kind of obsessed about this. Irony was a. Writer so i took note and thought about this a lot. For weeks i thought about this until they discovered they found the babys mother and the story came out in the news that they had found his mother and her partner and they had dumped his body and fled. Part of the narrative at the time, part of what was important to the narrative at the time was this woman and her partners these two killed this baby and ran away and they made it sound like being a was part of the crime. The people who talked about this in my neighborhood including teachers and librarians always talked aboutut this with either implicit or explicit. So i kept thinking about the story and thinking about it and 20 years later i wrote in sa of being this little girl when the story broke and essay was published in a magazine called the sun. A woman who had been at the time working as a Death Penalty activist who visited prisoners on death row right it and she said i know this woman that you wrote about. Ive been visiting herey in prison. Shes been on deathw row since 1992. So i wrote back to her and asked her if she could put us in touch and if we could start a correspondence. She did and eventually i wrote to her and i told her that i had written a story about discovering her story on the news. She wrote back. She wrote me letters and her first letter, she was kind of livid. She was upset that i had written about her and she said you didnt know me. You didnt know my son. What gives you the right to even write about me . So i wrote back and i wrote back and told her my story and told her who i was and why had he had written about it and how i wrote about discovering her story on the news and following along with it and i was a child at the time. I told her i would like to hear her story, not with the newspaper said or what was on the news or what people said that what was true. I put this in the book because i think its important. Its important for readers to see a writer who is writing a memoir to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain violences. When i asked her to tell me her story she wrote back and said this is not a story. This is my life. She put me in my place and i deserved it. At that moment i really started thinking about why it was writing and why it was writing it this way. I went back to the beginning of the book and i started interrogating myself and interrogatingti why i was tellig the story and i had a right to tell the story considering that if wasnt really a resident anymore and i have access to all these things and i was in graduate school and the people i was writing about didnt have access to it. She really got me to think about seeing all the women i was writing about and think about the fact that im writing about real people. Theres another woman that i mentioned a book whose name i didnt even know who died by suicide and i also thought about her a lot and i included her in the book because i thought about her in the same way. At the time i was someone who was suffering from major depression and ptsd and anxiety and Suicidal Ideation and thinking about taking my life and thinking of this woman as a story, as the legend. I also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way and to remind the readers that these are just stories, that these are real people and that she was a real woman. In 2017 Maria Cardona got a new trial and bonding with her for several years i wasnt writing all the time but i would send an occasional letter and then she would write back a right to her three letters and i would write back. One of the things that she asked for after she let me have permission to write about her than she did want me to write about her except he became very clear that she wanted to control the narrative and she wanted me to go to her retrial and i did preach he was being tried for murder again but this time the Death Penalty was and as i sat in the trial after having this correspondence with her and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else was partially responsible another woman had confessed, i realized she was lying. She got caught lying on the stand by the prosecutors three separate times. I included a little bit of that too because i really wanted the readers to thinknk about this ia of her that i had instructed in my head and how that sort of fell apart because i wasnt really thinking of her as a woman. I have been thinking of this is as a story that i was following is a journalist. So there are these other moments in the look where i thought it was important to call myself out i talked about writing about puerto rico and one of the things that i have done over the years has been to visit puerto rico and to got back almost evey summer and spent spend time with family. I still have most of my family there and to drive around. I drove to san juan one afternoon and if any of you have isn to puerto rico there this building in san juan called the Puerto Rico Tourism Company which used to be a prison. It used to be a prison where Puerto Ricans were tortured and murdered and somehow the building was purchased and doubts the Puerto Rico Tourism Company. To place we can get trolley maps and there is a gallery and people take selfies. The building still has to jail cells and their original condition where people stop to take photos. When i went backac to visit this building after having written most of this book, almost all of it and i was thinking i knew the history of this place and i went intending to see what it had been, a prison where people work tortured and where people lost their lives and yet when i got there and saw families and tourists afa woman asked me, she handed me her phone and asked me to take a photo of her with her two children. I took her phone and i took a picture of them and then i asked her to do the same, to take a picture of me in front of his jail cell. The moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing. Its a moment that now fills me with shame because it was like i was trying to forget and i was implicit in this. I thought i needed to include in the book to call myself out and to talk openly about how the desire to erase history and to erase violence and who is complicit. Something that also is in the book and a lot of people said that miami is like another character. Miami is the setting for part of the book and its atmosphere and historic low marker and a cultural marker. I tried to capture what was for me the real miami, not the miami that i saw over and over on tv and movies and music videos. I tend to write about this miami that was kind of invisible in everything isu consumed either n tv or videos and books which was this workingclass miami beach that was just four blocks away from ocean drive where people lived in poverty and people had brass in their apartments and sometimes to the benevolent to city because the power got cut off. This was very real when i was growing up in miami where we would have this building that was kind of falling apart, that was crumbling and a block away where the building that had been renovated and was beautiful and people with a lot of money who lived there and drove mercedes. We all lived in the same neighborhood and it sort of felt like this strange state, to live in a p place that didnt want yu there with people who didnt really want to see you and to be slowly pushed out. I wanted too kind of have a miai beach at this time be very present in the book because i wanted to Say Something about how a place can be beautiful and ugly and how a place can be glamorous and beautiful at the same time and to Say Something about the duality of the migrant experience and how people are more than what you see on the surface. Most of the people that lived in my community were latino and haitian and immigrants and migrants and most of them had education and had sessions back, and came to miami and drove taxis and had to go back to school and brought their families and lived in poverty. I remember my father had friends who were taxi drivers who have been doctors and engineers but have to start from scratch because they had to learn the language. They were struggling in other ways too but i i wanted that in the book because that was real and that was the reality then. Before i talk about how i became a writer, Mental Illness. My mother suffered and continues to suffer from Mental Illness and it was very clear when we were kids that something was wrong but my mother went undiagnosed until we move to miami beach from puerto rico. Years later it became clear to me that she had been undiagnosed for years and that, and also that because we were poor we didnt really have adequate medical care and she didnt really have Adequate Health care it was clear that it would have been different if we had money. She might have been diagnosed if we had resources and her life might have been different. I also talk a little bit about my maternal grandmothers Mental Illnessit and her Suicidal Ideation. She eventually did die by suicide in 2011 which is something is present in the book but it was also present during my whole life growing up because mike grandmother talked about the so often she threatened often she was also suffering from Mental Illness and depression and took a lot of ngmedication. When i was a kid i also was suffering from depression and ptsd and anxiety. I was undiagnosed for years but i thought that this seemed like an easy way out at the time. I dont know how to describe it but it seems much easier than living. How i became a writer is also something that i touch him in the book. When i was 16 i dropped out of high school and then i got my ged and i started taking classes at a community college. I enlisted in the military and for a brief period i was in the navy. This was also right in the middle so the boteri became a place, when i first got there, place the filled me with hope ironically even though it was in arizona. Because it was the first time that people expected me to succeed. I felt like i could start fresh in a place where no one knew me and reinvent myself and that i could work hard and have a future. It was the first time that i thought i could have a future and that real life as possible. Then the navy became unbearable because i was bullied for being gay and i had a relationship with a woman and someone found out in the rumors spread and eventually xoma hotel became my nickname. I left the military and its not something that i talk about extensively in the book. Its just one chapter but i do mention it because it became sort of liket a bridge, a way fr me to think of a life worth living. After leaving the military it went back to college and i took classes again. I did reallyl. Well and i went o grad school and i decided that i would hear writer. I knew id have to work other jobs and being a writer was possible and even if no one publish my books i would write. After graduate school i got this fellowship to the Wisconsin Institute for creative writing because i had applied for fellowships and scholarships and everything, every single opportunity. If i could afford it i would apply for it so i got a fellowship in one day i got a phonecall. They told me that i had gotten it so i moved to wisconsin. It was cold and there was a lot of cheese but it was great. [laughter] i have dario g. [laughter] it was also difficult. But then i started teaching and slowly things started falling into place. It was a lot of hard work teaching and for years i just worked odd jobs and kept trying to write this book and would take a break and step away from it. Then i went back to when i could and abandoned it and try to write another novel it is a didnt feel possible to admit all these things to people. And then i decided to actually go through with it and write this book because i thought it was important that i tell the truth and writing it as fiction even if i didnt change a word felt like lying. Id like to open up for some questions and q conversation, maybe something lighter. But before i do that i also wanted to read you a very short section because this i think is the core of the book. The book is also about girlhood and about navigating a certain kind of girlhood in puerto rico and in miami beach. I was talking about not just myself navigating this girlhood myself but these other girls who were mye lifeline. Im going to read you one paragraph was really at the core of what thisd book is. We were shortshorts and crop tops, baggy jeans and basketball jerseys, big hoop earrings and no matter what everybody had opinions about how we dressed and called his tomboys and hood rats or fast girls. Our shorts were too short, our jeans too tight, too baggy our voices to loud. Everybody wanted to control what we wore, what we did, who we did it with. We were not the girls they wanted us to be. We were not allowed to talk like them, to walk like this. We were supposed to feel the kind of desire you feel that 13, at 14. What kind of girl theyd love to say, what kind of girl even as they took what we gave, took what we try to hold onto, our voices, our bodies, we were trying totr live but the world s doing its best to kill us. Thank you. [applause] thank you. I appreciate it. And thankpr you for powering through that. Nrel i find very funny. I promise. If you would like to ask a question we ask so everyone can hear you there is a microphone in the middle. If you can step up to the mic if you can. Go ahead. Thank you. What an important story to share with all of us. I had a light or i have a question, your choice. The light question with the what other writers are authors havee inspired you . How many writers and authors have inspired me . I remember reading when i was puerto rican. I think it was at 19 and i thought this was the first time that i read a book in english about Puerto Ricans who were like me, just normal People Living their everyday lives. I thought we exist. Before them like i said multiple books from librarians were put in my hands mostly written by white men who werent around anymore but also some who were. I read a lot of stephen king. [laughter] i also read Toni Morrison and i thought oh my god this is incredible. You can do this . And i thought i would never be able to do this but i still think that. You should Read Everything that Toni Morrison has written. Everyone should. Some writers writing today who inspire me today . I love catalina where days latest novel and angie bruce. Ive read a lot of poets. And when my brother was an aspect. I could go on forever but i wont. And you have another question . Or did someone else have a question . I have to call you uproot im a resident of wisconsin, lifelong resident of wisconsin. Its not that cold now. It was cool for me. Just kidding. Tell me about the dances you and your girls did and how that function for you. Was it cathartic, was angered . Tell us about u that. Dancing and music in a lot of ways for me, dancing with more i think about performance and performing for me specifically performing a kind of strength. It was very often, they often in miami when i started going through puberty i felt the unwanted attention from men and i developed very early and i felt like i was getting all this attention that i wasnt interested in so i started dressing and boys clothing. I wore baggy jeans and polossss shirts and basketball jerseys. I dressed head to toe like a boy and i didnt want to be looked at. I think it was dancing pretending to be someone else pretending to be stronger and pretend to be happy but for me and my girls dancing was what we did just because we needed something to do. Auwe went to the Bayside Marketplace where you could get on the boat that had a dance floor. Music kind of got us through a lot. We needed it. Especially during that time we needed music. Now when i look back at everything we lived through it felt like dancing is not just performance but dancing was for assistance and survival. Thank you. Other questions . Would you please talk a little bit about your editing process . How much of theu book was editd and how did you get with an editor and agents . My first step even before the book was finished actually i started submitting parts of the book to agents that i found on line without really knowing anything about how publishing works. That was a mistake. Dontt do that. There is plenty of information out on the internet. If you are interested in casting an agent, what kinds of hooks are you interested in writing and what are the books out there on the market that are like yours are like the books you want to write and who are the agents that represent the writers you love or writers who are writing about somethingut similar and do research on them. There is 20 of information. There are interviews and articles and profiles and theres a wealth of information out there about them. I went and i submitted part of thisen book to an agent who isnt a very big house and have a lot of very big name authors. Shead read one chapter and she liked it and she signed me right away. I thought i had made it. I hit the lottery. This agent had a big house in my book is going to be a bestseller in that i didnt hear from her for a very long time. She was at a big agency and had very big clients and i was a very little, little, little fish. She didnt have time forle me. I kept writing and then i went to this writers conference and there was an agent there michelle brower. I had signed up for a scholars reading, so i read from his book and she heard me read and she emailed me. She got my email from the conference of the melt me and she said would you submit some work for us . Because i have this very powerful agent i didnt send her anything. She wrote me a year later to say i saw that you publish this other essay. If you y have work will you send me some work and i still didnt send her anything. By then i had already parted ways with my agent. The third year in a row actually around the same time she wrote me s again and she asked if i would send her something. I thought what if ive been waiting for . This agent is heard me read and has read my work and bread other pieces and actually gets my vision and likes my writing. I sent her work. Ake it in this book. She asked if we could have a conversation. We had a conversation about an hour. We talked about this book and what else i wanted to do in the future about possibly a career, how i envisio jaquira she gave me expensive notes and said go back and right to begin, read the book. Of the book in a row to the rotella road. I think three years later, the book was ready. The whole process of writing the book took about 12 years. And when the book was ready, she sent it to several editors and we got, i want to say a couple of offer right away. And for the book went into action, we got it offered. I had a conversation with them, and my agent, and really liked what she had to say about how she wanted to preserve my voice. Not turn it into commercial book. She wanted me to tell her what i to do to help me get there that is what i wanted. The only other conversations with editors had been we can make this the best educated. And i thought well i havent read educated. Im pretty sure this is not that. Every conversation i had with editors was more like what they wanted me to do and this other company wanted to make this the book that i wanted it to me. And when i look back at the pages and what this book looked like before, canning believe you kept reading after page one. I cant believe this is a book. I feel very lucky to have had her because this is was a collaboration. Guest if your mother has read the book has that change a relationship. She has not, has a alter just the mere existence of your book has altered her in any way. Jaquira my mother is not a reader. She does not read. But i have talked with her extensively about the book. She knows i am a writer she knows with the bookk is a lot. She is a lot more interested in will there be a movie and who will play her. [laughter]. You all are laughing but i am serious. I said mom, i wrote a book. I was a strange for mom for about seven years we did not talk. I completely removed myself from her life and her familys life for my own Mental Health. When my grandmother died, i felt like finally could reach out to my mother and start some sort of relationship again. It took years. Myan mother is clean now, shesn a assistedliving center and she sometimes calls me three and four times a day. Ith is difficult because my mothers netiquette. Even though she is clean, shes tougstill suffers from Mental Illness so seeing her, it requires me to do the kind of work that is harmful. Like i have to be harmful to my Mental Health and willing to forgive her every single time i walk in there. Everything a time of pickup the phone. I have to be open to forgiveness every single conversation, every single visit. Otherwise, i want to be able to have a relationship with her. And i wont be able to live with myself. It is difficult but we do have a relationship. I just got engaged last year. My mom took a really long time to accept first that i am gay, then i am engaged to a person who is not a man and also having to do with gender. My partner is a binary, trans masculine and my mother for her, all of this seems like too much. But i love her and almost every time a visitor, i have to say, i love you and you love me and youre going to have to love me this way. It is been working. Thank you so much. [background sounds]. [background sounds]. Tunable tv starting at eight eastern highlights our in Depth Program will begin with the author and a number of books among them history of the black National Anthem and brief. Novelist jodi, including her novel a spark of light in the journalist and Science Fiction novelist, cory discusses his book and activism. After the d