CANR
WORK TITLE: WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jennifermaritzamccauley.com
CITY: Houston
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
https://www.uhcl.edu/human-sciences-humanities/faculty/mccauley-jennifer
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Florida International University, M.F.A. (creative writing); University of Missouri, Ph.D. (creative writing and literature).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, and university professor. Origins Literary Journal, poetry editor; Gulf Stream Magazine, staff; Florida Book Review, contributing editor. University of Houston-Clear Lake, assistant professor of literature and creative writing. Yale Young Writers’ Workshop, faculty, 2023. Pleiades, fiction editor; The Missouri Review, poetry editor and contest editor.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize Special Mention; received awards from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, Academy of American Poets, and Best of the Net; was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction. Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Novelist, poet, and university professor, McCauley has been called by Pop Sugar an Afro-Latina poet who is “reshaping the poetry landscape.” Recipient of a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, Independent Publisher Book Award, and Academy of American Poets recognition, McCauley has published books of poetry, and her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Vassar Review, Columbia Journal, and The Breakbeat Poets: LatiNext. She has worked as an editor at Origins Literary Journal, and is the poetry editor at The Missouri Review and fiction editor at Pleiades.
In 2017 McCauley published Scar On/Scar Off, a cross-genre collection of poetry that was named among the strongest collections of the year. Pursuing intersections and duality, her poems evoke the relationships between psyche and city, and identity and language. In a review online at The Friday Influence, José Angel Araguz explained the part language plays in McCauley’s poems, which “embody spaces of agency and contemplation.” In the poem “Loriella Is Dead,” McCauley asks, “What could words have done?” when she reveals a moment of grief and misunderstanding. Araguz declared: “Even the phrasing of ‘girlIhearyou,’ whose collision of words evoke urgency and a desire for connection, stands out as a one-sided gesture.”
In 2023, McCauley published a book of short stories, When Trying to Return Home, that spans a century of Black American and Afro-Latino identity, family life, loves, and communities in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and elsewhere. In the title story, a Black and Puerto Rican woman deals with insensitive questions about her race from white people and laments her own lack of knowledge of her ancestry. In the story “Torsion,” a Black college student faces loyalty to her mother versus wanting independence for her disabled brother living in foster care. Other stories confront grief over the loss of a parent, and moral dilemmas about sexual misconduct.
In an interview online at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, McCauley explained to Ivelisse Rodriguez her view on identity based on location: “the code-switching and re-naming process is stitched into the POC [people of color] experience in the U.S. This country is complex and vast, and every region has its own history, traditions, and culture. …in much of the work I gravitate toward and write, I’m looking for definitions of ‘home,’ how we translate ourselves to ourselves and to others.”
Commenting on the themes of yearning for the past and the wisdom of ancestors, a Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that McCauley “chronicles such yearnings in each story, interested in those spaces where differing forces collide internally and externally.” The contributor added that “The stories hang together in surprising ways, often linked across time.” “McCauley’s explosive debut collection crackles with moments of honesty, upheaval, and longing among families,” observed a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, who added that “Each story is a treasure.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2023, review of When Trying to Return Home.
Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2022, review of When Trying to Return Home, p. 102.
ONLINE
Center for Puerto Rican Studies, City University of New York, https://centropr-archive.hunter.cuny.edu/ (July 10, 2018), Ivelisse Rodriguez, “You’ll Be Who You Are, Wherever You Are: An Interview with Jennifer Maritza McCauley.”
The Friday Influence, https://thefridayinfluence.com/ (September 25, 2017), José Angel Araguz, review of Scar On/Scar Off.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a writer, poet, and university professor. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds an MFA from Florida International University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri. The author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, she is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley, M.F.A., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing,
College of Human Sciences and Humanities
Contact number: 281-283-3372
Email: McCauley@uhcl.edu
Office: B2617.07
Biography
Jennifer Maritza McCauley teaches literature and creative writing in the Literature program. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo and Sundress Academy for the Arts and awards from Best of the Net, Independent Publisher Book Awards, and Academy of American Poets. She also received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.
Dr. McCauley received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University and her Ph.D. in English (Literature and Creative Writing) from the University of Missouri. She is presently a fiction editor at the literary journal Pleiades and was formerly a contest editor and poetry editor at The Missouri Review. Her books include the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (2017, Stalking Horse Press) and When Trying to Return Home (2023, Counterpoint), a short story collection.
Curriculum Vitae
Areas of Expertise
Creative writing
Poetry, fiction, non-fiction
Hybrid forms
African-American literature
20th and 21st century American literature
Afro-Latinx/Latin American literature
Latinx/Latin American literature
Publications
SCAR ON/SCAR OFF. Stalking Horse Press. October 2017. (Book)
“Lost in Montjuïc, After Losing” “Descansar.” Zone 3, Austin Peay State University. May 2020.
“Fore-Mothers.” Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Illinois State University. January 2021.
“Mama Diaspora,” “Help I’m Fine!” Columbia Journal, Columbia University. February 2020.
“Afro-Colossus.” The Breakbeat Poets Anthology Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Haymarket Books. April 2020.
“Blackout/Apagón.” Puerto Rico en mi corazón, Anomalous Press. August 2019.
“Torsion.” Vassar Review, Vassar College. May 2017.
“Loriella is Dead.” Academy of American Poets/Poets.org (republished) and Puerto del Sol, New Mexico State University. March 2017
“Baby Dolls.” The Los Angeles Review. March 2017.
“But There is Also Rosa.” Passages North, Northern Michigan University. January 2017.
Courses (Current Academic Year)
Creative Writing
American Literature
World/Multicultural Literature
Literature and Experience
American Immigrant Literature
American Minority Literature
Research Projects
Dr. McCauley is a multi-genre writer and considers hybrid forms, short stories, historical fiction, personal narratives and lyric essays a special creative home. Her creative and critical projects currently center on Black women during the American Reconstruction Era, Black Puerto Rican transnational exchanges, and the Afro-Puerto Rican experience in the United States.
Awards and Accomplishments
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
Independent Publisher Book Awards
Academy of American Poets
Pushcart Prize Special Mention
CV: https://www.uhcl.edu/human-sciences-humanities/faculty/documents/curriculum-vitae/mccauley-jennifer.pdf
Jennifer Maritza McCauley
is a writer, poet, and university professor. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (prose), Kimbilio, CantoMundo and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds an MFA from Florida International University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri. She has received awards from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, Academy of American Poets and Best of the Net and she has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction. She has been published in Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Vassar Review, Columbia Journal, The Breakbeat Poets: LatiNext, Deep South Magazine, Jabberwock Review, Luna Luna, Split this Rock, Verse Daily, Connotations Press, Latinas: Protests and Struggle and on poets.org among other places. She has been on staff at Pleiades (Fiction Editor), The Missouri Review (Poetry Editor, Contest Editor), Origins Literary Journal (Poetry Editor), Gulf Stream Magazine (Staff) and Florida Book Review (Contributing Editor.) The author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF and the forthcoming short story collection When Trying to Return Home, she is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She is also faculty at the Yale Young Writers’ Workshop 2023.
McCauley has been called an Afro-Latina poet who is “reshaping the poetry landscape” by Pop Sugar, Hispanicize called her an “Afro-Latina Poet Who Inspires Us” , Hip Latina listed her as an Afro-Latina writer who discusses the “duality of [her] identity.” , Electric Literature says she is a Puerto Rican writer who tells “new stories”, Leyendo Lat Am says she is a Puerto Rican writer to “read right now” and the Columbia Daily Tribune said she “can write her way into and out of any situation, style or genre.”
McCauley displays book smarts as writer, editor
Aarik Danielsenadanielsen@columbiatribune.com
Jennifer Maritza McCauley [Courtesy]
Don’t fence Jennifer Maritza McCauley in. The University of Missouri doctoral student can write her way into and out of any situation, style or genre. An accomplished poet, whose “Scar On/Scar Off” was among the strongest collections of 2017, McCauley also feels the short story’s gravitational pull and is seeking a home for her first novel.
Trouble is, McCauley spends a significant amount of time navigating creative traffic jams. Her labor as a student and as an editor for two literary journals precludes her from writing as much as she might otherwise.
But McCauley never names these efforts as busy work. One pursuit influences the other, feeds the other, forms the other. While she’s still connecting the dots between her creative endeavors, her very recognition of all these dots allows McCauley to envision constellations of possibility.
As the poetry editor for The Missouri Review, and fiction editor for Pleiades at the University of Central Missouri, McCauley runs her eyes across fresh ink, the latest revelations from emerging and established writers. McCauley counts these encounters as joy and considers them a sort of continuing education. As she refines her ability to read through and sift the beauty in others’ work, she applies lessons learned to her own sentences and structures.
“When you start being able to see what doesn’t work in a piece — or what could work in a piece if only it did this, that’s in your head no matter what,” she said. “When you’re going back to self-edit, you have more instinctive tools.”
McCauley’s editing work affords her necessary distance from her writing, and allows her to return with perspective. She tries, as much as is possible, to step out of herself and consider her own work like an editor, as if it showed up in her inbox from a writer she never met.
At The Missouri Review, a hub of Columbia’s literary community and a magazine of national renown, McCauley learns as much from the pieces she rejects as the ones she accepts. Never content to rest on its laurels, the journal’s staff emphasizes quality over reputation, evolution over maintenance mode. Applying those principles, McCauley finds herself face-to-face with a wealth of quality work, free to experience the work on its own terms.
“I’m just always impressed by the bravery with some of the writing that I’ll read. They encourage me to want to be a braver, more bold writer,” she said.
McCauley seeks work that excels on both intellectual and instinctual levels. If a line or two sticks to her after reading or “if I have to tell somebody about it,” the chances are high it will wind up in The Missouri Review’s pages.
And yet, rejection doesn’t necessarily equal deficiency. Writers tend to treat their submissions as pass/fail propositions, but McCauley takes both a more intimate and wider-lens view. Numerous factors, not least of which is the amount of available real estate, affect whether a piece is accepted. A rejected piece might continue to do its work on McCauley, even if it doesn’t work right now for The Missouri Review. The beauty and weight of some writing she said “no” to has stayed with her for years.
“As a writer, you don’t know who you’re affecting,” she said. “And just because you don’t get the stamp of acceptance doesn’t mean that you’re not influencing the people you’re sending the work out to, or another audience.”
As McCauley translates her every experience to the page, she sees her work shape-shifting in beautiful ways. The style she favors in prose poems has been making its way into her fiction. She senses a greater energy and immediacy to all her work thanks to her recent emphasis on poetry.
You can read McCauley’s mind on the page. She writes of the bodies which carry us, commend us and fail us, of the spaces between identities, of gazes cast with love, lust, judgement and compassion. As her work evolves, she continues to consider the images she projects with and upon her characters, and seeks to amplify humanity with each word.
Lately, she has succeeded at carving out time to write every day, to get something down. But whether she signs her name to a piece of writing, or sends another writer’s work into the atmosphere, McCauley is finding that each seam in an increasingly seamless life grants her words singing, staying power.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Jennifer Maritza McCauley's poetry explores dualities like the relationship between identity and language. To paint that duality, she often mixes Spanish, English, and different voices that are natural to her, with lines like "Oye: /this talk / ain't school-taught."
The poet and professor of literature and creative writing says her style has been influenced by poets like Mayra Santos-Febres, a celebrated Afro-Puerto Rican multigenre author like herself.
"My cultural identity is very important to me," she tells POPSUGAR. "I often write about being both Black American and Puerto Rican and living in in-between spaces and different worlds — and where those worlds overlap. I'm proud of my heritage and like to explore it in my poetry."
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is most recently the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, a searing collection of poetry published by Stalking Horse Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico. McCauley is a graduate of Florida International University’s MFA program, a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, and a recipient of many writing awards and grants, including a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
At the 2018 AWP Conference in Tampa, Florida, Ms. McCauley took time out of her schedule to chat with Manzano Mountain Review about her writing process, hybrid writing forms, and how the personal and political informed her astounding new collection.
Justin Bendell: SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is a book of poetry, and I think of you as a prose writer, that's how I know you. However, I felt like, as I was reading this, that your writing has a signature. When I am reading it, the way the language happens, the way you fuse words, the tone, and the shape, I see it in your prose and I see it in your poetry. In terms of process, how did this collection take shape? Did you come to it knowing you were going to dive in and write a collection of poetry, did some of it start as prose, where did it start and how did it become what it is?
Jennifer M. McCauley: I played around a bit before I decided on the book’s final form. I wasn’t sure SCAR ON/SCAR OFF would, properly, be called a poetry collection; I still think of it as a poetry/prose or hybrid collection. I like the poetry label, though, because it tells readers that every piece in the book is a poem. This sort of reading raises questions as to what poetry is, isn’t and can be. The reader’s prior experiences with poetry may lead to a variety of different interpretations of the text. That’s cool with me.
I didn’t have a plan to write a poetry (or hybrid) collection originally, but I’ve always loved poetry. I was a UTA for the poet Lynn Emmanuel as an undergraduate and started out in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, but I switched over to fiction. Like you said, I was mostly focusing on long-form prose when I was in my MFA. After I finished my MFA thesis, a historical novel I wrote at FIU [Florida International University], I assumed I’d go on to write short stories again. I couldn’t. After the novel was done, I hit a point where I just needed a break from writing long narratives.
When I get stuck in a writing rut, I usually immerse myself in reading outside my genre. So when I’m writing fiction or essays, I read a poetry collection. After I started my PhD, I gravitated toward shorter works and poetry again, and was inspired by Jean Toomer, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Gloria Anzaldua, writers whose work, identity, and scholarship reside in hybrid spaces. Also, because of the political climate and where I was in my life, the subjects on my heart weren’t working in the novel or short story form anymore. It would take too long to get to the point(s) or to topics I wanted to explore. It felt more organic to write in prose poems, flash fiction, and poetry at that time. I can’t tell you exactly why.
To answer the second part of your question, the first piece I wrote for the book was "Summer Love, On Sidewalks," which was published as a prose poem. A few more poems (many didn’t make it into the book) followed. SCAR ON/SCAR OFF started to slowly emerge, in my head, as a cohesive project, when I started writing more personal stuff.
I wrote the narrative poem "Loriella is Dead" and “Brother Invisible” on a Megabus from New York to Pittsburgh. I went back and edited the poems, and as I kept writing new pieces I realized I was writing a collection about black femininity, Afro-Latinidad, and personal and communal responses to political tensions. Plus, I started realizing the effectiveness of telling some of my own story. In fiction, I’d tackle subjects that mattered to me through characters who were nothing like me. I'd been mentoring teenage girls, and I’d talk abstractly about touchier material like race, sexism, abuse, isolation and loneliness.
They were so open about their lives, and I’d think “Oh, this has happened to me, or I get that,” but I was hesitant to get too specific. I don’t remember when it happened, but I became more forthright. When I dug into my life, got vulnerable, and stopped being so abstract, I connected much faster to the kids and they told me as much. I realized my writing was also going through that transformation; I was loosening up, getting reactions I hadn’t gotten before, and realizing the power of stories and poems all over again.
SCAR ON/SCAR OFF didn't begin, in its earliest stages, as a collection but emerged as one, once I started hitting the more sensitive material. I started looking for thematic through-lines in the work I’d produced and wanted to produce. Then, the collection took shape. I’m thankful to James Reich too, for taking on the project; he’s great with making sure writers keep their original vision.
JB: Writing personal stuff can be incredibly difficult, and I've been avoiding it my whole life, but if you can actually crack the code like you did with the poem that triggered you to start thinking about this stuff, then it's dangerous and awesome because there's now a fountain of material to work from. But you did mention prose not working in that time and place because so much shit was happening in your life. You moved to Missouri right after Ferguson and right when the football boycotts were happening in Columbia, so in the sense this was an epicenter of Black Lives Matter politics and racial justice activity. Did that contribute to the fire that permeates the collection?
JM: It did. And I’m sure a lot of that passion was built up over the years too. A lot of the material I’d been working on was developed before or during my MFA (I wrote “We Are Always At Somebody’s Party,” “An End,” “Summer Love On, Sidewalks” and “Baby Dolls before I went to MO, for example.) My family and I dealt with racism in the North growing up, and there’s certainly racism and sexism in Miami (where I lived before I moved to Missouri), but I came to Missouri during a tumultuous time, for the country and the state. Ferguson, the student protests at Mizzou, Black Lives Matter and the presidential election, all brought race to the forefont in a way I hadn’t experienced since I was kid. I love Missouri for so many different reasons, but I'm not ignorant to the darker sides of the state.
My dad is from St. Louis, he grew up during segregation and integrated a white school, and some of the racial divides that were present when he was growing up obviously haven’t disappeared. But as were my experiences in the North, just because Missouri was in the papers for these events, it doesn’t mean systemic injustices, police misconduct, and racism doesn’t happen in other states. You can find racism and sexism in any state in the country, in every city, in overt, systemic and micro-aggressive ways. So yes, being in MO after Ferguson, and during the protests and the election years played a part, and a lot of my passions over the years, outside of MO, also contributed to that energy. It was rooted in trying to figure out how to dissect race, gender, cultural displacement, from being called offensive slurs in the North, South and Midwest, from seeing abuses against women, and from moving around and watching the same problems I grew up with re-emerge.
There’s a lot of good in Columbia, MO, for sure. The community has been incredibly supportive and I’m thankful for my friends, the department, and professors. I love working on lit journals, the local art scene; I feel artistically inspired here. There was a shift, though, from Miami to Missouri, where Miami’s melting pot culture disappeared. It was a strange mix of events all happening at once in MO. Writing these pieces was my way of tackling built up concerns and making sense of my new environment.
JB: Miami is one kind of America, and then, you came to another kind of America and you're like, this still exists.
JM: Yeah, exactly. You can find racism and sexism everywhere, absolutely in Miami. In the Midwest, and in Missouri, though, you are dealing with a border state mentality, with black-white tensions that trace back to Dred Scott v. Sanford, to the Civil War. I was getting into a lot of uncomfortable discussions with folks who, I realized pretty fast, had no interest in seeing the side of protestors, or the historical basis of these raw spots for POC. It was just “black people are always complaining, playing the victim.”
JB: Why should you have to be in the position to constantly be defending people when it seems like a common sense thing.
JM: When you’re in one of those “why are black people always complaining, slavery is over” conversations that go nowhere or someone is just slinging a slur to you in a parking lot, you have a few options. You can let it go. Shut up, if they press for a response. Or if you don't let it go, and you address the situation, you've made folks pissed, and they expect you to apologize for making them uncomfortable about saying something that was offensive to you. That whole process, doing that over again, is exhausting. In many ways, I’m glad for these experiences, because I’m pushed as a creative writer and a person. And so many of the communities I belong to were on fire for social justice, in MO and otherwise. Friends were passionate and inspiring, young activists were courageous and kind.
JB: I can imagine the work you've been doing on your historical fiction novel, which is tied to slavery era America, speaks in interesting ways to contemporary racial injustice, at a time when everything's heightened. Does that inform you, connecting the dots between the times, and how very little has changed?
JM: Absolutely. American history is still in a re-evaluation process, still figuring out how to include non-Anglo-centric narratives in a traditionally Anglo-centric story. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, says grand U.S. narratives or “American stories” weren’t written for POC, they were stories in which POC were “props” or “strictly [seen] as stock characters.” He says, “[Black people were] invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative…” If the American narrative is only made to accommodate one group of people, and to cast marginalized folks (women, LGBTQ, the disabled, POC, anyone who lives in the intersections of any of these groups) to the sidelines, we haven’t made progress. Things are changing, but with every major structural or systemic change (or perceived change) you get pushback and fear. You get folks in power preying on this fear of change. That fear led to the walking back of ex-slave and freedmen rights during the Reconstruction Era, the passing of Jim Crow laws, the death of great African-American leaders, our present racial tensions,.
There is a poem in SCAR ON/SCAR OFF called "Nothing Ain’t History” that uses the backroads of Southern Louisiana as a jumping off point to talk about hauntings in our history. The idea behind it, is that the history we’d like to forget is still alive; the ghosts still live in our country’s busy and quiet spaces. I’ve been to Louisiana several times, and I absolutely love New Orleans and Baton Rouge; the culture is wonderful. But at the same time, it’s impossible to ignore its past. Many plantations are still up for tours, some are used for weddings. The ugly side of our history isn’t an abstract idea, we have real markers that remind us what happened. Evergreen still has its slave cabins intact. You can still stand in Congo Square. There are still statues honoring Southerners who massacred ex-slaves and agents from the Freedmen’s Bureau. I met folks who slanted plantation stories to praise slave masters, who insisted slaves didn’t have it all that bad, at least they were clothed and fed.
So anyway, for marginalized folks, you can enter spaces where you can’t shake the darker histories of this country, where you can technically be “safe,” but you’ll never feel a full sense of comfort. You know that you weren’t meant to be part of the American narrative, and now here you are, trying to find a way in. I remain hopeful, that’s my modus operandi. I’m constantly inspired by the love and support coming from so many folks. But our work isn’t done.
JB: The immediacy. The book feels immediate. It feels right now. It's alive.
JM: It was written at a time in which my whole body and heart needed to write that thing. I haven't had that experience much in my life. I needed to write what I did, immediately, that’s why, no matter what ends up happening to the book, I’m happy I wrote it. I almost didn’t. My friend, the late Monica Hand, had read some of my poems and was like "Why aren't you showing people your poetry? Why aren't you giving poetry readings? Why aren't you part of our poetry community?" She set up readings for me in Columbia, and invited me into her circle, and that meant a lot. A few weeks before she passed, I was telling her about this book and was saying, “Well, I have a bunch of poems, short essays. And I’m thinking about putting them all together.” And I asked for her advice, and she encouraged me to embrace the hybridity of the work, to include essays and poems. Having that kind of validation and somebody who could see what I was doing made me bold.
And I had other folks here like T’Keyah Thomas, an activist and poet, who encouraged me to write poetry back then. And the journals who published my poems, the folks who supported the pieces on social media, I was thankful for that energy.
JB: It's amazing how one person can say one thing, that can influence you into new directions. It happens so often in writing communities, mentors, mentees, and all that. It's so easy to discourage people, but it's just as easy to encourage them and get them to do amazing things—the power of language and the power of committing to each other.
In my experience, when I'm trying to write about stuff that's immediate, or stuff that's political and highly charged, I find it difficult to get the tone right, to not let the anger emerge and dominate. I hate polemic writing, writing that reeks of propaganda, so trying to strike that balance is really tricky. You manage to do that. This book is righteously angry but [the anger] is offset by love. You somehow found a way to get that tonal balance, and I don't know how you did it. [Laughter.] How did you do it? How are you able to contain these dueling emotions and strike that chord where it feels immediate, fresh, angry, all those things, but also love and community oriented, ultimately positive even though there is not much positivity in the material itself. It doesn't read as a totally negative work, or even negative at all, in a funny way. It's like magic.
JM: Thank you so much. That's cool you interpreted it like that. I don't like polemical writing either and I didn’t want to write a book of political sermons. I’m a believer in the image and the moment. This is true for poetry and prose for me---concentrating on the image itself can be just as complicated as the message, the image or moment can go beyond the message. You can unpack so much from a moment or series of moments that hits the political, the personal, the uncomfortable, all at once. It was important for me to create a work that was, on the surface, accessible. I wanted readers to generally be aware of what was going on in every piece on the first read. But I also didn’t want readers to say “Oh, okay this poem is only about this…” In some of the pieces I was a bit more direct, but I tried to curb that directness by playing with the voice of the speaker. I like trying out voices, that’s the wonderful thing about poetry; the speaker is the speaker. It doesn’t always have to be confessional or your purest real-life voice.
JB: It's like your surrogate.
JM: Yeah. And creating a hybrid work, including multiple styles and forms helped me get away from being polemically-minded, or just making the book feel one-note. I think if every single poem was "When They Say Stop Speaking Ghetto" it wouldn’t have been the book I wanted it to be. I also didn’t want to only write narrative poems. I wasn’t imagining a book of essays. I wanted a mix of the performative, the narrative, the experimental, the lyrical. But the story-teller in me is still there; I still think about how to hit narrative notes.
JB: That makes sense. It sounds good on paper, but it's hard to actualize, so I commend you.
There are a million more things I could ask you but I'm not going to beat this to death, so . . . what's next? What are you working on? What are you excited about? What can we expect in the next couple years?
JM: Right now, I'm focusing on my composition essays and oral exams in my PhD program. I’m creatively in a place where I’m working on projects but I’m not holding myself to a deadline. Since I finished a few long projects, I’m just experimenting now, letting that process unfold naturally.
Ideally, I’d like to write another hybrid book. Since this book wasn’t meant to be in chronological order, I want to challenge myself to approach the form in a different way. I wanted [SCAR ON/SCAR OFF] to have a bit of dissonance, and the time jumps were intentional. I might try something new, though, in the next work.
JB: It's "I, We, Us."
JM: Right. In “I” and “Us” particularly, I tried to make it clear which pieces were part of my story (with reoccurring place-holders, names, and settings) and in “We” there are more persona pieces and prose poems that are focused on the problems and power of the “We,” encouraging the reader to become that “we.” (And if the “I,” “Us,” and “We” bleed together that’s part of the point.) The next hybrid project won’t have that structure, though. I also plan to return to long-form prose. I have a short story collection that I’m finishing. I'd like to write another novel at some point, but that’s down the line. I keep busy.
JB: Plenty of works in progress.
JM: Haha, hopefully. I’m restless. And got to finish the degree!
JB: Well, thank you for spending time with us, Jen.
JM: Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley teaches at the University of Missouri, where she is working on her PhD in creative writing. She is also Contest Editor at The Missouri Review and poetry editor at Origins Literary Journal. She has received awards from Best of the Net and the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, CantoMundo, and Kimbilio. Her work appears in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Passages North, Jabberwock Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her poetry-prose collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is now available from Stalking Horse Press.
You’ll Be Who You Are, Wherever You Are: An Interview with Jennifer Maritza McCauley
by Ivelisse Rodriguez, PhD
Editor's note: This interview is the 11th in a series that will focus on contemporary Puerto Rican authors. To read the previous interview with Kenyatta JP Garcia, click here.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley teaches at the University of Missouri, where she is working on her PhD in creative writing. She currently holds staff positions at The Missouri Review (Contest Editor, Poetry Editor in Fall 2018) and Origins Literary Journal (Poetry Editor.) She has received awards from Best of the Net, the Academy of American Poets, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, CantoMundo, and Kimbilio. Her writing appears in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Passages North, Jabberwock Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is available from Stalking Horse Press.
Ivelisse Rodriguez: SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is your first book—a hybrid text of poetry and prose, which explores the scarring of racism, femalehood, and identity. One aspect of identity that comes forth in your poem “When Trying to Return Home” is how identity is at times tied to location. “I was born / where my culture rarely bloomed—amongst Northern steel-dust and / dead skies….” This is in contrast to how the narrator feels in Miami, as if she belongs. Can you discuss the fluctuation of identity based on locale?
Jennifer Maritza McCauley: From what I’ve seen, the code-switching and re-naming process is stitched into the POC experience in the U.S. This country is complex and vast, and every region has its own history, traditions, and culture. So it makes sense that our identities fluctuate and are defined by locale. I’ve noticed, in much of the work I gravitate toward and write, I’m looking for definitions of “home,” how we translate ourselves to ourselves and to others, and how we answer the question: where are you from?
I’ve also been thinking about Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Hurston grew up in all-black Eatonville, Florida, and when she moved, and entered non-black environments, she realized “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.” I had the opposite experience growing up outside of Pittsburgh, PA. I wasn’t just Jennifer, I was Jennifer the Black Kid. There were few Black-American or Latinx folks in my immediate area, but I went to Puerto Rico and St. Louis as a teenager and hung out in all-black spaces on my own. The culture clashes were a bit jarring. I moved to melting pots like Miami, D.C., and San Juan, PR as an adult and realized there were plenty of people like me. Blackness, then, became more complicated. My father is a Missouri-born African-American, and my mother is a mestiza Puerto Rican, born in Guayanilla and raised in Connecticut. In Miami and in San Juan, I was a negra in a place with many negras and mixed Latinx folks. Still, my mother’s culture had a new weight that I carried along with me. Being Puerto Rican meant something different in mainland U.S., where displaced PR communities try to find each other and preserve the culture of the island. On the island, where everyone is Puerto Rican, I was just seen as States-born or negra and judged by my proficiency with Spanish. I was excited to see all that blackness and Latinidad in these spaces, to hear my mother’s language in San Juan and Miami. I also had some dissonance; a one foot in everywhere, no feet in anywhere kind of experience. Tato Laviera’s Mixturao and AmeRícan were particularly influential for me. The idea of an Afro-Latino negotiating “…the commonwealth / stage of my life, not knowing / which ideology to select,” was a sentiment I related to, even if I didn’t have Laviera’s exact background.
My father says, “there’s no perfect spot. You’ll be who you are, wherever you are.” I think this is true. Whether we stay in one place our whole lives or move around, we are uniquely ourselves. We’re a composite of the places we’ve gone and the people we’ve met.
IR: In Awad Ibrahim’s “One Is Not Born Black,” he articulates how he is not seen as “black” in Africa; instead, he is seen as Sudanese or tall or as a basketball player, etc. So the way one is viewed racially is dependent upon who is doing the looking. In “Loriella Is Dead,” the narrator is told by Loriella that she was the “wrong kind of tawny / that I was too soft-voiced to be a real black girl….” Can you discuss these experiences of being labeled and evaluated by someone else’s gaze? Do you think it trumps the way one sees oneself?
JMM: Gloria Anzaldua says: “We perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates… living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”
I find the idea of the “choque” very apt. I’d posit hybrid identities are formed in the choque. In the choque, you are the identities “your culture communicates” and the version you define for yourself. We’ve been interpellated in the U.S. to see blackness, Latinidad, and womanhood, for example, as separate identities with distinct values, but they can obviously all occur and clash in one person. Often these identities have been defined, historically, by folks who aren’t us. That’s especially true for black people in the U.S.; our country has its history of the one-drop rule, so blackness is simple, if you have a drop of blackness, you’re black. People who embody many kinds of blackness, or deviate from cultural expectations in some way, are more difficult to define. On the personal side, from the moment I had any kind of self-awareness, I knew I was black. I can’t fully understand Ibrahim’s experience, but it makes sense to me. Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” hits home in this regard.
My parents told me I was African-American at the earliest stage of my development. Blackness was as close to me as my name, and still is. My parents prepped me for the realities of being both black and American early on. Latinidad was also part of my childhood; my mother would speak Spanish, teach me Héctor Lavoe and Ismael Rivera songs, make arroz con habichuelas and asopao, and talk about her culture all the time when I was a kid, and how she missed it. But I was taught the black-American experience first and experienced it directly. I was also proud of and inspired by black America’s many achievements. Years later, I was told I was Afro-Latina by welcoming Latinx folks, and after seeing myself represented in black Puerto Rican culture, I started to accept Afro-Latinidad as another reality. Defining myself as black first, but also as Latina, was its own process. I love my blackness. I love Puerto Rican culture and the island’s resilient and rich history. Latinidad is also important to me because it’s important to my mother. I appreciated the nuanced beauty of Puerto Rico more and more after I visited the island in my teens, returned many times as an adult, took classes at UPR-RP, and became invested in connecting with Puerto Rico. I met plenty of Afro-Puerto Ricans on the island, and plenty of other folks in the U.S., who like me, had some mix of black-American and Latinx heritage. My understanding of identity, then, was based on some combination of accepting who society said I was, my parents’ history, and who I wanted to be.
The poem you mentioned, “Loriella is Dead,” attempts to, among other things, set up the relationship between two black women whose blackness has bonded them, separated, and defined them. Loriella wrestles with internalized stereotypes when she says the speaker can’t be “really” black because she doesn’t talk or act a certain way. The speaker argues that black girls suffer in similar ways. I didn’t want the reader to think Loriella or the speaker was “wrong,” but rather, this is a snapshot of how black girls classify and define themselves and each other. The speaker and Loriella are sort of mirror images of one other, representations of the love and systemically-induced trauma present in many black-American female relationships. SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is partially about asserting identity, complicating stereotypes, and showcasing universal instances of love, loss, hurt and celebration.
To answer your last question, I think identity is defined by the location, culture and individual. You can decide for yourself how and to what degree society’s definition of you will overrule your own. Still, while we know race is a construct, we can’t pretend cultural definitions don’t exist or have real-world importance. We can honor our ancestral history and still be ourselves. I’d say our experiences with cultural collisions and our recognition of ascribed and assigned identities all shape how we define ourselves.
Click on the picture for additional images
IR: In “We Are Always at Somebody’s Party,” you write, “They are speaking, again. I watch them choke down oceans, gnaw on fat slabs / of countries. I watch their mouths grow until they are too-huge and too-dark. / I wonder if these mouths will be large enough to devour me someday.” Here, and in other texts in your book, you illustrate the violence of language. Can discuss the ways in which language damages the self?
JMM: In SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, I wanted to capture the beauty, power, uselessness and damaging effects of language. From my experience, language can feel worthless when it’s not connecting and can hurt deeply when it negates your personhood. Language can also uplift and empower. I wanted these conflicts to be represented in this book, and I wanted to show how language can hurt and heal POC communities. In some poems, language fails to save a life, in others it communicates joy and justice. In “We Are Always at Somebody’s Party,” I tried to examine how language can silence and blot out a person’s existence. That we can get so caught up in our ideas of people, we forget to hear them.
Language has high stakes, especially at this politically fraught time and for POC, LGBTQ+, women, immigrant, disabled communities, and intersections of these identities. Our identities have been deemed “controversial” topics. When we write, we are writing for our lives, giving form and defense to our experiences. Damaging language has been hurled our way: empty platitudes, dismissals and insults that have harmful histories and still sting. So language can be violent, for sure. I’d say language is a sword that should be wielded wisely, but we shouldn’t ditch the sword. Like Audre Lorde says, “what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
IR: You have worked in various capacities with numerous literary journals, such as The Missouri Review, Gulf Stream, and Origins. In terms of Latinx literature, can you talk about the amount of work you have come across by Latinxs and some trends you have seen in their work?
JMM: A consistent trend is that we want and need more Latinx voices. There’s been a concentrated effort at the journals I’ve worked for to find, publish, and promote Latinx voices, but there still aren’t enough. We need intersectional Latinx voices and a multiplicity of Latinx artistic styles represented in the literary world. We, as gatekeepers, need to continue to find Latinx writers and let them know we’re here because that’s our responsibility. And we would love if Latinx voices sought us out too, because we’re looking for them.
IR: You recently won a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in prose (Congratulations!!!). With the fellowship, what project will you be working on next?
JMM: Thank you! I appreciate it! I hope to use the grant for travel and research as I work on another hybrid book and a novel. The NEA is a wonderful organization, and I’m honored to receive the fellowship.
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her short story collection, Love War Stories, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in summer 2018. The Belindas, a fiction chapbook, is forthcoming from Tammy in summer 2017. She is the senior fiction editor at Kweli, a Kimbilio fellow, and a VONA/Voices alum. She is currently working on the novel The Last Salsa Singer about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico. To learn more about Ivelisse visit: http://www.ivelisserodriguez.com.
© Ivelisse Rodriguez. Published by permission in Centro Voices 10 July 2018.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley awarded NEA Fellowship
Jennifer Maritza McCauley has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in Creative Writing for 2018. Jennifer is currently a doctoral student, and her poetry collection Scar On/Scar Off was recently published by Stalking Horse Press.
When Trying to Return Home
by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
In the morning, I leave a panaderia on SW 137th
and a Miami browngirl sees my face
and says de dónde eres Miami or Not?
And I say Not, because I live in this blue city now
but she means where are your parents from
and I tell her I have a Daddy who is Lou-born
and coal-dark and looks like me and I have a Mami
who is from Puerto Rico and looks like the trigena
in front of us who is buying piraquas for her yellow children.
The browngirl says eres Latina at least, and I say at least
in English. I look down at my skin, which is black, but
smells blue by the shores of Biscayne. She thinks my skin could
speak Spanish, a los menos. I want to tell the browngirl I was not born
by ocean rims or white-scuffed waves. I was not born
beside browngirls who speak Miami’s itchy Spanish. I was born
where my culture rarely bloomed—amongst Northern steel-dust and
dead skies, where my two-colored parents stuck out at any
Pittsburgh party. I want to tell her, I would love to be the type of girl
that says soy de Somewhere and everyone says, “Girl, I see”
or “you’re una de las nuestras”
or “you belong.”
I want to tell her, you are right, in this blue city, I look like everybody
and everybody looks like me, and this is the thing I’ve always wanted:
to be in a crowd where nobody remembers my skin. I’ve wanted
this when I was a child, amongst grey buildings and steel-dust
where they called me unloved and weird-colored but here, mija,
I smell like blue and people who look like Mami can say funny
things like at least, at least.
Instead, I smile at the browngirl and she does not smile back.
Instead she says, in Spanish: If you are Latina, you should be so,
speak Spanish to me. And I say, in English: Yes, I could
but I am afraid, and she laughs in no language and judges me.
I want to tell her the history of my family-gods. They are rainforest-hot,
cropland-warm, dark with every-colored skin. They have mouths
that sound like all kinds of countries. I want to tell her these gods
live wild and holy in me, in white and blue cities where my skin
is remembered or forgotten, in cities where I am always one thing, or
from anywhere.
I want to tell the browngirl this while she turns and walks off.
I want to tell her that when she came to me, thinking I was hers
in that moment we were together,
at least.
First appeared in Aspasiology 2016.
IMG_0276
Jennifer Maritza McCauley teaches at the University of Missouri, where she is pursuing a PhD in creative writing. She is also Contest Editor at The Missouri Review and poetry editor at Origins Literary Journal. She has received fellowships from the NEA, CantoMundo, and Kimbilio. Her work appears in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is available from Stalking Horse Press.
Jennifer says her style “depends on the subject matter, the genre I’m writing, or the speaker.” She says, “I enjoy free-verse and experimental poetry and I’m drawn to prose poem/lyric essay hybrids. With fiction or non-fiction, I like my narrative voice to fit the environment I’ve created. I generally have an interest in the pop and snap of language, and the intense focus on an image. I love playing around with linguistic mash-ups. My real-life voice code-switches often, and that impulse is reflected in my writing, I’m sure.”
Bekah and Jennifer connected after a review of Jennifer’s new collection, SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. We wanted to know more about this fellow Missouri poet and her writing, so here is our interview with Jennifer.
Q~Tell us a little about “WhenTrying to Return Home.” How is it representative of your work?
A~I’m interested in narrative poetry, how a poem moves, and how color holds literal and metaphorical meaning. In this poem, I wanted to tell multiple stories that explore the intersections of Afro-Latinidad, and issues of belonging, race, and cultural displacement.
Q~Did this poem come easily or was it hard to write? Is there a backstory you want to share?
A~It took some time! I wasn’t sure if I was ready to write about my own cultural disconnections yet. I was reading poetry that forced me out of my comfort zone, namely Nancy Morejon, and Cherrie Moraga, who are fearless. A few months later, I was asked to write a poem for Aspasiology in tribute to the wonderful poet Raquel Salas Rivera. I was inspired by Rivera’s poem “suprasegmentacionalidades,” which has this terrific line “you are so much more than your translation. My jumping off point was thinking about how we are “more than our translation.” “When Trying to Return Home” (slowly) emerged soon after.
Q~What’s your writing process usually like?
A~Scattershot! Some pieces come out fast, others take years. I like writing late at night, and during writing sessions I warm up by reading something completely unrelated to my creative leanings. I’m a day-reader, and a night writer, unless I have a deadline. During the day, I’ll usually read work that is related to my research, composition exams, or creative writing. When I have a writing session, and I’m especially stuck, I like to read a short bit of something, but preferably unrelated to my project, sonically or subject-wise. I like my brain clear of direct influences. It might be a weird process, but the tension between me trying to figure out some problem on the page myself versus reading something unrelated to the project, helps me find my voice purely and gets the creative juices flowing. And most literature channels the human experience, so regardless I find access points and inspiration.
Before I started writing my historical novel, for example, which is set in the South during the Reconstruction Era, I spent much of my time reading as much Southern and period lit as I could, while doing on-site research and poring over history texts. During the actual writing sessions, when I hit a wall, I’d read Ezra Pound, Percival Everett or Pynchon. Completely unlike how I write and generally unrelated to the book. Before I write fiction, I often read poetry and vice versa. Many of the poems in SCAR ON/SCAR OFF I wrote at various times over the past few years, but before the actual writing sessions, I remember reading Lao Tzu passages,Octavia Butler interviews and Stanisław Lem, to name a few. I encourage my students to read outside of their interests, and I like doing the same. This isn’t a set rule for me during the writing process, but I find the trick helpful.
Q~In the review of your book in the Post Dispatch, they said you illustrate “with lyrical resonance how deeply intertwined family and social history can be.” Can you talk a little bit about the importance of this to you?
A~A through-line in my work, and especially in SCAR ON/SCAR OFF is how history, political landscapes, and familial ties influence who we become. I also like using poetry and lyric essays to explore subjects that are intensely personal to me. In this book, I wanted to examine how our ancestors, cultural communities and our connections to them reveal why we have scars, and how we heal them. It was important to me to pick apart my relationship to the collective, the personal, and the familial.
Q~Why did you choose the title, SCAR ON / SCAR OFF?
A~The title is a reference to the Rosa Parks quote: “Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.” The “you” and the “place” in that quote haunted me. Who the “you” and what the “place” of hurt could be, reflexively, generally and specifically. In Parks’ life, in the lives of my family, friends and communities, and in my life. I thought about why scars show up on our bodies, and when. We can ignore them, but still know they’re there. We can willfully pick at them or let them heal. The process of acknowledging, feeling bound to, or ignoring our pasts is its own kind of strength because we are taking back our agency. And, the scars that haunt our bodies might not be our own.
I was working on an essay about not liking my name and being distantly related to Rosa Parks and when I found that quote, I was inspired. My late friend, Monica A. Hand, wrote brilliantly about how the women we look up to linger forever in our lives in her poem “dear nina.” Her quote “The women I am from are wild; beautiful/This is what I know/When Lucille died, I tell my grand daughter/We are like Lucille trouble in the waters can’t kill us…” addresses scar-sharing and love, and the regenerative, healing power of connecting with our families, heroes, and children. The Parks and Hand quotes are epigraphs in the book. So, the title references ideas I wanted dig into in this collection.
Q~Who was your poetry first love?
A~Pablo Neruda, because my mother used to read his poetry to me as a kid, in Spanish and English. Toni Morrison, because her novels are like a tight hug; her prose is poetic.
Q~You’ve had a lot of experience editing literary journals including being a contest editor for the prestigious Missouri Review. What insights can you offer from this perspective?
A~I’ve been fortunate to work for journals with editors who give their staff, writers, and collaborators a great deal of creative space. In the editorial roles I’ve inhabited (The Missouri Review, Origins Literary Journal, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Florida Book Review, Sliver of Stone, and Fjords Review), there has been a genuine interest in developing the journal with the times, while maintaining a cohesive vision.
Working at The Missouri Review has been special. As Contest Editor, I coordinate our two annual contests, and, in the past, I’ve read general submissions and conducted audio interviews. Our editor Speer Morgan has a deep love for literature and enjoys talking to people about their day-to-day lives just as much as he loves reading. The whole staff is excited about what we publish and the submissions we read; it’s a fun, productive place to work.
Every journal has a different process for acceptance, and a unique vision for each issue. The Missouri Review has been around since 1978, and we get about 12,000 submissions per year. Submissions go through several rounds of review with interns and senior staff before they are published, and each contest has its own review procedures. There are many pieces that are almost accepted, but don’t make it for whatever reason. We don’t have room for everything we love, but writers who don’t get into TMR or place in the contest, often get into the journal later. We enjoy publishing unpublished, up-and-coming, and established writers. At the core Speer wants the essay, story, or poem to have an “about-ness” to it, that it can be analyzed from different angles and has something interesting to say about the human condition. At Origins, which is edited by the marvelous Dini Karasik, we like stories, poems, and essays that directly explore how identity and upbringing inform a literary work. I’m happy I worked for every literary journal I have, and I always encourage writers to read submissions for a magazine, literary agency or publishing house, even temporarily. You learn a lot about your own writing from the experience. And submit, submit, submit!
Q~There are lots of publications out there. What are some literary gems you feel deserve more attention? Why will we love them?
The Missouri Review is currently looking for submissions for our 11th annual audio contest, judged by Avery Trufelman. (Deadline, March 15). Origins Literary Journal is looking for submissions in all genres. Some of my other favorite journals are Pleiades, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, LunaLuna, Glass Poetry, Kenyon Review, PANK, Vinyl, Kweli, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Journal, Sliver of Stone, Fjords Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and TriQuarterly. My amazing friend Ashley M. Jones, is looking for submissions from Southern writers at Southern Humanities Review. These journals take an interest in writers from all backgrounds and styles, and the work they publish is consistently engaging.
Q~Where can readers go if they are interested in reading more of your work?
A~My book is available on Stalking Horse Press’s website, on Amazon.com.
McCauley, Jennifer Maritza WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME Counterpoint (Fiction None) $26.00 2, 7 ISBN: 9781640095687
Short fiction featuring Black and Latine characters trying to figure out their roles within their families, their love lives, and their communities.
In the bite-sized title story of McCauley's collection, the narrator, Andra, moves to South Florida, where her new co-workers want to know where she's from. "No, I mean really?" they say. Andra's father is Black, her mother Puerto Rican. She's visibly othered, but grief has also estranged her, as she's recently lost her mother. When Andra runs into a dark-skinned Latina at a panadería who speaks Spanish to her, she freezes, thinking of her mother, "Body-full with misted ancestors, yearning for old ghosts." McCauley, who is also Afro-Latina, chronicles such yearnings in each story, interested in those spaces where differing forces collide internally and externally. Sometimes those forces are based in identity, as in the stunning opening story, "Torsion," in which the narrator, Claudia (another young Afro-Latina) weighs loyalty to her mother against her desire to move into a self-determined future after her mother asks her to help illegally seize her young disabled brother from the foster parent he's living with. Almost always, those forces have a moral dimension, as well, as in "Good Guys," in which Alejandro, a college student at Miami Dade College, seeks to convince the audience, and himself, that he's better than the class villain, Vick, who comes on to a young woman with a very good reason for not being interested in dating. The stories hang together in surprising ways, often linked across time--McCauley excels at historical fiction as well as contemporary. Individually, they are each admiringly gutsy and tender, with flashes of poetry. No reader will be surprised to learn that McCauley's debut--Scar On / Scar Off (2017)--blended prose and poems.
What can't McCauley do? A writer to watch.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"McCauley, Jennifer Maritza: WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562284/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da4e51bd. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.
When Trying to Return Home: Stories
Jennifer Maritza McCauley. Counterpoint, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-1-64009-568-7
McCauley's explosive debut collection crackles with moments of honesty, upheaval, and longing among families. In "Torsion," Black Pittsburgh college student Claudia hews to an unwavering love for her volatile single mother, a hair technician who struggled to support Claudia and her younger brother Sam, who is now in foster care and needs dialysis for his renal failure. In Claudia's loyalty, she allows her mother to convince her to help take Sam from his white foster mother, so the family can be reunited. In "Trying to Return Home," Andra constantly faces questions from white people about het ethnic background and takes to answering with a mix of vagueness and specificity. At her new job in south Florida, she says her father is "Black American; her mami Cagus-born, mixed with several Something Elses." As she mourns her deceased mother, who neglected to fill her in on their family tree, McCauley offers an illuminating view of the complexity of Andra's private life. "La Espera" features multiple points of view on a messy family situation, with sisters Elena and Camila and Elena's husband, Carlos, the father of Camila's 12-year-old twin daughters. In a poignant scene, the girls are dressed in bright dresses while waiting at their house in Puerto Rico for Carlos to visit them from New York City, where he lives with Elena ("Let's impress him with your loveliness," Camila tells them). Each story is a treasure. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"When Trying to Return Home: Stories." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 51, 5 Dec. 2022, p. 102. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731123922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7dc4ad63. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.
microreview & interview: Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off
scar on scar off
review by José Angel Araguz
Loriella is Dead – Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Yesterday Loriella choke-cried into my phone,
saying we black gals got to stick together, hip to hip
since the world is a leech sucking at our night
necks, and I said girlIhearyou and I could hear
her voice cleaving clean down the center and
I remembered this was the girl who kicked a blackboy
down the stairs of Litchfield Towers, and burned my books
in the dorm yard when I told her I couldn’t love her like that–
With all-the-time love, with only-her love
and she said give me sweet words then and I said what sort
and she burned my books again, the next night, on the dormhall yard
and told me my skin was the wrong kind of tawny,
that I was too soft-voiced to be a real black girl, that
everything I said was too long for listening.
Yesterday, she was talking and her voice got soaked with
ghosts, of men who sexed her bad and women who
gave her lies of love, and I remembered the other nights
she called me, when we were young and tighter-skinned, and
she talked about firearms and gun barrels and her
Auntie’s arm- burns and she said she’d never
do what her Auntie did though she thinks about
what it’d be like to go away, with no man or woman draining her
dead, to go away by her own hands like Auntie did that
night when we were playing Scrabble on the dormhall
floor and she got the call that said Auntie is dead
Auntie left the room.
Yesterday, Loriella thanked me for love, said I was okay and
she knows her head is cut-up and we agreed that every
head is cut-up and every little black girl head is a little
tired and today her Mama calls me and says
Loriella is dead, and asks me what I said to her and
I said nothing, just that we black girls got to stick together
hip to hip, heart to heart, and her Mama says
how come you didn’t try any kind of talk to make
My Girl live and I listen to fat air on the phone and her Mama’s
cold cries, and I imagine Loriella’s neck, life-broken, on the floor.
I think of its fleshy folds and clavicle, her pink mouth,
how it pursed and pouted and spoke fear and I think of what
I said every day when we were young: What do you want
me to tell you? and how I wondered what
words could do. I tell her Mama that, as
I choke-cry, “What could words have done?”
*
Reading through Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On / Scar Off (Stalking Horse Press), I kept coming back to the final question in the poem above: “What could words have done?” This question lives at the core of this collection whose poems embody spaces of agency and contemplation. Whether reckoning with danger and gendered double standards while listing “40 Ways to Avoid Sexual Assault,” or invoking Celia Cruz’s bittersweet refrain “la vida es un carnival” in an underground mall, McCauley’s poems answer the question of “What could words have done?” with witness and presence.
In the poem above, the question originates from a moment of grief. The narrative of Loriella is one of misunderstandings and fractures. Even the phrasing of “girlIhearyou,” whose collision of words evoke urgency and a desire for connection, stands out as a one-sided gesture. The speaker goes on to detail the ways in which that sought-after connection kept slipping. And yet, the poem stands as an answer to the question itself, a testament to a life that cannot be summed up neatly, and the life of the speaker who must move forward despite this knowledge, questioning and holding close to words.
This question returns implicitly in the lyric essay “An End,” in which a speaker meditates on her experience working with and caring for an elderly man. The speaker relates: “I am afraid to die, my oldman client tells me,” at the start of the piece, and follows up a little later with “My oldman says don’trepeatwhatIsaid again, and I nod.” Through this back and forth, the text becomes a space where this secret can be held; it resides here for the speaker in a way that allows her to empathize as well as contemplate the fear itself. The speaker later learns of his death via a phone call answered while driving. The news shocks her and results in a car accident:
I pull over and wait for the driver to get out. She climbs out of her Jeep carefully. I walk up to her, give her my information. I watch this woman scribble the superficial facts of my life on the back of a Burger King receipt. She is writing what I tell her: my car’s make and model, my Daddy-given name, my address and phone number. All evidence of my short and stupid life. Underneath the red of Target storeface, I watch this woman record everything I tell her about me. She finishes quickly; I don’t have much to say. She looks up, wondering if my body is shaken. It is not. I was young then, nauseatingly alive.
Here, again, we have misunderstandings and fractures, albeit of a more literal kind than before. In the act of exchanging information after a car crash, the speaker becomes aware of her mortality, but also of what little might remain afterward. This piece which is an act of the speaker recording the final days of her “oldman client,” suddenly finds a parallel in this scene after an accident. The insights offered here are nuanced. What can words do in the face of “the superficial facts” of our lives? What could words have done for her oldman client? Again, witness and presence return as an answer.
Not every answer to the question “What could words have done?” is elegiac. “The Summer of Screens,” for example, presents a speaker awake to what words can do and are doing. In the excerpt below, there is a lyric elasticity able to hold the varied layers of experience that the speaker lives through while watching a Beyonce video in a particular time and place in American history. What plays out as juxtaposition within the literary and aesthetic act of a poem, reflects the complicated nature of life for this speaker of color. Here, again, the speaker seeks connection, but finds instead a troubled reflection; the same medium that offers up these also offers up the cultural rejection embodied by Donald Trump. It is hard not to feel left out in a world where our pop stars and our politicians have a major presence in our consciousness while remaining, ultimately, inaccessible on several levels.
The poems of Scar On / Scar Off live in this duality. How do we make peace with the scars we have? We live despite them, with them, but not ignoring them. We remain present with them. We use words to engage what the scars mean. And after understanding what we can through the witness and presence of books like McCauley’s, we persevere, like the speaker below, to “still, desperately, / want to getinformation.”
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III.
On YouTube, Beyonce has tied up that
blonde weave we’ve been seeing for years
into tight braids that look like shadowed cornfields,
shining against her expensive scalp. She
is twitch-dancing, her soft-hard legs jerking
to the sound of pop and power, a beat
rehearsed to make us shout “yeah, girl, please!”
Beyonce isn’t wearing white and she’s not
having fun anymore she wants you to know she won’t
have as much white fun. On YouTube, she glowers
at me and descends into Katrina-water, while sitting
on top of a copcar she bought for this video.
In another video, Donald Trump calls my graduate school
by name and says it is full of little black people with little
white leaders, and he looks me in my eye and reminds me
I am one of the little black people he hates.
I click on Beyonce’s video again because I know this dark
rich woman, in a game of theoreticals, loves me
far more than Donald Trump.
When I realize this, Beyonce is no longer glowering at me,
she’s saying, “girl, we got this, I’m with you,” and she is
glistening fine and smooth. Her royal black skin could be mine
but it isn’t.
Her skin: as shiny as a money-coin.
When she sings ladiesgetinformation I start crying
and don’t know why, because I know this is
a video and she has purchased all of our culture’s
chilling symbols and will go back to a queen-home
I will never see. But when I see her skin like this: suddenly black
and toughly smooth on my small computer, she reminds me of who
I am. This summer I could be one of those Bey-lovin’ blackfolks
worshipping my be-weaved goddess from the backrow of
a concert that costs half my rent. Maybe, before I go back to
my busted Ford, me and other blackgirls and boys might get lucky
enough to pass her security guards, to walk around the concert
copcars she owns, that we could never buy
for protection. I still, desperately,
want to getinformation.
I click off the video,
when she sings:
SLAY SLAY SLAY
SLAY SLAY SLAY
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Influence Question: How would you say this collection reflects your idea of what poetry is/can be?
Jennifer Maritza McCauley: Audre Lorde has this terrific quote: “There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself…because they want to dismiss everything else…” Poetry is my way of underlining, striking out, and rewriting all of these pieces. With poetry, I can interrogate the many definitions and intersections in one person, community, language, and genre. As a half-African-American and half-Puerto Rican woman, I’ve often been told who I am, what I’m not, how to fit in and how to talk. As a result, I’ve never been a fan of simple definitions. I don’t like leaving “pieces of myself” dismissed. I also enjoy many poetic forms, and think the identity of a poem can be just as complicated as the identity of a person.
For me, the beauty of poetry is that it can tell a story, sing love, compel readers to act, lay loss bare and bloody. Ideally, I wanted this collection to reflect some of the issues posed and dissected by poets I admire like Claudia Rankine, Sonia Sanchez, Tato Laviera, and Gloria Anzaldua. How do my experiences and those of folks I know push against stereotypes? What are the conversations and conflicts in my communities? How do I complicate what folks already think about race and gender? These were questions I was consciously and unconsciously wrestling with as I wrote this collection. Ultimately, I wanted this work to be many-voiced, hybridic, messy, searching, and full of love.
Influence Question: What were the challenges in writing these poems and how did you work through them?
Jennifer Maritza McCauley: I started writing this collection while I was bouncing around the South and Caribbean, editing my novel with my wonderful agent Amanda Jain and preparing to move to the Midwest from Florida. During this time, I’d be in prickly situations or meet folks that unearthed my complicated feelings about blackness, Latinidad, the body, love, and loss. Poetry and short prose were my go-to genres for exploring these concerns.
Some poems were more challenging to write than others. Sometimes I had to be in the right mindset to get the words on the page. Often, I’d say, “I really need to write a poem about this,” and the piece would take forever to come together. I’d give up, return later. Other times, the words came naturally. Sometimes a poem would tell me it needed to be prose, or vice versa. After a year or so, when I realized I had enough poems to start thinking about a collection I tried to find themes and through-lines. The hard, fun work was determining which pieces belonged and didn’t belong in the book. I cut a lot of darlings and played around with the structure of the book quite a bit. The awesome folks at Stalking Horse helped with this process further after they picked up the collection. Writing this thing overall, was a challenging and liberating process.
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Special thanks to Jennifer Maritza McCauley for participating! To find out more about her work, check out her site. Scar On/Scar Off can be pre-ordered from Stalking Horse Press.
jenniferpictureJennifer Maritza McCauley is a teacher, writer, and editor living in Columbia, Missouri. She holds or has previously held editorial positions at The Missouri Review, Origins Journal, and The Florida Book Review, amongst other outlets, and has received fellowships from Kimbilio, CantoMundo, the Knight Foundation, and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Award and has appeared in Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Split this Rock: Poem of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. Her collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF will be published by Stalking Horse Press in fall 2017.