Interview with Karlo Yeager Rodriguez

Our friend Karlo Yeager Rodriguez writes deeply moving and surprising speculative fiction. Recently, he published a story called “Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground” in Strange Horizons. If you haven’t yet, go ahead and click the link and read it! Then we’ll chat.

For more work by Karlo, visit his website and find him on (sigh) X.

In this story, a woman who seems utterly vulnerable gains power through her dreams. What are your thoughts about the power of dreams? 

I love that there's this sense of mystery surrounding dreams. Imagine something so ephemeral it dissipates upon waking, but so powerful that like a current flowing under the surface it can influence us, move us in ways that our waking minds justify after the fact. This is part of the beauty and terror of the human experience: we are all swimming at the juncture between dream, memory, and story at every waking moment. 

Did the names you chose for your characters have a special meaning for you?

I chose the names for their irony in the context of the story, so while the names don't necessarily provide a glimpse into my own mind (at least, I like to think they don't!) they have a definite purpose within the story. So: Gloria ("Glory" in English) receives no such honor, and Pedro ("Peter" in English) is by no means her rock in all that happens.

What inspired this story?

There's a Puerto Rican riff on The Juniper Tree that I came across in Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico that involves an ají (or cayenne) pepper plant, which stuck with me. In both the original Grimm's as well as the Puerto Rican version, the father of the family is a benevolent force and the mother. . . well, she's a mother in a Grimm's fairy tale, so obviously she's wicked. Given how often in real life that dynamic is quite the opposite, it got me thinking. I wanted to write a story where someone who would be viewed as an "evil stepmother" in a fairy tale context was portrayed in a more compassionate way, with an eye towards the material and external factors that made her who she is. Not that Gloria's evil - far from it! - but she isn't without flaws, either. It was very important to me that she wasn't portrayed as a "perfect victim."

Another inspiration was M. Rickert's The Chambered Fruit (collected in You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Stories), which is an absolutely beautiful and heart-rending retelling of the Demeter and Persephone myth. Too often, I find that retellings rush to let the reader know which story they're drawing from. Rickert is in no such hurry, and lets the story unfold as a family tragedy first and foremost. This was what I want out of retellings, and what I attempted to do with Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground: to connect old stories to the modern day in ways that show why those stories still have power.

Of course, in my case, the connection I made to the modern day was the decades-long sterilization campaign of poor women and women of color in Puerto Rico. Euphemistically called "la operación," at one time up to 30% of women on the island had been sterilized. It began as a purely eugenicist project, which was later repurposed to work hand-in-hand with "Operation Bootstrap" and get more women into the workforce. That this bit of history is barely known by people in the U.S. is ironic because Puerto Rico isn't unique: the State of California conducted a similar campaign among poor Xicanes and women in prison, not to mention the recent cases of detainees at the border being sterilized as a matter of course.

Do you see Pedro or Dr. Mendoza as malicious figures, or do you see them as products of a bad system (or both)? 

I view Pedro and Dr. Mendoza as both complicit in a bad system, but one much more than the other. Pedro's decent and hard-working, but too self-absorbed and trusting in the system to take Gloria's concerns seriously. In the aftermath, he is more cruel to Gloria on an interpersonal, individual level. Dr. Mendoza is more monstrous towards Gloria, but his is the impersonal cruelty of the system itself. He's an instrument of the mass devastation colonialism brings, but it's not personal. Of the two, however, there's no doubt Dr. Mendoza is malicious.

I thought you captured a female POV beautifully in Gloria. One thing I appreciated is that you gave her character space and didn't assume too much about what she was feeling. Did you have a strategy when crafting this character, or did she sprout like a seed?

I see what you did there - "sprout like a seed" - but Gloria absolutely grew from the initial challenge of writing someone who in a fairy tale would be an evil stepmother (because often only young and innocent girls can be the heroes in these stories). I also drew on conversations I've had with the women in my life who have often had to deal with their healthcare providers not listening to them. Rather than center my own sense of outrage when I've had those conversations, I wanted to inhabit the weary resignation of knowing the system isn't for you. That's who Gloria is from the beginning of the story - someone who's certain she won't get what she wants that she's become so used to paring back her dreams. And those dreams end up sending out runners, and growing back in weird ways.

What do you think are some of the challenges faced by Latine speculative writers today? 

One big issue is visibility. Outside of a few cultural touchpoints, Latin America is largely invisible to North Americans. It beggars belief that North American media (news channels included) have been largely successful in making an entire continent invisible. The sole exceptions are portraying parts of Latin America as lovely vacation spots - if only the people living would do something about how dangerous it is to live there. All of this with no mention of the effects of U.S. interventions or ongoing policies in the region. Thus, stories about the horrors of colonialism, which are anti-imperialist, or would make North American readers uncomfortable, have a difficult journey to publication - if they get published at all. 

Who are some writers who have inspired you?

There have been so many over the years. Tolkien and being immersed in Middle Earth showed me what fantastic fiction can do. Like many other horror writers, I had a King phase in my teens, and read everything I could find of his - a straight run from Carrie through IT and beyond. Bradbury, Gibson, R.A. MacAvoy, Kij Johnson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter, and many more I'm likely forgetting. 

Your prose is elegant yet strong. I am always curious about whether someone's prose style was something they worked consciously to form, something that came to them naturally, or some combination. Any thoughts about how you arrived at your own writing style?

Thank you! The funny thing is I call my style simple, but to achieve that simplicity took years of practice. At this point, I've been writing seriously for about a decade, but much of the groundwork for my writing career was many, many more years of reading. Learning why other authors' sentences and paragraphs worked. What shapes stories can take and why. No doubt, some of my first attempts probably read like bad imitations of whomever I was reading at the time, but it was all part of my process. Once I learned the why of my own writing, it shaped the what of it, and I've since let that guide me.

Anything else to add?

Thanks for reading my story, and for the opportunity to talk about it!

And thank you to Karlo!