Seasons of Story: Closing the Chapter on 'The Devil That Haunts Them'

As we bring our enlightening May series to a close, join me in "Seasons of Story: Closing the Chapter on 'The Devil That Haunts Them'," where we traverse the ever-changing landscapes of genre and emotion embedded in my trilogy. This series has been a voyage through my evolution as a storyteller, intertwining the eerie tendrils of horror with the serene reflections of historical fiction.

In our final episode, we delve deep into the lives of Julitza, La Doña, and Isabella—three characters whose journeys are marked by resilience, the warmth of sisterhood, and the vivid strokes of Dominican culture. I'll share how crafting their stories mirrored my own personal growth, transitioning from battling life's darker moments to embracing the wisdom that comes with time. This episode is a tribute to the power of sisterhood and found families, which stand as pillars of strength for our heroines.

Together, let's celebrate the vibrant tapestry of Dominican heritage that breathes life into my writing. Discover the profound impact of authenticity and cultural richness in literature, and how these stories resonate with readers seeking depth and truth in their reading experiences. Join me for a heartfelt conversation that promises to inspire and connect, as we bid farewell to our May saga.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Oh, we could. We could fly. Welcome to this new season of the have a Cup of Johani podcast. So I want to title this new season that I'm embarking on with I'm growing, so this is going to be the season of growth and that's what I'm going to share with you throughout the season. So I thank you for coming over here and sitting with me and I hope you enjoy. Hello everyone, and welcome back to have a Cup of Joannie podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:34

I am Joannie and I am your guide on this journey of storytelling and self-discovery, and today we are wrapping up our May series, which has been all about the devil that haunts them. We are diving today into how I did this very scary thing and created a trilogy that spans, embodies, different genres, kind of like the seasons of our lives. Just think back at your entire life and how you may be able to see now, in hindsight, which is 2020, how you may have embarked on different seasons. Right, that brought along its own flavor and its own challenges. So that's what we're going to talk about here on this very last episode of May. Are you ready? Yes, you are, let's go All right, folks. So I'm going to try my best to explain it here. Sometimes a story is too vast, too big, too rich to be confined within a single genre. Kind of like life, it demands the space to unfold in various forms. I see the trilogy as this one full story, like a good chunk of one's lifetime, and how that lifetime is broken down into various eras, and those various eras are when we're talking about the trilogy. Here are the three books each representing its own era in the span of the trilogy.

Speaker 1: 2:51

Making my own personal connection here, because I had to do this in order to understand how I was going to embark into telling this massive story and breaking it down into three different books, which I knew from the first drafts that each book would just fall into a different genre, I had to make that personal connection and I remember, right looking back at my life, how I did have various eras of my life and I would say that my beginning era, I would deem it, label it, categorize it as my own horror era and very representative of kind of like those devils, those demons, those clowns, diablo de Cajuelos that scare the crap out of you and kind of like hold you back or make you pause into continuing your walk towards life. And for me, as someone who looks different. You have heard me say this. It's nothing that I hide. Right, as soon as anyone sees me, this is the first thing that they see. Right, I have a lazy eye as my horror era, because it was a dark time where I had to learn quite quickly how to choose myself. And I had to learn that while not having the experience that come with having lived many years, I had to make that choice with also not having that maturity and not having the will and internal fortitude at the time to make it. Still, I made it and I had to make that time and time again as I encountered these, what I will call these demons, these devils that would just make me question whether I should love and respect myself, whether I was worthy to see myself as a human being, even though others did not and treated me as I wasn't. And that's why that was my horror era, because it was just it's challenge. It was challenge, it was barriers at every turn. Really, it's kind of like like those like those 90s scary movies where the protagonist is just trying to stay alive and barely does it at the end of the film, right, she barely skates out of there alive. And it's either some what is it? A deus sex machina, I think, something that Stephen King does in his book or like this godlike thing or supernatural thing, just you know, takes it all away and everything goes away, or that by some coincidence or luck or whatnot, person just skates out of their life while everybody else didn't. That's how it felt for me coming out of my childhood and into young adulthood. It was very much my horror era and I still have scars from it. I still have certain triggers that are reactive when people touch on them without knowing or anything like that, just because of what I survived back then.

Speaker 1: 6:29

And I made that connection with Julitsa, who is the young character in the Crone, the Mother of the Maiden. She is the maiden, so in the trilogy of things she is going through her horror era, where she tries but unlike me, she fails to push back against those devils, those demons, those clowns, diablo de Cajuelo that just keep her from loving and respecting herself. And for Julissa, unfortunately, it just becomes too much and she gives in. And we see that a little bit in Isabella's story, under the flamboyant tree, because even Isabella, at one point she says it was just so easy to go with the flow, like her thinking back. It was just so easy, because Isabella has to cope and has to learn from her inactions. That kind of led the way, paved the way for what happened to Julitza in the past, and we're going to see a whole lot more of that interaction in Julitza's book. But you get to see a little bit of it, a little bit of it, and hopefully it's enough to make you want to read more of Julitsa's story, so that way you can really see it from her eyes, from her point of view.

Speaker 1: 7:54

And that was what I could hold on to and understand in order to be able to write these books that span different genres. And I theorize the same thing. Just like I give the characters this internal monologue, I have my own internal monologue and I'm like you know each character in the trilogy. They just demand their own space, they demand their own book and once again, just like in life where we pass through different phases, each book took on a genre that best represented its core story and that's just how it was. And I really am that person that writes. And that's just how it was and I really am that person that writes first and then I look at it and I'm like, okay, what genre does this fall into? What genre does it best fit?

Speaker 1: 8:57

All of them, like I said before, all of them have magical realism in them, and that's just because of the element of the flamboyant tree. That is the commonality between all these stories and you will see it just in different timelines, but you will see it, it's very much in bloom the entire time. Like it says in Isabela's story, these women to shed tears, to desalgarse, let things off of their chest and lighten their load a little bit and just feed the tree with the things that are overwhelming them. So that way it is the tree that carries it and not themselves. That's the one commonality. So all of them will have elements of magical realism. But when it comes to juliet's story, hers fits into the horror genre, much like my young adulthood did as well.

Speaker 1: 9:53

But embracing a multi-genre approach was daunting, right it's. It's like approach was daunting, right. It's like hosting a dinner party, a potluck, where each dish comes from a different cuisine. I've done that before. I've hosted these potlucks where everybody brings a dish from their own home country or culture, and it's exciting, yet unpredictable, and yet you always have somebody that just is so against it or doesn't like it, while you have a lot of people that are like, oh, this is great, I love the differences in cuis and they're excited to taste, kind of like, taste the rainbow, kind of like that you know, like to taste the various spices and in various cuisines from different culture. But you know, you still have those people like, nah, it's not, you know, but this is how it felt really was like making that buffet from cuisines from different cultures that it's exciting yet unpredictable because you don't know who is going to have a problem with it. But just as we categorize different seasons of our lives, right, I keep going back to that. That's how this trilogy is.

Speaker 1: 11:25

This trilogy is, and I can say, while my young adulthood was the horror era, I will say, in my 20s and 30s I had my sisterhood era, which is more like Isabella's story. Even my own sisterhood era, like Isabella's story, kind of like falls into contemporary fiction. You know and you see that a lot in Isabella's story where she has those, those ladies that, uh, the lawyer, adriana, she has Yolanda, she has Clara, who really are the backbone that she needs for her to keep going. And and I too, I too, went through that sisterhood era where it's because of these ladies in my life I was able to get through some things that were very hard for me if I would have been by myself. So that facet of my life was pretty much a contemporary fiction and it just it showed how the bonds strengthen me and help me to accomplish more.

Speaker 1: 12:25

And that is exactly what you see in Isabella's story is something that I mined from my own life when it comes to Isabella, because I wanted to show that how, even though your romantic companion may fall through sisterhood in the absence of family, sometimes it's found family. It's better sometimes than family, especially if you have the type of family that kind of like throws you out to the wolves or doesn't want to be around you or doesn't understand you or doesn't want to understand you, therefore leaves you alone. Sisterhood is where it's at and that has been proven for me, and that's what you will see in Anisabela's story under the flamboyant tree. But understanding this helped to shift my mindset, which is what I needed to do in order to write these three books that are all part of a series but fall under different genres. And now, mind you, I also have my historical reflection era, which we will see in La Doña's story. I feel like that is what's going on right now in my life. I don't know if it's like a 40s thing, right when you reach a certain age or whatnot. I don't know if that's what's happening here, but I've grown very reflective of my past and I'm doing that a lot with you all on this podcast, and that is to reflect on the past in order to let go of it and learn from it, you know, to not allow it to have that much strength on me, but to allow me to learn from it, so that way I can grow from it and I can then kind of gochisar to grow, to plant seeds for a better future, you know. So, just as the trilogy falls under these various genres, like my life also does too, and I'm telling you like this was what I needed to understand in order to not be so afraid of embarking on this series, to not fear the whole what will people think? This is unorthodox, this is outside of the industry norm and so forth and instead embrace it with confidence, knowing that it really reflects the true essence of stories that I need to tell Because, if anything, my stories are realistic fiction, because I mine my life quite a lot and I do that because I want to connect, because I know I'm not the only person in the world that has gone through some of these things, and I also know that people may feel as if certain cultures don't go through certain things or certain cultures are not represented. And while I am seeing more Dominican books out there, I don't think it's enough and I just want people to understand that the Dominican people in the island and in the diaspora, as well as the culture, it, is diverse and it is worthy of respect, of love, of empathy and of understanding. I'm putting my stories out there in order to enable others to find it and to learn about the country, the culture and the people, or empathize with us at the very least.

Speaker 1: 16:10

Writing multi-genre trilogy also means that I have to trust that the right reader will find these books, and I just had a conversation with Dal Dal, cecil Fruno. She writes fantastic sci-fi books. Please go check her out, okay. And when I say we just had this conversation, that means I replied to a threat that she had on threats and I told her I was like I 100% agreed with her on, I say, negative marketing, which means that don't read my book if you don't like this, which means that don't read my book if you don't like this. And I agree with her because I'm a big believer that I want the right people to find my books.

Speaker 1: 17:03

I want the right reader to find my book Because I know they're out there. Because what happens when the wrong person finds my books? I feel like it just goes lower on the pile of books to be discovered. That's how I see it. Right, it may not even happen that way, but that's how I see it, because if an ideal reader finds it, that means that this person is not xenophobic, understands that when you speak more than one language, you tend to mix those languages together as you speak and y'all may have heard me on this podcast I tend to mix Spanish and English to make Spanglish.

Speaker 1: 17:47

I tend to have an accent when I say certain words or cannot pronounce certain words fully, and things of that nature. But that's very natural to me. That's my lived experience. But it's not just my lived experience. It's the lived experience of a lot of other folks that don't just speak English but speak other languages on top of English. And when I find my ideal reader, somebody that is not just tolerant but is appreciative of that and understands that and doesn't feel threatened by somebody else speaking something that they may not understand. That's the people that I want to read my books, because they will be the best advocate, the best ones to give word of mouth about my book, because they would have understand it, because they would have understand the main characters of my book.

Speaker 1: 18:40

The main characters of my book are all Dominican, they all speak in Spanglish, they come from urban neighborhoods, so they are mixed into the Dominican diaspora, you know, and they're also inculcated a lot in the culture that is part of those inner cities, which a lot of it has African-American culture. So it's almost like this mixture of Dominican American and African-American culture and you will see that in the main characters, because that's my lived experience. So I tap into what I know when I write these characters and I write these stories and I do that because it's easier for me to write it that way. That's it, period, point blank. It requires very little research because I've lived it, but I am trusting that this trilogy will find the right readers so that way they may give that word of mouth that I need, so that way others will find it, and just as we find the books we need and the seasons we need them, I am a big believer that this trilogy will resonate with those who are meant to read it. And if you happen to be one of those and you're listening to this, please be on the lookout for this trilogy. Put it on your calendar November of this year, november 2024, put it on your calendar, okay, and share it with those who you think may enjoy it as well, may enjoy Dominican characters that come from inner cities, that speak Spanglish, that come from blended families, unorthodox families. You know all of that. Add it to your favorite authors and favorite books to read, so that way you can read it and you can pass it along.

Speaker 1: 20:31

But in writing, as in life, it's about trusting the process. I hate to say it. I have to trust the process. I have to finish through and embrace our unique story and give it a big hug and then let it go as I share it with the world, and that is the scariest thing to do, but that's what I'm fixing to do here shortly.

Speaker 1: 21:02

All right, folks, was this a short episode? Let me see. Oh, my goodness, it was All right. Thank you so much for joining me this month as we explore this amazing trilogy that will be coming out, the Devil that Haunts them. Be on the lookout for them. Give that trilogy word of mouth, please. Nevertheless, it's been a journey not just of discussing a book series, but also reflecting on the nature of our life stories and how we have all these different seasons as well. But don't forget every mistake, every challenge is just a step on the path to aha, and I hope that you keep seeking, keep learning, keep loving yourself and, until next time, come back here so that way we can have another cup together. See you next Wednesday. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. I want to hear from you, leave me a comment, do a rating if you can on the podcast, share it with somebody you love, but, most importantly, come back. See you next time. Bye.