[inaudible conversations] good afternoon fellow book lovers. Im happy to welcome you to the 13th annual savanna book festival. Presented by Georgia Power david and nancy cintron. We are especially grateful to jack in mary romanus our sponsors for this beautiful venue. We would also like to welcome our members and individual earners today. It is through your support that we are able to make festival events this saturday free to the public. 90 of our revenue comes from our donors and members and we thank you. Before we get started i have some housekeeping notes. Miss diaz will be signing festival copy purchases. If you are planning to stay for the next author Michelle Sullivan after this presentation please move forward to fill seats as the venue empties. This will help the ushers get them for the next session. Please turn off your cell phones so they dont disrupt the cell phones. Later, as you exit the venue you will see the volunteers in the back with buckets. They would be happy to accept the generous donation. You can always donate through the festivals book and app. Please help us to continue sharing the love of books with the public. We will have the opportunity for questions and answers at the end of the talk. Please come to the microphone at the center aisle to ask your question. Jacquira diaz is with us today courtesy of several members. Ms. Diaz was born in puerto rico her work has been published in rolling stones, the guardian, long reads. The New York Times out magazine. And included in the best american essays 2016. The recipient of two prizes and the elizabeth and George FoundationGeorge Foundation grant and fellowship from the mcdowell colony. And the Wisconsin Institute for creative writing. She lives in miami beach with her partner please give a warm savanna welcome to jacquira diaz. Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here and its wonderful to see all of you book lovers here. And thank you savanna for your southern hospitality. I also want to thank the savanna book festival and everyone who made this event possible lets give it up to the indie booksellers in the room. I love you all. Thank you for all that you do for loving books and championing writers. Because of you im here. Thank you. I want to open with a just the just a little piece that opens the book it functions like we were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop. Going towards the boards letting the world spin. The wind in our hair. We were the loud moms and the troublemakers. We were at the party girls. Hitting the clubs in height top jordans. We where the wild girls who loved music and dancing. Girls who were black and brown and poor and queer girls who love each other. I had been those girls on a greyhound bus. Homeless and on the run. A girl sleeping on the stand. On a bus stop bench. A hoodlum girl still throwing talented boys and girls in their older sister. And even the cops. Suspended every year for fighting on the first day of school. They throw a chair at the math teachers son. Kicked out of pre algebra. A girl who got slammed onto a police car by two cups in front of the whole school after a brawl with six other girls. And i had been other girls. Girls standing before a judge girl on a dock appeared the morning after a hurricane looking out at the bay like it is the end of the world. Girl on a rooftop. Girl on an edge. Plummeting through the air. And years later a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. This is the opening of my book. I will talk about the inspiration and why i wrote it. It took about 12 years to write and it is without a doubt the lifes work. Its about the girl of adolescence. And miami beach. About surviving depression and survival. About our parents and how their actions shape us. About losing the people we love about how we are not defined by the worst thing we have ever done. It is about my relationship with my mother. Growing up i was a juvenile offender who spent most of her time on the streets. At 11 i attempted suicide for the first time than a few months after that i ran away from home for the first time and then i started getting arrested. I dropped out of high school kept running away kept getting arrested. Kept fighting in the streets. Kept trying to die. I was also in the middle of a sexual awakening and would finally come out as gay. I cannot talk about that not to anyone not in the early 90s not in my neighborhood. It was marked by homophobia entrance phobia. And certainly not for my mother. I spent much of my childhood pretending to be someone else especially when it seemed like the whole world was trying to erase us. I spent a lot of that time hiding in books and looking for myself in stories and after i became a writer i decided that i would write about people like me. Girls and women who are black and brown and poor. And on mother. Women like my mother a white puerto rican woman who did not know how to raise or protect her black children. They would spend the entire life spending it with Mental Illness. My mother was and is accommodated woman. She was loving and abusive. She held me one minute and then it kicked my and then held me again. She was and is flawed and vulnerable. My mother was and is deeply homophobic. When i first started writing ordinary girls. My mother was a ghost. I wrote around her. Avoiding the truth. The truth was painful. The truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about. A black puerto rican woman who carried meet my whole life carries me still. Who taught me to pray and cook and chain smoke and taught me to keep house and taught me everything i know about forgiveness. I wrote about it. A miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3yearold son and dumped his body in a neighborhood close to where i grew up. And spent most of her life on death row. I wrote about my mothers mother my grandmothers mercy. She hated the fact she had have his children that her grandchildren were black. She would later die by suicide. And i wrote about them. The mythical woman the legend who took her children from their bed that night. In carried them to a nearby river. Held them underwater until they drowned. And then drowned herself. And now her ghost haunts bodies of water. I read about all these other mothers any mothers except my own until a friend who read the manuscript ask after reading about five chapters where is your mother. I have to sit down with the book and take a hard honest look at the pages. Examine my life and all of the reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. The truth is my mother broke me in the truth is i was afraid to look to admit to see how much she had broken me. How hard it had been to find my way back to myself how easily i could be broken again. But i finally decided to ask the question and more than that to ask the question for myself. To answer it, where is my mother. To write about her to examine the relationship in a way that was honest that acknowledged all of the ways that she was real the writing from beginning to end took about 12 years i have to step away from the book several times and there were many different versions. To say that the writing of this book drains me. It would be a understatement. I gained weight, i lost weight. My hair started falling out. Ive have the worst insomnia ive have in my life. And then my grandmother died by suicide. I often needed time away from the book to take care of myself. And to make sense of what i was doing to interrogate different parts of the book it was quite the opposite. Writing this book is the hardest thing i have ever done. What kept me going. I wanted to write about people who rarely have a home in the literary landscape. I wanted to y up write about growing up poor in miami. About all of the ways that they were invisible and hyper visible and i wanted to write about my Community Without losing sight of what mattered most. The people i were writing about were real. They existed. That they lived and loved. Even if the rest of the world did not see them. When i started writing this book i thought not about how to write my story but how my story was and is connected to a larger world. And what my place in that world might be. Im here because i found that place. Thanks to a group of friends who saved me. I was struggling as a girl as a woman and later as a writer struggling with how to write about Sexual Violence in a way that was honest in still artful. In a way that was not just about my experience but spoke to something larger about girls. About how complicated family lives in fights and loves. I wanted to write it without pity or glory or anger. Also, more so than any of my girls i am someone who had had access to education. Two fellowships into writing conferences. It has taken a lot of hard work but that does not erase the fact that ive had access to all of this and that most of the girls in my community had not. The world is not kind too black and brown girls. In the world isnt kind too black and brown women. Especially when they come from workingclass communities or poverty. These girls taught me that its possible to make our own families to make her own way. They helped me believe in love and friendship and hope that more than anything after they have girls of their own it was there girls who taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write this book. They helped me to see the girl i had been they helped me remember that there are girls out there who are just like i was. My story was not unique. All girls no matter the circumstance are vulnerable this is something we share. That transcends borders and ethnicity and race and class somewhere there is a teenage girl whose mother suffers from Mental Illness and rejection just trying to get through the day. And try to come to terms with her sexuality. Imagine maybe seen herself in this book will make this life a little bit easier. Some of the other things i talk about in the book are also things that were very important to me. They made me a writer. My father loved books. He was a poet. Who stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father he took me to the funeral up puerto rican protest poet. And when i saw everyone gathered and celebrated his life. People who have read has his book. I thought, that poets were important and that they could change the world. I thought i want that. I also wanted this book to Say Something about access into gets access to this world. Who gets to be up here. And talk about books it was important to me because coming from where i came from. I always felt like i did not had enough. It was important for me to talk about that and talk about puerto rican history. In the relationship. I started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir that was something that was not a history book and how my story is connected to that story. Being puerto rican i think most of us who come to puerto rico we feel a connection to the island even after we had left it even if we never been there. Which is the truth. I saying that a lot of Puerto Ricans know. It comes from a poem it means that i would be puerto rican even if i was born on the moon. I wanted to reach people that would never be there. People that did not had access to that history. For whatever reason and make some of that history assessable to the general reader. I tried to talk about the parts of local history. A lot of this influenced the kind of a writer i became. I was always thinking of who i was writing for in some ways i felt like this book even though i intended it to be as open and honest and as vulnerable i wanted it to be in conversation with a very specific group of people girls who are like girls who grew up in poverty. And for them to understand i wasnt just writing about them but i was writing for them. Something i mentioned in the book is how i was a kid who loved to read. And i didnt have money for books so i went to the library and i asked librarians to give me books i Read Everything they put in my hands. And they were all books that were written about white people and for white people. I thought to be a writer you have to be brought white. I wanted them to understand and to see themselves that that was not real. That we exist. That this is possible. There were other parts of this book that shaped me at the time i thought about how it would make sense to the story. One of them was the baby lollipops murder that i talk about which happened in 1990 there was a toddler found in our neighborhood in miami beach at the time they didnt know where the toddler came from. Just that they had found his body. I saw this story on the news they took over at the 24 hour news cycle. At the time i was 11. I was a kid. Because i was on the news. And everybody in my neighborhood was talking about it. We kind of obsessed about this. I already imagined myself a writer and so i took notes and i thought about this a lot in for weeks i thought about this until they discovered and they found the babys mother in the story came out on the news that they had found the mother and the partner and that they had dumped his body and fled. Part of the narrative at the time part of what was very important at the time the news made it sound like this woman and her partner these two lesbians kill this baby and ran away. They made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. And the people talked about this in my neighborhood including teachers and school security. Always talked about this with either implicit or explicit homophobia. I kept thinking about the story. And then 20 years later. I wrote an essay of being this little girl when the story broke and the essay was published in the magazine called the sun. A woman who have been at the time working as a anti Death Penalty activists. They read it. And email me and said i know this woman you wrote about. I had been visiting her in prison. She has been on death row since 1992. I wrote back to her if we could start a correspondence. Eventually i wrote to them and i told her i had written about her. She wrote back. She wrote me letters. Her first letter was kind of livid. She was upset that i had written about her. And she said. You didnt know me you didnt know my son. What gives me the right you the right to even write about me. I wrote back and told her my story. I told her who i was. And why i had written about it. I was a child at the time. I told her that i would like to hear her story not what the newspaper said or what was on the news but the truth i include this in the book because i think it is important for readers to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain violence is. And when i ask her to tell me her story she wrote back and said this is not a story this is my life. She put me in my place. And i deserved it. I really started thinking about why i was writing in my i was writing it this way. I went back to the beginning of the book. And i started interrogating myself and my was telling the story. And if i have a right to tell the story considering that i wasnt really a resident of that anymore. I had access to all of these things that i was in graduate school and the people i was writing about did not had access to any of that. She really got me to think about seeing all of the women i am writing about and thinking about the fact that i am writing about real people another woman i mentioned in the book whose name i didnt even know. Who died by suicide and i also thought about her a lot. And i included her in the book because i thought about her in the same way. At the time i suffered from major depression. And thinking about taking my life and thinking about taking this woman as a story as a legend. I also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way. And to remind the readers that these are not just stories. She was a well a real woman. In 2017 she got a new trial. I was corresponding with her for several years i was not writing her all the time. I would send an occasional letter and then she would write back. Where she would write two or three letters and then i would write back. One of the things that she asked for after she let me have it because i wrote about her. She did want me to write about her except it became very clear that she wanted to control the narrative. And she wanted me to go to her retrial i did. She was being tried for murder again but this time the Death Penalty was off the table and as i sat in the trial after having this correspondence with her. And feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else was personally responsible. I realized that she was lying. She got caught lying on the sand three separate times. I included a little bit of that also because they really wanted i really wanted the readers to think about this idea of her that i have constructed in my had and how that kind of fell apart because i wasnt really to get of her as a woman. I had been thinking of this other story that i was following. There are these other moments in the book where i thought they were important to kind of call myself out i talked about writing puerto rico and one of the things that ive done over the years is to visit puerto rico and to go back almost every summer spent time with family. I still have most of my family there. Into drive around and so i drove to san juan one afternoon and if any of you had been to puerto rico there is this building called the puerto rico tourism company. It used to be a prison used to be a prison where Puerto Ricans were tortured and murdered and somehow the building was purchased and now it is the tourism company. Its a place where you can get trolley maps. There is a gallery and a grand piano. The building still has two jail cells in their original condition where people stop and take photos. When i went back to visit the building after having written most of this book almost all of it i was thinking i knew the history of this place. And i was not intending to see what have been. A prison or people were tortured and lost their lives. And yet when i got there and saw families and tourists a woman asked me she handed me her phone and she asked me to take a photo of her with her two children. I took her phone and i took a picture of them. And then i ask her to do the same to take a picture of me in front of the jail cell. It is a moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing its a moment that now fills me with shame. It was like i was trying to forget. I needed to include in the book to call myself out and to talk openly about how the desire to erase history and to erase violence. Into is complicit. Something that is also in the book. A lot of people have said that miami is like another character. Miami is a setting for part of the book. In the atmosphere and Historical Marker and a cultural marker and i try to capture wh