The Storyteller: An Interview with Romina Garber
Hi and welcome to Issue #8 of The Storyteller!
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Can you believe we're already at the start of yet another month? The pandemic has seemed endless and yet the days are flying by much faster than they did at the start of it. Hope everyone's keeping as sane and healthy as can be expected.
Today we have with us the New York Times bestselling author Romina Garber, whose latest book, Lobizona, came out via Wednesday Books just last month. It's the first in a new contemporary YA series, Wolves of No World and, personally, one of the best books I've had the pleasure to read this year so far. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Miami, Romina is a graduate of Harvard College, and now the author of her second series after the ZODIAC books.
AN: Let's talk writing journey. I know your first writing gig was a weekly Sunday column for the Miami Herald that was later picked up for national syndication. What did you write about? How did you start writing novels? Is there another format you want to give a shot in the future or have tried your hand at already?
RG: The summer after senior year of high school, I landed an internship at the Miami Herald. The one thing interns weren’t supposed to do was go into the editor-in-chief’s office, but I was a seventeen-year-old in possession of an idea, so nothing was stopping me.
I walked into his office, and I pitched him a column I could write from college. At the time, newspaper subscriptions were plummeting, particularly among younger generations, and they’d been doing some focus groups among interns, which must have emboldened me. So I told the editor of the paper that I thought younger readers might be more interested if there were articles that felt relevant to their lives.
He loved the idea and walked me right over to the features editor’s office, and I got the green light that day. The Sunday column was called “College She Wrote,” and I wrote it weekly from my dorm room at Harvard, dispelling mysteries and misconceptions about student life. It was one of the best experiences of my career, and eventually it was even picked up for national syndication.
I think the biggest thing I discovered through that column was my audience—I loved writing for teens, and I’ve never stopped. I wrote my first novel three years later, when I was a college senior. I’ve completed ten additional novels since then, six of which are published or soon-to-be-published. As for future endeavours, I would love to learn how to write a movie script or a TV pilot! Before becoming a full-time novelist, I worked in Los Angeles as a writer/producer of movie trailers, and I’ve always been curious to craft my own multimedia project.
AN: Walk us through your world-building for Lobizona and the ZODIAC series. How do you balance real-life and fantasy elements and what were your inspirations? I haven’t read the ZODIAC books, but I know they’re more sci-fi, while Lobizona is paranormal fantasy. What were the challenges? What did you enjoy most about both of these very different projects?
RG: Worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing. For me, a book’s setting often goes hand-in-hand with its concept. I find that one of the greatest challenges with SFF worldbuilding is the level of intricacy and complexity, so I try to stick to the guiding principle that every scene’s goal is to reveal character.
In the ZODIAC series, one’s astrological sign is determined by where they’re born, not when. The population of each House is characterized by the traits of their sign, and every world is reflective of its people’s values—their government, spiritual beliefs, culture, economy, technology, transportation, food, fashion, etc.
The concept behind the series is a case of art imitating life: The thirteenth constellation exists in our own sky, but long ago the Babylonians decided to divide time by twelve instead of thirteen, so they ignored Ophiuchus, until it got lost to history. Yet every few years, someone in the media world re-discovers the Serpent Bearer constellation and questions whether the Zodiac is truly twelve or thirteen, and the whole debate gets sparked again.
What’s most fascinating to me isn’t the question of whether there are truly twelve or thirteen signs—it’s the fact that it matters to us at all. The way we tie our sense of self to our Zodiac sign is akin to how we draw our identity from our birthplace or bloodline or upbringing—all things outside ourselves over which we have no control.
Beyond SFF, I’m drawn to the sociology of identity: I love to investigate how we form communities, while questioning our attachment to and dependence on ancestral memory.
My new release, Lobizona, explores the immigrant identity and the dehumanizing effects of labeling a person illegal.
Manu is a teen who has grown up in hiding in Miami because of her undocumented status and otherworldly eyes—but when her mom is arrested in an ICE raid, Manu is left unprotected. Alone, she follows a series of clues that lead her to the Everglades, where she discovers a realm ripped from the pages of Argentinian folklore . . . A world where it’s not her residency that’s “illegal,” but her existence.
I based the fantasy elements on a superstition that claims the seventh consecutive son will be a lobizón, or a werewolf, and the seventh daughter a bruja. Since I wanted to write about how it feels to come from two worlds but belong to neither, I knew my main character had to be ostracized in her supernatural heritage too. So I made her the first ever lobizona.
I decided that rather than stick with the traditional transformation lore, I wanted to explore this species’ unique sense of identity, given their dual supernatural and human heritage. So I created Lunaris, a physical representation of their power source, where they return once a month to connect with their roots.
I also wanted to emphasize the characters’ connection to Nature. The werewolf myth already fit in so organically with the lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle, and I wanted the brujas’ magic to sprout from the soil and grow like the trees. I hoped to remind the reader that the lines we draw on this Earth are invisible to the universe. We are all creatures of the entire planet.
AN: How does you being Latinx influence your work and is there a writer’s manifesto you want your work to convey? I guess, what I’m asking is, what draws you to writing the stories that you do? (Maybe I’m wrong, but Lobizona felt intensely personal.)
RG: There’s a moment in Lobizona when Manu asks Perla, her surrogate grandmother, why so many Latin American authors employ magic in their stories. Perla says, “Sometimes reality strays so far from what’s rational that we can only explain it through fantasy.”
That sums up what I attempted to do with this book.
Lobizona is based on a real Argentinian law—ley de padrinazgo presidencial 20.843. It declares the President of Argentina godparent to the seventh consecutive son or daughter in a family.
When I researched the history of this legislation, fact and folklore seemed to blend together: Was it simply a tradition brought over by dignitaries visiting from Europe in the early 1900s? Was it a government countermeasure to stop parents from abandoning children they feared had been born cursed? Was it both? And why is it still in effect today?
My parents met at the end of the Guerra Sucia, a violent dictatorship during which dissidents disappeared overnight and children were ripped from their families. To this day, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo continue to search for their lost grandchildren. So I chose to weave Argentinian fantasy into this contemporary tale about U.S. immigration to sound a warning about how thin the line is between policy and public sentiment.
I hoped to draw a parallel between human and supernatural law enforcement to remind the reader that this isn’t just escapist fun. Rather, this is a book about worlds and who gets to live in them—and the border between fantasy and reality is as thin as the edge of the page you’re turning.
AN: How/why did you decide on a pen name for your debut series?
RG: My journey to publication lasted just shy of a decade, during which time I completed five novels, all of which were rejected by traditional publishing. After my fifth failure, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get up and try again. It was my boyfriend at the time, Russell, who shouldered me up. He offered to support me for a while so that I could really give my writing my all, instead of just nights and weekends—three months later, I was signing the contract for ZODIAC.
I felt then—and I still do now—that his name deserved to be on that spine. I will be forever grateful for his faith in me.
AN: What has been one of the most challenging aspects of being a writer that you didn’t expect? Equally, what’s one of the most enjoyable?
RG: As a lifelong loner, I expected the solitary nature of writing to be what most appealed to me about this career. Yet I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that the greatest reward of sharing my stories has been the friendships I’ve forged.
I think a book is an act of faith. It’s a cry we cast into the universe, to see whether our people are out there—and when we hear from readers who stumble across our call and are able to decipher its message, we know we’re not alone.
AN: I read about your ZODIAC series being part of the Penguin Random House virtual reality project which uses VR to help kids appreciate literature, books, and reading. What makes certain books/settings/genre more of a fit for VR or is that being too narrow-minded? What was the experience like? Could you tell us a bit more about how it actually went down and what you did? What do you think the pros and cons are, based on your experience of doing it?
RG: Walking into the VR worlds of my series was one of the coolest experiences of my life! I was scanned in and an avatar of me was created, which was surreal. They also built avatars for ZODIAC’s four main characters and portals into two of the planets—I was able to literally step into Houses Cancer and Libra, which was incredible.
The company that created the elements is Abelana VR and we used the High Fidelity platform for our event. Process-wise, I would send along images of what I was thinking for the characters and worlds, as well as descriptions from the books, and they designed everything.
I felt that VR took things a step further than a screen adaptation, particularly because there is no screen. There’s an unrivaled immediacy. You can literally walk in the world of the book you’re reading, something a movie doesn’t let you do. I think the closest would be an amusement park.
As an author, it also enabled me to speak with readers from all around the globe “in person.” I think this technology could be great for any number of stories. It had a particular synergy with the Zodiac Universe because residents travel by hologram often, and due to identity fraud, there’s an axiom “Trust Only What You Can Touch.” That gives it an extra layer of resonance in VR because it’s like experiencing the same thing as the characters.
For anyone interested in learning more about my experience, or seeing some of it, here’s a quick segment from CBS News.
AN: What sort of a writer are you? How do you work with an idea from start to finish? (Does the plot come first or the characters, for example; do you plot everything out and so on.) Has this process changed from when you first started?
RG: With every project, I always begin with setting because of something the philosopher Alan Watts once said—we’re not born into this world; we’re born from it.
The ZODIAC quartet takes place in a galaxy where all twelve planetary systems—or Houses—are inspired by the Zodiac signs. I began by putting together a guidebook where I broke down all thirty-four inhabited planets. For each world, I had to determine the topography, whether it had to be terraformed, what materials could be used to build structures, and so on. Then for each House, I had to decide what kind of civilization that particular sign would create based on their values—the governance, architecture, technology, spiritual beliefs, monetary system, social structure, entertainment, fashion, food, and so on.
Once I know my world—in this case, worlds—I can begin to chart out my main character. This way I can be sure I’m growing someone from that unique soil, as opposed to basing them on my own upbringing.
When outlining a new book, I begin by identifying the three biggest moments: Inciting Incident (first real decision), Midpoint Reversal (point of no return), and Black Moment (all is lost). I try to think of these plot points as simply forcing a character to make a choice—except these must be choices that reveal deep truths about them and move their story forward.
I always plot first—it’s part of my neurotic Virgo nature—and even though some characters may stray from the path during drafting, usually the story unfolds more or less as I expected.
AN: Any advice you wish you’d gotten when you first started out?
RG: This is actually advice I passed on to Tomi Adeyemi, which she later quoted for Writers Digest, so I’ll let her say it:
"If I could go back, I would’ve told myself that I will be published one day and it’s a marathon, not a sprint. (Of course, one of my very wonderful writing friends Romina Russell—author of the ZODIAC saga—did tell me this, but I was too dumb to listen to her when she did—lol—so be smarter than me and take her wonderful advice now)."
AN: What are some of your favourite diverse reads that you cannot stop recommending to people?
RG: Children of Blood and Bone, The Hate U Give, The Poet X, Labyrinth Lost, We Are Not From Here, Woven In Moonlight, A Phoenix First Must Burn, Cemetery Boys. . . .
AN: What next?
RG: The sequel to Lobizona—Cazadora!!! 😊
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1. What's the last book that you read that you'd recommend and why?
A Phoenix First Must Burn because it’s a stunning collection of powerful stories about Black Girl Magic, resistance, and hope!
2. What's the last TV show or movie you watched that you'd recommend and why?
Get Even on Netflix because it’s based on the YA book series by the incredible Gretchen McNeil!
3. What's the last song you listened to that you'd recommend and why?
You Should See Me In A Crown because it’s also the name of the next book on my tbr!
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Thank you Romina for this wonderful and illuminating chat! I'm so grateful for your time and I hope my readers will enjoy reading it (and Lobizona) as much as I did.
As always, I've included both mine and Romina's social media links below, for you to check out if you so wish. There are buying links as well, which include links through my own online affiliate shop for Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. I have a separate section on there titled "The Storyteller newsletter" so you can access the relevant buying links for all the authors I've had on here so far.
In Issue #9 coming into your inboxes on September 15, we have debut author (and my friend) Janella Angeles with Where Dreams Descend, the first book in the Kingdom of Cards duology that is a fresh take on "The Phantom of the Opera meets Moulin Rouge meets The Night Circus." It debuted on August 25 via Wednesday Books.
If you enjoyed this and know someone who would, as well, please forward this to them! I'm also always up for a book (or general) chat so feel free to turn this into a conversation at any time by replying to the email, even if just to let me know your thoughts on an issue or if you have any feedback, but also if you must share with someone how awesome something is that you've recently read, watched, or listened to.
Thank you and until next time!
Anu
Currently reading: The Sum of our Days by Isabel Allende
Currently watching: Lucifer, Season 5 (Netflix)
Currently listening to: Wadsworth, my friend, Felix Herbst's achingly soothing debut original EP
Latest writing: The Dark Knight - twelve years later
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Buying links:
https://rominagarber.com/books
https://bookshop.org/shop/anushreenande