My guest author today is a long-time contributor to The Good Men Project, Taylor Garcia.
Good Men Project: Your new book, Functional Families is a collection of short stories surrounding secrets and unpopular truths seen in dysfunctional families. How and when did this collection originate? Were your stories intentionally assembled to address family dynamics?
Taylor García: The stories in Functional Families started coming together in graduate school as part of my Master’s thesis in the early 2010s. Years after completing the program, I realized I had the opportunity to group them by the various members of a family: mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, etc. because all the main characters were one of these in their own respective dysfunctional families. Since families, family dynamics, and the politics and drama that goes on within all families intrigue me, I began to curate and embellish the original stories to lead back to the overall “functional” family theme—that is, families that simply function, even though they are dysfunctional. While the characters live their own lives and have their own unique and often strange experiences, they carry their own burdens, all of which relate back to their families. Bringing all of these stories together was just as fun and rewarding as writing them. I saw that I had a collection that resembled a family: there was the goofy one, the pensive one, the matriarch, the patriarch, and the troubled child. The best part is, they all belong.
GMP: Your “Father Time” column at the Good Men Project addresses modern manhood, fatherhood, socio-politics, and identity. How has your column writing influenced the fiction writing of this story collection or vice versa?
TG: The Father Time column at the Good Men Project has been an evolving meditation on fatherhood, family, and the politics of living in this amazingly complex world. I address the big and small things, and I like to get at the core of issues and problems (the pain point) and soften it with a bit of philosophical empathy. Writing a column with a narrow focus like this has helped me hone my fiction writing, and it was especially helpful in writing Functional Families. As I aim to parse a societal dysfunction in column writing, I examine and attempt to redeem the dysfunction of a character and/or their families in the short story medium. A short story is by no means Anna Karenina—instead, it’s a small peek into the lives of people, while columns in journalistic writing are quite similar: it’s a sliver of insight surrounded by the abyss. As for thematic similarities between my columns and my this collection, all my usual subjects are there, masculinity including the toxic kind, family as the lens for how we view the world, feminism, codependency, interpersonal communications and problems, and Latino interest and subject matter.
GMP: If you will, share with our readers how much of your own personal experience with your family (nuclear, extended, chosen) is represented in this book. Were some of the stories you included in Functional Families inspired by your own family?
TG: Yes. This is where things get a little … sensitive, both for me as the writer, and for anyone in my family reading these stories. Many of these stories most certainly have a basis in real events or real people, or they contain an imagined version of another story or person close to me. There’s a real danger in writing about family, even in a fiction form, because the writer runs the risk of alienating themselves and burning bridges. But in fiction, we change the names and situations to protect the innocent. Many of the characters in my collection share personality styles, speech patterns, moods, and ticks of people close to me. I’ve made sure, however, to mash things up so as not to give everything away, nor to implicate a certain person. At a book signing event I had in October for my novel Slip Soul, I announced that I had a short story collection coming very soon and that it was about families. I publicly gave a disclaimer that some stories are taken right from the mythologies of our very own family. I warned people that they might find themselves in those pages. Speaking with other writers who have written about their families, there are risks, but the stories, whether good or bad, need to be told. Writing about family is a deeply personal subject and it’s definitely a form of therapy. As one of my mentors, Steve Almond once wrote, “… write about anything you cannot dispose of by any other means.”
GMP: You’ve spoken about characters in the book that are based on real people in your life. Have you shared yourself through any of the characters in your stories? If so, are you willing to reveal what elements of which characters represent you and your own experiences?
TG: With any piece of art, the artist always leaves an imprint of themselves in the work. As for this collection, I believe certain aspects of me appear in a few stories, specifically “Rattlesnake Rabbit,” “Monica In Georgetown,” and “Bird Dog.” Rabbit is a story about a Native American man and his Caucasian girlfriend. Through this story, I was able to share the perspective of being in a relationship with someone of a different ethnic background and culture and the challenges that go with that, similar to my relationship with my wife, me being of Mexican-American descent, and she being of Northern European descent. In Monica and Bird Dog, the narrator is coming to terms later in life with their mother’s and father’s past, respectively. From Monica, I see many similarities in the protagonist Troy’s undying love juxtaposed with his qualms for his mother, as I sometimes have for mine, and from Bird Dog, I’ve envisioned this to be a future telling of how I might find ironic redemption with my long-estranged father.
GMP: What is your favorite story or section of this book?
TG: I have two favorite stories in the collection. One is “Agony In The Garden,” a story about a teenage father and mother and their infant daughter. The three of them live with the teenage girl’s super-conservative Catholic parents, the father who is white, and the mother who is Mexican-American. When the infant starts crying one day non-stop, which happens to be New Year’s Eve, the teenage girl’s superstitious and religious mother believes the baby has mal de ojo (evil eye) and calls over a nun to perform a limpia, or, cleansing. Figurative hell breaks loose. I love this story for its blend of Catholicism and Mexican folk ways, the young versus the old, conversative versus liberal values, and the fact that it takes place on New Year’s Eve. There’s a powerful symbolism with that day.
I also love “Wheel of Fortune,” which is set in 1995 in Santa Fé, New Mexico (my home town) when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton visited our state. A local restaurant where she dined went so far as to build a small separate dining room for her with a gold placard in the archway and everything. I wrote an alternate reality of her visiting a fortune teller while in town to ask if Hillary would ever be President.
A section I’m really fond of is the “Others” section. The characters and situations in these stories didn’t fit into the standard Mothers, Fathers, Daughters, and Sons sections of the book, so they earned their own place. Stories include one about two time-traveling lovers who set the wrong time coordinates and end up in different places, another is a ghost story about an Oregon state trooper who is haunted by his former partner and love interest, and another is about Blizten the reindeer and his elf friend who escaped the North Pole an end up at a celebrity rehab reality TV show in Los Angeles.
GMP: Functional Families is full of different narrative points of view. You write from the perspective of adult Hispanic cisgender men, adult white men, women, a teenage girl, a Native American man, a teenage boy, a bisexual man, a transgender girl, and even an elf! How did you inhabit these narrative points of view, and how might readers of these backgrounds receive your work?
TG: Great question, and one that I can only answer with one word: imagination. Fiction writing is purely imagination. The writer (at least I know I do this) starts with a singular question: “what is it like to (fill in the blank)?” That’s how I set out to write all of these stories. For example, I asked, what might an obese woman at a health and wellness bootcamp experience? For another I asked, how might a macho father feel spending an evening with his transgender daughter, how would an elf who was addicted to cocaine deal with reality once sober, how might a man who believed he was gay but is now attracted to women think and feel? It’s all in the cosplay of writing characters, but as any writer knows, one must tell the truth, which was my intent as I wrote each of these stories. By inhabiting that person or their mindset, I wanted to feel their feelings and have empathy for them. What would they be thinking, feeling, doing, saying. With that, I was able to arrive at their truth, and that is what I hope the reader receives.
GMP: Can you share with our readers what your creative process is for writing a short story? How is it different from novel writing? Do you prefer one over the other?
TG: I believe short stories are one of the most fun and versatile forms to work in as a writer. In a very small space, you’re able to show an entire world full of comedy or tragedy or both. The best include both. There’s also an urgency in short stories. Inciting incidents have usually happened off the page, and you’re usually pages away from the climax. The denouement is sometimes sublime, other times way off, and other times totally incomplete. That’s the beauty of short stories—they’re only glimpses. As a mentor of mine once said, “Arrive late and leave early.” She meant this when it comes to scene building, but the same is true for writing short stories. As for my process, I’ve always compared myself to a custodian always sweeping up odds and ends here and there. For example, I’ll “sweep up” a bent spoon, a guy who’s left shoulder slowly lifts when he talks, an old map of South America, a young girl’s text threads, a drafty basement, and the smell of gas. I’ll let those things marinate for a long while, and then I’ll write. I’ll write and write until I have something.
GMP: With a novel and short story collection in print, do you foresee any forthcoming works in one genre or the other? Are you planning to focus on one area or write in other forms?
TG: I’d like to switch over to instructional manuals. Kidding. Short stories will always be my first love, and I know I’ll continue to write those off and on. Right now, however, I am continuing to master the long from as I work on my second novel. Because I enjoy writing short stories, I envision my next book-length work actually being a novel in stories. As for any other future books or forms, I’d really like to explore the super short, punchy, and pithy. One of my favorite writers is Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live “Deep Thoughts” fame. His books are compact, quick reads and packed with the sweet and the macabre, with humor, philosophy, and wisdom. I’m aiming for all of those things because those books never die. They end up getting read at graduation ceremonies and over-the-hill birthday parties, or they live on your coffee table and on that top shelf of your personal library. They also go well in a dentist’s waiting area, a second-hand bookstore, or the trash.
FUNCTIONAL FAMILIES is now available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon
Fiction. ISBN: 9781950730872
Publisher: Unsolicited Press (November 2, 2021)
Watch the Book Trailer:
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This post is brought to you by Taylor Garcia.
Photo credit: Functional Families book cover