Authors Interviewing Characters: Joy Castro
From International Latino Book Award and Nebraska Book Award-winning author Joy Castro, comes FLIGHT RISK (11/1), a heartbreaking, suspenseful, and ultimately triumphant novel split between Appalachia and Chicago.
Drawing on her own personal experiences, memoirist and Willa Cather Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Castro crafts the wrenching story of Isabel Morales. Isabel is a successful sculptor in Chicago who’s married to a handsome doctor, but she hides a brutal family history. When she receives a call that her mother has died in prison, she’s forced to return to West Virginia and face the demons she’s long since buried.
This darkly literary thriller, called the “rarest of beasts—beautifully written yet a real page-turner,” by internationally bestselling author S. J. Watson, unfolds with breathtaking heartache and suspense.
An Interview with Isabel Morales, the Heroine of Flight Risk
Joy, the author: The narration in Flight Risk is very intimate. How do you feel about having an entire book written from your point of view?
Isabel, the character: A bit mixed, really. I’m very shy, and I keep my feelings to myself. That’s always felt safer. Having my thoughts, memories, and sensations revealed to a crowd of strangers feels awkward and a bit unnerving for me. I’ve always held my cards, as they say, close to the vest, and having all my thoughts and feelings exposed feels very uncomfortable.
But on the other hand, it could be a helpful thing for readers to learn what the inner world is like of someone who’s been marginalized in so many ways. It’s not a voice we often get to hear in the public sphere. I think it’s much easier to blame poor people, especially poor women, and poor women of color, for “bad choices” when you don’t know what they’ve actually gone through. So maybe my story can help some readers—those who’ve mostly been comfortable and well cared for—understand the other side of the story, and help other readers—those who’ve been judged, deprived, or misunderstood—to feel less alone in the world.
Joy, the author: At the beginning of Flight Risk, you seem to have it all: the love of your handsome doctor husband, a beautiful home in Chicago overlooking Lake Michigan, wealth, a fulfilling career as an artist, a gorgeous wardrobe many women would envy. Why would you want to disrupt that picture-perfect life?
Isabel, the character: True—but with seem being the operative word there. What my experience taught me is that it’s possible to achieve the American Dream—wealth, professional success—and the fairy-tale happily-ever-after ending—marriage to a good man—and still feel quite miserable inside. In my case, there were pains from my upbringing that had been left unresolved. I was always running from my past, always concealing it, always pretending it didn’t matter.
Early in Flight Risk, my mother dies—in prison. That’s a heavy legacy, and I felt a lot of pain and confusion when it occurred, so it felt important to go back to my origins in rural Appalachia and untangle what happened to me as a child. I didn’t realize how transformative it would all become.
Joy, the author: The forest seems so important to you throughout the book.
Isabel, the character: Yes. I always found the forest to be a place of enchantment, wonder, and peace. I loved the wilderness when I was a child, when my mother—whom most people would today call neglectful—let me roam free in the mountains.
But what I learned in my education is that it’s more socially desirable to live in an affluent urban space. In New York and Chicago, most of my well-to-do, educated acquaintances (and certainly my wealthy husband’s friends) had very little relationship with the natural world, which was always so magical and important to me. It seemed like a strange sacrifice to have to make. I think that part of the reason I felt so lonely in Chicago was all the cement, all the concrete. It’s a beautiful, thrilling, exciting city, but all the grayness made me long for green.
Going home to West Virginia was a beautiful immersion in nature for me—yet it also posed the political problem of how I need to care for the natural world. How can I put the forest, which I love so much, in the foreground of my life? A really wonderful book I love on this topic is Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, by Robert Pogue Harrison. It’s very beautiful.
Joy, the author: Fairy tales also seem important to you, as they have to writers like Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Isabel, the character: Yes, I’m fascinated by fairy tales, which are—as far as we know—the oldest stories in Western culture that were authored by women (though most were anonymous and collected by men). They’re some of the earliest narratives we learn, and they often feature girls as protagonists, so sometimes they structure our desires, because they offer a clear path to a happy ending: overcome a few obstacles, suffer a few trials, and true love will win out in the end—the whole good-girl, princess narrative which is so alluring to so many.
But what I witnessed in my life was that my mother was not a good girl and was despised, even by her own family, and then I was not a good girl, either—so my grip on the happily-ever-after trophy life seemed rather tenuous. I wondered what stories were available to someone like me.
“Six Swans,” the Brothers Grimm narrative I explore in Flight Risk, is a really weird fairy tale: it moves past the supposedly happy ending of a wedding and into the vexed space of marriage itself: hostile in-laws, mistrust when spouses hurt one another, tensions over having children, and so on. “Six Swans” also includes a narrative of love for a sibling, a brother, which is very important to me. I miss my little brother Charlie every day, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop. People with a core of grief move through the world differently than other people. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—” wrote Emily Dickinson, and I suppose I’m imbued with a very formal feeling, as well as a strong feeling for form. Fairy tales offer a familiar form, a structure, for exploring our rich, strange experiences, and I love them.
—
Photo credit: Shae Sackman
Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, and the story collection How Winter Began, as well as the memoir The Truth Book and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award.
She is also editor of the anthology Family Trouble and served as the guest judge of CRAFT‘s first Creative Nonfiction Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Salon, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Brevity, Afro-Hispanic Review, and elsewhere. A former Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, she is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“A deftly intelligent literary thriller, Flight Risk is that rarest of beasts, beautifully written yet a real page-turner too. Wonderful.”
Find out more about Joy on her website https://www.joycastro.com/
FLIGHT RISK
A woman is forced to face her past in a heartbreaking and triumphant novel of old wounds and family secrets by award-winning author Joy Castro.
Isabel Morales is a successful Chicago sculptor hiding a brutal family history―one not even her husband knows. After decades of turning her back on her past, she’s forced to return to Appalachia when she receives news of her estranged mother’s death.
But going back means revisiting the traumatic childhood she escaped―and the family that cast her out when she needed them most. Back on the land she has inherited, she’s flooded with memories of the forest where she once roamed free, of her beloved lost brother, and of the old house in the West Virginia hills where she grew up. Her mother has left her another legacy, too, which reveals secrets that Isabel is only beginning to understand.
As forces bear down and threaten to take what she has left, it’s time for Isabel to step into her power, reclaim her roots, and finally confront the painful memories that have kept her from the life she truly wants.
BUY HERE
Category: Interviews, On Writing
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
