Welcome to the 5 Questions Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week, I’m talking with José Pablo Iriarte.
Okay, before we dive into writing, I’ve heard a rumor that you are a wild singing person. Is this true and can you tell me about it? What appeals to you about music and does it affect your writing at all?
Hah! I am a constant singer, pretty much if I’m awake and not teaching or writing, I’m singing. I’ll burst into spontaneous filk any time a random line reminds me of a song, which is constantly–I’ve even got one of my grown daughters doing it now! I’ll be honest with you, when my voice is there, nothing in life feels better to me than the physical sensation of singing.
I’ve sung in choruses and in community theater, but the place where this love of music gets its . . . socially sanctioned outlet is in karaoke. I generally go at least once a week and have a repertoire that’s a mile long. Pop, rock, country, showtunes, oldies, songs in Spanish, songs by men and songs by women. You name it, I’ll try to sing it!
I think a lifetime of singing other people’s words has given me an unconscious sense of rhythm and maybe how to wring emotions from language without dipping into bathos.
Singing has also, like reading, given me a space to explore my sexuality and gender by allowing me to explore identities that, as a young person, I didn’t feel empowered to express or explore in any other way.
I’ve also had story ideas that were basically inspired from . . . well, from the backstories I basically make up for the songs I love. Also, in my forthcoming book (dropping April 30!) I write about a kid who gets to experience playing the trumpet at far above his own skill level, due to ghostly assistance. I can’t play the trumpet myself, but I channeled how it feels to me when I sing, that weird bit of magic in how just making sounds somehow makes me happy.
You are traditionally published, and you also give workshops on finding agents and other aspects of publishing. Can you talk a little about why you went the route of traditional publishing and what the process has been like for you?
The most honest answer is that I defaulted to it, in that I’m older than my publication history would lead one to assume. When I was first trying to break into publishing, in the eighties and nineties, my role models were traditionally published, and it was hard to find anybody with a kind thing to say about self-publishing. So I internalized a lot of their lessons about how the industry works, and a lot of things that are no longer current.
If I had to do it over again, I might make the same choices, but for different reasons. I’m primarily known for short fiction, and this month I have a middle grade novel coming out. Both of those are, I would argue, spaces where it’s still easier to find your audience through traditional publishing.
The process? As I implied, more than anything, it has been long! I’ve written a lot of stories that never got out into the world, and I’ve experienced a lot of rejection. I do feel that I tell stories that are half a step off of the mainstream . . . stories that tend be rooted in emotions more than tangible goals and action.
I think breaking down the barriers and getting past the gatekeepers took me longer than it might have taken somebody with more conventional storytelling beats–but then, those of us who are marginalized in one way or another are typically going to be in that slightly non-conventional space. And that can be an argument in favor of stepping outside of an unfair system, and I certainly do respect that. But on the other hand, I feel like trying to force a system that maybe wasn’t receptive to the kind of stories I wanted to tell to publish me anyway required me to level up my work a lot more than I might have if I hadn’t needed to.
I notice that all of my favorite authors tend to be marginalized. They tend to be queer, or writers of color, or both. And I think it’s because marginalized writers have to be better to break through the system. I wouldn’t change the choices I’ve made because I like the stories I’m telling and the skills I’ve honed, and those choices led me to where I am now.
I get a lot of questions from students who aren’t even sure how to know what agents to approach. What advice would you give someone who wants to start looking for an agent and isn’t sure where to start?
I am hyper-thorough in this sort of thing, and maybe not the best example. I think over-planning helps me get past my own anxiety and brainweasels. That said, a pretty innocuous first step would be to use a resource like querytracker.net to compile a list. I made a list of agents who represented not just the book I was pitching, but also the other genres I could see myself in. For me at the time that was young adult, fantasy, and science fiction. I ranked those agents in terms of a variety of categories, like who represented authors I read and liked, whose name I saw making good deals in Publisher’s Lunch, who was located in or near New York (which I want to emphasize is not necessary in today’s market, but which I still saw as a plus). And then I started at the top. I also followed agents on social media and read their blogs to get a feel for them as human beings. Unfortunately, social media seems to me to be much more fragmented than it was back then, and maybe not as useful for getting to know people.
You also write short fiction. How does that inform your novel-writing?
I’m actually much better known for my short fiction. My stories have been finalists for all of spec-fic’s big awards and reprinted in year-end anthologies like Best American and Transcendent.
It may be that being a reader of short fiction has led me to prize the emotional punch above the intricate plot. I just love a story that can make me feel something in a short space.
As a writer . . . well, it’s important to not entrench the idea that short fiction is an apprenticeship for novel-writing, because plenty of novelists never wrote or sold short stories, and because short fiction writing is a beautiful and worthy art in its own right, not as a path to novel success. But, that said, each story has one beginning and one ending, and you have to learn to stick both of those things to sell your work. And in writing short stories I got to practice those skills many many more times that I would have if I only wrote novels. And of course short fiction forces you to learn economy of words, and it forces you to learn to hone and polish your prose. I do believe that writing short fiction honed my craft.
How important is writing community to you and how do you go about finding it?
My writing community has been massively important to me. I wrote in isolation for literally decades, with nothing but rejections to show for my trouble, but leveled up quickly when the internet came into my life, and when I found spaces like online forums. Later, when I was making those first sales, having a bunch of likeminded mutuals on social media led my work to be discovered by readers more widely than it otherwise might have been. Having an online community has also meant that on the occasions when I can afford to travel to conferences and such, I’ve got a bunch of people there who already know me, so my anxiety doesn’t have a chance to completely obliterate me.
All that said, those spaces are different now. That doesn’t mean I believe it’s impossible to find your community, I just think the process looks different and it may not be as useful to base advice on what worked for me a decade ago.
If I were an outsider in 2024 just looking to find my people–and not yet buried under writing deadlines!–I think there are two main things I would do. First, I would join the discord servers hosted by my favorite authors who have such servers. In particular, I would seek out the ones that are thriving online communities. Second, I would volunteer in the organizations devoted to promoting the kind of work I write. A significant percentage of my published work is sapphic, but for me that would really be SFWA and SCBWI, since all of my work is speculative and all of my novels are for younger readers. Seriously, find committees that need somebody to get stuff done. That’s where you will meet the best people, because you will be finding the people with actual commitment to building something.
And I would, if I were capable of it, travel to conventions and conferences, particularly those where I know my online friends will be present. But I can’t say that without acknowledging that any ability to travel is a massive, massive privilege, not just in terms of the financial challenge but, increasingly, the health challenges of traveling while Covid is not really quite under control.
Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?
I . . . have not, but now I’m starting to regret this.
But wait! Here’s a picture I took last week of a hawk on my neighbor’s mailbox. I mean, it could be weird. Maybe it plays D&D and listens to emo folk music when it’s not standing on top of mailboxes! Neither of us knows that it doesn’t.
José Pablo Iriarte’s latest release, Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed, can be purchased through Penguin Random House here.
Finnian Burnett 