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Talking with Meliza Banales is like riding some amazing, brightly-colored roller coaster through the church of creativity. What? She’s just inspiring, whether she’s talking about reframing the promotion process as part of the creative process, being willing to fail, living with lupus as a writer, or launching her new novel into the world.
She gave us terrific tips on using separate spaces to juggle different aspects of writing, and she never forgot that everyone doesn’t have the luxury of living alone. She talked about committing to your writing (“Give it what it needs or walk away”), getting help, going on art dates with yourself, and reading your work in public as you go. About this last, she really urged writers to pitch your work to the street and stay current with your readers. This might reflect her status as a former Poetry Slam champion. Poetry Slam is a boot camp for writers: “It’s all about telling a story and you only have three minutes to do it.” Drawing on her filmmaking experience, she looked at the practice of writing in pieces the way filmmakers shoot films and then building the plot and the sequence with the time frame around the core concept.
Reading, she reminded us, is integral to being a writer. She urged us to look at books “as a refuge rather than work.
Some of the books and authors we discussed:
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
To Show and to Tell by Philip Lopate
We also talked about:
Chicana feminism
punk rock chick coming of age
character growth
inherent conflict
writing as refuge
Find Meliza at missyfuego.com, get her novel, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific and her chapbook, You Smell Like Danger, and more.
Meliza Bañales
Meliza Bañales aka Missy Fuego is the author of Say It With Your Whole Mouth (poems, Monkey Press) and has work in Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing-Up Working Class (edited by Michelle Tea), Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing (edited by Michelle Tea), The Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Change, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of the Spoken-Word Movement (edited by Alix Olson), Lodestar Quarterly and Ladybox Books. She was the first Chicana/Latina on the west coast to win a poetry slam championship in 2002, has toured with Sister Spit and Body Heat, and gained national recognition for her appearances on NPR and The Lesbian Podcast. Her short film with J Aguilar entitled “Getting Off” won the Jury Award at TG Fest: The Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival in 2011. Her second book, a work of fiction titled Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific, will be out in June 2015 on Ladybox Books an imprint of Broken River Books. She has a spoken-word album, And Now Introducing Missy Fuego, expected to be released on Crunks Not Dead Records in 2015. She is a community builder with Con Fuerza Collective, a radical, Xicana Feminist collective in the heart of East LA. She lives in Los Angeles.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.