As Vivid as a Woodland Experience: Three Questions With Carolina Soto
By the Re/Creation Collective and Carolina Soto
Carolina Soto’s writing desk
After months of working on her long form essay “Mothers & Daughters” and sharing it with the Re/Creation Collective for feedback, Carolina Soto published the essay on the website. You can read the whole thing here.
As we prepared for publication, we caught up with Carolina to ask three burning questions. She answers them below.
Re/Creation Collective: Can you tell us a little about your process for writing this piece? How did you decide how and when to tease out the tensions and complements between the joys of childhood, your painful relationship with your mother, and your later incarceration? How did you decide what to include and what to leave out of this piece? How long did it take you to get to the final draft, and how did you know when you were done?
Carolina Soto: I have been using my writing to let out many of my personal demons. I write as much as I can to get the story or ideas out, and then I read it. I often will do this several times and then cut and rewrite. What I am usually left with is too many details and a hard core story.
My relationship with my mother was difficult and whether or not I felt compassion for her, in the retelling, it is necessarily hard. Not exactly a fun read. I wrote sequentially which is not how it is presented in the final draft. A collective member, Jackie, suggested I read a story that was braided. A horrific story of abuse of the writer by her father braided with a beautiful Scandinavian story told to the author over time by her grandmother. I tried my hand at it. [Editor’s note: Carolina is referring to “Woven” by Lidia Yuknavitch]
My essay was still one vignette after another that did not really braid. I consulted Jackie again who suggested printing and cutting the story up physically. I didn’t go as far as William Boroughs did with Junkie, but marked the paragraphs by who or what they were about. It was confusing at first but surprising how some things flowed together and others looked crazy wrong. It took me away from my very sequential mind set. I was literally picking up pieces of paper and reading them until I liked how they flowed together then turned back to the computer. I found it refreshing to leave my mom and go to the woods. I am always my happiest in the forest or the mountains. I love the city, I act in community with many groups, and am always involved in several projects at once, but I need the woods to feel whole. So when I felt the hardness of what I was writing, I escaped to the woods.
R/C: How do you remember details from long ago so vividly?
CS: Just like everyone else my memory is often incorrect. I have strong memories from before we moved to the hill when I was three and four years old. I remember replanting ladies slippers in the sun and my father explaining how some plants needed shade and water more than others. I think I hold my memories with my dreams. My husband thinks I should join a Hollywood pitch group for all the vivid details and strangenesses I relate every morning.
The cabin was a unique place. Some of us would walk ten miles a day, running up the mountains even at night on the full moon in the snow to surprise the deer by crawling on our bellies then standing up to watch a herd of one hundred sprint away.
The area has changed considerably because of trees decimated by insect invasions, leaving more sunlight and changing undergrowth. I walked for six hours where the cabin had been recently and led several friends up one mountain traversing the ridge and heading back to the car with no path and a forty year old memory of how to do it. What people say or what I have read is never as vivid as a woodland experience.
R/C: If you could talk to your mother now, without any judgement or fighting, what would you say to her?
CS: I shielded my mother from my experiences that she would not approve of. I knew that the era I came up in was radical and different. I sent postcards and letters from every continent in the world, remembering birthdays and anniversaries with presents from exotic places. Her response? Why don’t you go to someplace my friends have heard of, like Paris?
Now, I laugh. I hold no grudges, in a way I was always trying to please her. The only thing that would like to know is: How can I make you happy but still be the person that I am?
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The Re/Creation Collective wishes all our readers safe and happy holidays. We will be on vacation through the end of the year, returning to our regular publication schedule in January.
One of “the real women of Orange Is the New Black,” Carolina Soto is one of the founding members of the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza. Unlike the fictionalized Yoga Jones, Carolina has a long history of work in social justice and advocacy, and is a seasoned painter and visual artist. Since beginning her work in the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Carolina has increased her confidence and aptitude with both the written and spoken word, composing speeches and essays for her advocacy work and as well as written memoir. In particular, her essays and memoirs illustrate her vast capacity for empathy in her descriptions of people with whom she shared time inside. She now splits her time between living in New York City and the Dominican Republic.