A Direct Line from SLM to the Writer I Am Now: An Interview with Christopher Gonzalez by Paula Mirando
This week, I had the delight of chatting with SLM contributor and former contributing editor Christopher Gonzalez for our tenth anniversary interview series. Christopher Gonzalez once skipped work to try out a brunch spot that was too crowded on the weekends. He is the author of I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat. A recipient of the 2021 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship in Fiction, his writing appears in Astra Magazine, Poets & Writers online, the Nation, Catapult, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions, among other journals and anthologies. He currently serves as a fiction editor at Barrelhouse magazine and lives in Brooklyn, NY but mostly on Twitter @livesinpages.
Recently, Chris published “Loose Strands,” a collaboration with Kate Pincus-Whitney, in 7x7. He and I spoke via email about Daniel Radcliffe, Degrassi: the Next Generation, and our mutual appreciation for SLM EIC Maureen Langloss.
Paula Mirando: In honor of SLM’s tenth anniversary: can you share a memory from when you were ten years old?
Christopher Gonzalez: I was ten in fourth grade and this might mark the first of maybe two consecutive years where I dressed as Harry Potter for Halloween. But the real memory is seeing Chamber of Secrets in the theater. Time stopped. Lives were changed. My crush on Daniel Radcliffe was set in motion and sealed my fate as a stan even now almost twenty years later.
PM: Daniel Radcliffe is such a gem! Thinking back to that same era of movies and television, I saw on Twitter that you’ve been deep in the Gilmore Girls trenches. Do you have any comfort shows or movies that you find yourself revisiting for nostalgia?
CG: I will always revisit Degrassi: The Next Generation, which takes me back to the summer I first fell into the series. I spent my summers visiting my grandparents in Virginia and the summer I was thirteen going on fourteen, they had a cable package that included The N. I was able to catch up to whatever the current season was at the time and the show became my entire personality. I might rewatch my favorite episodes of Charmed, or Adam Sandler staples like Spanglish and The Wedding Singer for some comfort. I also rewatch a lot of clips that bring me joy—namely, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s gold medal-winning Moulin Rouge program from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. If I only had eight minutes to live, I’d call a loved one and watch it with them one last time.
PM: I’ve never followed figure skating (or the Olympics) but I looked up this performance and got all misty-eyed—it was so gorgeous and moving—so thank you for that gift.
Do you have any obsessions? If so, how do these find their way into your writing?
CG: Oh, absolutely. The thing about writing a book is, all your shit is laid bare. The fact that I just needed to include at least one Oscar Isaac reference in my collection is pretty damning.
PM: The short story you published with us, “Dress Yourself,” really resonated with me as a reader. Has the SLM editing process changed your writing or editing style at all beyond working on this piece or those you oversaw as a contributing editor?
CG: I worked with the current Split Lip EIC Maureen Langloss on “Dress Yourself” when she was the flash editor. Maureen is a very caring editor and knows how to see the shape of a story, identifying little details in the language to cut or tweak to really make each line pop. We’ve become really good friends since that story and my time as a contributing editor for the magazine, eventually joining the same writing group where I finished up the last few stories of my collection. And although I did not include this specific story in my book, I can draw a direct line from SLM to the writer I am now. Absolutely.
PM: I’m a huge fan of Maureen as well! She’s been so supportive ever since I started with the magazine, and I’m grateful for all she does to ensure staff and contributors feel cared for.
Your short story collection begins with the following note: “every narrator and protagonist in this collection is a bisexual Puerto Rican cub with the exception of one—in that story, the narrator is gay.” Reading this, as a fellow bi, filled me with so much unfiltered joy. Why was it important for you to include this preface?
CG: I initially wrote the note as a joke to share on Twitter, but then it felt so true to the aims of I’m Not Hungry. With some early feedback, sometimes there was confusion around the sexuality of individual characters, and I wasn’t interested in trying to find a way within each story to label that if it didn’t feel organic to either narrative or character. There isn’t one way to be bisexual or queer—that confusion says more about a reader than anything else, I think. Once I decided to include it at the start of the book, it felt like an extension of this desire many of the characters in the collection share about wanting to be understood and seen in full. And I liked what it might do to a reader’s experience. What do they think when they see “bisexual Puerto Rican cub”? Who do they see? And what way will the book challenge or possibly affirm those preconceptions? It’s an exciting way to interact with a text. At least I hope it is.
Paula Mirando is a queer Pinay writer from the Bay Area. Her writing has been supported by the Kearny Street Workshop Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Philippine American Writers and Artists. Her fiction appears in Waxwing, and she is currently working on a collection of linked short stories. She once skipped work to swim in an apartment pool and lu