March 3, 2025

UC Davis MFA creative writing student Jessi Jarrin interviewed Karla Cordero whose poems “The Year Was” and “A Lesson in Harvesting or The Day I Was Told My Body Was a Betrayal” were featured in Huizache 11. Karla’s poetry collection, How To Pull Apart The Earth, was a San Diego Book Award winner and her work has been featured by NPR and the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day.” She has also published in Split This Rock, The Oprah Magazine, PANK, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol.4 LatiNext Anthology.

There’s a deeply intimate way you write about your family and your garden, and your niece Zoey feels like a central “character,” though not exactly a character, more of a human presence in your poems. What are some ways that your relationship with your niece has impacted and influenced your teaching style and storytelling?

I love this question! To offer some context, Zoey was born in 2019, and a year later, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. It was a stressful time in my life learning how to live in a new body that limited my ability to write the way I used to. Between flare ups, doctor visits, joint pain and battling issues with mental health, it’s as if the universe or God said, “Here’s Zoey. She’ll teach you everything you need to know.” Zoey not only gifted me the privilege of being her tía but she became the inspiration to relearn how to be a writer all over again. 

Zoey reminded me of all the reasons why I love poetry and storytelling. I’d watch her curiosity for the world, taking her time to admire sound, textures and (literally) savoring every object that crossed her path with an attentive and meditative ease. She would take conventional items and use them in unconventional ways. I watched her turn a spoon into a wand, turn a bowl into a hat.  I became obsessed with her playful use of imagination. She’d even make her own rules for language and code-switch between baby babbles, English, Spanish, tantrums, and song.

Zoey embodied the similar work of a poet, that being the permission to play and seek out wonder. She was a natural at seeing (what many of us consider) the boring and mundane, then turning them into marvels. She constantly challenges me to play with synonyms, description and verb choices to help guide her toward understanding the purpose and function of everyday rituals.

Zoey is now five years old and she continues to mentor me with her kindergarten wisdom, rebuilding me back into a writer filled with so much gratitude.

It’s no secret that a lot of us are going through it right now. We live in a time of constant upheaval— climate disasters, political violence, and injustice unfolding in real-time. It feels relentless. How do you balance all of that while also taking care of yourself as a writer and a Chicana? What are some ways you practice care?

I think my answer to this question varies based on my day-to-day needs. Sometimes I need to be in the garden soaking in the sun and picking fresh tomatoes as a way to decompress, sometimes it’s a matter of taking vitamins, or binge-watching Dexter with a tall glass of lemon water, or having a tea party with my niece, alongside her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures as our guests of honor. These actions stem from the reminders of various literary mentors, one being Audre Lorde who said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde constantly reminds me that self-care is how we maintain a healthy self that carries your family’s history and lineage. Self-care is the necessary medicine during a time of political, economic, and financial distress, especially now in this country. To laugh, to learn, to love, to grieve, in a world with so much turmoil is a revolutionary act.

As a writer, I also turn to the words of Marie Howe and her perspective on how poetry can serve as an act of self-care. She mentions, “We’re under a constant spell of consumerism, right? So poetry is a counter spell in that it says, ‘Be here exactly as you are.’” Howe calls us to be present with our honest and authentic voices, avoiding the illusions of the status quo and its expectations to conform. As poets, we are the curanderas, the shamans, the herbalists, the healers that create these necessary counter spells in an ill stricken society. We can take pen to paper and use language as a way to reclaim a narrative, rewrite history, reinstate power, and imagine a more hopeful future, as this too, is an act of self-care.

Outside of the individual self, and thinking more as a cultural worker, I view self-care to be synonymous with community. One of my all-time favorite quotes by Lorde states, “You cannot have liberation without community.” The call to civic engagement and serving others is an effort towards individual and communal freedom, as well as self-care. Learning how to care for myself and sharing those resources with others is invaluable. For example, nurturing Latine and Chicanx writers through mentorship and writing workshops is one of the many ways we as a collective can heal together. Arming ourselves with support, going to open mics together, workshopping our stories and being there for each other when rejection hits us as writers, we can then rally together to validate and affirm that our voices matter. As the beautiful Gloria Anzaldúa says, if we change ourselves we can change the world.

I’ve noticed the use of ampersand in your poems, (particularly in “A Lesson In Harvesting or The Day I Was Told My Body was a Betrayal;” “Ode to Rest;” and “A Lesson in Resourcefulness”). I know how important not only every word is, but also how important every space, punctuation mark (or lack thereof), every capitalization—how every small piece matters. So my question is: What does the ampersand mean to you?

I love nerding out on a good punctuation question! Long story short, I remember during my undergraduate studies I took a linguistics class. I was blown away by how various parts of language have their own tribe, their own communities. Each word belonging to a category, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, and then I learned about conjunctions. A conjunction’s sole purpose is to carry a great labor, to be a bridge for two ideas coming together which felt vitally important and oh, so beautiful!

When I started writing poetry, I, as many writers, would use conjunctions all the time. However, visually I thought “and” looked clunky on the page, especially since the literal definition has no concrete image attached to it. The word “and” is an abstract concept. I was then introduced to the ampersand, which in Latin, functions as a ligature. A ligature being, when two letters come together to create a symbol. And in Latin, the ligature or symbol for “and” were the letters “E” and “T” meshed together, which became the ampersand. I like how the ampersand can look like a series of knots on a rope needed to climb a wall or little bricks to build a house, a kind of adhesive if you will. There was also something poetically and visually romantic about two letters coming together in holy punctuation matrimony, into a forever embrace, and I’ve been using the ampersand ever since.

Can I ask you a bit about your poetry process? Has it ever changed? Are you the kind of poet with discipline—an “I am going to write a poem a day or week” poet or more of a “binge”-poet, in the sense that you write when you feel inspired and can’t stop? What has been the best method/process for you when writing poetry?

Early on I was told that a great writer means waking up every day at four in the morning sucking down a pot of coffee to create what would be your best work. I understood this as the discipline needed to embody the role of a writer. I quickly learned that this wasn’t a healthy practice for my life as a college professor, who also works as an Executive Director for a non-profit arts organization, while treating my chronic illness, traveling for work, and maintaining a social life with family and friends. I slowly began to learn that the discipline I needed as a writer was to honor the balance in taking care of my mind, body, and spirit, because without these three sources of power, writing became impossible to birth into existence. I try my best to avoid turning writing into a laborious act that would lead to procrastination and pushing projects off to the side. I constantly ask myself: “What brought me to writing to begin with?” Surrounding myself with books and authors who have saved me, while listening to some good vinyl, pouring a hot cup of ginger tea, lighting a candle with gratitude, as these are all little rituals that ignite the energy and excitement to go back to the page.

Our current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón discusses how as writers, we can view the writing process as there’s a time to grow and a time to harvest. Sometimes the growing part of the writing process is simply being human. Pay the bills, do the laundry, feed the dog, spend time with family, read a good book, watch a movie, host a dinner party. Then comes the harvesting, where we are now full of experience and inspiration ready to jot down the poem, the story, the painting or sculpture, whichever medium that speaks to you, to best express or harvest the stories that carry an urgency to be told.

And when the urgency to write arrives like a flood pouring out of you, be ready to document every line, idea, and concept. Avoid saying, “I’ll remember that idea,” because we always forget the idea and the energy that carried it. Keep a notebook on hand. Heck, snag a napkin, a Post-It note, an old receipt, use the Notes App on your phone to capture the magic of an idea with an eagerness to become a living thing, then watch it morph into a line and eventually a poem or story.

Do what works for you. Don’t carry shame for not producing because just existing and asking questions and being a witness is all very much the work of a writer. I think as long as you acknowledge that, then you’re doing the work.

Your work explores themes of mortality and heritage—where we come from, and where we eventually go. But it also asks readers to slow down, to notice. What are some ways you slow down? And what advice would you give us?

I always go back to what the ancestors and elders have taught me about the land. My family comes from a long line of agricultural workers, farmers and mercado owners. We carry a great respect for every living and growing thing that inhabits the earth. I continue to practice the traditions of growing organic food, flowers, and herbs, using regenerative and Indigenous practices. Oftentimes when I introduce myself at a poetry reading, I acknowledge my lineage by referring to myself as a Chicana organic backyard farmer. In saying this, my advice would be to secure a place in your home, in your apartment, wherever you seek refuge in – to appreciate the miracles of Mother Nature. Nature is the best teacher in showing us how to overcome struggle and embrace celebration. She is life’s extended metaphor on how to be patient, persistent with great determination.

You can slow down by putting your hands in the soil. Scientifically, it’s been proven when your hands and feet touch soil, touch land– you begin to release oxytocin; often called the “love hormone” or “cuddle hormone”, it plays a key role in forming social bonds and feelings of closeness. And in the midst of those chemical responses, watching something grow opens the doors to what I like to call “awe-watching,” to be in awe of our surrounding environment. Awe-watching, or being an observer, allows us the opportunity to appreciate the microcosms of the world. You can watch a seed slowly turn into a sprout, a flower, a pollinator for the bees, even food you harvest for your dinner table, or watch it become a dying thing that spreads its fertile seed, only to restart the process all over again. The appreciation of this slow and miraculous process helps us become better witnesses of the world, as well as, becoming kinder and more sympathetic people to ourselves, others, and the life that inhabits the land.

Try taking a walk without your headphones, and really listen to the trees, the wind, watch how the clouds move, the way the dog barks, how traffic travels from Point A to Point B. You’ll see how everything too, encounters their own little forms of oppression and if we watch long enough, we can witness their triumph.

You can read Karla’s poem “A Lesson in Harvesting or The Day I Was Told My Body Was a Betrayal” here.