SUMMER READS: Book recommendations from Street Roots' staff, vendors, volunteers, kids and friends.
How do different facets of your identity overlap and interact with each other? This is one concept among many that Emilly Prado explores in her debut collection of personal essays. “Funeral for Flaca” delves into the impact of relationships, provides a nostalgic snapshot of the 2000s, and meditates on the complexity of family.
In a simultaneous exercise of resurrecting the past and laying things to rest, Prado takes the reader on an up-close-and-personal journey through the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, her bipolar disorder diagnosis and surviving sexual assault.
Prado is an award-winning multimedia journalist based in Portland, who also serves as the director of youth programs at Literary Arts and moonlights as DJ Mami Miami. “Funeral for Flaca” will be released on July 1 by Future Tense Books.
Janey Wong: At one point in “Funeral for Flaca” you write: “It’s also hard to get started on anything creative when you’re caught up feeling like a wannabe creative person — like a stone-faced phony-ass fraud.” Can you touch on what, if anything, helps you get over that imposter syndrome which I think a lot of women, particularly BIPOC women, face?
Emilly Prado: I think that the writing process is sacred, and you should try to really tune out the world and try to immerse yourself in whatever you’re trying to create, whether that’s a fictional world or in my case, excavating the past. That’s something that needs your full attention, and it also takes a lot of noticing when that voice creeps in. And being able to just sort of argue back “actually, the writing is important,” or “I am fine,” or also just really de-emphasizing labels is helpful for me personally.
Especially with writing: As long as you’re writing, you’re a writer. You don’t have to be published to be a writer, even though people or the industry might try to make it seem like that’s the only way. I think stripping away the power of those different titles and claiming your own stake, whether it’s a title that you want to hold, or just in wherever you’re at creatively is super important.
One other thing for this process that was different was that I did have the knowledge that it was going to be published. That added a new level of scrutiny that I hadn’t foreseen or experienced before. What I did during that time when I was updating with one of the final rounds of edits and adding a couple more scenes and things ... I wanted to try to make sure that I wasn’t catering my narrative to a particular lens that wasn’t mine. What I did to try to keep myself as honest and accountable to my own self and vision was looking at a picture of myself when I was 6.
I’ve heard other writers say that they also might look at old photos or think of whoever their audience is, but for this book I really was thinking about a book that 13-year-old me would want to read. I wanted to hold a picture of myself and just know that I was doing this for little 6-year-old me. And that was really helpful as a practice.
Wong: I think the short story “Keep Ya Head Up” will resonate with pretty much any American teenager. You go through different phases, like punk, preppy and chola, in an effort to find an identity that fits. Can you talk about what reflecting on past seasons of your life means for current and future Emilly?
Prado: I think what the collection explores, and what I’ve learned through not just the writing process but also through growing up, is that there’s a lot of emphasis on fitting into particular boxes or definitions. That’s also sometimes a self-imposed pressure, because you want to feel like, “I know who my community is,” for example, and “I know where I fit into this world.” But I’m finding that I embody many different little boxes or layers and that it’s OK to not feel like I perfectly fit into any particular identity in this case, or subculture or even culture, and I’m just not as preoccupied with fitting into that.
One of the things that I’m actually working on with my therapist is thinking more about the ways that the world can conform to me, as opposed to myself conforming or constricting in order to fit into what other people want or need or expect of me. It’s been a journey to get there, but it’s exciting to me to think about all the things that I still carry from when I was 6 or when I was 19 years old and experimenting with music or my outward appearance. I do feel like I kind of embody them all in different layers, and it’s more liberating to me to have the freedom to embody as many things as you want.
And that’s like the collection — sometimes there’s pressure, especially as BIPOC, I think, to hone in on one particular topic or theme. People ask what the book’s about, and it’s about a lot of things. That was important for me to include, as opposed to sort of picking and choosing, because it’s hard for me to understand where certain aspects of myself begin and things end. So, I think the book is very much a tribute to the complexity of different people.
Wong: You get really raw and vulnerable in the collection. What drew you to touch on these subjects for your first book?
Prado: Well I think first, I reject the term “raw” often because I think it connotates sort of a messiness. With writing, you can’t write about things that are raw because you don’t have the distance that you need to think about, for example, where they fit into the narrative structure of a collection. So I think that there’s definitely vulnerability and maybe things that can be hard to digest as far as subjects. But I just really listened to my body and myself and thinking about what are the things that I want to unpack and expand on. I don’t try to over analyze, and try to just present things as best as possible at those different ages. I’m making conclusions now, in my own life, but that’s not necessarily where I was in those different points of view in those essays.
I don’t think it serves anyone to shy away from topics because they’re hard or uncomfortable, and that’s very much in line with how I feel and why I wrote what I ended up writing about. Especially as someone who, for example, has been hospitalized. When that happened, I really was drawn to finding stories of people like me who would make me feel better about myself and know that there was something on the other side. And so, I’m grateful to be able to contribute things that maybe are less often discussed. Hopefully people that are ready for those topics accept them, and folks who don’t want to read about difficult subjects won’t read it, and that’s OK, too.
Wong: In addition to being a collection of writing, Funeral for Flaca is a mixtape — each essay is titled with the name of a song. We see how music, and Tupac in particular, influenced your writing. Are there ways in which writing has influenced how you DJ or consume music?
Prado: I do often approach — my playlists or when I’m DJ-ing a set somewhere — in a storytelling manner, whether that’s a particular narrative or just a mood. I think that’s what a lot of DJs do, whether or not they would say it in the same way, but you start with something a little slow to warm up the crowd if it’s going to be a dance party and then you start to bring it. I often am thinking about different decades and genres and how those relate to each other. You can also do fun things where you might have a song and then that song is being sampled in the next song, and so there’s ways to make connections and threads with music and in DJ-ing. I’m really excited when I get to put that together. And sometimes, I just kind of freestyle a set and it’s more about the BPM (beats per minute). Other times, I do get to tell stories with playlists. Specifically with playlists when I was younger and not a DJ yet, I would think, what is the overall storyline of this playlist from song one to song 12.
Wong: Since the book touches on a lot of different topics, is there one message that you hope readers would take away from reading it?
Prado: I hope that folks are just gentle with themselves and know that the things that we experienced shape us but don’t define us. I hope that folks feel like they have community in places that they may not know, and books are one way that we can feel like we’re a part of a community. Hopefully then people can also find other folks who have gone through things like them or empathize with others if it’s not their own experience exactly.
Obviously, no book is going to be perfect for every person, but I appreciate you touching on the universality of certain things. Because even in the publishing industry, you’re often expected to think about what boxes you fit in so that you can advertise the book, for example, and what I’ve seen even early on is sometimes there’s a quickness to say that the book is for Latinx teens, or it’s that my Latinx community has been excited to read it. But I think that that’s too narrow, and I just welcome the collective fighting back against that. I hope that other people connect with it, Latinx and non-Latinx alike.