Q & A with Emilly Prado

OM: Many of the essays you write about document traumas that occur to you, your family, or to a wider community, and yet there is still humor and gentleness woven throughout. In what ways has writing this book impacted your relationship to these particular memories?

EP: Writing these essays felt healing, albeit very difficult and triggering at times. I had to reckon and sort through what I thought about different experiences I had, then zoom out enough to think about how to structure the essays and the collection as a whole. My work often reflects on the micro and macro—zooming in and out to examine how individual instances connect to wider systems, so I needed time to process to be able to analyze and step back with a critical lens. Part of that processing and move past, or at least through, the stages of heightened emotionality that memoir stirs in me occurred away from the writing desk alone or with friends or in therapy, and part of it also occurred through the writing process itself.

What’s interesting is that Funeral for Flaca started out as a class project for the Prose and Bookmaking Certificate Program I participated in at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland in 2019, and in the two years since, I’ve already found I feel differently from how I wrote about the experiences then. I added new essays written in 2020 and 2021 to this expanded and heavily revised edition. It’s now about twice as long as it was originally, and some major changes have happened to essays that appeared in the first version of this collection. It was exciting to see this growth from a personal healing and craft perspective.

I also found that in the time that had passed, I had actually forgotten about the lightness within the essays. Maybe because of my brain’s tendency to remember the painful subjects I covered more? I was pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing along the book when I reread it in preparation for adding new essays. That might sound odd or a little pompous—laughing at my own writing—but I laugh at my own jokes in-person all the time, so this was comforting to me and made me feel less nervous about putting out the collection again because it suddenly was a more balanced, accurate reflection of my experience than I had remembered. Yes, terrible, painful things have occurred in my life, but I am also so grateful for all the times when that isn’t at the forefront of how I’m feeling and for all the sweet, funny moments in this life that I get.

‍

OM: The theme for this issue is Luz/Illumination. Looking back on what you’ve written, what is a topic or theme that you feel particularly proud to have shined a light on?

EP: I think one of my favorite things about this collection is the sense of untidiness and getting the chance to write into the gray. I think we, living under the white supremacist United States perspective, have been taught that many things in life are binary—good or bad, right or wrong, genders are limited to two, et cetera. I wanted to explore the gray, and how it has felt and still feels for me to reckon with contradictions.

What does it mean to be an intersectional feminist that hates the patriarchy, but still wants a relationship with her dad—a human whose values and actions often feel opposite to what I believe in? How do I, as a survivor, feel about accountability in a transformative justice lens, sans police, when it comes to the white man who sexually assaulted me? What does it mean to heal my relationship with my body when the rejection of ethos and emphasis still feels centered on size?

I still don’t have precise answers to the questions I pose, but I continue to reckon with what my beliefs and values are, and how they impact one another. I’m proud that Funeral for Flaca feels like a documentation of the messiness of my humanity. Like Carmen Maria Machado writes in In The Dream House, it’s in this complexity of humanity—the right to be portrayed as messy or as villains—that marginalized people can be seen as whole.