Ask ANOTHER Author: Sofia T. Romero
Interview with the debut author of We Have Always Been Who We Are
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News!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus (content note: law enforcement, mental health, description of violence)
“Good Dead Girls,” is out in No Tokens (content note: sexual assault)
In April I interviewed Marissa Higgins about her visceral, unsettling debut novel A Good, Happy Girl (Catapult, 2024) and I’m thrilled to have Sofia T. Romero joining us this week to for the second (woohoo!) installment of “Ask ANOTHER Author” to take us behind the scenes of her haunting short story collection, We Have Always Been Who We Are (Blackstone, 2023).
I picked up Sofia’s book wanting to read more short stories and work on my own craft, and I’ve been recommending it ever since. If you read short stories, this is for you. If you don’t read short stories, this is also for you, to see what’s possible within the genre and when thinking more broadly about how different components can link together to make up a larger whole. The book has such emotional and stylistic range, and I was curious to hear more about how it all came to together. I’m thrilled that Sofia generously agreed to share more about her process!
From Pushcart Prize–nominated author Sofia T. Romero comes a breathtaking debut collection of interrelated stories suffused with magical realism.
In stories that evoke the haunting beauty of New England beaches and resonate with a bittersweet loneliness, Romero blurs the lines between life and death, reality and fantasy. A deceased woman counsels her son’s fiancée on how to be a good wife to him, with disastrous consequences. A mysterious, commanding cat appears in a young woman’s home, as inexplicable as the demise of her years-long relationship with her boyfriend. At turns humorous, sorrowful, and whimsical, this collection spans the familiar setting of a college-town supermarket and eerie dystopias that are not just postpandemic but postart. Romero masterfully conveys the follies of youth and the regrets of life, and a sense of loss—of a relationship, a child, a time before—pervades each page.
With this remarkable debut, Romero joins the ranks of writers such as Brenda Peynado and Marytza K. Rubio, offering a superb collection of speculative fiction with a distinctly Latina perspective. We Have Always Been Who We Are is at its heart a testament to the power of storytelling, and an invitation to develop our inner strength through the imagination.
Sofia T. Romero is the author of the short story collection, We Have Always Been Who We Are. Published by Blackstone in October 2023, the book has been longlisted for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards for fiction. Sofia's writing has appeared in several publications, including Necessary Fiction, Electric Literature, and Chestnut Review, among others, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in the Boston area and is the recipient of a 2024 Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals. She is also a fiction reader for Peatsmoke Journal.
One of the things that amazed me about We Have Always Been Who We Are, and that’s really stuck with me since I first read it last year, is how beautifully and brilliantly it’s structured. It’s a story collection, and every story stands on its own—it’s not a novel in stories, and it’s not exactly linked stories, either. And yet we do have recurring characters and a sense of a through line, as these interrelated worlds and characters recur and weave together as the book builds and the characters and their concerns move into adulthood. I’d love to know what influenced your writing and your approach to structuring the book this way. How did you come to connect the stories together and build them out into a full collection? Did these start as separate stories, or did you always know you were writing a book? Did you leave any stories on the chopping block, or have to write new work to fill out the collection? I guess what I’m really asking is—how did you do it?!????
I didn’t really set out to write a collection—I was just writing stories, and my dream was to get even just one published. When I had written a number of stories and was finally getting some of them published in literary magazines, I started to work with my agent to put the collection together.
The stories weren’t really written to be linked together the way they ended up in the book. But when I looked at the ones I had pulled together for the collection, I could clearly see that some of the characters were the same character, even though I had given them different names. So I examined the stories and thought about what would happen if I made the connections that now seemed so obvious to me. I literally created a big map of characters with post it notes and plotted out the timeline to figure out how to make it work.
As a fellow map-maker and Post-It afficianado, I’m here for this! We talk a lot about querying and submissions here on Ask an Author, and how, let’s be honest, it can be a bumpy ride. Can you talk about how you connected with your agent? Was We Have Always Been Who We Are the book you queried with? My understanding is that it’s even harder to publish a short story collection than a novel, and to sign with an agent based on stories—so you had an extra challenge! What was this process like for you, and do you have any advice for writers who are currently querying or preparing to start?
I was extremely fortunate in how I connected with my agent—we were college classmates who had connected over our love of reading and writing. We were even in the same creative writing class! She was always super supportive of my writing, and years after we graduated, she was working as an agent and reached out to see what I was working on.
She was candid about the difficulty we might face getting a short story collection signed, but we went ahead anyway. I went through two rounds of submissions. The first round, the collection was rejected by all but one editor, who met with me but ultimately passed. Still, it was a valuable part of the process—their feedback gave me a lot to think about, and I ended up making some changes to the book that I think helped it to eventually land with Blackstone.
So while I don’t have experience with querying, I am grateful to have ended up with my agent, and she has been helpful to me in so many ways. My advice to people who are starting down this path would be: Follow the process the way everyone talks about it, but also be open to the possibility that opportunities may find you in other ways.
“But we went ahead anyway” is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? It might not land the first time (or the second, or the third…) but that striving is the only way to finally get to yes. Some of your stories are realist fiction, and others are touched with magical realism. I loved this interplay, and how deftly you work within different literary traditions, voices, and perspectives—from the demanding cat in “No Good Answer” to the voices in “The Jars” and the dreamlike qualities of “No One Is Waiting for Me” (which was one of my favorites!). How did you come to the short story form, and to an interest in the supernatural? What do you think these approaches let you do as a writer that wouldn’t be possible in, say, a realist novel?
For a long time, I was frustrated because I wanted to write, but I didn’t feel I had a good idea for a novel. So I thought my career as a writer was over before it even started. At the same time, I was writing all these short stories—and I started reading more short stories, too. And it finally dawned on me that if what I wanted to do was write short stories, I could do that!
As a young reader, I read a lot of fantasy, mystery, and science fiction—and was really drawn to works by authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor. Later, I started to read Gabriel García Márquez and Shirley Jackson. Reading the work of these and other authors opened my eyes to a world in which writing pushed beyond certain boundaries. In college, I wrote this one story about some kids who investigate a rumor that a new resident in town is a snake in human form. It was really exciting—and still is—to give myself permission to write about something just because I imagined it. I don’t concern myself with wondering if something is realistic or not in the world as we know it—I just have to make it realistic in the world I’m creating.
I, too, wanted to write for so long, but didn’t know what to write or how to do it. I think a lot of us have that experience where we finally get so fed up with not writing that we just… do it. Or we realize that the little side project we had going on while we tried to figure out our Life’s Work was actually what we should have been focusing on all along. The journey is long, and it’s twisty! A number of these stories were previously published in individual journals, which I assume means they were edited by editors at those places. What was it like working with your editor at Blackstone, and did you do more edits to those pieces that had been published, to make them fit the collection or to because your current editor had a different vision? What sort of revisions did you do to the manuscript as a whole? Was there anything unexpected that emerged in the changes, or any surprises along the way?
I’ve been an editor myself for many years, so being on the writing side was a pretty interesting change. It’s hard not to take things personally, but I know from my work that good editing will help you make your writing the best it can be. In general, most of the literary magazines I published with had pretty light touches—but where they did ask me to make changes, it really did make the story better in the long run.
I did have to make edits across all the stories when I put the collection together. Some of those were just the inevitable, endless tweaking writers do and some of it was to make the collection more cohesive. Then, Blackstone paired me with a wonderful editor and together, we worked on a couple of rounds of additional revisions. I learned a lot from that process—she caught things that I had completely missed, from small errors to larger plot holes or narrative problems.
It’s hard to let go, though. I still have trouble reading the finished book because I’m afraid I’ll find something I want to fix!
The paperback version of We Have Always Been Who We Are just came out in July—congratulations!! Any thoughts on what comes next? Are you working on something new, and do you have a sense of where your writing is taking you? (Rest is also a valid answer!) I’m also curious about how it’s different writing after publication than it was before you had an agent/editor/book deal. In some ways your work was already public because you had stories published before the book came out, but I’d imagine there’s still something different about having your debut out there. Has publication impacted anything about your writing and your relationship to your work?
Thank you! Having the paperback out is another exciting milestone on the incredible journey I have taken with this collection and all the stories in it. I have met a lot of really interesting, wonderful people and connected with other writers and writing in new ways.
As you point out, writing has many seasons, and since I started putting the collection together, I have probably been through all of them. There are definitely certain pressures that come with having published a book. A big one is the question I often get: When is the next one coming? So for now, I’m trying to stay focused on why I wrote those stories in the first place—because I couldn’t not write—and to be grateful for having come this far.
At the same time, ideas are still percolating, and I’m still writing! I have several stories going and have done some writing on a novel that follows one of the characters that appears in a couple of stories in the collection. But for the near future, I just learned that a new story was accepted by Latino Book Review and will come out later this year, so stay tuned for that!
You can buy We Have Always Been Who We Are here.
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I’ll be back in two weeks answering more questions, so get in touch with anything you want to ask about craft or publishing, and keep going on your own work!
Kate