MARY CAMARILLO shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Hi MARY, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to share your story, experiences and insights with our readers. Let’s jump right in with an interesting one: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
I love a routine. I read Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter on my phone first thing in the morning. I admire her historical perspective on current news. I make the bed after I get up and then drink a pot of coffee with my husband as we read the Los Angeles Times. We love the print version and are long time subscribers.
After our usual oatmeal, yogurt, blueberries breakfast, we discuss the day ahead of us, feed the cat, put away the breakfast dishes, and get read for our daily workouts, either in our garage gym, at the local LA Fitness, a walk around our neighborhood, or online in our living room with Sheri Cruise’s yoga class.
Our cat mate, Riley, prefers the yoga class. His favorite pose is upward facing dog.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I was transplanted from North Carolina when I was 14 and my dad’s job transferred us to Southern California. I’m now a long time resident of Huntington Beach. My husband and I had long careers with the Postal Service, where we met. We’re retired now. We are Riley’s cat servants who love to travel and to listen to live music. My husband plays ukulele and performs regularly at a local brewery.
I’m a writer of novels, short stories, poems, essays, and a biweekly newsletter. I have two novels, out in the world.
“The Lockhart Women” is a mother/daughter/sister story set in Huntington Beach. It starts on June 17, 1994, the night of the O.J. Simpson slow-speed chased through Southern California after the brutal murders of his wife and her friend. The Lockhart family is on the freeway when the Simpson parade passes them by. The novel is not about Simpson, it’s about a woman who gets hooked on watching the trial instead of her pending divorce. In case you didn’t know, TV was the social media of that time. Meanwhile, her two teenage daughter make some bad decisions, the family falls apart, and eventually comes back together.
My second novel, “Those People Behind Us,” is set in the summer of 2017, post Trump’s first election and pre-pandemic. The story takes place in a neighborhood based on my own, in the fictional town of Wellington Beach, California. There are five characters, a ex-con living in his car, a real estate agent, a haunted aerobics teacher, a Vietnam vet, and a teenage boy. The characters deal with loneliness, death, declining finances, aging parents, and rebellious teenagers in a neighborhood increasingly divided by politic, protests, and escalating housing prices. These neighbors are sure they have nothing in common, but in the end, they realize they are more alike than they ever imagined.
I publish a newsletter every other week on Substack called “Life With Riley.” Riley is our roommate/landlord/Manager of Marketing when he’s in the mood. I’m currently working on a third novel about a South Carolina family with lots of secrets. It’s very loosely based on one of my grandmothers.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
My mother gave me her love of reading at a very young age. She was a voracious reader and took me and my brothers to the library where we could check out as many books as we wanted. I’d read them as fast as possible and beg to go back for more. My mother also saw me as a talented writer. I wish she’d lived long enough to read my two novels.
My mother was a talented writer. She left some beautiful letters about her childhood. I wish I’d recognized and praised her talent when she was alive. I also wish I’d asked her more questions about her life.
I was the only daughter, so my mother saw me as an ally and confided in me when I was very young. Sometimes she shared her unhappiness, her frustration with how difficult my father could be to get along with. She wanted more out of life than simply being a wife and mother.
These were the days of corporal punishment for children, so I occasionally witnessed a terrifyingly violent side of my mom. To the outside world however, she presented as a true Southern woman, polite, kind, soft spoken, well mannered, well dressed, accessorized, lipstick in place. I learned at an early age that people could be more than one thing.
This made me a careful observer, always wondering what people were really thinking regardless of what they said or how they behaved.
If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
My family moved several times during my younger days and I was frequently the new girl in school. I was shy and self-conscious and frequently felt like I didn’t fit in. If I could, I’d go back and tell myself that school years (especially high school) are a formative time but they represent such a small percentage of life. All those slights and dramas that seem so life shattering at the time end up not being as important as they feel.
Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. What would your closest friends say really matters to you?
My closest friends would say that my family, my writing, and my support for my local literary community mean the most to me. And of course, Riley, our 17 pound Flame Point Siamese.
Keeping Orange County’s literary community relevant, inclusive, and vibrant matters a lot to me.
I’m on the advisory board for the LibroMobile Arts Cooperative (LMAC) in the city of Santa Ana, California. LMAC includes Crear Gallery and LibroMobile bookstore. Not only is LibroMobile the only bookstore in Santa Ana, California, a city with a population of more than three hundred thousand residents who are 77 percent Latino, LibroMobile is also the only bookstore in Orange County, California that prioritizes Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
Prioritizing BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists, LMAC offers free community reading and writing programs in Spanish and English, visual exhibits, and creative workshops. LibroMobile carries Spanish, multicultural and bilingual books as well as a special collection that prioritizes ethnic studies, gender studies and academic books.
LibroMobile is a welcoming community space with free Wi-fi, comfortable chairs, safe, quiet spaces where kids can do homework and adults can work on projects, as well as meeting rooms for community groups.
These are challenging times for independent bookstores, due to the current political environment, the loss of federal and state grants, and an overall decline in books sales. As an advisory board member I act as a sounding board for new ideas and creative initiatives to increase sales and community outreach,
I’m also on the advisory board for Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination. Citric Acid is an online literary quarterly with the goal of providing a thoughtfully curated site featuring the best writing from and about Orange County, California, with a commitment to advancing the work of both established and emerging regional talent
The journal features original prose, poetry, memoir, history, art, comics, and long-form journalism as well as photography, reviews, and interviews. As an advisory board member, I am able to promote local, emerging authors and artists, participate in readings, and offer encouragement, direction and support to the editors.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. Are you tap dancing to work? Have you been that level of excited at any point in your career? If so, please tell us about those days.
I was a government audit manager who wrote and edited countless audit reports about financial and performance efficiency at the Postal Service. If you think that sounds boring, it often was, but I as a life long novel reader, I enjoyed the storytelling aspects of the job. What was wrong, why did it happen, and why should anyone care.
But I was not tap dancing to work.
Strangely, writing and editing all these reports, along with a lifetime of reading novels, gave me the idea to try my hand at fiction. Now that I’m retired and writing novels, essays, short stories, poems, as well as a bi-weekly newsletter, I am excited every morning to get out of bed and go to work. I have a first draft of my third novel that finally feels as if it’s coming together.
I also really love writing my newsletter, Life With Riley. I never know exactly what it’s going to be about until I sit down with one random idea and then watch it expand. I love interacting with readers, the newsletter is free, and I always offer a giveaway.
I’m so fortunate to be at this stage of life, with a decent pension, and a real passion for my work.
