Meet Margaret Elysia Garcia of Whittier/Mission Viejo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Margaret Elysia Garcia.

Hi Margaret Elysia, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I never know where to start with a question like that and I know this will come out stream of conscious but I will go for it anyhow:

So I was born and mostly raised in the San Gabriel Valley (born in Montebello, family in Pico Rivera and raised in Whittier). My mom’s family has been here since 1920. The true wild one was probably my mother. She was the first in her neighborhood to go off and marry a white guy. He died six weeks after they married and his brother (my dad) and my mom took this extended trip to Mexico the following year and so yeah. But they never married and my mom slowly realized after marrying my stepdad, that she and my stepdad were both gay. Did I mention we were a military family? My stepdad rejoined the military after my brother was born and they realized he was hard of hearing and they couldn’t get insurance. I spent kindergarten to ninth grade mostly on the east coast, south, and then West Germany, but came back to live with my grandparents in Whittier for high school (St. Paul’s in Santa Fe Springs) and I’ve been back living in California since then except for one year in rural Japan working on the Japanese English Teacher Exchange Program in 2000. I went to college at CSUF in Fullerton , then USF in San Francisco. I’m first generation graduate on my mom’s side and third after my dad and my uncle on my dad’s side. I think that even though I’m Chicana/Latina and an Angelino through and through my time away in my formative years kind of sets me apart from others who’ve never left the area. Sometimes that creates a barrier; sometimes people seem to think I just got here. Or I’m not Latina enough–my Spanish is terrible but then again we’ve been in the San Gabriel Valley since 1920. My grandfather was a gardener for 65 years in this valley. I came from a solidly working class background. I actually think traveling is what made me realize how we were definitely a Mexican American family from southern California. What we valued. How we lived. I remember even in elementary school in Georgia going to other kids’ houses knowing we weren’t like the others. I didn’t realize that not all kids grew up with lots of books and art supplies in the house. I didn’t realize that not everyone had gay uncles. Or that our food was different ( a combination of hippie organic and Mexican food).

When I started having children , I moved to the northeastern Sierras and stayed their 20 years until my town burned down in the Dixie Fire in 2021. I taught community college for 15 years , then taught in the prison arts programs run by the William James Association for five years. I now teach ESL classes at Santa Ana College from time to time and guest lecture on occasion. I started off teaching 90% of the time and writing 10% of the time and in the last 10 years I’ve made an effort to reverse that and I’m happy to report that I write 80% of the time now and do random things for work the other 20%. My two kids and grandson are my inspiration for writing and trying to make the world a better place. There’s so much more but that’s the broad brush strokes.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The biggest obstacle to publishing seems to being a non-traditional Chicana/Latina. I don’t fit easily into the boxes we’ve created for ourselves. And to be clear assumptions happen in both the white world and Latine world of what you’re supposed to cover in your writing if you’re Latina/Chicana. Much of my work explores that. I get discounted for being too far in the suburbs ; I don’t naturally speak Spanish as we never spoke it at home. These two things have discounted my work at times. I was also a very hands-on mother and still am and that sometimes hard to carve time to be an artist when you are trying not to be the kind of writer who ignores their children. Also the ‘literary ‘ scene here is awesome but I’ve spent so much time away that I often feel like I don’t count as an “LA ” writer. And now that I’ve remarried an OC born and raised man I feel further away.

The other challenge is just my own procrastination and perfectionism that gets in my way. And my background. Every time I take time for myself to work on my craft I can hear my mother (who likens herself to the overbearing grandmother in Coco) reminding me that I need something to fall back on. A safety net. So working creatively always feels like a few steps forward and a few back just in case. It’s a mindset that’s hard to shake.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My background is working class but I’m also a bit academic. That’s a weird combination when you are writing short stories and poetry. Too academic for the street poets; too street for the academics. It mirrors my ethnicity. Too Chicana for some; too white (Scottish) for others. I was also a reporter in Quincy, CA in the Lost Sierra for five years and wrote a column through the Dixie Fire and recovery–I am known for that (got interviewed by Ari Shapiro twice about the Dixie Fire), and my elegy for my adopted town of Greenville went viral. Before that my most viewed creative work was a video I did for Listen to Your Mother about my kids having lesbian grandmothers that got picked up by Upworthy. I’m proud of my fire reporting and I have a book I’m co-editor of coming out in June on AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/red-flag-warning.html that addresses this. I’m also super proud of my poetry–it’s the genre I’ve been writing in the longest and being picked up by LA based El Martillo Press has been a great experience. I think what sets my work apart is I’m both a history nerd and former goth girl in my youth. My writing reflects that. I was a shy kid going from one military base to another and lived with my grandparents when I got back. I have stories and I was too shy to make friends right away. My short stories have mostly been set in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County. I love introducing readers to who lives here and have it not be about gangs or Disneyland but everything else that gets missed when we concentrate on stereotypes. I think one quintessential element of the character of Whittier is its absence of nearby freeways and it being so close to Los Angeles but being in its own little world. I think that’s reflected in the people who live here. Parts of it feel small townish.

My focus now is on completing my second attempt at a novel –this one following the immigration story of my great grandparents—Mexican miners–who settled us here. I’m also working on a memoir about disillusionment with body positivity–I’d been interviewing women into alternative modeling and burlesque who tending to be “plus size” and followed their journeys as I was going through my own. I’d been diagnosed with diabetes and fell and busted my knee and couldn’t walk. I dropped 65 pounds, my knee healed, and I don’t have diabetes anymore. It’s been a crazy journey. But I look at my body differently now and it’s never been about loving or hating it. I’m also getting together a manuscript of new poems which I keep calling the “fire poems.” They all stem from losing my adopted Sierra town of Greenville and then heading back to the homeland down here and the giant culture shock of climate change displacement. It’s been four years and I’m finally able to navigate down here without crying and smelling smoke in my sleep. The poems reflect that. I hope some publisher finds them as interesting.

Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
You can learn more about my work at my website: www.margaretelysiagarcia.com ; my instagram (@writerchickmama) usually has upcoming events I’m working on. I didn’t publish much in 2024, but 2025 has seen my poetry chapbook ICONISTAS! out in March, Red Flag Warning–the anthology I co-edited with Dani Burlison comes out in June on AK Press, and in October my second collection of short stories Chicana Noir Stories comes out on El Martillo Press. ADHD writers unite!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.margaretelysiagarcia.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writerchickmama/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-elysia-garcia-897062238/
• Other: @writerchickmama.bsky.social

Image Credits
Head shot by Ryan Upton (my husband). Artwork /cover design for all my books have been by my long time collaborator Whittier based artist Ross Amador.