Jennifer Givhan, a Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist, grew up in Southern California. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University, Fullerton, and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College, and she’s been the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices, among others. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, and more. “Salt Bones” is her latest book.
Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “Salt Bones.”
One afternoon, I went to pick up my daughter from junior high school, but she didn’t come out when the bell rang. I panicked. After several minutes, I found out that her teacher had kept the class late without telling me, but in those moments, I was ready to set the world on fire to find her.
That was the spark.
Over the next several years, “Salt Bones” became an ecological swansong for disappearing girls on a vanishing sea.
My work has always been about singing the stories of girls and women, too often othered or erased. While crime novels often focus on the killer or the puzzle at the expense of the missing or murdered girls and women, I write for the unseen and ignored.
Malamar, my protagonist, is an imperfect Mexican and Indigenous mother because no mother is perfect, nor should she be. She’s not a trope. She’s flesh and blood, with a complicated past and conflicting desires.
For readers unfamiliar with life on the borderlands, I offer stories beyond the stereotypes. And for my Latine readers, I hope my book feels like home.
“Salt Bones: A Novel,” by Jennifer Givhan. (Little, Brown and Company/TNS)
Q. The Salton Sea plays a role in the novel. What drew you to that location?
In the ’90s, I grew up near the Salton Sea, an ancient saline basin that has filled and emptied over millennia in the Southern California desert. In the early 1900s, it was unintentionally recreated after two floods and a broken dam channeled irrigation water from the Colorado River. But when I was a kid, 90 years after its re-creation, my mama warned us about how poisonous it was; we kids could smell for ourselves how it killed fish in massive die-offs and stank to high heaven for weeks from toxic algal blooms.
After I left for college, got married and had kids, I returned to my hometown to visit my best friend, who told me that the Salton Sea was drying up and releasing toxic chemicals like arsenic, residue from decades of pesticide runoff, which had sunk into the lakebed, aerosolized, and wafted into the lungs of everyone still breathing throughout the community. The whole Valley would become a ghost town if nothing was done.
I started researching, and over the next decade I became increasingly concerned about the fate of the place that raised me, which had been featured in shows like “Abandoned America,” though the mostly Mexican community was still thriving, even as the farm-owning elite brought in billions in agricultural revenue each year, all while the so-called accidental lake poisoned the air. I knew I had to tell this story, despite lawmakers who had actually been recorded as justifying their apathy with remarks like, “No one lives there anyway.” I also knew that my soapbox was slippery, but that people tend to love murder mysteries. So I wrapped my heart in one.
Q. What are you reading now?
I’m reading several books, as is my way. I keep books all over the house, in every room, in my purse and car. Right now, I’m in the middle of “You’ve Awoken Her” by Ana Dávila Cardinal, “Bad Cree” by Jessica Johns, “Vanishing Daughters” by Cynthia Pelayo, and “Bochica” by Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro. I gravitate toward books that straddle genre, that bleed through the borderlands and liminal spaces. I want to be gutted and rebuilt by stories, and I love strong literary thrillers that examine society alongside the human heart.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
I’ve been reading everything I could get my hands on since I was a very young girl, so early on I loved “A Wrinkle In Time” and other magical happenings. I also read my mom’s books, including thrillers by authors like Mary Higgins Clark.
And then, when I was in high school and taking an extra AP English class through Stanford University online from my small-town borderland borrowed computer, I read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and it changed me. I mean, it wove itself into my marrow.
I’d already experienced trauma, and this novel showed me how to write a ghost story, reckoning, lullaby, and testimony all at once. It would be a decade before I had a baby girl of my own and sat down to write my girlhood trauma into my first novel, “Jubilee,” but Morrison had taught me early on that story can be a time machine. She says the whole story’s in the first line and hopes readers stay for the language. I return often for a dose of courage, music, and bone-deep truth. I’ll keep writing until I’ve built my own time machine. I hope “Salt Bones” comes close.
It wasn’t until undergrad that my brother told me Sandra Cisneros was reading at the Santa Ana Public Library nearby where we lived, and when I heard her read and speak, I knew I was home in Chicana literature. She discussed how her Antepasados or Ancestors, guide her writing, and finally I understood my own Ancestral call, the voices speaking through me since I was very young. I started polishing my poems immediately and sending them out when my son was born. He’s now 18, and I mark the start of my writing career by his birthday. Both my firstborn and writing career have grown up and are adults now.
Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?
I’ve had many amazing events at my local bookstore in Albuquerque, Books on the Bosque. Most recently, I launched “Salt Bones” there, and it was incredibly supportive. Over a hundred people packed into the store—family, friends, former students from the University of New Mexico MFA program—and so many readers brought all four of my novels, telling me how much my body of work has meant to them.
One of my dear friends and booksellers surprised me with a “Salt Bones” book cover cake, which was so sweet and unexpected (and I highly recommend Howdy Cakes, a Native-owned gem in Albuquerque)!
What moved me most was that I didn’t need to contextualize everything. I was speaking to my community, people who already understood my goals: to write stories that include and center us.
My incredible colleague, Ramona Emerson—a Diné writer and filmmaker whose “Shutter” series blew me away and was a finalist for the National Book Award—joined me in conversation. Her questions made me feel deeply seen and understood. We laughed, we cried, and I felt truly at home.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I’ve been writing since I was a little girl growing up on the Mexicali border, putting on backyard plays with the neighbor kids, handwritten scripts, but at the time, I didn’t know any other writers who came from the border. There were no readings, workshops, or visible literary community back then.
For my senior project in high school, I wrote a children’s book, but my teachers didn’t know any local writers (this was before we had much internet know-how down in El Valle), so I walked into a small bookstore in El Centro and asked the bookseller if she’d mentor me.
(This summer, I’ll give a “Salt Bones” talk in El Centro at a new indie bookstore called After-Hours Books, and I’m beyond thrilled for the shop, the book club, and my hometown finally having a literary home)!
Back when I was growing up as a young escritora, it was my big brother, Paul Gonzales, who opened the literary door for me. He’d gone to Los Angeles ahead of me and paved the way, gifting me Destiny’s Child’s album “Survivor” and assuring me I was one. He also told me about Sandra Cisneros reading at the Santa Ana Public Library, and when La Maestra spoke about her Antepasados helping her write, a dam inside me broke open. She’d put my experience into words. I knew how to listen not only to my living familia’s chisme and historia, but I could tune into the dead. That changed everything for me.
Later, it was Ana Castillo, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, and all the mujeres whose words lit my path. At Cal State Fullerton, I wrote my Master’s thesis while raising a newborn, and this became “Landscape with Headless Mama,” the book that taught me how to mother on the page and claim my Chicana and Indigenous identity in the act of creation. Every novel I’ve written since then, including this newest one, echoes what I first put to the page in that unpublished poetry manuscript.
Balancing motherhood with writing has been the central challenge of my life, but also the deep heart of my work. My books are survival guides. Testimonios. Love letters. For the girls from the border dreaming in the dark and bringing our voices to the light.
Now I’m writing the books I needed, flashing Spanglish and sweat and salt and reminding us that we’re not alone, that we belong.
Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?
The prologue to “Salt Bones” ends: “If anyone were out here but the night animals, the stars, they’ve shut their eyes. They haven’t seen a thing. They haven’t said a damn word to anyone.”
It’s meant to show how we’re all culpable for the lack of attention Latine and Indigenous women and girls who disappear in a vanishing community receive.
So my question is, will you say a word to anyone?
For more about the author, go to jennifergivhan.com
