Dear friends,

I hope this newsletter finds you and those you love safe and warm. As our country continues to be more and more troubling, terrifying and rage-inducing, I find it conflicting to reach out and talk about writing. I think that’s okay. I think it’s important to pause, reset intentions and question the way we move.

I know our stories are powerful and important and have the ability to not only provide comfort, but to shift minds and hearts. So I’m doing my best to tend to this space with integrity.

We’re starting this month with a Newsletter Takeover. This means that the main article was written by someone who isn’t me. You’ll meet Angie one of my very best friends and someone who has kept me grounded, checked on me and been a constant source of support since the day I met her in 2009. Good friends make hard times easier to bear so I actually love that you’re meeting her today.

She asked if she could interview me and I said yes. We’ll talk about my writing process, why I decided to self-publish and my book’s surprising birthday.

I know it’s cold and our hearts are heavy. Let’s sit down together, drink something warm and connect. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hi. My name is Angie and I have been friends with the writer Catherine Castillo Cruz since the early days of college. We both studied theatre education, and whereas I would go on to move to Chicago and be a stage director, Cat continued her journey teaching way too far away from me, in NY and NJ.

Our friendship has been primarily sustained through writing, letters, texts, emails. So when she texted me so many years ago to say, “hey, I am starting to write a YA fantasy novel,” I was unsurprised and very excited. I was honored to be a person Cat shared her very first drafts, pages and scribbles with and continued to be honored by the proximity I get to have with her and her process. 

So, I wanted to highlight my writer friend, and what better way than to use her already existing newsletter where she celebrates the hope and joy of the literary journey! We sat down together and I asked her a BUNCH of questions, and here is what we came away with.

A: Hello my writer friend. You’re a writer!

CCC: I hope so. 

A: And see it’s good you said that because that is exactly what my first question is about. You’ve worked on this first book in your YA series for about six years now. Take me back to the moment where you first identified yourself as a writer. If you even do, at this point. 

CCC: Oh yeah, I do now, one hundred percent. When I had met my former coworker, and now friend, Ali, who I interviewed in one of my previous newsletters, she said “I’m a writer”, and I remember feeling envious.

For me, claiming to be a writer was never about whether or not I had credentials. It just felt uncool and dorky, but more to the point it was vulnerable. Growing up a lot of my writing was in notebooks hidden behind my dresser, away from the world. And at that time I was really focused on building my career as an educator. What I found by talking to you and sharing my early writing–which was like, bad, right, it was really rough—was that I could detach from the pressure of this passion project needing to connect to a job.

A: Which is what I am seeing with your implementation of your creative identity Bold & Bookish. This blend of being a writer, but also using your background as a facilitator to bring to life the writing process.

CCC: That’s why I wanted to lean into that! I feel like there are a lot of people out there who just need other people who like the same thing as them and can go at it in an non-intimidating way. You don’t have to know all the jargon, or name-drop fancy publishers, or even be aiming for a book deal. It’s just people who want to write whatever they want to write.

A: But you’ve written a whole book now! In your mind, does your book have a birthday?

CCC: My book has a really specific birthday, it's August of 2008.

A: Whoa! (I was not expecting to be as surprised as I was in this interview, but this is a revelation!)

CCC: And here’s the reason, one night my friends and I were having a sleepover, and my friend Shannon said, “Tell me a story”. And so I did. I told the first parts of what would become my book. Before I went off to college, I wrote Shannon a whole book, and granted there is pretty much nothing from that book that is this book—some character names survived— but it lived in my head for ten years. It was sort of an imaginary friend that I could use when I was nervous or things were changing. But when I finally decided to take it seriously, it took me six years to write because I was teaching myself how to write. 

A: Talk to me about what that was to you, to teach yourself to write. So much of writing feels isolated and solo, but you’ve created this very social method. 

CCC: I come from an educator perspective. Everyone needs to know how they learn. Once you know how you learn, you can teach yourself anything, even how to write a book. I learn by doing so I just had to write and then make it better and better. A very strong principle in education is that learning is a social experience, we make meaning by interacting with others. So when it came to ‘making it better’ I needed other people. I needed feedback and to talk to other writers. One podcast I really like, TheShit No One Tells You About Writing, helped me improve because they are directly working on people’s query letters (the letter you write to pitch an agent) and pages. They use a lot of specificity, and that's something I also need when I learn.

A: Speaking of query letters, you’ve recently made the decision to self-publish. Talk to me about how you got to that decision. 

CCC: One day I was finally able to say, “I have a book”. It's not a draft, it's not a dream. It's real. And I am proud of it and it’s the best I can make it. I did a few rounds of queriers, and it is a lot of work– work worth doing–but I have other things that fill up my life. I worked on this book for a million years, I’m not, not doing anything with it and that’s why I decided to self-publish. Also, my community got me this far and I want my community to be the ones who walk with me over the finish line. So by self-publishing I can keep collaborating with the people who have been with me since the beginning.

There is so much more Cat and I chatted about, from her relationship with rejection to the people in her life that she has pushed toward. But if there is anything that you could gather from this, it’s that writing is just that….writing. If you write, you’re a writer. If you want more, go out and get it. And if you are already reading this, Cat is facilitating a virtual writing retreat that you can sign up for here on February 28th. Now is your time!

Thank yall for indulging this interview. And thank you Angie for the care you put into crafting it. I hope it gave you insight into my journey and my choice to self-publish.

But I’m not the only writer at this party this week. Angie is a writer too. She shared this beautiful and powerful poem with me last week after the murder of Alex Pretti and she is allowing me to share it with you too.

Remember that your voice is powerful even if you’re only speaking to the people across the table from you. If you’re feeling too full these days, pen and paper will always hold you.

Please know that even as I reach out to you with bold thoughts and bookish news I’m thinking of your safety, your wellness and the hardships that out communities are facing.

Take good care of yourself and don’t forget to let stories make you smart and empathetic and brave.

Much loves,

Cat