Maria D’Alema

Link to Margarita Cruz’s website: https://shortendings.com/

Hi! How about you start by telling us a little bit about yourself. I’ve found some really cool things that you’ve done so far, but I would love to hear what you have to say. Let’s start with who you are and what you’ve done so far? 

Yeah, first, thank you so much for asking me to talk with you today, it’s always really exciting to speak with folks. My name is Margarita. I’m currently adjunct at Northern Arizona University. I teach a creative writing class every semester. I have in the past taught grades 4th through 12th and then at the community college as well and then I help coordinate the Northern Arizona Book Festival. I’ve been their president for the past 2-3 years, before that vice president and treasurer. I’ve been with them since 2018-2019. I write a lot of poetry, I got my MFA in fiction which is a really different world. I do a lot of different things and I also write for a newspaper, the Arizona Daily Sun, and for their small arts and culture publication, Flaglive. I’ve been doing that since 2017.  

What of those things (publishing, hosting Poet Brews, Northern Arizona Book Festival, etc.) has been your favorite to do? 

I got into a lot of the literary scene and that’s kind of jumping into what I love to do now. I jumped into it when I was 19 or 20. I had English professors who were so kind to me and took me in and really helped mentor me. They would sneak me into bars where open mics were held. They showed me this world that I had never seen before and where I grew up was not a place where I experienced anything like that. I didn’t even know writers had a community like this and so what I really love to do now is build these communities. I currently run an open mic for  writers every Tuesday for the last two years. That sparked from me attending this other open mic that happened before the pandemic shut downs and after the pandemic a lot of things fell away or were impossible to do again. So putting together community events is something I am really passionate about. With the Northern Arizona Book Festival we’re able to put together programming throughout the year by supporting different organizations in town. I help make a lot of those community relationships. We help fund the poetry slam in town, the MFA reading series at the university and then during the festival we have a weekend, sometimes several weekends in a row, where we have 30-40 plus events where we’re putting together workshops and readings for many different people. I think those are some of my most favorite things that I’ve done aside from writing, which is my favorite practice.  

You’re published in so many different places, what has been your favorite publication you’ve been in? 

That’s so hard. I really love so many of them and I feel really lucky because some of them were my dream magazines that I never thought I’d be published in. But I think one that is really special to me is Ploughshares. I couldn’t believe I got Ploughshares, that was a huge one for me. And I think my first ever publication where I felt like I was really doing something that encouraged me to keep going was PANK magazine. A long time ago they had a Latino anthology, with a guest editor who was picking out Latinx writers. Ruben Quesada picked my poem for that series and then I actually got to study with him at Tin house the next year. To me, that felt really special to know that this person believed in me once and then believed in me again and was able to help mentor me the next summer. That’s one of my more special or favorite moments.  

You’ve recently been published in the Winter 2024-2025 Ploughshares issue. Let’s talk about your poem “Tiny Broken Things.” Is there a line in there that was a light bulb moment for you? Where it feels like the poem stands out the most. 

That one is special to me because I love Ploughshares and it was one of the first magazines that I ever picked up. I used to work in a bookstore where I really advocated for that publication to stay on our shelves. I would try to get people to buy it because I really loved it and really loved the people they were publishing. I submit every time they have an open call. That was one of me trying over and over [to get published] and it finally stuck. This poem in particular, I worked on at a workshop with Kenyan Review, under Dan Beachy-Quick, he was really helpful in trying to understand the idea of how we work in circles or how writing can feel like a drop in the water and how the rings move around. I tried to do this in “Tiny Broken Things.” Thinking about what one tiny thing that ripples out or has this ripple effect and to me, that’s what I strived to do here. It really is that repetition of ‘Tiny Broken Things’ and ‘Work of Home.’ To me, in this poem, it’s about my sisters and I in a truck—this was an actual thing that happened to us at the border—to relate that or parallel that to a bird which is a really interesting theme that I try to do in my work.  I’m working towards a manuscript with birds as a central theme because they migrate and my family migrated. I’m thinking about how fragile birds can be, but birds are also weird and crazy and show up in the most random places. They take these nests and they make them out of these scraps and hair and all these things and then my sisters and I felt like we had this family dynamic that was trying to do a similar thing. Half of our family is in Mexico, half of our family is here. So how do we weave that together to create a home? This was a particular moment where we  were without our mother and we were with our father and we spent a month apart. It was a really interesting situation and to me, “Tiny Broken Things” is about the bigger concept of family and creating things and people from different countries working to create things. My brain also still goes into this mathematical thinking about poetry which I think is not a normal conversation most people have, but thinking about the linguistics and thought and time process is interesting and is in all my poetry.  

In your past writings, are there things you would change now? Or are there ways you’ve seen your writing change? 

I got my MFA in fiction and that’s really where my heart started. I started with novel writing that turned into fiction writing and micro fiction writing, which turned into vignettes, which then turned into poetry. I got to watch myself separate from that world. I still write fiction, but my heart is more in poetry right now. A lot of my earlier poems are very narrative based and they still revolve around that. Right now, I keep going to workshops to try to figure out what I am doing and how I can generate the stuff I want to say. I really do think I’m stuck between this world of wanting to write very abstract vs very narrative. That’s happening a lot in my poetry right now as I try to whittle down to a manuscript that is cohesive. A lot of the parts in my manuscript are very disparate and I’m trying to tell a story. I think that’s still stuck with me. I think it’s just now working to put that narrative together.  

How do you work with someone else’s ideas vs what you want to do? How do you walk that line of following through on good criticism and ideas without losing what you were initially trying to do? 

This one is always really hard and I think it’s a question everyone should ask themselves. What is the goal here? What am I really trying to accomplish? Sometimes you don’t know that when you are going into it. Sometimes it finds you years later or a month later. Sometimes you just know. I am so excited for the people who just know. I did not know what my goal was with a lot of my poems or where they were fitting into my manuscripts or stories. Even my vault of writing. So I think what I wanted to understand as people were giving me criticism is do I trust this person? Do I love their work or trust them as a friend? Do I want to include their feedback? And then in the grand scheme of things can I keep this feedback for later or can I use it right now?  That example of someone giving me feedback about my manuscript not being what I wanted it to be was really helpful because it helped me to force my perspective and shift because sometimes you get so stuck in one mode and you’re looking at the same thing over and over and you’re like “this is good I think? I’ve been looking at it and it doesn’t look bad and it sounds okay,” but then the moment you force your perspective into someone else’s is so helpful and so I love all my feedback and trust some more than others. But you sometimes have to roll with the punches even if it is something you don’t want to hear, especially if it is something that is more global vs local edits. Local are line editing and global are changing the whole scope of everything. I often go for the global aspect first and have people help me figure out the larger thing and if that’s not a problem then I feel like I can just work inside of this poem and change it around instead of having to make huge revisions with it.  

Moving forward, what are things looking like? You have your manuscript you are working on, are there any other big things we should expect from you? 

I’m working on the manuscript, I’m going to keep doing the book festival, and I’m trying to shop around my novel that I had worked on in my MFA which is a harder process than I think most people understand. Sometimes when you shop around short stories, it’s a little harder than a novel. But that’s all I’ve got planned right now.  

Where are the best places for people to find your work and what you’re doing?

My instagram (@blue_margaritas) is the most active thing I do. I get really bad social media exhaustion so that’s the one place I’m really at and updating pretty frequently. My website (shortendings.com) I also keep pretty frequent. I usually post as things come up.  

Thank you so much for doing this! This was so exciting for me and a great experience and I hope it’s been great for you as well! Anything else you want to talk about real quick? Anything new and exciting? 

I’m starting to get ready for the Northern Arizona book festival, sometimes we have online events. The schedule is about to get published next week and we’ll solidify if that’s something anyone is interested in. That’s all that’s on my mind right now. I’m trying to focus on doing summer workshops, perhaps online or in person. It’ll be this summer that I’ll be hosting and providing for people. That’s something I’ve been toying around with. The future is wild and mysterious and I’m ready for it.