Infinite Grief Infinite Love Finite Life: A Conversation with ire’ne lara silva

At first, I was intimidated by the idea of speaking to a writer that opened my heart, but after a few Instagram messages a week before the interview, she had already won me over with her kindness, especially after she shared how much she loves El Paso, Texas: my hometown. Talking with ire’ne lara silva felt like a Sunday afternoon. The joyous combination of smoke-filled air coming from charred carne asada and tinfoil-wrapped green onions, harmonizing laughter, and Ramon Ayala’s voice dancing throughout every neighborhood. When we finally met, and she smiled at me with that sunflower-filled smile, I felt at home.

Candia: Thank you for taking the time to be here and talking with me. Your writing and this opportunity came at a specific time for me. Less than six months ago, my grandmother passed away, and I’ve been in this space of grief where I’ve never had it happen to me so closely. Finding the words for it has been difficult–and especially, going back to that time–uncovering and writing about it has been really hard. So, I wanted to say thank you for getting into the feeling, finding the words, and for creating a beautiful book like the Eaters of Flowers.

silva: One of the things that I have always found interesting, for me, I’ve had a lot of family relatives that died young and one of the things that kept striking me over and over again–but of course, especially after my brother’s passing–was that there are a lot of people that haven’t been through grief before. They’re very awkward. They don’t know how to talk to somebody who’s in the middle of grief. It’s almost like you have to have lived through it to be able to find the language for it, and to be able to sit down with somebody else, and to let them tell you their stories of who they’ve lost, and for it not to freak anybody out. We can talk about this the way we can talk about our favorite sandwiches, or we can talk about the memory of where we grew up. To be able to say, these are the people we lost and to know that we’re not making other people uncomfortable by talking about our grief. My brother passed three years ago, my mother passed 24 years ago and then, of course, a lot of people died when I was young. It’s important to me, I think, with all writing, that it’s not just me expressing what I feel or what I went through, but that it’s about being able to start discussions, either me with other people or other people having read it then they can have a discussion.

When I did Blood Sugar Canto, apparently people needed language to talk about diabetes and, you think, well, it’s a health issue and your doctors tell you this and blah, blah, blah. But it doesn’t give you the emotional language to talk about the experience of it. For other people that think that poetry is not important or that it’s dead or whatever else, we still need poetry to figure out how to live and how to talk to each other. Especially navigating through something like grief. Everybody experiences it in one way or another.

Candia: You’re right, there is a tiptoeing around the subject itself unless you’ve already been confronted with it.

silva: So many people are afraid of mortality; they haven’t considered their own, they don’t want to consider somebody else’s. I had a friend, her daughter wanted her to keep dyeing her hair because she said every time she saw a silver hair that had made her think, “My mother’s going to die.” I told her, “She’s in her 20s, she needs to accept eventually that you’re gonna die.” I was also at a book panel a few years ago. I don’t remember what the other writers said, but I decided to start my comments to the audience by telling them that they were all going to die. They all freaked out, and I said, “Not tonight. I’m not saying y’all are gonna die tonight but eventually we’re all gonna die.” And the writers that were next to me said, “Well, I’m not.” And I’m like, I don’t understand why you think that that’s a way to live. Like, how are you organizing your life if you’re refusing to admit that you’re going to die at once at some point?

Right now, my excuse for everything is telling people, due to decisions I recently made while contemplating my mortality, I will not be at Saturday’s meeting. You have limited time and limited energy; I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do. My other motto is, no more half assing. “Whole ass or nothing.” I only want to do things that I want to do with my whole ass.

Candia: If I’m gonna take a bite, I’m gonna take a good bite.

silva: Yeah good bite! Or it better be the good thing. With anything it better be the good thing. Don’t waste my time with crap.

Candia: So, I found that you began writing at eight years old after waking up from a nightmare involving your family, a fire, and being abducted by aliens.

silva: Yes.

Candia: Can you tell me about the writings that followed in the subjects you started to explore and do you find this eight-year-old girl still in your writing process?

silva: I think so because one of the things that I’ve discovered all these years is that the relationship to writing changes. When I was a kid, well, especially with that first story, I didn’t have the kind of parents that you would go to to have them hug you and tell you everything’s gonna be okay. I knew that wasn’t ever going to happen. If I had told them what dream I had, they would have laughed at me or ignored me. They might have gotten mad at me for dreaming about them all burning to death. But I knew there was no consolation to be found. And of course, at eight-years-old I didn’t know what consolation meant. Looking back, I knew that was what I felt. I felt like the act of writing the story consoled me because I woke up freaked. It was interesting to be abducted by aliens but I was freaked out: by the fire, by losing them. I was freaked out in the dream by being with a foster family and having to remake my life. I was a very dramatic eight-year-old.

As I got older, writing was escaping. It was escaping my family, escaping whatever stresses were going on, escaping whatever the situation was, economically or socially or whatever else. When I went to college, my relationship to writing changed again. I think it became more about finding my voice and my political, cultural identity. It probably went back to escapism for a little while. And then when I started to enjoy my life, I was like, well, if I’m not writing to escape, why am I writing? So, I had to change again. And then it changed later on.

Seven years ago, it had a really big change when I realized that for most of my life, I had been fighting myself to get to the page. Until I realized I didn’t need to fight myself anymore. And even though I had less time and less energy, all of it could go to writing, as opposed to like 75% fighting myself and 25% doing the work.

It has changed and changed and changed.

Candia: Something that I wanted to touch on is language. A few years ago, I started writing about both of my grandmothers, and of course, I had to include Spanish as a way to honor the language that they taught me. When did you begin to intertwine different languages in your writing and can you tell me about the joy and connection of writing in Nahuatl, Spanish and English?

silva: I don’t think I knew that it was possible before college. I didn’t even know that Chicano people had published books before college. I had to go from the Rio Grande Valley to Upstate New York to find out that people had written books. I remember finding it in the library. I started at one end of the shelf and kept on reading until I read everybody: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer and Francisco Alarcón and all these other people. I saw what they were doing and I said to myself, wow, this is possible and so, I went nuts with that. It’s been interesting when you really start looking at what real code switching is.

It’s not doing it in a decorative way, it’s doing it because in Spanish, Nahuatl or whatever the language people use, you need that word. Nothing else has the weight of that word, or that phrase.

I think this has probably been more in poetry. I used to do a lot of code switching in poetry and I found that English wasn’t this monolith. I realized that English itself was already fragmented and that it could be broken and remolded and you could do crazy things with it because it’s already pieces. I started writing less code switching because I figured out how to break the English. Now, it just seems like there are just certain times I need the Nahuatl. I really need Nahuatl. Nothing else works.The same way that with Spanish, a lot of it is memory. In some ways, I feel like Nahuatl is both memory–like an older memory–and a way of reaching forward because it has concepts that I need, that I don’t have words for. I end up finding them there, because they’re not in English and they’re not in Spanish so I have to go look somewhere else.

Candia: And where did you discover Nahuatl? Or was it already a part of your life?

silva: So, several different things. One is that, we don’t realize how much of Mexican Spanish is Mexican because it’s Nahuatlized Spanish, and there’s different parts of Texas that have taken on different indigenous languages that have also influenced their Spanish. That’s part of what’s happening in Tejas, too. My brother–it was really funny–I couldn’t ever really give him endearments because, I don’t know, I guess he was weirded out by them. His favorite endearment was when I would call him my little monstro. That would crack him up. But all the other ones, he would just look at me like, eh. But when I called him my little monster, he would giggle and he was, you know, it was cute. But every now and then I would just start using nonsense languages as endearment. I’d been doing it for years, and one day, he said, “Do you know what I think you’re doing when you do that?”  I was like, “What?”

He was like: “I think you’re reaching for the sounds of Nahuatl, and you don’t know the words that you would use. But the rhythm of it and the sounds that you’re using, it’s Nahuatl. And you’re using that to express your love.”

I was like, whoa, that’s a trip. I remember my mother calling me something when I was little and it wasn’t my nickname and it wasn’t a name and it’s not any word that I ever knew. She’s the only one that ever called me it and I never asked her why. So, until someday when I find out if it’s related to some Nahuatl word or another native word, I will never know what that reference was.

Candia: I think that’s what’s beautiful about Nahuatl, because I think in El Paso, a lot of people have been exploring Nahuatl, especially connecting it to a deeper identity with indigenous culture and indigenous roots. That’s what I meant by there was something familiar about your writing; it reminded me of home.

silva: Well, and then too, so many people are ashamed or distraught by not knowing Spanish. Then when you think about it, that’s another colonizer language. So really what is it to start reaching to want to learn whichever indigenous languages either we are geographically or culturally or ancestrally connected to. Of course, a lot of us don’t know so we reach for what we can reach for.

So, I have a whole long, ongoing debate about tamales. People want to say, it’s not tamales, it’s tamal, and it’s not this, and you shouldn’t have it with ketchup and blah, blah, whatever else. I seriously do not care. I’m glad we’re eating tamales 500 years later. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it tamales. I’m okay with that. As long as you’re eating them and not eating the hoja, I’m okay with that. The fact that things survive, that’s a miracle.

Candia: It’s interesting to think about tamales that way and I do say tamales, so I don’t know what that says about me.

I also wanted to talk about the Eaters of Flowers, I was in awe through every page. The first few pages I had to really step back and confront the grief that I had been feeling and sometimes avoiding. I found it so profound, the way that you were able to transmute the ache of loss and turn it into an appreciation of presence. I had never considered it in my grief. It always felt so far. In the book, we end up sitting with these powerful poems, and I wanted to list a few of my favorites, which were: It’s the Old Hunger to Grow Wild, Puño de Flores, Descanso, and It’s Been Six Months. Did you feel ready to write this book and grow wild, or like some things did it take time?

silva: Right after my brother passed, I wish I had a lot of friends that wanted to sit with me. I had friends that came from out of town to take me to the movies or to lunch or to talk or whatever else but I also had a lot of people giving me advice that I did not necessarily appreciate. And, okay, I really didn’t like it. Because I was like, I am in this grief and this thing has happened and I have taken care of him for 20 years and people were really quick to make suggestions about what I should do with my time. From: now that he’s gone you should get a cat or a dog so you’re not alone. And I was thinking and I didn’t say it: how does a cat or a dog make up for the loss of my brother, who is my favorite person in the world? People even told me you should go start dating now. And I’m like, excuse me, I’m grieving. There were some who were like, you should go buy a house. You should go start a business. You should go back to school. You should go to this grief group. You should come to my church. You should.. and I was just like, Jesus, people, what is this thing to not want me to sit with my grief? I really felt like not only did I need to sit with my grief, but my whole life was different. The only way that I’ve been able to tell people is that I had taken care of him and I had prioritized his care for so long that when he was gone, I literally did not know when to eat or sleep, because I was so used to doing that when he needed me to do it and when there was available time and whatever else. I had to go learn that again and what does it mean to have to sit with yourself till you know, I am sleepy means it’s time to go to sleep, or I am hungry, it’s time for me to eat. This is what I need to do to take care of me, the way I took care of him.

The other part, too, was that the writer, the artist part of you knows that if you repress or stuff feelings down, you can’t deal with it. I remember telling a friend of mine, I need to be alone and not only do I need to learn how to live with myself and to be alone, but I need to be alone so I can write the things that I need to write because I’ve never been here, this here before and the only way I’m gonna figure this out is to be alone and to figure it out. It’s been three years since he’s passed and I feel that the stuff that I’m writing now, I’m still trying to push at things and write things I haven’t written yet. And they still require me to be alone a lot because I need to go places I haven’t been before. In some ways, you can’t go to those places if you’re not by yourself. So, that was part of beginning the book, knowing that I needed to sit. and just be. Once I started it, the different thing about this book from everything else that I’ve written, is that it was published in the order that I wrote it. I didn’t move a single poem around.

Candia: Wow.

silva: Because I realized, you know, I wrote it over six months? After a certain point, it felt like a journal of processing that grief. There was no way for me to move one poem from another because that’s not when the understanding came. That’s not when the epiphany arrived. That’s not when I found peace over one thing or the other. That’s not when I figured it out. I don’t think I even knew till a year after the book came out that as much as it is about grief, that it’s also about gratitude. You know, because I have those 20 years with him, well, most of the 40 years of his life, but especially those 20 years, or how grateful I was that his end was peaceful, or how grateful I was that I made it to the end of his life to be able to take care of him. But you don’t understand any of that at the beginning. I wandered away from your question.

Candia: If you felt ready.

silva: No, absolutely not. But this is the only way.

Candia: Through?

silva: Yes and, you know, this is my fifth poetry book. By this point, I know, okay, time to carve the heart out again and feel it. A friend of mine who has her first book coming out said that she was feeling so vulnerable. I remember when I first did two self-published chap books, I was 26. In 2001, 24 years ago. I felt so naked like my poems are going down to the world without me and somebody is reading a whole collection of them, and I’m not there, and they can psychoanalyze me all they want from these 25 pages of poems. I felt so naked, so so naked. But over time, I realized that when I put a book out, if I don’t feel naked and vulnerable, I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. With every book, it’s like, all right, how much deeper can we go? And how much more can I explore? And how much more can I say that I haven’t been able to say before? Apparently, I’m going to need about 20 or 30 folks to be able to get to everything. There’s a bunch of books in the works.

Candia: Forever, basically, huh?

silva: Well, I mean, now, I’m feeling like I might live to be a little old lady. I don’t think I ever knew that before. I’m kind of surprised to find myself alive now, but now I’m like, “Oh, I could live another 30 years. How many more books can I write in 30 years?” Now I’m unleashed, and now I’m retired, and now I’m free, and now I’m not fighting myself. Good Lord, what might I do? I’m also going to take a bunch of naps and watch movies. But, how much more work can I be able to get to that I never dreamed I’d be able to do? You know, how much are any of us ever really ready? But we throw ourselves in ’cause that’s where we know there’s something there. We keep going back to it and we keep sitting ourselves down, and we keep saying, all right, let’s do this. and see what happens.

Candia: What did you mean earlier when you said fighting yourself? Is that something you struggled with for a long time without realizing it? Or did you know? And what did it feel like to know that it was over?

silva: With writers, we talk a lot about the internal editor and the internal critic. I did a 14-hour workshop over two days at a retreat. 14 hours of programming and the name of the workshop was Getting Out of Your Own Way. The big question was, with writing and with a creative life, how do you get out of your own way? That’s why we needed 14 hours. One of those days we were talking about the internal critic and the internal editor. A woman in the workshop said–I don’t know if she said it on purpose or by accident–but she said, “internal enemy.” I heard that and I was like, “Whoa, that is the phrase I have needed.” Then they ask you: think about whose voice do you hear? Is it a professor, is it a family member? Who is this voice in your head? But for me, it was like, no, it’s an internal enemy. That’s the right word. For me, it was my father’s voice. And with my father’s voice, there were multiple parts of it, it wasn’t about him criticizing or about him editing. It was the part of his voice, the repeated messages over my childhood, of being worthless. If you’re worthless, what you say and what you do and who you are is worthless. So, there was a part of me that was fighting that, and then the other part was that I tell everybody, I love the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Candia: I’ve never seen it.

silva: Oh my God, go watch it. Gorgeous story and heartbreak and everything else, but there’s a concept in that movie where they talk about this woman who was incredibly talented, but she didn’t have the socioeconomic background and because she never got to learn the things that she might have been able to learn if she’d been born someone else, she became a poisoned dragon. She had power, but she got twisted inside because it wasn’t able to do the thing that it could have been developed to do.

When I heard that, I was thinking of my dad. I think he was an incredibly creative soul. He would even talk about how much he would have loved to have been a singer but because he was illiterate in both English and Spanish, there were so many opportunities that he said no to. I think the fact that he didn’t follow this dream at all turned him, in a way, into a poison dragon. It wasn’t just that he didn’t do the creative thing, but he didn’t want his children doing creative things. He was trying to destroy the creativity, because if he didn’t get to do it, nobody else would. And so, I realized, okay, so then I have my father’s voice that’s telling me I’m worthless and at the same time, it’s wanting to destroy all creativity, not only within myself, but even in other people. So that’s the internal enemy of fighting. I was telling a friend of mine about this, and she’s like, “Well, have you ever tried to talk against your father’s voice?” and I’m like, “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the last 25 years?” That’s all I do. All my writing–like my day-to-day life is–I’m fighting that voice. I’m trying not to self-destruct, I’m trying not to destroy other people, and I’m trying to believe I have worth.

Interestingly, because she asked that question, it then threw me into another place where I thought, okay, so if I’m talking about a destructive father voice, what would a nurturing mother voice sound like? And it wasn’t even about thinking about my mother. It was just, how do I have a voice that nurtures me? The way they say you should talk to yourself the way your best friend would talk to you. And so, I thought, if I was a nurtured mother and a nurturing best friend, that’s the only voice I’m going to use to talk to myself with. I’m not going to critique myself or criticize myself or put myself down. I’m only going to be this nurturing voice. I think when I started doing that, that’s when the fighting myself to get to the page stopped or at least lessened a lot, because it wasn’t fighting the what the hell am I doing trying to put words down and trying to tell a story. I wasn’t having a fight, that desire to destroy everything.

It was: you are a person that wants to tell a story. You’re a person that wants to sit with a song. You’re a person that wants to express how beautiful dawn was today. You love writing. Let’s sit down today and write a few words and listen to some music and be happy we’re alive and just do it. This is who you truest are, so let’s go do that. Without any expectation of “it has to be brilliant”, or “it has to be publishable” or has to be whatever, just “let’s go be good to ourselves”. That’s what I want to concentrate on. I hate the idea of discipline, and I hate the idea of shame or guilt building up around creativity. It’s hard enough going through feelings and whatever else. Let’s at least make the practice a joyful, pleasurable thing. And if nothing else–if it’s a hard thing–at least when you get up, you should feel lighter. You know?

I wrote something last week, actually, about my mother, and I don’t even know where that poem came from, but I got up and I was all shaking, and I had to go meet some people for lunch, and I told them, I was like, I feel wobbly.

I either released something, I healed something, or I broke something, but something big happened.

Then it was time to go eat, have some café de olla and some guava pie and chill with friends for three hours, and then come home and take a nap. Because that was what was needed. And again, it’s like, let’s nurture me. What do I need to tell? And who do I need to be with? And then let’s get some rest. And let’s just be good.

Candia: You can see how you claim memory. Not in like a, this is mine kind of way, but it’s like, this is what happened, and this is my story. Especially when it comes to the memories that you narrate between you and your brother or conversations, dialogue. I think the number one piece that I kept rereading and looking at the form and the white space next to it and even looking through the white space, it was in the Blank Canvas.

silva: I still have a blank canvas upon my walls, and I plan to have one for the rest of my life because I used to tell my brother that he was the most brilliant person I had ever met or known and he would say that that was ridiculous because he barely graduated high school. And I’d say, it has absolutely nothing to do with how much education you’ve got. It has to do with the way that you observe, the way you analyze, the way you understand and the way you deeply connect things. To me, he’s been gone for three years, but he was my best reader and my best editor and the one that pushed me the most. There is nothing ever that I write where I don’t feel his belief or his pushing me or his challenge. That’s now an embedded part of my language where his aesthetics and that push and that desire. There are so many times where it’s like, okay, I realize I do this because this is a conversation I had with him and that poem is so much about the way that we as people and we as artists fear the unknown.

If he could welcome the unknown, we can all welcome the unknown.

Like, why fear the unknown? He was almost an artist above the unknown and you can apply that to anything. We don’t know what’s gonna come tomorrow or in our future. We don’t know what’s gonna come in our relationships. We don’t know about anything. So, how can we observe what’s coming, not knowing, but appreciate it and study it? You know, without fear.

Candia: I think that’s why I linger so much on the white space because for me, it was like a mirror or like a door to grief in a way that it’s like what’s in there. Instead of just looking at it and saying that it’s a loss, it’s an absence, it’s nothing. I feel like this poem made me confront that white page, that grief, and say, like, no, there is something in there.

silva: It’s hard to say, but in a way, you continue to have a relationship for the people that are gone. But it’s just so many people don’t let you talk about it, or you’re being dramatic or you’re being morbid or you’re not moving on, or you’re not whatever, like all these other things that they say you’re supposed to do. But how do you suddenly stop having a relationship with a person who was a part of almost all your life? My mother’s been gone 24 years and still on a daily basis hear the details that she would always quote or her opinion about something. When I cook food, I always hear, “Dejalo cocinar con el vapor” and don’t stir it and leave it alone. I hear that every single time and it’s been 24 years. And I probably will hear it for the rest of my life. So how do we say we don’t continue to have relationships with people that are gone? I saw an interesting meeting, maybe last year, where somebody was saying that they cook noodles a certain way because of an ex-boyfriend and that they have shoes like this because of somebody else that they knew and a friend taught them something about makeup or clothes or whatever. It’s not even people that are dead. It’s just people that have been in your life leave marks. There are certain movies, there are certain songs you always associate with people, and you might not have seen them in 15 years or talked to them on the phone in five but we all leave imprints on each other. So of course, the people that we love the most, that we live with the longest, they’re gonna leave a much deeper imprint than other people.

Candia: And what a beautiful way to do that through food.

silva: Mm hmm.

Candia: I think it’s something that I really threw myself into the time after my grandma passed away. I wanted those frijoles she would make but I wanted the smell in the house, of them cooking. I wanted her mole and to be able to make it and just show gratitude.

Thinking back to form and white space, what is there to be said about these when it comes to the significance of a poem?

silva: I never finish a poem without having figured out the form. I’ll start, and of course, you don’t know where it’s gonna go. You don’t know what the rhythm of it is gonna be. I don’t know what the white space needs to be but I have to figure it out as I’m writing the poem, or I’m not able to finish it because it hasn’t found its shape yet. Sometimes it’s as specific as these stanzas all have to have seven lines, or it’s gonna be something descending where it starts off with nine lines, goes to six, come back to nine or it’s going to have to be in couplets or whatever the form is, or it has to be left indent or right indent. I can’t finish a poem without figuring that out because I think that white space in the form, they’re not incidental. In my case, I don’t often keep the same form. Like I hope I never, I don’t know, I might. But as far as I know, I haven’t written a book yet where they all look the same because I need them to do different things. The same way that I have to find the words, I have to find the shape and I have to find the white space that fits that poem to be able to write it.

Part of it is because I think of all poetry as being musical and white space isn’t just silence. It’s not just a pause. It also helps inform the rhythm, the same way that you need silence to figure out the beat. And so, you have to have that. Or rather, I have to have that. It’s very deliberate and it’s not a purely aesthetic choice. It’s supposed to be sound, aesthetic, but also emotional. You need white space but we’re not used to thinking about it that way but I literally think, okay, you need a pause. If you’re sobbing, at least half a breath before, you can keep on going. That’s probably one of the things you see in my poems. If the lines are short, or if there’s a lot of white space, it’s because those words are very hard to say. So, I need them to be read, slower, not as slowly as I wrote them, but to be read slower than other words.

Candia: Thinking back to The Eaters of Flowers, it has cover art made by 2025 poet laureate Octavio Quintanilla, titled Puño de Flores. Other books have featured cover art from your brother Moises, like in Blood Sugar Canto, Blood Song, Cuicacalli, and now The Light of Your Body. What is it like deciding what your cover art will be? And is the art made specifically for the book, or does it exist prior to the book being created?

silva: In all cases, the art existed before. With the case of The Eaters of Flowers, the reason that it’s Octavio’s artwork and not my brother’s is that I had just come to the realization that I wanted to write something like this and I had decided on the title. Then two weeks later, I saw the art piece, and in my brain, it all came together. As I was writing the poems, that image was what I went back to and what I went back to and what I went back to. It was both inspiration and in a way too, it was also consolation, because to me, it was the best visual representation of how I felt at that time.

Candia: And the song!

silva: There was no way that I could hear Puño de Flores and not think Puño de Tierra. So, this is, for me, was a perfect tie in to what I’m writing about. That’s why I had to write that poem because I wanted to explain why this is perfect. I also don’t see how I could have been looking at my brother’s art while writing about losing him. That would have stopped me. I never would have been able to finish writing the book.

Candia: You do have a new book of short stories coming out, which I have right there.

(Takes out the light of your body.)

Is there anything you’d like to tell us about how the idea was born and what the nurturing process was like after?

silva: I actually wrote the first rough draft of one of the stories, 20 years ago, this summer. It’s been in between other books and other things and I didn’t know what the title was gonna be until about six years ago, but I knew that that was the art piece I wanted. It’s the last painting that my brother completed. I think it was in 2016 when he completed it. As I’ve been revising and finalizing and writing the last of the stories, that was the artwork that I concentrated on. I center my vision on an art piece, and it helps me write the book. I actually just finished writing the new poetry manuscript and there was an artwork that helped me do that, and that’s going to be on that cover by another friend.

Candia: Well, thank you so much for talking with me.

silva: Oh, sorry, one last part. It’s a question that I did want to answer. You were asking about the aftercare of it.

Candia: Yes.

silva: It was interesting. A few years back, somebody asked me about what I do to recover from the hard strenuous work of writing, and I said, actually, that question is turned the wrong way. I told them: the writing is the medicine. It’s just having to figure out how much medicine I need, huh? Is that six sentences worth of medicine, or is it a story worth of medicine, and how much can I take at a time? And afterwards, there really is none, because I’ve been taking care of myself throughout it. I really think that there are ways that we can look at art as medicine, that makes it healing. I’m interested in the idea of how do we disconnect the idea of art as being self-destructive or being abusive to our systems?

Candia: Or full of suffering.

silva: Yes. Especially for us who, you know, we are already coming from childhood into oppressed backgrounds. How do we not take down that Western idea of addiction or of having to abuse ourselves or of having to suffer? Like, let’s make this a good thing.