1--What is the title of your latest release?
CANDLELIGHT BRIDGE
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
In 1910, twelve-year-old Candelaria Rivera and her family flee across the Chihuahuan Desert to America to escape the rising storm of the Mexican Revolution. Meanwhile, twenty-year-old Yan Chi Wong flees the Chinese Revolution and a shattering loss, also bound for America, where he’s nicknamed Yankee. They meet in El Paso, Texas, where they struggle to make a home in a world that does not want them, until a terrible desire threatens to destroy their lives. Candlelight Bridge is not a romance but a tale of grudging partners struggling to survive the American Dream.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
Candlelight Bridge takes place in southern China, northern Mexico, San Francisco, and primarily El Paso. Those locations were decided by family history. My Mexican Chinese grandma raised me, and my novel was inspired by the family stories she used to tell me: tales of secret immigrants and their mixed-race children, of loyalty and betrayal, and of trauma that gets passed like a torch from generation to generation.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
One thing I love about my protagonist is that she’s not a person I’d typically hang out with. But she’s only so different from me because of her time and place in history. Candelaria Rivera has little education and no specific goals. She becomes the epitome of motherhood and domesticity. I’m neither of those things. Yet, like her, I’m fiercely loyal to friends and devoted to family.
As I wrote Candelaria to life, I unearthed her hidden desire to learn, experience a wider world, help others, find romantic love, and grow inner strength. I relate to all that. My goal was to liberate her within the limitations thrust on her by society.
So, although I wouldn’t usually hang out with someone like Candelaria, I’m grateful I did. Getting to know her helped me empathize more with people I don’t immediately understand and helped me better understand many facets of myself.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Fierce, Protective, Resourceful
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
Much as I relished the challenge of connecting with Candelaria, I shuddered to realize I had to connect with Yankee Wong too. He goes through a terrible trauma and doesn’t come out the other side a better man, though he wants to be.
Yankee allows the experiences that haunt him to drive him to do whatever he wants, without considering the feelings of others. He justifies his actions as necessary to receive his due in life. Those all-too-human impulses frighten me.
Yet, unless I found a way to relate to Yankee, he’d be just another run-of-the-mill villain. As I came to understand him, I began to forgive myself and others for the mistakes we rationalize along the way. I believe literature deepens our compassion, even for people who baffle us.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
On a first draft, I trust my subconscious to know better than I do the story that wants to be told. I outline only after I finish a chapter, asking questions about what I’ve just written. What are the character’s motivations? What’s the conflict? What changes? My answers reveal what needs work. Maybe a motivation is unclear, a conflict needs higher stakes, or nothing has changed in five pages! Once I save my notes, I’m free to move on and revise later.
I used to agonize over every problem, spinning my wheels in the mud for days. Answers come faster when I keep moving. Sometimes, I discover I didn’t need that frustrating chapter after all. Prioritizing momentum not only speeds my progress but also improves my storytelling.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I love baking homemade fruit pies. My favorite is winter berry, made with pears, cranberries, and blueberries. The secret is Grandma’s crust recipe, which uses cooking oil instead of shortening. My mouth waters just thinking about flaky crust, piled with sweet and sour fruit, topped with vanilla ice cream.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
During the pandemic, my husband and I used our 2020 vacation fund to transform our backyard into a certified wildlife habitat, full of native plants that attract birds, bees, and butterflies. Then our 2021 vacation fund paid a small company to build a she-shed from recycled materials and set it in our garden. That’s my writing studio.
My studio is made from reclaimed dead urban trees, corrugated tin from old greenhouses, and a timber from an old shipwreck. One of its many windows is a salvaged door full of mullioned glass, hung sideways, which drops open to catch the chatter of birds, the scent of orange blossoms, and the splashing of our rock waterfall. A picture window overlooks our whole rollicking garden, which includes magenta hummingbird sage, yellow monkey flowers, and orange alstroemeria.
It’s not perfect. The shed needs a space heater in winter and hits 80 degrees in summer—even with my overhead fan spinning and all the windows open. Despite my studio/she-shed’s many distracting joys and pains, I’ve never been more productive. It’s like writing from inside the happy ending of a book.
10--Who is an author you admire?
One of my favorite living authors is Luis Alberto Urrea. I love connecting with my Latina roots through literature, but what keeps me coming back to Urrea’s writing is that every page reveals what he teaches all his students: “Pick up your pen with love or don’t pick it up at all.” My favorite Urrea book is The Hummingbird’s Daughter, a historical novel that reimagines the life of his great-aunt Teresita, the Saint of Cabora, a healer and mystic who helped inspire the Mexican Revolution.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
I was a lonely only child, so I often sat alone in my mother’s overstuffed armchair to read. Books were my first friends. In third grade, I read Little Women and identified with Jo, who got in trouble for speaking her mind and doing things her way. Like me, she loved writing and acting out stories. From then on, I knew I wanted to be a writer like Jo, which is to say, like Louisa May Alcott, though it took years to believe I could write a book, which seemed like magic.
Despite my initial doubts, my journey always involved stories. I was an aspiring actress, then a TV journalist, a writer for HGTV and Food Network, and a ghostwriter who helped others write their books, until I published my memoir, They Only Their Husbands—about my life in Alaska and solo trek around the world. Yet it’s with my novel, Candlelight Bridge, that I feel I’m fulfilling my dream that began with Little Women.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I started writing Candlelight Bridge in 2009, finished around 2015, and spent seven years submitting and revising. By 2022, I was ready to self-publish. But I submitted to a few final small presses, keen to find one editor willing to tell readers, “I think you’ll love this story…”
When I got “the call,” it looked like this: me sitting at a laptop reading an email. But when I read the publisher’s words, “I really believe in this novel,” it felt like finding the right home. I said that affirmation to myself for years—“I believe”—but someone saying it back is powerful. FlowerSong Press is devoted to amplifying borderland stories and voices often marginalized by mainstream media. This was what I’d been waiting for: the right fit for my story.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Historical fiction, science fiction, and experimental are my favorites. However, what my most beloved books have in common isn’t genre but scope. I love sagas set in unfamiliar worlds, with characters who feel like fish out of water. It doesn’t matter whether the stories are about present, past, or future, reality or fantasy. I don’t read to escape. I read to explore—ideas, the human heart, myself.
I love hard-luck characters and big problems, so long as the author draws such intricate sensory impressions and interprets characters with such compassion that the story both reflects and transcends reality. I’m into multilayered plots that reveal deep human connection, such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from The Goon Squad, literary labyrinths that weave through my mind long after the story’s over.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
My list of favorites is long, but these days, I could watch Arrival over and over and never tire of it. After so many sci-fi flicks about the terror and wonder of first contact with aliens, this one’s dramatic question slays me: how the heck are we supposed to talk to each other? Bonus points: I love stories that are unstuck in space and time, that dive into intimate relationships set against expansive plots, and that remind us we’re all connected.
15--What is your favorite season?
I find spring downright inspiring. Doesn’t matter that I have allergies, I’m all about the rebirth of life as flowers bloom and explode with color. The replenishing of the earth after a long sleep, and even apparent death, fills me with hope and wonder.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
My favorite birthdays include a hike with my husband, followed by dining out someplace where we don’t have to dress up but the food tastes as if we did. My favorite hikes involve streams and flowers. My favorite dinners involve butter and sometimes require a bib.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I recommend Wes Anderson’s Oscar-winning short-film, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, adapted from a Roald Dahl story. Henry Sugar is a rich man who reads the story of a guru who can see without using his eyes. Mr. Sugar wants to master the same skill so he can cheat at gambling, but this effort transforms him into a man who wants something completely different. I love that Anderson never forgets my favorite thing about stories: anything can happen! He maximizes every audio-visual tool possible, even if he must invent them, to carry us deeper inside the story: books within books, pictures within pictures, stories within stories. It's a 39-minute kaleidoscope of wonders with a timeless message.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Mexican. It’s a comforting taste of home that reminds me of my grandma, who raised me. Even if it’s simple beans and tortillas, I’m all in. However, my favorite is chile colorado, especially if it’s almost spicy enough to make me cry.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
I asked my husband what I do with free time, and he said, “You find something to fill it.” That’s fair. But what are my favorite somethings? Read a book, write a book, watch a movie, dance to swing music, hike to a waterfall with someone I love, sit in our garden and watch hummingbirds hover.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
I’ve begun writing the sequel to Candlelight Bridge, which will pick up where the first story left off—in 1934. This time, the main characters will come from the next generation of the Rivera and Wong families. The story will journey back to China and El Paso, but also to L.A.’s Eastside. The book will take readers from the Great Depression, through World War Two, and beyond.
In 1910, twelve-year-old Candelaria Rivera and her family flee across the Chihuahuan Desert to America to escape the rising storm of the Mexican Revolution. Meanwhile, twenty-year-old Yan Chi Wong flees the Chinese Revolution and a shattering loss, also bound for America, where he's nicknamed Yankee. They meet in El Paso, Texas, where they struggle to make a home in a world that does not want them, until a terrible desire threatens to destroy their lives. Candlelight Bridge is not a romance but a tale of grudging partners struggling to survive the American Dream.
Historical | Fiction [Flowersong Press, On Sale: May 28, 2024, e-Book, ISBN: 9781963245073 / eISBN: 9781963245073]
Cara Lopez Lee is the author of the new historical novel, Candlelight Bridge, which she’s excited to announce is now available from FlowerSong Press. She’s also the author of the memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands, and coauthor of the veteran-acclaimed Unexpected Prisoner: Memoir of a Vietnam POW (with Robert Wideman). You’ll find more of her writing in such publications as Los Angeles Times, Slackjaw, and Manifest-Station.
She’s nuts about traveling, swing dancing, and binging stories of all kinds—fiction and non, TV and movies, live storytelling and podcasts. Cara and her husband live in Ventura, California, where they enjoy hiking, biking, and gardening in their coastal wildlife habitat full of hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies.
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