Yes, experiences inform writing, but someone like Zoraida doesn’t need to steal from real life to create the wonderful words she creates. There’s sometimes a tendency to equate everything a writer does that has some connection to their culture as being personal, and it absolutely isn’t. I felt the pressure to do write by her story because I’m writing very close to home-an Ecuadorian matriarch and the questionable men in her life.”īut that doesn’t mean Zoraida is writing her story, or her family’s story. “Writing adult didn’t require stepping out of my comfort zone but writing about Orquídea and her family did. I have written adult romance under the name Zoey Castile.”Īdult romance which you should absolutely go read, ASAP. “ Inheritance of Orquídea Divina is technically my adult literary debut. This work, of course, meant stepping into a space Córdoba hadn’t occupied before, not in the same way.
Character names have changed, but the central scene of the family funeral expanded, and so I worked out figuring out what happened before that moment and what happened after.” In fact, “the seed for Inheritance of Orquídea Divina was a short story called “Divine Are the Stars” in the YA fantasy anthology Toil & Trouble. “I work off of imagery, especially when there’s a character I can’t get out of my head.” As Córdoba herself noted “the rooster in the novel is named Gabo, and I do admire Allende so much.”īut the real inspiration for the book was “the image of a woman who lived in a valley all alone and called her family back to that homestead,” Córdoba shared, only to go on to explain. But just because she wasn’t meaning to call back to them in this book, that doesn’t mean that the things you read, the things you love, don’t leave their mark on you. This, of course, means that I was very excited to get a chance to pick Zoraida’s brain about the inspiration behind the book, her dream projects, and of course, this book that I enjoyed so much.įor me, the book was both a revelation, and a return to my roots, because there’s a lot of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina that calls back to writers from the boom of Latin American literature, and what they inspired afterwards in writers like Isabel Allende – something that, consciously or not, was both an inspiration to Zoraida and to me. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Zoraida Córdova’s adult debut, is one of our favorite books of the year – and one I re-read three separate times before even sitting down to write my review.
0 kommentar(er)
