Today we’d like to introduce you to Rhonda Jackson Garcia.
Hi Rhonda, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I started writing when I was really young. I had a wonderfully supportive mother who always encouraged the storyteller in me to express herself in writing at every opportunity. I couldn’t always express my big feelings verbally, but I could write about them at length.
We didn’t have much in the way of material things but we always had books and magazines around the house. Reading and speaking were honored activities in our home. Mama was fond of telling us to watch the words we used because once they were spoken, we couldn’t pull them back. So I grew up in awe of the process of using words to build things and respected their ability to also destroy.
I took solace in that permanence and malleability of words and used them to create worlds I wanted to live in, while also writing my existence and personalized voice into the actual world I inhabited. I started out writing every story that popped into my head, often derivatives of books I was reading or movies I watched. I wrote plays and wrangled my two siblings into performing them with me. As a teenager, I branched out into what basically amounts to fan fiction romances and poetry. My first professional sale was a poem to a national romance magazine when I was seventeen.
Always a horror fan, I didn’t fully embrace the horror writing side of my being until I found myself pregnant, with an overabundance of pregnancy hormones and trepidation over the responsibilities of impending motherhood. The sometimes overwhelming fear I experienced as I thought about raising a child in a world where I knew real monsters existed spawned stories that explored these fears. There was a comfort won through exorcising my personal demons onto paper.
The academic side of writing opened up for me while I was in my MFA program. Up to that point, I hadn’t seriously considered that someone who had always been a strong writer in school could continue that type of writing outside of school. Thanks to a couple of insightful professors I had, I ventured out into that arena. I quickly figured out I could tie romance and horror to academic observations about the genres, as well as to popular culture.
Considering my early forays into playwriting and my neverending love for movies, it isn’t an accident that I also write screenplays. Film is a natural extension for storytelling and another outlet for the stories inside my head begging to be released.
Today, I happily write to my heart’s content. I also work as an English professor with the distinct honor of teaching students how to embrace writing as they learn how to make their voices heard. I’ve had several publications to date and my first horror story collection will be published in summer 2022.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Ultimately, I’m a Black woman who centers Black women in my writing. I advocate for the students in my classes who are often from marginalized communities, just as I fight for my own children at home. I champion inclusivity at every level of higher education and storytelling. I work towards a world where everyone has an equitable chance to define and enact their existence in the ways they desire, in all aspects. My writing is the main weapon I have with which to fight these battles.
All those branches along the same path have deeply entrenched resistance from systems and individuals, implicit and explicit. In the writing arena, I’ve often faced rejections based on my refusal to write stereotypical characters and my insistence on writing Black female experiences. In the writing discipline in higher education, I often find myself fighting practices and traditions that harm my students and impede their success in college. This fight will never take place on a smooth road. It’ll be rough and bumpy more than it will be comfortable.
But I have on my walking shoes. I follow in the footsteps of advocates for justice and inclusivity who have been doing this work since before I was born and alongside many much more experienced than I. I don’t know that what I work towards will come to fruition in my lifetime.
I do know this is my calling and I’m charged with working through the obstacles and lending my gifts to achieving the ultimate end.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I center the experiences of Black women in my academic and creative works. So many accomplishments achieved by Black women these days, especially in the horror genre, are groundbreaking. This means we’re creating in a long established space that hasn’t always been welcoming to us and our expressions. We’re slowly gaining a voice in a space where we’ve always worked but not been heard.
At this point in my writing career, I’m most proud of two accomplishments. The first is having been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award™ in the horror genre this past year. A nomination for this honor is exciting in itself, however, having been nominated for short non-fiction holds a special relevance for me. This is a relatively new category for these awards and to make an appearance on the final ballot with an academic essay about marginalized women means my beloved horror genre is not beyond growth, nor is inclusivity an unattainable goal. There is growing interest in the experiences of marginalized women.
The second point of pride is in the relationship I’m building with my film agent, Karmen Wells at The Rights Factory. Thanks to her tireless efforts and support of my writing, my work is gaining traction in Hollywood. Again, the fact that stories about Black women are of interest to people in the film world means these experiences are ones of interest on a broader scale than has been historically afforded.
One thing that sets me apart from others is my genuine desire to help my fellow writers and work in community with them to sustain and grow our genres. Because there are still scant few opportunities open to marginalized writers, especially in horror, there can be a tendency to develop the belief that “there can only be one or two of us” at certain levels. I don’t believe in this zero sum approach. We have to help each other. More successful writers help me all the time. I work to pay this benevolence forward and help other writers. None of us will find long-lasting success if we don’t build towards it together.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
My favorite childhood memory is of going to work with Mama when we were little and she didn’t have a sitter for us. Looking back at these adventures as an adult and mother, I understand this wasn’t something she wanted to do and it probably wasn’t easy to wrangle the three of us in a busy restaurant while she was trying to work. At that time, though, I remember being happy that we could all be together throughout those days. I hated when she had to leave us at home to go to work every day. I missed her dreadfully.
When we were with her at the restaurant, Mama would check on us in the lobby and bring us food and snacks. She packed plenty of diversionary toys and books to keep us busy, often bringing out brand new things we had never seen before so we’d stay interested in them to stay quiet and out of the way. We would sometimes sneak from the space she settled us into, away from the customers, and go up to the counter to watch her work.
Mama was so capable and she multi-tasked in a way that helped shape my own approach to working and motherhood. I watched her giving orders, cooking, interacting compassionately with customers, and offering gentle correction and problem-solving with an ease that was hard to recognize when she did it all the time at home. I decided that if I became a mother and had a job, I’d take my kids with me to work, too, and be successful at both parenting and working. I haven’t been able to do this on campus but I have often taken my children with me to book conferences and festivals.
Contact Info:
- Email: horrorblackademic@gmail.com
- Instagram: @rjacksonjoseph
- Facebook: Rhonda Jackson Joseph, Writer/Editor
- Twitter: @rjacksonjoseph
- Other: https://amzn.to/2UrRJLG
