March 20, 2025 • 34 mins
Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. Known for her genre-bending works that blend crime, horror, and folklore, Pelayo shares her personal journey, including her Puerto Rican heritage, the impact of death and loss, and her work as a journalist; and how these experiences shape her writing. Pelayo's latest novel, Vanishing Daughters is now available!
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Want to hear your story on Susto? Fill out the Letters From the Beyond form or visit SustoPodcast.com to be shared on the show!
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Become a Patron here! Subscribe to Susto's YouTube channel!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Hey, girlfriends, it's me Adrian or Aiden. Either way, you
are still listening to SUSTO and I am still your host,
and today I have a very very special treat for you.
We are joined by none other than Cynthia Belio, who
is the first Bourriqua, the first Puerto Ricanya bram Stoker
Award winner. She's also the author of titles such as
(00:46):
Forgotten Sisters, Children of Chicago, and The Shoemaker's Magician. In
addition to writing genre venting novels that incorporate fairy tale, mystery, detective, crime,
and horror elements. Pilio or Sina, as I've heard you
like to be called, has written numerous short stories, including
the collection Lotteria and the poetry collection crime Scene. The
recipient of the twenty twenty one International Latino Book Awards,
(01:09):
she holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she
lives in Chicago with her family. And we will kind
of drop this again later, but if you want to
look into her now, you can visit Sinapilio dot com. Cynthia,
thank you so much for being here. Welcome to SUSTO.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Thank you for inviting me. I just love you. I
love everything that you do, so thank.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
You the music to my ears. I mean again. Also,
I'm like I told you right before we kind of
started recording, I was like, I'm going to get into it.
But I'm such a fan of this book of your work.
I think, just right off the bat, something that I
noticed in reading Vanishing Daughters, which should be available now,
it I can tell that you are a poet. Your
(01:52):
writing is just so beautiful, and the world building that
happens in your writing is it's so cool and so
so If y'all are looking for something to add to
your I'm sure already very long to be read piles.
You need to get Vanishing Daughters. You need to put
it at the top of that pile and read it
because it is so so good. Cynthia, would you care
(02:13):
to kind of introduce the listeners to a little bit
about who you are, if maybe they don't know you yet.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, So, Cynthia Palaio, my friends call me Sina. I'm
Puerto Rican. So every Puerto Rican that you know probably
has a Puerto Rican nickname. And so my oldest brother
is Roberto Junior, but we call him titoo our family.
Then we have Richard, who's GOC. Naturally he would get
GOC from Richard. I don't know how we got that.
(02:41):
And then my my nickname just became Sina, and so
that's a term of endearment. That's what my dad called me.
My dad died in twenty twenty three, and so I'm
still like reeling from that because I was super close
with him, and I was born in Puerto Rico. My
parents were born in Puerto Rico, my great great grandpa,
parents great grandparents, and so they my family came here.
(03:03):
They kind of went back and forth for a bit,
and then finally in the eighties they were like, we
got to stay here for the kids so they can
go to school. I mean, my parents have a sixth
grade education. They grew up in houses with dirt floors.
My head of latrine, and so they were just like,
we could stay on the island and deal with you
know that it's very difficult. It's gonna be difficult for them,
(03:26):
or we can be here and it's gonna be difficult
for them, but at least they'll have running water, because
on the island there's issues with like the water and
the electricity going out and things like that. So I
think my parents knew. My dad especially knew, these kids
are gonna deal with racism. They're just gonna deal with it.
This is gonna be their life. He dealt He was
(03:48):
a darker skin, so he dealt with it quite extensively.
I dealt with it, of course, being a woman and Latita,
and I recognize my privilege as being a lighter skin Withina,
and I do recognize that it still hasn't shielded me
from so much. And so I grew up in inner
city Chicago, and the inner city and our neighborhood quickly gentrified.
(04:13):
We were the first Hispanics on the block. Within a
few years, all the everybody else left. I was the first.
I went to inner city schools that were didn't have
the proper resources. But you know, I may do like
I had librarians that recognized, like she she likes to read,
but this is we got all the beat up books.
(04:34):
So I read a lot of like classics. I was
the first person in my family to step in a
college classroom. I had no idea what I was doing
there because that was my high school was like ninety
percent Latino. So the walk into a classroom with all
white people. It was terrified, and I was. It was
the first day I ever experienced, like straight up racism.
Was the first day I entered a college classroom. And
(04:55):
I I came home crying because I told Dad and
I was like, I'm not going back, and he's like,
you're going yeah. And I eventually worked as a journalist.
I worked in Inner City for the Intercity newspapers. I
left journalism because of post traumatic stress covering crime, and
then I eventually got my MFA and started writing Wow,
lending crime.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
And I mean, in reading your work, I kept thinking,
this is someone who has truly lived a robust life.
And I don't know you personally. I don't know many
of these details that I'm hearing now, So hearing them
now it's kind of also validation of like how much
of your life and yourself that you pour into your writing.
And I think that is such a beautiful, vulnerable thing
(05:39):
to do as a creator, as a writer and author,
and it truly shone through through this book and on
all of your work. But again, in reading this book,
and I have some questions about it, it was it
was so so I don't know, just like the grit
you know that it had was I like, I wanted
to like hug you if I don't know, that's weird,
(05:59):
but I was like, I was like, I just felt
kind of also seen in some places. So I was like,
this person understands true loss, and so I just I
want to thank you for putting that out there into
the world, because it can be very hard to do,
but I think you were going to truly, truly impact
a lot of people in a really positive way. So
(06:19):
I wanted to ask you. I guess the first question
that I have here is again about the way that
you blend crime, horror, and folklore into your writing, and
especially in this book. Do you have a particular approach
to balancing all of those genres and additionally, what draws
you to write these kinds of stories that mix those
(06:40):
things with investigative elements.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I think with fairy tales and folklore, those were just
the first stories I was told. My parents couldn't read English,
and so what they did they would just tell me
whatever stories they remembered from like their kindergarten or their
preschool was told to them, like you know, whatever ghost
stories my father remembers from like, you know, the island.
(07:06):
I remember him telling me that up on the mountains
in Puerto Rico that you would late at night you
would see like lights blowing up the mountain and he's like,
those are the ghosts of people that would walk up
with their lanterns and they would fall off and they
would like miss their stuff and fall off the mountain
and die. So like things like this they just like
really stood out to me. So fairy tales were told
(07:28):
to me by my mother and like ghost stories by
my father. And then with covering crime, I think it's
because I just I was exposed to so much crime
growing up because I went I went to a high
school that it struggled. It was ninety percent black and
Latino and ninety percent at the poverty rate our high school,
(07:49):
and so there was a lot of socioeconomic issues there
and a lot of really good people there, but many
of them were victims of circumstance. And so I unfortunately
lost a lot of people to goune crime. I have
friends who are surveying life in prison for murder just
(08:11):
because of so much. And it's still like we still
see it. We still see young people hurting each other
and that's something that that stuck with me, like what
we do this to people from a very young age?
What is going on? And so I think that's where
I started exploring it from my personal experience. I couldn't
(08:34):
do it via realism because it's too painful for me
to write it without the monsters. So I write it
with the monsters included, and that makes it a little
bit more easier for me to mentally process.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, definitely, I've had someone on the show, a screenwriter
and a director, say that horror is a really good
analogy for attaching grief to and honestly, I think for
many emotions and kind of experience experiences that we have
to go through as as people. But kind of jumping
(09:07):
back to this what you mentioned about like your dad
telling you stories about like you know, the lights in
the mountain and other kinds of stories. Are there specific
legends or stories, either real or fiction that influence to
vanishing daughters? And I want to kind of just call
it out specifically to why the idea of like sleeping beauty.
I think that kind of like the story sleeping Beauty
(09:30):
was very prevalent in this book, and I read in
a previous interview that you had mentioned your next book,
which was Vanishing Daughters, was going to be kind of
based around or built on, the story of Sleeping Beauty.
So I'm curious about that, and also if there were
any other kind of legends that influenced this book.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I mean, definite, that's definitely just the concept of La Yourna,
because she's I know, you know, there's the story that
she did the horrible thing with her children. Of course,
it's a folk story or a legend. Do we know that?
And so I am fascinated that so many of these
(10:09):
legends and folk stories are around women becoming monstrous because
they were either murdered or something bad happened to them.
And so that was my fascination with it. And then
I kind of thought about the vanishing hitchhiker, which is
a woman in white and that story. You have that
(10:33):
legend all across the globe. You have it throughout Latin America,
you have it throughout Europe, you have it all Like
I feel like every single state and America has a
vanishing hitchhiker, and it's very often a woman dressed in white.
And so I guess I just started thinking, why are
we scared of it. Is it a ghost that's was
(10:55):
hit by a car? Is it a ghost that was
like murdered. Is it a ghost that like fell down
that like? And so just the fact that we create
monsters out of what I think were murdered women, I
think is sad.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, one hundred percent. And you mentioned that, and I'm
so glad that you kind of like said it almost verbatim. So,
I mean, I have the reader's copy here, and I
don't know if you can see I have all my
tabs here on the book because the way that I
read a book is like anytime something kind of like
impacts me or that I think is like really strong,
I leave a little tab. And there are many tabs
(11:30):
here in this book. But one line that I want
to read, if you don't mind, and it just to
echo what you said. It says, why do we fear
the ghosts of women who were murdered? Why don't we
fear the thing that made them what they are? And
oh my god, I just got toolls right now reading it.
But when my first read through of this that I
like again, it just kind of it hit me like
a ton of bricks, and I was like, oh, it
(11:51):
was just like it it's painful and it's sad, like
that is kind of like that that is true, like
that's that's what happens. And those are also the kinds
of conversations that I try to initiate when I'm telling
these stories, especially like you said, with the story of Laodona,
that is such a classic story. I love this kind
of I'm not sure what to call it, if it's
(12:12):
like a reclamation or like a restructuring or whatever about
the way people are now talking about the story of
Lioona or La Malince and kind of approaching it from
a more like human like empathetic space instead of like, no,
like she's a bad person, she's just a ghost and
that Whereas I don't know, if you believe in astrology,
(12:34):
I'm a cancer, so I have a lot of like
feelings and emotion, and so whenever I hear these stories,
I'm like, no, but I want to know their side. Yes,
I'm a virgal rising. But then you also mentioned the
trope of the vanishing hitchhiker, which again was also very
prevalent in this book, and like you said, it's a
classic tell and your use of it in in this book,
(12:55):
it was so nostalgic because it's also one of the
stories that I heard growing up, and I want to
to ask you more about your relationship with that story,
although you just kind of mentioned about it, but I
also wanted to say growing up, there is a book
and I constantly I'm sure my listeners are tired of
hearing of it. I'm constantly referencing it on sustal. It
took a book called Stories that Must Not Die And
(13:16):
in the questions that I sent you, there's a link
to it so you can check it out later if
you want. It's a PDF of the book. It's page
five of the PDF that I sent you. But it's
the story of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. And that story was
read to me in elementary And the name of the hitchhiker,
the ghost hitchhiker in this story, her name was Maria,
and so I was like, oh my god. I was like,
even the name was so close to to what you
(13:39):
Her name one of the characters names in this book
was Mary, So I was just like, WHOA Like, It's
interesting to see how these stories are so similar regardless
of where they're told geographically.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Well, with the Vanishing hitchhiker specifically, I was just fascinated
with it because this particular story is the Chicago area's
most famous ghost story. And what I find fascinating about
this one, as opposed to like other folk tales about
(14:12):
other women that are perceived as monstrous, this particular one,
there is like a level of endearment or warmth over Mary.
And while it isn't I know, we're talking about Latin
need that like, while it isn't a Latino story, I
also feel like it's still like an it has hints
(14:35):
to an immigrant story, and I think what a lot
of people forget and what I the arguments I make
in a lot of my books when I write about
Irish immigrants or Dutch immigrants is that these people were
once the immigrants and were the other at that point
in time, and a lot of the.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Persecution that they experienced are now we are experiencing as
Latinos in the United States. And so that's why I
do like to go to like those stories to kind
of see like what were they experiencing, And especially with
I wrote about the Irish immigrants who were working on
the Illinois Michigan Canal. They were literally working on this
(15:17):
canal building it falling into the river and dying and
nobody cared.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Like and I was just like, this is literally like
our immigrant farm workers today, Like these people will work
and then get sick from the chemicals or in accidents,
and nobody remembers their names. And I remember when I
was doing research finding accounts of like, yeah, we just
don't know how many Irish immigrants died, and I was like,
(15:43):
that's we're literally doing that today to the people today.
And so with this story, I just felt like there
was so much historically that I could kind of build
onto and ask, And especially with we're talking about the
character or the ghost story. The ghost name is Resurrection Mary.
(16:07):
I feel like every single Chicago knows the story. If
you're born in the city of Chicago or raised in
the city of Chicago, you have been told variation of
the Resurrection Mary's story. And this was me trying to
give her some agency. And in all the accounts of
people who have seen her, she always says, take me home.
(16:30):
I want to go home. And so this was me
taking Mary home.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Oh my god, ah so so so good, so good,
thank you. I want to ask also if there was
a particular scene or an element in Vanishing Daughters that
(16:59):
was especially either difficult or rewarding to write. And I
want you to choose where to take this question. You
don't have to give both. You can just kind of
choose one if you'd like.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
To, Oh, difficult or rewarding. Ah, okay, I'll do both.
So difficult was writing the serial Killer because to put
my brain in the mindset of a serial killer was very,
very difficult and very disturbing rewarding. This is also a
(17:33):
grief story.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I wrote it while I was not well. My father
died and I was very close to him, and I
wanted to kind of write about what it feels like
to go through grief. And one thing I've noticed is
that in American culture, to grieve openly is perceived as strange,
(17:57):
whereas we just let it all out, like we cry,
we scream, we we do what we need to do,
and it's seemed as so normal. I mean, I remember
sitting vigil next to my father's but like, we just
do this, this is part of death, is part of
the process. And then I kind of felt like shamed
(18:19):
almost by like Americans or American culture, because I was
grieving so loud and people were like are you okay?
And there was like they're losing it. I'm like, my
father's what do you mean.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
My father just like no, I'm not okay.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, and it's okay not to be okay. And I
just thought that was so insulting and so disrespectful.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Or could you imagine going like and you know, I
remember my husband He's like, oh yeah, may well, we
would be there like with the rosary, during the rosaries
for like days after someone died.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's part of the process. And I was so insulted
that there was this perception that I will grieving too
much and I'm like, oh, I'm not grieving enough. And
so the book was that the book was me being like,
this is what grief feels like.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Oh my god. Yeah again. I just thank you for
being so open and so vulnerable. I want I keep
saying thank you because I agree with that. I feel
like grief is kind of shamed in some ways, and
I won't I don't want to get like air their
business up. But one of my closest friends, one of
my best friends, they lost a parent a couple of
years ago, and I remember them saying something very similar
(19:34):
about how like they felt like they weren't almost allowed
to grieve. And so just again everything you're saying now
and then in reading the book was wow. It was
like a just such like a deep look into what
those emotions feel and can look like too. So again,
(19:55):
for the one hundred times I'm going to keep saying it,
thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, the main
the main character of the book Briar Rose Thorn. She's
a journalist who starts experiencing these eerie occurrences after her
own mother's death. And so I want to ask, you're
kind of touching it already, but what was the inspiration
behind her character.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I wanted to write a character that was very like
on the nose to be like appended to like a
fairy tale. Like I didn't want to like it's almost
like I didn't want to write like sleeping Beauty herself
and what that meant. But I wanted to write somebody
that was like very embedded or very like a representative
(20:40):
of what a fairy tale is. And then developing her
took of a long time, and I think it took
me like months to even find her name. And I
was just like, I'm just gonna go with Briar and
that comes from the Grim's fairy tales, the Little Briar Rose.
So she's a mash of the various characters of Sleeping Beauty,
(21:05):
mix of myself as a journalist, and and a third
thing that I don't even know where she came from.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, a third secret ingredient.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, it took a while to like really pin her down,
but I wanted somebody who had been in Chicago for
a long time, that had ancestry here, that did have
like like really you know, you know, you know, generational
roots here that was connected to this place in time.
(21:39):
And then when as I was doing the research along
Archer Avenue and it's this takes place along Archer Avenue,
and Archer Avenue is said to be the most haunted
road in the Chicago land area and one of the
most haunted roads in the United States. So it's not
just resurrection Mary that's scene here. There's like people have
(22:00):
claim to have seen like carriages being pulled by like
black horses that have like fire coming out of their eyes.
People have said that they've seen like monks rising from
the woods. So Archier Avenue is a lot of weird stuff.
And so when I found that historical piece of all
of those Irish immigrants that had died there. I was like,
(22:20):
this is it, this is her ancestry.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Yeah, yeah, god, yeah it was. It was really fun
to see how you kind of weaved in these, uh,
these folk tells or the ghosts, these ghost stories throughout
the book because the story itself, like the main story,
is already it's creepy and it's eerie. And again, like
you said, you you got into the minds of a
serial killer who you wrote so well because reading it
(22:44):
was like uncomfortable at times, I was like, oh, this
person is making me like crawling my skin. So the
work paid off. But also, yeah, the weaving voice, Yeah,
the weaving of those stories into the novel was so good.
And the novel itself it touches on the horrors of
(23:06):
real life. You know that horror is like tremendous grief
and violence, particularly violence against women, and this book is
about a serial killer targeting women over years, and it's
countless women, countless lives lost. How do you approach this
weaving of supernatural horror with real world terror.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That's a great question. It's one of the things I
usually do when I'm drafting a novel, is I know
I'm going to go into it with a fairy tale
or a folk tale in mind. I usually want some
type of true crime element as well, and then we'll
have like the overall arching story. With this story, we
(23:52):
have had a lot of community members have claimed that
there's a serial killer operating in the city of Chicago.
There have been reports of over fifty one woman of
predominantly women of color throughout the city who have been
murdered in very similar circumstances. And I thought it was
(24:14):
very strange and scary that law enforcement keeps brushing aside
the very similar instances in which they're found. And so
I wanted to explore a serial killer in this story
that is like obsessed with, of course women, and there's
(24:35):
very specific type of women women like he Yeah, you
had mentioned writing being in his voice was very upsetting.
It took me a while to find that voice and
to develop that serial killer's voice, and I researched. I
did a lot of research, reading of different serial killers,
Like I read Sounds of the Lambs again, but that's
(24:58):
I'm like, that's not really him. And someone said you
should read Joyce Carol Olts's Zombie, and that book is
loosely based off of a young Jeffrey Dahmer and it's
told from his perspective. I could even finish the book,
like I was reading it and I was like, yep,
that's that's kind of I get. I was starting to
get the voice of my serial killer. And I was like,
(25:19):
I've got my house, Like I literally like I got
halfway through, and then I went and I donated it
to like a community library center. I was like, I
don't even want this book. It was so disturbed. Oh
my god, Joyce carol Olds's Zombie. It is disturbing. It's
like loosely based off of a young Jeffrey Dahmer.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah wow, but a great reference for character study, I guess. Yeah,
oh wow. So have you as we you know, approached
at the end of our interview, and I forgot to
mention earlier. This is a video episode available for patrons
on patreon dot com Slash Sustal podcast. So as we
wrap up our interview and before we jump into the
(26:01):
Patreon exclusive questions, have you ever had your own experience
or encounter with the paranormal and if so, could you
share that with us?
Speaker 2 (26:12):
That's a great question, because I was like a paranormal
investigative girally like hardcore for a while. I've gone to
so many different places with my tape recorders and my
different equipment. I've done it all. I was like spending
night hearing and going to abandoned places, and I never
(26:34):
ever ever experienced anything until randomly my husband and I
had taken a ghost tour, like a fun ghost tour
in Chicago espirs and then this is what my book
Before Vanishing Daughters is based off. I've Forgotten Sisters. We
were standing outside of the Chicago River and the tour
guide is like, eight hundred eleven people died in the
(26:56):
Chicago River right here in nineteen fifteen, and he starts
telling us the story, and he tells us if you
take pictures, you'll see orbs. Some people claim to see
a face. And I was like at that point, I
was so like disillusioned. I'm like, I'm not going to
see anything. And I just started taking a ton of pictures.
And then as I was scrolling through the pictures, there
was a woman standing behind me and she like screamed.
(27:16):
She's like, oh my god, there's a woman in your
picture and we zoomed in and it's like from shoulder
up of a woman looking out from the water, and
we were.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Just like, oh my god.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
It was so creepy. And that's what my book forgot
there's just based off of And it was because of
that that I'm like, Okay, something's there. And I felt
very like what we struggled with wanting to believe. And
after that, I felt like, Okay, there's there's there's a
there's a cosmic wink. The universe is like winking at me.
(27:50):
There's something there.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
So yeah, oh my god. I had like just full
chills when you said that.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Oh it was very Yeah, it looked it was like
a face that people are just like, that's a face
staring at you. And since then I was like, I
have to write the story and so yeah, it might
look great. Yeh canon camera but uh yeah, we would
have like scrolling on the viewfinder. But yeah, I'll show
(28:15):
it too.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Oh my god. That is so cool. And our final question,
this is something new that I want to start asking guests,
so you'll be the first person to answer this question
on SUSTA. I want to know what is haunting you
right now? So if you have any books or movies
or music or multiple things that are just currently like
just can't get them out of your head. What's haunting
(28:39):
you at this moment?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
You know what's haunting me? Saints, like different the stories
of this. I don't know, Like I've had this like
weird thing with different saints lately, and I've been like
researching different saints, and I mean this, there's like thousands
of saints and then some of the them aren't even
(29:01):
recorded because like their history was like never the original
saints were sainted by cults or by like by they
became like a cultish activity. I don't know. I've been
really fascinated with saints and their stories and how some
of them have some wild stories of saint ud. So yeah,
(29:21):
that's been my thing. I've been on a very like
iconography thing lately, and I don't know where it's going.
So I'm just writing that out. But some of these
saints have got some wild stories heads being chopped off,
yeah yeah, and you know, going becoming it, going into
(29:43):
meditative states, and it's some you know like Joan of
Arc you think you forget, you know, we forget Joan
of Arc was like burned at the stake as a
witch and she's a saint, so I don't know. I've
been really into saints lately.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Wow, oh my god, that is such. That is such
a good answer, especially for the first time that I'm
asking it on here. So such a great answer. Yeah, yeah,
I was actually yesterday. It's so fun. You mentioned I
was going around town here in Austin and I was
dropping off some red cards, the know your Rights cards
for immigration and in case someone has encounters with ice.
(30:16):
And one of the places that I went to, oh,
of course, one of the places that I went to,
it was a shop that had candles and stuff, and
there was a wall that was just all candles and
it was all saint candles, a big section of it,
and I was looking at them. I was like, wow,
there's so many of these that I had never heard of,
and like, obviously people are working with them or praying
(30:38):
to them or putting in petitions with them because their
candles are here. So it's so interesting. I was I
had taken a picture. If I go by again, I'll
take a picture. I'll send it to you and hopefully
that'll contribute to your study on saints.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
I'm just so fascinating. I'm like, I feel like, I
don't know, I feel like there's almost like this reclamation
and I think there's a portion of us that are
like reclaiming that we can reclaim these images and I
can reclaim it, you know, as absolutely non binary or LGBTQ,
Like I can reclaim this image and this this strength
(31:13):
and this power and tap into it. I don't know,
there's just something, there's something there. I don't know what
it is. It's kind of and I think it's I
think it's all kind of started with the Bishop recently.
Remember when the Bishop kind of went viral a few
days ago. I saw that, uh Trump, She's just like,
have some mercy on trans children, on immigrant I was
(31:36):
just like, yeah, reclaim this. So I loved it.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, absolutely, Oh my god, Yeah that was such a
beautiful moment. Oh my well, speaking of beautiful moments, once again,
thank you so much for coming onto Susta and also
for writing Vanishing Daughters Again. It is available now. If
you haven't yet, please go pick up your copy. Right
after this, we are just going to jump into to
the bonus Patreon content, But for anybody who is not
(32:03):
a Patreon, a best goalfriend subscriber on Patreon. Thank you
so much for listening today. Cynthia, thank you so so
much for your time for being here. If people wanted
to find you online or in stores, where could they
look for you?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Thank you. You can find me online at Sinapalile dot com.
I'm on Blue Sky and substach and for now Instagram.
I'm still on Instagram, but overall for my books, you
can find them in Barnes and Noble or any of
your favorite local dy bookstores.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Awesome, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Ay goolfriends.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
This is aiden I am jumping in while editing because
I realized that I forgot to promote the book giveaway
that Cynthia and I are doing. Cynthia was so kind
and so generous as to donate two signed copies of
her books. To learn how to enter the giveaway and
win your signed copy, you can do so by checking
(32:59):
out the social medidia post for this episode on Instagram. Again,
that is at susital podcast on every social media platform,
but this giveaway is happening on Instagram, so go to
this post swipe through the carousel to learn how to
enter and win your signed copy of a Cynthia Belio Book,
good Luck,
Hey, girlfriends, it's me Adrian or Aiden. Either way, you
are still listening to SUSTO and I am still your host,
and today I have a very very special treat for you.
We are joined by none other than Cynthia Belio, who
is the first Bourriqua, the first Puerto Ricanya bram Stoker
Award winner. She's also the author of titles such as
(00:46):
Forgotten Sisters, Children of Chicago, and The Shoemaker's Magician. In
addition to writing genre venting novels that incorporate fairy tale, mystery, detective, crime,
and horror elements. Pilio or Sina, as I've heard you
like to be called, has written numerous short stories, including
the collection Lotteria and the poetry collection crime Scene. The
recipient of the twenty twenty one International Latino Book Awards,
(01:09):
she holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she
lives in Chicago with her family. And we will kind
of drop this again later, but if you want to
look into her now, you can visit Sinapilio dot com. Cynthia,
thank you so much for being here. Welcome to SUSTO.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Thank you for inviting me. I just love you. I
love everything that you do, so thank.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
You the music to my ears. I mean again. Also,
I'm like I told you right before we kind of
started recording, I was like, I'm going to get into it.
But I'm such a fan of this book of your work.
I think, just right off the bat, something that I
noticed in reading Vanishing Daughters, which should be available now,
it I can tell that you are a poet. Your
(01:52):
writing is just so beautiful, and the world building that
happens in your writing is it's so cool and so
so If y'all are looking for something to add to
your I'm sure already very long to be read piles.
You need to get Vanishing Daughters. You need to put
it at the top of that pile and read it
because it is so so good. Cynthia, would you care
(02:13):
to kind of introduce the listeners to a little bit
about who you are, if maybe they don't know you yet.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, So, Cynthia Palaio, my friends call me Sina. I'm
Puerto Rican. So every Puerto Rican that you know probably
has a Puerto Rican nickname. And so my oldest brother
is Roberto Junior, but we call him titoo our family.
Then we have Richard, who's GOC. Naturally he would get
GOC from Richard. I don't know how we got that.
(02:41):
And then my my nickname just became Sina, and so
that's a term of endearment. That's what my dad called me.
My dad died in twenty twenty three, and so I'm
still like reeling from that because I was super close
with him, and I was born in Puerto Rico. My
parents were born in Puerto Rico, my great great grandpa,
parents great grandparents, and so they my family came here.
(03:03):
They kind of went back and forth for a bit,
and then finally in the eighties they were like, we
got to stay here for the kids so they can
go to school. I mean, my parents have a sixth
grade education. They grew up in houses with dirt floors.
My head of latrine, and so they were just like,
we could stay on the island and deal with you
know that it's very difficult. It's gonna be difficult for them,
(03:26):
or we can be here and it's gonna be difficult
for them, but at least they'll have running water, because
on the island there's issues with like the water and
the electricity going out and things like that. So I
think my parents knew. My dad especially knew, these kids
are gonna deal with racism. They're just gonna deal with it.
This is gonna be their life. He dealt He was
(03:48):
a darker skin, so he dealt with it quite extensively.
I dealt with it, of course, being a woman and Latita,
and I recognize my privilege as being a lighter skin Withina,
and I do recognize that it still hasn't shielded me
from so much. And so I grew up in inner
city Chicago, and the inner city and our neighborhood quickly gentrified.
(04:13):
We were the first Hispanics on the block. Within a
few years, all the everybody else left. I was the first.
I went to inner city schools that were didn't have
the proper resources. But you know, I may do like
I had librarians that recognized, like she she likes to read,
but this is we got all the beat up books.
(04:34):
So I read a lot of like classics. I was
the first person in my family to step in a
college classroom. I had no idea what I was doing
there because that was my high school was like ninety
percent Latino. So the walk into a classroom with all
white people. It was terrified, and I was. It was
the first day I ever experienced, like straight up racism.
Was the first day I entered a college classroom. And
(04:55):
I I came home crying because I told Dad and
I was like, I'm not going back, and he's like,
you're going yeah. And I eventually worked as a journalist.
I worked in Inner City for the Intercity newspapers. I
left journalism because of post traumatic stress covering crime, and
then I eventually got my MFA and started writing Wow,
lending crime.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
And I mean, in reading your work, I kept thinking,
this is someone who has truly lived a robust life.
And I don't know you personally. I don't know many
of these details that I'm hearing now, So hearing them
now it's kind of also validation of like how much
of your life and yourself that you pour into your writing.
And I think that is such a beautiful, vulnerable thing
(05:39):
to do as a creator, as a writer and author,
and it truly shone through through this book and on
all of your work. But again, in reading this book,
and I have some questions about it, it was it
was so so I don't know, just like the grit
you know that it had was I like, I wanted
to like hug you if I don't know, that's weird,
(05:59):
but I was like, I was like, I just felt
kind of also seen in some places. So I was like,
this person understands true loss, and so I just I
want to thank you for putting that out there into
the world, because it can be very hard to do,
but I think you were going to truly, truly impact
a lot of people in a really positive way. So
(06:19):
I wanted to ask you. I guess the first question
that I have here is again about the way that
you blend crime, horror, and folklore into your writing, and
especially in this book. Do you have a particular approach
to balancing all of those genres and additionally, what draws
you to write these kinds of stories that mix those
(06:40):
things with investigative elements.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I think with fairy tales and folklore, those were just
the first stories I was told. My parents couldn't read English,
and so what they did they would just tell me
whatever stories they remembered from like their kindergarten or their
preschool was told to them, like you know, whatever ghost
stories my father remembers from like, you know, the island.
(07:06):
I remember him telling me that up on the mountains
in Puerto Rico that you would late at night you
would see like lights blowing up the mountain and he's like,
those are the ghosts of people that would walk up
with their lanterns and they would fall off and they
would like miss their stuff and fall off the mountain
and die. So like things like this they just like
really stood out to me. So fairy tales were told
(07:28):
to me by my mother and like ghost stories by
my father. And then with covering crime, I think it's
because I just I was exposed to so much crime
growing up because I went I went to a high
school that it struggled. It was ninety percent black and
Latino and ninety percent at the poverty rate our high school,
(07:49):
and so there was a lot of socioeconomic issues there
and a lot of really good people there, but many
of them were victims of circumstance. And so I unfortunately
lost a lot of people to goune crime. I have
friends who are surveying life in prison for murder just
(08:11):
because of so much. And it's still like we still
see it. We still see young people hurting each other
and that's something that that stuck with me, like what
we do this to people from a very young age?
What is going on? And so I think that's where
I started exploring it from my personal experience. I couldn't
(08:34):
do it via realism because it's too painful for me
to write it without the monsters. So I write it
with the monsters included, and that makes it a little
bit more easier for me to mentally process.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, definitely, I've had someone on the show, a screenwriter
and a director, say that horror is a really good
analogy for attaching grief to and honestly, I think for
many emotions and kind of experience experiences that we have
to go through as as people. But kind of jumping
(09:07):
back to this what you mentioned about like your dad
telling you stories about like you know, the lights in
the mountain and other kinds of stories. Are there specific
legends or stories, either real or fiction that influence to
vanishing daughters? And I want to kind of just call
it out specifically to why the idea of like sleeping beauty.
I think that kind of like the story sleeping Beauty
(09:30):
was very prevalent in this book, and I read in
a previous interview that you had mentioned your next book,
which was Vanishing Daughters, was going to be kind of
based around or built on, the story of Sleeping Beauty.
So I'm curious about that, and also if there were
any other kind of legends that influenced this book.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I mean, definite, that's definitely just the concept of La Yourna,
because she's I know, you know, there's the story that
she did the horrible thing with her children. Of course,
it's a folk story or a legend. Do we know that?
And so I am fascinated that so many of these
(10:09):
legends and folk stories are around women becoming monstrous because
they were either murdered or something bad happened to them.
And so that was my fascination with it. And then
I kind of thought about the vanishing hitchhiker, which is
a woman in white and that story. You have that
(10:33):
legend all across the globe. You have it throughout Latin America,
you have it throughout Europe, you have it all Like
I feel like every single state and America has a
vanishing hitchhiker, and it's very often a woman dressed in white.
And so I guess I just started thinking, why are
we scared of it. Is it a ghost that's was
(10:55):
hit by a car? Is it a ghost that was
like murdered. Is it a ghost that like fell down
that like? And so just the fact that we create
monsters out of what I think were murdered women, I
think is sad.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, one hundred percent. And you mentioned that, and I'm
so glad that you kind of like said it almost verbatim. So,
I mean, I have the reader's copy here, and I
don't know if you can see I have all my
tabs here on the book because the way that I
read a book is like anytime something kind of like
impacts me or that I think is like really strong,
I leave a little tab. And there are many tabs
(11:30):
here in this book. But one line that I want
to read, if you don't mind, and it just to
echo what you said. It says, why do we fear
the ghosts of women who were murdered? Why don't we
fear the thing that made them what they are? And
oh my god, I just got toolls right now reading it.
But when my first read through of this that I
like again, it just kind of it hit me like
a ton of bricks, and I was like, oh, it
(11:51):
was just like it it's painful and it's sad, like
that is kind of like that that is true, like
that's that's what happens. And those are also the kinds
of conversations that I try to initiate when I'm telling
these stories, especially like you said, with the story of Laodona,
that is such a classic story. I love this kind
of I'm not sure what to call it, if it's
(12:12):
like a reclamation or like a restructuring or whatever about
the way people are now talking about the story of
Lioona or La Malince and kind of approaching it from
a more like human like empathetic space instead of like, no,
like she's a bad person, she's just a ghost and
that Whereas I don't know, if you believe in astrology,
(12:34):
I'm a cancer, so I have a lot of like
feelings and emotion, and so whenever I hear these stories,
I'm like, no, but I want to know their side. Yes,
I'm a virgal rising. But then you also mentioned the
trope of the vanishing hitchhiker, which again was also very
prevalent in this book, and like you said, it's a
classic tell and your use of it in in this book,
(12:55):
it was so nostalgic because it's also one of the
stories that I heard growing up, and I want to
to ask you more about your relationship with that story,
although you just kind of mentioned about it, but I
also wanted to say growing up, there is a book
and I constantly I'm sure my listeners are tired of
hearing of it. I'm constantly referencing it on sustal. It
took a book called Stories that Must Not Die And
(13:16):
in the questions that I sent you, there's a link
to it so you can check it out later if
you want. It's a PDF of the book. It's page
five of the PDF that I sent you. But it's
the story of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. And that story was
read to me in elementary And the name of the hitchhiker,
the ghost hitchhiker in this story, her name was Maria,
and so I was like, oh my god. I was like,
even the name was so close to to what you
(13:39):
Her name one of the characters names in this book
was Mary, So I was just like, WHOA Like, It's
interesting to see how these stories are so similar regardless
of where they're told geographically.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Well, with the Vanishing hitchhiker specifically, I was just fascinated
with it because this particular story is the Chicago area's
most famous ghost story. And what I find fascinating about
this one, as opposed to like other folk tales about
(14:12):
other women that are perceived as monstrous, this particular one,
there is like a level of endearment or warmth over Mary.
And while it isn't I know, we're talking about Latin
need that like, while it isn't a Latino story, I
also feel like it's still like an it has hints
(14:35):
to an immigrant story, and I think what a lot
of people forget and what I the arguments I make
in a lot of my books when I write about
Irish immigrants or Dutch immigrants is that these people were
once the immigrants and were the other at that point
in time, and a lot of the.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Persecution that they experienced are now we are experiencing as
Latinos in the United States. And so that's why I
do like to go to like those stories to kind
of see like what were they experiencing, And especially with
I wrote about the Irish immigrants who were working on
the Illinois Michigan Canal. They were literally working on this
(15:17):
canal building it falling into the river and dying and
nobody cared.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Like and I was just like, this is literally like
our immigrant farm workers today, Like these people will work
and then get sick from the chemicals or in accidents,
and nobody remembers their names. And I remember when I
was doing research finding accounts of like, yeah, we just
don't know how many Irish immigrants died, and I was like,
(15:43):
that's we're literally doing that today to the people today.
And so with this story, I just felt like there
was so much historically that I could kind of build
onto and ask, And especially with we're talking about the
character or the ghost story. The ghost name is Resurrection Mary.
(16:07):
I feel like every single Chicago knows the story. If
you're born in the city of Chicago or raised in
the city of Chicago, you have been told variation of
the Resurrection Mary's story. And this was me trying to
give her some agency. And in all the accounts of
people who have seen her, she always says, take me home.
(16:30):
I want to go home. And so this was me
taking Mary home.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Oh my god, ah so so so good, so good,
thank you. I want to ask also if there was
a particular scene or an element in Vanishing Daughters that
(16:59):
was especially either difficult or rewarding to write. And I
want you to choose where to take this question. You
don't have to give both. You can just kind of
choose one if you'd like.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
To, Oh, difficult or rewarding. Ah, okay, I'll do both.
So difficult was writing the serial Killer because to put
my brain in the mindset of a serial killer was very,
very difficult and very disturbing rewarding. This is also a
(17:33):
grief story.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I wrote it while I was not well. My father
died and I was very close to him, and I
wanted to kind of write about what it feels like
to go through grief. And one thing I've noticed is
that in American culture, to grieve openly is perceived as strange,
(17:57):
whereas we just let it all out, like we cry,
we scream, we we do what we need to do,
and it's seemed as so normal. I mean, I remember
sitting vigil next to my father's but like, we just
do this, this is part of death, is part of
the process. And then I kind of felt like shamed
(18:19):
almost by like Americans or American culture, because I was
grieving so loud and people were like are you okay?
And there was like they're losing it. I'm like, my
father's what do you mean.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
My father just like no, I'm not okay.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, and it's okay not to be okay. And I
just thought that was so insulting and so disrespectful.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Or could you imagine going like and you know, I
remember my husband He's like, oh yeah, may well, we
would be there like with the rosary, during the rosaries
for like days after someone died.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It's part of the process. And I was so insulted
that there was this perception that I will grieving too
much and I'm like, oh, I'm not grieving enough. And
so the book was that the book was me being like,
this is what grief feels like.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Oh my god. Yeah again. I just thank you for
being so open and so vulnerable. I want I keep
saying thank you because I agree with that. I feel
like grief is kind of shamed in some ways, and
I won't I don't want to get like air their
business up. But one of my closest friends, one of
my best friends, they lost a parent a couple of
years ago, and I remember them saying something very similar
(19:34):
about how like they felt like they weren't almost allowed
to grieve. And so just again everything you're saying now
and then in reading the book was wow. It was
like a just such like a deep look into what
those emotions feel and can look like too. So again,
(19:55):
for the one hundred times I'm going to keep saying it,
thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, the main
the main character of the book Briar Rose Thorn. She's
a journalist who starts experiencing these eerie occurrences after her
own mother's death. And so I want to ask, you're
kind of touching it already, but what was the inspiration
behind her character.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I wanted to write a character that was very like
on the nose to be like appended to like a
fairy tale. Like I didn't want to like it's almost
like I didn't want to write like sleeping Beauty herself
and what that meant. But I wanted to write somebody
that was like very embedded or very like a representative
(20:40):
of what a fairy tale is. And then developing her
took of a long time, and I think it took
me like months to even find her name. And I
was just like, I'm just gonna go with Briar and
that comes from the Grim's fairy tales, the Little Briar Rose.
So she's a mash of the various characters of Sleeping Beauty,
(21:05):
mix of myself as a journalist, and and a third
thing that I don't even know where she came from.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, a third secret ingredient.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, it took a while to like really pin her down,
but I wanted somebody who had been in Chicago for
a long time, that had ancestry here, that did have
like like really you know, you know, you know, generational
roots here that was connected to this place in time.
(21:39):
And then when as I was doing the research along
Archer Avenue and it's this takes place along Archer Avenue,
and Archer Avenue is said to be the most haunted
road in the Chicago land area and one of the
most haunted roads in the United States. So it's not
just resurrection Mary that's scene here. There's like people have
(22:00):
claim to have seen like carriages being pulled by like
black horses that have like fire coming out of their eyes.
People have said that they've seen like monks rising from
the woods. So Archier Avenue is a lot of weird stuff.
And so when I found that historical piece of all
of those Irish immigrants that had died there. I was like,
(22:20):
this is it, this is her ancestry.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Yeah, yeah, god, yeah it was. It was really fun
to see how you kind of weaved in these, uh,
these folk tells or the ghosts, these ghost stories throughout
the book because the story itself, like the main story,
is already it's creepy and it's eerie. And again, like
you said, you you got into the minds of a
serial killer who you wrote so well because reading it
(22:44):
was like uncomfortable at times, I was like, oh, this
person is making me like crawling my skin. So the
work paid off. But also, yeah, the weaving voice, Yeah,
the weaving of those stories into the novel was so good.
And the novel itself it touches on the horrors of
(23:06):
real life. You know that horror is like tremendous grief
and violence, particularly violence against women, and this book is
about a serial killer targeting women over years, and it's
countless women, countless lives lost. How do you approach this
weaving of supernatural horror with real world terror.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That's a great question. It's one of the things I
usually do when I'm drafting a novel, is I know
I'm going to go into it with a fairy tale
or a folk tale in mind. I usually want some
type of true crime element as well, and then we'll
have like the overall arching story. With this story, we
(23:52):
have had a lot of community members have claimed that
there's a serial killer operating in the city of Chicago.
There have been reports of over fifty one woman of
predominantly women of color throughout the city who have been
murdered in very similar circumstances. And I thought it was
(24:14):
very strange and scary that law enforcement keeps brushing aside
the very similar instances in which they're found. And so
I wanted to explore a serial killer in this story
that is like obsessed with, of course women, and there's
(24:35):
very specific type of women women like he Yeah, you
had mentioned writing being in his voice was very upsetting.
It took me a while to find that voice and
to develop that serial killer's voice, and I researched. I
did a lot of research, reading of different serial killers,
Like I read Sounds of the Lambs again, but that's
(24:58):
I'm like, that's not really him. And someone said you
should read Joyce Carol Olts's Zombie, and that book is
loosely based off of a young Jeffrey Dahmer and it's
told from his perspective. I could even finish the book,
like I was reading it and I was like, yep,
that's that's kind of I get. I was starting to
get the voice of my serial killer. And I was like,
(25:19):
I've got my house, Like I literally like I got
halfway through, and then I went and I donated it
to like a community library center. I was like, I
don't even want this book. It was so disturbed. Oh
my god, Joyce carol Olds's Zombie. It is disturbing. It's
like loosely based off of a young Jeffrey Dahmer.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah wow, but a great reference for character study, I guess. Yeah,
oh wow. So have you as we you know, approached
at the end of our interview, and I forgot to
mention earlier. This is a video episode available for patrons
on patreon dot com Slash Sustal podcast. So as we
wrap up our interview and before we jump into the
(26:01):
Patreon exclusive questions, have you ever had your own experience
or encounter with the paranormal and if so, could you
share that with us?
Speaker 2 (26:12):
That's a great question, because I was like a paranormal
investigative girally like hardcore for a while. I've gone to
so many different places with my tape recorders and my
different equipment. I've done it all. I was like spending
night hearing and going to abandoned places, and I never
(26:34):
ever ever experienced anything until randomly my husband and I
had taken a ghost tour, like a fun ghost tour
in Chicago espirs and then this is what my book
Before Vanishing Daughters is based off. I've Forgotten Sisters. We
were standing outside of the Chicago River and the tour
guide is like, eight hundred eleven people died in the
(26:56):
Chicago River right here in nineteen fifteen, and he starts
telling us the story, and he tells us if you
take pictures, you'll see orbs. Some people claim to see
a face. And I was like at that point, I
was so like disillusioned. I'm like, I'm not going to
see anything. And I just started taking a ton of pictures.
And then as I was scrolling through the pictures, there
was a woman standing behind me and she like screamed.
(27:16):
She's like, oh my god, there's a woman in your
picture and we zoomed in and it's like from shoulder
up of a woman looking out from the water, and
we were.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Just like, oh my god.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
It was so creepy. And that's what my book forgot
there's just based off of And it was because of
that that I'm like, Okay, something's there. And I felt
very like what we struggled with wanting to believe. And
after that, I felt like, Okay, there's there's there's a
there's a cosmic wink. The universe is like winking at me.
(27:50):
There's something there.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
So yeah, oh my god. I had like just full
chills when you said that.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Oh it was very Yeah, it looked it was like
a face that people are just like, that's a face
staring at you. And since then I was like, I
have to write the story and so yeah, it might
look great. Yeh canon camera but uh yeah, we would
have like scrolling on the viewfinder. But yeah, I'll show
(28:15):
it too.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Oh my god. That is so cool. And our final question,
this is something new that I want to start asking guests,
so you'll be the first person to answer this question
on SUSTA. I want to know what is haunting you
right now? So if you have any books or movies
or music or multiple things that are just currently like
just can't get them out of your head. What's haunting
(28:39):
you at this moment?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
You know what's haunting me? Saints, like different the stories
of this. I don't know, Like I've had this like
weird thing with different saints lately, and I've been like
researching different saints, and I mean this, there's like thousands
of saints and then some of the them aren't even
(29:01):
recorded because like their history was like never the original
saints were sainted by cults or by like by they
became like a cultish activity. I don't know. I've been
really fascinated with saints and their stories and how some
of them have some wild stories of saint ud. So yeah,
(29:21):
that's been my thing. I've been on a very like
iconography thing lately, and I don't know where it's going.
So I'm just writing that out. But some of these
saints have got some wild stories heads being chopped off,
yeah yeah, and you know, going becoming it, going into
(29:43):
meditative states, and it's some you know like Joan of
Arc you think you forget, you know, we forget Joan
of Arc was like burned at the stake as a
witch and she's a saint, so I don't know. I've
been really into saints lately.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Wow, oh my god, that is such. That is such
a good answer, especially for the first time that I'm
asking it on here. So such a great answer. Yeah, yeah,
I was actually yesterday. It's so fun. You mentioned I
was going around town here in Austin and I was
dropping off some red cards, the know your Rights cards
for immigration and in case someone has encounters with ice.
(30:16):
And one of the places that I went to, oh,
of course, one of the places that I went to,
it was a shop that had candles and stuff, and
there was a wall that was just all candles and
it was all saint candles, a big section of it,
and I was looking at them. I was like, wow,
there's so many of these that I had never heard of,
and like, obviously people are working with them or praying
(30:38):
to them or putting in petitions with them because their
candles are here. So it's so interesting. I was I
had taken a picture. If I go by again, I'll
take a picture. I'll send it to you and hopefully
that'll contribute to your study on saints.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
I'm just so fascinating. I'm like, I feel like, I
don't know, I feel like there's almost like this reclamation
and I think there's a portion of us that are
like reclaiming that we can reclaim these images and I
can reclaim it, you know, as absolutely non binary or LGBTQ,
Like I can reclaim this image and this this strength
(31:13):
and this power and tap into it. I don't know,
there's just something, there's something there. I don't know what
it is. It's kind of and I think it's I
think it's all kind of started with the Bishop recently.
Remember when the Bishop kind of went viral a few
days ago. I saw that, uh Trump, She's just like,
have some mercy on trans children, on immigrant I was
(31:36):
just like, yeah, reclaim this. So I loved it.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, absolutely, Oh my god, Yeah that was such a
beautiful moment. Oh my well, speaking of beautiful moments, once again,
thank you so much for coming onto Susta and also
for writing Vanishing Daughters Again. It is available now. If
you haven't yet, please go pick up your copy. Right
after this, we are just going to jump into to
the bonus Patreon content, But for anybody who is not
(32:03):
a Patreon, a best goalfriend subscriber on Patreon. Thank you
so much for listening today. Cynthia, thank you so so
much for your time for being here. If people wanted
to find you online or in stores, where could they
look for you?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Thank you. You can find me online at Sinapalile dot com.
I'm on Blue Sky and substach and for now Instagram.
I'm still on Instagram, but overall for my books, you
can find them in Barnes and Noble or any of
your favorite local dy bookstores.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
Awesome, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Ay goolfriends.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
This is aiden I am jumping in while editing because
I realized that I forgot to promote the book giveaway
that Cynthia and I are doing. Cynthia was so kind
and so generous as to donate two signed copies of
her books. To learn how to enter the giveaway and
win your signed copy, you can do so by checking
(32:59):
out the social medidia post for this episode on Instagram. Again,
that is at susital podcast on every social media platform,
but this giveaway is happening on Instagram, so go to
this post swipe through the carousel to learn how to
enter and win your signed copy of a Cynthia Belio Book,
good Luck,
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