Thea Prieto
Author Interview - Thea Prieto
Author of From the Caves
Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller’s injured leg and the danger of Tie’s imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. From the Caves presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings.
Author Interview - Thea Prieto
Author I draw inspiration from: Stanley Crawford. Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine showed me new ways a story can stretch and constrict at both the micro and macro level, and as someone who grew up in a rural, agricultural community, I find Crawford’s balance between his writing and garlic farming to be both relatable and inspirational.
Author Interview - Thea Prieto | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book: In bed, right before I go to sleep. I might read one page or an entire book, but reading at the end of the day always combs out all the tangled thoughts, and it’s nice to drift into a single narrative before drifting off to sleep.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with: Molly from William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. She’d have us out of there in like five seconds.
Author Interview - Thea Prieto | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author: I believe I was around eleven years old. I had been listening to music on my headphones every day and coming up with these mental film strips that followed the arcs of specific songs. When these arcs started to span whole albums and eventually the characters I had created started to require dialogue, I remember staying up late listening to whole albums night after night in an effort to remember the details of these stories I was holding in my mind. So one day I realized it was too much to remember all at once, I took out a notebook I had only half-filled with school assignments, and I began to write everything down in shorthand. I didn’t start off thinking I was a writer -- at first I thought the stories might end up being animations. But once I saw my shorthand written in my notebooks, I knew the writing, those markings, didn’t accurately represent what I had imagined, and so I continued to write and revise, to get at some truth of what I had imagined. I guess I’m still engaged in that work today.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook: Paperback. I’m a more visual person and I prefer the feel of books, but I also travel frequently and somehow always need to stuff five books into my travel bag even if I’m only away for a weekend.
The last book I read: I just finished John Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s The Purgatorio. A few years back I gave my brother (who is in a few different punk and metal bands) this creepy copy of Dante’s Inferno that I found at a book sale. I was scanning over a huge bin of secondhand books when I noticed the corner of an old hardcover sticking out of the heap. I dug it out and felt like I was holding some kind of necronomicon -- it had this black, water-warped leather cover and large versions of Gustave Doré’s engravings. My brother recently gifted me The Purgatorio in return. I enjoy reading those books as creative writing; the setting is a clock with so many precise wheels and pinions.
Author Interview - Thea Prieto | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer: Oh, computer. I began writing with pencil and paper, but often found myself erasing, backtracking, and making notes in the margins (or even trying to add whole scenes in the margins). Switching to a word processor was magic. I no longer force myself to draft or revise chronologically, and sometimes I even write stories in reverse, since I tend to know how a story will end before I know how it will begin.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with: Genly Ai from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, because of his travels and his interests in and knowledge of diverse cultures.
Author Interview - Thea Prieto | Book Character I’d be Best Friends With
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a: If my own stories never occurred to me the way they did, I’d likely still be working in fruit and nut orchards and vineyards today. It’s hard to imagine I wouldn’t be engaged in some kind of storytelling, though. Ag work often involves steady, physical work or repeated motions that allow the water and oil of the mind to separate, and it can lead to some clear epiphanies that are fun to share with others at the end of the day.
Favorite decade in fashion history: I’m drawing an incredible blank right now, which I’m going to go ahead and blame on the pandemic, seeing as how I’ve been basically living in pajamas for the last year and a half.
Place I’d most like to travel: I road trip frequently throughout the Pacific Northwest, and so I tend to think of place in terms of departure and destination. Thinking about it right now, and in the midst of a California heat wave, I’d like to take a winter trip that begins at the foot of a high river and ends on top of a snowy mountain, or take a summer trip that begins in a rainy desert and ends at a foggy ocean.
My signature drink: A can of ice-cold beer at the end of a long day of outdoor work.
Favorite artist: My grandparents, Antonio Prieto and Eunice Prieto. They were both ceramics artists, and among many things taught me about revision. Pots can quickly chip, crack, or shatter, and when it happens, it only means that it’s time to create something new. In writing, this can mean a sentence needs to get scrapped or perhaps the whole project should be buried in a field, but that’s also a good opportunity to bury most ideas concerning perfection and changelessness, too, so I can get going on the next project.
Number one on my bucket list: I’d like to build a house with my own hands. It doesn’t have to be a big house -- it might even be a single room -- but writing a book is this interesting thing, where a person labors within themself and in the company of others for years, and all that thought and purpose and intention cooks down to something another person can hold in one hand and connect with. People live in stories while they read and write them; I’d like to build something else in which people can read, write, and live.
Find more from the author:
Facebook @TheaPrietoWrites
Twitter @thea_prieto
Author Bio: Thea Prieto is the author of From the Caves (2021), which won the Red Hen Press Novella Award. She is a recipient of the Laurels Award Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the international Edwin L. Stockton, Jr. Award and Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. She writes and edits for Poets & Writers and The Gravity of the Thing, and her work has also appeared at Longreads, New Orleans Review, Entropy, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches creative writing at Portland State University and Portland Community College.
