Claudia Zuluaga was born in White Plains, NY, grew up both there and Port St. Lucie, Florida, and now lives in New Jersey. She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, JMWW, and Lost Magazine, and was included in Dzanc Books's Best of the Web series. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. Claudia is a full time Lecturer in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
An excerpt from her novel, Fort Starlight, appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.
Here, Claudia Zuluaga answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from her book. Enjoy!
What is writing like?
She straightens her legs, but can’t feel the bottom.
She can climb back out. She will. In a minute. First, she needs this cool water all around her. God, it feels good. Weightless and clean. She wishes she’d taken off her clothes.
Steeling herself with a deep inhalation, Ida pushes herself under the surface. She forces herself further down with her arms, at first only to where the water covers her head, then further. And further. Her toes don’t touch anything and her hair streams out above her. When she opens her eyes underwater, they burn. All is darkness. She thinks about baptisms in the water, how you have to be pushed under and then everything is new the second you pop back up. Then she thinks of the woman in the movie, trapped under the surface of the water, and raises her arms and kicks her legs.
The light of the sun is so bright when she surfaces. She sucks in the air and tastes salt on her lips. A small, soft wave rushes across her shoulders. She is facing a different continent. Africa.
What isn’t writing like?
She saw it on the menu: warm, flourless chocolate cake. Though she was too full to consider it earlier, she wishes she could have a bit now. She isn’t sure she knows how to make one. This is something she needs to learn.
And she will learn it. There is no magic. Cakes are like anything else; it is just a recipe that she will have to make time to practice. She loves the experience of starting from nothing but sugar, flour, fat, and heat and ending up with something so mood-altering. She checked a few baking books out of the library in Aster, knowing full well that she would never bring them back. They are in her apartment still and she wishes she had brought them with her. Besides doubling the cinnamon, or adding a pinch of some other spice, she never does much to change the recipes, but the people who run the community center were crazy about her blackberry crumbles, banana walnut muffins, pecan tarts, and caramel squares, as though she gave them some special touch.
When you do it, why?
Ida is only going because she needs to get out of the house. It is probably built on some lost souls’ burial ground. Haunted with misery. The tarp has a death rattle lately; at night, it takes all of her energy to block it out so that she can sleep. Relief doesn’t come in the daytime, either. There is nothing to see when she looks out the window, no way to distract herself from her tongue touching the tender, empty space. The cool baths give some escape, at least from the heat, but the darkness of the bathroom makes her imagine a sarcophagus. The other night, she climbed up on the bathroom sink to screw a light bulb in, but there was no fixture. Just a hole for one.
When you don’t, why?
Banal, New-age garbage. When his carefully selected and recorded sounds came together, they created nothing. The first time he heard it, he was hopeful; he strained his ears and his mind to ear what wasn’t there. It didn’t tug at his brain in any way, or make him feel like he was privy to any secrets. It would tug at no one’s brain, except for the biggest of fools. No one needed to be evolved to appreciate it. IT was music for now, and not even particularly good in that respect. It might be played in yoga classes, or in environmentally-conscious retail stores, if he cared to try to make such a thing happen, which he did not. He sat with his head in his hands.