Michelle Ruiz Keil’s novel, Summer in the City of Roses, is a visceral reading experience. The story follows a family dealing with generational trauma and a growing rift between the father and his children in the absence of their mother. The family comes together through a beautiful tale of friendship and sacrifice. We asked Keil about Portland in the ’90s, becoming a published author and how this novel tells part of her life story.
Tell us about yourself and how you grew up. What are your hobbies? In your bio, I read that you are a tarot reader. Where did you get into the practice?
I grew up in the Bay Area, just me and my young single mom. I was a bright kid but had a lot of challenges in my life as a child. By high school, I was really struggling. I was the lead in all the school plays but my grades were suffering and sitting through classes became very difficult for me. I left school at 16 and left home at 17, moving to San Francisco.
There, I studied method acting and began a process of self-education that’s lasted a lifetime. It was then, during the late 1980s, that I delved deeply into tarot after a boyfriend gave me a deck. At that time, there was strong counter-cultural interest in feminist spirituality and Wicca. This dovetailed with my tarot practice and also led me to an interest in world religions, fairy and folk tales, and Jungian psychology — all things that continue to inform my work!
As for hobbies, I don’t really have them — unless by “hobby” you mean obsessive interests. Those I have! Including the areas of passion I listed above, I am fascinated by non-human cognition and communication, fashion and style as a medium of visual storytelling and right now, early forms of modern dance — a subject I’m researching for a book I’m working on.
Your novel, Summer in the City of Roses, tackles questions of family, queerness and love through the bold lens of a fairytale-esque, Greek myth inspired story. What drove you to write such a unique novel?
Summer in the City of Roses was inspired by my life. I am lucky to be part of a family of idiosyncratic neurodivergent artists — both my partner, myself and our kids. There aren’t a lot of models in life or culture for us to follow, so I wrote a book for people like us — tight-knit siblings, loving but complicated parents who carry a lot of emotional baggage, and children whose paths lead in unexpected directions. Fairy tales and myths are in the water in our house, so finding the details of this novel in those sources came naturally.
What about magical realism as a genre appeals to you?
Magic realism is a term used to describe a way of experiencing the world and/or a literary tool for telling a certain kind of story. It’s also a way to categorize a book for sales purposes — a practice I sometimes take issue with. Magic realism is more than random magical elements in a mostly realistic setting. For me, it is inherently political — a decolonized description of the way I move through the world on any ordinary day. When I’m writing, I lean into the magic I experience in life, exploring its boundaries within my own sense of what is possible and true.
Throughout the novel, Iph struggles to understand her absent mother more wholly. What decisions did you make when writing Iph’s coming to terms with her mother’s violent history? Why?
I had to discover Iph and Orr’s parents, Callie and Theo, through the inner lives of their kids. As I wrote, I began to see that I was telling a story about generational trauma. What if there were two parents, I wondered, who’d both gone through some serious trauma and loss in their early lives? And what if these two, by luck, through privilege, were able to protect their own children from the kinds of things they went through? Would that generation of kids be a trauma-free blank slate? Epigenetics and my own experience say no — trauma shapes a person, people shape one another. I realized that part of Iph’s coming into adulthood was an affinity for people who’d known troubles like her mother’s, and through those relationships came a growing understanding of her mother’s story and herself.
The book starts off by highlighting the fractured relationship Iph and Orr have with their dad. What inspired that relationship?
You ask the best questions! This is an issue I’m so happy to address. Theo’s character and the Santos Velos family dynamic reflects my own experience in a patriarchal structure. In such a system, in families with two parents, labor is often divided in a way that can suffocate all parties, with one parent as the main source of care for the kids and one parent as the provider. Even families with radical sensibilities can fall into this well-worn societal pattern which often creates burnout for the primary caregiving parent and isolation for the primary earner.
As the latter, Iph and Orr’s dad, finally in charge of his kids after many years with his wife at the helm, makes mistakes. Big ones! Some readers find his character irredeemable because of them. But while sending Orr to the boot camp program was not well informed or wise, I believe that Theo has wisdom to offer the family. He is not a static character and I think his response to his kids’ refusal to come home shows that.
In your author’s note, you said that you first considered ‘they/them’ pronouns for the character of George, before deciding against it. What thought process led you to do that?
I wanted to be true to the time period and George’s experience in that world while simultaneously holding the possibility of a different world in the narrative.
Your debut novel, All of Us with Wings, received much praise. What has your process of becoming a professional writer been like?
My process was very slow! I wrote my first novel only because a group of teens at my daughter’s school heard of NANOWRIMO and wanted to try it. Because I was a playwright, they asked me to support them in the process. I agreed and said I’d write a novel, too. I brought in four plot ideas and vowed to write whichever one they voted for. After many years of revision, workshops, starts and stops, that NANOWRIMO project became my first novel. That was the writing part. The professional part was a whole other hurdle. I queried fifty agents before I found representation and was prepared to go to a hundred before changing my strategy. Once I realized publishing was what I wanted, I never gave up.
How did you get into writing?
My first love was reading, then theater. I always journaled and did free writing, often inspired by whatever I read. My first real attempt at fiction was for a college class — taken for practical reasons, not because I knew writing would become my thing. I just needed a class that fit my schedule and seemed like the workload was light. But my teacher really loved my story! He encouraged me to keep going — and I did. Sort of! Life happened. Kids happened. I got back into theater after moving to Portland and started writing plays. If not for those students and that fateful NANOWRIMO, who knows. I may not have written novels at all!
What advice would you give to aspiring teenage writers?
I know everyone says this, but read! Read passionately and widely. Follow rabbit holes, curate your obsessions. Read and edit other people’s work — it will teach you so much about how to do that for yourself. Take an acting class — there is no better way to learn to write dialogue and gain an understanding of character psychology. Remember that no matter what happens in your life, every experience you have is giving you the best possible education to write the book only you can write.
Towards the end of the book, the mystical cottage is introduced to the story. What significance does it have? Is it inspired by a specific experience?
It was definitely inspired by a real place! I had the great fortune to be invited to a women’s writing residency on Whidbey Island in February of 2020. For those that don’t know, residencies are magical places that grant writers time and space and a beautiful location to work, usually free of charge. The residency I attended was for woman identifying writers. We each had a perfect fairytale forest cottage that was the ideal place to write. All meals were provided as if by very talented elves. When I got there, I’d been struggling to write the second half of Summer in the City of Roses — which was due to my editor the day the residency ended! Somehow, I wrote forty-five thousand words in three weeks, did two full editing passes and made my deadline. I credit the magical cabin at Hedgebrook!
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