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Two Thirds Terror, One Third Romance

On vacations, my father encouraged me to keep travel diaries. These were less diaries than documents—drawings, descriptions, and artifacts recording our movements each travel day. You’ll treasure them when you’re older, he reasoned. He was right. Whenever I’m back home in California, I graze the diaries’ multicolored spines with my fingertips, my own library of memories. 

I created my most significant work at seven: a clothbound, lime green journal the size of an encyclopedia that recounted our travels to Houston, a city my parents lived in for over a decade, the city my sister and I were born in but barely knew. A city that held as much evidence of my parents’ professional milestones as family lore. Each evening of that Houston visit, I bent my head over a family friend’s kitchen table and diligently rendered the NASA Space Station, Eastwood, Montrose, The Heights, Bellaire. I drew a picture of my sister and our friend dancing in pastel tutus, our bodies wispy and thin, part the children we were and part the women I’d seen in films, our toes pointed dutifully towards the viewer. 

I glued in restaurant menus. I included ripped off Barbie dolls heads and old sugar cubes. I cut out patterns from candy wrappers. My father lined each page with pencil and a ruler. He instructed me to write in graphite before copying over my story in ink. Following his grooved nailbeds as he pointed to text boxes, I learned the discipline in artmaking, I learned the art of arranging the material of one’s life, turning it from detritus into treasure. Tragically left-handed, I lived in fear of smearing the page. 

My mother’s shoulders tensed at the strict requirements of these journals, her back stiff with something like anger or discomfort. She mostly made herself scarce during these tutorials, but every so often she muttered comments that my father should let me use whichever color I wanted for whatever dog, bank building, or river that day. I can’t quite remember her dissent. That I simply enjoy the trip? That I be a kid? You were so small, she laments when I ask her about it years later. Instead of playing outside, you were toiling away. It made art a chore. 

While my sister refused the activity, I treated the journals like church. I wrote, drew, and collaged with a mix of wonder and exhaustion. While my sister sang into hairbrushes, I hunched over my sacred object. Toil. Divine labor. The work of self-definition. I brought to it the same dedication I would later bring to hunting for bargains at thrift stores or installing art, to my work as a community advocate and then a writer, moving, shark-like, across the page with as much intuition as intellect. 

My father stood behind me while I created the journals, hands clasped behind his back, making suggestions as to which moments of my day to record, where to position the key images on the page, which shading techniques best captured the wonder of the trip. He smelled of rotten onion, but I didn’t mind. Age fifty-one when I was born, his base smell was of mild death, the routine deterioration of the elderly. It was a smell I would come to associate with discipline, with authority. 

There were times when I was tired, when I would rather have read a book in bed with my mother and sister, but I didn’t want to disappoint him. The journals were as much his objects as mine, proof of my loyalty to him. An archive of my dedication. The perfect artist’s daughter, the one destined to be made in his image. 

When my father died, a family friend found my lime green tome amidst his library. “I read it,” she admitted gingerly, regarding the green binding with an emotional seriousness it didn’t deserve. “I couldn’t help it. It was so beautiful.” 

It is beautiful, I realized, flipping through it again for the first time in a decade, sitting in my father’s house for the first time in five years, minutes before we dismantled his wall of photos, his closet. Before we separated his possessions that will go into our own personal collections—our own archives, our own closets and spare drawers—and those we will give up to Goodwill, absorbed into discount anonymity. Before people I barely know posted Instagram reels of his studio, filming the process of archiving his work, cataloguing their connection to him, making sweeping statements about his life, his family, us. Boom cameras and light boards. A life reduced to sale prices. Before watching strangers touch my father’s work. Before I realized that who he was to other people was a stranger to me. 

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In early childhood, I thought my father was Superman. This was not a random fantasy. A photo of him from the 1960s loomed over his tottering library, an image from the memoir of Kate Paul, my father’s sometimes girlfriend. Journal is a compilation of Paul’s diary entries from the late 1950s to early 1960s and details their years-long situationship. My twenty-something father, a symbol of her youthful infatuation, appears on the book cover alongside James Dean and Elvis. He lowers his tortoise shell glasses to level his blue eyes at the viewer. His biceps flex against the white fabric of his T-shirt like a Calvin Klein model. As a child I sat waiting for him to rip open the T-shirt, to show me the blue and red suit underneath. 

“He told me that he was equally cruel to all of his girlfriends,” Paul writes, “and it was a calculated defense. He was, as always, and more so, extremely rude and bitchy, but we laughed a great deal.” After he died, I cackled through tears at the accuracy of this entry. My father was someone with whom you couldn’t help but laugh as he plunged the knife into your back. 

The photo crowned a section of books in my father’s library that bore his name. He owned multiple copies of any book that he was mentioned in, labeled with sticky notes. What does it feel like to write your own name so often? To treat yourself as an institution? 

I first fell in love in his library. In the years of our estrangement, I traveled back to my father’s bookshelf in my mind whenever I missed him. It was one of the safe places. His tottering volumes caved the flimsy self-made shelves. An enthusiastic LA transplant, he left the front door open all day. The dry California breeze grazed the back of my neck as I found the divine in those pages: Hockney’s lavender and lime Yorkshire hills. Glossy reproductions of Picasso’s Guernica, a pop-up book of Alice in Wonderland, the yellowed, tissue paper pages of his original King James Bible. I pressed my hands to the pages, feeling the transmission of knowledge through my palms, infusing myself with the tactile act of learning. My first engagements with books were more about touch than text. I kept a sketchbook beside me. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to read or create, absorb or produce. 

My father—working-class hero, World War II baby, lost British Pop Artist, chronicler of the evils of capitalism and senseless war—loved an archive. He came of age in the Swinging Sixties. He shape-shifted in every retelling of his youth, traversing subcultures. He was a clean-cut Mod, blond hair cropped to the sides, dressed in a black suit. He was a long-haired hippy, gallivanting with a crew of situationists etching messages into the chalk green hills of Wales. He was a London Adonis, just the son of a sailor, a would-be-butcher turned art school lad smoking endless cigarettes, gossiping with beautiful heiresses, exhibiting his paintings with other up-and-comers like R. B. Kitaj, Peter Blake, and Richard Hamilton. Amidst the tear down of the British class system, he partied with Princess Margaret. Lord Snowden took his portrait. He rubbed elbows in bars with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger. He and Hendrix teased each other for going after the same girl. 

My father made a career out of archives, awarding otherworldly meaning to everyday objects. His early paintings gave matchboxes a political weight. He poked fun at the 1950s Ad Man. He exploded the meaning of newspaper headlines. After we moved to California, he leeched the loneliness and desire out of the stacks of dailies that lined Los Angeles’s sidewalks, walking from one news rack to another tucking them under his arm, a mini library of regional opinion. 

His house was filled with his collections. He collected cardboard cutouts of vintage cards. He collected paper bags from around the world. He kept a toy collection in a giant glass case in his living room. Porcelain faced dolls from Russia with delicate closed fists. Miniature Harley Davidsons. A rare 1940s Batman action figure. All the beautiful things I could not touch. I moved my own reflection over them, pretending I could make the figures fight or kiss me. 

One’s archive is one’s ability to persuade. Growing up, I watched at the dining table as our guests’ demeanors transformed in my father’s midst, leaning in like children at story time. He changed the minds of gallery owners, museum curators, art collectors, journalists. Later, I would understand that this charisma had as much to do with exchange as intimacy, an economy of attention: One story about selling John Lennon his first car for a positive artist profile in an arts glossy. One mention of being David Hockney’s college bestie for a two-week stay in a friend’s chic Camden flat. He documented who he knew as much as what he did. 

Friends are more important than family, my father often reminded me growing up. Friends can open doors. No wonder my sister and I, recently migrated back to the US, took comfort in the sitcom of the same name, a nine-season ode to the power of one’s peers. My childhood was measured out in Dad’s decades-long friendships. As my father’s ward, I stayed on beautiful country estates. I swam in indoor Victorian pools. I brushed against Al Pacino at a party in the Hollywood Hills. I was, and still am, rich in the doors my father’s friends-over-family philosophy opened for me. 

When he died, his Wikipedia page was updated with a “Friendships” section, where an eager archivist listed his fifteen minutes of fame with Bowie, the songbook he designed for the punk band The Clash, even the money Hockney gifted him for his cancer treatment, right down to the amount. There was nothing about his personal life. 

A month later, I came across a Facebook post detailing a time about a year before his death when he stood in for a lecturer who was running late. The writer of the post praised him for stepping in and then rejoining the audience when the prime speaker arrived, but all I felt was sad. In the photograph, his flimsy, vein-riddled arms clutch the one David Bowie album he designed, holding it over his head like a prize. Bowie’s figure falling, falling into black space. The second photo: My father’s sunken eyes watching some unknown speaker who had just overtaken his spotlight, mouth slightly open, thin body hunched over, irrelevant again. 

I imagine it was, in part, his archive of celebrity that attracted my mother to my father. She was his eighteen-year-old art student. He was thirty-nine. On their first date, he introduced her to 1950s rock duo The Everly Brothers. I see him through her eyes: successful, stately, still attractive though perhaps blurring at the edges, his square jaw softened with age. He had admirers everywhere he went, doused in the glamorous diesel of art, a career unimaginable for my mother, an art student who had emigrated from Colombia in the 1970s. I picture her as a teenager, sitting in the darkened theatre of the British Film Institute, watching The Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, thinking that maybe, maybe, people like her could do something like this. Yet, when I talk to her about this years later, she is quick to correct my romanticization of their meeting. I didn’t even know who they were, she says of The Everly Brothers. The fame didn’t register.

My father’s life and work were structured around archive, on the documentation of everyday life he mined for his art, of the art he made that he could later document. My father loved an archive, but he never admitted what he did to me, to us. There are no journals that document. He destroyed all evidence. 

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The first time a man looked at me hungrily, I was seven years old. We’d recently moved from Houston to the United Kingdom. Instead of relocating close to London, where my mother’s Colombian family settled, my parents chose to live in a remote village four hours south. They bought a farmhouse at auction. The farmhouse was not a farm. It performed no functional duty. It had no electricity or running water. It had holes in the roof. Still, I was enamored with the murky pools of green water, the apple orchards, the orange cows grazing in the field behind our house. I spent hours wandering through meadows and stepping in cow paddies unattended. At night, my sister and I curled up to read with our mother in a battered armchair next to the kitchen stove, one of us on each of her thin thighs, a cat in each of our laps. 

My father traveled back and forth to London. When he returned, he brought back groups of visitors. Like a tour guide, he walked them through the flagstone kitchen, equipped with turn-of-the-century range, the rooms full of Victorian detritus, the tangle of thicket at the edge of the property. The collapsing barns were his favorite part of the house tour. He picked up owl droppings and energetically cracked them open to show our guests the undigested rat bones inside. 

Once the roof holes were fixed, the electricity connected, the walls painted a milky sage green, the house held the promise of quaint country romance. My father invited potential buyers back to the farmhouse to close the sale of a painting. My mother cooked for them and we, the children, entertained. 

My special skill was the violin. I dressed in a white lace frock my grandmother had hand sewn several years ago but was tight in the armpits now. At my father’s request, I practiced for days before our guests’ arrival. When they got there, I serenaded them with Suzuki’s “Allegro in A Major.” 

In my child brain, the men are a collective. I don’t remember the men’s faces, but I remember their mouths—thin twisted lips and yellow teeth, the white stubble smattering their chins. They wore crisp button-down shirts. They smelled like linen. They smelled like bergamot. They smelled like the inside of department stores. Pungent scents evoking cleanness yet couldn’t quite cover the vague must of aging, like my father’s. Always older and vaguely important: curators from London, chums from my father’s Swinging Sixties days, reformed playboys turned bankers and graphic designers. I remember their clapping, how it sent both pride and ice surging through my chest. I wasn’t sure how to respond to their probing looks. Good enough to eat, one of the men said, staring down at my legs, long for my age. His eyes followed my fidgety hands as I tugged at the hem of my dress. You look more like fifteen, another man marveled. 

As an adult, I would wonder what my life would have been like if my father had sensed the hunger in these men, if he had thrown them out right then and there. If he had signaled to me that no man was made to consume me. 

Instead, he asked me to get up on the kitchen table. The encore show! he laughed, hoisting me up, the seams of my too-tight dress popping. At the time I didn’t understand the logic. From above, they wouldn’t be able to see my violin, or my fingers plucking the strings. 

What they could see better was my long, older-for-my-age legs. 

All my life, these hungry men would seek me out—in clubs, on the street, within my own home. I would wonder if I had swallowed some kind of beacon, if the silences I’d been raised on had fattened a welcoming gland for them inside me. As a child I sensed that this was a symptom of a larger, most terrifying animal, but now I see it as a pattern, a preference, a kinship between my father and these men. My father was hungry too. 

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A family is a kind of archive, author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich said in 2024 to a room full of writers. The only sound: our pencils scratching across our personalized notebooks, which we’d selected to file these kinds of pearls of wisdom. 

My family taught me how to collect things. I kept drawers full of labeled gemstones safe in their tissue paper cubicles, to be looked at but rarely touched. I collected autumn leaves. I pressed flowers between the pages of Pride and Prejudice. Months later, their dried spines and fragile petals fell to the carpet as I flipped through my copy to find the passage on judgement. I sifted through the farm’s detritus when we first moved in and emerged with a small, delicately carved bottle of blue glass.  

When my mother, sister, and I started living off canned beans and backyard carrots, I collected food. I hoarded fruit, half-eaten chocolate bars, my friends’ leftover lunches under my bed. 

I collected tadpoles in an old jam jar from the pond behind our house. I kept them by my bed, watching them grow. I was devastated when I had to leave them behind in England when we moved to California. 

As a lithe, sun-kissed girl-child wearing too much eyeliner, I went to concerts that shifted my belief in God, in a Higher Power, in an otherworldly Out There. I let the music x-ray my ribs, not even watching the band. Instead, I lifted my eyes to the ceiling and tracked smoke, following it as it stretched and spiraled through pink and blue light in the crowded wood-paneled walls of The Troubadour. I snuck in the back to join the thunder of a hip hop show at Low End Theory, white lasers slicing through sweaty air, all of us one animal. I allowed grown men to burn cigarettes out on my scrawny fourteen-year-old arm. I let even scrawnier adolescent boys mount me like an adult. I walked the smudgy coastline of Dockweiler Beach collecting shells at 3 a.m. on the hottest day of the year, shoes in one hand, my best friend’s hand in the other. I collected lovers in other people’s dark bedrooms. I collected friends on the front steps of crowded house parties. I collected friends who were actually lovers, but I didn’t realize that until later. 

I collected diaries, recording every first knee scrape, erotic thought, existential epiphany, and first kiss. I did not document any of the boundaries crossed during my childhood. 

Even at a young age, I understood the risks in telling. 

I collected lost boys and appointed myself their mother. I babysat their drug trips, held their heads in my laps as they cried through the shrooms near some pond in Pasadena. I forced them to confide in me, obligated their tears and carnal desires. 

I inherited my father’s love of discovering abandoned things and making them beautiful. One of his sports was finding treasure in the rubble. Later on, I would wonder if this is how he felt about himself. Once, my father took my unread copy of a Faulkner book and blocked it out completely with paint for an installation project. I learned that in his house, you had to mark the things you loved. 

I collected vinyl records that saved my life—Joe Cocker, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Wailers. I thrifted outfit after outfit and hung a row of new, interchangeable selves in my closet like armor. My father and I drove the stretch of Tujunga strip mall to Sun Valley Thrift, where I’d buy two dollar sundresses and five dollar men’s suits and he’d buy one dollar DVDs and fifty cent napkins. My disposable selves let me cross decades, cross genders, cross cliques. Most days I looked like a mix between a Martian and a Woodstock diehard. I smeared fuchsia makeup in a bar across my eyes. I tinted my cheeks blue, staining half-moons. I collected clothes because I was addicted to taking someone’s breath away simply by walking past. I preferred to be looked at than talked to, was prone to overthinking, to writing and rewriting every potential phrase in my head until I had nothing to say at all. 

When I couldn’t collect anymore, I stole: film, disposable cameras, batteries for my camcorder. Anything to help me document myself. Tools to make me a more solid self, someone etched on paper by light. Someone who could be archived and stored away for future consumption. I still have photograph upon photograph taken by me and other fellow slackers documenting my youth, stacks of all my best and worst decisions for me to flip through at a moment’s notice. I keep them in a cardboard box under my bed—us smoking at the beach, horsing around in abandoned lots, our forms making impressions in the overgrown grass of Elyria Canyon Park. 

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My family taught me the value of silence. He’s from a certain era, those close to us repeated when I complained about my father describing a blow job he’d recently received, when he left out his dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra for me to find. When he presented, giggling, a wind-up toy of Santa fucking one of his elves from behind that one of his friends sent him at the holidays. It would be years before I told anyone anything beyond these anecdotes. Jokes, my father called them. The people who surrounded him—call them friends, call them fans—still echo this insistence, this need to permeate these perversions with history, to keep the danger at a distance through the lens of time. Once, a white woman I don’t know emailed insisting I speak to my father for the sake of art history. To be an artist, you have to put yourself first, she later explained in a speech at his funeral, the first time I met her. It’s difficult for things like family, and all of that. Years later, my sister tells me she stole that windup toy and buried it in his back yard. 

Silence was a family affair. In my early twenties, my father confessed he was secretly married, then told me not to tell. I don’t want you to write about our family, my mother announced before I started an MFA in nonfiction at the university where she worked, and I wasn’t sure if our family meant me too, I wasn’t sure if my experiences were ours and vice versa. 

Instead of writing about my life, I hoarded it in a plastic container under my bed. In the rare times I browse through my journals, all I see is my own face. I filled sketchbooks with self-portraits. After every bad break up, financial crisis, sexual assault or thought of death, I drew myself. As a college student living in Argentina, I carved my features into soft wood on the tiled floor of a rented room while my peers hit up the discoteca. I drank máte and pressed the reject button as my flip phone lit up with my friends’ pleas to come out and have fun. I drew the purple halos of my eyebags while living in a rat-infested trailer while working on a Sacramento goat farm. I traced my hands with my nondominant hand. I sketched my shifting cellulite mid-dance while cooped up during COVID-19 in an Oregon winter, mourning the severing of a ten-year relationship. Three years later, in the days following this ex’s death, I would dust off these Oregon sketchpads and render my tear-swollen face. 

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Twenty years after penning my lime green tome, I returned to Houston to become a professional documenter. What else is a writer? I was accepted into two creative writing PhD programs, and found myself choosing between two returns: one to my birthplace Houston and the other to London, my family’s bedrock. The decision was between two distinct writing projects but also two lineages, two family lores. It was also a decision between fact and fiction. I would either write a novel about Colombian migration and 1970s British punk, twisting my mother’s life experiences to fit my interpretations, a child of diaspora’s birthright and sin, or I would write essays about art and identity. 

I chose fiction, but fact would come back to find me in the end. I came to Houston thinking I’d write about neocolonialism in Latin America and the smell of rain on warm earth, but I ended up writing about our family farmhouse and the men. Fiction was the easier way to lie. I was good at it. I’d been doing it my whole life. Fiction was a way to be both loyal to myself and to my father, to never fully show how his mask slipped as soon as he walked through the front door. I created more masks to tell the story of his mask, until my entire creative practice became a costume shop. 

When I arrived in Houston, I hadn’t spoken to my father in a year. An ordinary conversation caused the snap. A run-of-the-mill betrayal tipped me over the edge into silence. 

My body simply couldn’t be around him anymore. 

In Houston, my body betrays me too. It sweats. It secretes any emotion I have. My earliest memory is of a family friend holding me in the pool during a Houston lightning storm. Clad in arm floaties, I clung to her damp neck as we floated endlessly in the swimming pool’s fake blue, darkness close around us. White light cracked the black night. Thunder rumbled, low and guttural, in the distance. As electricity spidered across the sky, my family friend didn’t make moves for us to leave the pool. We watched sparks crisscrossing the horizon, advancing and receding. From the water, we marveled. Here, storms are an everyday occurrence. 

My father once described the role of media similarly in a 1983 interview with the Houston Chronicle—“two thirds terror and one third romance”—an evaluation easily applied to the city’s weather as well. Since moving back to Houston, I’ve learned to fear a storm. As many Houstonians know all too well, the wet mouth of a hurricane can widen its jaws in seconds, swallowing you whole into its uncontainable eye. 

Houston holds much evidence of my father’s charm. At a cocktail party, a curator informed me that my parents did a lot for Houston. What can two people do for a city, I wondered? What could they possibly have done by living here? How can paint impact the cracked concrete and perpetual road rage? 

Later that same year, an older local famous artist gasps when she finds out who my father is. I’m at my first work function for a new job. I’m surrounded by glasses of champagne and teased white hair. If I squint, I can pretend I’m standing among clouds or at the edge of a frothing sea. You’re D’s daughter? the artist’s husband, already sloppy with wine, asks me. He continues before I can answer. Because if you’re an ounce as charming as him, then I want you now! His rough finger pads pressing into my skin. My side slickens with his sweat. I stare at his greying chest hair. When I look up, I can see strands of coconut shrimp in his teeth. 

As he grasps me, his wife makes a joke about wanting a threesome. I laugh. I laugh. I laugh until I feel his fingers release their pressure on my arm. When I walk home, I can still feel them glowing there. 

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During my graduate orientation, my new cohort and I sit in an overly air-conditioned grey room and introduced ourselves by way of our academic interests and what we like to eat. Some of us like BBQ and Walter Benjamin. Others study Gloria Anzaldúa and the shadow self and can’t resist a cheeseburger. All the poets admit they write about the moon. 

A woman who will soon become like kin to me says she studies postcolonial feminist poetry. But really, she confesses, pushing her dark curls out of her face, it’s just all about love. 

Three years later she will quite literally hold my grief, my dumb confusion at having lost my father. I can’t figure how, after decades of harm, I miss him this much. She will look at me and calmly explain, You’re living in the paradox. 

Our motley crew are not so dissimilar from the lavender glow of my father’s artist communities. There will be nights of ice-cold beer sipped with barbacoa tacos on wooden benches. There will be the sweet tang of country music on crackled speakers late into the night. 

There’ll be thirsty mosquitos and hands that come away chalky from petting dusty dogs. There’ll be pink sunsets you can’t look away from, even as they fade to black. A cityscape both timeless and monstrous in its steely gleam. 

I will make friends with a poet who creates ekphrastic narratives from the blacked-out journals of an Italian feminist. She sleeps with chunks of Roman marble to stay in the process. 

She will bring me pizza and wine and much-needed gossip when I am in the throes of my grief. Another friend writes speculative fiction about fuckbois and lets me hold her cat, understanding my need for soft things. Two more loved ones will press me close to their bodies when my own body cannot register the shock of loss. They will offer to stay until I fall asleep. My friends will become my family just when I start to lose my grip on the word. They will, time and again, pull me back from the terror of being alive with the endless romance of their intimacy. 

At the orientation, I say I eat sushi and write about multicultural identity, but that isn’t exactly true. I write about my mother’s sinister Caribbean landscapes and my father’s pop culture-addled canvases. I study my parents, unable to resist looking up their names in any bookstore or art library. I pick up the fragments of their identities and place them within my own, arranging and rearranging as if they were figurines in a doll’s house. 

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I still think of that early Houston thunderstorm, the comfort of being held and the profound danger of the storm’s closeness, how it felt like I could reach out and touch its power. 

When I was nine and too noisy in his studio, my father twisted the flesh of my arm like he was unlocking a door. He frowned with determination as he broke the skin. Seconds earlier, I watched from the eaves as he painted an eight-foot light bulb Santorini blue. Among people, my father didn’t stop talking, anecdotes and insights falling from his mouth as his audience lapped it up. Watching him in the studio offered me a rare stillness, divine insight into the world of creation, a world I would one day join. It was an initiation from afar. It was like seeing Zeus mold Man. 

As my father pierced my skin, I knew he wasn’t taking pleasure from my pain. When our cat pissed on our comforter, he would grab hold of the cat and smash its face into its own urine as he smacked its back. He wasn’t angry. This was just how he understood authority. As he twisted my arm, I didn’t fuss. I didn’t pull away. There is a pleasure in believing someone is right. Until it almost breaks you. Extremely rude and bitchy, but we laughed a great deal. 

My father got it wrong. Terror and romance aren’t an equation. The terror is eternally wound around romance. My parents gifted me the profound euphoria of standing in front of a painting that moves me, the heady logic of feeling so alone and so free, like nothing, no one, can touch me. I have felt that blunt palm of both of my parents’ hands on my body. I have loved them with ferocity. But even when I’ve loved them, the fear remains.

 

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ROSA BOSHIER GONZÁLEZ’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in publications including Guernica, Joyland, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Georgia Review, and The Washington Post. She is the recipient of a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Fulbright, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. Boshier González earned her MFA from CalArts and her PhD from the University of Houston. She teaches creative writing at Rice University. Find her on Instagram @rosaboshiergonzalez. 

Featured image by pure julia, courtesy of Unsplash.