C.I. Jerez is the author of the new novel At the Island's Edge. She is the co-founder and vice president of the cybersecurity firm Ashire Technologies & Services, Inc., and she lives in St. Cloud, Florida.
Q: In your new book’s acknowledgments, you write, “It is no surprise to me that after multiple attempted manuscripts, the one that finally helped me break into mainstream publishing is the one about Puerto Rico.” Can you say more about that?
A: I’d love to because I believe I share a magical connection with the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. My mother is originally from the Bronx. Her father is a first-generation American born to Irish parents, and her mother is a first-generation American born to Puerto Rican parents. (West Side Story, anyone?) So, I grew up hearing about Puerto Rico my entire life without ever visiting the island.
When I decided to join the Army in 2005, I researched worldwide installations and was shocked to discover Fort Buchanan, an Army base in Puerto Rico. So, I went to basic training with the notion that I could simply ask to be stationed there, and the Army would gladly oblige. (A notion the Army recruiters gladly bolstered as I signed my life away in the thick of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.)
No surprise, it didn’t quite work out that way. (Smiling). However, in the end, the joke was on them because in 2008, at the conclusion of my three-year tour on active duty, I accepted a job in Puerto Rico and transitioned to serve in the Army Reserves at Fort Buchanan after all.
This was the first time Puerto Rico offered me a life-changing lifeline and put me on an amazing career path in medical device manufacturing.
In 2018, when I began the dissertation phase of my doctoral program, it was my study on the elements of strategic planning within the economic environment in modern-day Puerto Rico that got me across the finish line and earned me a degree I nearly gave up on.
It was also in Puerto Rico that I finally got a taste of a lifelong dream to practice law. I was hired to run a local law firm as a director of operations on the west coast of the island, and while it was an amazing and rewarding experience, it showed me that my heart wasn’t in law after all.
That’s when I knew I was meant to follow the path that scared me the most—writing fiction. Writing terrified me because I do not handle failure well. I’m extremely competitive and I’d become accustomed to “mastering the rules” and exceeding at what I set out to do, but anyone who’s attempted to break into the book industry knows—it doesn’t work that way.
Sure enough, I wrote two manuscripts that ended up in a drawer before I finally sat down to pen a story directly from my heart. The island of Puerto Rico landed directly at the heart of that story. So, it didn’t surprise me that my love for this place and her citizens translated to readers of all backgrounds and finally put me on the path to publication.
Q: How did you create your character Lina?
A: Initially, I thought about my eldest daughter, who’s now a mother herself, and how, when she was little, she was highly principled, but also afraid of everything. So, Lina came to life from that initial idea that I could create a character like my oldest child. But then she quickly took on a life of her own.
I don’t know anyone quite like Lina or anyone who’s ever walked her unique path. So, I think I poured parts of myself into her as an ambitious soldier, parts of what I loved best about mothers in Puerto Rico and how they approach parenting on the island, and parts of the humanness and frailties I’ve seen in my friends over the years that drew me to them.
Q: The writer Barbara Davis said of the book, “Somber and heartfelt, At the Island's Edge offers a flawed but substantiative protagonist plagued by the psychological trauma of war as she returns home to face her family's failed expectations.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think there’s a reason Barbara Davis is a global best-selling author. She’s got an amazing way with words. She’s also the kind of reader an author can only dream of.
Not only was Barbara open to reading and connecting with a character from an entirely different culture, but she opened her heart in such a manner that she shared all the different ways she could see that while we are different in some areas, there are the universal things like love and a desire for acceptance where we really are not that different at all.
I think many people who grew up away in one place, leave to become something great, and then find themselves returning home will relate heavily to some of Lina’s concerns and anxieties about letting down the people who once believed she’d go off to do great things.
Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Oh my! So many changes. In fact, I am incredibly lucky that my brilliant (and extremely patient) literary agent, Katie Reed, has over a decade of experience as a developmental editor and that she’s believed in me enough to take me on even with some strongly suggested rewrites than what I initially had, including a completely different ending.
Fortunately, I learned long ago to listen to people who know more about something than you do. In this case, it served me well. She’s a fantastic brainstorming partner, and after we discussed the proposed changes to the ending, it didn’t take me long to toss out the last two chapters and re-write them.
Then, the famously brilliant developmental editor at Lake Union, Tiffany Yates Martin, got a hold of the manuscript, and she and I added an extra 30 pages and a few in-depth scenes to the ending, which I had originally glossed over.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m thrilled to be working on three projects. I have two follow-up manuscripts we are pitching to my publisher, Lake Union. Both stories follow the themes of strong Latina female protagonists. One book features a Colombian woman, the other a Cuban woman. In both books, I tackle the challenges of family, culture, and unrelenting odds that stand in the way of achieving what these women believe they want most.
My third project is an FBI cyber-based thriller that I’m excited to pitch later this year. It’s got the Latina flavor with a family dynamics theme but delves into virtual reality, the dark web, and a dash of a serial killer to keep things interesting. I wrote this one as I was delving into the intricacies of my real-world cybersecurity consulting company.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m really hoping to do something a little different in contemporary fiction that incorporates Latino cultural elements. I am a proud American first, and I’m not afraid to lean into what that means for me even though I grew up speaking both English and Spanish at home, and I was raised in a Cuban/Puerto Rican home while living on the Mexican border.
My mother’s maiden name is Mulligan. So, my identity is varied and multicultural. And so, I will embrace many things about my American identity (such as my time living in the traditional South), and it will weave itself through a Latina lens.
Well, what does that mean? It means my books will feature many different types of cultures in the lives of my characters because that’s what life was like for me growing up. My friends represent cultures from all over the world, and I think it makes life and stories much more interesting.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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