Platica Y Poetics S4E7 Carmen Gray

The only items missing from our space were an incense slowly burning, and perhaps green tea. What began as a carefully outlined interview was dissolved almost immediately. My physical questions — printed, prepared, structured — disintegrated into space the moment Carmen Gray began to speak. Instead of a formal exchange, what unfolded was something far more sacred: a plática of intuition. An esoteric current entered the room. We spoke less about genre and more about destination. Less about craft and more about what calls to us. When I asked, “Who is Carmen Gray?” the answer did not arrive as biography, it arrived as presence. Tejana. Mexicana. Teacher. Storyteller. Woman attuned to the mystical undercurrent of language. Her roots are not decorative; they are ‘tierra’ soil. Culture and lineage do not simply influence her fiction and poetry; they animate within characters and settings. In her worlds of horror, magical realism, historical fiction, dark romance, and verse, the supernatural is not spectacle but inheritance. I realized Carmen does not shift, she acutely listens to lineage, what whispers to a mystics’ ear. Our conversation deepened when we entered the terrain of language. As an educator Spanish for over two decades, she lives in the liminal space where meaning shapes and reforms. We reflected on how bilingualism reshapes rhythm, and how code-switching is not fragmentation but expansion. My question about sound, scent, texture gifted a sweet pause and breath. My Aquarius air gifted the body remembrance before the response. We spoke about how writing is less about invention and more about excavation, the difficult unearthing of what has always lived beneath the surface. This plática led to speaking about what we hope readers feel in their bodies long after the final page. The lingering scent, tremor in the chest, recognition. Our space, the plática became poetry