The Roots of the Guava Tree, with Sonia Daccarett
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Even though we're so diverse, we're all the same. We're all longing for the same thing, to belong. to have to have a a a m uh purpose in life, to understand what our what why we are here on this planet. Right, there's it's there's very there's so much difference and yet we're all the same.
Hello and welcome to Uncorking Your Story. I'm your host, Mike Carlin, and today I'm joined by Sonia Dacaret. Sonia is a writer and communications professional. Born in Columbia to a Christian Palestinian father and a Jewish mother. She moved to the United States and received an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a master's degree in international and public affairs from Columbia University. For more than two decades, she's worked on strategic. Communications initiatives with corporate and nonprofit clients. Her debut memoir, The Roots of the Guava Tree, Growing Up Jewish and Arab in Colombia, explores identity, belonging, and coming of age against the backdrop of nineteen eighties Colombia.
She currently writes and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. Welcome to Uncorking a Story, Sonia.
Thank you. It's great to have to be here. Thank you. And thanks for having me.
I'm excited to have you here, Sony. I'm curious, where does your story as an author begin?
Well, I mean, there's different answers I could give to that. The this book really uh is not was not intended to be a book. It just it started with midlife and uh a period in my life where things got a little quieter, I had more time, and I just um decided to take a writing class for my own enjoyment. And it happened to be a memoir writing class. Out of that class came many, many pages and many um a a a deep exploration of the genre. I fell in love with memoir. It was just not something that I was really familiar with. Now I really am. And I'm a big fan of memoir. Uh and uh it I started writing about my childhood. I started writing about all the questions that I had growing up that went unanswered, I started writing about
A time and a place in Colombia that, you know, the city I grew up in in Cali, which is Cali, change has changed a tremendous amount. And on a visit at some point I realized I really wanted to write about what it used to feel like before it just became so urbanized and so big. And uh there was just a very f a a very different feeling and an enchantment of being there in the seventies and eighties that I wanted to capture. And um I that that's where the book came from. I honestly was not writing a book. At some point I sat down and I thought I have many, many pages here and I really have to figure out what I'm going to do with it. And then I realized that the themes were identity, diaspora and family and anything else that um I had written about kind of just went on the cutting room floor and I really uh started thinking about turning it into a book.
But
So it sounds like you know your life quieted down some somehow, right? Um and and you turned to writing, not intending to write a book. What were you intending to write? Were you just journaling for yourself or what was what was the initial project? If it even was a project?
Yeah, I spent many years in corporate communications doing that kind of writing and I thought I have a little more time now, the kids are older, I'm not working full time anymore. I really would like to explore more creative writing. Truly, that was just it was just a very just personal fun exploration of writing, trying to get out of the press release sort of newswriting mindset and reteach myself things that I uh t the types of writing that I had done as a child, scene, dialogue, you know, that sort of more narrative writing that I had long since forgotten about and I had really not um Uh written in that style for a long time. It took me a long time to break out of the five W's and the Tell uh the entire story in one page kind of mindset.
Yeah, so I was retraining myself too. It was a very interesting process as well.
So it sounded like you used to like to write as a kid?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:31
2
How did Sonia’s memoir‑writing class turn into a full‑blown book?
6:31–17:32
3
What challenges did she face moving from corporate press releases to narrative storytelling?
17:32–31:42
4
Why did writing in the child’s voice become the breakthrough for her memoir?
31:42–34:53