Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cara Lopez Lee. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Cara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I love writing and telling stories of all kinds: memoir, novel, essay, flash fiction, and true personal stories I can share with a live audience. Whether on the page, on a screen, or onstage, storytelling is the most powerful force for good I’ve experienced. The more we all share our stories, the more we recognize our common humanity, the beauty in our differences, and the community we all yearn for. For me, storytelling is a path to kindness, which is the path to peace.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was a lonely only child with few friends, so I often sat alone in my mother’s overstuffed armchair to read. Books were my first friends. In third grade, I read Little Women and identified with Jo, who got in trouble for speaking her mind and doing things her way. I wanted to be a writer like Jo, which is to say, like Louisa May Alcott, though it took years to believe I could write a book, which seemed like magic.

Despite my initial doubts, my journey always remained connected to storytelling. I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. I chose TV news because it had an exciting immediacy and allowed me to engage with an audience via multiple means: they could see and hear much of what I saw and heard, while they also listened to my voice provide context and meaning.

During my 10 years as a reporter, mentors taught me to analyze news through the lens of the personal. If I wanted to tell a story that affected a lot of people, the trick was to find one person and tell a true story about how the news affected them. Those were my first forays into storytelling.

I spent most of my news career in Alaska. By age 35, I reached the ceiling of what I could accomplish there, yet I couldn’t land a better gig in the Lower 48. Instead, I stepped away from my career to take a yearlong solo trek around the world, in hopes of encountering the kind of adventures that might provide material for a book. I journaled every day.

After my return to the U.S., I wound up in Denver, where I shifted into TV production, as a writer and field producer for shows on Home and Garden TV, Food Network, and Discovery Health. In my limited spare time, I wrote travel articles and began writing my first book: a memoir about my life in Alaska and my trek around the world.

My TV career required long hours, which made it tough to complete the memoir. To free up more time, I left television and became a part-time ghostwriter. From about 2006 to 2022, I collaborated with more than two dozen clients, helping them write memoirs, novels, and other books. That gave me time to finish my memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands (Conundrum Press, 2014), and to also write and submit essays and short stories to literary journals.

I’ve spent much of the past 15 years writing my historical novel, Candlelight Bridge, (FlowerSong Press, May 2024). It has been the great gift of my life to inherit this story. My Mexican-Chinese grandma raised me, and Candelight Bridge was inspired by the family stories she used to tell me, tales of secret immigrants, mixed races, and surviving the kind of family trauma that gets passed like a torch from generation to generation.

A few years ago, while I endlessly revised Candlelight Bridge, I was fortunate to stumble into the world of live personal storytelling. This art form offers instant connection with an audience that’s not only a joy unto itself but also helps keep me energized during longer projects. The brevity of oral storytelling has also improved my skill at editing for the page. I’ve been telling stories onstage for more than eight years. I’m a winner of the Moth StorySlam, and I share true stories from my life on many storytelling shows, including Unheard L.A., Risk, and the Storytellers Project.

What do I hope to achieve by spending my life immersed in stories? Connection. All my stories are about the search for home and belonging, the universal desire to find our place in the world. In some ways, I’m pursuing the same work I began as a journalist: exploring the human condition. Except now I’m free to chase my questions as far as I care to go, through fact, fiction, or whatever path calls to me.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I’m fascinated with creating something from nothing, which is, of course, impossible. When we create, we often face a blank page, blank canvas, or vacant space, and feel the pressure of attempting to fill it by conjuring magic that didn’t exist before. Yet we need not fear this challenge. We need only remember: energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. So, most of the raw material we need is within us. We simply must summon the courage to begin, and trust our subconscious to help shape our ideas into a form we can share.

As a writer, I transform my life experiences into metaphor, or you might say, I reshape memories into meaning. This is how we make sense of our world, our community, our families, and our place in all of it. Writers have the potential to affect the way our audience interprets their own experiences and the way they empathize with others. These effects can reach far beyond our audience to affect people we’ve never met.

The greatest distance in the world is that between two minds, but when we lean in for a story, that distance shrinks. Everything people create has the power to convey story. Through stories, we open ourselves to the possibility of spending less energy on mistrust and discord, and more energy on curiosity and engagement. I believe stories can transform the world.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

An interviewer once asked for my advice to aspiring writers. I suggested, “Always seek so much joy in the writing process that success is irrelevant.” One commenter responded: “What’s wrong with wanting success for something you’ve worked hard on?” My answer: “I don’t believe it’s wrong to want success. I’m only saying we spend more time on the journey than the destination, so let’s love it.”

I’m talking about revising the meaning of success.

The day someone says, “We want to publish your book” is amazing, as is the day someone says, “Your book meant something to me.” But such moments are fleeting. I work six days a week to make less money than I did before I quit working for others. Although book research often creates opportunities to travel and meet people, mostly I spend a lot of time alone, sitting at my laptop, exacerbating my back problems. It’s not glamorous. Sometimes I write in my PJ’s.

Sure, I’d love to sell a million books, but a vast majority of authors, even the most successful, will never achieve that. In any case, it’s not a good reason to write. I write because I feel compelled to share the stories inside me.

As difficult as it is to complete a book, that’s the easy part. Modern authors also engage in public relations, marketing, accounting, event planning, video production, and social media campaigning. Long ago, I found inspiration in the Confucius quote, ‘Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.’ I no longer see it that way. Great love requires sacrifice. Any job can be a grind now and then, but I’m happy to be ground to dust if that’s what it takes, because sharing stories is my passion.

Contact Info:

• Website: CaraLopezLee.com
• Instagram: @caralopezlee
• Facebook: /theyonlyeattheirhusbands
• Linkedin: in/caralopezlee
• Twitter: @CaraLopezLee
• Youtube: Cara Lopez Lee
• Yelp: Cara L.
• Other: Threads: @caralopezlee

Image Credits
Image of Cara reading from a book – Credit: Steven Deeble