The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Mirta Ojito, Deeper Than The Ocean
In this episode, I chat with author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mirta Ojito about her novel Deeper Than The Ocean. This book is one of my top reads of 2026!
A century-old shipwreck with no survivors. A journalist haunted by dreams. A family secret whispered across oceans. Mirta Ojito shares the real history behind Deeper Than the Ocean and the intimate choices that make a sweeping story feel startlingly close.
Ojito takes us from Spain to La Palma in the Canary Islands, to Cuba, and to Florida, tracing the hidden currents that shaped migration from 1919 to today. She opens the archive on the Valbanera, the “poor man’s Titanic,” and shares how one chance encounter with a Spanish-language book in Key West became the seed for a dual-timeline novel.
We explore Spain’s post–World War I turmoil, the Spanish flu’s shadow, and why economic windfalls can deepen inequality when systems fail. Along the way, silk traditions, natural dyes, and island geography anchor the narrative in physical detail that lets history breathe.
We also talk about craft and conscience. As a newsroom standards leader and Pulitzer-winning reporter, Ojito explains how trust is built word by word, why details matter, and how to tell the truth without exploiting suffering. Her fiction draws on lived experience—from the Mariel boatlift to the tenderness and terror of motherhood—and on the unsettling idea that trauma can cross generations. The result is a story about courage, belonging, and the complicated love we carry for places we cannot return to, and places that no longer exist.
If you’re drawn to literary fiction rooted in real events, migration history, and ethical storytelling, this conversation will stay with you. Listen, then share your answer: what does home mean when it spans more than one shore?
Subscribe for more author interviews, leave a quick review to help new listeners find us, and pass this episode to a friend who needs a powerful story today.
Hi, my name is J Jackson Beverly. And if you're looking for the Bookshop Podcast, you're here. Don't switch that line. We have a new theme, and I would love to know your thoughts. Let's take a look. Do you prefer this theme or the old theme? You can drop me an email at thebookshoppodcast at gmail.com. Okay, let's get on with the show. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media. And remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 316. With 2026 just around the corner, I've decided that I'm going to switch a few things up in my life. And one of the things I'm changing is the amount of time I spend on social media. I do all my own posts on social media, and at times it gets overwhelming. The difficult thing for me is to stop scrolling. And I just feel that that's not healthy. So I'm going to start spending less time on social media. I might take a week off every month just to spend time doing the things that I really love doing, like reading and being with friends and family. It's ridiculous how much time social media takes away from living. Coming up though, I have an incredible array of authors for the Lunch with an Author literary series in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and OHI, California. All the information will be on my new website, thenarrativeexchange.com, which will go live the first week of January. If you click on the events page, you can look at the great lineup of authors we have for the 2026 in-person Lunch with an author literary series. You can also sign up for my newsletter on that website, and you'll automatically receive my newsletters, which go out about twice a month. Okay, now I have a question for you. What are you doing in 2026 to make yourself happier and healthier? And this isn't about making New Year's resolutions because I find them easily broken. I'm making my social media change for mental health reasons. There's just too much sadness in the world, and uh I tend to get uh hooked into it all. So anyway, my uh thought is to bring more joy into my life and the lives of others and not get distracted. Moving on, I read a book this year which I felt was one of the best I'd read, and it is called Deeper Than the Ocean by Murta Ohito. Murta was at the top of my list when I was uh searching for authors for the Lunch with an Author Literary series for 2026. However, as you'll hear by her bio, she's an incredibly busy woman, and it's difficult for her to take time off work to uh travel from Florida all the way to California. But anyway, here is her bio, followed by the synopsis of her new novel, Deeper Than the Ocean. Born in Havana, Murta Ohito is a journalist, professor, and author who has worked at the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and the New York Times, the recipient of an Emmy for the documentary Harvest of Misery, as well as a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles about race in America for the New York Times. Ohito was an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University for almost nine years. She is the author of two award-winning nonfiction books, Finding Manana, a memoir of a Cuban Exodus, and Hunting Season, Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Currently, Ohito is a senior director on the NBC News Standards team working at Telemundo Network. Deeper Than the Ocean is her debut novel. And here's the synopsis. In 1919, Spain, Catalina Quintana is the eldest daughter in a family of silkworm farmers on the tiny island of La Palma in the remote Canary Islands. Fiercely independent, Catalina dreams of building a life with her childhood love. But when a devastating fire ruins her family's silkworm farm, she's forced into a loveless marriage and a journey across the sea to Cuba, abound a doomed ocean liner. A century later, in 2019, journalist Mara Dennis travels to La Palma to cover a modern-day disaster near the island. But the trip becomes personal when her mother asks her to find a long-lost birth certificate. Long haunted by the sea and plagued by dreams of a daughter she's never had, Mara begins to uncover a hidden family history that centers on Catalina, her great-grandmother, who, she soon discovers, is listed among the dead in the infamous Valbanera shipwreck. As Mara follows Catalina's trail across Spain, Cuba, and Key West, she unearths a story of forbidden love and resilience that echoes through six generations. Told in a dual narrative that moves seamlessly between past and present, deeper than the ocean is a meditation on the strength of women, the enduring power of a mother's love, and the corrosive hold of family secrets across oceans and time. Hi Myrta, and welcome to the show. It is an honor and a pleasure to have you here.
SPEAKER_01:It's my pleasure to be here and finally to see you in person after listening to you. And you're also an immigrant, aren't you now?
SPEAKER_00:I am, yes. I was born in Australia. I lived in London for a couple of years before I came to California. And I decided to move here because when I landed in Los Angeles, I looked around and saw people from all over the world. And I just thought, this is where I want to be. So I moved here because of the cultural differences. That's what I wanted in my life. And to see what's going on now is heartbreaking. Ice agents have been spotted in the little town where I live. It's just awful.
SPEAKER_01:Do you actually see it in the community where you live? Do you see it? Do you see it happening? Not personally.
SPEAKER_00:We're in a rural community, so it's a lot of farming here. Friends have been blocked on the road by ICE vehicles while they're returning from Santa Barbara to Ojai.
SPEAKER_01:We cover it quite a bit. I mean, I still work in journalism. I am I'm a director of standards at um Telemundo, which is one of the two Spanish language networks. And um, we have two or three stories a day or per newscast every day on the subject.
SPEAKER_00:So I'm aware. Yeah, and thank you for covering stories like this. I know it is a big part of your life uh with the immigration in the United States, and your work is appreciated.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, that's my job to make sure we don't do that. That's precisely what standards means. And it's important that we don't lose the little trust that we have left. I mean, trust in journalism has eroded dramatically, and if we play around with that, we're gonna lose it all if we haven't yet.
SPEAKER_00:And that is a terrifying thought. Okay, I think that's a great segue into my first question because I would like to begin with learning about you and your work in journalism, how it all began.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So I um I was born in Cuba in 1964, so just a few years after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that brought Fidel Castro to power. And uh my parents um always wanted to leave Cuba. In fact, they married earlier than they would have, um, so they could live together. But that did not prove to be the case. I had to wait, I had to wait for a long time, for almost 20 years. So I finally, we finally left Cuba when I was, I had just turned 16. It was 1980, and it was an event that those who remember it remember it as the Mariel Boat Lift. It was a time when the Cuban government allowed hundreds of people, in fact, um 125,000, 130,000 of us left Cuba in the span of about five months, aboard a variety of ships and boats and um whatever you could get from the US to Cuba and back. And that's how I arrived here with my father, my mother, and my younger sister. She's four years younger than me. I the time I already knew that I wanted to be a journalist, but I thought, forget it, there's no way that I could, I didn't know any English, so I thought, how can you be a journalist, not knowing the language? I it's it's all about you know reading, writing, asking questions, and so I thought I'll do something else. But eventually I found my way to journalism, um, began working in the Miami Herald in 1987, then I transitioned to El Nuevo Herald, which was the sister newspaper of the Miami Herald in Spanish, and I went back and forth between the two papers for about nine years, and then I left for I moved to New York. Well, I left for the New York Times and therefore I moved to New York. I worked at the Times. Um, while I was there, I had the idea for my first book, which is not a novel, it's nonfiction. And I thought I needed to write that book from Miami. So I left the paper, moved to Miami, and wrote and published Finding Manana, a memoir of the Cuban Exodus, which is my first book. And it's very much what it sounds like is the story of the boat lift, my own story as a child, an adolescent, growing up knowing that one day we would leave. I mean, that was just part of my genetic makeup, I think, part of my life. I knew we were leaving until we finally did. So the book is about that, and it was published 20 years ago. Yeah, exactly this year, 20 years ago, which is incredible to me. And then I went back to New York this time to teach. I taught at the Columbia Journalism School. I taught I taught journalism to um, you know, Americans, but also foreign students. We had a lot of foreign students, and it was always fascinating to me. Uh, well, my children pointed it out before I before I said it, they they pointed it out that um not knowing a word of English when I arrived, I was teaching nativeborns how to write in English. And taking into consideration that only two generations ago, my grandfather didn't know how to read and write in Cuba. That is, that's just uh it's just remarkable, and it's a testament to where we are and the opportunities that this country offered me when I arrived. While at Colombia, I wrote another book, and again, nonfiction, um hunting season, immigration and murder in an all-american town. And I'm very happy to say, because this is this is a year of good, good news for me regarding books, that my oldest son, who is an actor, just recorded that book and it's just been released two days ago as an audiobook, and it's his voice recording. Yeah. And and you know, it's really it's great because when he was 15, he went with me to Ecuador to report that book. I needed to go um to interview the mother, the family of the immigrant who was killed by a group of teenagers in a town on Long Island, about 63 miles from New York City. And I needed a photographer, so I took my 15-year-old to report this with me. And now, as a 30-year-old actor living in New York, he got this um amazing opportunity and recorded the book, which is coming full circle.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's wonderful. And I think an important part of living of our life is acknowledging our grandparents, great-great-grandparents, our ancestors, and what you've achieved since then, if we look at your great-grandfather, unable to read and write, and here you are, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. I read that you left Cuba in May of 1980. Is that correct? Correct.
SPEAKER_01:May of 1980.
SPEAKER_00:So that means the Marielle boat lifts were just in, like I think they started in April, right? And went through October?
SPEAKER_01:It's a little less than six months, so it was very much at the beginning. It began in April and we left in May. In fact, we arrived on Mother's Day, May 11th, that year.
SPEAKER_00:That seems like another confirmation of the maternal link throughout your ancestral history. Before exploring your new novel, Deeper Than the Ocean, I think it's important to understand what was going on in Spain during 1918 to 1919. What made people want to leave their homeland? Was it social unrest, political instability, food shortages, effects of World War I, Catalonia seeking autonomy, and of course we had the Spanish flu. Can you speak to this and how it reflects upon immigration now?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, so there was political unrest, there was um greater class divisions, and part of the problem was the war was, of course, over, the first war, and Spain had remained neutral at that time, and therefore, in fact, had benefited a great deal of their neutrality. But the wealth received during the war was not invested properly, and it quickly lost value. And so there was a lot of poverty, particularly on the islands, because they were so isolated. Some people didn't even have anything to eat, so it was a really difficult time, but also they had the pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu, which did not originate in Spain, despite the name, it originated uh someplace else. But Spain was the first country because it was neutral to report it, and that's why it became known as the Spanish flu. And that is a story on its own. I know, yeah. Um, I think 260,000 people died during the pandemic, which was um a huge number because I believe at the time there were about 20 million people in Spain only. So that was that was a big number, and there was a lot of despair, but at the same time it coincided with sort of the golden era for migration um to the Americas. That immigration had started in 1820 and it went on until 1920. 1930, sorry, 1930, from 1820 to 1930, 110 years. 4.5 million Spaniards left for the Americans at that time, Cuba among them, but also Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, many of the different places. And um there was there were of course, you know, family ties, uh, common language, common religion. The history of colonialism since 1492. Um, there were no colonies anymore, but there were so many ties that um it made it really, really attractive for Spaniard to leave for the Americans to find a better life. And that is not that different from what is going on now and what is always going on. Immigration works with um a dynamic of push and pull. There's a push, which is the reason why you leave, poverty, escaping poverty, escaping conflict, and the pull is opportunities, family, um, money, hope, uh, peace, all kinds of things. And that that hasn't changed. In fact, the framework of uh deeper than the ocean is precisely that it begins with an assignment that one of the protagonists gets to cover the migrants who are arriving on um the Canary Islands from Africa, and that's a phenomenon that's been going on for a long time.
SPEAKER_00:When you began the research for this book, what details or stories most surprised you or contradicted what you thought you knew?
SPEAKER_01:I think what really surprised me was to learn that because I focused on the on the islands, right? On the Canary Islands, which is an archipelago of islands off the coast of Africa, but they belong to Spain, they have belonged to Spain since uh 1492, I think. And I didn't know that one of the islands in particular, in fact, the island I was writing about was uh a major center for silk production, uh specifically in the 16th century, but it went on for a long time. It kind of started to die out in the 18th century, but in the book I appropriated it because I thought once I learned that I was very interested. And to this day, the tradition is uh preserved in El Paso, which also El Paso, not El Paso, Texas, but El Paso in La Palma. And when I was in November, in January, I went there and I happened to go, didn't happen to go when on purpose to the island and to El Paso and to the museum. And you can still see their women working as they used to in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century, which is incredible. I believe it's the only place in the world where they're still weaving silk the same way and using natural dyes.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I'd love to see that.
SPEAKER_01:But you should go, it's lovely. Specifically, it's the island of La Palma, which is a small island in the shape of a heart. And I fell in love with it. I fell in love with it even before I went. In fact, I wrote the entire book before going to the islands. I mean, and I'm pretty superstitious. And then I decided that I wasn't going to go until I finished the book and sold it. So finally, when the book found uh an editor and it was sold to Union Square, I I went, I went with a friend of mine in January, and I went to La Palma, and I went primarily because, well, first of all, because I was incredibly curious, but I also wanted to see if the country, the island that I had imagined was real. And a little time to change things, so if anything needed to be changed, I would change it. And I did have to change one important thing: the town that I imagined where my protagonists lived uh was not as I described it at all, at all. And so rather than changing the entire town, which would have been not good, I changed it, I made it up. But the original town, the one that I thought I would be focusing on, was Hedei, which is not not at all like the one I ended up with. I ended up calling it La Pena.
SPEAKER_00:And how did immersing yourself in that historical moment influence your understanding of displacement or belonging?
SPEAKER_01:Do you know? I think that it didn't change it, it reaffirmed to what I already knew. Um displacement is the same no matter the time, the period, and the pain of leaving home, the anonymity of migrating is all the same. Um, and I could write about that pain from a very personal perspective because as we just discussed, I too left my country. I was 16 years old when I left, and at the beginning, all I could think about was how can I possibly return? I cried, I think I cried for four years, every day for four years. It wasn't until I got to college and sort of found my tribe in college that I stopped pining for my neighborhood, my friends, my country. It's very difficult. And you never quite feel comfortable where you are. I was just telling a friend of mine yesterday that I that this new way of communicating through Zoom or Teams is very comfortable to me because that's how I look at the world through these little windows. I'm always I always feel like the I'm the outsider looking in. I never really quite feel like I belong. But the saddest part is that if I went to Cuba now, and I haven't been in a long time, I haven't been since 1998, I would probably feel the same way. I would probably feel that I no longer belong as well. I've been away for a long time. And so this I played with that idea in the book. There were two protagonists. One is a journalist, and and the other is Catalina Quintana in the beginning of the 20th century, and Mara Dennis, the journalist, in 2019. And um I kept thinking how I'm sorry. Sorry. It's okay. I Mara, which of course has takes a lot for me. I I imbued her character with many of my characteristics and passions and even fears. Um she's an immigrant herself, and she's covering immigration, and her great-grandmother migrated. So this whole the idea of immigration is very much essential to the book. And um I try to describe in different stages how that felt, how that felt for each one of them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, as you said earlier, immigration displacement is multilayered. There was something that you said that tugged at my heart. Coming from Australia and being away from that country of my birth since 1982, I still don't know where home is. I think when I describe home, it is actually a state of my heart. It's where you're with your family and your friends. Exactly. Anyway, back to your book. Where and when did you discover the book El Misterio del Valbanera by Fernando Garcia Echigoyen? And how did this story become the seed for Deeper Than the Ocean?
SPEAKER_01:So I was in Key West in, believe it or not, 2006. So a long time ago, almost 20 years ago, I was in Key West promoting my first book, Finding Manana, and I happened to be walking. I don't know if you've ever been to Key West, but it's small, very quaint, and there was a table outside the shop, and he had all kinds of things. And I found the book. I have it right here so I can show it to you. It's like a coffee table book titled The Mystery of the Balvanera, but in Spanish. So that caught my eye, and it was$10. I bought it. It's you know, pretty, pretty big and full of wonderful pictures, historical pictures. And I took it to my hotel room and I read it, I think in one city, and I thought, how come I don't know about this ship that sank off the coast of Key West in 1919 during a hurricane, full of immigrants? It was a ship that had left Spain in August and it was going to Puerto Rico, and it did go to Puerto Rico. Um, Santiago de Cuba, which is a bay in the eastern province of Cuba, and then it was coming to Havana, to the port of Havana. But before it could get to Havana, a devastating hurricane developed, and the ship disappeared. It was like a ghost ship. There was a lot of coverage in the media. Um, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, AP covered it, Times Peak Ayun, the Cuban press, everyone covered it. Where's the ship? Where's the Guarvanera? It was gone. It had disappeared. And then eventually it was found. But when it was found, no bodies were found. The people had disappeared. It didn't even seem like they had even attempted to escape. They were simply gone. They were swallowed by the ocean. They were eye content deeper than the ocean. And therefore the title of the book, which was always the title of the book from the beginning, it just came to me. I knew that it had to, that it had to be the title for a lot of reasons that we can discuss. But anyway, I thought, how come I didn't know about this? I thought I knew, well, not everything, but a lot about Cuban history. And I'm also, you know, I have a lot of relatives in Spain. I've been going to Spain for many years. For for years, we spent our summers there in the same city where Mara lives, in Santander in the north. Uh, therefore, I gave her also my love for the city of Santander. And um, I was I was shocked. And then the the main thing was that right after I read that, in my mind, I saw a woman running through a ship without shoes, wearing a lilac dress, and with long flowing red hair looking for her daughter. And I was like, where'd that come from? And that was the beginning. It took me a long, long time to write it because I've always had a full-time job, very full-time. I work in journalism, and we're always busy, busy, busy, busy. I'm busier now than ever. And finding the time to write this book was the biggest challenge. I have huge admiration for people who get up at four in the morning and they write before the kids wake up. That is not me. I cannot do that.
SPEAKER_00:And working in journalism, you don't know when a story is going to happen. You don't know. When you need to just pack up at three o'clock in the morning and get on a plane and get to wherever in the world the story is taking place.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And then it's and then you come home exhausted, and the last thing you want to do is look at another screen. So, yes, it's that was difficult doing that.
SPEAKER_00:You spoke earlier of when you found the book about the uh Valbanera, that you had this sudden image of a little girl in a lilac dress with red flowing hair. Do you feel a kind of responsibility to history or to the people lost on that ship to tell their story?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yes. I felt the need to tell the story, and I have to tell you, after I saw her, her name came to me. And the name was always Catalina Quintana, which happens to be my grandmother's name, my maternal grandmother's name. I just I just knew that it would be her story, even though that didn't happen to my grandmother. But I'm reminded of a poem by um Mary Oliver that begins needing one. I invented her. And I guess I needed a grandmother. So I invented her. I she died young. She died when she was 40. My mother was um 16, she had just turned 16. I grew up hearing her stories from my mother, knowing about her and understanding my mother's pain about that loss, which was profound. And it got worse as my mother aged. Instead of getting better, many people tell you, you know, it gets better, you get used to the pain. My mother didn't work for my mother. My mother missed her more. And so, though I never knew her, she was very much a presence in my life, and I knew her name, and I knew about her. And so I thought, I write about my grandmother. That was really the germ of the idea. And I felt, I think your question was about the responsibility for the past. Yes, I do. Do you know you have to, of course, a lot of a lot of the stories in the in the book are product of my imagination. It is a novel. But I was um very faithful to to the ship and to what happened to it. At a certain point, someone who read it, read the manuscript, suggested, oh, you should let some of the people survive. And I thought, I can't do that because that's not how it happened. I mean, the only people who survived the ship, luckily, the ship had two stops, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the people who were going to San Juan get out, then Santiago de Cuba. Now, interestingly enough, more people than were supposed to disembarked in Santiago de Cuba. And it's unclear why, but some people were sick, they weren't feeling well after the journey. Um, some people wanted to try out the new train. There was a train route connecting Santiago de Cuba to Havana, and Spain didn't have trains at that time, and so it was a big deal, and people wanted to do that. Others had a premonition. It was a little girl who kept crying, we're gonna die, we're gonna die, the ship's gonna sick. And so the parents finally relented and they stayed. So because of that, only 488 people died, but still, that's it. That's a very big number. It is one of the worst tragedies. Uh I think it's the worst tragedy in the history of migration of Spain. But that's what makes it so strange that it isn't talked about more. I know, I couldn't believe it. I didn't know about it. And then every time I told someone, it's like, have you heard about the Valbaneda? You know, and it's like, no, what is that? So, you know, it's known as the poor man's Titanic. Everybody knows about the Titanic, of course, for a lot of reasons. I mean, it was a very uh very nice ship, it was a maiden voyage, it was, but but I think uh fundamentally because of the people who were aboard the Titanic. Although it also had immigrants, it had people who were very well known and wealthy, and of course, the survivors told the story. In the case of the Valvanera, there were no survivors, so no one could tell the story except those who left it behind, the families, and they were very poor. They were very poor immigrants, many of them didn't know how to read or write. In fact, there are stories, and of course, I I use that in the book, of people who survived, but their relatives never knew about it because they could never write to let them know, to say, you know, I'm here. They just went on with their lives, and the relatives uh were left behind, wondering where they were.
SPEAKER_00:What you said about the Valbenera being the poor man's Titanic, that's really sad. I'd like to talk about the opening of the book. You introduce Mara, a 55-year-old journalist. She's having a recurring nightmare where she's searching for her daughter when she's awakened by a call from her editor asking her to report on a story of a boat full of dead refugees found off the coast of northern Africa. Mara calls her photographer in Spain and the two meet up at Bajaras Airport. Mara then calls her mother in Miami, who asks her daughter to find her maternal grandmother's birth certificate, who was born in the city of Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands. This is the setup of the story of Mara's great-grandmother, Catalina Quintana Kebaisis. While reading this book, it felt personal to the author. It is very personal. So, how much of this story is derived from your family's history as told to you by your mother? Do you think by sharing these stories with you, she planted the seed for this book?
SPEAKER_01:I think she always did. My mother, um, despite her upbringing, was a great reader. She read all the time. And she told me that when she was a child, she used to climb a tree, an orange tree, sit there, and dream about being a writer. And of course, that didn't happen for her. She had a sixth-grade education, and it was a different life, a different time. She got married, came to the United States. Here she felt, you know, she felt very bad because she never really learned English. She tried, but she was 40 when she arrived and had to go work at a factory. It was very difficult for her and my dad. So her English was very, very limited. She always felt bad about that. But she was always a great reader, and I was always getting her books in Spanish. Um, towards the end of her life, I think she knew that it was the end of her life. She knew it so much that a few days before she showed me what she wanted to wear for her funeral. She had picked out a dress, and I took a picture of that to send to my sister in case I forgot. And of course, I have it. I have it on my phone. That was um October 28th, and she died November 7th. So just a week before. And as we were approaching that day, which of course I didn't know, I saw her that morning, and she died in the evening. Every time I visited, visited her, she told me more stories about her mom. Some of them I had already heard, some were new, or they were slightly different. And I didn't know what to do with those stories. She knew I was writing a book. She knew what the book was about, and she knew that it had that the protagonist had her mother's name. But I wasn't going to tell the story of my grandmother, like the real story of my grandmother. It wasn't about that. And then in the mysterious way in which writing happens, those stories began to find their way on the page. And at a certain point, I thought, maybe I should just give up the story of the Balbanera and just write about my grandmother. But um, luckily I didn't do that, and I found a way to merge these two stories together. So much of what happens in part two of the book, much of it is real. The house that I describe where Catalina lives is the house where my mother was born and that I visited every summer. I know it well. The relationships that she had, the fact that she was a healer, a much sought-after healer in her community. My grandmother was that.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's fascinating.
SPEAKER_01:There's just so many things. I don't want to say there's so many things because I want to want to give um the book away, because some of them are connected to what happens to the character. But um suffice it to say that yes, it is very much imbued with her stories. And then Mara's character, because she's because she's a journalist and I gave her the age I had when I was writing the book. Um, I also made her a mother, and I'm the mother, I'm the mother of three, three boys now, men, not one, but um my youngest son was reading it and it was like, oh, I know that. Oh, I know that. He kept recognizing things, so it was a lot of fun. But um, I gave her my fear of the ocean. I'm I'm very afraid of the water, and I'm very afraid of, I don't really know how to swim. I learned very late in life, and I'm not comfortable unless my unless my feet are touching the bottom, which you can't really be comfortable in the ocean like that. So yeah, that that's it's very much you picked up on that, and it's true. It's very it's a very personal book.
SPEAKER_00:In a piece you wrote for the Miami Herald, you wrote, quote, I too have always been afraid of the sea. I'm attracted to it, but also afraid, end quote. Okay, so that line had me thinking, because of the story opening with that recurring dream, I wondered about your thoughts regarding inherited trauma and suffering. Did your mother ever speak of this? And were there moments in your own life where you felt like you were living out an inherited pattern?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, the recurring dreams are really my mother's. My mother always dreamed that she was looking for a little girl. And she would wake up in a panic and call me. Are you okay? Is your sister? Are you already called your sister? Sister's okay, are you okay? I mean, I was 40 years old and I was getting calls from my mother if I was okay. I was like, I'm okay. Why? I was looking for a girl. And it was always a little girl that she was looking for. I don't exactly know why, because you know, she had two daughters and we're fine, we're alive, we're healthy, we've never been lost. Uh so it's but it was her recurring nightmare. I think it was probably because she lost her mom. It was her fear of maybe being alone. I don't really know. But those nightmares are exactly my mother's nightmares. She would call me and describe them to me. But also, I do believe, and studies show that trauma is inherited and that it could also be in your DNA. I mean, it's a profound thing. Many, many Cubans, not just me, are afraid of the water. There are a lot of Cubans who don't know how to swim, even though we were born on an island. If you take a look at um El Malicón, the seawall in Havana, the famed seawall, and use many, many pictures and videos of people sitting there on that seawall, often they're not looking at the water, their backs are to the water, they're looking at the city, which I always find very interesting. It's like the city is so attractive to her, to them, to us, that we looked in, we look inwards rather than outwards. I don't know if it's because we're afraid of the sea or because we can't leave or because we feel trapped on that island. But most, every time you look at those images, uh, take a look, most of the time they're looking to the city. We're afraid of the rain, we're afraid of so many things all connected to the water. And I wasn't really sure why, and I'm still not sure. However, doing the research for the book, I realized that the entire Caribbean, not just Cuba, is it's like a cemetery. There have been so many shipwrecks, beginning with one of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Santa Maria of the coast of um Haiti. And so many people trying to escape Cuba and Haiti and other places that have died in those waters. So between the shipwrecks and the refugees, no wonder I'm afraid of the water. I mean, I don't I don't know that I totally feel comfortable swimming there with knowing that all those souls have been lost in that water, right? And you know, I don't want to sound too macabre, but it's it's it made me realize where my fear came from.
SPEAKER_00:Dreams can definitely mirror the soul, I believe, anyway. Um, on page 199, Catalina is suffering physically and emotionally from devastating news, and she experiences a recurring nightmare. A doctor examines her and she asks him what it's like for someone to drown. I don't want to give anything away. You write of Mara, quote, there was something exquisite about her pain, and she wanted to feel the full intensity of it. Only then, she intuited, could she understand her daughter's ordeal, end quote. These two sentences explain the extent of Catalina's courage. Because for a mother to ask that of a doctor, knowing what uh she had been through, took a lot of courage, and it's not something that Catalina would ever forget. Um, is that how you saw these words when you were writing them?
SPEAKER_01:I'm not sure, but it is how I saw my mother. My mother was um my mother was a very, very fearful woman and at the same time very courageous. She needed to know, she needed to imagine the worst before she tackled anything. You know, I think it's because she needed. Know if she would survive it. And I do this too. Sometimes when I need to make a decision or when I need to do something difficult, I think, what's the worst that can happen? And if the worst that can happen is something that I can live with, then I do it. If I can't, then I don't. But dwelling on that, dwelling on the negative fatality of it all, it's something that my mother did quite often. And that I think she left in me. I am the same way. Probably not as bad as she was, but but I have. I have um a little bit of that as well. But I didn't think I wonder, you know, that's interesting that if it was she was being courageous, Catalina, at that point. I suppose so. She needed to imagine the worst to know that she could survive it. She needed to go on. She knew at that point, she's already she's been given news, which we're not going to reveal. And she knows that she needs to go on. And so she needs to resolve that issue, which again ultimately she doesn't resolve the issue, but it lives with her. It was, I think asking the question was probably worse for her than not asking it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, almost like another ghost.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:There's another section on page 48. A memory comes to Mara about her journey from Cuba four decades earlier. And this memory is awakened when she goes to the morgue to see a child who died on the crossing from Ghana. You write about the little girl's clothing and her quote, tiny toenails painted frosted pink, end quote. Your attention to detail in your writing is real, meaning the reader sees the child and feels the loss. Are your observational skills a carryover from your reporting days?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, but it's one of those questions that you don't know what comes first, the chicken or the egg. I don't know if I'm a reporter because I have those observational skills or if I develop them. But I do think that I had them to begin with, I always did, but um they were strengthened by my profession, of course. I mean, we are supposed to report with our five senses, which is in my case is interesting because I only have four senses. I don't have the sense of a smell. I was born without it.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_01:And so I know. So I always have to work harder than um other reporters to notice that. For example, when I went out reporting with a photographer, I would ask the photographer, what does it smell like? Or if if we like if we were like an earthquake or volcano, if if there were a lot of people who were dead, I would ask, when do you start smelling the dead people? You have to report with the five senses. And I wasn't going to allow the fact that I didn't have one to prevent me from showing the world as it should be described. And so I did that in the book as well. And you can see that there are a lot of smells described in the book. I've read a lot about smells so that I know how to describe them. But um I had, like Mara remembers in the book, I had an editor. I was on assignment once in Atlanta, Georgia, and the national editor of the Miami Herald was there with us. It was an important assignment. It was a takeover of a federal penitentiary in 1987. And I was picked to go inside the penitentiary. Out of all the reporters there, they picked me and another reporter who worked for AP. And um, you know, I was new, I was like the youngest reporter, and the editor didn't know what to do with me. So he called me and he said, There are only three things that are important in journalism. And I'm there like, I want to take notes, I want to absorb it, this is important. And he said, details, details, details. And so I've never forgotten that.
SPEAKER_00:Um and I use that, all of that in the book. And were you able to gather information by using his words about detail when you went into the penitentiary?
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, yeah, it was a front page story. It was it was incredible. I mean, yeah, it was a huge national story in 1987. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I have an off-the-cuff question for you. Um, do you remember what clothes you were wearing when you were on the boat from Cuba headed to Key West?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, my best clothes, which is something that I describe in in the book because it's always about where you're going. It's aspirational, is what how you want to present yourself in this new country now where you're leaving behind. And so I was I was wearing clothes that my mother made. My mother always made my clothes, um, red pants, bell bottom, even though it was 1980, but um, and a top um with you know a plat plate, uh top which was red, wine, and blue, but I didn't do that on purpose. It was just happened to be my nicest clothes. Um, the blouse had a little piping around the neck. That's what I don't remember, but I but I remember, but I don't remember my shoes. I don't remember what shoes I was wearing. And I still have that clothes. I have it in my garage.
SPEAKER_00:Murta, if this next question is too personal, just let me know and I'll delete it. Uh would you like to share what happened when you landed in Key West? Who checked you in? Was your family together? Did you have relatives in Key West?
SPEAKER_01:Well, uh, when we arrived in Key West, we were not the first to arrive. So already the US government had set up a structure to receive this uh onslaught of refugees. And um I was very sick in the boat, my sister and I both were very sick, to the point that when we arrived, um some soldiers who were helping wanted to take me on a stretcher to the hospital. And my mother said, no, we're not separating. And um it's a long story, but basically, my father was in another boat. We arrived alone, my mother, my sister, and I alone, and my father and my uncle in another boat. My uncle is the one who chartered a boat to go get us. He was returning with my father in another boat because the original one sank. Oh my goodness. So, yeah. So my mother, um, my mother said, We're not separating, we're staying together. But I had memorized my uncle's phone number at home, and I gave it to someone for his wife to come pick us up, and that's what happened. We were taken to this area where all refugees were taken, and we were given some food, I don't remember, because I was so sick I didn't eat anything. And that was around noon, and by six or seven that evening, my aunts, both both my aunts were there, and they picked us up, and we got in a car, and we came all the way to Ayalia, which is where they lived, which is um a city, very immigrant city here in the greater area.
SPEAKER_00:Do you remember how long the boat trip was from Cuba to Key West? 16 hours. 16. Yeah, it was long. And you wrote about this in your memoir.
SPEAKER_01:I did, I was gonna say that's all my first book, that's Finding Manana. Finding Manana in Memoir of the Cuban Exodus.
SPEAKER_00:I need to read that book next. I have a final question for you. Is there one detail from your reporting career that has stayed with you? And did it influence how you write scenes of loss?
SPEAKER_01:Oh my goodness, so many. So, so many. But I don't have to I don't have to look at my career to think of scenes of loss because I lost my country. I lost my father, young, my father was young when he died, and I've lost a lot during my lifetime, so I can use my own experience. But yes, in my reporting, I witnessed a lot of despair, a lot of loss. Particularly, I remember a couple. When you met when you asked me the question, the first thing that came to my mind was this couple who they were Cubans, they lived in Orlando, and they came in the boat lift as I did in 1980. And um they were detained by what was then called INS, Immigration Service, which I guess would now be ICE, for a misdemeanor. But because they had small children, the children were given away to the foster system while the situation in the courts was resolved. If it had been anybody else, they would have been out in days. But because they were Mariel refugees, they were detained because at that time, if you came from Cuba having committed a crime, or if you committed a crime in the US, no matter how minor, you were immediately detained, detained by INS or ICE. The woman was finally released, she lost all her teeth while in detention, which I didn't know you could lose your teeth from pain and suffering. She like really lost all her teeth. And then they tried to, they got the kids back eventually, but the kids were very young when they left or when they were separated, and they no longer spoke Spanish and they no longer recognized their parents.
SPEAKER_00:And how long were the parents detained? It was detained for two years, a little longer.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And so that story has stayed with me always. I've never forgotten them. I've often wondered about them. I know they lived in Orlando. I never went back because journalism can be cruel that way. You do something and then you move on to the next disaster. And uh, but I've always wondered about them. I mean, stories of perhaps because I'm a mother, but stories of mothers and their children are particularly poignant to me because that's there's just nothing worse than being separated from your kids.
SPEAKER_00:And it's happening more and more these days in our country. Murta, can you share with us a little about winning the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism with the team you were working with?
SPEAKER_01:I can tell you quickly, yes, I was working for the New York Times, and we worked on a series of stories about race in America. In fact, it was called How Racists Lived in America. There were 15 of us in the end, 15 stories, and there were more people, 15 reporters, but of course the photographers. So it was a Pulitzer Prize for the entire team that worked, the you know, the photographers, editors, reporters. And um, of course, reporters always get the glory because you see their byline, but behind every reporter, there are tons of people. It's a team, it's a team effort. But we won it for that, and it's um it was a fantastic series that was eventually published as a book of the same title, How Race is Lived in America.
SPEAKER_00:Murta, a couple of things. Thank you for all the work you do and all the research you do and the journalism and reporting to cover immigration in this country. And for your brilliant work in fiction writing. Deeper Than the Ocean is highly recommended reading from me. And I was so grateful to receive an early copy. Um, it is just a fabulous book.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. And I'm so happy you like the book. You're the first person to read it that is not connected to me, that has been able to tell me that she likes it. So I'm I'm just so pleased to have like a real reader already this early in the process. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Murta, I've loved chatting with you. I hope we get to do so in person one day. And I wish you all the best of luck with Deeper Than the Ocean. Thank you so much. Thank you, really. That really means a lot to me. You've been listening to my conversation with author Murta Mojito about her new novel, Deeper Than the Ocean. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media. And remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcast.com. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy JacksonBeverly, on Instagram and Facebook, and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcast.com. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly. The music provided by Brian Beverly and my personal assistant is Kaylee Dishinger. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.