Gina Velasco was one of our Fall 2025 Digital Residents. As a part of this program, we do Q&As with our residents to feature them, their work, and their words. See our Q&A with Gina below, and explore more Spotlights here.
TSW: Tell us about your work, writing, or project. What are you writing these days? How is your work changing, and how is it changing you?
Gina Velasco: I am currently experimenting with hybrid creative nonfiction forms. I’m integrating poetry and images with personal narrative. After a career based in academic writing, it has been freeing to focus on my creative writing practice in my work. This has opened me up to centering my intuition and made me more receptive to creative inspiration. It really has rekindled my love of writing. After previously pursuing dance as my primary creative practice, it has been exciting and invigorating to pivot to creative writing. Writing hybrid creative nonfiction has allowed me to integrate my over two decades of academic writing experience with an attention to creativity, curiosity, and play.
TSW: What is a question you’re asking yourself these days, and what is a question you or your work is asking of your reader?
GV: The questions that I have returned to over and over again in my writing are focused on growth and reinvention after physical and emotional trauma. How does one grow and change after the dissolution of the self? How is trauma stored in the body? How can we heal from post-traumatic grief? What is your body telling you? What stories are hidden in the body? My hybrid memoir in progress explores my experience of enduring breast cancer while parenting a baby and a toddler during the Covid 19 pandemic lockdown. Within this time period, I had six cancer-related surgery and separated from my spouse. I explore these questions of grief, trauma, healing, and reinvention throughout the project.
TSW: What were you processing during our residency program? Did anything unlock for you? If so, what new entrance did you find for your work or for yourself as a writer in the world? And what caused that shift?
GV: The Narrative Shifts residency encouraged me to explore two sets of questions that are crucial to my current book project: 1) Am I waiting for permission to write? For whose permission am I ─ perhaps subconsciously ─ waiting? What is holding me back from telling the story that I want to write? 2) What is the archive of my story? I’ve realized that much of my work as a writer has to do with excavating the stories that the body wants to tell. I understand the body as an archive of the trauma that I’ve experienced. In this sense, I see my writing practice as partially one of excavation. To understand how one’s stories and one’s interiority are rooted in the somatic has been key to my process as a writer. As such, I’ve come to understand writing as both a somatic and intellectual/creative process. The residency facilitators Cal and Carolina and the discussions with my fellow residents deepened my understanding of these questions and their relation to my creative practice.
TSW: What motivates you to keep beginning, and/or, what is a story that gave you permission to tell yours?
GV: Reading Akwaeke Emezi’s epistolary memoir, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, was a crucial moment of insight to me as a writer. Their unshakable faith and certainty in the importance of their writing and their need to share their stories, was inspiring to me. Their ability to let go of the institutional structure of an MFA program, and their complete confidence in their own ability ─ particularly as a Black nonbinary immigrant in the U.S. ─ inspired me to have faith in my own work. I have also been influenced by hybrid and experimental memoirs that combine poetry, images, personal correspondence, theory, family histories, and personal narrative, such as Zahra Patterson’s Chronology, Jen Soriano’s Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir.
