Ever wondered how the Christian students at Brown University and RISD process things like identity, Scripture, undergraduate life, their faith and more? Cornerstone Magazine is your ticket into their minds. Their website boasts beautiful illustrations, investigative prose and reflective poetry from students like Mikaela Carrillo, who I met during our brief overlap at Brown through our involvement in the Christian community there.

Mikaela was born in Sacramento, California to strong Christian, Puerto Rican parents. She says her identity is something she has “no clue how to talk about” because of its multiple facets: Christian; Latina-American; writer and staff for Cornerstone Magazine; 2021 graduate (congratulations!) in Public Health interested in social justice, maternal health, and community engagement… and perhaps most recently, Creative!

Mikaela is taking this next year to get some experience in population health by working in the Providence community before commencing her time in medical school. I’m honored to feature her this month as National Hispanic Heritage Month begins, and she steps into new seasons for her own professional and creative journeys.

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Talk to me about your journey as a Creative.

It’s interesting even to be asked to do this interview. I can’t believe I’m being called a Creative right now. As a school-aged kid, I thought I was the least creative person ever. I was very book smart, did what I needed to do. I didn’t feel very creative. I always thought “creative” meant I had to make stuff up. Especially in English or Lit class, it felt like I didn’t know what to say or how to be creative about things. I was more into analytical, research papers. 

In seventh grade, we had to do a creative fiction piece. I was dreading it. I didn’t know what I was going to write. To this day, I’m not good at fiction. I’ve realized I was calling myself uncreative for a long time because I felt like I had to do fiction well, but what I really loved was doing creative nonfiction, which speaks a lot to identity. I felt a bit more creative with writing in high school when I realized creative nonfiction was a place I could express myself.

How do your various identities factor into your writing?

Especially at the beginning, I felt most connected to creative nonfiction pieces that touched on my ethnic background. In high school, I wrote a piece about my struggles with language. By the time I was school-aged, there wasn’t a lot of Spanish speaking in my household. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up and I think that’s how language stayed alive for me but I also felt huge amounts of shame for not being fluent. I was also inadvertently shamed by others for not being fluent.

The shame that you feel because you’re not carrying on your culture in the same way as everyone seems to expect you to, that’s something I felt a lot as a kid. I didn’t grapple with it all the time. I grew up in a very diverse school district and could avoid some of the more complicated dynamics of ethnic identity, but I did struggle with language. That’s one of the first things I wrote about that I felt very connected to. It sort of spiraled upwards from there.

I speak about a lot of ethnic and cultural identity, but wrapped up in most pieces as well is my identity as a Christian, as a believer in Christ. Writing has been an avenue for me to express that, explore different feelings and thoughts. In my college days, I wasn’t always very good at expressing myself verbally. Writing was a good way for me to express and explain some of the ways I was feeling.

In my early college years, I went through some difficult seasons that transformed the way I saw things and how I saw myself. I became much more attuned to metaphor, in the way I saw and described things in life. I think more about symbolism or metaphor to help explain things in my life. That’s made my writing much richer, being able to put pen to paper to express that kind of change in my mindset.

Your poem To Be Thankful is very narrative. Tell me more about the process of bringing this poem to life.

I think I’d written something for Cornerstone earlier that semester, something encouraging about continuing to trek along. Taking the unique circumstances of Covid to grow in certain areas—ideas which I do still totally support. But when it came time to write To Be Thankful, it’d been a really difficult week full of difficult decisions in my personal life and I was just thinking about the year. I went out to get coffee with a friend and we were talking about having a piece lined up for our Cornerstone meeting the next day. I didn’t have anything. Sometimes I feel bad for the rushed way I do my pieces but the pressure helps. I definitely consider myself creative now, but, even so, it takes a lot of work for me to get my thoughts to paper. I often find myself up against deadlines thinking I’m not a great writer because I don’t “take the time,” but that’s the way I’ve worked and it’s worked.

I wrote To Be Thankful in a moment when I was reflecting on the weird year that 2020 had been. I tend to write prose. Rhyming is what gets me into poetry. I enjoy having a rhyming scheme, and this one doesn’t actually rhyme. The reason I kept this piece poetry but sort of prose is I was just stitching things together. I didn’t have a full sentence. I didn’t have a full explanation or I didn’t want to explain it all the way, because it was private information for myself and others. Prose made it feel like I had to explain myself; with poetry, I could say it, I could describe it, but I wouldn’t necessarily have to spell it out. I had never written anything like this before but it felt like the right way to explain my thoughts.

You’ve described Cornerstone as this wonderful strange thing in the midst of your STEM classes and public health focus. How did you get involved with Cornerstone?

The summer before I came to Brown as a freshman, I was reading through Deuteronomy and I just remember loving reading it. I decided to start writing what I thought about it. Coming to Brown, early in my fall semester, an upperclassman suggested submitting to Cornerstone. In my freshman “open to anything” mode, I figured, “Why not?” My writing on Deuteronomy was very analytical, not creative. My writing has changed a lot since then!

So I submitted this really rough piece about Deuteronomy, and they accepted it. We went through a lot of revisions, which freaked me out. I’d never done anything like that before. And then it was published in the Cornerstone 2018 Spring issue. That was my first taste. Then my friend invited me to come to one of the meetings. I showed up and never left.

What compelled you to stay?

The people are what kept me there. As a freshman I was looking for community. I’d found it in other spaces, but Cornerstone was this beautiful collective group of people who were creating this magazine. For a while I wasn’t sure of my position there. Most people in Cornerstone are general editors and I’ve never enjoyed editing. I think over time I found my place, by the time I was a senior. But early on, I was like, what am I doing here? Editing for me wasn’t my favorite but I loved the end product and being able to read different pieces. I stuck around also because I love the vision.

What is the vision of Cornerstone?

To glorify God and share the gospel through creative work, which I think is so beautiful. A few days ago, I was just marveling at the creative energy in the Christian community. It’s often overlooked by the more dogmatic, cookie-cutter faith that we sometimes get. There’s so much creativity out there. Cornerstone is a way to share the message of Christ through creative work, and that’s why I stuck around.

How did your role change over your time there?

My junior year, they were going to put me in leadership for Cornerstone, something that was just editing to the next level. It was already assumed that I was taking the position. I knew it wasn’t the best for me, and saying no was new for me. I was used to just taking positions that were offered. But this position wasn’t for me, so I said no.

At the same time, we were talking about revamping our online space. It was there but no one had taken the helm. It was interesting that I took the step to say, “I can’t take this copy editor position but I’d love to take Online, if I can. That is where I’d love to help Cornerstone grow.” Luckily they let me do that and that’s really where I found my footing. It was a long time coming, but that’s where I came fully into joy in my position in Cornerstone.

What about the Online Head position excited you?

With the online team, it was new, we didn’t have anything set up, no organization. It felt like a good opportunity to schedule and organize and build, which I felt more comfortable with. s Online Head, I was really working to gather people, to organize them, to have a schedule and a system to get pieces out. I got to do a little bit of editing but the onus wasn’t on me. My biggest responsibility was facilitating and making sure the system worked, and that was best for me.

How do you see your writing continuing as you step out of the Cornerstone, undergraduate student realm into the health profession side of who you are?

That’s a great question. I’ve written some very different pieces more related to my health interest, but my creative writing tends to focus on my Christian or ethnic identity. From my little taste of having a job in a health setting already, I’m noticing that it’s one thing to talk about the unfortunate realities of society in class and another to witness them on a daily basis. That’s something I’m thinking a lot about.

I’m not working directly with patients but I’m at a place that serves a lot of patients from low income or under-resourced backgrounds. A lot of them are immigrants and not a lot speak English as their preference. I take public transportation every day to work. I rode the bus occasionally throughout my four years at Brown, but now I’m taking it every single day and for longer periods of time and having to grapple with the different experiences of other people in this greater community. I walk into my workspace and continue to see that pan out.

I always wrap my ethnic and faith identity into what I do, but I’ve been thinking lately about how those interact in spaces highlighting the unfortunate disparities of our society today. Moving forward, I can definitely see myself writing about some of those questions and pains, which I think will be increasingly informed by my experience in the healthcare setting.

The feed is raging, contention rising

Anger ripping through the seams

As evil spills forth over the fabric

Of this broken American dream

from “A Reminder” by Mikaela Carrillo

In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, are there any Latino/Latina creatives you recommend people check out?

A lot of my creative energy is an outlet for my faith and so I’ll talk specifically about Latino art from the point of view of Christian faith. I recently started following this account [on Instagram] called LatinasLovingJesus and it felt like my soul was touched in a new way. Prior to that, having grown up in a Christian space, in a non-Latino church environment, my faith and ethnic identities were very separate for me. It was so touching and heartwarming to my soul to be able to follow Latina women and witness that intersection of faith and ethnic identity. I just didn’t know there were these things out there. 

As we talk about National Hispanic Heritage Month, this is as much of a learning experience for me as for other people. Depending on how you grew up, you may not have a lot of exposure to Latinos who work in different spheres relating to art or literature. For me as well, it’s a growing area. I know there are some books being written, but there are very few out there. This particular group I follow, they asked for favorite books by Latina women in the faith, and there are so few! The list is growing, but I’ve been grappling with this lack of representation. 

I would encourage people to look into it, actively get out as I’m doing. I know there’s a recent book called Abuelita Faith [by Kat Armas] that I haven’t read, but I have it on my list. Since I don’t have specifics, I would just say look for it and you’ll find your way. It’s something even Latinos are struggling with, specifically for me, finding people who are voicing their faith and identity in this way.

Could you be one of those Latinas?

I have this career path [in public health] that I’m fully committed to and I think that’s what I thought I was going to do for my life. Now I hope to hang onto creative writing opportunities and definitely make room for that moving forward.

With that comes a fair amount of shame-breaking, like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes I still feel a lot of that shame. The Latina experience in the US is variable, depending on who you grow up with or where you grow up. I’m learning to accept that it’s a spectrum of unique experience, that doesn’t nullify my perspectives or thoughts or experiences. The art of shame-breaking is writing about it; it comes with it instead of before it.

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Follow and support the artistic journey of folks like Mikaela…

• Read the latest posts on the Cornerstone blog
• Keep your eyes open for the next Cornerstone issue and read past publications
• Celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month by intentionally searching out books, blogs, art, and accounts held by our Latina and Latino Creative friends
• Learn more about National Hispanic Heritage Month here

Remember, coming into the fullness of who you are is a complicated, messy journey made beautiful by God’s hand at work in us and through others; embrace it!

Tune in next month for another Chat with a Creative! Follow the blog or subscribe to Katie’s newsletter to receive an update as soon as it’s posted.