Madhouse Author Interview: Crime Scene by Cynthia Pelayo

Hello friends and fiends--

Today in The Madhouse, we're talking true crime and crime fiction with one of my favorite people and authors, Cynthia Pelayo. I've had the pleasure of working with Pelayo on two poetry collections now through Raw Dog Screaming Press, and when I read this one, frankly, it just took my breath away. I read her collection Into the Forest and All the Way Through when it came out in 2020, and not only did I appreciate the heartbreaking beauty of those poems, but the grace that Pelayo handled those cases with was extraordinary. If you haven't read it yet, please consider picking it up (but make sure you're in the right head space when you sit down to read it).

True Crime, in general, is a difficult genre to work in, especially when you're dealing with unsolved, contemporary cases, yet Pelayo's writing isn't exploitative but rather a war cry, a protest. Her writing challenges readers to not only think and rethink their pull to the genre but to also politically question why these cases remain cold or without the marketing attention that others so easily get. I always feel like I learn so much when I read Pelayo's work--not only about the world, but myself, too--and Crime Scene is another great example of how her poetry speaks to issues of racial injustice, violence, political corruption, mental health, and the empathetic heaviness that exists in jobs that consistently deal with loss and grief.

NOTE: For readers of poetry, true crime, and crime fiction, this is one not to be missed. It's written as part epic poem/ part narrative verse, so its a structure that will speak to all readers. Preorders are available now.

With that said, please enjoy the following interview with Cynthia in celebration of her upcoming October release. 

Best, 

Stephanie M. Wytovich

SMW: Hi Cynthia! Welcome back to The Madhouse. I want to first draw everyone’s attention to a previous interview we did together for your crime collection Into the Forest And All the Way Through because we touched on a lot of great points about the true crime genre in general, not to mention violence in America. Can you talk a little bit about the emergence of true crime poetry we’ve been seeing lately? Why do you think this subgenre is finding its legs right now and has been over the past few years?

CP: I think the genre of true crime has morphed into something we can’t even contain anymore. The genre itself of true crime feels like it has multiple subgenres within it and varying ways to be consumed. It’s entertainment. We can’t deny that true crime is entertaining, and I almost liken it to those crowds of people that would go and stand at the gallows to watch someone be hanged or to watch a woman be burned at the stake. We’re still doing that in many ways. We’re still standing around and consuming people’s suffering. Why do we do that? [Why] do we sit back and watch a grueling Netflix documentary about the rape, torture, and killing of people?  Why are we consumed with the theories around what happened to a person that has gone missing?

I’m guilty as well. I used to consume hours and hours of true crime. I would listen to the podcasts and watch the documentaries and read the books, but honestly, after Into the Forest and All the Way Through, I haven’t been able to. I don’t want to consume someone’s pain anymore, and maybe Crime Scene is my way of saying goodbye to that genre for now, even though Crime Scene isn’t true crime. It’s more of a reflection of a crime that could have occurred anywhere really.

I think people consume true crime because it’s simply not them, it’s not them suffering. You could have had an awful day at your job, and are struggling to pay your bills, have a relationship that is falling apart, but who is doing worse off than you? Well, you can listen or watch a few hours of true crime, and maybe some part of your brain tells you…at least you’re not that murdered person, or that missing person, or that suffering family member. Subconsciously it’s there. It’s always going to be there, that your suffering is not as great as theirs.

SMW: My experience and “enjoyment” (and I use that word lightly because it’s not exactly that) with the true crime genre always comes in waves. I’ll do nothing but consume it for weeks, but then something inevitably happens or pops up in a case and I’m just done and need to take some distance and recalibrate my wellbeing and headspace. Most recently for me, this happened after reading The Last Victim by Jason Moss. With that said, I’m curious what your writing process was like during Crime Scene. When did the idea for the collection take shape and how did you protect yourself mentally from it while writing?

CP: It's funny, after Into the Forest and All the Way Through like I said, I went without consuming true crime for quite some time, and then at one point I told myself ‘Well, let me watch something.’ Well, I watched The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez and my reality collapsed once again. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the absolutely tragic and brutal account of a young boy’s torture and eventual murder by people that should have loved him. That really shook me for a very long time. Months went by and then I sat down and watched The Alcasser Murders on Netflix, and the only reason I watched The Alcasser Murders was because it really highlights this idea of media and spectacle and how true crime becomes a spectacle. That was months ago too, and I haven’t consumed any true crime since.

The idea for Crime Scene really came about because I just felt like I wasn’t finished. I felt like Into the Forest and All the Way Through was incomplete, in a sense. I wanted to speak to the overall tragedy of what a case actually is – this empty and lonely journey that really never ends. There will always be another body. There will always be another missing person. There will always be clues. There will always be suspects and misdirection, and there will always be law enforcement failure and eventually unsolved cases.

There are people [who] commit crimes, and we really have to unpack what we are talking about – we are talking about human beings [who] take other human beings and do vile things to them. There are people [who] will take people from their homes or off the street with the intention [to] inflict absolute pain on this person for their enjoyment. And there are those [who] do this without any fear. There are those [who] do it again and again. There are those [who] get away and live a long life and die with the [knowledge] that they have killed people and no one will ever know it was them. That is haunting. That is horror.

I wanted to speak to that emptiness, but do so without using an actual case and that’s where the idea for Crime Scene came in. I wanted to talk about a journey that never ends, a journey that is thankless and cruel.

SMW: Can you talk a little bit about your characterization of Agent K? I think so often with poetry, we talk about form, style, and voice, but characterization is such a big part of this collection that I’d love to hear more about how you explored that as a whole and then individually in each poem.

CP: I never mention this in the poem, but originally, I had interpreted the K in Agent K as “Kill.” And the M in Agent M stands for “Murder.” I wanted to make sure that the idea of killing and murder [was] always there somehow. But as I continued writing I discovered her name was Karma, and you hear her name mentioned twice in the poem.

When I started thinking about her it was hard to not make the connection between her and Detective Lauren Medina who I wrote about in Children of Chicago. Agent K is very different than Lauren Medina. Agent K is, or at least I wanted her to be, a sort of [fill-in] for every investigator guilted with not being able to fulfill justice. I thought about what it must be like for a human being with a conscious to wake up every morning knowing that their job is to solve murder, but yet they have a backlog of murders they have been unable to solve. So how do you really keep going through [those] motions? I imagine there are many investigators who just don’t care, but I want to believe there are people out there [who] want to help, [who] want to set things right, but know they are unable to.

It was important that she remained largely nameless and faceless. That the place where she was investigating a crime could be any place, any town, any city. She could be anyone. I also didn’t want her personality to overwhelm or to be too muted either. So, I had to find this balance between her and whatever aspect of the case I was specifically zooming in on for that particular poem I was writing about.

SMW: This collection is essentially a novelization told through poems. How is writing something like this different from writing a collection of individual standalone pieces? Did you find it harder or easier to tackle the collection this way?

CP: At first it was very hard. It took me a while to find the rhythm. I had to stop and delete poems, and it was a mess in the very beginning because I tackled it at first like I would any other poetry collection, and that was not going to work. I then had to step back and think of it as I would a novel. I had to outline. So, I created a general outline. I wanted a very basic three-act structure, and from there I was able to construct what would happen within each act. Once I plotted that out the poems came fairly quickly and I wrote them from [the] beginning straight through to the end, which was really exciting since I’ve never written poetry like that before.

I think my answer is, it was actually easier than writing a collection of standalone pieces in a way, and I think I enjoyed doing it this way more because there was no starting or stopping. There was only a story I needed to tell. So even when I would take a break, when I came back to the work I knew where I was going and what needed to be told.

I did want to however make sure that the poems weren’t too homogenous in design. I wanted to be sure I was playing with variation and style throughout and that also came naturally. I never wanted the pace or tone to feel consistent. It needed to have a certain unpredictable speed, just like with any investigation, things slow down, but there tends to be a flurry of activity during certain stages of the case. It still feels very my style, this collection, but there is something about it that does feel different than my other collections, more mature I suppose.

SMW: I feel like every time I turn on the TV, I see another documentary about Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Over the past few years, we’ve seen things like Confessions of a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, the movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, My Friend Dahmer, and Ryan Murphy’s upcoming crime drama series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Personally, I’m a bit worn out with these stories and I’m curious what you think about why these same stories keep being told over and over again while other lesser-known cases remain in the dark. 

CP: Unfortunately, it’s all marketing. Serial killers have become a brand. Isn’t that awful to think of it that way? There’s name recognition and that will instantly generate interest and an audience. Movie studios know that if they package another program on Ted Bundy it will generate interest instantly. However, not many studios are willing to invest money in a missing person’s case or an unsolved murder from a low-income rural community, or a case from a city that is made up of mostly marginalized individuals.

There are many, many lesser-known cases that are just absolutely tragic and complex and do deserve some attention in order to get resources devoted to investigating the case, and it’s sad and frustrating that missing person’s cases or murder cases do not have an equal level of dedication from law enforcement to investigate through to prosecution. 

SMW: What nonfiction books would you recommend to someone who is interested in adding more true crime reads to their library? Any that you’re hoping to read soon yourself?

CP: For the paranoid, like myself: The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signs That Protect Us From Violence, by Gavin De Becker

Some people hate it, but I don’t care: Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas

Other: Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases by Paul Holes

Overall, I’m trying to navigate away from formal true crime and prefer just to read pretty far away accounts, or anything based on the psychology of motivation, but not specific to any one person.

SMW: I feel like a lot of true crime buffs have that one story that hit them harder than others. What is the one case that has haunted you all these years?

CP: There are two, the kidnapping and the murder of John Walsh’s son, Adam Walsh. Adam Walsh was kidnapped outside of a Sears department store and his remains were found days later, and the murder of two-year-old James Patrick Bulger who was lured away from a store in England by two 10-year-old boys, who then tortured and killed him.

Adam Walsh was murdered by an adult.

James Patrick Bulger was murdered by other children.

I guess it’s hard for me to even write about why these cases have stuck with me for so long, but I’ll just say they’re both so tragic. To me, children are literal angels on Earth and for someone to hurt a child, another child, well, there’s just no coming back from that. Anyone who harms a child is not human.

SMW: Something that’s always made me uneasy about reading and watching true crime is that I feel like I’m promoting or reliving something horrible. For instance, I visited The Death Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago, and the experience was really quite weird and horrible for me because as I stood there and walked through exhibit after exhibit, and then later went through a gift shop filled with—what I thought at times was—tasteless merchandise; it felt like people were celebrating serial killers and I’ve lived in this weird space surrounding the genre ever since. So for poets who are interested in exploring true crime in their work, what advice would you give them? How do you find that balance between not glorifying the crime but still exploring it and giving genre fans what they want all while still being sympathetic to the victims and the victim’s families---admittedly, one of the harder dances to dance as a crime/horror writer?

CP: It's been admittedly hard for me. I’ve been struggling with writing true crime. I know that Into the Forest and All the Way Through made an impact on a lot of people. I’ve received the most emails of any of my works for that collection, from people telling me they knew of the victim, or a family member knew the victim, or that this happened in their small town, or people telling me they haven’t read poetry since high school, but were able to read this poetry, and so on. So I know I was able to do something. People were moved. People felt something.

My goal with Into the Forest and All the Way Through was to take the power away from the killers and to give it to the victims, in a way. I wanted you to experience what the victim experienced in those last few moments. I spent days, weeks, longer, thinking about those women and the absolute terror they felt in their last few hours. I thought too about what I would think about in my last few moments, and in those moments of pain and despair, I can only imagine they thought about the people they loved and how they would never see them again, and that has affected me tremendously. I can no longer consume true crime like I used to. I don’t know if I want to ever explore writing true crime again, because even if I’m writing it from a position where I’m trying to explore our motivations for consuming it, I’m still contributing to the body of entertainment that is true crime. I’m still the thing that I hate if I write about true crime – and that is a person [who] is benefiting from the tragedy of another. I no longer want to be that.

At least for me, I think the only way I can be truly sympathetic, and truly honor the victims is to step away from writing it and to allow the family to mourn their loved ones without me interfering or adding to their suffering.

Granted, Crime Scene isn’t true crime. It is horror and crime fiction, but it does explore a crime, so I suppose that’s why I was fine with returning to it. I am a horror writer and a crime writer and any other genre or non-genre I want to explore, but at least for now, I will no longer be exploring true crime, and I will try my best not to consume it.

That doesn’t mean I judge those that do. We’re all artists and we have to explore what is calling us. To those poets and other artists who want to work with true crime, my recommendation is to remember always that these are real people. If you are working with a contemporary case, then please be extra careful because there are still friends and family [who] are suffering. Lives are broken when someone goes missing or when someone is murdered. The tear in the fabric in those people’s realities never heals. Be kind. Be gentle. Be respectful.

SMW: What poets are you currently reading? Are there any collections you’re looking forward to adding to your TBR list?

CP: Some I’ve recently read, reread or will read:

• We Are Possessed, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda
• Northwood, Maryse Meijer
• An Exhalation of Dead Things, Savannah Slone
• Felon, Regional Dwayne Betts
• Internet Girlfriend, Stephanie Valente
• Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell, Stephanie Parent
• Choking Back the Devil (I’m rereading this) as I wait to read her newest collection Girls From the County, Donna Lynch

SMW: What’s next for your readers?

CP: I have a few things coming out over the next few months:

• We Came From an Island, a limited-edition chapbook with Thunderstorm Books
• Loteria, my short story collection, which was originally published in 2010. It’s being re-released in January by Polis/Agora Books with a new novella.
• The Shoemaker’s Magician, book two in the Chicago saga
• And tons of short stories!

Author Bio:

Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo is a three-time Bram Stoker Award® nominated poet and author. Her novel Children of Chicago won the International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery (2021). Her works of poetry include Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, and the upcoming Crime Scene.

Twitter: @cinapelayo
Instagram: @cinapelayoauthor
Website: cinapelayo.com

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