A Conversation with David Raygoza
David Raygoza is a writer, born in Culiacán and raised in Texas. He really likes kindness and sincerity, music and poetry, sci-fi and horror.
David’s poems, “Penitencia Pequeña” and “It Wasn’t Just Once” can be read in Issue no. 1 of Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine.
“I didn’t need a budget or a profit to write a poem; I just did it.” —David Raygoza
Yasmina: Are you okay with being recorded? I’m kind of debating recording versus taking notes because I feel like the recording might make me act differently than I normally would.
David: Oh, I’m cool with it—all my work meetings are recorded, so I’m just kind of used to it.
Yasmina: In this surveillance state we live in (laughs).
David: Yeah.
Yasmina: So I'm reframing the recording right now. We're recording this, but not in a surveillance state way because I'm going to choose what's written in the interview, which I realize is still a little surveil-y for you, but...
David: Yeah, but no, it's a mutually agreed on perception, so it’s not surveillance.
Yasmina: Okay, cool. Yay!
David: I think surveillance implies that we don't see who is surveilling us. I'm not sure that's the actual definition, but I know that I don't feel surveilled when it's a friend or someone looking me in the eyes.
Yasmina: That’s a good point. I think you're onto something there. What is it that you do for work?
David: I'm a "content producer.” I'm putting air quotes up because what I really do is video shoots for home brands—so, sinks, bathtubs, doors, et cetera. I just fell into this job last summer, so I’m still new to this, but I went to school for film, so I’ve been making videos for years.
Yasmina: Is it informing your creative practice in any way to look so closely at something, or is it more so being corrupted by the advertising of it all?
David: I'm an optimist, so I'm always moving it towards a space of deliberate creativity. I try not to bum myself down, like, "Oh, this is only serving people who can afford houses that I'll never be able to afford.” I see it as, “Now I know the name of this wood stain.” Something I love about writing and everything, really, is research. It feeds into my brain that wants to know.
Yasmina: It’s cool that you’ve found an art to making that effort to look for something positive. You have a pretty extensive film background which makes me wonder, how did you come to poetry?
David: I grew up in Texas, and there was this thing called the UIL (University Interscholastic League) which held all kinds of regional and state academic competitions. There's math and logic competitions and also one called “Poetry Interpretation,” where you’d pick three or four poems—though some people did ten or more!—and then have eight minutes to stand before the judges and weave a thematic thread through all of them.
Yasmina: Eight minutes? That’s nerve-wracking.
David: Yeah! It was like forming a portfolio of other people’s work. It was my first experience with poetry readings, and I loved it. I went all four years of high school. I actually went all the way to State once.
Yasmina: Wow! That’s impressive.
David: Yeah, and then I continued to casually read poetry in college.
Yasmina: If you were going to perform these two poems [from Sabr Tooth Tiger] at a reading, what would be a sentence or two you’d say to introduce them?
David: Ooh. Yeah, no, I have been going to readings, and I haven't been giving context. With these, it was almost like a journal entry that I tried to make more universal. Sometimes I'm trying to write from the perspective of a character who might resemble a friend of mine or the way I wrote in the past, but with both of these poems, they're me now in 2025. Especially with “It Wasn’t Just Once.”
Yasmina: Oh, that’s so interesting—did that happen naturally, or was it intentional?
David: It just happened naturally. Something I love about poetry is how much of it deals in the ephemeral and the abstract, but because you have it in print—or even if you hear it, there are certain lines you remember—it becomes a little bit more tangible. I guess I was trying to make a solid thing for myself because I felt something very heavy... (laughs).
Yasmina: What draws you to the ephemeral and to the expression of the ephemeral through poetry specifically?
David: Poetry feels so real to me because I feel it’s a truth of life that everything is fleeting. I've never preferred realism in any type of writing. I like stylized novels—even if it's autofiction or a memoir, I want there to be a pepperedness of expressionism. I want it sprinkled with what is subjective to you and almost magical, you know? Even in the mundane, there's something magical.
I’ve always kind of been the “emo artist,” (laughs). I’ve always loved letting a mood flow. I don't need to feel happy all the time, and I know when I'm sad that it won’t last forever. Any bad depression I've been in, I’ve always come out of it.
Yasmina: (finger-claps)
David: Here’s to all of us getting out of it.
(Both laugh.)
Yasmina: How do you feel your film experience informs your writing? Do you feel like they connect, or that the specificities of one medium teach you something that enriches the other?
David: I'm not sure they interact. I think they're both coming from the same fountain in my head; I'm also, in movies, not very interested in realism, but I don't think I'm ever seeing a movie when I'm writing a poem.
In a movie, I don't want people to feel lost, because that can be very disorienting. But I’m fine with disorienting someone in a poem. I'm fine with someone not even getting it at all. In my journal, I wrote that poetry is like polaroids. When I write a poem, I don’t have to think about how much it’ll cost to shoot or what it’ll make back. It exists for itself. The audience is not a factor for me. Maybe that’s contradicting what I said about readings.
Yasmina: We contain multitudes. It's fine.
(Both laugh.)
Yasmina: When did you start writing poetry?
David: My mom passed away two years ago, and writing poetry was very helpful to me in processing the grief. I really needed an outlet for the beauty I still wanted to see in the world, so my practice of writing poetry came about with a lot more force then than it had before. I didn’t need a budget or a profit to write a poem; I just did it.
Around that time, I went to Read Some Shit—the reading series at aliveOne—for the first time, and I realized I had friends that were all encouraging each other to keep at it and to get it out of the journals. That's how I keep phrasing it to myself and to my friends. I thought, “This can exist outside of the journals, and I want that.”
Yasmina: I am sorry to hear about your mom. I’m glad you are able to still see so much beauty in the world.
David: I appreciate that.
Yasmina: And also, now I'm looking at “Penitencia Pequeña” in a new way. Did you feel like it was about a family member, or did it just feel like general grief?
David: It definitely felt like it was about a family member, especially because in it, you talk a lot about being forgiven—and, yes, the main reading of that is religious, but I also felt like you were asking to be forgiven by this person who had passed away, which to me is very family member-coded.
Yasmina: It did make me want to ask you about your relationship with religion, when you were growing up and now, if you wanted to share.
David: My mom was very devout her whole life. She practiced the brand of Roman Catholicism that’s in Mexico, and she used to have me and my brother pray with her every night. It made her feel like our souls were being looked after, and she wanted us to respect God and His creation. But to me, going to Sunday school was kind of a chore.
Then, when I was 12 or 13, I checked out a book from the library about humanism. It was a collection of essays about different philosophers who were agnostic but still believed there was something sacred about empathy and the human endeavor. You know how some people discover an edgy text or a movie and it changes their life? Especially when you're at that age and you want to understand yourself outside of the scope of your family?
Yasmina: Yes, definitely.
David: That was my rebel book. It was my rebel moment when I was like, “Okay, I don't believe in God, but I believe in us. I believe in humans.” My mom was never one of those people who thought I’d go to hell if I didn’t believe in religion, and I'm so thankful for that. But we still argued about it.
Yasmina: Was your dad religious as well?
David: No. Growing up, my dad was the only atheist I knew. He’s a software engineer, and since I was a kid he would joke that we were living in a simulation or that aliens are controlling everything, like in the Matrix.
Yasmina: The Matrix was his “rebel book.”
David: Yeah. He saw himself understood in The Matrix. I think he was probably feeling, even when he was very young, that we are so small. For him, that developed into, “I don't believe in a God, but I believe in tech,” and the notion that tech would eventually reach a point where it’s hyperintelligent and ruling us.
Yasmina: It sounds like all of you were seeing a variation of the same thing—something beyond our miniscule field of vision.
David: I think so. I wish I’d been able to articulate more often the sentiment of “I understand you” to both of them. Maybe I did. I don't know. I feel like I only remember the fights.
Yasmina: Classic. Are there any specifics of the type of Catholicism you and your family practiced that have left a lasting impact on you?
David: The common youthful, empathetic approach is to say, “I’m not against religion, I’m against the institutions that came out of it.” There are important virtues, like caring for your neighbor, that I think have existed in every religion. Maybe my worldview was always shaped by Catholicism in that way.
For the first 14 years of my life I was going to church every single Sunday. I remember my mom and myself making friends at church. It was a routine and a community, and there was a sense that you don’t only exist in your own home. Your city matters. Your pueblo matters.
Yasmina: What do your Sundays usually look like now?
David: Oh, I like that question. Sundays I definitely hold for connecting with friends and family, whether on phone calls or in person. I had a beautiful evening with my friend last night where we talked for five hours about everything.
Yasmina: I like that. I think we should all have a day that’s hanging-out-with-the-people-I-love day. It seems like in our modern culture, especially among young people, Friday and Saturday have become those days.
David: I agree. And I think that I have found the balance between the party social scene and a more quiet or pensive phone call. I see the benefits of both. I like libation, and I do like a little bit of hedonism. I think we all feel the pressure of capitalism. The older I get, the more I relate to the cliche type of Facebook post that’s a giphy of Snoopy with a coffee mug that says, “One more day til Friday!” I look at that now and I’m like, “So real.”
Yasmina: Everything that is corny and overdone has always been rooted in truth. You’ll be going through something really hard and see the simplest platitude ever on social media, and in that moment it feels like you're reading it for the first time: “‘The only way out is through…’ Oh my God, the only way out is through!”
David: How different is the meme of the guy mining from that? Memes are truly just the Facebook posts we thought our family members were so corny for posting, only we put little levels of irony and sarcasm in them.
Yasmina: You’re so right. My family is from Montenegro, so I see a lot of Balkan memes, and I like to translate them for my friends who don’t know the language because I want them to laugh with me. Recently my friend said, “I’ve noticed a lot of the Balkan jokes you show me are centered around family in some way,” which was so intriguing to me because it is very much a collectivist, family-oriented culture. And then here in the US because of the “grind culture” the memes are all, “Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee!” It's like memes are informed by the way we live life.
David: That's really interesting. I wonder which memes might not make sense in other cultures, like the one with the two people on the bus where one of them is staring at the cliff and the other at the sunshine. In the US, our understanding of depression is such a bipolarism; we’re always expected to exist on one side or the other. But maybe in a culture where depression is understood more holistically, that meme wouldn’t pop off, because there’d be a sense of, “What do you mean? We’re always both of these things.” Maybe they’d even have their own version of it.
Yasmina: Oh, that’s so interesting to think about. We're clawing at something.
David: I think so.
Yasmina: One thing I thought about when I was looking at your poems was the language of action and movement in them. “Penitencia Pequeña” made me think of searching for forgiveness as a search for certainty.
David: As in, “I wish I knew whether you were or not forgiving us.”
Yasmina: Right.
David: One of the toughest things about the grieving process was that we didn't have a true funeral in a church for my mom.
Yasmina: At all?
David: No. My dad is a very introverted person, and there was nothing appealing to him about organizing a funeral; he didn’t want any pomp and circumstance to her death. All my mom’s friends from Texas had come to see her in the hospice in her last days, and making it a larger event would have made it feel so much more real in a way I think he was avoiding. But I know my mom wanted a funeral. I think my dad knows that, too, but she wasn't here anymore. That was one of his points to me, that question of, “Who would we even be doing this for?” A big thing I had to untangle for myself was wondering what she would think. If she would be mad at us.
Yasmina: That’s really hard. It’s interesting to think about the function of ritual even if you don’t believe in God. Even though there was no funeral, were you able to create a moment of ceremony for her?
David: I do believe in ritual, and, in a way, my dad's idea of holding a kind of service in hospice was true to that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in those spaces, but they have showers there, so for a little bit over a week we were all in the same room watching people come and go and say their goodbyes to her.
Yasmina: Oh, my God, that's intense.
David: Yeah. And the whole time I was journaling. I'd asked my friend to bring me a journal, and the one she brought me belonged to one of her nieces or nephews; it had the Marvel character Venom on it. So I’m writing about the nightmares I'm having and about hearing her breathe, and I'm writing in this little kid Marvel journal with Venom’s evil face on the front. (Laughs.) I still have it. And that’s a real funny bit to me. Like an idiosyncrasy.
Yasmina: It’s absurd.
David: That's what it is. Absurd. Life is absurd.
I wish I had been taking notes throughout the conversation because you just made me think of a lot of things, like that humanism book—I can literally see the cover in my head. I haven’t thought about that book in over 15 years.
Yasmina: How has your worldview and spiritual practice evolved since then?
David: At 12, I was probably closer to being an atheist than an agnostic. Now I would say I’m agnostic, but closer to the woo-woo spiritual stuff. (Laughs.) It just seems so evident to me that everything is in interaction with everything else. There are so many relational systems in science that we’ve only started to understand in the last 200 years, and I can't even begin to imagine how much more we'll understand about the interconnectedness of everything 200 years from now.
Yasmina: And in the in between, we just have to, like, trust.
David: Yeah! I don't see the use in rejecting the world. I want to embrace the world because I think there’s an interaction that happens there. The energy I bring into spaces gets returned back to me. Having faith, for me, is not “everything happens for a reason,” but “everything is dancing with each other.”
Yasmina: That’s beautiful. Have you been thinking a lot lately about the energy you put into the world?
David: I have. A few weeks ago my friend Olivia came to a reading I performed a,t and she told me there were one or two specific poems she almost wished she hadn't heard out loud. A public experience that you're sharing with people is never going to be the same as reading something by yourself, and I think her private experience of reading them was more impactful to her in a way that didn’t translate into the reading.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have never read “Penitencia Pequeña” out loud at all, but I'm glad I did. I don't know if I'll read it again. I think whether or not people already have the poem in text would be part of that decision. Maybe some poems should be in the middle sequence of existing to be read but not belonging in the oral tradition, and that decision is related to a sense of privacy. Maybe that’s selfish, though. Maybe there’s no reason to do that.
Yasmina: We’re allowed to keep secrets. As writers, we all do, just in choosing what to share and not to share or how to arrange a series of events into a narrative.
David: That’s true, that’s true.
Yasmina: Do you think you’re shifting towards a more private poetic life, or do you want to keep performing?
David: I’ve only recently started doing readings, so my mind is very much centered on, “What kind of affect do I want to present as a poet at readings as opposed to what I know exists on the page?” Because it's different. I think there’s a nature of resistance around being perceived. Whenever you do any kind of performance you have to make deliberate choices about how you want the poem to be perceived as well, which I’ve been struggling with a lot lately.
I think I’m a lot more scared than I need to be sometimes. But I want, for my own self-betterment, to push past that fear and remind myself that we're all encouraging each other. It's a community. I want to continue being a part of the community, to have a presence in it.
Yasmina: Okay. I think we’re done. Thank you so much for doing this.
David: Thank you!
