Cristy Road Carrera’s illustrated dystopian novel Sink or Burn is a culmination of an artistic life dedicated to punk rock.
Community and self-expression are tantamount to Carrera’s work, like Sharpie is to a fanzine. She grew up in Miami, Florida in a Cuban-American family and community that precipitated into a lifetime of DIY punk rock. Carrera began her storied career like most punks, as a near-obsessive superfan. In the 1990s, she had a fanzine called Greenzine, a partial nod to Green Day that focused on punk and sexual violence, and 30 years later, showing the breadth of her creativity, she released her Next World Tarot collection. In the interim, she released numerous records and graphic novels centered around the revolutionary elements of sexuality and social movements.
“Everything in my life happened very organically,” Carrera says of her work. Sink or Burn, which follows a character named CT and her band through a post-apocalyptic America, originated as a project akin to a journal. Only later did it occur to her that she had written something that could grow into a full book. Once she had that book, however, convincing publishers to take it on was a whole new experience: “I needed to really convince people that talking about healing from sexual trauma, fascism taking over the world, getting a really huge crush on an unavailable person, and the general story about being a rock ‘n’ roll band—all these things … made sense together.”
Sink or Burn is driven by a connection to ancestral magic and history, using imagination as the vehicle for resistance. “It was really fun to imagine a world where the government cares about people doing what they love and there being a (safety) net for all kinds of work.”
Loss, trust, and belonging swirl within the Sink or Burn narrative, blooming from “a long line of self-sufficient, queer—maybe queer—women and people who really wanted a revolutionary home and land and then lost it for one reason or another.” Punk and anarchist visions of community provide constancy against cycles of progress and fascistic backlash for Carrera’s characters and herself.
The freedom of DIY—to start a zine, create art, tell stories, start a band—offers safety to artists without the pressure of staying on a singular artistic path or gaining mainstream recognition, and Sink or Burn makes no compromise. Carrera will be selling Sink or Burn at the merch table with her New York-based band Choked Up. For a wild journey that all at once revels in the past, tastes the future, and resonates deeply with our world today, introduce yourself to Carrera’s work with a copy of Sink or Burn.
Preorder Sink or Burn here.
