I was going to hear Sandra Cisneros read from her new nonfiction, A House of My Own: Stories of My Life.  I think of her poems, the ones I taught in my multicultural literature class.  My favorite was “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me.”  I love that poem.  Everyone had to write an imitation of this poem, but it was “You Bring Out the Blank in Me.”  You had to fill in the blank to make it the right poem for you.  I did it too.  I think of her primarily as a fiction writer or a poet, but I think all those pieces are stories of her life, too.  Maybe names have been changed—not sure.

I drive early to Rice–I don’t want to be late.  When I pull in to park, the sky is pink, like the West, or Mexico, or somewhere else that you might have imagined when the real sky was too dark.

This reading is sold out.  I told my students: “Hey, I think this is going to sell out.”  They look at me like maybe I want them to do something.  I do.  Or I did.  Those tickets are gone.

Sandra Cisneros, my program tells me, was “the first Mexican-American writer to be published by a mainstream publisher.”  Although I knew she was born in Chicago, I always wanted to teach her work because I knew she had a house in San Antonio, and even though she had won NEA Fellowships, the American Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, I always thought of her as Texan more than anything else.  She lives in Mexico now, but just knowing she lived in Texas made her seem less remote, made writing seem like something you could do right here at home without New York or El-Lay, more like someone you could have a real conversation with if you really wanted to.  As if things were possible.

When Rich Levy, Executive Director of Inprint, introduces her, he reminds us that she grew up in a family with seven children and that “her teachers thought she was a dreamer.”  Later, when she reads her piece, “Natural Daughter,” I will be glad that that fact was put on my radar, as it is about a family mystery, and everyone has a slightly different take on it.  But her piece is not just about one family mystery, but the larger mystery of how we put our family stories together, and how we have to get something, sometimes, out of the most difficult sources to crack.  Why do we need to do this?  Well, in part, according to Cisneros, “to heal us, to transform pain into enlightenment.”  Sounds like a worthy goal to me.

When Cisneros walks out, she seems glamorous. She doesn’t look any older than the pictures I have seen of her from the eighties and before.  And she is very gracious, funny, and self-deprecating.  She says that “I usually hide behind poetry or fiction” but that tonight she will read nonfiction.  Since the stories are true ones, she quips, “My family never reads my work.  Maybe they’ll open a book now.”

She tells us that the piece “Natural Daughter” is in Chicago Magazine.  It is an essay, but no, an autobiographical slice of her life, no, a real-life mystery, no, a meta-nonfictional moment on how we figure out the truth—no, it is all of these things, all at once.  You forget that just because something is easy to read that it can still be experimental and profound.  You realize, after she starts reading, that she is writing her life much like fiction.  But, it is not fiction.

Her narrative is about an illegitimate daughter in her family who was hardly ever mentioned because she was part of a long-standing family secret that was treated with a strong dose of denial.  It takes me awhile, like the entire piece, to realize the supreme irony of the story:  early on, Cisneros tells us that “my mother doesn’t like silences,” but then of course her mother does, as we all do, when it is silencing the very thing that one does not want to hear about, can’t acknowledge.

Such revelations also help to account for Cisneros’s admission of her own curiosity, her “nagging need to poke under the bed with a broom.”  Honestly, we’re glad she has it.

Cisneros brings up a constellation of issues:  feminism (“It’s always worse for women, isn’t it?”  she muses as she considers her half-sister’s less privileged life), the status of the immigrant (she tells us of seeing at an immigrant march a sign that read “IF YOU DEPORT ME, WHO WILL BUILD THE WALL?”) and the intersections of class and race in her family in contrast with her natural, but unacknowledged, sister.  She visits the idea of dirty laundry, and the significance of secrets long after their initial potency has waned, if it ever does.

She reminds us of the ironies of life, as when we claim “We are not dogs!” even if we are acting like them.  Her own stories seem like they could happen to anyone, hit close to the bone.  When she thinks about the sister whom she never really knew, we think about her too, as if we might have one somewhere.  When Cisneros says, “To me, abandonment is worse than death,” we see what she means, even when we might have been thinking all along that nothing is worse than death.  We see the difference when someone leaves to go to another realm, and when you “have someone leave of their own volition.”  She is right:  it is a harder pill to swallow.  It shakes us up. She asks, “How could the man I knew [her father] be the same one to walk away from a daughter?”  The answers are complex, uncomfortable, maybe even unanswerable.  They leave us hanging.

Even until now, as when Cisneros confides that she sees this sister’s face everywhere and especially in “the poorest of the poor” as she travels the globe, far and away, more attached to the places that she has lived than the blood relative who was never really a part of her real life, yet can never leave her imagination regardless of the pressures of family denial.  This lends a poignancy to the question of “what tribe?” does she belong to when asked by the census in a humorous section of her narrative that probes the way we classify ourselves based on race or ethnicity.  The audience realizes that if our own family members don’t muster up the qualifications for membership in our tribe, then indeed, we have a long way to go in other arenas for reconciliation, understanding and acceptance.

Cisneros delivers this in such an entertaining and humorous way, that at times you forget that she is serious as a heart attack about these things.  Until you don’t.

The Q & A is with the friendly and talented Chitra Divakaruni, who teaches in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.  Divakaruni asks Cisneros how nonfiction is different, and Cisneros says, “I let things go where they want to go,” and invokes Fellini’s quotation that “The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography”—the epigraph for the entire collection.  Yet, we believe her when Cisneros says that she is trying to be “as honest and as true as I can make it.”  We believe her—she isn’t trying to sugarcoat anything.  But, it is funny when she says, “If they don’t like it…well, at 60 it’s like, who cares!”

The most interesting thing she says is that “in the US you get censored before you write it”—and that “we censor ourselves before we can even think.”  She refers to our era as an “age of terror,” because we are terrified of saying certain things, to the point that “we can’t think straight.”  When she crosses the border from Mexico to the US, she feels a lot of sadness and fear in US culture.

The most interesting thing she says is that “in the US you get censored before you write it”—and that “we censor ourselves before we can even think.”  She refers to our era as an “age of terror,” because we are terrified of saying certain things, to the point that “we can’t think straight.”  When she crosses the border from Mexico to the US, she feels a lot of sadness and fear in US culture.

She is a big believer in the “spiritual epiphany”—something that does not seem to get much traction in American culture.  She explains that “the spirits speak to you in Mexico” and that the “border between the living and the dead” is more open, with more freedom of movement.  She thinks of these spirits as allies.  It makes me understand what she means in a larger sense when she tells us about how she realized that “you are not your house,” and how that moment of enlightenment helped her have the courage to move.  Borders are not always borders.

And that movement, from many houses over time, is part of her life’s story, and part of her larger trajectory of moving “fear and any personal agenda out of the way” when she writes.

As the Q & A progresses, I realize that there are really few direct questions, more wistful inquiries and profound moments of gratitude from audience members who have been so moved by Cisneros’s writings in multiple genres.  She tells us of her concern about “the vilification of the poor,” and how arts programs are necessary, keep getting gutted, result in kids that “get washed away” and left out, leave her with questions about why there are so few Chicano and Chicana writers, something that “breaks her heart.”  She says that “I remember the flotsam and jetsam of life.  I remember emotions.”  Yet, it still seems like so much more.

Near the end, she tells us of making an altar to her mother—someone who was a frustrated artist.  She reminds us of the importance of intuition and emotion, and that the most important reasons to write have nothing to do with publication.  I like how she gives advice about writing with kindness and without condescension.  She is encouraging, but not in a false way.  She says that the “longer you sit the deeper and better your writing.”

On a serious note, she says that writing is “a mirror into our heart” and that it is healing, and that if you stick with it, you will “find yourself one day astonished at your own life.”

She also says, about this latest collection, “I think my loves will be looking for themselves in this book.  But that is for the next one.”  We laugh, but a lot of people sitting in the audience do indeed love her, and they will find themselves in her words.  The ones in which she has followed the advice she gives, to “find what works for you…find your fingerprint, your voice, your place of passion.”

After all, she has already told us, “You can’t fake a passion.”  It makes you want to find one.

The post “Her Teachers Thought She Was a Dreamer”: Sandra Cisneros and the Backward Glance first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

What I mean is that we don’t know them yet.

I meet some new friends—or writers I know from Facebook–in person, and let me tell you, in person is better.  Two of my friends win books at the party and I feel happy for them:  what is better than a new book, by a new writer, that you have never read?

Well, not much.

I walk with my friend Elizabeth to The Wortham Center and see my students.  They look so grown up to me—we have read a lot of books together.  Some of them are graduating in May.  I am not sure if I am ready for it, not sure if I am ready for them to emigrate from the benevolent despotism of my classroom to The Next Big Thing.  No wonder people stay in college forever.  There are worse countries to visit, hang around, linger.  Everyone migrates somewhere; even the suburbs of Houston seem like independent states sometimes, each a new country, with languages that I cannot recognize at times.  That is because so many people from so many different countries come to Houston:  it is ever changing, kaleidoscopic, never boring.

Rich Levy, the executive director of  Inprint, reminds us that 350 writers from 28 countries have come to Houston to share their words.  Sometimes, when I am grading, and I think I am on a small island known as my office, I long to get out and see the world:  somewhere exotic to me, as exotic as Abyssinia to Coleridge, Arabia to Poe, New York to everyone.  But on nights like tonight, I realize I live in a place where, sometimes, the world comes to me.

Cristina Henríquez is the first reader, and she has come all the way from a colder clime: Chicago, where she teaches at Northwestern University.  Her new novel is called The Book of Unknown Americans, and was inspired by her immigrant father’s experiences moving from Panama to Delaware, where he met her mother.  Rich has told us already that Henríquez’s influences include so many authors I love:  Sandra Cisneros, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, Junot Diaz.  She has confessed in interviews that she is “seduced by stylists.”  I know the feeling.

She reads from a section that highlights the interest of her characters in the election of President Barack Obama, and juxtaposes that with the post 9-11 feeling that America is no longer the safe harbor that it has been considered to be, yet complicates it with the admission that “compared to anywhere any of us are from, it’s safe.”  Yet Henríquez will later say that she is not so interested in a political novel, but in the “human stories” that the immigration experience yields.  Yes, there are logistics, but she wanted to tell the “ordinary” stories that get lost in narratives, and dramatize the “hearts that never stop breaking” and the reality of how immigrants become Americans.  She also highlights the resentments of not going back to Panama, and the “maybe one day” longing that is part of that enterprise.

Marlon James has also come from the Midwest—Minneapolis and Saint Paul where he teaches at Macalester University.  His novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is set in Jamaica, and has Bob Marley as the hovering ghost presiding over the multiple narrations.  But the country that takes up so much space in this book, I realize, is not only Jamaica, but also the time period of 1976 through the early nineties, with the sensibility of the seventies occupying the most real estate in James’s head.  After all, the past is another country, and James is aware of the fusion of American culture into Jamaican life, particularly during these decades.

James has multiple characters, and lasers in on five days and those affected by the attempt to assassinate Bob Marley.  He highlights drugs, wild nights, desires for money: “Anything in Jamaica is up for sale.”  He describes characters through their conversations and dialogues, yet his narrators are masters of phrasing themselves:  you don’t forget it when James reads “This is how nine become eight.”  He has characters remind us that “revolution must begin in the home,” but we know that the spillover into the rest of the world can have terrifying and lethal consequences.  James knows how to dramatize danger.

My favorite part is when he presents part of the narrative in which Sir Arthur George Jennings—a ghost, mind you—is speaking to those about to die.  He speaks to Bob Marley in a lyrical riff that lingers long after the reading is over:  “You play with anyone up for a game,” he says.  Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but you don’t forget it, and I like that a ghost thinks in a stream-of-consciousness that helps us see the influences of Joyce and Faulkner on James’s multiple narrations.

In the question and answer period, the charming Chitra Divakaruni (who teaches in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program) wears a beautiful orange sari and sits next to the writers as we all applaud.  I met her almost a decade ago when she came to my university to read and speak, and I was so star-struck, I could barely say a word.  I am sure she was wondering how I conducted my English classes at the college level as a mute.  Ah, well.  Maybe she could intuit that I was a fan.  I make a note to get her most recent novel, Oleander Girl.  Divakaruni never disappoints, and she asks Henríquez and James where their ideas come from.  At first they are a little brittle about it, but Divakaruni puts them at ease, and the answers start to flow.

Henríquez says that she “never comes to a project with an idea,” but that she was interested in the fact that “no one was telling those ordinary stories of the immigrant experience.”  For her, things start with language: a line, a sentence—not an idea.

James agrees, is delighted when he writes something and then says, “I didn’t see that coming.”  He tells us that for this novel he “didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” but I am not so sure.  But his modesty is disarming, and you think that you, too, might give writing a novel a shot, no matter where you are from.

He tells us of the “dark, nasty part” of Jamaican history that “we don’t talk about” regarding Bob Marley and his assassination attempt.  He reveals that his big “Eureka!” moment was when he was reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and realized that “a novel doesn’t have to be one person’s story.”  He is also indebted to James Ellroy’s American Tabloid and I can see that what makes James different is that he can juxtapose Starsky and Hutch with Shakespearian tragedy, Hostess Twinkies with multiple narratives: in other words, no ideas but in things, but the ideas are commensurate with those always engaged in serious literature.  No wonder he calls himself “a post-post-colonial writer.”  He hasn’t just psychologically left Jamaica and its influences—he is creating whole new literary territories.

Henríquez uses her novel to “poke at stereotypes” and looks at the human issues of immigrants once they are here.  But, she also loves love stories, and that issue—love, is not held in relief to more social and political dimensions of her writing.  She thinks her next big project is on its way—that she is like a “volcano”—ready, eventually, to erupt.

Both authors, at Divakaruni’s urging, give us some great advice:  Henríquez tells us to not get “too precious” about time and place of writing, but rather to “squeeze it into every nook and cranny of your life.”  She is in favor of “ways to trick yourself into getting it done.”   Similarly, James says we should “read everything” and “have a great first draft reader.”  Both agree we should “read like a writer”—figure out how the narrative works, and I realize you can do all of these things in Jamaica, Panama, Chicago, St. Paul, Houston.

Both authors, at Divakaruni’s urging, give us some great advice:  Henríquez tells us to not get “too precious” about time and place of writing, but rather to “squeeze it into every nook and cranny of your life.”  She is in favor of “ways to trick yourself into getting it done.”   Similarly, James says we should “read everything” and “have a great first draft reader.”  Both agree we should “read like a writer”—figure out how the narrative works, and I realize you can do all of these things in Jamaica, Panama, Chicago, St. Paul, Houston.  I realize that the real estate in your head might be more important than what is around you, but if you can pick the right book, you might get to travel elsewhere anyway, take that trip, let it make you think that someone else’s voyages—far flung or not—might help you when you decide to make your own.

I drive down Smith, honk and wave at my students, wonder what they thought.  They are so young. They are traveling. The night seems cool.  We are all a little different now after hearing all those words, taking them in, heading back home.  Maybe we will go home, not be too precious about it, read everything, imagine another place, book some kind of trip.

The post Another Country, Near and Far: Henríquez and James Read in H-Town first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.