A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don’t want.
I’ve been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians.
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
I’m a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive – Mexico City’s big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.
There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.
I don’t think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it’s loved by enough people that I’m grateful and able to keep going.
I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.
You don’t have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don’t have to drop the pleasures of style.
A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens – to be informed and engaged.
No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.
Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.