The stories are what no one wants to talk about. So you make up a story because no one is going to tell you the truth.
I don’t know what the definition of a short story is, and I don’t even care to answer that question. That’s something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it’s a story.
But I deal with this by meditating and by understanding I’ve been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.
One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I’ve ever spent.
I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.
Sometimes I feel I can’t quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I’m too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.
Every writer I admire is my teacher. If you look at it, and if you care to read carefully enough and to read and reread a text, you teach yourself something about craft.
I realize that when I moved out of my father’s house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself.
I’ve always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I’ve even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men.
I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It’s what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.
Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
For me, a story’s a story if people want to hear it; it’s very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I’m speaking it out loud.
The thoughts of letting go of everything I love overwhelms like a tsunami of sorrow.
Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.
I have to understand what my strengths and limitations are, and work from a true place. I try to do this as best I can while still protecting my writer self, which more than ever needs privacy.
I lose things. I write things and they disappear from my desk, my life. I move a lot. I wanted to gather them and put them under one roof, under one cover, so I could document my life in a series of snapshots.
I didn’t intend to be writing – the writer’s life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.
How can art make a difference in the world?