Kathleen Alcalá Quotes

That's how dreams are. Nothing ever quite happens, but you assume it's going to. It's as though your mind stops wasting energy on the image once it thinks you understand what's going on. (p163)

I want my writing to insinuate itself into the subconscious of the people of the Southwest, so that we might remember who we were and who we will be, since so little time is spent in the present.

For many people their story begins the moment their families arrive here. That’s only one way of telling their story.

That’s what made me a writer as much as anything. I wanted to hear the endings of stories that didn’t have endings. A family member would tell a story. I would ask, “What happened?” No one would say because no one knew. So I had to write stories.

We are not going to eradicate poverty by bombing people. ("Dear John: A Letter to a Friend Following 9/11")

I hope that by including these cultures, the Jewish and indigenous as well as the mestizo, we can get past the idea that we are a monolithic people.

That's what we do as artists: we collect, we connect, we serve as scribes for the collective culture, and as messengers between worlds. Most important, we bring these symbols to the public. This is our gift, our regalo, our ofrenda. But it's up to the reader, the viewer, the listener, to bring out the power of these stories, to call out their names, and give them a place in the world.

I think that it still takes a very motivated-either by need or exceptional ability-woman to succeed in Mexico today. In a country where the minimum wage is the equivalent of three dollars a day, most working-class women are still too busy putting food on the table to organize. The teachers union is very powerful, and it will probably be through some sort of labor movement, rather than strictly social or cultural, that real change will come about.

In some cases, the stories take the reader right over the line to horror, the worst thing you can imagine fulfilled. In others, the fantastic elements are merely implied, and if the reader tried to pinpoint the specific elements that made the story fantastic, it would be impossible to do. Rather, the fantastic element lies in "the overall effect" that Edgar Allan Poe tried to infuse into each of his stories.

Stories of the supernatural are stories of transformation, from one state to another. Love is the strongest transformational force that we know, and also the one most sought after on a daily, ordinary basis. These stories, for the most part, were not tales of alienation, which might have been expected if this was a collection of strictly horror stories, but of people searching for connections, usually to others. When our drive to connect, to transform ourselves from one state to another (unhappy to happy, unloved to loved, shackled to free) is so strong that it seems to exceed the limits of the physical world, then we may invoke the otherworldly on our own behalf. And sometimes there is a response, but not always in the ways that we expect.

Each of these women has a story. Each beat incredible odds to get where she is today. They, too, have given a helping hand to other women on the way up. That's what they have in common with the women of their grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' generations. They didn't stop worrying about equal rights and equal access when they made personal gains. They turned around and said, 'There's room for you, too.' ("Against All Odds," September 1992, Hispanic Women's Network, Olympia, Washington)

Even the doves were in mourning. The trees seemed to sigh at her leave-taking, and the windows of each building looked, to her, like sorrowful eyes. (first lines)

This is how they took back the world - step by step, song by song.

This is the story of my journey to Tucson, where I would find both happiness and sorrow. This is the story of my people, the Opata, who once numbered as many as the saguaro of the desert, and who once farmed many rancherías and had many villages, but are now just a few, and scattered far and wide from their home and the constellations that knew them. (p5)

Writing every day worked for Hemingway and Dineson. Dineson advised writing a little every day, without hope or expectations. I don’t write every day, but if I intend to write every day I do more than I would otherwise.