(In terms of telling stories based on cultural differences, do you consider yourself a “magical realist”?) The term became an easy way to classify a set of writings that didn’t match up with North American expectations. I ended up writing/talking a good deal about magical realism in relation to my work. I had already read One-hundred Years of Solitude when I was in college, probably because that was when it was translated into English. I sent a copy in Spanish to my parents, saying, “Look this is just like our family stories!” And they said, “Yes, this is like our story-telling tradition.”
American novelist, essayist, short story writer, teacher of creative writing
I have always read science fiction along with mainstream fiction. Some people look down on “genre” fiction as not true literature, but alternate worlds and points of view fit perfectly with my upbringing in the southwest, with cousins on both sides of the border. Our reality has always been alternative. Other writers will tell you it is comics that sustained them when they were young, but that’s really the same thing, except in pictorial form: narratives willing to address the “what if.” (madam mayo)
...It had become a place of intervention, of restriction, of strife, of a contest of wills between her husband and the natural inclinations of a group of plants and animals to create for themselves a climate of nurture and co-resplendence. For by forbidding the plants to have a free will in order to banish his thoughts of the wilderness, [he] had inadvertently created a desert region that reflected the desolation of his own heart. [His] books grew dusty with neglect, for they could not cure the despondence that hung over him the way the heavy smoke from many cookstoves lingered over the town on a winter morning. (p92)
Straightening the ruffles on the curtains, she could not forget it. Stirring the soup in the kitchen while Josefina bit her lips and waited for her to leave, she could not forget it. Sewing the torn lace back onto the hem of one of her daughters' petticoats, she could almost forget it, but Estela cringed every time she remembered the hurt, closed look on Zacarías' face as she tried to talk to him. (first lines)
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)
In the desert, deep inside the spiny center of the cactus, nests a bird no bigger than my finger. While the sharp thorns fend off animals that would eat the eggs, the parent birds come and go at will. And this was my mother's name, "living at the heart of the spiny cactus," Chiri, what others would call Hummingbird. The last time I saw her was on the way to Casas Grandes. (first lines)