Kathleen Alcalá Quotes

There was so much, he thought, of which she never spoke. (p172)

Even without legs, moving about by the propulsion of his strong arms in a crude, hopping motion, [he] seemed to have roots that extended far beneath the surface of the earth, and tied him to the memories that we all share. (p135)

A slight breeze entered the window and stirred the single rose in the vase on the table, causing the edges of the petals to quiver like the lips of a lover. (p 117)

[she] felt more at ease than she had at the hotel. The people there reminded her of who she was not. Also, she did not know why, but her mother's necklace had seemed to weigh upon her, like a burden from the past. In doing one more unforgivable thing, she felt that she had divested herself of a last anchor to the respectable life she had left behind. Estela slept well that night for the first time since arriving in Mexico City. (p12)

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)

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.

The writer and her language should be the humble servant of the reader. To me, the act of writing is not fulfilled until it is read. The words need to be read, digested, and assembled within the context of the reader's mind and experiences in order to be complete. In other words, every reader is "reading" a different story, because every reader brings a different set of experiences and sensibilities to the story.

A good story works like a musical composition. An idea is presented, elaborated, debated and perhaps defeated, and finally, presented to the reader in a modified, more mature form that embodies the path that was traveled in order to reach that idea. By taking the reader on a journey, we, to a certain extent, can re-create in their experience the thought processes and emotions of our characters. This should be done with compassion, humor, and generosity. But again like music, we can provide a pattern, a symmetry and closure that one seldom encounters in life. That is why reading good writing is pleasurable and fulfilling. That is why listening to good music can induce ecstasy.

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.

In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other.

Providing the narrative thread to life is one of the oldest functions in culture. People need storytellers. They make sense out of life. Instead of being an abstract concept, a road without an end, life becomes something that we can touch, hear, feel, taste, see. Chekhov gave us the Lady with the Dog, James Joyce gave us Leopold Bloom, Sandra Cisneros gave us Woman Hollering Creek, and by creating the specifics of a life, they give us a sense, they make sense of, life.

No matter what the venue, we can be witnesses to our own existence. "If we do not define ourselves for ourselves," said Audre Lorde, "we will be defined by others- for their use and our detriment." Each generation must look around with a critical eye and ask, "Is this who I am? How will we be portrayed to future generations?"

Writers collect things. We read magazines, we ride buses and eavesdrop on other people's conversations, we stop and read posters on telephone poles, we examine soup cans and old clothing stores and babies and pets and sewer covers and weather reports. We delve into ancient history, old gossip, rumors, hints of rumors, maps, brochures, irrelevant details, bad advice, good omens, lucky stars, and things that are nobody's business. In short, we are called to be witnesses. Things may happen, but unless someone takes note of it, it might not matter.

In Latin America, there hasn't necessarily been a clear line between fantastic literature and literary fiction. This has allowed writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Clarice Lispector to be noticed by upstanding and respectable critics of modern culture, and has led to the eventual translation of their work, as well as that of many others. They now form a canon of work against which all the rest of us must be compared, although, in many cases, we have little in common with them other than the Spanish language.

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.