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

Once we lost the keys to our houses in Barcelona during The Plague, or the Inquisition or whatever other excuse was given for taking our properties, all the world was our temporary habitation. We saw each place through the eyes of the stranger seeking that pocket of refuge where we could set up shop until the next disaster turned people against us.

She could drop her shyness the way she dropped it to recite a speech or a poem, then step back into it like a cloak.

I grew up on the edge of the Mojave Desert in a very rural part of southern California until I was six years old, when we moved into town. Every time I start writing a new piece, I write a description of that landscape; it’s as if I have to ground myself in those very early memories and relationship to the land before I move on to the next thing.