Published on
September 23, 2008 in
America, Books & News, Children's, Cultural categories, El Paso, Juarez, Las Cruces, Latin America, Social Issues, The Confessional, U.S.-Mexico Border, Young Adult, immigrant rights, latino/a, literature, politics, teenagers and writing.
Here is the text of the speech I gave at REFORMA’s national conference last weekend, for those who are interested.
When I was a teenager growing up in El Paso, I was a voracious reader, consuming on average a book every day, most of them young adult novels. In all those young adult novels I consumed, I only encountered the world I was growing up in once, in a suspense novel by Lois Duncan. In the novel, a teenager’s sudden and mysterious death in Albuquerque draws his sister into a world of danger. To fulfill one of her brother’s debts, she ends up smuggling drugs across the El Paso/Juarez border. Okay, so….the world portrayed in that novel was not EXACTLY my world, my border, since I never encountered the harsh world of drug smuggling. But it was the closest I ever came to seeing my world in a book as a teenager. And it made it seem–well, exciting. Different.
My parents rather unusually chose not to live in the neighborhoods where other professionals gravitated. Continue reading ‘Facing Two Worlds: Growing Up On La Frontera’
When I’m working on a novel, I usually listen to one or two c.d.’s obsessively. For example, I wrote The Confessional while listening to Sparta and The Mars Volta, both classic El Paso bands. I wrote Killing Isaac to Talib Kweli, Damian Marley (especially “Road to Zion”), and Blonde Redhead–music which evoked the rage and religion dominating that book. I wrote Witches, Healers, and This Thing Called the Future listening to Zola and Freshly Ground. Zola’s a South African kwaito star, and Freshly Ground does South African Afro-funk.
My writer’s group suggested that listening to music allowed me to get deeper into my character’s minds. I agreed, since the type of music I listen to for each novel has been so different. It made me feel like an artiste.
But my dad broke the news to me that really it’s just classic Pavlov conditioning. Like a dog salivating when he hears the little bell that signals he’s about to be fed, listening to that music signals to me that I’m about to be creative.
Pavlov isn’t nearly as romantic as being an artiste.
Actually, I end up traveling a lot. I’m taking three trips in the next two weeks–I leave for Salt Lake City to see my new niece today until Saturday (some Freudian slip prompted me to type “see my new voice,” which would be realy nice if it were true since I feel like I have this kindergarten teacher’s voice, the kind you don’t expect to hear issuing the word f***); on Saturday, I’m flying to Seattle for a good friend’s wedding; and then when I come back, I leave two days later for El Paso, to give a talk at REFORMA’s national conference and to take photos of Annunciation House’s activities for a reprinting of my Color Lines article in Maryknoll’s magazine for latino affairs, Revista Maryknoll.
Because I do fly so much, and for some reason I’ve always chosen Delta, I recently got awarded Medallion Status. Yay, Medallion status. I’ve already learned one of the perks: unlimited complementary upgrades! I’m flying first class to Salt Lake City and back….
Today, I was reminded how much I love working with teenagers when my El Paso Community College classes started. All my students are high school students this year, and they are a lot more incorrigible online than your typical 18+ student. And, well, I love it! As always, when I get around teens, I start thinking crazy thoughts, like, “I want to be a high school teacher.” Okay. I don’t really want to be a high school teacher, not because I wouldn’t love it BUT because it would do the same thing my Ph.D. program did–suck all my time away from me so that I was digging out time for writing.
But my friend Merrie fired up an old dream of mine when she mentioned that her niece loved The Confessional, and then wondered aloud whether I would ever do a writing camp. A few years back, I started planning a writing camp for teenagers in El Paso. I never got further than writing up a plan, but it’s been in the back of my mind. Maybe it’s time to make that more of a reality and less of a in-the-back-of-the-mind kind of thing.
