(Sandra Cisneros, John Phillip Santos) Sponsored by the Macondo Writers' Workshop. Two amigos talk about the (very) personal and political. They will say things that they've never said before in public or in print.

Published Date: August 17, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington DC on February 4th, 2011. The recording features Lorraine Lopez, Sandra Cisneros, and John Phillip Santos. You'll now hear Lorraine Lopez provide introductions.

Lorraine Lopez:

Today it's my honor and privilege to introduce today's speaker, Sandra Cisneros and John Phillip Santos. Originally, Helena Maria Viramontes was going to have the conversation with Sandra. Unfortunately, health problems arose for Helena and she was not able to make it, so we're very grateful and we're very privileged that John Phillip Santos stepped into the breach and he's really wonderfully generous to do this and I hope that you all appreciate that as much as I do. I want to see a little bit about Macondo before I introduce today's conversationalists. Macondo Foundation works with dedicated and compassionate writers who view their work and talents as part of a larger task of community building and nonviolent social change. Macondo is a community of poets, novelists, journalists, performance artists, and creative writers of all genres whose work is socially engaged. What unites us is a commitment to serve our underserved communities through our writing, and that's the official word of Macondo.

Unofficially, this is the most remarkable organization I have ever been honored to be a part of. It really feels like a homeland. Macondo feels like a homeland to me, a place that nurtures my creative spirit and a place where I can extend nurturance to other writers. It's just a remarkable organization. I think you have to experience it in the way that so many of us have in order to appreciate it fully. Macondo enjoys the ongoing support and participation of many internationally recognized writers, including Denise Chavez, John Philip Santos, Luis Rodriguez, Dorothy Allison, Joy Harjo, Carmen Tafolla, and a large body of emerging writers. And I recognize many of you here today. I'm so proud to see you here who are publishing books, touring in the US and abroad and working in their communities.

Officially incorporated in 2006. The Macondo Foundation has roots in the Macondo writing workshop named after the sleepy town in Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which began in 1995 in the kitchen of poet and writer Sandra Cisneros. The workshop grew rapidly from 15 to more than 120 participants in less than nine years. During that time, the Macondo Workshop expanded its community involvement through annual events with Our Lady of the Lake University, UT San Antonio, Trinity University, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Jump-Start Performance Theater, Casa de Maria y Marta, and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center. Macondo currently makes its home at Our Lady of the Lake University, and now this is a new affiliation of Macondo workshops with the associated writing programs that we're very proud of and we're very happy that Francisco Aragon, who spoke before me was able to facilitate this new relationship, which is going to be important for both parties, I know it. Okay, I want to introduce today's conversationalists. I don't want to say presenters because this is a conversation.

Like most people, I first encountered Sandra Cisneros on the page. I remember coming across her short story Woman Hollering Creek in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in my parents' house many, many years ago. And I'll never forget the scalp tightening feeling of recognition I experienced in reading that narrative. As I devoured the story, I felt as if I had been set on fire, not in the self-immolating sense, but in the incandescent sense of being a blaze with excitement and energy. Finally, I found someone writing for me and to me, someone writing about what concerned me, someone inscribing a life with which I identified. The moment was a turning point for me. It was if Sandra had appeared in that small bedroom of my parents' house where I read to give me a heart shake, to wake me up to my life as a woman and as a writer, and to draw me away from the margins and fully onto the page, ultimately enabling me to change from object to subject in the long and very convoluted sentence that has been my life.

That such a story was possible, made tangible for me, my dream of being a writer. And it was the first time Sandra Cisneros changed my life and that would've been enough, more than I could have any right to hope for, but as it is in fables and folk tales, three is the magic number. And years later, this happened two more times. Sandra appeared in my life and altered it in a profound and permanent way when she selected my stories to win the Miguel Marmol Prize in Fiction, which resulted in publication of my first book. Then again, when I became a member of Macondo writing workshop and met Sandra in San Antonio nearly five years ago. Words cannot convey the impact such intercessions by this radiant woman have had on my life, personally, professionally, even spiritually. To the extent that though we are, but a few years apart in age, I consider Sandra Cisneros my spiritual mother, and I strive never to commit any acts that might make Sandra wish she had practiced spiritual birth control.

It's true. Many, many people have had their lives changed, enhanced, liberated, enriched, and expanded by encountering and experiencing in one way or another on the page or in the flesh this amazing writer and activist who I'm honored to introduce to you today. You must know of Sandra's accomplishments and publications. If you do not shame on you, shame on you. But I'm just so honored to introduce her today and I don't want to take any more time from the conversation, but I had to say what I had to say and I'm very glad I had that chance. So I'm very honored and privileged to introduce Sandra today.

And I have a dual privilege. I have also first encountered John Phillip Santos on the page first, and my sister and I have been fans of his work since we first read his memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. In fact, she will be quite jealous when I tell her that I've had the opportunity of introducing him this afternoon. Macondo workshop provided me an opportunity to meet this author in San Antonio a few years ago and to find out that he is every bit as large spirited, generous, and insightful as his writing and professional accomplishments suggest if not more so. John Phillip Santos is a widely published author and media producer who has produced documentaries and news programs in 16 countries for CBS and PBS. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express News, Texas Monthly and numerous newspapers, magazines and journals in the United States, Mexico and Europe.

He was the first Latino to be elected as a Rhode scholar and holds degrees in English literature and language from Oxford University and Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. Santo's memoir Places Left Unfinished at the Creation of Time was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999 and the inaugural selection of the One Book, One San Antonio project in 2006. His first book of poem songs older than any known singer, was published in 2007 by Wings Press and the sequel to his memoir, the Farthest Home is an Empire of Fire, was published by Viking Penguin in April of 2010. Please join me in welcoming our distinguished speakers today.

John Phillip Santos:

Thank you, Lorraine.

Lorraine Lopez:

Initially, when we conceived this conversation, well, Sandra and I discussed a number of topics that might be stimulating to information or commentary that's not ordinarily publicly known, and that was kind of our attempt in constructing these topics. And as such, we've created a list and we'll just sort of run through and stimulate some discussion along those lines. And I'm hoping we'll have time at the end so that you can chime in with your particular questions or concerns or comments to the authors.

The first thing that we talked about was community social responsibility and activism in the writing life. And I'm just curious about some of your reflections on those subjects. What is the sense of responsibility that you feel or what does the writing life entail insofar as social responsibility goes?

John Phillip Santos:

Well, I think on the occasion of the fact that we have the Tennessee Williams commemorative bottle of wine with us, we need to begin with a toast because Tennessee Williams always began his talks and his readings with a public toast. And I remember he came to Notre Dame and in 1977 and he began with a particular toast, he said, "To our mother, to our lady." So I went to make a toast to all our mothers, [inaudible 00:09:33] our spiritual mother, Sandra, Lupita, to our mothers, salud.

The social dimension of writing, the activist dimension is integral, I think to both of our practices perhaps in different ways. I see writing principally as the evidence of things experienced, undertaken, witnessed, revealed, contradicted. And out of those experiences, social conscience emerges and you're writing weaves together, all of the books you've read, all of the authors you emulate, all of the voices you've heard growing up from your family, and you put that down on the page. And unless you're writing manifestos or you're writing political tracts, you expect that perhaps that work can then maybe on a molecular level begin to affect the way that people experience the world themselves.

So my orientation about this isn't directly in the line of political action, it's really more about how work can affect conscience, how work can in subtle ways move people's magnetic polarities in the world and maybe move them more towards understanding commonality of the experiences of the poor, of the marginalized, of the oppressed and excluded, and that that can lead to a politics. So I've found that generally when that urge to write comes on, you want to, in a sense be of clear spirit about it and let those processes take place. It's perhaps for me a little bit more instantiated because I try to see things more in a millennial context. So the politics of the now are a context, a part of that context, but not the totality. So how do you move readers into a vision of our time that is set in millennial contexts? That's been my orientation.

Sandra Cisneros:

I feel a lot of guilt that I have such a blessed life and my brother doesn't or my mother didn't. The people I love are still in the burning house, but I escaped. And I feel like I know who's in that burning house and I don't know how it is that I'm sitting here with all of you came out to hear us. I feel so lucky every day I'm astonished and filled with gratitude when I know that my brother is never going to have this opportunity to have one person listen to him. And you can extend that to community. Our cousins who are still on food stamps or our friends who are stuck drinking, people that are numbed with the blows of life. All of us here are writers and we have power. We're able to create an alchemy of that negative energy that kills and is killing those we love and we can survive because we know how to translate that energy into light.

But how do we do that for other people and how can we not do that rather for other people? That's how I feel. I feel this absolute privilege and astonishment that my life has taken me to this marvelous route. I was that kid that never spoke in class, and I'm aware of that when I go into the classroom and you see the ones that can't even look you in the eye, they can never raise their hands. So I feel guilty. And my mother could never have the time to do the kind of work we do sitting with our problems. She would say, I would tell her, "Oh, I'm depressed." She goes, "Depressed. I had seven kids. I'm not depressed." But she didn't realize that she was angry as hell and she would die angry as hell. She would never see what she did. She could only see what she didn't reach.

Whereas those of us, we spend our time like a 20-year sitting meditation or 30 year, 40, 50, however many years were granted life to sit in our monastic doing our sitting meditation and our monastery transferring that darkness that numbs other people, that knocks them in their back, that just silences them completely and we're able to translate it into loose. That's what we do. We all work with light. All of us are healers and we're survivors. But I don't know how you escape from that burning house and don't hang around and try to run back in and get the ones that are still in there. That's what I'm trying to do when I write. I hope that I'm saving other people, and there are some people that don't want to come out of the house and there's nothing you can do. That's the saddest part, but that's why I do it.

Lorraine Lopez:

I think that leads into another topic quite gracefully, and this is a question that Dorothy Allison is, we have to thank her for this question and that is what are you afraid of? What do you fear? What are some of the things that really scare you? And it sounds like those are the things that are driving you toward activism, but can you expand on that too?

Sandra Cisneros:

I remember the first time I got interviewed at the Lannan Foundation, you get to pick who interviews you, and I always wanted to meet Dorothy Allison and she had a horrible back condition. She came all the way from San Francisco and it really pained her literally to get in a car to get to the airport, get on a plane, and she was there and she wanted to meet and interview me, and she astonished me with that question. So it's on the Lannan tape of this interview with Dorothy and me, and she asked, "What was I afraid of?" That was a long time ago. And what I used to be afraid of is not the same thing I'm afraid of now. I think we'd probably change every day, that list of things we're afraid of. I was afraid then of childbirth and of having children because one, I didn't want to have a child and worry how I was going to raise a child alone.

Children stayed. Men came and went in my life and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to have help. So I didn't want to have a child and I didn't want to go through what I thought was the roller coaster of giving birth. You think that looks like a good ride? I'll get on that one. Then you get on, I want to get off. You have to go to the end, and off you go. Well, it's like that's no going back once you get on that roller coaster. So I was terrified the way draft dodgers may be terrified of battle. I was terrified of childbirth.

But now that I've gone through menopause and I don't have that fear anymore, I have other fears that have popped up. And I think now that I'm older and that I'm by myself, I worry about getting sick and being by yourself and not being able to make a living. What if I got Alzheimer's? I make my living from memory. What would I do then? And I worry about our healthcare system and how do we exist as writers when we're single? How do we reinvent ourselves after 55 when we become invisible as women? So that's scary for me. That's one of the things that scares me. And the other thing is living alone, I live with six dogs and when they bring home the headless squirrel or the headless rat, I'm terrified.

John Phillip Santos:

Fearlessness has been a part of my writing discipline in a sense. And we're talking yesterday at the reading about travel and being in situations where fearlessness was an important thing to keep in your pocket as a way of getting through unexpected circumstances like coup d'etat or revolutions in Chiapas or martial law in Peru. And-

Sandra Cisneros:

[inaudible 00:18:32].

John Phillip Santos:

Well cultivating a kind of fearlessness about the way that you move in the world as a writer, opening yourself up to experiences. When you hear that there is an upheaval, a revolution taking place in San Cristobal de las Casas and you're in Tuxtla Gutierrez, and the sun is going down and you hear various reports that the army is attacking the city or the sabatistas are attacking civilians and you decide to drive in anyway, into the night. And that was a big part of, a good deal of the last 30 years for me, and recently traveling on the Texas Mexico border after a long time where it was free passage to move back and forth across the border and to move anywhere in Mexico as a writer, as a seeker, as a witness to everything that was going on. Suddenly to encounter this extraordinary upheaval of violence that's taking place in our homelands. My family's been in that region since the 1620s, and suddenly it became a concern.

I have a daughter now, nine months old, and that fearlessness that has always been sort of ample was suddenly checked. And I had to really think about whether it made sense to go across the border just to get a plate of roasted [inaudible 00:20:04]. So the protection of fearlessness, the fear of losing that for me has always been a kind of delicate balance. And that remains a big part of how I seek stories in the world, is to put myself into places where things are taking place. We're watching it happen hour by hour now in Egypt, and you see journalists hunkering down on their Skype cameras in their hotel rooms as the world is on fire outside.

So that is a measure for me of where you are willing to go in terms of that daring about witnessing stories taking place and bringing them back to your desk, writing them, believing your words, and then putting them out into the public. So the fear of losing fearlessness is always present with me, because I'm really a chicken. And many of these cases were these somewhat dangerous circumstances, it was usually women who were telling me to go forward into it. They were traveling companions, so they wanted to go into Belfast when Belfast was on fire or they wanted to go into Khartoum when a revolution had just taken place or to drive into Chiapas. So I've always depended on the fearlessness of women to get me through.

Sandra Cisneros:

You know, you think you're so brave. And then I go back a lot to Sarajevo where I used to live and I knew Sarajevo before the war, but especially I've been making the trips afterwards. And you think you're so brave when your friends tell you the stories and then they say, "Oh, come on, we want you to see our apartment where we got under siege." And they'll say, "But be careful. There are landmines here." And I paused and then I said, "I'll meet you in the car." So you're not that brave when you really have to make those little choices.

John Phillip Santos:

It makes a big difference if it's your fight. And this is I think a major issue now for Tejano writer, for writers along the border. This is our fight. What's taking place in Mexico is historic in many ways, the continuation of the Mexican Revolution. We've been in the midst of these observances of the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. In fact, the revolution continues and now it's really at our doorstep again, and we have to really resolve where we are going to align ourselves with all of these [foreign language 00:22:37] that are taking place just 90 miles to the south of San Antonio. We both live in San Antonio, Texas.

Lorraine Lopez:

Well, that leads conveniently into the next topic, I think, which is about the influence of spirituality and creation as a spiritual act. And I think I'm getting from both of what you're saying, that sense of yourself being part of something larger than yourselves. So I guess let's talk a little bit about inspirations, spirituality, channeling the creative force and being part of something larger than yourself that helps you mitigate fears. Very tangible, very realistic fears.

John Phillip Santos:

[foreign language 00:23:26].

Sandra Cisneros:

It's really hard for me to talk about teaching or writing. I can't teach writing without talking about the spiritual because one of the things that I learned is that writing is a spiritual act. And the more I can get myself out of the way, the better the writing is. The more humble I can become, the more I pledge my work for other people, the more I do it for love, but love for others. And the more I get my ego and my agenda out of the way, the writing will take me to better places. And that's very simple two things, humility and fearlessness. You'll have to ask for those two things that's important to put it out there, even if you're having great doubts about the spiritual world, we all believe that in higher self. And you can just say, okay, this is what I need to do. I need to get myself out of the way by being humble, getting my agenda out of the way and just opening myself to wherever the peace is going to take me.

I think it's a spiritual act. I always invoke all the help I can get. If you've got connections in higher places, why not use them? So I always to get myself in a quiet place, I start my meditation with my father because his love is really present. He's very present in my life, in the way that I was so astonished after his death. I didn't know, and maybe everybody doesn't know this, maybe everybody knows it, but I didn't know that when someone dies that you continue to receive their love.

It was such a mind-boggling news that I thought they should put it on CNN on the little banner that flashes. And I thought, well, why didn't they tell me? But someone told me that not everybody knows this. I think all artists know this or I'm presuming too much, but it was just a visceral thing. I know that my father's love still comes to me. I feel it the same way that when you see a beloved across the room and you go, Hey, and you feel this energy from that person, I still feel it with my father. And if I'd known that, I wouldn't have cried so much when he was ill.

So I know that there's something, I don't know what's there on the other side of our death, but there's something that, for lack of a better word, I will call spirit. And I just know that it's part of the process of writing for me to channel, get out of the way, act almost like a medium, or I like to think like a flute that this music travels through you, but you clog it up with your ego. You clog it up with fear, you clog it up with any negative energy, but as long as you're doing something for someone else, you forget to be frightened and you forget about yourself and you just are clear to get this light that comes through you, that comes through you, that comes through you. It just takes an awful lot of time to get to that state. But it's not impossible.

John Phillip Santos:

Well, spirituality has been a place of dual meanings for me. I was an undergrad at Notre Dame, as you mentioned, so four years at Notre Dame, sort of guaranteed and deepened my anti-religiousness in a way that is almost irreversible, almost guarantees that I will never find my way back into institutional faith of any stripe. But on the other hand, early in my life, early on as a writer, as a young poet along with poet Naomi Shihab Nye in San Antonio, one evening we went and met Swami Sivananda, one of the great high souls of our time, past not too long ago. And so he in a sense kind of awakened me to this other path of spirituality, something that was inward, something that was connected to the world. I remember in this Darshan, he gave a woman was asking questions at one point, she'd asked lots of really annoying questions to him, and he was very tolerant with her.

And then she finally asked, "Well, is it true Guruji that the world is created and destroyed every minute?" And he replied to her very quickly, he said, "Well, you're still here, aren't you?" This guy really knows something. And ironically, my work in television, my work at CBS News was reporting religion and spirituality in the sense of faith movement. So a lot of reports on liberation theology and resurgent Islam and new religious movements. And that experience took me around the world and gave me witness to the incredible power of belief to reshape communities. From the poorest, the most dejected communities in rural areas of Nicaragua or Peru to urban places like Sao Paulo and Chicago and LA. And so I saw there this other element of a universal human story that connected back to growing up Chicano in South Texas, remembering the experiences of our family coming out of Mexico, the experiences of poverty and dislocation, refugee status and all of that, giving us a kind of universal human spirit.

So that became a way for me to think about memoir. A way of thinking about memoir, not as an account of myself, an autobiographical account, but using memoir as a way to try to reconstruct our connection to this universal story and to this ancestral journey that connected us in part in the case of my families to Mexico, the indigenous world, to Spain, to the Middle East, to Africa. Ultimately, when you begin that kind of writing, you're always going to be taken back to these primal sources of our humanity and our ethnic distinctions, our national identities, our racial and cultural identities begin to wash away like a very thin paint, very thin tincture. And you start getting down into this other dimension of our humanity.

And so for me, memoir has been the means by which I connect to this spiritual realm. And the influences in that lineage are very diverse, sir Thomas Brown and Thomas Traherne in the 17th century, and Edmund Spencer and Borges and William Blake. And those are kind of like my spiritual mentors. So they're literary spiritual mentors. As I said earlier, that experience at Notre Dame I think guarantees that that particular path unless something terrible happens like one of those road to Damascus stories where you get stricken off your mule by a lightning bolt, I won't find my way back to the church.

Sandra Cisneros:

Well, I have to say something there. My family is from the parish of the real site where La Virgen de Guadalupe or the alleged site, La Virgen de Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego in the neighborhood called Tepeyac in Mexico City. And I grew up taking that for granted, but now I'm a [foreign language 00:31:01], and I never would've dreamed that. So life is very astonishing. Be very careful. My mother was not a Catholic by any means, and my father was a man and Mexican, which means he never had to go to church. But we grew up a few blocks from the little derby of the hill where the vision appeared, and we were always hanging around there as children playing, waiting for my grandmother, waiting for my grandfather who worked next door.

And I think I like what Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk has to say about, you have to embrace your roots, whatever those roots are, and go back when you become a Buddhist, you must take those parts that are part of your culture. So if you're Mexican, you've got to recognize La Virgen de Guadalupe as a powerful community organizer. You just have to recognize that. So I just see her as an image that allowed me to open the door. But I really think God isn't a person or a woman or a man or any religion. I really think that everybody doubts the existence of God, but nobody doubts the existence of love. And love to me is that energy, and it just comes to us pour in different bottles so we could open or close the door.

John Phillip Santos:

It was just down in [inaudible 00:32:30] a few weeks ago and there at Tepeyac and after a couple of days of moving around other parts of the city and Templo Mayor and Tlatelolco, some of the old ceremonial centers, the Mechica, the places where people came to worship Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl and those now are in ruins that are being extraordinarily well excavated and all kinds of new discoveries taking place. But at Tepeyac, they're at the shrine of Guadalupe you see alive today, this ancient ritual of pilgrimage. The persistence and the continuity of pilgrimage in our ancestral past is present there in a living way. So that part of the story for me is tremendously moving, whether it's in Tepeyac or in Mecca or in Jerusalem or in the shrine to Nino Fidencio in northern Mexico. That part of our tradition I think does connect us to these deeply human roots. But when it's layered on with the apparatus of the ecclesial institution of the church with Pope Vader the current pontiff of the church, then it becomes a deeply darkening experience for me.

Lorraine Lopez:

Well, it's come up a few times your connection not only through Macondo, but through your current place, the current space that you inhabit and the subject of love has come up. And just thinking about place where you live now, San Antonio, and that I'm sure love hate relationship that people often have with the places that they inhabit. I was just curious if you would like to speak to what is that like to share that particular geographic and cultural milieu, San Antonio love-hate place?

Sandra Cisneros:

Well, I think that John Philip has more love, and I probably have more hate. I only lived there 25 years where they've been there how many generations?

John Phillip Santos:

Yeah. Well, if you want to count in years, it gets very lengthy. But a couple of centuries, let's say.

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes, right? You get a little bit of a jump on me. But I have to say San Antonio drives me crazy. And the reason why I named Macondo, Macondo was because if you read a One Hundreds Years of Solitude, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it's a town that keeps inventing ice because they're so isolated that the gypsies come and bring ice. And they go, "Oh my god, ice." And then someone comes and tells them the world is round. "Oh no, the world is round?" That's San Antonio. So I used to wait for, I read about movies and I read about plays, and I know that they're going to come to San Antonio, maybe never. So I just read about them and people say, have you seen this film? And I said, "When's that coming to Macondo?" So I was disgusted and angry for a long time, and finally one day I just said, I got to just make my reality.

And no matter where I go, even if I lived in Paris or Santa Fe or New York, I would still have the same complaints that it isn't the community I want. So you have to make your community better if it isn't a good fit. So I couldn't sit around and wait for the universities to invite my friends because they were never going to do it. So I decided to ask them myself. I asked my friends like John Philip, "Will you help me? My workshop's getting too big. I'm going to split it into two and clone it. Will you teach one for me?" And he would do it. And I was the only one that was earning from my writing. But out of the generosity of friends, they helped the workshop to grow.

The members themselves. I would say, "You've got a hundred dollars. Have you got a hundred dollars? Have you got a hundred dollars? I need to raise $800 so that we can fly so-and-so from Seattle." And everybody would just pitch in. We didn't have any, not-for-profit, we just did it because we had Ganas, desire, and that's how we did things. So that was a wonderful thing. San Antonio has its great things and that it's a small enough town that it was affordable to put on a one-week workshop like Macondo. I tell people it's like organizing a seven-day wedding. And we had the support system there, the people at Our Lady of the Lake, at Trinity, at UT, they were happy to loan us the classroom space. And so we've been doing it for 10 years without any money except the money out of our own generosity and goodwill, the members themselves.

We are operating the way organizations operate that have a university helping them out. And we just do it with [foreign language 00:37:47] just do it any old way. And the way we make it work is simply we just have the desire, we have volunteers, and that takes a lot of work. I have to mention for all the controversy, this may say that we're getting support from a corporation this year, I think this corporation said, "I must do something to fix my image." And that's amazon.com. So if they're willing to change their image by helping organizations like us, I want to say bravo, bravo. And so we're getting help. We're finally getting those grants, but it's a lot of work to do the work that we've been doing on a volunteer basis and to do it for 15 years. And I forgot what the question was.

John Phillip Santos:

We were talking about San Antonio.

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes.

John Phillip Santos:

Which was great, San Antonio was a great place to grow up as a writer. I had the great fortune early on to meet Naomi Shihab Nye. So it was a place where a large number of poets, Rosemary Catacalos and-

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes, but you're from San Antonio?

John Phillip Santos:

I am from San Antonio.

Sandra Cisneros:

So the San Antonio-

John Phillip Santos:

So we were rooted there-

Sandra Cisneros:

... might embrace you. To me, they sit there and say, well, who is she and why did she take my job?

John Phillip Santos:

Well, when Sandra came to town in 1984, she became a kind of hearth for other writers. So that small community of long-established writers in San Antonio connected to the music scene in Austin, folks like Townes Van Zandt and Alejandro Escovedo and Flaco Jimenez in San Antonio and Esteban Jordan and many others. Out of that kind of foment in San Antonio that was always present, I have to say Sandra's presence really catalyzed something new.

Sandra Cisneros:

Catalyze and irritated.

John Phillip Santos:

And what?

Sandra Cisneros:

Catalyzed and irritated some people.

John Phillip Santos:

You would have to describe that. Well, it was a scene where for maybe 10 years, it was slowly gathering fire and along with other conspirators, like the artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz, who established out of an old botanica that he bought and acquired and turned into a kind of combination thrift shop, performance art space, salon and scene of various solicit activities. Almost on a 24 7 basis. This became the hub of a new idea of San Antonio, a new cultural theme that I think has really transformed the city. And it's no coincidence that it happened in the neighborhood where Sandra lives because she was directly involved. She was inciting, she was conspiring, she was enabling and celebrating all of this. And there was a considerable amount of mayhem.

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes, that's true. We got thrown out of a lot of places,

John Phillip Santos:

Lots of broken glass and opera karaoke and-

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes. Jumping into swimming pools.

John Phillip Santos:

This long period of experimental misbehavior I think has really resulted in a new kind of city.

Sandra Cisneros:

I would call it exuberance.

John Phillip Santos:

It was exuberant experimental misbehavior. And it has left the city a very different place. This neighborhood where Sandra lives now has I think a nationally recognized art space, several other spaces for theater. It is the hub of a new kind of visual arts movement. In part Latino, but not exclusively Latino. In part Mexican-American, but not exclusively Mexican-American. In fact, it's crossroads as, and this is where I'll go back to recover some aspect of San Antonio's reputation in the past, San Antonio has always been a crossroads of cultures and civilizations going back now nearly 300 years.

The place of the hinterlands, before we were hinterlands of the United States, we were hinterlands of New Spain, we were hinterlands of Mexico. And so San Antonio has been accustomed to being at the edge where that kind of exuberant experimental misbehavior perhaps is a little bit more possible than doing it right in the middle of an east coast urban center. And I think has a prophetic role to play in what is becoming the Republica Cosmica, the beginning of a new story about the United States, that there's a prophetic role of a place like San Antonio so long-established in this history, both in the epic of Mexico and the epic of the United States, that we have a testimonial to offer the rest of the country about this experience of being a crossroads, of this experience of being an amalgamator of culture.

Sandra Cisneros:

And what Tomas Ybarra-Frausto would call a convidencia, a co-living of communities that have intermarried, even if it's not the official story told at the Alamo, the unofficial story is that that's a birthplace of communities coming together and uniting and creating a new mestizaje. No?

John Phillip Santos:

Yes, I agree. I agree with that.

Sandra Cisneros:

I agree about that. And it also, as much as I complain, where else would I be able to afford a house on the river and I could have a herd? I have a herd of dogs that had called my little ranchito. It's just my house. It's an old plot of farmland that in the old days it was allotted to some widow or some person that had something to do with the Alamo, and it used to be farmland, but a lot of those lots are rather big compared to lots of land now. And it's possible for me to have six dogs, and I'm not Julia Roberts. I don't live in New Mexico and have all that land, but it's possible to do that and live two miles from downtown. San Antonio people have goats and chickens in the city center, and it's kind of like a rancho right?

John Phillip Santos:

A little bit. But is this movement that's been underway now for almost 20 years, and as I say it almost directly coincides with Sandra's arrival in town. This movement is really in the beginning way of constructing a new kind of Latinidad, the idea of a Latindad that is not parsing ethnic differences. In fact, it's about understanding how Latindad is the prophetic core of what America has always been meant to become. The idea of a place that's rooted in identification with the experience of the dislocated, of the disenfranchised, of the colonized, the conquered and the decolonized, those people who've come out of that experience, that is what for me, Latinadad betokens. And it began out of the experience of Latin America, but it's becoming, I think, a kind of beacon ethic for a new kind of America. And in San Antonio-

Sandra Cisneros:

Well, let's not get too romantic though.

John Phillip Santos:

What?

Sandra Cisneros:

Let's not get two romantic-

John Phillip Santos:

Okay.

Sandra Cisneros:

Because the Alamo is, the story of the Alamo is-

John Phillip Santos:

Yes.

Sandra Cisneros:

... still told as a place of destruction and violence. It's still a very colonized place. And that story is what defines our city and defines our young people.

John Phillip Santos:

That's right.

Sandra Cisneros:

Until our young people can see themselves as being born from that destruction as opposed to being the destroyer, it's going have a lot of negative energy.

John Phillip Santos:

But this is why we want to turn the Alamo into a museum regarding how badly immigration policy can go awry.

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes, I think that will be very good.

John Phillip Santos:

This is going to be the International Destination Museum for Bad Immigration Policy.

Sandra Cisneros:

I think that's good. I also want to just take a roll call. How many [inaudible 00:46:07], don't have my glasses, but how many [inaudible 00:46:10] are out in the audience? Keep your hand raised. Now, here they are. I'm just so happy you all came out. And you can see what we look like. We come from across the United States, we cross genders, across race. And if you believe as I do that we have a responsibility to transfer light for those we love and communities that are underserved, please apply and join us. There's a link on my webpage and macondoworkshop.org has its webpage two, so I just want to invite people to apply. And-

John Phillip Santos:

It takes Lopez Place in July every year.

Sandra Cisneros:

It takes place in the hottest part of the year in July. And Lorraine Lopez is also a member of Macondo. She's a PEN/Faulkner finalist, an extraordinary writer. If you haven't read her work, please do so. I just love your work.

Lorraine Lopez:

Thank you.

Sandra Cisneros:

I love your writing and you make me so proud.

Lorraine Lopez:

Thank you.

Sandra Cisneros:

And so just do apply. We unfortunately, in the old days, I could just say you want to apply, come and now I'm trying not to be Fidel Castro and letting the members like select who comes. So you have to apply.

John Phillip Santos:

And who's teaching this year?

Sandra Cisneros:

This year we have Helena Maria Viramontes, Manuel Munoz and Julia Alvarez, and we have a Edwidge Danticat coming in 2015 and Marga Gomez teaching performance and comedy writing next year.

John Phillip Santos:

Last year, Elena Poniatowska.

Sandra Cisneros:

Elena Poniatowska and Leslie Marmon Silko came last year. Jorge Ramos said he will come in the future. Nilo Cruz, Alexander Hayman, and, well, I don't know who else.

John Phillip Santos:

Our brother from New Orleans.

Sandra Cisneros:

Oh, Andrei Codrescu came.

John Phillip Santos:

Andrei Codrescu.

Sandra Cisneros:

Not only did Andrei come, but he wore a lucha libre mask and cape. We asked him to, and so did the poet [inaudible 00:48:03]. They did a marvelous job. We have a lot of fun.

Lorraine Lopez:

Well, speaking of community, and I guess going from the community, which is kind of large and can be general, one of the things that we've talked about when we were thinking of the conversation in terms of Elena and Sandra was talking about family and the impact of family, the responsibility that one feels toward family and that responsibility one feels for taking care of others, not just family, but nurturing young writers and how that has a different impact for women than perhaps for men. So it would be really great, I think we're blessed to have your perspective and how that can either draw away from or feed the writing life, that necessity of taking care of others, including family and how family feels about the fact of having a writer among in their midst. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that. I think that would be really fascinating to see some of your thoughts on that.

Sandra Cisneros:

Nothing comes to mind immediately because my family didn't read my work. I liked how Martinez father said, if you want your family to not find out about something, put it in a book. And I always write about my family hoping that it'll bring catharsis and that we'll cry and we hug each other and come to some wonderful truth like in the telenovelas. But they never talk about my writing, which leads me to suspect they don't read it or they don't know what to make of it. Maybe once in a while, one brother or something, I think they think I make it up. And then when I make it up, they think it's true.

John Phillip Santos:

Well, my first book, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, was in part about a long held family secret, the likely suicide of my grandfather in 1938. And that story had sort of lingered in the family heart silently and virally for a very long time, hinted at. And it seemed that my father may have had some role in finding the body of his father. And so that first book, the story was a very risky story to tell about our family as a way of introducing the Santos Garcia clan to the world. And it was in part though a kind of healing as well. There were some respects in which that book was written for the family. It was great other people read it, but it was written as a way of resolving that story for all of us. And maybe the greatest critical review I ever got was from an aunt who said that it had unburdened her of that story.

She still didn't think my grandfather had committed suicide, but she felt that the story had finally been allowed to find its way into the world and was resolved. And it also is a way of understanding how one family can connect you to the deepest sources, the epic sources of a nation, in this case, Mexico and the indigenous world, and the world of the mestizo culture that emerged in Mexico after the conquest. With a second book, there was a quarrel in a sense between families. My mother's family was more of a Spanish family, the Lopez Vela family. We are both Lopez's. So with that story, it was a kind of argument against being comfortable in being Mexican. It was an argument against finding any comfort or any consolation and the idea of touching your indigenous sources or touching your mestizo sources. It was a way of pulling out of the family story in this case, documented in libraries and archives that I found around the world where the Santos Garcia family was almost entirely spoken, oral history, things told to me.

With my mother's family's story, it was a challenge, a kind of incendiary challenge that you can't be comfortable with any sense of the origins of yourself. Because no matter what you think of as being your true self, your ancestral voices will always beckon you farther into the past. They'll always call for you to account to who you were before you think you are now, who you were before you became who you think you are now. So these two books were out of family experiences, but they connected to these very profound sources of the human story.

So when you begin to tell your family stories, if you're not careful, you're led off the cliff into this void of our human origins. And you're in a sense ultimately going to have to account for why we're here at all and why it is we take such comfort in associating ourselves with particular lineages of identities, whether indigenous or Iberian or Mexican or Chicano or Latino or whatever it may be. And so my family stories have been a way of unsettling all of that, strangely. So even though they're about heritage, they've ultimately undermined my idea of heritage as a kind of place of consolation. It's more a place of energetic and catalytic curiosity. And that's what happens when you start listening to your ancestors, especially the time traveling ones that come from the future.

Lorraine Lopez:

And what about responsibility to family and to other writers? And I guess that's the theme that keeps reemerging that sense of how do you preserve what you need for yourself to create, to write and still balance the desire to meet responsibilities to family? You have a new baby now.

Sandra Cisneros:

Yes.

Lorraine Lopez:

Or to the community of writers that you support and you nurture. How do you find that balance?

Sandra Cisneros:

Well, I moved from Chicago. That helped. Because when I was a young woman, my father expected me to come home every Sunday. First, he didn't want me to move away from home. That was scandalous. And the fact that once I did that, I had to make a contract that I would be home every Sunday the way that married sons go off and come back home on Sunday. I had to make that contract to come home on Sunday. And when you live with a family with six brothers and cousins and the whole branch of the family, the branches of the family in Chicago, there's never a weekend that there isn't somebody's party or somebody's birthday or the cousin's baptism. It never ends. So I had to move away. I tell people I ran away from Chicago so I could run away from home and have a space in which I could be a writer on the days that I wasn't working. So that my father could understand why I wasn't showing up for family events.

So I had to do that as a daughter. I don't know how my brothers, they seemed to have the excuse of saying, oh, my wife and her family. I didn't have that excuse because I just was married to my pen. So moving away from my family, I had to move away from them. And when I go back to Chicago and get back and all the drama, I feel guilty that I'm not there. And I feel guilty when I'm there. I feel guilty when I'm there that I am never going to be able to write that I'm reminded why I moved away in the first place. And when I leave, it's always with this sense of sadness that I can't do more. I just never get over the guilt. I'm just full of guilt. I'm sure that there must be some Sephardic Jewish ancestry in my book too.

John Phillip Santos:

Undoubtedly. I'm grateful to have been able to write the books I wanted to write. The first book was probably too lyrically poetic by half. And the second book is just inexplicably more esoteric still. And so I got to write those books and they got to get out into the public. And I did it without thinking about commercial viability. And that's proven to be actually a very good expectation. There was not much commercial viability. But it's not to say that there haven't been people who've been advising me along the way to be more commercially savvy. A woman, an agent about maybe 12 years ago was telling me, "What we really need is a Chicano vampire saga." Are you crazy? That would never sell. Now it's been a vampire werewolf season for the last eight years.

But I think for writers who have this orientation towards conciencia and social change, only that which accomplishes that in your heart is going to really suffice and journeyman work, if you can get it, is not a bad thing to kind of keep the boats floating, whether it's making television or writing the occasional magazine article or doing some speaking engagements and such. Finding ways creatively to put your themes, your messages out into the public in a way that might come back to the household and sort of support the enterprise is a great thing if you can do that. I wonder if we can take questions.

Lorraine Lopez:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

I'll try to correct you, [inaudible 00:58:13] say that your mother was not a blessed person but you are, but I think she was very blessed because she had you.

Sandra Cisneros:

Well, maybe she knows it now, but maybe not when she was alive. You didn't live with her.

Speaker 6:

I just wanted to ask you basically, what's the secret of the success on your stories? Like The House in Mango Street, which the brevity of the writing is just so hard, complicated to put together. It's not the typical short story where there is a beginning, a middle and an ending. How did you work that concept? And also I think-

Sandra Cisneros:

How did I work the concept for House on Mango Street? Yes.

Speaker 6:

Right. And also I think if it's more like a little bit of your personal life, because you're talking about a little bit of poverty when you said it's our own house, but it's not the house we wanted. My father is saying that it's temporary, but I know that it's not true. I know these things are different. So how do you [inaudible 00:59:15]?

Sandra Cisneros:

Okay, a little bit about the autobiographical parts of House on Mango Street and about the creation of that form is the question. The Iowa Writers' Workshop was such an awful experience for me. When I was there, I didn't know what Iowa Writers' Workshop was. I didn't know about the fame. I didn't know it existed. So my instructor told me to apply and I was very dutiful. And I went there and I didn't know it was a big deal to get in. I had no idea of how exclusive it was and sought after. I had no idea even, until I got there. And I had a very difficult time. I was in the poetry workshop. I noticed now in the catalog that there are lots of institutions now that take dual citizenship, that you can cross genres, that you can be both a poet and a fiction writer. You can mix them up.

And there's a lot of room for flexibility that there wasn't back then. You had to pledge allegiance to the country of poetry, the country of fiction. And because I had studied with a poet, I had more poetry under my belt, but I always knew I was writing fiction too, and I just didn't have any guidance in fiction. So I submitted poetry, got in the poetry workshop, and when I was there, I immediately felt like I was in the wrong place. I felt like I wasn't smart enough to be there, that people made me feel like the books I was reading were the wrong ones. Things I had to say were stupid. So you learn to be quiet. And even the subjects that I was writing about and I was having an illicit affair, it was not what poetry writes. It's not what poets write about.

So I put that aside and started writing in voices. The voices was a way for me to just speak when I was voiceless. And one day I got really angry and after we were reading books about houses, one day, first I got upset, I should say. When I recognized that we were talking about houses in these books, but we weren't talking about houses that I knew, we weren't talking about the houses in the communities I grew up in, the one room flats, the third floor walk-ups, places that had pipes that froze in the winter. We had never talked about those homes. And no one in my workshop knew that house. My first reaction was to feel absolute shame that I didn't belong in graduate school. I didn't belong in a writer's workshop and maybe out of some kindness or quota system I had wound up there.

But what was I doing competing with my classmates who'd gone to the best schools and sometimes talked about their summer houses and their houses in Rome. And it made me so ashamed that I remember locking myself in my room and it was this really crummy house I rented with a hippie landlord where you shared the kitchen and everybody had their little room with a lock on the door. And my bed had a big [inaudible 01:02:23], a big hollow in the center where some lonely person had slept. And I remember curling like a little marble in that little space for three days and thinking maybe I should go back to Chicago. I got offered a job teaching. Perhaps I should have done that all along. I don't belong here. But I don't know where this anger came from. The other side, I think, I guess you have to go through sadness and to get to the other side, which is rage.

And [foreign language 01:02:52] because [foreign language 01:02:54] we have a lot of, when we come from oppressed communities, unfortunately we use that rage against ourselves. But I somehow knew that if I quit, that would be putting the gun to my head. Why don't I aim that gun instead in the biggest blabbermouth in my workshop, we thought she knew everything. Let me write a story where she couldn't tell me that I was wrong. And so I said, I'm going to write something that she can't say I'm wrong. And so she was one of the barracuda and I wrote a story and all of a sudden I had, when you have writer's block, you just have writer's fear. I suddenly had all this stuff to say, all the poems, and it became my thesis. And House on Mango Street began from that place of saying, well, let me write something that you can't tell me I'm wrong.

And so I think I was in love with people like Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers. He writes fiction, he writes poetry, and then he writes this book that is a place in between, a kind of [foreign language 01:03:56] in between those two countries. And I wanted to explore that, a new experimental form. I also wanted to create a new poetics inspired by Niconor Parra and his anti poems. I wanted this literature to be available for people who can't go to Iowa, or never heard of Iowa Writers' Workshop. And even if they had heard of it, wouldn't want to go there because they didn't have the money.

So I thought, what if I write something that anybody, any age, no matter how little or how much education you've had, you could read one and you could appreciate it. So that's how I got the idea out of pure anger, and that's how I wrote my way through Iowa. I didn't get credit for the piece. I did it on my own, and it kept me alive because I was in the poetry workshop and I just wrote a house to nourish my soul during a period when I was dying.

Speaker 7:

My name is [inaudible 01:04:48], I'm a writer of Tucson, and I want to ask you a question about Tucson and about large events. I have a novel in progress, which is set in Tucson, in fact the title [inaudible 01:05:00]. And it's very socially aware, it's a political novel and [inaudible 01:05:06] has been immensely inspired by yours Sandra, so thank you for that. I want to know what you do in your life when some enormous event has occurred in your subject. My heart is broken by what happen in Tucson, and I understand that when big things happen, conventional wisdom is that you just chill for a little bit. You think about in order to incorporate it [inaudible 01:05:35]. I'm angry and the change to happen now. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on how you reconcile.

Sandra Cisneros:

Well, I also want to hear what John Philip has to say because he's a journalist and he works immediately. But one of the things that I feel right now is very powerless too about things that have happened since 9/11 and the direction that the world has taken globally, the fear that has blocked light from us receiving guidance. And I'm angry too. I'm depressed. One of the things I think it's really important for us as writers is to have questions. We don't necessarily have to have the answers, but we need to have questions. And I felt just as powerless when I was writing House on Mongo Street. It's good if you use that anger and you channel it to do something, but you don't do something destructive with that anger. You don't in turn create writing that has bullets, that you compost it until it takes you to some place of light.

For me, I'm in that place still where I'm asking what am I supposed to do when I read about what's happening in Mexico and how Mexico's under siege and how the immigrants are just the under vilification in the United States. What is my role? I feel as powerless as I did in my twenties, if not even more so, and I don't know what I'm going to do, but I know I'm looking. My antenna is out there. I'm asking those questions when I go to sleep and when I wake up.

So I think it's important that you ask those questions, that you use that rage to fuel you to action, not in action or not to violence, and that you put those questions out there so that the answers will come when you're dreaming or in the next hours or the next weeks, the next months. I truly believe in La Divina providencia. Divine providence has taken me to most astonishing places that my ego could never have planned. So I just know that I put it out there to my higher self and I go to sleep and I wait for that answer. And every day I dutifully make time to sit and wait for that answer. And I know John Philip probably have something else to say.

John Phillip Santos:

Here, here. When I see what happened in Tucson and all of the other atrocities that we're seeing around the world as part of a piece that, it's what Edmund Spencer in the last book of the Faerie Queen calls the Blatant Beast. It's kind of a morphous force roiling through communities, raping, pillaging, destroying, all that is creative, all that is affirming about our humanity. And it's a single energy. It manifests in places and in people and in movements and in debacle like the one in Tucson. But it is connected to what we're seeing in our lands and the borderlands right now in terms of the horrific violence, the kind of desecration of bodies that we're seeing on a daily basis. So my orientation is to try to frame that force. How do you frame that fundamentally anti-human force in stories and in testimonials you hear from people experiencing it, from people witnessing it. To give witness to that force as something that is real. It's not just a specter.

Sandra Cisneros:

I also think we have to ask for voices wiser than our own to guide us. And I don't think they're coming from the politicians. We have to look for alternate sources of wisdom. I don't know why we don't create a peace Pentagon. It's obvious that the Pentagon doesn't work. I don't know why we don't fire them. We would save a lot of money. I think we should hire a complete new staff of peacemakers, and that's not impossible. There are peacemakers that are alive now. We don't have to sigh and say, oh, if only Gandhi was here, there are peacemakers alive now that work-

John Phillip Santos:

An insurrection of compassion.

Sandra Cisneros:

... of that work in nonviolence. Yeah, we could do that. I have a list of names and some of those that I read that have changed my life, they completely changed the way that I speak and teach and write. [inaudible 01:09:45]. The Tibetan American woman who, she's Tibetan, Buddhist. And Thich Nhat Hanh, he really has changed me. And many, many writers can point to him as one of their greatest teachers. So I look for these people as examples of wisdom, humility, and courage. I think if you read them and you ask yourself before you go to bed, and as you wake up those questions and you move with rage, you'll walk through the anger to some place of light. That's your job. That's why you were put on the planet.

And it is great that you have that rage, but know that you've got to move beyond it.

Lorraine Lopez:

I think we have time for one more quick question, Carla?

Carla:

Good question. Sandra, what makes you happy?

Sandra Cisneros:

Oh, many things make me happy. I think getting testimonials. I feel so emocionada, being at AWP, all the things that you told me, the beautiful introduction you gave, that gives meaning to my life. You do.

Lorraine Lopez:

Thank you all.

Speaker 1:

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