The 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago | March 3, 2012

Episode 45: An Interview with Luis Urrea by Jessica Anthony

Luis Alberto Urrea's fourteen books include The Devil's Highway and Beside the Lake of Burning, and prize-winning poetry books, Fever Dreams and Ghost Sickness. Awards include the Kiriama Pacific Rim Prize and American Book Awards. He is Professor of Creative Writing at University of Illinois, Chicago.

Published Date: July 25, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago. The recording features Jessica Anthony and Luis Urrea.

Jessica Anthony:

I am with Luis Alberto Urrea at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conferences in Chicago, Illinois.

Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea is the author of 13 books and has won numerous prizes in fiction, nonfiction in poetry. In 2004, his nonfiction book, The Devil's Highway, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His 2005 novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, tells a fictionalized version of the true story of his great aunt, Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora, and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and was widely praised as the best book of the year.

Urrea's most recent novel, Queen of America, follows Teresa and her father at the turn of the century as they crossed the border into America and find themselves searching for identity at the mercy of industry.

In the Chicago Tribune, writer and book critic, Alan Cheuse, offers this praise, "The novelist's powers work their way in this entertaining and intelligent historical fiction, studded with delights, rich in image and metaphor, the voice strong and at the same time comforting as it creates a universe replete with a multiplicity of characters, complete in body and soul. And as in the best of fiction, though the novelist himself is not physically present, his voice speaks worlds."

Welcome Luis, and thank you for joining me.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jessica Anthony:

In a recent interview with Terry Hong, you said, "I was always a writer."

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I was.

Jessica Anthony:

"I was always the writer in the family, always the writer in high school." And I'm curious because many writers often say that they were readers first and only discovered later on that you were a writer. How did you know that you were a writer at such a young age?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I was also the reader. I was just a fanatical reader. But there was this moment when I knew to my bones, I think, that I couldn't do anything in life other than something in the arts. It just was me. I was a good visual artist. I was a good actor. And I found out that what really made me excited was telling stories.

And there comes that moment when you want to do the thing that you love. You read and read and read and you think, "Wow, I'd like to try that." But I never believed people like me would be authors. Authors were something beyond human. And I thought, wow, people from Tijuana, people from my slum neighborhood, they don't write books certainly. And I've told this story before, but I was also a music freak and I listen to music all night, every night. I couldn't sleep very well.

And Leonard Cohen and of course, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, anybody who had lyrics, that's what fascinated me. And I think there came this moment when as a probably ninth grader, 10th grader, I stumbled upon Jim Morrison's book of lyrics and poems, Lords and the New Creatures. And on the same bookshelf was Bob Dylan's Tarantula and Leonard Cohen's Spice-Box of Earth. And I thought, "Oh, my god, these guys write. They write."

You don't just put on leather pants and have songs come out, you write them. And that with my fascination for story just made me go a little crazy. And I started trying it for myself. And I thought I had discovered some kind of HP Lovecraft ritual that nobody knew about but me. And every line I wrote, I thought, "This is going to definitely change the fabric of reality somehow."

And that madness, it just takes over. And you don't realize that you're practicing. You don't realize you're doing homework. If it had been offered to me as an assignment, I would've not done it.

Jessica Anthony:

Were you the storyteller in your family?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I was the story collector. They were all storytellers. I was lucky enough to have a family of incredibly loquacious and twisted people and were liars and fabricators. And that clash between American and Mexican culture has made a lot of sparks. And so, I felt compelled to pay attention to all of it. I thought that was our duty. I thought we are supposed to keep a record, a spiritual record of everybody's life and details. And being caught between two cultures was interesting because certainly for the Mexican relatives, I ended up being an unofficial translator, helping lots of people translate.

So, at a very early age, I was entrusted with people's stories. For example, I had a cousin named Margo, and Margo had fallen in love with a marine in Vietnam. And he would write her these incredible rather filthy letters. And I was a little guy and she'd bring them to me. [foreign language 00:05:33]. And I'd be like, "Uh-oh." So, I'd have to read this. And then she'd dictate to me in Spanish and I'd have to write the letter back to him in English. So, I was definitely into a weird sort of R-rated world in about fifth, sixth grade.

Jessica Anthony:

That's great.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

But it was amazing to have story pass through you at such an early age. So, I was the keeper.

Jessica Anthony:

And so, was there a reward in your family, like you tell a good story and you get a reaction?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Oh, yeah, yeah, man. I mean, in the family, people who had aplomb, people who could come up with a witticism on the spot or what we call piropos in Mexico, the art of instantaneously saying something insanely romantic and seductive to a woman, that was all rewarding. So, in places in which I wasn't very good, athletics or music or all the things the family thought was important, I could outstrip them with gab.

Jessica Anthony:

Well, in the telling of Teresa's story through two novels, I think you've actually done what a lot of writers dream of doing, but could never really pull off, which is working with a family story to create this incredibly vibrant and fully imagined fiction. So, I'm curious, because you're a prolific writer of nonfiction and also poetry of course, what made you decide to fictionalize Teresa?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

This probably took 20 years, because I couldn't find out what the story wanted. It's a little mystical, but since we're talking about healers and medicine people and shamans in those books, it fits. But there's a certain moment at which the story tells you what it wants, what it is. It's like meeting somebody. And that story was so huge and sprawling and, in some ways, nebulous because so much of it had disappeared in time. And I had to keep going deeper and deeper in time to find clues and find data.

At first, I thought it was going to be a footnoted nonfiction book. And I say this flippantly in interviews, but it's the truth. And that is you come to a moment when you realize you can't footnote a dream and you've entered into a dream world. And it's particularly applicable to this because a lot of the medicine people work in dream time to get the information that they use.

And suddenly, I found myself in this odd compositional dream time to the point that they would actually give me dreams. They'd say, "Okay. You're going to have a dream in three days, and then tell me what you dreamt and I'll tell you what it means." And I'd never had people place dreams in my mind before.

So, through both books, there are dreams that were actually the shamanic dreams I was given in sequence. And you realize that those dreams actually in a weird sort of imagistic way are narrating the book, too. They become a framework for her. So, I made them her dreams. Things like that were mysterious and too rich not to go with.

Jessica Anthony:

Talk about this return to Teresa. I mean, my god, the completion of Hummingbird must've been such an extraordinary relief in and of itself.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Oh, my god. I was like, "Never again."

Jessica Anthony:

And then...

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Yeah. Here it comes. Well, first of all, in my house, part of the religion was books. My parents, fortunately for me, love books. And I think in my family at that time, I think the highest accomplishment was being James Michener. If you did a giant book that began with the volcano that erupted, that led to a dinosaur that then somehow, that became settlers coming to Colorado, those kind of books. So, I always had that in my mind and I thought, "Well, when I do this, I want to do an old school, giant, epic American novel."

Jessica Anthony:

That's right.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

And frankly, it was just too much information. And I realized that at the end of the first half of her life in Hummingbird's Daughter, I was ready to keel over and die of exhaustion. And I couldn't imagine my readers getting to the halfway point and saying, "Oh, boy, here's another 600 pages to go. That's great." Maybe for Stephen King or George R.R. Martin.

So, I stopped. And I always suspected there'd be more because I wanted to finish her life out. And it turned out to be a really great break to have a couple of years, do another book, change gears, because I realized that the transition from prerevolutionary indigenous ranch life Mexico to industrial revolution United States was so huge that it was kind of a science fiction book. But I always say now, when I look back on it, I think that train trip at the end of the first book in the beginning of the new book is like a spaceship trip.

She leaves her planet and takes this incredible fire-belching machine and lands in a complete other world where they look like her, but they don't speak like her. And there are bizarre automobiles and electric lights. That was in play. And I realized, particularly really researching her American life and going to New York City where she lived on East 28th Street, it became this revelation to me that when she got to the US, she became Lady Gaga.

She went from being a saint to being a pop star and not knowing how are you a pop star. What do you do? And how do you still try to be in touch with God when everywhere you go, there're photographers and autograph hounds and men and people are hitting on you? And you'd really love to have a boyfriend. You're only 19 years old. And you're thinking now, "I've been there, done that. They killed all my followers. I've been in prison. I've been dogged everywhere. People are trying to kill me. I would just like to fall in love and have a family. I'm done with this," but she can't get out.

She's almost like Michael Corleone, The Godfather. So, that was the challenge. So, it was really good for me to have the break and recalibrate my thinking and then attack it from this point of view. What would it be like to be here?

Jessica Anthony:

Well, I mean, how did you even know where to begin with the second book? I mean, I'm thinking about this great juxtaposition of the violence of these writers, and Teresa is plucking her eyebrows. You know what I mean? How did you get into that moment?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Yeah. Maybe I'm ripping off Truman Capote or something in Cold Blood, the Clutter families eating pies and stuff. And then here comes this terrifying virus of destruction. But I thought since in my mind it's the second half of the same book, it's got to pick up right after they get here. And they're already sort of lost. Like Tomas says ... It was my chance to make a lot of social commentary when he says, "Wait a minute, I've come to the United States and all I see are Mexicans. Where are the Americans? I'm in Arizona. It's all Mexicans."

And she's trying to find her way, and she's already learning that ladies in this country pluck their eyebrows, my dear. And we powder our cheeks, make ourselves pale, and she's complaining, "This is terrible. What's wrong with you?" At the same time, they're trying to do this life. This other thing is pursuing them. These furies are coming after them.

And that was historically true. They came here and thought, "Okay, okay, that's over." And then, Diaz had decided he'd made an error sparing her and tried to kill her long distance and sent assassins to try to get her. So, I thought that was a really interesting, terrifying note at the beginning that as she's trying really hard to find her way into our lives in the US and maybe live happily ever after, the demons are still following and there's not going to be an escape.

So, to me, that added the friction when you realize that she's not going to get away and there's going to be this threat all the time for her probably. I think she would've liked nothing more than to have just had a happy life. And it's interesting, this second book, especially, because of the first book, I've been in touch with her great-granddaughters and Tomas' great-grandchildren and they gave me a lot of their direct family lore.

But what was interesting to me is that nobody ever spoke about her. She was like this complete secret, and they would not share with the younger generations a lot of stories. So, a lot of the grandkids and great-grandkids don't know.

Jessica Anthony:

Why do you suppose that is?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I don't know. I think it was such a tumultuous thing and such a strange thing. And like I say over and over again, being a saint is a really rotten job, brings nobody joy at all. And I think that was all really hard for them. It's nerve-wracking because you're writing your version of their mom and you don't want to offend anybody. But on the other hand, working on Teresita's section on my website and those family members we've invited to actually write their own memoir and we'll post it.

Jessica Anthony:

Oh, that's fabulous.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Yeah. Because people are starting to do MA and PhD work on my auntie. It's kind of weird. So, it'd be nice to be able to go straight to the family and get their version.

Jessica Anthony:

How do they feel about the book? Do they [inaudible 00:15:03] both of the books, I can say.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Yeah. I think so far really well. Though one of the cousins I've noticed is getting a little crabby, and he wrote to me and said, "So, my grandfather, really, the drunken idiot clown you make him out." And so, I wrote back and I said, "Well, I didn't mean to make him a drunken idiot clown." I said, "I think he's, first of all, he's probably the most popular character I've ever written. And he's pretty heroic in his own way, but he's also human and he's faced with a lot of things that drive him crazy."

So, he's comedic, but he knows he's comedic. If he were an idiot and didn't know it, that's a different thing. But he takes part in the comedy. He knows he's larger than life. And that's what's, for me, so funny about him.

Jessica Anthony:

Well, there's this extraordinary nobility to your humor. There really is. I mean, I'm a huge fan of writers of literature who employ humor to reflect a larger human experience. I think neglecting humor-

Luis Alberto Urrea:

You've got to.

Jessica Anthony:

... leaves out...

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I agree.

Jessica Anthony:

... enormous amount.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I agree. I tell my writing students, laughter is a virus that infects us with humanity. And if you laugh with someone, it's very difficult to hate them thereafter. And there's a certain kind of laughter, which I talk about in both books, which is that unfortunately, the evil laughter that you hear in atrocities, at every atrocity, if you find even at the Sand Creek massacre, even at Wounded Knee, the killers are laughing. They're having a great time.

And nowadays in the days of video, you can find any number of videos of people hurting other people or women, and the men are laughing, and it's really terrifying. That's an evil kind of laugh. I don't mean that kind of laugh. I mean, the laughter between the two of us over breakfasts or the laughter we have seeing something that makes us both happy. And I think that kind of ... Laughter is either a weapon, I think, against someone, i.e., this new idiotic assault on Ms. Fluke by Rush Limbaugh, that's not funny. And it's somebody with great power using laughter to belittle someone.

But then, there's that other one which unites us. And I've always been fascinated by that. And I think it was during Devil's Highway when I saw border patrol guys and undocumented people laughing together about something that shocked me. And I thought, "Wait, wait. They're humans together, too?" And I felt really more solid about that. I just can't help myself. I like to read books that are funny.

Jessica Anthony:

There are so many amazing lines in this book. Well, "All pleasure," Tomas says, "could and should be doubled." And his dialogue about the bees. But my all-time favorite though, the top, which I've been repeating to writers all over AWP, is, "He was the hidalgo of nothing."

But your narrative style is actually, it's really quite fascinating. I mean, I find it to be this boiling stew of humor, of glimmers of even postmodernism, of myth, of reality, all rendered in these incredibly lush and poetic tones. You seem to find color and music, even in the simplest of actions. They crunched thin cookies that blew ghosts of powdered sugar into the air as they breathed. So, I'd like to actually ask you, how does poetry inform your fiction? How does ... Yeah.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Totally, totally. My secret Japanese poets. Yeah. It's serious.

Jessica Anthony:

Japanese poets.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I tell people, here's my secret for Hummingbird's Daughter. It's about 32,000 haiku in a row. That's basically, I'm always thinking about ... I don't know, something happened to me. I come out of Tijuana, I come out of the barrio in the ghetto, and then I go to working class suburb white San Diego where all Mexicanness not only disappears, but is suddenly verboten and filthy and horrible.

And that entire life until I get to college, I didn't even know any Latinos wrote or published or anything. I mean, I knew there was mariachi music or whatever, but I didn't know there was art. How sad is that? Maybe Don Quixote somewhere off in the midst. I know there's a Don Quixote, so you think it's a donkey named Hote.

Jessica Anthony:

Don Quixote.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

There's that donkey's named Hote, kid's book probably. And then I get to college. And as soon as I go to college, people there recognize "Luis" as a Spanish name first of all. As soon as we moved to the suburbs, I was Luis. "Hey, Luis." And people would say, "I thought you was French, man." It's totally because I don't look Mexican, I guess.

But I get to Luis, and then we start reading this stuff, Neruda, Alfonsina Storni, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa. I was like, "Oh, my god." Unamuno, these books, Carlos Fuentes. And I thought, "Oh, holy cow." And then the music started coming Facundo Cabral and Juan Manuel Serrat from Spain. That was just incredible. So, in the middle of all that awakening an explosion, I take a class with a Chinese scholar, Wai-Lim Yip, Dr. Yip. And Dr. Yip starts exposing me to Chinese poets, Li Po, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Hanshan. I was like, "What? What is this?" It was the most astonishing revelation.

So, I began reading Asian poets as a habit. And the Chinese led to the Japanese, and I read Korean poets now. But in '95, in the midst of the struggles to do Hummingbird, I moved to Tucson and I was having a really hard time. My life collapsed around me and the spirits were flying, and I was trying to do this medicine work, and I could not concentrate in any way on reading.

And so, I started buying haiku books. And that was the transformation for me, when I realized that I was very serious about these haiku poets. And I started reading the books about haiku and about the elements of haiku. The Japanese and Zen concepts behind that poetry and that vision and the concepts of wabi-sabi, the kind of sorrow and compassion involved in life.

And then the realization as I was writing that Hummingbird's Daughter in some ways is an Asian story, the healing things, the stuff where she makes herself too heavy to move. That's true. It's in the record. The Cowboys, when she was a teenage girl, couldn't move her. But that's a tai chi trick. Tai chi masters do it.

And so, I started getting this sense of a universal matrix of sacredness that didn't care about churches, didn't care about politics, didn't care about skin color or language, but there's this sacredness present. Free religion, even God, if you don't want to go there, but it's here. And medicine people go there. That's what they tap into.

And when that book came out, it was picked as the all city read in San Francisco. I was doing a reading in San Francisco, and lo and behold, an old, old Chinese woman was there sitting in the front row, and she came up to me and she said, "I know what your book is about." And I said, "What's it about?" She said, "Tai chi." I know. I was like, "Hallelujah." I said, "Yes, ma'am. It is about tai chi. It's about chi." It was so cool.

And as you're writing a thing like that, and these teachers appear, medicine people, then people like yoga teachers appear, and martial artists. Every time I needed something new, a teacher would appear and you start to feel like you're being led in a way. So, that's poetry, and especially Asian poetry, and particularly I think the haiku masters are there a lot.

Jessica Anthony:

Well, tell me, we were talking briefly about Tucson.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Tucson.

Jessica Anthony:

And I got to say, this is a pretty fiery time for Arizona. Are you a banned author there now? Are you not [inaudible 00:23:35]?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I'm the king of the banned authors. Yeah. I had five books banned. I ended up being accidentally the guy with the most books banned. So, that was great for my career. Upped the sales, upped fight Facebook and Twitter fans. But yeah, it was a tragic thing because this is the tail end of some really evil-hearted soul crushing that's been going on in Arizona. Let's face it, it's anti-Mexican, anti-native sentiment. Couch it as-

Jessica Anthony:

Anti-American sentiment.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Well, ultimately, yeah. And they've played a really interesting rhetorical game. They didn't ban the books. They annihilated Mexican-American and ethnic studies. That's different, they say. They came in the classrooms and took the books away from the students and they took all Native American writers away. They took away Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ofelia Zepeda, who's MacArthur genius grant poet, Tohono O'odham, the only voice of that desert that's that beautiful. And they took it all away. And then they took away Shakespeare. They took away The Tempest because The Tempest is anti-colonial.

So, if you put that in brown hands, you know it's anti-American and then they took away Thoreau, but everybody takes away Thoreau. He's always gone. So, that was just somehow too heartbreaking and too angering. And those students have been beautiful and heroic, very well-spoken. They've tried to protest and been punished. They've done walkouts and been punished. In the Tucson School District, they have been doing their own ethnic studies on their own on weekends to read those books.

And the catch-22 is that ethnic studies was taken apart, and the books may be taught in other courses as long as they're not identified as ethnic studies. But as I understand the edict, if you do teach those books, then you could be fired. We will review whoever teaches.

So, on the one hand, it's like, "Yeah, go ahead and teach it." However, catch-22 being, it's not banned, but if you do teach it, you could be under review. So, that's a really weird scene. And for me, it's odd because Queen of America got the Southwest Books Award, it's the best book about the southwest. Then all my books were banned. And now this week coming up, I'm going to the Tucson Festival Books where I'm keynote speaker.

So, it's really weird. And the week after that, I'm joining the Librotraficante movement, the book smugglers who are smuggling the banned books in crazy guerrilla theater back into Arizona. So, that's a little too much Arizona for my taste, but staying busy.

Jessica Anthony:

Are you working on a nonfiction book about Teresa next? Is that your nexy project?

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Well, here's the thing. People have been so fascinated with the journey. And I'll probably have to be braver than I've ever been if I do write that book, because I have to fess up to stuff. People are going to say, "You are out of your mind." They're going to think this is like the travel channel ghost adventure show or something. "You did what? What happened?" But I saw stuff, and it's going to be hard to convince people, "No, I did not take peyote. This stuff happens to you when you're out there with these teachers," and you get into this really amazing world of inferences and happenstance and synchronicity.

And I always take to my heart, one of the guy who was the model for the medicine man in Hummingbird, Manuelito, when she goes to him, you see Apache medicine man in the desert, first of all, that was a real guy in history, but I was introduced to Chiricahua Apache medicine man named, Manuelito. They call him Manny.

And he said something fantastic to me because he was very sophisticated. Over and over, the medicine people would say, "This isn't magic. This is our science. This is science." One of them said, "We didn't have atom smashers. I didn't have a lab kit. I have my body, my soul, and the land. So, this is science." Really interesting. But he said to me, "It doesn't matter to me if my medicine is real or if I'm just telling you stuff to program the little computer in your brain. What's interesting to me is results." And I thought, "Wow."

So, if there's some way to write a history of that, fortunately for me, I was doing a writing experiment the whole time, which was keeping a journal of the process for a writing group I had taught, and I would send dispatches. So, there's a friend of mine in California who has, I think it's 2500-page shelf in binders of my entire experience. Stuff I don't even remember.

Jessica Anthony:

You've got to do it.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

I know I got to do it. It's just going to take some time to get up the gumption to go back there. But yeah, I will do it one day.

Jessica Anthony:

Thank you very much for speaking with us.

Luis Alberto Urrea:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

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