My favorite post to date

The odds of me ever catching up with someone from my high school have been slim to nil since graduation. Physical distance and a messy divorce to my first husband made it hard. But there was also the fact that I was never the social butterfly that my friends were. I wasn't even a moth, if the truth be told. On top of everything, I always felt this canyon of dissimilarity that grew larger by the decade in regard to... everything... religion, politics, music, hairstyles and the oh-so-important RECYCLING issue.

So I was shocked when I rediscovered someone whom I used to (and, WOW, still do!) have so much in common with. I'm in natural resources. She's working with the wilderness. I'm trying to be a writer. She's an actual writer...

Her name is Michelle Otero and she wrote an important book about surviving sexual violence. Because I'm someone who knew her in the third grade, and maybe because we both have endearing memories of Ms. Arnold's SQUIGGLES, I was lucky enough to have snagged an interview with her. You can find the beginning of my interview with Michelle at Mile High Mamas. If you are so inclined, please read that first half and then immediately come back here to get the rest of the story.

Thank you in advance!!



Q: You were the girl that could do anything. And DID, now that I think of it. So what was it that drew you toward writing as opposed to, say, conducting The Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra?

A: Growing up in a working class family on the U.S.-Mexico border, I was surrounded by people who worked because they had to and did what they loved on the side. The writers and artists I knew were people like my dad who always had the kind of job that required him to wear a company shirt with his name stitched over the breast pocket. He always carried a pen and could recreate any image from the Sunday comics on paper napkins or the pages of my spiral notebooks. For bedtime stories, he would take storylines and characters from classic fairy tales and develop new plot lines.

I often wonder how life might have been if somebody had handed me a copy of Bless Me, Ultima, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or Always Running (the first books I ever read by people of color--in college), or if someone had told me about Denise Chavez or Benjamin Alire Saenz who were living and writing just east of us in Las Cruces and El Paso, when I was in high school. It never occurred to me that anyone other than the dead white guys we were reading in English class wrote books, much less that someone like me could do it too.

In high school I was rewarded for writing long, flowery sentences jam-packed with adjectives and short on image or meaning. And then I went to Harvard where any notion that I had an ounce of writing ability was savagely beaten out of me (okay, perhaps I exaggerate). I started writing again during the two year period after college. I was living and working in Belize as a Jesuit Volunteer. A need for quiet reflection woke me nearly every morning at 5:30, the coolest part of the day, when the other volunteers were sleeping. There were no distractions in our home--no internet, no television, no magazine subscriptions. There were books. There was paper. I started keeping a journal. I wrote long letters to friends and family. I wrote at least thirty minutes a day for two years. Writing became a form of meditation for me, a way to make sense of my reality--22 years old, Chicana with a Harvard degree, pastoral assistant at a Catholic church in the Caribbean. I had to write.

I returned to New Mexico when I was 24 and fell into consulting work for non-profits and government agencies. I kept writing. It was the only thing I did every day without complaining, the one thing I did that made me feel like me. There were other twists and turns--a car accident, a breakup, a move to El Paso, turning 30, attending a community writing workshop, reading my work out loud for the first time. It all added up to the realization that, yes, I am a writer. I have something to say. This is why I am here.



Q: I write in an effort to understand how I FEEL about something. And, while I enjoy it immensely, it's a lot like swimming or sudoku or acting sexy... I REALLY have to work at it and often fail. Does your lyrical writing voice come to you pretty naturally?

A: Lyrical writing comes to me more naturally than, say, aggressive or plot-driven writing. And still, even this often feels like work. In early drafts I rely on lyricism to help me get the story on the page, especially if I am writing about something difficult or painful. I almost need the language in order to distance myself from the intense emotion or the fear that can come up and paralyze me. The hard work comes in giving the story what it needs rather than playing to my strengths. Writing is hardest for me when I feel I am trying too hard--like trying to act sexy or getting enough oxygen when I am swimming. Sometimes I come to my writing feeling like an estranged lover--distant and awkward and longing to find my way back into that little nook where I fit perfectly inside its chest and could lie there for hours. That's why it's important for me to do a little bit each day, even if it's only 500 words.



Q: You are currently working on a writing project that takes us back to the border where you and I grew up. Does it help you to physically revisit the places of our past? Or do you prefer writing as you remember it in your mind?

A: The easy answer is both. The interplay between memory and reality becomes part of the story, and it can be just as important as the story itself.
My own memory--a truth that lives in me and is based very little on the actual physical makeup of a place--is the foundation for most of what I write. I like working with emotional, corporal, and spiritual memory, with all its holes and silences, and I often use those silences to give my writing a depth and texture that it might not have if my memory were the kind that could hold up in a court of law. Distance is helpful, in fact, necessary for me when working with this type of memory because it is often painful to revisit these moments, and being physically in the place where the events occurred can trigger the same fears that kept me silent in the first place.
Physically revisiting a place is helpful when I am filling out a piece, when the emotional memory needs grounding in physical details like the color of the carpet or the way light moved through a particular room.

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