Women Authors From The United States

"…I also think I was wrestling with the issue of God in a very large, philosophical sort of way. I think if you’re a believer there’s a certain comfort in that. I’m trying to figure out if I’m a believer at this point; I’m not even sure. And so you’re just trying to wrestle with it, to pin it down for yourself. That just comes through somehow in the characters. The further I get into my career, the less autobiographical the stories are getting, though in a way they are more so. All of a sudden my preoccupations go into my work in a more forceful way, even though the characters, and the circumstances they find themselves in, are less like me."

"In speaking from that personal place, and in considering the political questions regarding state-sanctioned death and its dealers-urban poverty and its consequent child abuse; the prison of drugs and apartheid-style education; illegal land occupation and war for profit-I am most concerned about my own inability to control the warring inside me. My beloved and I speak almost daily about the cost of internal occupation. We witness it from the most mundane to the grandest displays of what the poet Lorna Dee Cervantes calls "that nagging preoccupation of not being good enough." As Chicanos, I see it in the often timidez and assimilationist politeness of our writings."

"Two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other, arcing their bodies in grim determination to find what is good, what is given them to find. These are warriors distancing themselves from history. They find peace in the way they contain the wind and are gone."

"I started writing for the same reason I breathe-because I had to."

"I am driven from this world, alive. I come to this world, in dreams."

"I was a street kid by day and by night I was a library kid. At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."

"There's sky and death shimmering the waves."

"Our dreams wafted over the sullen skyline like crazy meteors of flying embers: a glow in the heart all night."

"For me, poetry has been an exercise in freedom. Freedom is like a muscle-the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Poetry can give you a sense of choice. It's free on every level. Language and memory have no price tags on them. You have limitless choices-in form, language, subject matter-that spill over into life."

"I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates whose history reveals what words don't say. Our anger is our way of speaking, the gesture is an utterance more pure than word."

"In the years that separate, in the tongues that divide and conquer, in the love that was a language in itself, you never spoke, never regret. Even that last morning I saw you with blood in your eyes, blood on your mouth, the blood pushing out of you in purple blossoms."

"I ran flushed and shadowed by no one alone I settled stiff in mouth with the words women gave me."

"We knew, love, and that was all we were ever offered."

"And finally, it is me only guessing at what secrets or hatreds they share."

"She would not be silent and still. She would live, arrogantly, having wrestled her death and won."

"I have learned the serenity of a mockingbird, the justice of a crow, blue jay's strength; I've dipped their feathers in blood to seal the pact—my path."

"Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it."

"And late that night I tasted the last of the sweet fruit, sucked the rich pit and thought nothing of death."

"I intended all of that. And this is what I like about this, and drawings like draw, like the gunman. I call this the shoot out, the high noon draw. That was also my intent as well as drawings; draw a bucket back to the cables and the whole idea about drawings…"

"This is the conscience of trauma. This is a grief book. That's how I refer to it, privately. It's my grief book because my mother was murdered, and raped, and battered. Then they burned the house down. I was dealing with that and with my divorce, and all of that stuff When people ask me, do you believe that everybody can write poetry, in a certain sense, yes, in a certain sense, no. Not everybody can write poetry…"

"Reading African American women poets politicized me. And it was the fact that poetry politicized me that had to do with then saving my life. Then all of the sudden, I started questioning; that's the dynamic of oppression, and especially as a child and as a woman, a girl coming into it. You look around, and you don't see anybody like you in positions of power, and you don't even question it. You just assume that you are not going to achieve anything and [that] no one expects anything from you. And so when I started reading this poetry, then I started questioning and questioning real hard. And I got angry."

"When I first went to Mexico in 1974 and was involved in Chicano teatro—Mexican American guerilla theater—I realized that my politics and my poetry could merge; suddenly it wasn’t just for me. Before then, I didn’t share this poetry; I kept it in notebooks…"

"Something I think you’re very conscious of growing up in the South is people who speak correctly and people who don’t…George Orwell said, ‘Englishmen are all branded on the tongue.’ It’s the same for southerners. I grew up around people who had wonderful, mellifluous voices; there’s also that twangy cracker accent. And then you were also aware of black English…"

"[Asked if she has any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors to recommend) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

"They spotlight those who walk like a dream, with no one waiting in the shadows to palm them back to living."

"I am not driven, so much, by intentions, as I am stunned into being by intent."

"I’m a bit of a lone wolf…I don’t give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out—too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens."

"I don’t think it’s a good idea for a writer to psychoanalyze herself or try to explain why she writes what she writes—it’s a reductive way of looking at oneself and one’s work. Readers really participate in the writing of a book. As a writer I’m giving the reader signs to help create the story with me. The reader is bringing his or her own memories, intelligence, preconceptions, prejudices, likes, dislikes. So the characters in your copy of the book are going to look and sound different than in mine. I have my own ideas, but once the book is out there it’s not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn’t any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging."

"This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best."

"As a writer, I think I’m more an eye than an ear — the world comes mainly in for me at the eye. So I’m glad the visuals came through for you. As I’m writing my books, I really do see them almost literally — I experience scenes almost as an onlooker, watching from the outside."

"My palm cupped her mouth As I kissed her, the flesh Of my hand between us."

"The (Chicano) movement to me is now like a mosaic with all these little pieces. The little pieces are the ones that are now being activated so that a poet like Lorna Dee Cervantes is her own little miniature movement. Francisco Alarcón, Norma Alarcón, José Limón, all the people who are writing are carrying out the struggle against domination and subordination in the kinds of things they focus on-language, folklore, just anything."

"“I didn’t leave Puerto Rico. A mí me sacaron,” she tells me, referring to her exodus from Puerto Rico as a girl from San Juan. “I think nobody would prefer to leave that way.”"

"Edmaris Carazo, who the author says is one of her favorite talents from Puerto Rico at the moment...For Santiago, the impetus to develop a new tradition of Puerto Rican authors comes from her beginnings in literature, back in her childhood when she spent time in the backyard of a family member’s house in el campo. There, she listened to relatives tell trovas – oral tradition in rhyme. She also credits her dad’s love for poetry and Puerto Rican authors Julia de Burgos, Manuel Alonso, and Luis Palés Matos with sparking her interest."

"“I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.”"

"Through her work, she has shown a remarkable commitment to maintaining the stories of Puerto Rico in boricua hands. “If we preserve our stories, then they belong to us,” she says."

"At a certain point, I gave up on the idea that I’m not enough for other people…You are enough for you if you believe that you are enough for you. Whatever they say — you’re not Latina enough, or feminine enough or smart enough, you know ... just say ‘fuck you.’ That’s their problem."

"I thought, 'I have been through this process before’…When I was 13 years old I came from Puerto Rico to the United States not knowing any English. What I did at that time was I went to the public library, and I would go to the children’s book section where there would be alphabet books and everything would be illustrated. So it was very easy to connect the words to the images. I said, ‘I’m just going to do the same thing. If I did it once before, I can do it again.’"

"For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created."

"How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unknown?"

"My own ancestors. I come from poor, landless peasants who left no records. And so I began to read the story of Puerto Rico, and the more I read the story the more I realized I would never find my own ancestors, but I could make my imaginary ancestors. And so the book emerges as a result of my trying to create them, to create the people that might have been."

"I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."

"What doesn't kill you, makes you fat."

"(What books or authors have most inspired you? What books did you read while working on Ordinary Girls?) JD: Definitely Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. It was one of the very first times I saw myself in a book written in English. Before then, to me, it seemed like Puerto Ricans didn’t even exist in American publishing. As a kid, I went to the library and everything the librarian handed me were books written by white people about white people — mostly by white men. When I Was Puerto Rican still feels relevant and iconic for me."

"Esmeralda Santiago has defined the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora."

"words...carry these layers of stories with them, inside them, and...they're always changing. (2022)"

"I don't know that art by itself is enough to sort of magically change people's minds, but what I hope is that if it can get people questioning and thinking and connecting with other people, that might be something that will get them to take action. I think art can touch us emotionally sometimes. It kind of blindsides us, but in a good way. And when you sit with those feelings, that might be one of the things that pushes you in the right direction. (2022)"

"When a book is explicitly about how marginalized culture and dominant culture interact, it’s much harder to stay detached and voyeuristic. If you’re white, for instance, you may end up asking yourself hard questions: “What do I think about how these white characters—who resemble me—behave? Do I act this way? What’s my place in the system?” You’re asked to think in terms of the larger picture, and you can’t pretend that a marginalized group’s experience is totally separate and other from yours—because, in fact, it isn’t."

"(should be on every college syllabus:) Something by a non-white writer, something by a queer writer, and something by a non-American writer. For starters. (2022)"

"I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t think there’s a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I’ve written, that didn’t have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can’t write about someone else’s voice. You can only write in your own."