By Christine Maul Rice • ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN CHICAGO LITERARY HALL OF FAME FULLER AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT PRINTED PROGRAM
Like Chicago, Ana Castillo can’t be easily summarized or neatly categorized.
Her body of work—poetry, essays, short fiction, novels, plays, translations, visual art—is at once expansive, gritty, badass, sexy, gorgeous, disturbing, humorous, erotic, bold, dangerous, explosive, biting, lyrical. The writing never panders to the reader. It’s meant to challenge. It’s meant to look you in the eye and dare you to flinch.
None of it is written to entice the little old lady, as they say, in Iowa.
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Years ago, I boarded the Red Line at Addison on my way to a soul-crushing corporate job in the Loop. Picture a bitter Chicago winter morning, pre-dawn, platform lights flickering, the sky opalescent before sunrise. Boarding the nearly empty train at 6:30 a.m., I found a massacre of books, pages torn and scattered, covers detached. I knelt to gather the pages and mangled covers (I’m quite sure you would have done the same) and imagined what had happened. The owner, I reasoned, had been robbed then pushed to the platform. The thieves, with the backpack, boarded the car, opened the backpack and, finding only books, angrily emptied the backpack of its contents, scattered and kicked them across the grimy floor.
If you’re from Chicago, this isn’t at all surprising. What was surprising were the books I rescued. Among them were Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the love poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and a slimmer book, one not easily splayed or ripped, Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters.
Thus, my introduction to Ana Castillo.
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Fast forward to 2019 when Ana graciously offered three poems to Hypertext Review and traveled to Chicago to help us kick off our first fundraiser (the whole thing so surreal I tried not to fawn). When we met, I wasn’t sure if I should tell her how I came to know her work. What would I say? I rescued your book, someone else’s property, from the floor of a Red Line train?
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Ana attended Chicago Public Schools. As a young person, she was a voracious reader and talented visual artist (recent pen and ink drawings can be found in My Book of the Dead). Once in high school at Jones Commercial, she fell in love with literature but, not seeing herself reflected in, for example, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets, she began writing poetry and short stories, even started a newspaper.
When we met in person, I asked, “How does a girl from Jones Commercial make a life in literature?”
“I had my own inner vision,” Ana began. “It didn’t surprise me. For me to get to where I did, and doing what I did, and the time I was doing it, it was a bigger deal. Now, there are role models. Avenues. A different world. Back then, Chicanas were making our own tracks in the ground.”
In 2023, a major house will publish a new collection of Ana’s short stories and next year will mark 46 years since her first chapbook of poetry, Otro Canto, was published in 1977. Ana has published consistently, in one form or another, since then.
“The only way I can write,” Ana said, “is to give voice to that which I know, to that which is underrepresented.”
How wonderful that she forged ahead, that the writing swept her away. How fortunate for us that her singular voice on the page carved tracks for countless writers; that her mentorship, activism, and grace continue to illuminate unknowable paths for us to follow.
Over the past few months, Ana and I had a chance to catch up. The following reflects those conversations.
Can you tell me, again, that story about your mother? The one about her speaking only Spanish to you?
Although my older siblings were born in Laredo, Texas, I was born in Chicago. Because of this or something else, I’ll never know, my mother was uncompromising with me on certain things. For example, she only spoke to me in Spanish. My entire life, if I said something in English, she would make me repeat it in Spanish. Because of this, I naturally assumed that my mother didn’t understand English.
When I was around thirty, a good friend who lived in Chicago called. “Ana,” she said, “I thought your mother didn’t speak English but I saw her today registering voters—and speaking English.”
I called my mother and repeated, in English, what my friend told me. My mother hesitated for only a moment before responding, in Spanish, that she didn’t understand me. She then made me repeat the entire story in Spanish.
That story beautifully illustrates the relationship you and your mother shared and I love how you laugh when you tell it.
And, when you were 40, your mother gave you her mother’s diary, yes?
Powerful to see that. She gave it to me when I was an established writer. It answered the question: Where the heck did I get this from? My grandmother liked to read, had a very nice life. If they had not been repatriated, who knows what that side of the family would have established. You’ve got to grab onto what you can, right?
In your work, you often use dialect—certain rhythms and tones and spelling. In person, when I’ve heard you in front or a group or at readings, I don’t detect a dialect. At certain times, though, during our conversations, you’ve slipped into a Chicago dialect.
It’s taken a lot of practice for me to lose that accent. When I was teaching in California, there were two CIA agents in my department and that scared every accent out of me. It’s really hard, if speaking in public. When I’m in Mexico, I speak fluent Spanish. Obviously, I’m not from Mexico. Consequently, when I’m traveling, no one knows where I’m from.
What other Chicago-isms do you use?
My dad was born and raised in south Bridgeport and I went to the same grammar school as him. Eventually, my parents and I moved to the north side. My dad died in his mid-fifties and, remembering him, these great Chicago wisdoms come to mind, wisdoms that are so handy to live by. So simple. When people are really getting on my nerves, whether colleagues or workers on my house, I think of his advice: “Eh, forget about it. Don’t listen to those bimbos.”
Bimbo. That’s so Chicago.
You now live in New Mexico. How is the rhythm of the desert different than living in Chicago? The quality of light? Sounds?
Wow, best question. The quality of light is the biggest difference. Where I live now, the place I’d come to when I was still teaching in Chicago and then in Boston, the light is startling with no obstruction from anywhere; from sun rise to sunset there is light around me. Like the Expressionists, I’ve studied the light on certain objects, the tree outside my bedroom [in] winter, a sage bush, or the Franklin Mountain Range at different times of day.
I see almost no human, hear no mechanical sounds. I hear birds, dogs, mares…a mosquito at my ear. Complete and total silence at night, later owls, dogs or in the distance, occasionally, coyotes.
How has living in different locales influenced your writing? How has it influenced your activism?
I’m not sure what made me move around. I’ve often done so on my own and with no job prospects waiting. I’ve bought properties that way. The price I’ve paid for taking these risks is loneliness and the constant worry about how to pay my bills. But I don’t regret any of it. It brought much to my writing and to my personal growth.
Knowing the varying cultures in the United States and places I’ve stayed for periods of time and visited, I learned firsthand to appreciate this world and planet. However, where I call home has now been my home for twenty years. I’m New Mexican by choice, Chicagoan by birth, and Midwestern by upbringing. In my heart, I am a Mexican woman. Ethnically, at face value, whereever I go— from growing up in Chicago or as a young writer walking about in Paris—dominant society perceives me as mostly indigenous, foreign, Other. I embrace all of it. I write from that privileged perspective to respond. I’m also viewed a feminine, a woman, this is important. And yes, in the eyes of many, ‘Other’ a brown woman without much by way of social status. As Whitman wrote so beautifully, “I contain multitudes.” There are no contradictions there
You mentioned loneliness and it made me think of this quote by Maya Angelou:
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
You weave various musical artists into your writing. One artist, for example, is the fabulous Celia Cruz. Does music bring you solace? Inspiration? Both?
Yes, indeed. Both my parents loved music, popular music. My father played percussion. His favorite music was jazz, all Latin music and mambo. My mother enjoyed that, too but also favored all kinds of popular Latin and Mexican music. I grew up hearing Stan Getz at home and Javier Solís. Music accompanied me through my novels. You see my nod to some in the pages. I tried learning piano but wasn’t disciplined enough, I suppose.
Do you miss Chicago?
I’ve not stayed away long. I accepted an endowed chair in 2014 at Dominican University so as to spend extended time there. I frequently visit. I consider it my hometown and am very proud of the City of Big Shoulders. My parents worked in factories there. My son and grandchild make their home there. It’s home. Obviously I don’t miss the freezing weather but as for the rest, I value it, the variety of people, cultures, creativity, energy. It’s just the right pace for me. My father was such a Southside Chicagoan—my speech still reflects the influence. My mother and her sister, who also made her life there, were very proud of the City. Once, my tía Flora, who was born in Mexico City, told me, she found her Paris in Chicago.
That’s beautiful. Chicago really shows off in spring. It’s my favorite season.
You are an activist. In your poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, you bear witness to influential events of the later part of this century including but not limited to environmental terrorism, climate change, the criminal mistreatment of immigrants, policing, incarceration, mass shootings, vigilantism, civil rights, death by firearms, among many other issues.
You also write about wholly personal issues including love, sex, joy, and devastating loss.
You are masterful at weaving these issues into relatable, human narratives. For example, in the poem “Detention” (My Book of the Dead, University of New Mexico Press, 2021) you give voice to a young person crossing the border, the horrors of being caught, detained, and eventually adopted by a white family. This piece is heartbreaking. It also exposes the reader to the narrator’s humanity in the face of brutal reality.
How has the way you process the world—and its inequities—changed over the years?
Thank you for your comments. My first response has to do with initially choosing poetry to use for political actions. A very early poem, Napa, California. (OTRO CANTO, 1977) might be seen as a precursor of the recent poem you refer to, Detention. Both poems address the migrant’s inability to escape their circumstances. As you may know, I’m a self-taught writer and have developed my craft through practice. However, I don’t see in either poem a great change in perspective.
I do fervently live and believe in social justice, equity for all, especially the poor and working class, women, etc. I share the concern for our planet with activists regarding the environmental justice movement.
From a very early age I became interested in the world outside our flat on the Near West Side of Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times was delivered and we read it every day. My father read it from front page to back. He’d often remark on stories that caught his eye. One day he said to me, “They’re burning down the Amazon.” I might have been twelve or thirteen years old.
By the time I was 24, I had learned Portuguese at the University of Chicago and traveled to Brazil on my own. That was in 1979-80, when that country was under a military dictatorship.
As an adult, my curiosity about the world, planet, and its inhabitants hasn’t waned and my travels have taken me to places my father could only read about in the Chicago Sun-Times—whether it was the pyramids in Mexico or Egypt, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Louvre, encouraging budding feminists in Kazakhstan or Peru, working with academics in Germany and Paris, promoting NGOs in Jordan or Ecuador.
I process the world as an adult mostly from first-hand experience. I once gave a reading—not that long ago—in a small, agricultural town in the Southwest. The first question (from a young man) I received was, “How can you relate to the women here?” I explained my humble roots and family background. I also explained how my older siblings, as children, worked summers picking tomatoes in Indiana. My parents worked in factories in Chicago until manufacturing moved to Southeast Asia where they could pay workers substantially less, no unions, no safety regulations, etc. I also told him that my father, who was an unskilled laborer, died unemployed in his mid-fifties.
What activists or movements influenced you? And in what ways?
In high school, it was local politics, the Civil Rights Movement, and the growing Latino and Chicano Movements. As a college student it was all the youth movements of the era including anti-war (Viet Nam), student movements, women’s movement, UFW, movements for justice in Latin America, you name it. As soon as I finished with my bachelor’s degree I headed for California–considered headquarters for the Chicano Movement and UFW. A few years later, back in Chicago, disillusioned by the male dominance and treatment of women by men in socialist movements, I turned my attention to feminism. I didn’t stop my belief in social justice, I began to focus on seeing it from women’s perspectives. There may be much more that I could see about the long journey of developing one’s consciousness.
Like many of my generation, I looked up to so many individuals, activists in the field, intellectuals, César Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, mind you, these were all strong and thriving individuals when I was coming up. I learned a lot from writers and those who preceded me. Their books were my teachers. In 1977 or 78, I gave a sociology class at a community college in Chicago and used Paulo Freire’s essential book. My friends in Chicago, California, and New York (where I also started traveling to, on my own, to seek out connections with Latino poets) were all my teachers, loves, mentees, and sometimes rivals.
It’s impossible to qualify all their influences.
There are a number of elegies My Book of the Dead. One is based on the life of H.G. Carillo and other is based on your relationship with Francisco X. Alarcón. Did the writing of these, in any way, help you deal with the unimaginable death and sadness wrought by Covid?
We’re still living through these times. A week doesn’t go by without hearing of a death. The book was in when Sister Dianna Ortiz, whom I also wrote about, passed from cancer. And there are many others. I am of a generation that is experiencing death of my mentors, peers and those from Covid. My hope and intention is not to become numb by the frequency of death.
Carrillo and Alarcón had, at certain points in my life, been personal friends. Their deaths touched me personally and led to the poems. Although, Carrillo died as a result of Covid. The pandemic and contracting the virus remains a lived and survivors’ experience.
Not finding yourself represented by middle- to upper-class feminists, you coined the term Xicanisma. Did this naming, this ownership, impact the way you approached the belief in social, economic, and political equality for women?
Xicanisma. The distinction between using the Ch of the Chicano Movement and an X was, I think, significant. The X signifies the indigenous connection, although I know the Chicano Movement was very connected to and loyal to our indigenous history. Certainly, as a Chicana I wasn’t the first feminist to note the difference between poor and working-class women and the feminists who came out of certain class privilege, usually white. I will add this was true in Mexico and elsewhere.
Labels are often signifiers. It’s important to know how you’re being labeled but the most important is the one you give yourself.
In my collection of essays, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, I attempted to describe, address, give depth and acknowledgement to women who, for so long, were marginalized. The collection was written long before the internet and Google. On my own, I searched libraries and bookstores throughout the country and around the world to find connections. I wrote the essay collection without funds and with little support, just my own drive. How do you prove what you’ve always known, experienced, felt in your gut? With scant historical documentation, I had no road map. At the time I wrote Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, it was an ambitious project and a sincere attempt to include the Chicana experience in the mostly white-focused feminist ideology. It was especially difficult because I was looking at large groups of people over long periods of time, in two nations and beyond and, most significantly, much of the history I wrote about was in the process of being erased or distorted.
I was invited to submit my manuscript as a formal dissertation to the University of Bremen in Germany. There were no mentors there, no residency, not so much as a plane ticket to go defend it. However, defend it I did and was conferred the doctorate in American Studies.
You written that, as a child, you often felt isolated. Your parents, who worked two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet, often didn’t have energy to indulge or even talk to you. Once you began to read, however, your world transformed. You devoured books. One day, your father brought home a Bible from the bindery where he worked and you were wholly taken by the spectacles of war, displacement, death, and destruction.
Yes, I was fascinated by that wonderful Bible by father brought home. It was the St. James version (we were Catholic). It taught me a great deal about patriarchy and fiction (fast forward, my novel, So Far From God.) But even in the Bible, where were the Mexicans? (Mixture of indigenous and Spanish-Catholic? The ‘New World’?)
You didn’t see yourself—a young Chicana—represented in the books you read.
When you started attending Jones Commercial in Chicago, an all-girls secretarial school, you started a radical newspaper. How did this newspaper come to be and what issues did you write about and publish? As a young woman hell-bent on changing the world, how did it feel to have that power—to create something people would read?
In terms of early ‘technology’ the Xerox machine was it in my youth. Going from the mimeograph machine to pressing a button…. At Jones we were required to work half time at an office job. As a nobody, part-time girl clerk, I had access to the Xerox. I am indebted to that Xerox for being able to get my work out even years later. My primary creative interest was not journalism but art. So, I was the illustrator of my underground paper too. It was distributed by me at my school but who knows if I gave it to any friends outside the school.
I didn’t exactly shake things up around me with my stapled Xeroxed publication. I was given the title ‘inteligente,’ by the Spanish Club (all Mexican girls.) Mostly, it showed my early ambitions to communicate what I was learning and fervently believing about the world. It was an activity inherent in my personality and character which led me to live the life I’ve had.
Today, on social media we see a lot about women’s ways to self-empower, to remind ourselves of ‘que chingonas’ we are, to give ourselves ‘permission’ to heal or what’s ‘ok’ to feel or do what we must do. Nearly a half century ago, I heard distant calls: the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, Chicano Movement. In my world as a teenager studying basic classes and working an office job as the lowest on the totem pole (the role pre-assigned to me as a Mexican American woman) it made sense to me to strive to break the horrific, unjust mold about my being.
How could I be so curious about the world, want to experience so much, learn languages, love art I’d not yet seen, music I’d not yet heard, and be told my life was to take a menial job, marry, bear children, be a good, obedient daughter, wife and mother, and die? (Simone de Beauvoir)?
It may be a matter of language. Along the road, I didn’t see it as ‘empowering’ myself, or giving myself ‘permission.’ My word would have been conviction. Latinas, like African Americans had by the time I was coming up, needed women to speak up and speak out, too. There was no guarantee or even indication that I would be that woman or one among them. I only knew that it had to be and I was going to give it my all. Conviction regarding social justice led me there.
You founded the zine La Tolteca. How has working with other writers influenced your own work?
I have two careers, professionally speaking. One has been, blessedly, as a writer and the other as a professor. In both cases, I’ve always worked with other writers. My zine was an outcome of the public writing workshops I gave from 2009 to 2019. I felt privileged and happy to encourage aspiring writers and lucky to have the contributions of many established writers.
During those years, I went through personal crises which affected my own productivity and pursuing publications. I was always happy for the writers pursuing their projects and encouraged them in any way possible. I did write and publish during those years. Throughout my life, I’ve mostly kept my writing to myself. If a book was on contract with the publisher, my editor there might be the first to see it. Many times, I had work that only I’ve seen. Case in point, my most recent collection of poems, My Book of the Dead.
Your grandmother was a curandera (and you have some gifts too, yes?). You’ve written a number of essays about your grandmother and other healers, of mothers of all stripes and abilities, and explain the significance of the mother of all mothers, the Virgin of Guadalupe, to Chicanas, Mexican women and, especially, to the curandera.
You edited the essay collection, Goddess of America. In your essay in that collection, Extraordinarily Woman, you wrote:
But she was a curandera—loosely translated, a medicine woman—and proceeded to negotiate with Maria Guadalupe with whom, I seem to recall, she was on a first-name basis. I was the youngest of all her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren and, as she also told me later, when I recovered, I was the very nectar of sugar cane in her heart, her consentida, and she was not about to let me go.
Later, in that same essay, you write:
God the Father was absent, though like the men in my family, who were often shadowy and silent, He nevertheless was the ultimate authority. He watched us with a close and critical omnipotent eye and mostly wielded His power by instilling fear. Our Mother, on the other hand, watched over her children without condemning our acts. Our mother simply loved us.
You also write exquisitely about your joy and challenges as the single mother of an only child.
This focus, on the mother as healer, as one who provides unconditional love, has seen you through the mystifying incarceration of your son. How has your background and experience with the all-knowing and suffering mother/caretaker/healer guided through your own hardships as a caretaker and mother?
With the exception of one spectacular and near-tragic moment, my only child, an adult man now, did end up imprisoned for two years. They were a long two years for me as a mother, mostly because of the mystification of the facts. With the exception of being picked up by police for doing graffiti as a teen he’d never been in trouble with the law before and hasn’t been since.
The last figure I’d have wanted to portray was the all-suffering mother. But suffer, I did. Living in the world that continues to designate archetype roles to women, I did. You don’t have to be a mother, wife to a man, obedient daughter, devout religiosa, sex worker, or mistress (side chick) to exemplify these roles. They show up within the confines of patriarchal designations for the feminine figure. You think you are defying these “signs,” but the terms remain. You’re an independent woman, living on your own terms, but much of your self-worth is dependent on your looks. Men gain cache with age. This hasn’t been the case with women, regardless of our accomplishments. I do feel this is all somewhat changing for various reasons now.
Like many women raised in (although later conflicted by the religion), I kept a rosary nearby during my son’s ordeal. I participated in the Way of the Cross Procession in Northern New Mexico and attended several indigenous ceremonies in the Pueblo reservations in NM. I let myself weep. I sat alone once in a Catholic Church in an indigenous reservation, after attending an all-male Native ceremony and appealed to all who have gone through the pain and agony of oppression, genocide, and mass devastation for strength.
But I am also the woman who reads and writes and connects with the world using other methods. I sent books to my son, we read, and talked about them. We emailed each other. A bit of our correspondence appears in the memoir essay collection Black Dove. He has an essay in the book too, as evidence of how as a writer and professor, I used those tools to bring him back to society.
I worked on La Tolteca Zine and gave public writing workshops and spoke about Chicano/Chicana writing to mostly Chicano/Chicana audiences that know of whence I speak and affirmed their experiences and perceptions as they did mine.
I lit candles and burned incense at home and at churches and temples everywhere I traveled.
During that time, I was single and without immediate family support and greatly appreciated whatever friend or friends stepped up. These are times when you must know yourself and rely on your convictions. I’ve always been grateful to anyone who has shown compassion at any juncture in my life and I’m deeply grateful to the few who showed themselves in how and as much as they could. A healer must know how to heal herself first and be a sound person if she is to lend herself to the pain and illness of others. My aim throughout the ordeal was to stay firm, acknowledge my pain and move through it.
It was particularly difficult because of the patriarchal emphasis on blaming ‘mother’ for offspring’s failings, to not blame myself, too. It was a concerted, conscious process but I moved through it, too. This readiness to blame Mother didn’t come at me in the abstract but from actual people in our lives.
In the early 1990s, when Sapogonia was published, you were dubbed one of “America’s leading Chicana writers.” How has the publishing industry changed (or not) over the years?
The qualification continues. It’s a notable distinction, therefore, from more than a century ago when the discussion was ‘woman writer’ versus ‘writer.’
Because Chicanas proved ourselves not just also to be readers, but to have the numbers in terms of consumers of books, was a game changer in the 1980s.
Chicanas are not the only exotic flavor but, more and more, the publishing industry is opening to all kinds of perspectives from marginalized sectors. With regards to how the publishing industry has changed, “ghost writing” in my view, has gone to top of the list, as far as publishing being a financially successful endeavor. Among NYT’s best sellers in recent years, we have a bombardment of non-fiction, biographical works from the likes of Trump to TV reality stars. Like the culinary arts, fashion and modeling, writing as a profession has proliferated in recent decades. You get a degree or certificate or don’t and just jump in there on Instagram or TV and there you are, swimming upstream.
At the end of the day publishing is an industry and ruled by what sells.
In your novel, Sapogonia, as well as in a number of essays in Black Dove and other writing, you take on the issue of mixed blood—of not being one or the other, not Mexican enough and not American enough. Can you talk about that tension—of not belonging—and why the exploration of it fuels your work?
At a result of European invasion, indigenous people experienced near genocide, slavery, servitude and to this day, second class citizenship. The importation of slaves from Africa is an added legacy to all of the Americas and the Caribbean that is fraught with continued pain. This all fuels my work because a day of my life hasn’t existed where I don’t experience the tension between the dominant society I live in and the blood I inherited.
There might have been a deviating factor. We return to class and status. All things ethnic being equal, had I been born to a middle, upper class or elite family, had I also been born in Mexico where my surname, mother’s language, my color and ethnicity were accepted, it would have made a difference. I’d have felt and been less marginalized than in the U.S.
By the time my parents began to imagine a middle-class life for themselves (in Chicago) I was a young adult on my own. The mold had been formed. The men I married all came from working class families. My priorities, heart, efforts were always directed to addressing ‘the masses.’
These are factors that have influenced my work. My project has been to make beings like myself less invisible, validated, represented on all levels and empowered.
I’m always fascinated by how a writer orders a book of poems (or short stories). You began writing My Book of the Dead in 2012, is that right? How did these poems come to you? In order? Or did you rearrange them before publication? And, if you rearranged them, did that cause you to edit any of the poems to fit the overall collection?
Yes, I decided to start a poetry collection in 2012. The poems came to me over time and experience in those years, whether through reading or lived experience or both. No, they’re not in ‘order’ but do cover the period of time: 2012-2020.
In terms of ordering it has always been organic and ever-changing. Some poems ultimately don’t make the final cut. (Craft-wise, the piece isn’t working.) I arranged all the poems before submission.
One day, while staying in my small apartment in New York, I laid out the hard copies on the bed and dresser. (Old school, how I’ve always organized my poems but usually on the floor. In NYC, there was little floor-space.) I decided to organize them into three parts—where thematically they might make sense, a loose beginning, middle and end, if you will. This is around 2019. In 2020, I returned to New Mexico and what is submitted is pretty much what you see in the book. In the final cut, I chose to eliminate one piece, again, because I wasn’t sure of its success. It wasn’t a poem in any sense but more of a diagram addressing migration.
While you take on profoundly serious subjects, your writing is often humorous. In “Two Men and Me,” bad boys Charles Bukowski and Jose Bolanõ join you at a café.
Years ago, I was sitting in the front row somewhere about to give a reading from my novel So Far From God. Someone behind me was laughing out loud. I turned around, it was a white woman reading So Far From God. “It’s very funny,” she said. “Did you know it was funny?”
“I hoped so,” I said.
Aside from limerick or rhyming verses it’s not easy to be funny in poetry. Anyone who knows me for ten minutes, however, knows, I appreciate humor. Wit is a cup of liquid gold in any sitting. But when you are a writer who takes on grave, currently relevant subjects, a poet who feels social crises or the urgency to address environmental issues, we understand the need for a moment of levity. I imagine, men like Bukowski, Bolaño, Neruda, Nicanor Parra and his anti-poemas would have been a blast to go out carousing with on a given night. If I didn’t embrace many woman poets in my young adult years it was because their books didn’t reach us in the U.S. that often.
Nevertheless, whether conscious-driven performers like Violetta Parra or Mercedes Sosa were passionate lovers, mothers, gave everything of themselves for their people and for their art. These, like Bolaño and Bukowski, I never met but I know they had to have had joie de vivre. They danced with abandon, drank, and sang aloud. You have to let go now and then or you die of sadness and one of those two women, finally did take her own life.
You’re embracing silver hair. Tell me about this journey.
Again, the question of the weight on women’s attractiveness, appeal to the public in reference to her worth and relevance. For many years now, women, regardless of ethnicity but women whose natural hair color was dark, have been encouraged by society to lighten their hair as they grow older (The assumption is it’ll take away from their visibly aging faces.) Suddenly you are seeing everywhere, women who were never auburn haired or blond, now using that color in middle age. I took another path, I colored my hair dark brown—my original color but kept the roots white.
During the pandemic many women, middle aged and older, couldn’t get to the salons. It’s a whole beauty movement now, “grondré,” hair that is two shades, the grey or silver growing out and the lower half, dark. I didn’t ‘join’ the movement, per se but had made the decision not to color it anymore on my own, as I was also letting my hair grown long again. There’s much more pressure on women than on men on denying our aging.
Greying hair, weight, crow’s feet, rooster neck, the multi-billion-dollar beauty industry is such because of our fear of aging and subsequent self-loathing, as with being dark-skinned (how many dark-skinned readers will hate me for saying this? I’m not self-loathing either but I question ‘blond hair’. There’s a movement to break out of all this, plus-size models addressing the increased size of the average woman in the U.S. It’s a process but Capitalism, Imperialist-Corporatism always adjust and accommodate trends.
We may start not dying our hair—not going to salons or buying products to do it at home—but rest assured, the hair industry is paying attention and is already profiting from this new fashion trend in new ways.
Is it true that, in the desert, you own horses?
I have mares. Once I was living on the homestead I’ve had now for twenty years, I thought it made sense. Decades ago now, I learned to ride in the desert here.
A number of poems in My Book of the Dead deal with earth’s destruction. One of my favorite poems in the collection is “By the End of the Twenty-First Century When.” This poem is playful in a super terrifying way. You face the senseless destruction of our home head on but it’s also playful. How did this poem evolve?
Thank you, Chris.
The poem in reference didn’t have a long evolution. The planet was enduring the Trump era. Buddhists remind us that we begin dying at birth. Dystopian governments aside, we are dying every day. One method as a writer to deal with a hard subject is to bring some levity and inject humor, irony, or fantasy. I think this poem has some of all of that.
As to its evolution, I know some people sometimes don’t like to hear how something just flows stream of consciousness or comes from an actual dream. This poem reminds me of some of my pen drawings. Drawing consumed me during part of the Trump administration. I did them without preliminary planning. I’ve drawn hybrid animals, whimsical scenes, from mermaids to buffalo, goddesses to spiders. My subconscious reveals what’s on my mind, my fears, longings, grief and desires. It must be from the same place where such a poem comes.
Ana Castillo is a celebrated author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Among her award winning books are So Far from God: A Novel; The Mixquiahuala Letters; Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me; The Guardians: A Novel; Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel; Sapogonia; and Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo resides in southern New Mexico.
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.