Q: What are your thoughts about women traveling alone?
A: I think everybody, every young person, should be given a grant to travel to a place where you don’t speak the language. We have to go outside our zones of comfort because it’s when we’re in zones of discomfort that we’re challenged to grow in our lives. It’s like four years of college rolled into a season when you travel because it teaches you to expand your mind. Like Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” So I would say it’s very important that all women travel, but we need to train them how to not take risks, not to trust people, and to never be unguarded. I think it’s important that there be seminars about training women and understanding the culture you’re going to because the culture is going to see you in a way you don’t see yourself. And I would always say travel, if you can, with a friend.
Q: Was moving to Mexico, the land of your heritage, an attempt to come full-circle?
A: I think I’m following my mother’s ancestors because my mother’s family is from the region where I live. We never knew much about them because they fled during the Mexican Revolution. And I came back a hundred years later to that region. I’m not in the same town because they were in the countryside near the airport, but I feel very much a spiritual connection with the ancestors. And I do feel, the older I get, I recognize more that connection with the spiritual world and with my own spirituality. So I think I’m being called back. I don’t know why, and I know to accept where my intuition takes me. When I was younger, I had a lot of doubts about my life. But the older you get, the more you start seeing patterns, and you realize that there’s some divine providence that’s leading you.
Q: How does place affect your writing?
A: I’m very much a product of where you put me. When I lived here in this neighborhood [the King William District], South Texas voices creeped into my writing.
Woman Hollering Creek was written in this neighborhood, and a lot of my poetry is from this neighborhood. So I’m really a product of what I hear. People’s dialogue and voices and dialects and language and slang come into my writing.
Q: How did your time as a writing fellow at the Dobie Paisano Ranch cultivate you?
A: Big time. It changed my attitude about Texas. After my first year here, I was marching away. I was in hair-on-fire mode in San Antonio—
this is the most difficult place I’ve ever lived and I’m never coming back. I was literally wrapping a flower pot in newspaper when I got the phone call. And instead of being thrilled, I remember my dismay. I thought to myself, oh no, I have to stay in Texas. It was scary. I’m from the city. And once I was out there in the country, I thought, this is like a healing sanatorium where the universe sent me. I just kind of remember sitting out there in these Adirondack chairs and looking at this huge sky and thinking, what a beautiful place. So it was very healing. It kept me in Texas. It shifted me and made me realize that Texas is not a bad place.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I got a Ford Foundation Fellowship last year. I’ve been interviewing people on the issue of the undocumented: people who are hiring the undocumented, people who are Dreamers, people who are undocumented themselves, people who work with them, people who voted for this administration, people who didn’t. So, I’ve been listening. I think it’s essential because we’re living in a time when no one listens, but everyone has an opinion. I’ve got to put them together in a script. Maybe it will become a play, maybe it will become an opera.
Q: Do you consider yourself a free spirit?
A: I think of myself as being a person who lives by her intuition, and I think of myself as a spiritual being. But other people see that as eccentric or free spirited. I think of everyone else as being sheep that don’t listen to their hearts. I’ve always been guided by my heart.