“I Write about People Whose Lives Are on Fire”: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros, by Emily Doyle

Interviews   Sandra Cisneros’s success as a poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist is tied to her determination to write about others with awareness and love. Her work is populated by powerful people—powerful in their pain, joy, and hunger for home. This fall, Cisneros’s poetry collection Woman Without Shame will be published in English by Knopf and in Spanish by Vintage Español. We spoke ahead of UC Riverside’s forty-fifth annual Writers Week, at which Cisneros received the Lifetime Achievement Award. As we settled into our conversation by making not-so-small talk, Cisneros commented: “We have a very profound connection with landscapes, and when we’re born into the wrong landscape, we feel it.” When I told her that’s what makes me nervous about the idea of leaving Earth for another planet, her response captured the service-minded spirit with which she’s lived and written: “Yes, absolutely. I feel like traveling south has been a return for me to an ancient DNA that wanted to come back. The people that ventured far away and couldn’t come back—I came back for them.” Cisneros’s writing offers an opportunity to return to ourselves and the places from which we came. Emily Doyle: The concept of home seems to inform much of your work. In your memoir, A House of My Own, you say you knew “little about how women writers lived” and “even less about working-class writers.” What has living like a writer meant to you, and has your... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2022-04-01 16:29:13 UTC ]
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[ BBC News | 2011-08-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2011-08-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The New York Times | 2011-07-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2011-07-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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