![]() ![]() When they look at reality, they see it really, really skewered to their sensibility that was shaped by what? By mom, by the environment, by trauma, by sorrow, by whatever, I don’t know, but their sensibility was formed by something and they use that sensibility as a sort of fulcrum or epicenter where they can look at reality and it’s already prefigured itself according to the style that they’re going to write in. Faulkner, I could go on and on, Arundhati Roy, on and on. ![]() I don’t know what Great Creator gave them the gift that they have. Anyway, he did it, but he did it with the squad, and he made it really funny.Ĭormac McCarthy’s style, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, everybody has this unique, unique voice and it has to do with their unique way of looking at reality. I read something similar in a novel just recently about the Vietnamese living in Vietnam, what’s it called? He was a spy, what was it called? It won the Pulitzer Prize. ![]() If you’re without your wife for 10 days and you’re in bed, get the watermelon, put a little hole in it and go to it, go to business. If it’s really hot and you’re out on the field working, put a straw in the watermelon and drink the juice. We can stick it on our head, we can put our penis in it, we can put a straw in it and make it a juice bar or something, but the actual watermelon itself is style and what we do with it depends on the work that we’re doing. J.S.B.: If style is a watermelon, consider all the things we could do with a watermelon. L.O.T.: How did you find your style of writing? No, they’re beyond the truck, now they’re on the damn box.” And then just get up and just write something really super mundane because what you’re doing now is creating a habit and habit is the most important thing in writing. Say, “How fast can I describe the sun right now?” and that you look up and it’s changed completely and then you do it again and it’s like trying to catch a rabbit and you look at the sun, “Oh my God, the shadow’s over there. Get up in the morning and just record the sun getting up and play games with yourself. You keep a notebook every single day and as difficult as it is to do, record the most mundane aspects of your day. L.O.T.: In which practical ways does someone teach oneself to write? And there’s time when I started to write when I knew that it wasn’t the words that I was inventing it was the application of words to a certain experience that I was inventing and then, in a sense, I was actually inventing words to fit an experience so there was all these different things happening at the same time. And there were times when I started to write and it was like I’ve been on the greatest roller coaster in the world. There were times that I sat to write and I stopped and wept for thirty minutes I couldn’t keep going. I could be writing about thirty four whores with one Mexican in a cheap motel room doing meth and it’s still sacred. It’s got this spiritual aspect to my writing when I sit down. J.S.B.: It’s a holy act when I get up every morning, it’s an act of sanctity or something. L.O.T.: Your first impressions about the act of writing. Tell me the question again, it´s quite peculiar. Jimmy Santiago Baca: Wow, thank God for not asking all of this bullshit about prison and crap and being an underprivileged child of orphanage or whatever the fuck they come up with. Lucía Ortega Toledo: What were your first impressions about the act of writing when you started? Between the irreverent and the delicate, like navigating a universe between the outcast and the sublime, where there are no labels and each affirmation can be undermined from one moment to another-this is where this interview took place. While interviewing him, I had the sensation of at the same time being with a caustic and unrestrained writer and with an affectionate and committed father listening to a voice of a wandering and provocative dissident and of a wise and relaxed country man a voracious-erudite reader and a crazy and incendiary poet. I was careful in my interview to avoid terrain that would disengage Baca, and I completely avoided any subject connected to his biography. My trip was motivated by a close writer friend who did a writing retreat with Jimmy Santiago Baca and, since I had previously asked Baca for an interview, this ended up being the best time to do it. At the beginning of May I traveled to northern New Mexico. ![]()
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