original art by Sarah Hart

Many places have their iconic crop.  In New Mexico, where I live, it’s the green chile.  In Iowa it’s corn; in Georgia, the peach; upstate New York, apples; in Orange County – well, duh.

And northern California?

Okay.  So blackberries may not be the first crop to come to mind when you think of Humboldt County.  For me, though, blackberries epitomize the place.  They are luscious and juicy and rich with flavor, and they spring up rampant and uncultivated along the wild margins of civilization.  You have to work a little to get to the best bushes, and you might get a little scratched up along the way.  But you know it will be worth it, because when that fat dark fruit squishes against your taste buds and floods you with everything that is good and sweet and real, it brings as well an edge of tartness that grounds you firmly in the here and now.

Wrecker, which comes out this February, is set in amid the giant trees of northern California’s magical Lost Coast.  That’s Humboldt County, mainly.  And a lot of the trips I’ve taken to Humboldt, both before and during writing Wrecker, have included encounters with wild blackberries.  A few have included encounters with that other iconic crop.  But the legal system frowns on that; and besides, this book is about something else.

It’s about the thorny path and sweet rewards of raising a kid.  It’s about love in a world where not everything is perfect – some mothers land in prison, some friends disappear into the woods – but where, in spite of its tendency to break your heart, love is the only thing that has a shot at saving you.

I’ve asked the friendly people at Mad River Farm to put together some special jars of wild Humboldt blackberry jam.  It’s an essential ingredient for the blackberry jam cake I’ll be serving at Wrecker readings and booksignings.  For every jar they sell, they make a donation to the Humboldt County Library (go, guys!).  If you’d like to get some for yourself, you can reach Marika at 707-822-0248, or go to their web page at www.mad-river-farm.com.  I’ll be sharing recipes in future posts.

Enjoy responsibly, as the beer ads say.  In this case, I think it means washing the jam off your hands before you touch any books.

What foods say “home” to you?

We took field trips two days of the five, but the other three days found us inside at a conference table. We talked about place in writing, traded stories about specific places in our personal memories, put pen to paper for timed writing exercises, and assembled a list of books that offer valuable insights to the writer wishing to access the power of place in her work. I diligently wrote those titles on a large flip chart we kept handy throughout the week. I less than diligently forgot to transfer the list to a notebook before leaving at the end of the week — !!!!– so what follows is an incomplete record.

You’ll all have to pitch in.  Anybody remember others?  Any readers want to add personal favorites to the list?

Here, then, are ten books I’ve found particularly useful in thinking about writing place:

The Meadow. James Galvin. I return to this novel every few years for Galvin’s acute observations, breathtaking prose, and sheer love of a particular place and the man who embodies it in human form. Read more about Galvin’s craft here.

Home Ground. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (catch a review of Home Ground here). A lexicon of terms Americans have used to describe physical places.

Mayordomo. Stanley Crawford. We talked about how work offers a useful lens on place, and this memoir of serving as head honcho for a New Mexican village acequia — the network of ditches that water the agriculture in this area — is a good example.

Power. Linda Hogan. This novel, set in Florida, is as mysterious and unsettling as all of her work. Read Linda Hogan and the power of place for more background.

Wisdom Sits in Places. Keith Basso. An anthropologist’s account of decades of work with the Western Apache, whose landscape is annotated by stories that remind people how to live.

Broken. Lisa Jones. A recent work of non-fiction about a quadriplegic horse gentler whose powers extend to healing people in the harsh and beautiful windswept plains of Wyoming. Compelling.

Divisadero. Michael Ondaatje. This novel works the power of the weather — in this case, a rogue blizzard — for all it’s worth.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Grace Paley. Stories of urban New York by a modern master. Find out why I miss Grace Paley, who died in 2007.

The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien. Everything essential about a small group of soldiers in Vietnam is revealed by — you guessed it — the things they carried. An astonishing novel.

Invisible Cities. Italo Calvino. Calvino imagines his way along Marco Polo’s route in a series of short bursts of brilliance.

What titles have inspired you?

The stack by my bedside grows. I just picked up Marilynne Robinson’s ABSENCE OF MIND, which sounds a bit like a murder mystery title but is instead a meditation on the tension between science and religion. Being a science geek with a decidedly non-empirical approach to the world, I’m pretty excited to read what she has to say on this topic.

Robinson is one of our finest novelists writing today. Wait; that sounded lukewarm, and I am scalding hot in my appreciation for this writer’s work. I read GILEAD straight through, and then I turned back to the start and read it all over again. HOUSEKEEPING; HOME — these are master works by a writer who marries an achingly beautiful approach to language to a penetrating inquiry into the nature of morality, particularly as it pertains to human relationships.

And who writes a damn good story.

Speaking of which — I’ve just finished two of those.  Susan Breen‘s THE FICTION CLASS came out in 2008 and I’ve just now read it.  Breen is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh all the way through and then fell you with the earned sentiment at the end.  This novel follows a woman — Arabella Hicks, named for the heroine of a romance novel — who teaches fiction to a colorful assortment of beginners in New York City while juggling the demands of her aging, ailing mother.  Wry, sly, and with not a touch of meanness, THE FICTION CLASS made me laugh, made me tear up, made me laugh again.  I developed a lasting fondness for the characters and for Arabella herself, an old-fashioned and at the same time thoroughly contemporary woman doing her bumbling best to make sense of a world through the stories it offers her.  Extra pleasure for anyone who’s ever taught fiction.

I turned from NYC of THE FICTION CLASS to the Los Angeles and Salton Sea of  CUT AWAY, a short and breathtaking novel by Catherine Kirkwood and published by the inimitable Red Hen Press. Kirkwood has the corner on stunning sentences; this novel may be short in pages, but it’s long on poetry. Surefooted, inquiring, cool in the very best manner, CUT AWAY follows three women whose lives intersect as each gives chase to a missing teenager, a girl who fled her home in search of a clearer understanding of her own identity. Each of these adult women, too, seeks to understand who she is beneath the multiple disguises she herself wears. Los Angeles may be the city of hard surfaces, but it’s the arid, unforgiving landscape of the Salton Sea that serves up the most accurate mirror for these characters — and Kirkwood’s prose is a match for that unrelenting honesty, yielding pleasure at every turn.

You reading anything good, lately?  Or has the world outside snatched your time, too?

photo by Kathy Namba

Yesterday morning we woke up to spring snow, a layer of white that melted well before noon. Beautiful! Except for the fact that we’ve got apricot trees growing in our new digs here in Taos, and the branches are loaded with delicate white blossoms that mean a bumper crop of fruit this summer — IF they can make it through spring without freezing.

It’s a long shot, I know.  One good year in seven are the general odds for apricots in Taos County.  Last year we were swimming in fruit, so I ought to quit being so greedy and just enjoy the snow.

Hanging out among the blooming branches of fruit trees is one of my most favorite, how’d-you-get-so-lucky kind of ways to spend an idle hour. Bees buzzing, sun streaming past the petals, the smell that’s too earthy to call ambrosia. Who wants to go to heaven when you can sit in the crotch of an apple tree here and let heaven settle around you?

My friend Lucy Gonzales wrote about that experience in a writing class I taught in Questa in 2002. Eight years later, she’s got a book out — Treasures of My Valley:  Humor and Survival in Early 20th Century San Luis Valley – that describes not just the joys of spring but also the hardships of growing up native New Mexican, and the resourcefulness and cooperation it inspired. She’s got tales of picking wild raspberries, wearing bloomers sewn from flour sacks, driving a tractor, raising five kids, burying a husband. She’s got a lot of stories. Lucy is 92.

But the story I love best is the way she describes her “secret place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about secrets in general and secret places in particular. One of the most provocative panels I attended at AWP considered the use of other people’s private details in fiction. What kind of responsibility do we have to the owners of those details when we borrow them for our own work?

Put another way, how much respect should we pay to the privacy of other people’s personal lives?

And places? Even our own places? Can we describe them without revealing their location? Can I say what they mean to me without insisting they mean the same for someone else?

I almost didn’t go to the panel.  Me? I’m hugely respectful of other people’s privacy (I thought). I rarely use details that arise directly from experience, my own or anyone else’s (I thought).  When I write, I take the kernel of a thought or an experience and cultivate it in my imagination (“culture it in a petri dish” is probably a more apt analogy, given the messy state of my mind) so that what emerges will, I HOPE, resound with the emotional truth of the original impulse while bearing no identifiable relation to that specific motivating detail.

But I went, and realized … all that “no sir, not me” stuff? Kinda bullshit.

All writers do it. Autobiographical or not — and I land far on the “not” end of the spectrum — we use the raw stuff of our daily lives as grist for the mill.

So the moral issue stands, for all of us. And sometimes it means a hard, hard choice. Abandon the felicitous detail — the one perfect capsule of meaning that motivates the whole story — or risk treading on something deeply valued by someone else.

Is there a way that the transformative power of art justifies this kind of theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking.

‘Cause, the way it feels to me? If I use a secret — my own, or someone else’s — I’m risking some kind of bad karma. I’m risking having that thought or secret or experience taken away from me.  Door closed.  Story over.

Oddly enough, I excuse memoirists from this exchange — on the basis that we each own our own interpretation of our personal history. Memoir carries in its membership rules the one that says:  this is how I see it.

In fiction, we are doing something different.

Aren’t we?

With all apologies due James Taylor, there’s something powerful about the way a place – even a place you’ve never visited – can stand in for a state of being.

Siberia? I think: Cold. Isolation. Hard labor. Okay, tundra. Maybe caribou.

There are few places in the world I don’t want to go to as much as I don’t want to go to Siberia.

Not so for the unnamed narrator of Per Petterson’s latest novel, TO SIBERIA. Called Sistermine by the brother she adores, she dreams of traveling the vast region by rail, leaving her native Denmark to escape to a place of “open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances.”

Like Petterson’s 2007 OUT STEALING HORSES, TO SIBERIA gathers its emotional weight from the intersection of personal life with the rise of the Nazi threat in northern Europe. As her brother becomes increasingly involved in the Resistance movement, her own isolation and disengagement grow more profound as she watches the effect of the war on her parents, her neighbors, her schoolmates, her town.

Many of Petterson’s gifts evident in OUT STEALING HORSES – the later, more mature work – are on display in this novel as well. His long lines, with their unconventional breaks. His descriptions of place, less often as landscape and more as a felt experience of water and rock, a way of breathing, the chill in the bones and sounds carrying down the streets of the town. Some of his images are breathtaking: a fisherman approaches, the holes in his layered wool sweaters overlapping at places; the girl and her brother lie on cows for their warmth, matching their breathing to the animals’ deep respiration.

TO SIBERIA is no match for OUT STEALING HORSES in its psychological acuity, though. For me, there’s something off in the author’s efforts to capture the sexual awakening of a young woman. There’s a kind of narrative flatness in the sex scenes that seems intended to stand in for the character’s overall social estrangement – making them function more as a device and less as a natural outgrowth of who she is.

But when she dreams of Siberia, it’s a place where “the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer, and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never fades. The wood contracts and waits and stretches out when spring comes and drinks in the wind and the sun.”

That’s sexier than it ever gets in the rest of the novel.

Next up: Ian Frazier goes to the real Siberia – and gets bitten, real bad. Stay tuned.

And for you?  Any place carry a mythic weight?

I spent much of last night watching the TV and staring at the computer screen, stunned by the images of a Haiti under siege. The disastrous earthquake and its death toll, the very literal ticking clock as relief workers toil to rescue those still trapped, and the misery among the survivors – who will face not days or weeks but years of work to rebuild their lives – it’s a disaster of such scale that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory, among other books. She spoke with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now about Haiti’s troubles (“Haiti devastated…”). In the report – which combined reports of collapsed buildings and general mayhem with some history of Haiti and Haitian immigration to the US – Danticat mentioned the work of some of the long-standing relief organizations doing positive work in the country.

One of those, Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, was profiled by author Tracy Kidder in the bestselling Mountains Beyond Mountains. The organization’s mission is “to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care,” and they’re fulfilling it in an inspiring way. Right now is a good time to donate at the Partners in Health website.

The health care needs of this country, always enormous, have increased exponentially in the wake of this disaster. The Red Cross, USAID, and teams of rescue workers and medical providers from around the globe have rushed to bring aid to the injured and supplies to those in need. Part of the problem, though – said a weary Nan Buzard, a senior Red Cross coordinator in the country – is the difficulty presented by the need to transport supplies through a devastated countryside.

Accurately updated maps and other geographic information is critical in any disaster. That’s why I’m so impressed by the work of MapAction, a British-based NGO that works to provide “frequently updated situation maps showing where relief help is most urgently needed.” They take a boots-on-the-ground approach to gathering and assembling geographical data that can help advise relief agencies on blocked transportation routes, physical dangers, and other impediments to their work, helping them make decisions and save valuable time.

They’ve published a free downloadable handbook called MapAction Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping. It teaches relief workers how to use free, open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) software to guide their humanitarian operations.

The last blog post I planned to write was on how you could tell it was fall in northern New Mexico by the procession of big, hairy tarantulas crossing the road. Instead I looked out the window this morning to find a white-out. Kind of Rip van Winkle, you know?

Paul Moody's snowstorm

It’s not that I missed the fall entirely. Kathy and I had a glorious day up Columbine Canyon, the aspens in full golden glory. I caught a few glimpses of the fog that clings to the Rio Grande on fine October mornings. But I passed too many days inside, my nose to the grindstone, while outdoors the temperature teased with lingering warmth that promised to last forever even as the days shortened and the trees shed their leaves and the chamisa flowers grew bleached and brittle.

Today, there’s no question: winter’s here for good. The mountains are shrouded and the dog and I got lapped by three separate snowplows as we made a circuit of the neighborhood. It’s a powder day in Taos. But if I don’t pick up my head and pay attention, it’ll be spring before I know it.

–

Got some good news to share with you all. WRECKER, my second novel, is slated for publication in winter 2011 by Bloomsbury USA and Bloomsbury UK.

Can we pause for a moment of silence? And then… A DEAFENING ERUPTION OF CHEERS AND CATCALLS? Whistles? Maybe a kazoo?

I’m thrilled, to say the least. And overwhelmingly grateful to (and humbled by) the deep list of people who have contributed to this moment.

And I’m excited about what’s to come. The US editor, the fabulous Kathy Belden, says she thinks WRECKER’s “got legs.” As in … go the distance.

Hell, yeah! I didn’t raise that boy to give up early!

Seriously, I can’t wait to hear what you all think of it.

–

More news? The Taos Big Read – during which, for the month of November, a whole lot of people up here read BLESS ME, ULTIMA – has come to an official close. November 20^th was “Big Read Day” by official proclamation of the mayor. (How many of you picture a Dr. Seuss-style Burgher-Meister-Meister-Burgher ahem-ing over a scroll? Is it just me? – Our Darren C. is much hipper than that.) You can read “Crack a Book for Big Read Day”, my opinion piece for The Taos News, if you like.

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One more thing. When you’re shopping for presents, don’t forget your local bookstore. And if you’re not sure what to buy, let me give you a hint. It’s called MORE OF THIS WORLD OR MAYBE ANOTHER, the breathtaking debut by AROHO’s Fifth Gift of Freedom Recipient, Barb Johnson. I’ll talk with Barb in a later post, but for now, take my word for it: these are gorgeous stories guaranteed to grow your heart. (Rough it up a bit, too – but isn’t that part of the process?) And for only ten bucks. What else can you buy for that that’s one tenth as good?

–

Sooner, I promise. Now I’m going outside to enjoy the snow.

In the northwest corner of New Mexico lies a small jewel called Ghost Ranch. Its redrock landscape is familiar from the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted there for fifty years; and in August of every odd-numbered year, a bunch of women writers from across the country gather to write, to learn, to share their stories, to drink wine, to hike the backcountry, and to have the tops of their heads blown off by that thing called poetry.

Well, poetry and fiction and drama and memoir… all these genres are represented at A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Women Writers Retreat. This year, the fourth incarnation of the conference, faculty included fiction writer Pam Painter, actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin, memoirist Meredith Hall, poet Dana Levin, and a host of others at the top of their game. The quality of the evening readings blew my mind. Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate of the U.S., was in good company when she read for the group on Wednesday; her spectacular performance, remarkable for the intimacy of the setting and for the generosity with which she shared her thoughts and life experiences, fit seamlessly into the lineup of gorgeous work we listened to all week.

It was especially poignant for me, as it confirmed once more that this organization is one of the most unique, positive, and effective supporters of women writers that exists. I’m fresh off a two-year stint as recipient of their $50,000 Literary Gift of Freedom Award, a grant which allowed me to write WRECKER, the novel I’ve wrestled with since ARROYO came out in 2001. I’m immensely grateful to the organization for its support, and it was with the greatest joy that I passed on my imaginary tiara to the 2009 recipient, New Orleans writer Barb Johnson.

Haven’t heard of Barb? Trust me: you will soon. She’s an amazing talent wrapped in Southern humor and graciousness, a writer who conveys with strength and delicacy the heartbreak of life in Mid City, New Orleans – and the love that redeems it. I’m a new fan, about to be joined by thousands more when her first collection of fiction, More of this World Or Maybe Another, hits the bookstores in October. I’d spoken to Barb a few times before, but spending these days together at Ghost Ranch, and hearing her read a story to the group, assured me that she’s the real thing: smart, funny, original, generous; a writer whose intense language lets her story leap from the page and change the reader’s life.

I felt overwhelmingly grateful to be there, and to stand between two writers – Barb to one side, Meredith Hall, 2004 Gift of Freedom recipient and author of the already-classic memoir Without a Map (a runaway bestseller), to the other – whose work I admire and whose friendship I cherish. It seemed to me a great example of what AROHO does best, which is to bring together women writers whose work and lives enrich each other and spur each other to work harder, trust deeper, believe more strongly in the power of literature to transform our personal lives and to – yes, I’ll say it – make a better world.

That week at Ghost Ranch was a better world, and it was this world: no fantasy, but a real example of what work and intention and love can do when yoked to a worthwhile cause. A tremendous amount of all of those things went into the making of the retreat, and I offer my greatest thanks to Darlene Chandler Bassett and Mary Johnson, founders of AROHO and directors of prior retreats; to Kim Ponders, extraordinary novelist and teacher who threw herself into directing this retreat; to Tracey Cravens-Gras, a writer herself, who worked tirelessly to keep all the ducks in a row; and to all the gifted and generous participants who came together to make this week so tremendous an experience for all.

No question about it: I’ll be there in 2011. Can’t wait to see you then.

I didn’t know what a ghazal was until my friend Veronica Golos showed me one she wrote. Her poem is called “Exile”, and because it’s still in progress, I can’t print it here; but the more I learn about ghazals, the more I understand why a poem on that subject might take that form.

A formal poem of Arabic origin, the ghazal is composed of up to fifteen couplets that bear a complex relationship.  It is an ancient form, originating in 6th century pre-Islamic Arabic verse, and it found its most famous modern practitioner in Agha Shahid Ali, a reknowned Kashmiri-American poet who died in 2001.  These are poems of love and loss.  “A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain,” says the Wikipedia entry, and though some might argue that that’s a fairly succinct way to sum up most of human life, there’s no question that it fits the bill when it comes to exile from a place you love.

It’s a big country, exile.  I’ve been thinking about the subject more since reading Veronica’s poem.  Formal exile – meaning that a return to your home would result in death or imprisonment – is the most brutal extreme, but aren’t there plenty of other kinds of unintended separations?  Sometimes, simply, we wander, and can’t find our way home.  Or maybe it was our ancestors who did the leaving or who were driven from home.  Sometimes we can’t go home because that place – the one we knew, the one that occasioned all the stories – doesn’t exist anymore.  In that case, the language of names and of memory may be all we have left of a place we have left behind, and the only means we have to pass on the sense of worth and of loss that surrounds those memories.

Even for people who may never have visited an ancestral or imagined place, the language can be enough to evoke the landscape.  Rebecca Solnit, in her marvelous FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST, relates that for Jews displaced to the diaspora, the descriptions of the Holy Land are in Hebrew, not the everyday Yiddish.  Through practice of that language “an indelible image of a then imaginary homeland kept those speakers from melting into their surroundings.”  She muses further,

I wonder sometimes about the merit of that miraculous tenacity, that adherence to a lost landscape and a senescent language.  A case could be made that they would be better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so they could wholly embrace the country they were in.  Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it.

When I was a kid and crossed the continent to go to college, I surprised myself with a bad case of homesickness.  I missed my family desperately, it’s true; but I also missed my place, the woods and creeks and hills and pastureland and twisting back roads of northern New Jersey.  I consoled myself with the thought that when I returned for Christmas break I would borrow a car and drive those back roads for hours, letting the countryside bathe my eyes in a kind of running smear.  I did that.  I still do, when I go back.  But thirty years have passed since then and I’ve never returned to live there.

Yes, there’s a huge gap between exile and the kind of voluntary separation many of us choose.  But there are elements in common: the body-feeling (they don’t call it homesickness for nothing) of being away from the place where you belong, until you don’t; the dreadfully insular aspect of it – no one can understand your emotion but those who have experienced the place as you have, and have gone away. 

It’s customary for the final couplet of a ghazal to include the writer’s name, in one form or another.  Of course.  It is personal to each of us, that feeling of loss, the beauty of love “in spite of pain”.  But we know it well enough to empathize.

The Roman poet Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea – the land of the “barbarians” – for an, um, indiscretion.  Check out David Malouf’s beautiful and masterly novel, AN IMAGINARY LIFE, for a fictional account of that time.

The play between languages in a given piece of literature is, at its best, a dodging back and forth across the border between cultures.  The fugitive dirt of one cultural and linguistic terrain can’t help but stick to the soles of the writer’s shoes, and be tracked all over the other.  I love this.  When it’s done appropriately and well, it can be breathtaking.

I just finished reading two books written in English in which Spanish is used liberally and effectively.  Eddy Robert Arellano’s newly released “Cuban Noir” novel, HAVANA LUNAR, and his graphic novel DEAD IN DESEMBOQUE are quirky, surprising, sometimes exhilarating, amazingly cool modern stories that plumb old forms (the detective novel; the comic book) to tell new tales.  I love how Arellano plays off genre conventions to put a new twist on the young man’s (often drunken) stumbles through the landscape of unrequited love, insufficient sex, and unreliable friendship.  (Smiley face.)  And I love still more that these adventures happen during the “special period” of Castro’s Cuba in HAVANA LUNAR, and down through the deserts of Mexico in the wacky/brilliant DEAD IN DESEMBOQUE.

Writers use alternate languages at three different levels, I think.  First is as a kind of surface gloss, a provider of “local color” that might even generate a little street cred for the piece.  That’s language as vivid detail, tropical hues in the author’s more subdued English palette.  Second is because an isolated character or action requires it, and can’t be brought to life otherwise.  Third, and most profoundly, is because a place or set of cultural concepts is untranslatable.  In this case the reader is introduced to not just a vocabulary but to a whole place and way of life.  HAVANA LUNAR is like that.

For the writer who uses more than the occasional word from another language in a piece of writing intended for monolingual readers, a bunch of questions come up.  To what extent do you have to explain the words’ meanings in the text?  How much ambient knowledge of the language will you expect readers to bring to the experience?  What degree of ambiguity do you think readers can tolerate? And – if you’re going to dish it out – how can you use that ambiguity to your benefit?

Some authors opt for a glossary at the end of the book, but unless it’s addressed creatively, a glossary can be pedantic and irritating.  It seems to work much better to integrate the information into the text itself.  Introducing single words is pretty easy; you can talk directly about them, or weave enough ambient information in adjacent that it’s possible to get a clear picture without being provided a definition. 

Using another language in dialogue is much more complex.  Cormac McCarthy, who does this extensively, often follows a line of Spanish with a direct translation as return dialogue.  Arellano has passages where he expects the reader to follow, mystified, for quite a while before he reveals the meaning.  Sometimes that’s rich and even suspenseful, especially when wordplay is involved; but other times – when the payoff doesn’t make it worthwhile – it’s kind of an obstacle to pleasure.  To watch this dance is to recognize the delicate balance that must be struck between the vivid authenticity of alternate language, and the reader’s necessary comprehension.  To complicate matters, the fulcrum shifts reader to reader.

For American writers who grew up bilingual or whose first language was not English, the successful ability to slide back and forth from one language to another can offer a gorgeous display of strength and versatility.  It’s kind of an embarrassment of riches, and Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Arellano and others have made an art of it.  (It’s no surprise that the authors that come to mind are those using Spanish, not Mandarin or Anishinabe.  Spanish words are so embedded in American English that a writer can rely on at least a moderate familiarity among readers.)  Even those of us raised on nothing but cornflakes and the King’s English find it essential sometimes to tap other languages to tell the stories we are motivated to tell.  For that, these writers are a guide and an inspiration.  It’s not just what you hear, but how you lay it on the page that counts.