Western Writers
An Interview with Dagoberto Gilb
By Jenny Shank, 4-21-08
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| Photo by Nancy Crampton. | |
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Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles and moved frequently throughout the urban West that he depicts in stories and novels in his characteristic incisive and humorous way. After earning a master’s degree from the University of California, Gilb worked for many years as a construction worker and carpenter in LA and El Paso. Gilb began publishing stories in literary magazines and eventually books, including 1994’s The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and 2003’s Gritos, an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gilb currently is a professor at Texas State University, and recently published a new novel, The Flowers, which depicts life in an apartment complex as seen by the winning 15-year-old narrator, Sonny Bravo. I interviewed Gilb via email about the quirky characters and organic structure of the novel, and how writing and living in Texas influences his work.
New West You published your first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, in 1994, and since then have written successful essay and story collections. What prompted you to write a new novel?
Dagoberto Gilb: This is my fourth novel, even if it appears to be my second. Nobody needs prompting to write a novel. Maybe some mental and financial counseling and education.
NW: What are the unique challenges of writing a novel as opposed to a collection of shorter pieces?
DG: Some pieces are harder than others. The ones that seem the easiest are usually the hardest. Writers write what they need to write. I love writing short stories and essays too.
NW: The voice of Sonny Bravo is so arresting and inventive, with its humor and multilingual teenage flair. In some ways, it’s similar to the voice you’ve used in other works, but in other ways it’s unique. How did you come up with the way he’d talk?
DG: Never used that voice before. It was the long work of the book, to carry a voice that was as “young” in the past as it might be hearing it now and yet not only.
NW: Sonny decides to teach himself French, and uses French words that he likes the sound of in conversations. Why did you decide to have him do this?
DG: He needs to play. I need to play. He uses it to say, like, focque vous, to make himself smile, to lighten the darkness. For me it’s an inside joke about loving Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. My frenchez vous to all the internal and external expectations of Mexican American literature to be only about retaining Spanish, and so on. The book, like all Genet’s, is about breaking rules and being confined both, and I tried to break as many rules of expectation, and the rest, as was possible, while maintaining a storyline.
NW: The cast of characters in “The Flowers” is so vivid, from Sonny’s nerdish twin friends, to “The Cloyd,” to Sonny’s beautiful, self-focused mother. How did you create these people?
DG: I say I write from physical experience, not just musings or opinions or prescriptions. That is, I run or get into something and there is, call it, a throbbing. I focus on it and I write about that. The characters resemble people I’ve dreamed, re-invented, re-imagined, re-designed, made mythic in a “realistic” setting. The twins are my comedic Greek chorus. A novel is like a psychic map.
NW: Many writers start out writing from a young person’s perspective, and eventually write more from adult perspectives. If I’m not mistaken, most of your earlier work is from the perspectives of adults, and your most recent book is from the perspective of a teenager. Do you have any thoughts on why you decided to write from a younger perspective at this point in your career?
DG: Sure, Sonny is fifteen years old. But this character is a fictional artifice, just as a woman writer might make her lead character a homosexual man, a male writer a woman in the Weather Underground. I did not intend him to be only fifteen, the book would not be read by anyone fifteen. That is to say, for me there is nothing younger or older in perspective from my work except in terms of the historical time frame of my own life. That is, the point of view of this novel is certainly not younger than any of the writing I did which preceded it.
NW: The structure of “The Flowers” seems pretty organic—the plot arises out of the relationships between the characters, and it doesn’t seem like you rush it. Did you plan out what would happen before you wrote it, or did the story come to you as you were working?
DG: I write to the ending I know, which is where my stories come from. The work is to know where to start and why there.
NW: Why did you decide to have the book culminate in a race riot?
DG: That was toward the ending I knew it was going to. And, I say, where this kind of story has to go.
NW: Some reviews have said that the skirmishes you include in The Flowers were from the L.A. riots of 1992, but you don’t indicate this specifically. Did you have a specific place and time in mind?
DG: The only reviewer who said this was the one in the New York Times Book Review (she also judged me, with equal and more slandering inaccuracy, as a literary “stereotyper” of women, like that, not considering that the male characters have an equivalent set of troubled adjectives, which those who aren’t projecting their own stereotyping prejudice might recognize as the social backdrop of The Flowers). Though it is not brought up in the book for both willful “arty” reasons (maybe dumb!) and also for what I thought was the novel’s internal demand, anyone who’s from Los Angeles neighborhoods would recognize the ‘65 Watts Riot, which it is, and, of course, is not. I didn’t want this to be considered a “historical” novel, so I admit that it weirdly pleases me that it’s not clearly recognized—it’s not necessary to know. Exactly what I wanted, for better or worse.
NW: What was the process of editing Hecho in Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature? Did you have any revelations from what you uncovered to include in the anthology, and are there any pieces that particularly influenced you?
DG: I wrote the long answer to this in its introductory essay, which can be read here.
In the essay, Gilb writes, among other things, about his different responses to the work of Luís Valdez and Rolando Hinojosa: “If Valdez was creating a Califas of archetypes (and sometimes stereotypes), of hip zoot suiters and lowriders, pachucos y las rucas, characters I enjoyed but didn’t feel were like me and my more conflicted, and ordinary American experience, what I found in Hinojosa’s work bled a vein: He was writing about the common people who were cops or menial bank workers, employed at drugstores or who sold cars, went to little league baseball games and told stories of a living Mexico and the smallest cositas of a local community, like death and birth, who married who inside the community and out, much of it related as gossip and through simple conversation in dialogue. It was, in other words, what I recognized, and so, like much else that suddenly changed in my life from that point on, I began to understand the world I was in too, where I was not only as a working man, but as a writer I wanted to be.”
NW: You have traveled all over the country, teaching at various writing programs, and in recent years you’ve been back in Texas, which is one of the states in which you grew up. Is it good for your writing to be in Texas? How does the place where you live affect what you write about?
DG: I have traveled a lot by standards of my childhood peers. I have now taught at a few universities. Much of my life now I have lived in Texas, though many adult years I worked as a construction worker mostly in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. I think place and work—experience—are a writer’s dyes. For me, these are as important as parents and class and heritage. They set the story and bind the material. I have been a writer from the West, the American Southwest, and, like it or not, it’s who I will probably always be.
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Comments
I hope you realize that you are doing some of the best literary interviews anywhere right now, with some of the best writers. Your work is much appreciated.
A good friend gave me Gilb's collection "The Magic of Blood" in 1995, and I have been reading his work with great relish and admiration ever since. At the time I read "Magic..." I was working
as a treeplanter, and Gilb's stories of labor and wandering were exactly what I wanted to read. I cannot recommend him enough to readers of any stripe, but particularly readers who are working people, caught in some of the same situations that Gilb nails like nobody else in the writing world.
Thanks for this interview,
Hal
http://www.newwest.net/city/article/the_fiction_of_lucia_berlin_an_appreciation/C94/L94/)
I find Gilb's work to be so unexpected and different than that of other writers--the language is fresh, the characters are fresh, and the settings are fresh. And I really enjoy that he writes about people that aren't always featured in literary fiction, just like you mentioned.