For our next 20th Anniversary event , Letras Latinas is headed to San Antonio, Texas. Letras Latinas collaborated with the legendary Macondo Writers Workshop to bring Michelle Otero for a public reading as part of the Guest Faculty writers at Trinity University in the Ruth Taylor Recital Hall on July 27, 2024 at 7:00- 8:15 pm. Otero is also providing a free community workshop called How to eat a Memory at Gemini Ink on July 25, 2024 at 10 am-12 pm. See Macondo's website for more details.
For many years, the Macondo Writers Workshop has a haven for writers. On Macondo's website, writers Pat Alderete, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Larson, Olivia Mena, Amelia ML Montes, and Carla Trujillo describe Macondo as a place named "after the mythical village in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. During the week, the participants would leave the time and place of their ordinary lives. Macondo was and has always been a soul family. Writers from across the country felt at home in the sweltering heat of South Texas. During the day they would hone their craft and their stories in the Macondo Writers Workshop, 'to inspire and challenge one another in order to incite change in our respective communities' through each other’s writing."
We spoke to Macondista, Michelle Otero, about her recent book Vessels: A Memoir of Borders (FlowerSong Press), her previous chapbook Malinche's Daughter (Momotombo Press), and what she's looking forward to this summer at Macondo Writers Workshop.
Brent Ameneyro (BA): A story being told out of chronological order can strengthen the arrival of certain moments of tension. It is also a way to mirror the way memory often works: fragmented, a little chaotic. In addition to writing Vessels in this way, you also chose to jump back in time to before you were born, to your ancestors’ stories. Time becomes fluid as the reader bounces around in what feels like an eternal story, one that started long ago and is still being written off the page. Can you speak on the impetus behind the way you approached time and storytelling?
Michelle Otero (MO): Trauma has a way of compressing time, of making certain events feel present, even if they happened years or decades or centuries ago. This was certainly true for my grandfather. After decades of relative good health, my grandma’s illness and death triggered his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and reminded all of us, in the words of his psychiatrist, that “every day is an anniversary for Mr. Moran.”
I also wanted to convey the sense of history walking in circles, patterns repeating themselves, inheritance, how each generation does some of the work the previous generations did not complete, how we keep revisiting old wounds until we make a conscious effort to heal them.
Writing this book is one of the ways I hoped to lighten the load for future generations.
Laura Villareal (LV): Vessels: A Memoir of Borders includes essays from your chapbook Malinche’s Daughter published in 2006 by Momotombo Press. I really admire the hybrid form you chose for Vessels. I think we often think of genres as being very separate, but Vessels is a masterpiece of hybridity. It resists our expectations of how a memoir should look by intertwining poems and fictions. When you wrote those first essays in Malinche’s Daughter, did you already know the essays would be contained in a hybrid book like Vessels? Did you ever have any hesitations about writing a memoir in this way? Were there any books that influenced your writing of this book?
MO: Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed
A Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A
Harrison, Candelaria, Fletcher
Nance Van Winckel’s workshop on hybrid forms
Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street
When I wrote Malinche’s Daughter, I was still in my MFA program at Vermont College, and though I was focused on creative nonfiction, I appreciated being in community with poets. (A trusted friend advised me to spend as much time reading and listening to poetry as possible. Write poetry. Read poetry. It will make your prose better.)
My grandma’s voice required this hybrid form. The short pieces I call The Grandma Poems started off as overburdened, not-so-lyric essays in which I was trying to put the reader in my grandma’s kitchen or hospital room. It just didn’t work. And then I re-read Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros and remembered how much I loved her short poems with long titles, how the title both rooted and launched the poems. So I went back to my ladened grandma pieces and stripped away everything but her voice. In the end, both on and off the page, it was my grandma’s voice that could make or break anyone in our family.
I remember Denise Chávez starting an Acknowledgments page with “Who says I can’t have 3 pages of Acknowledgments?” So, who says I can’t write a hybrid memoir? I started the book in lyric essays, but the more time I spent with it, the more my grandma and Malinche and Coyolxauhqui asked to be written as poetry.
BA: Mythology and history make their way into the book. Did you do research or did you pull this all from prior knowledge and memory? What was your writing process?
MO: Yes and yes. Research, memory, dreams, prior knowledge, serendipity.
I don’t know when I first heard the name Malinche, but even that first encounter had echoes of Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman. Cortés’s wily interpreter. She was a teenager. She was given to the Spaniards.
I kept trying to go back to a time when women were safe.
The curanderismo course at the University of New Mexico.
Traditional Mexican healers.
Some of these practices seeped into me through ceremony. My own healing journey.
BA: I like the way characters are given nicknames, it reminds me of the way one might tell a story to a friend: Bad Boyfriend, Physician Assistant cousin. Aside from avoiding potential grievances from including real names, it feels like there was also a creative aspect to this decision, creating a universality to these characters. Was this intentional?
MO: For Bad Boyfriend, especially, I wanted to create the feel of an archetype, rather than a traditional character. In early drafts, I felt I was writing the case against a particular partner. See, everyone? See how bad this person was to me? That didn’t serve the narrative or me. Then I tried to make the reader fall in love with this person, just as I had fallen in love in real life. When things finally clicked was when I realized that what mattered was not him or how bad that particular relationship was, but Michelle’s pattern of choosing men who were unavailable.
I also wanted to give the sense that there are so many things over which we have no control. My grandmother’s illness and death hit us suddenly, and as it was happening, the doctors and nurses—even the attendant controlling access to the critical care unit—didn’t feel like human beings with whom we might relate, or who might offer us comfort, but forces delivering life, death, good news, bad news, comfort, distress. For so long, this was also how I felt about romantic love, like relationships were something that happened to me and the object of my affection had the power to accept or reject me.
LV: In the Acknowledgements you write, “One good thing about working on a manuscript for eighteen years is all the helpers who show up along the way.” As much as the myth of the solitary writer persists in popular media, I always appreciate hearing about all the writers who championed and shepherded books into the world. I was moved by the scenes within the memoir where Stephanie and Karen helped you get back home to Las Cruces when you were overwhelmed and grief-struck. It illustrated such radical care from your fellow writers and friends. We should all be so lucky to have fellow writers like that in our lives. How much of the book is shaped by your relationships with other writers?
MO: Even the mythical solitary writers had someone to cook and clean for them. I don’t imagine these were healthy relationships for the partners doing the cooking and cleaning.
I wanted a low-residency program because I wanted to stay in my community while I was practicing my craft.
This book wouldn’t exist without my community.
LV: You will be attending the Macondo Writers Workshop as a featured writer this summer. Summer workshops like these are such essential gathering places for writers that often result in lifelong friendships and pivotal spaces that help launch projects in new directions. As a Macondista, has this workshop influenced or guided your work in any ways? Outside of Macondo itself, is there anything you’re looking forward to about spending time in San Antonio?
MO: My first Macondo in the summer of 2006 was like an MFA program in one week. I had just returned to the US from Oaxaca. Malinche’s Daughter had come out a few months before and caused a rift in my family. I came back to the US feeling homeless and untethered. Here I had done this brave thing, and it caused me to lose people I love. I felt like San Sebastián, shot full of arrows, but still alive. What’s the point of speaking the truth if everyone is going to drop you? I cried through Sandra’s critique of my work.
Migas and café con leche at Cascabel.
Anything from Vegan Avenue.
Michelle Otero is the author of Vessels: A Memoir of Borders, Bosque: Poems, and the essay collection Malinche's Daughter. She served as Albuquerque Poet Laureate from 2018-2020 and co-edited the New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023 and 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso, a tribute to victims of the 2019 El Paso shooting. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.
Brent Ameneyro is the author of the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024). He is the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review.
Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI, among others.