I am astonished at reaching my 70th birthday, after at least 50 years dedicated to the teaching, practicing, organizing, and mentorship of writing. I was born in East Los Angeles, Mexican American, a Spanish speaker until the age of five, a child laborer who worked in the agricultural fields. As a woman, I was reminded daily that my life was demarcated by a violent colonialist imaginary that distorted the ways I existed in the world. Through reading, however, I came to understand that other worlds existed. The library table became my sacred space—a cathedral, oddly private but also shared by others—and the dictionary, my bible.

This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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Over time, I have written several essays contemplating various aspects of why I write, and I am always surprised that not much has changed about the faith I maintain in the practices of reimagining and creating. In fact, the search for clarity has deepened my understanding, even emboldened me to feel, think, and believe that the creation of narrative is by nature almost always benevolent, especially when positioned against the flood of daily violence. It is nearly scriptural in its poetic power to create empathy and teach us about ourselves, to complicate our souls. Writing becomes essentially a spiritual practice. I am not the first to draw such comparisons, but I appreciate their ongoing resonance. And like all spiritual practices, the ritual of writing finds power in delivering transformations, first in the writer and then, hopefully, in the reader. Consequently, from the beginning of my career until now, writing has been the only way I know how to pray.

Some writers and scholars may think of fictional narratives as artifice—but in my fiction, I am always aiming to humanize people considered not to be human. Early in my writing journey, I was told to my face that I shouldn’t write about Chicanos; I should write about people. It never occurred to me that fiction was artificial. Rather, fiction seemed an incarnation of human experience as tactile as a healing scab, as audible as any parent’s mournful wailing for their wounded children. Although I described writing as spiritual just above, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also embodied: grounded, taking the jugular pulse.

This embodiment of writing has something to do with why I see it as humanizing. I write about people who have been subjected to an enforced systemic invisibility. Institutions profit from our invisibility, so I feel compelled to reveal our human faces through sensory world-building. The senses invite participation in a narrative, not as a passive act but with imaginative engagement for both reader and writer, what Toni Morrison called “the dancing mind.” The reader and the writer work in tandem to imagine the face of the other. This empathetic commingling unshackles us from imposed frames of reference, including racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ stereotypes.

Imagination liberates us. Commitment to writing becomes a commitment to dismantling these encumbrances one word at a time. Resistance makes muscles. Muscular sentences exercise empathy. Words fashion one new world at a time, as María Lugones might say. Therefore, I attempt to make all the words in my sentences muscular and ready to work. Audre Lorde’s words ring loudly: “I am who I am, doing what I came to do…to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”

The love of my siblings propelled me to tell their stories, but most important has been to seek out moments of grace in a world so often full of evil, to find the goodness in the small gestures, and, more than anything else, to celebrate love, a radical notion when so much hate and slaughter persists.

From 70 onward, I continue the prayer.•