Writer Sandra Cisneros has been making sense of the world on the page since 1984’s The House on Mango Street. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we wanted to replay our 2022 conversation with the beloved poet.
We discuss her first poetry collection in 28 years, Woman Without Shame (4:40), why she chooses to write ‘dangerous’ pieces (6:18), and the significance of her poem, “My Mother and Sex” (8:38). Then, we walk through Sandra’s coming of age between Mexico and Chicago (15:16), the sixth-grade teacher that guided her entry into art (19:39), her epiphanies on class in graduate school (23:49), the “Pilsen Barrio” that shaped her seminal novel, The House on Mango Street (29:05), and how Studs Terkel informed her lifelong approach to story (30:17).
On the back-half, we discuss the loves and losses that inspired Sandra’s early sensual poems (36:36), how she documented her power through “Neither Señorita nor Señora” (40:04), a painful period captured in “Year of my Death” (50:30), the day her mother visited her writer’s office in San Antonio (57:56), and why she still has more to say (and write) at age 67 (59:59).
Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm student Forgoso. Welcome to the show today. I'm joined by writer and poet Sandra Cisnaros. Her debut book was called The House on Mango Street. I told the story of a twelve year old Jacana growing up as Cesnarros did in a Latin neighborhood of Chicago. Since the book's release in nineteen eighty three, it sold over six million copies and has become required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country. It's also made her a key figure in the Mexican American artist movement, which aims to tell our stories with candor and complexity. Those same qualities can be found in Woman Without Shame, her first poetry collection in twenty eight years. The book was published around this time last year, but it was recently released in paperback and can now be found wherever you do your reading. With Hispanic heritage month upon Us, I wanted to highlight Sandra and all the works she's contributed to the culture for nearly four decades. We talk about growing up between the two worlds of Chicago and Mexico, the influence of her mother and radio host studs turcle her tumultuous time at the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop, the highs of Mango Street and the lows that followed, and how in her sixties she feels like she's just getting started. Like the David Byrne talk we played this past Sunday, this is also just one of my favorites from twenty twenty two. However, I do want to note that at the forty five minute mark there is a mention of suicide. It's part of a larger conversation around mental health, especially within the Mexican community. It's really brief, but I just want to mention it to all our listeners here at the top and make sure that you're aware of that before getting started. Most of this conversation, however, is a celebration of her fascinating life and her remarkable work, which again, if you haven't checked out a House on Mango Street or her new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame, you can do so wherever you get your books. We'll be back this coming Sunday with a new episode featuring writer Zeti Smith. Zadi is one of the first people I asked to come on the show, and so this is a really special one for us. So I hope you check that out this Sunday. Until then, here is my conversation with writer and poet Sandra Cisneros. Enjoy, pleasure to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I'm glad to have you here. How are you feeling?
I am feeling good.
You say that so confidently.
That's because I did a little meditation right before we began this show.
We did it together exactly. Now we have to do this whole show.
Yes, in honor of our ancestors. Make them proud.
That's my aim every episode, but especially this one, given that so much of your work is born out of the place that I came of age in in Chicago. So I want to get to that. But to begin, we're talking around the release of your new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame. It's your first collection, I think in twenty eight years. Is that right?
That's right?
And these pieces, as you write in the book, have been winnowed from three decades, two countries, and too many houses. It is time I let them go. And I wanted to start here. Why was now the time to let them go?
Well, I would still be writing them. Actually, it wasn't that. I said let them go. It was that my agent and my editor said, you know you have a book. I said, really, and you have to have a confidence to show someone unfinished work or work that's in your dead end file and process file. And I shared it with these two men, my editor, John Freeman and Stuart Burns, my agent, and I had to trust them both to look at work that's not done, and they encouraged me to let them go. And I said, really, because I can never tell when they're done. I would still be working at them for another twenty eight years if you let me. Poetry is the most difficult of all the genres, and I always have to lay them down and tuck them into beauty sleep and then pull them out when I can be a little more objective. That's why I require another writer to work with me, and a California poet, John Olivari s Espinosa, is a Macondi statoo and a colleague from the Macondo Writer's Workshop that I founded, and he works with me to say, well, this stance is kind of flabby, or come on, you can do three more push ups? Come on? You know really? Oh no, I don't know, John, I don't know. So he works with me as my personal poetry coach.
Why is poetry the hardest genre?
Because poetry doesn't come from your head. It comes from your heart and your gout and wounds and from very deep places. And you're working on it like a musician. You're composing music with syllables, and so you move one word and you've lost the rhythm of that line. You have to go back and you know, do another rhythm with it. You also have to voyage and chase after it like a kite. You know, you're running after it so that you can lift off and take you somewhere you didn't know you were going to go and find out something about yourself that you didn't know you knew. It's terrifying, you know. I don't have to climb mountains or go into send not this. I just write a poem.
You said, recently, I discovered a poetic truth that you have to write, as if what you had to say is too dangerous to publish in your lifetime.
Yeah, for me, you know, everybody's poetic truth is different. But for me, I want to go to places that maybe I'm hesitant to talk about, maybe I'm afraid to explore. I want to write about things that maybe women shouldn't be talking about, or this woman shouldn't be talking about at this time in history. I really want to go very deeply and profoundly someplace within myself so that I can become a better human being, because I think the whole aim of why we're on this planet is to be the best human being and do work that serves others, and to prepare ourselves to transform ourselves to our next whatever lies beyond this life, which I know something does, I want to practice, so I'm not afraid when that moment comes.
I want to understand where that tendency of writing about things you wish you could forget comes from. And I think to do that, we should start with a piece in this book called My Mother and Sex. Now, for context, you talk about your mother a lot in this recent collection. You grew up with her alongside your father in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago fifties and sixties.
Among many other neighborhoods, because we moved around a lot.
As the third child of seven children and the only daughter of the bunch. Why don't we dive into this palm My Mother and.
Sex, My mother and sex. Eight live births, how many Dad, who knew, not us, her seven survivors. When a bedroom scene flashed on TV, she'd trie can scamper to her room as if she'd seen a rat. It made us laugh. What were we immacular conceptions could be sex? For her was dead, a duty, dreadful at cooking for her famished army sad to think this pure postulation from lack of conclusive conversation. She never talked of sex, especially not with me, She said, I put everything in a book, agreed, But what was worse? The truth or my imagination? But I know for sure rapture for her a library record, symphony, Ecstasy, Opera in the Park, intimate pleasure books, Friday Turkle Chomsky, herculean, brilliant men, unlike the man who shared her bed, who favored Sabado Higante to Sebastia Salgado. And yet father spoiled her. His Mexican Empress Parikotin, tempestuous, clueless to what she craved, her red flare sent up weekends. Help, there's no intelligent life here. Evenings in the blue moonbeam of TV. Father mesmeriz By Mexican thick thigh flew Zi's Mother's word, not mine, shaking their Hucci coochies. Father never drank, ran off, split flesh, brought home each faithful Friday a paycheck. Why would she complain she lived alone in a house full of lives. By the time I knew her, snake bitter mingy dead before being born, a woman in formaldehyde.
How does that land with you?
You know what? I feel like I understand my mother better after death. Writing poetry is a way to explore things she wouldn't talk about. You know, my mom was very skittish when it came anything sexual. You know, she didn't want to read my work because she was afraid of what I'd say. But you know, I didn't have these conversations with her because she couldn't. And I feel I understand her and forgive her an and ask forgiveness and forgive myself by exploring these taboo places, Especially if you're a Mexican daughter, you can't talk about sex with your mother. They ran out of the room. They don't want to hear it. And so this was a way for me to understand her and to look at her in a way that my brothers could not.
What you did understand of her is that she loved going to the library.
Yeah, she loved going to the museum. She loved going to Conservatory of Flowers. She loved art and beauty at the History Museum, the Shed Aquarium, all of these cultural institutions. We were there every weekend. She would have liked to have been an artist, she sang. She drew beautifully, but she had no opportunity to become an artist. I think a lot of women from my mom's generation, they just went into wifetom without thinking there was an alternative, and they certainly didn't know about birth control and had all the children that were given to them, but without knowing how to control it, and the families suffered economically, and children maybe suffered also because they didn't have the time with each of the parents. My father had to work sometimes two jobs. My mother was very bitter and angry all the time. So I think my mom didn't get to see the seeds she planted, she didn't see the harvest. She felt short changed my life.
You said once that she didn't choose to be a mom.
Now she got drafted. She wouldn't like me saying this publicly, but she had a son and her belly. I think she felt she had to marry. I think she would have liked to have maybe selected someone else to be or her life partner. My mother and father were ill suited as soulmates, but they were just terrific as a team of parents. And even though my mother was unhappy, my father babied and coddled and was amused by my mother's tempestuous behavior. You know, she was very better in Trula. You know, she was one of those women that you know, was like a baddikutine, like a little volcano.
They weren't great as soulmates, no, but they were supportive enough parents to get you into these cultural institutions that mattered. I imagine the library was the only place in a house full of nine people where you could find some peace and quiet.
Yes, and you know I needed it. My brothers and my mother filled up the house with noise. I just wanted some peace and quiet. So for me it was essential. I'm one of those people that are hyper sensitive and EmPATH and so I can't take all the noise and the frequency, and it made me nervous.
Is it true that before you knew how to write, your brothers taught you how to edit a story.
Oh that was Kiki. My brother. Kiki was funny, and I always tried to tell the story to make him laugh. And if I could make him laugh, then it was a good story. So Kiki was the one that was the story listener and the storyteller, and we were the two clowns of the family. So I think he honed my comedic skills and you know, the pacing. I just knew if he laughed it was a.
Good story, then he done something right.
Yeah.
Yes, I feel like that description of your household is a lighter version of how you've described it in the past. You have this quote where you say when you are a girl, you are invisible, especially if you're a Mexican girl. You are in the room and people are talking around you. I felt as if I was a spy in the house of my family. I didn't speak because I had such low self esteem about what I had to say. I was often silent. I was a witness. Listening is very good training for being a writer.
Yes, but I should qualify that statement. I meant publicly and at home when there were adults were taught to be silent, So when there were adults going on, I wasn't part of the conversation the way you see adults now talking to young people and saying what would you like for dinner? Helen. No, we were just served whatever was made that day, and if you complained, you got a double portion. And this was my oldest brother, who was like the general. He just inflicted these rules. The only one that really was open to talking to me and paying a lot of attention to me was my father, because we were clones, we were the same person.
How do you mean, Well, my father.
Was a very sensitive man. He was super cavallero, like one of those Mexican men that if he was in another era he would bow, you know, that kind of blite man. He was raised with the idea of good manners. But that's taught even if you're Compesino and Mexico people. The Mexican people have such a good manners and when they come to the United States, they're shocked at how bad manners people in the United States have no manners. People in the United States talk too loud, they don't say how are you, they don't wait for a reply, whereas in Mexico, if you don't have the protocol to know what to say or how to do. You're called a person without education.
I just want to say, as a white passing Mexican, I'm sorry I didn't bow when you walked in here.
You didn't have to bow in Mexico, and people don't realize you're supposed to say, you know, and when it's the as an acknowledgment a human connection. That's something that I appreciate now that I live in Mexico. I do it to all the people I meet on the street, especially the tourism in the United States. When was the s I could say good morning, but I don't, and they always like mumble. But I do it on purpose to see if they've learned their manners and how to greet people in Mexico.
Well, inside your well mannered household, I want to stick on that line you had for a second, he said. I felt like a spy in the house my family.
I still feel like us buy in the house of my family. Sometimes I think, am I really related to these people? I felt like a clone of my father, but I feel very different from my brothers and my mother. You know, when you're young, you always see what your parents didn't do for you, because you're narcissistic as a young person, and it's only when you get older that you see what they did. But once you turn into an adult, a mature adult, which sometimes takes a long time, you start forgiving them, and you have to forgive yourself too. So I didn't really see my mom. I didn't meet her until she was exiting the planet, and I got to feel her spirit leave her body. I was very lucky that I could sense it. My brother was in the room, but he didn't know what was going on. I remember asking him, you feel that it was exciting, like being in the birthing room, and he just scrunched his face and said no. But I could feel my mother's spirit leaving the room, and it was so like my mother in real life. It was sweet and vulnerable and tender. It makes me now even want to cry because I thought, how did she get from that person to the woman? I knew how many disappointments so that she had to create that shell so that she could survive her life. And I'm so lucky that I was in the room to ask her to go, that it was all right. I would take care of things, and for her to flutter, because it really did feel like a fluttering. Whatever that light was that I was leaving the room, I could feel it. It's like imagine like if you flicked a light on and off, but it had an emotion and then it just faded, and I thought, wow, that is so amazing.
The beginning of your writing journey, I think happens in nineteen sixty five, around the age of eleven or twelve. It's then that your family moves into a home at fifteen twenty five North Campbell Street in Chicago. What happens in sixth grade in that classroom when a teacher comes to your desk and plucks away a piece of paper that you're writing on.
Well, I was so used to teachers using students as examples of what not to do in the school I had been enrolled in, So when she plucked that paper from my desk, I thought, oh no, what have I done wrong? And I was drawing a flower. I had drawn a face on it and it had polka dots, and she picked it up and she took it to the front of the room and put a pushpin through it and said, look at our new student just did. Because I was an artist but I never got any attention for my art. In the other school, there was no class for art or no grade for art. And in this school she appreciated me and outed me as an artist. And I was so startled. I felt she had made a mistake. I thought, how could she mistake me smart? I had just gotten some new little blue glasses from the sears from reading too much, and I thought she must think I'm smart because of the little cat ei glasses I'm wearing, and I thought, to be nice, I would try a little harder. So I raised my hand. Whereas in the other school, I just wanted to hide, never raise my hand. But in this school, because she had singled me out, I had a little more confidence to raise my hand. It was thanks to a teacher giving me am. That's the secret. Anything you'd give love to someone, or some student, or some human or some plant or some dog or some cat or some planet that you love with no personal agenda, it'll always turn out well.
And it's because of that that you started writing. And yet, what I'm fascinated by is that your first instinct to a teacher calling you out for doing something right is to think, to yourself, I've done something wrong.
I felt frightened. I had like this fear in my chest. When she walked to the front of the room with my page, I thought, oh no, I just remember this, the sweat coming off my facing. Oh what a mistake she's made. But how lucky that she thinks I'm smart and that I do something good. No one had ever done that in school before.
Once you've accepted that, you know, maybe I'm doing something right. Maybe I should be writing. Do you remember that moment insid a library when you're flipping through the card catalog and you have a kind of vision for yourself.
I had a little laser vision of my future.
And what was it.
I was a card in the card catalog with my name on it and the title of a book. And I saw the spine of a book with my name on it. I didn't see exactly the title, but I visualized it with my third eye, and I said, that's what I want. I tell young people in middle school, visualize what you want. Now, use your third eye. You don't have to tell anyone, but walked towards that dream every day, and you have to put that intention there when you're that young.
You said, once, I think I didn't know what I was creating as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers. I didn't want to be married with seven kids in wish Oh if only I had done this.
Yeah, my mom didn't realize that her marriage scared me. I mean, I loved my father. He was a really great guy, but he was not the greatest match for her. And I loved my mother, but I knew a lot of her short temper and her bitterness and unhappiness that we caused it. I felt like we were the cause that she couldn't be whatever she wanted to be. On the other hand, I learned a lot from her.
You know.
She told me things like earn your own money, which is one of the first rules I tell young people. If you earn your own money, then you can control your Dstino. If someone else's holding out your money, then you have to do what they say. So that was a key to independence. Earn your own money.
Help me understand, as you start to shape your own destiny. You go to college at Iola, University of Chicago. Somewhere in that first or second year, you take this seminar on memory and imagination.
That was graduate school, though, that was grad school at Iowa. At Iowa, I wrote one story that was in the Mango Street neighborhood as an undergraduate, but I didn't train with a fiction writer, So it wasn't until I was in graduate school that that seminar came up and I stumbled on my Achilles heel that I realized I didn't have a house like everyone else in my classroom, and that I stumbled on my class difference as a result.
How did you stumble upon that? Well?
Once I was in graduate school, I became that girl again who was afraid to speak up. And it wasn't until my second semester first year that we were reading houses a seminar and houses and Homes, that I figured out my discomfort was a class difference of coming from a different kind of house than my classmates. That awakening spooke to me so much that I felt like running out of the room. I really felt like I got to get out of here, because no one had ever talked about class difference before.
And you hadn't talked about class difference.
Ever, No, never, and it was just dick. I woke up in my graduate school seminar to class difference, and I thought, that's why I feel uncomfortable walking down Michigan Avenue, and why certain shops I won't go in, and if I meet people that make me feel uncomfortable, I worry about the kind of shoes I'm wearing. It's all about being poor and realizing, Oh I am poor. That's what I'm ashamed about. So my first thought was, Oh, I don't belong in this writing program. What made me think I could be a writer? I should go home to Chicago. And I was depressed and crawled into bed and didn't climb out of bed all weekend and leave my room. I'm twenty two, twenty one, and I'm thinking I should go back to Chicago and take that job with Chicago Public Schools that they offered me. I should go back and just teach high school students. I have no right to be in this program. But the wonderful thing about my depression, the other side of depression is rage. I got very angry and thought, well, why have I never seen a house like mine in literature or in a newspaper article written with love, or in a movie, it's always, you know, vilified or shown in such a frightening way, but never an intimate way with love. And I told myself I would write what my classmates couldn't tell me. I was wrong. And they say, you know, find your voice, write what you know. You don't know what you know at twenty one. But if you make a list of ten things that you know that no one else in the room knows, ten things you know that no one else in your family knows, ten things you know that no one of your gender knows, ten things you wish you could forget, ten things you know that no one in your town and your neighborhood and your profession. It's ten times ten times ten times ten times ten. You have a lot of things to write about.
What was on some of those lists?
Oh, I said, I'm going to write about, you know, certain people in my neighborhood, like this boy named Memarties and his dog with two names. His name was also and bear. You know he had two names in English and in Spanish. I thought about all kinds of people, the house that we had wanted and the one we didn't get, and you know, so there's a lot of people and animals and incidents that happened when I lived in that house. A lot of those poems from that early time in my life in my thesis were poems that I wrote that were very bario based, and I exploited shocking my classmates and writing about things that they could not write about.
How do you mean exploited?
Well, like you and I thought, oh, okay, well I write about that will spook them. Let me write about a rat, a rat, a rat. Yeah, let's write about a rat that's gonna spook them. Yeah, because they write about swans. Yeah, let's write about like a little pharmacy that a child has to go to with a swollen infection. And you know, the pharmacy, the doctor's behind the counter and has to split open a wound by slamming a book on it. Stuff like that, you know, every day on a dose from the Batteral. I just wanted to shock them.
I feel like I just fell into your rat swan trap.
Yeah you know, well, you know, they would write about swans and I would write about rats.
I'm afraid of both of them.
So oh yeah, I guess I'm still afraid of rats. But I love a good rat story, but it has to be true.
As opposed to all the untrue ones.
Yeah, these are ones that people make up. I don't want those stories, I agree. I want, like, you know, first person rat stories.
If it's not first person rat, get out of here.
That's right.
You heard it here first. When you're at school in Iowa, you begin drafting, as you said, the house on Mango Street. But in nineteen seventy nine, after you graduate, you return to Chicago to teach kids in the Pilsen Borio. Is this around Eighteenth Street over there?
Yes, that's right. I was over on Nineteenth Street, I think, and often, damon.
It was there that you became, as you say, fascinated by the rhythms of speech. Fascinated by the rhythms of speech. Oh, fascinated by the rhythms of speech. Oh it's you, that do you? Oh? That was you.
I was.
Every time I said that, I thought I was wheezing. No, it's me with my it was you with the handkerchief. I was like, I think I'm dying on this podcast.
Sorry about that.
No, it's okay. I'm I'm glad to be alive. Okay, I said it three times. I was like, what the fuck is going on? Okay. It was there that you became fascinated by the rhythms of speech, this incredible deluge of voices.
Urban voices, you know, urban Chigano voices.
These kids that you were teaching, How did they inform the house on Mango Street their voices?
For one their stories? I was witnessing lives that were much more difficult than my own.
How so well, you know, I had a.
Mother and father that one stayed home and one went to work, where some of them, most of them had two parents that worked and as a result didn't have a lot of self discipline about getting up and going to school every day. Or they had parents that said yeah, yeah, they had estoliad, you've gone enough, you know, get a job and help me out. You know, my parents would never have said that they regretted that they didn't finish their school and pushed us to get degrees and to work with our heads and out our hands, whereas I had students whose parents want them to quit and it was only through their own tenacity that they were getting their ged, and they had stories that broke my heart. Parents that maybe physically violent, or lovers that were physically violent, or girls who had three children and were only eighteen years old. Stories like that. They were harder than my childhood.
You mentioned your mother didn't really get the education that she wanted, but the schooling she did find came in the form of Stud's Turcle.
Yeah, she listened to Turcle religiously and whatever stud said, you know, any book he mentioned, she would ask us to go get it for her. She knew a lot, you know, she was reading all these college textbooks and she'd say, hey, you know, I heard about this poet from Chila that Studs was talking about. Do you know who he is? And oh, yeah, that's Pablo Nerudah, Yeah, yeah, get that book. Get that book for me. So she would just you know, sometimes not get the name, but she would tell me a little bit what she wanted. At the end of her life, her favorite writer was Noah Chomsky. That's no slouch. You know. She would take a yellow marker and highlight whole pages. You know, the whole page would be highlighted.
When it comes to Nam Chomsky, you have to highlight the whole page.
That's what she did. And you know, she knew so much that she was the most well read person in the barrio.
God bless her. You know, he's come on this show, I think four times. I still don't know what the hell he's talking about.
I don't know what he's talking about, either, but I like him. I got my mother to meet Stut's turtle. I was on stud show more than once. Studs was very intrigued by the story of my mom. He wanted to meet her to interview her for one of his books. But my mom was too embarrassed by the idea of him coming to her kitchen table. She was just too overwhelmed. So instead I took my mother to the studio and there's a photo Studs and me and my mom together like that. Yeah, it was a big moment that my mother got to meet her mentor.
So Studs became her mentor. But I'm trying to think about the ways in which he informed your writing, because you have this quote where you said, the kind of work I do isn't just about writing what one hears. You have to do some research. And to me, everybody's a walking library as valuable as the library of Alexandria. I like to write about people I know who aren't history, and they won't be in a history book and they won't be in a museum. Yeah.
To me, history books look at people of poverty, women, people of color as not counting. They're not history. They don't count. For me, it's so important to interview people when I do investigations. A lot of people were interviewed for Carmelo to get moments of history that are included in that book. To me, it's a history book, it's a history of immigration. There's even a timeline at the back of the book so you can see what US attitude towards immigration has been and why it was created. I just feel like I want to document the people I love, because if I don't, they don't count. They're not history. Lots of people come across my life, and some of them are witty that like my friend and former yo Yugoslavia, and you know I witnessed and lived through that war with her from a distance. I want to write about the Japanese people I worked with when I was fifteen, and many of them deported to concentration camps. But I wasn't aware of that US concentration camps in World War Two and had no bitterness, or maybe they had bitterness but they didn't express it to me. Parts of my past. I haven't written about everything, and I hope I live long enough to sketch with love the people that I've been lucky enough to cross paths with.
Putting a pause on the conversation for a second, we'll be right back with writer, Sandra says Narus. The stories that you're referencing, you find them, you hear them, you put them in your work, and once you put them into Mango Street, the book gets published in nineteen eighty four. After the book comes out, you get to travel by yourself for the first time, and when you're traveling, you carry around this postcard that has a quote from Virginia Wolf.
Yes, that I carried with me before the book was published. I finished the book with that postcard. I won an NEA when I was twenty seven, twenty eight and maty six. Yeah. I bought a one way ticket and found that postcard and feminist bookstore. Took it with me and travel to Greece to finish the house on Mango Streets. I finished it when I was twenty eight.
The quote reads from Virginia Wolf. As a woman, I have no country as a woman. My country is the whole world. Now you rewrote that a little bit, right.
Yeah, I did. What did I say?
Your rewrite of that quote was as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I am an immigrant in the entire world. And I was thinking, how did that experience traveling by yourself make you rethink your family's own immigration journey.
It made me very much aware of what it is to be hungry or cold and not have a house. It was not a glamorous journey. I was trying to make my money last. Sometimes I didn't have access to fonds. This was before like the ATM guards and before cell phones. And I realized that when I had these hard moments where I didn't have a place to sleep or not much money and took me in, women would allow me to share a twin bed with them, or sleep on the floor, or say wait till my boss leaves and you can come and stay. Because they were working as au pairs or whatever the circumstances were. They weren't wealthy women. But it was women who always gave me shelter and who never asked for anything, whereas when men gave you shelter sometimes happened, they'd make a movida. You know. That was the pay they wanted you to pay for spending the night. And I learned that when men gave you things for free, there was a caveat, but when women gave you something, it was pure.
The women were kind and would ask for nothing right. The men were kind and would ask for sex everything. Sex is what they wanted me to pay. But I am thinking about you as a young woman out in the world writing as much as you were, but also I imagine for the first time having these romances.
Well, there were times when I was traveling when I had romances, and there were times when I was celibate, you know, So it really depends on when and where I was very young, you know, it was my choice. So there were moments when I had people in my life and there were seasons when I did not, And I love that about my life. At that time, I felt I had a little bit of money, not a lot, and I could control my days writing. I had places when I was at an arts residency to live. When I was writing house, I was an island. I had a house with a view of the sea, and there was the happiest time was when I was living in Greece and was writing, and if I wanted to invite someone to stay, I could, And if they stayed and I didn't want to have sex, I could. That was my choice. There was a beauty in having control of my sexuality and my love life. I wish we could live like that now. Now we get shamed because we had sexual desires. As women, we have so much shame and fear. We even have politicians shutting down our desires, controlling our fertility for us, and churches coming in embodying it in on our bodies. You know, it's it's a horrible I think women should have as many lovers as possible. How do you know who you're going to love and who's going to be with you unless you learn them and learn who they are from all aspects, with your heart and with your body. It's sacred for me to have relationships with people that are so profound that I know them physically as well as spiritually. And I don't miss my amorous life. I enjoy writing about it, and I enjoy meeting people, and I enjoy the possibility that I may or I may not because I don't feel a repentimiento. I don't feel regret, I don't feel sadness. I feel no shame. I feel like, Wow, what an exciting life I lived. Give Wennel, Well, why.
Don't we read a piece in which you kind of process some of those loves?
All right? Neither Senorita nor Senora. I didn't love those who did, and did those who didn't. Once I almost proposed in Paris because it was Paris my heart, Fragonard's shoe, but he was afraid of the ponouf and lingering in the rain. Another too busy saving worlds to think of saving us. I pressed between the pages of my thighs. Tender Green lost me to the darkness under trees, and lost himself to drink worst the pest who I would not love at all, whom I loved best shame I wanted as souvenir, cue the violins, please his child, even if disastrous for the kid and my career. But that's history. More recently, an exploding cigar, need I say more. God saves fools too foolish to save themselves. And now the odisaba years here. I have no answer how I got from then to now, except with gratitude to all.
I bow, who's got time for them? Anyway?
Exactly why they say me? He go exacto.
Well, if it's not regret, there's something I want to understand. I have here a photo of you in your Bucktown apartment circa nineteen eighty Mm. Yeah, what do you see?
Ma Willito and myself in a capulco on a picture that's on top of the typewriter. He was very dear to me, my father's father. I see a deco page bag wooden box with parakeets on it that I deco paged, and I'm wearing an old boyfriend's vintage woolen I think it's a Pendleton shirt.
But one time, maybe the last five to six years, someone presented that photo to you. And here's what you said. When I look at her, I say, Kitana, Yes, what an idiot I was. I had so much power and I didn't know, and I gave it away, and I just well, I had to make all those stupid mistakes.
Well, how do you become a woman with your own power until you make mistakes. I mean, everybody has to make mistakes. That's how you learn and come into your power. And I didn't come into my own born that way. I had to make a lot of stupid mistakes. But I see how innocente she is. I'm still the most INNOCENTI person I've ever met, which is great. It's good to retain that childlikeness I am. I'm eleven years old in my heart, and I see the eleven years old in her face. Man, I made a lot of mistakes, and I'm still writing about them and haunted by them and processing them.
What comes to mind when you say that.
Oh, man, I had affairs with married man when I was in my twenties that damaged me. I was very innocente about my relationships. I think people are vulnerable when they fall in love. Don't you think that sometimes it doesn't come from any place of logic, that it comes from baggage or previous lives. I don't know what, but I just made some really disastrous choices.
MM, And how did you give your power away?
I didn't know I had any power. See, that's the thing. I didn't know I had any power. I tried to fit into these relationships or allow myself to go contrary to my own intuition or well being. I didn't know how to become a writer. I didn't know how to become a powerful person, and I imitated some very How can I put this in a kind way? Some men that were spiritually undeveloped.
Honest is really better than kind.
Here, I mean honest. They were not on a spiritual path. They were done no interior work. It's all about ego and all about their primordial chakras. And you know, these were people that for me looked great because they were taking me to my path to be a writer, or taking me on my path to be a political person, or to be a traveler or whatever it is. When we see someone and we admire, oh, we all want to be like him, and then later on we superamos. We passed that person. We're attracted to people who are reflections of who we want to become. And sometimes later we realize, oh my, they were so little. You know, I'm so much bigger than that. They're so chik titos. But at the time you're in such doubt, you don't know who you are, so you go after all kinds of people that sparkle and dazzle you, and you think we'll transform you, and they leave you damaged.
So after Mango Street comes out in eighty four. Did you still have doubt about becoming a writer.
I had a doubt about becoming a human being that could pay the bills.
You don't.
Even though our house was out, I only want five hundred dollars every time they did a print run. That wasn't going to last two months. So when I was in my thirty third year, I couldn't find a job and I went through a year of near death. I call it because I went through a great depression and I doubted what good was writing If I couldn't take care of myself. I couldn't buy a car, I couldn't get insurance. I had to borrow. Any time I needed to make a big purchase, I'd borrow to get to a job. It just lowered my self esteem to not be able to take care of myself for nine months. And I was living with my boyfriend who was a waiter and a photographer, you know, so we really didn't have any money. I remember big night out for us was to go to Helen's Donuts in Austin and buy two cups of coffee and two glazed donuts. It was the big night out for us and The first job I was forced to take because I didn't want it was a job that my friend recommended for me at Kelsey, Chico.
A teaching job.
Yeah, my first and I never felt comfortable as a student, So imagine me being the professor and I got, of course, you know, the worst classes, the classes with people who didn't want to be there. And I just took all that failure and blamed it on myself. So every day I went to the job, and every day I came home, I was done. My spirit was dying. I wasn't writing, I had not been writing. I'd been depressed for nine months, and I just spiraled. I had a nervous breakdown. I now can see that, but I didn't know what to call it.
What did that look like?
You cry a lot, you don't want to go out of the house, You eat six chocolatey Claires and a box of corn flakes, and then you eat something salty, and then you say, no, that's not it. I need something sweet, And you know, like a binging eating and crying and not being able to sleep because you have nightmares and your body's telling you wake up. You need to seek help. But a friend of mine could see the signs of me marching towards self destruction very soon his way to put it. And he said, You've got to come home to Chicago. I've already made an appointment with my therapist, who's a Yungian. She works with artists. You need to come home. If you don't come, I will come get you. And I was so numb. I was like a woman on an iceberg. And I said, okay. But the person I lived with, who I loved and loved me, said if you leave, were done. And I had to make a choice. And I felt if I stayed, I would die, but if I went, I might live. And so I left. And when I got home, I had this letter waiting for me that my mother said, there's a letter from Washington, d C. I think it might be good news. It was from the National Endowment for the Arts. I forgot that I had applied and I'd given her address because I was transient. And I opened it with my coat on, and it said congratulations, you've won twenty thousand dollars. And that meant I could get out of cheekook, could quit my job, I could do anything. And more important than that, it slapped me and said you were put on the planet to be a writer, and don't worry about being a professor. I remember telling my mother, give me a piece of paper. I need to thank the Anya. They saved my life. And I went to the bathroom and my period had never stopped, and since my mensa started as a teenager, and it had stopped for nine months. Put in to the bathroom and the blood flowed. It was like my body was holding its breath and I knew coming home was I lost my partner and I feel sad about that, but it was not a choice. I had to survive. My partner couldn't save me. Yeah, that's a sad time, but you know, I forgive myself, you know, for hurting him. Because I'm here, I haven't written the sadness of that time, so it's coming out of my eyes. But I need to write about that because I know there are other people in our community there suffering with depression and suicidal thoughts, and we need to know that when we can't battle this by ourselves, that they're professional therapists that can help us. When I won that any I kept saying to myself afterwards, it's a good thing I'm not dead. Because I could have gotten it posthumously. It was during that season that I really was losing it and planning my death and how I would do it and how I would leave. I had it all planned out so that I could do it on a weekend and turn the car on and stuff the garage with rags and take the cat with me because I didn't know what to do with the cat, and wait until my partner was in the city for the weekend and no one would interrupt me. So I was very very close to self destruction that year. That's the year of my near death.
And shall I read it?
Yes? Now, this poem is also about my mother's death exactly, and two thousand and eight I also had the body speak, so this is about two years. It's two times my death, you know, eighty seven and two thousand and eight, the year of my near death. Six months after my mother died, a ribbon unspooled for my uterus like a stillborn child. At fifty three, the womb awoke, exhaled, and spoke one last time for my mother's sake, my own, I who birth no one in life Earth grief thin red line on a road map guiding my escape from servant to master, from daughter to adult. Ever after my body spoke once before, at thirty three, year of my near death, year of my cross I succored despair with silence, sleep, measured self worth by others, a child still borrowing to pay the bills, no good at anything but words? And what good were words? When the month began nine months, the uterus did not breathe, nine months wavered before the breach, save by providence, angels or ancestors stigmata. To prove this story true, I've died twice when twice survived at thirty three the christ year, and twin decades later, when my mother transformed herself to light, twice died twice. Death defied, marvel at the body's power to speak, mend, resurrect, forgive. Why did you pick that one? That's a hard one, But you know, talking about it makes it easier for the listener because it's one I don't usually read out loud, not because I can't, but I think there are some poems that are paper poems. You need to look at it and savor it and read it again and again. But I think with our conversation that poem makes sense now.
So why did you ask why I pulled it?
Well, I'm just wondering why did it be to you?
What I understood going into this conversation, at least from the research, was that we couldn't really understand your heart without understanding nineteen eighty seven in two thousand and seven.
I think that's true, and it's something that I've talked about, but I haven't written the essay here of my near death. I've talked about it. Like I say, if you don't write it down, it never happened. I need to document it before someone documents it for me, and I've tried. When I just came out of that dark time, I spoke about it at a lecture, but I was too close. You know, you need the long view of time to see yourself.
The other reason I presented the poem is because although it represents some of your darkest hours, what comes on the other side of that is a kind of lifelong commitment to writing, your conviction to put your life on the page. I think is fortified on the heels of that darkest hour in nineteen eighty seven, and in fact it is physically manifested in two thousand and seven because on October twenty fourth of that year, your mother travels to San Antonio to see your new.
Office which I built for her.
That you built for her. What do you remember about that day?
Oh, first, I remember that my mother didn't want to come. The ticket was for July, and I had to defer it because she said, oh, it's too hot in Texas. But I think my mother knew that her energy was waning and she was afraid of traveling when she felt she was winding down and getting ill. I said, Ma, you have to come. This ticket is going to expire and I can't recycle it. It's in your name. And that's the only reason she came, because I forced her. If I had not forced her, I wouldn't have seen her. You know, she didn't want to travel anymore. So one of those things, and my cranky brother came with her. My brother ey Or, well that's my nickname for him because he's always complaining. So you know, she came with Eyor, and I remembered a last things she said. She was going through security, I said, don't forget to tie her shoes, because they had taken her shoes off and put her on a wheelchair. You know, my brother said, what I said, don't forget to tie mama's shoes. What don't get a time mama shot? I was like one of those shouts from security. That was the last thing I said about my mom. You know, when I saw her, she looked up and we saw each other, and the next time I would see her would be in dreams.
That day of October twenty fourth, when she comes to see the office that you have built for yourself but also for her, you two walk through the space.
Yes, she was really impressed. It was such your beautiful office. And she was evaluating and taking an inventory how much things cost, because you know, she was married to an upholster and she knew about fabrics and curtains, and she was looking and saying, hmmm, that must have cost a pretty penny. That's the way she spoke. You know, she was just like, get impressed. She didn't want to go up to the terrace because you had to go up a little spiral staircase, which was a little iffy for her, but I forced her. I said, come on, you just go up slowly. I'll put a cushion. You can go two at a time, and just go up to and sit down and another two, so we did like that. She went up the stairs backwards, you know, she climbed up and then she turned around and sit down. Then two more and sit down. And I made her come all the way up to the terrace and I put a cushion like a yoga cushions and mats and made her lie down with me.
It was really nice, the two of you lying down up there. Yeah, it's really really nice. It was like a full moon moon was rising. It was really beautiful, and we just it was twilight and it was daylight.
When we went up there. We just were up there for a while. I got some sparkling wine or some champagne. I don't know what it would persecle. My mother liked bubbles, and she was always in a good mood if she had a highball, that's what she called it. So I just made sure we had something for her to drink. She was a good mood. She didn't want to climb down right away. It cost a lot of effort for her to climb up. So we were up there for a little while and just making plans maybe my brothers could come, and it was just like, you know, I finally got my mother to see what I had made with my pen. I never would have thought of building something that grand. It was for her.
That image really sticks with me. You two up there, you look at her while she closes her eyes, and you're right, you close your eyes. You look like you're sleeping. The plane ride must have tired you. Good lucky, you studied, you say, without opening your eyes. You mean my office life. I say to you, good lucky.
I've always wanted to write a story or a novel called good Lucky, you know, and I hope I can do so in this lifetime. There is in the opera house on Manga Street a song called a good Lucky song, and it's at the finale of the opera. And when I hear it, of course, it's in honor of my mother.
You know, you've often said when I was a child, I always felt that I wanted to rescue my mom from the slights of her mother in law. She had a lot of pain that she opened up to me about as a little girl, and I always wanted to come and rescue her, and as I became a writer, to tell her story. But I felt always that my mother knew so little about her own mother, and her own grandmother, and all the women in my family just got erased that I wanted to honor them as much as I could write about them, think about them even though I didn't know their names, to somehow imagine their lives. And as we leave, do you think your way of rescuing her something that you wanted to do as a kid but couldnot. Do you think your way of rescuing her is by preserving her in essence and time through words on the page.
My mother appears more often in my work now, although she's present in every book I've worked on in some way, but she's much more present in my life now that she's spirit. You know, she visits me and talks to me. I see her asleep and awake, so she's not gone from my life. It's an extraordinary thing when you're an intuitive that you know and you see people awake and asleep. So some people only see them asleep, and some people only see them awake, and some people only get smells, and some people only get messages. But I've been very lucky. You know, I don't have a conversation with her like I do with you, but you know she will visit me in waking, sleeping, and in dreams. The relationship continues because I feel her love and her presence, especially when we're talking about my mom like now, or like when I witness the Good Lucky Song with the singers singing it. I knew my mother was in the room. I said, gos, she's not going to miss this. So I don't feel her absence as much as I used to when I was not aware of my spiritual gifts. And I'm learning to connect with her more and more, and I think I'm journeying with her in the text and I'm working on in text I wheel write because this is an amazing time of my life. I'm only sixty seven. I'm just like apprentice. I'm going to apprentice a baby about my craft, and I'm just learning a lot in this phase, and I'm excited about what I'm learning. So I'm learning with intuitives and people that have gifts that I have that I only have acknowledged in the last fifteen years. I'm working on trying to share what I've learned in works I'm writing now.
Well, before you go about writing your next chapter, why don't we and with a poem in this new book, called woman seeks her own company.
You know, I keep looking at those ads that say woman seeks male, male seeks male. I said, why don't they have one that says woman seeks her own company, woman seeks her own company. Profession, word, weaver, fervent, believer, humanity of humanity, proclivity, day dreaming, hobby, night dreaming, sensitivity, everything, pleasure, books, biographies and poetry, especially lessons on how to mitigate disaster, medications, pen and paper, purpose, preservation, leisure, home alone, unstressed on, undrusted, indulgences, movies, pre hayes and Italian tragedies. Because a good cry balances out a good laugh. Favorite actress Annamagnani. Preferred company, Borros, elephants, clouds, favorite soundtracks, trees, speaking, wind, rain, night, thunder, nagual also Ludo like Alardo, Nemesis, rodents, automobiles, planes, savored, scents, mothers, Lilies of the Valley, Grant Park, Lilacs, Abulito, Cigar Mexico in the Morning, Family, Friends, strangers, kin Achilles, heel, rescuing, vulnerabilities, six Brothers, anathema, babies, math, best trait, generosity, fatal flaw, generosity, put to rest, saber repartee and Molotov, bon Mott, luxury, seclusion, foibles, love, life, merit, my life as witness. Height five two or one hundred and fifty seven point forty eight centimeters last measured, diminishing with age, however, simultaneously growing in self worth, weight, done, being concerned, shape, shifting into chicennitza relinquished vanity of paint ever, passionate, fashion, personal aim, mystic this lifetime or next, auto criticism, at peace with being, work in progress, solo amusement, laughs aloud at her own jokes, encourages, eccentricities, dislikes, chit chat, parsimony, satellite loyalties, fond of cholos, magee, paeonies, different drummer since birth path not taken all that, Culinary skills none, decadences, unmade bed weekends, some weekdays too, recompense, lounging like an Odelisque preferences What others think? Sent to Department of Dearly Departed Artistry as sixty five, convinced just getting started.
He's sixty seven.
I'm sixty seven, only just getting started.
I feel like.
I'm just getting started, and I'm just finally mastering something of what I know in my crap, but when it comes to spirituality, I'm like just a kid. I really have a long way to go. I want to do things like, you know, fly out of my body at night, you know, cool stuff like the mystics do. Maybe I won't get there in this lifetime, but eventually.
I don't know if you're going to get there with the flying out of your body thing, but I have a feeling you will continue to write. You have this quote on the art and act of being a writer that I just want to end on here. You said, when you're a writer, you live in dream time twenty years what's that We put our head down and then we pick it up a decade or two has passed. That's how I feel about my life. I was still a person that was writing that story. Time time was good to me, so I could find an ending for the story. But it's kind of like a kite. You begin with your own story, and the higher it goes, it starts to take off and characters start to say things you would never say. The more you tether it to your life, it won't go very far. It has to begin from something constructed for me that's real, and then I just give it more string. That's a good quote.
I said that. No, I wrote it, Liar, Liar.
You started this podcast with the kite analogy. It seems only fitting that we end.
Here, yes in dream time, and I just want to.
Thank you for dreaming. Even though as a teenager you were scolded for dreaming I was. I am so glad that you became a woman that made it her profession and.
That I get paid for it.
Yeah.
Who would have thought I'm so happy at this time in my life that i walked down the street giggling.
Please don't stop.
I ought to say, Sam, if you were not working on a radio, I would say you would make a good therapist.
You know, I'll tell my therapist stop, Sandra. Thank you for sitting with me.
Oh, thank you, Sam. I feel like I've gone through all the emotions and back, like if you hypnotized me chore. Also, yeah, you're how old are you? I think you're an old question. I think you shuld be a therapist.
And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. If you want to go the extra mile, you can leave a review on Apple. You can share the program on social media. All of it really does help new listeners find Talk easy. I want to give a special thanks this week to the team at Penguin Random House, Mickey Collins, and of course, Sondra Cisneros. You can find the paperback edition of her new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame wherever you get your books. To learn more about Sondra and the work discussed in this talk, visit our show notes at talkasypod dot com. If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd recommend our conversations with writers like Jennifer Egan, Ocean Wong, Margot Jefferson, Tom Hanks, Joyce, Carol Oates, David Sedaris, and Maria Ressin. To hear those and more pushkin podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk easy pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs they Come and Cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with writer fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod dot com slash shop that's talk easypod dot com slash shop. Talk easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenick Si Bravo. Our associate producer is Kitlyn Dryden. Our research and production assistant is Paulina Suarez. Today's talk was edited by Clarice Gavara and Kitlyn Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editors are c J. Mitchell and Lindsay ellis Or. Music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Chenoy, Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gamberzac, Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. I also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Jenars, Kerry Brody, David Glover, Heather Feane, Eric Sander, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Noreyes, Kira Posy, Tara Machado, Maya Kanig, Jason Gambrell, Justine lang Lee, Tom Alan, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisber. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening to another episode of Talk Easy. I'll see you back here this Sunday with writer Zadi Smith. Until then, have a good rest of your week, stay safe, and so on.