En pocas palabras: Javier J. Jaspe

Washington D.C.

The 2024 National Book Festival was held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday, August 24, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Several programs were livestreamed, and video of all talks can be viewed online after the Festival’s conclusion.

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2024-national-book-festival/

Una lista completa de los autores que participaron en el Festival Nacional del Libro de 2024 (FNL2024) puede verse

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2024-national-book-festival/authors/

La serie que continuamos hoy se refiere a escritores de origen latino que participaron en el FNL2024. Su objeto no consiste en realizar un análisis de su obra, sino el de publicar material encontrado en Internet relacionado con la misma y sus autores. Los textos de Internet se transcribirán en itálicas, en español o inglés, según sea el caso, con indicación de su fuente. Esta quinta entrega se refiere a Elizabeth Gonzalez James. Veamos:

Elizabeth Gonzalez James:

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novel “Mona at Sea” and the chapbook “Five Conversations About Peter Sellers.” Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Rumpus, storySouth, PANK and elsewhere, and they have received numerous Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net nominations. Her new novel, “The Bullet Swallower,” is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2024-national-book-festival/authors/item/n2020032150/elizabeth-gonzalez-james/

Selected Works at the Library of Congress

EN: https://www.loc.gov/search/?all=true&sb=date_desc&uf=contributor:james,%20elizabeth%20gonzalez

Entrevistas/Videos en el FNL2024:

Fathers, Sons, Guns — Novels of the West: Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Alexander Sammartino

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2024-national-book-festival/schedule/watch-the-festival/video-on-demand/item/webcast-11471/

Website de la autora:

https://elizabethgonzalezjames.com/

Biografía en el Website de la autora:

About

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a screenwriter and bestselling author of the novels, Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower, as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. She has taught fiction writing at Grub Street, Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop, Story Studio, and elsewhere. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts.

EN: https://elizabethgonzalezjames.com/#about

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Books/Libros en el Website de la autora:

https://elizabethgonzalezjames.com/mona-at-sea/

https://elizabethgonzalezjames.com/five-conversations-about-peter-sellers/

https://elizabethgonzalezjames.com/the-bullet-swallower/

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Reportajes/Entrevistas

Idaho Review

An Interview with Elizabeth Gonzalez James

EN: https://www.idahoreview.org/journal/2024/1/18/an-interview-with-elizabeth-gonzalez-james

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a writer of extraordinary talent, as evidenced by her much-anticipated novel, The Bullet Swallower. This epic and multi-generational story follows Antonio Sonoro, a Mexican bandido hoping to save his family, and Jaime Sonoro, an actor and writer reckoning with the sins of his ancestors. To celebrate its publication, staff editor Kira Compton spoke with Elizabeth Gonzalez James about her writing process, generative research, and the cyclical nature of time.

IR: One of the many things I loved about your novel was the strong sense of place. At times, the land itself seemed like a character with agency. How much are you inspired by landscape and environment in your writing?

EGJ: George Saunders says to lean into your strengths, and I think writing descriptions of place is a particular strength of mine, so I tried to get in as much as I could without being exhausting. I grew up in South Texas, so it was fairly easy for me to write about what it looks like and how it feels to walk around down there. It’s unbelievably hot, humid, and sunny. I have no idea how anyone lived there before A/C. So I had a lot of fun finding different ways to say it’s miserably hot and sunny. And then because of the magical nature of the book, I could take some liberties with the environment. I have vines of purple flowers unfolding and pointing to the sun; I have an ominous rust red winter sky over gray snow. I wanted to give the sense that anything could happen.

I read a short story collection by a Polish writer named Bruno Schulz, and if I recall correctly he never really left his very small and obscure village in Poland. The way he describes his hometown, though, it sounds positively magical. I bet in reality it wasn’t. But by his very intense and close observation of the streets and the buildings, he takes what’s there and amplifies it and makes it unforgettable. That’s what I tried to do, too.

IR: Personally, Remedio was my favorite character. He serves as a wonderful foil to other strange, almost omnipotent characters in the canon of westerns–McCarthy’s Judge being the most obvious example. But unlike the Judge, Remedio is undecided on the true nature of humans, unsure of his place on the balancing scale of good and evil. This ambiguity adds a delicious layer of complexity to the world you’ve created. I’d love to hear more about Remedio’s conception.

EGJ: Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed him. Once I decided to write the book with some magical elements in it, I settled very quickly on having the Devil as a character. But this presented some problems as I realized that the Devil can’t really experience personal growth. He’s too static. So then I thought about some of the functions that the Devil fulfills, one of them being, possibly, that he collects the souls of bad people and takes them to Hell. So then I had the idea of writing a character who isn’t the Devil per se, but is a sort of soul collector, taking the deceased to wherever they’re headed next. He’s also sort of a scorekeeper, as he can see who’s been naughty and nice.

I left his role a little ambiguous because I didn’t want to try to outline the entire moral universe of the novel. But in writing his character I did have to clarify quite a bit for myself: What happens to bad people when they die? Why does God let bad things happen to people? Are descendents punished for the crimes of their ancestors? Is the universe a place of chaos and randomness or is there any kind of moral order? I didn’t expect to get quite such a theological and philosophical awakening in the writing of the book, but I had to clarify my personal thinking on these matters so that I could find a moral framework for the story.

IR: Research plays a significant role in your writing process–sometimes in ways that might surprise readers, like a deep dive on Sartre for Mona at Sea, or devouring Peter Sellers biographies for The Bullet Swallower. In what ways has research shaped your work? Is there any tidbit you couldn’t include in The Bullet Swallower that you found fascinating?

EGJ: Research was a HUGE part of writing this book. I thank the Oakland Public Library in an author’s note at the end of the book because I could not have written it without interlibrary loan. The research I did wasn’t just informative about the way people lived and the historical context of the period. It also helped me generate ideas. I encountered so many fascinating characters in my research that I ended up including some of them in the novel. Casoose was an actual Texas Ranger. He was Mexican, but when his family was killed by bandits he joined the Texas Rangers and essentially declared war on Mexicans. The scene where thousands of dead cattle are lined up on the banks of the Nueces River is also lifted straight from a memoir written by a woman who was an early inhabitant of Corpus Christi.

As for tidbits that didn’t make it into the book, there are probably hundreds. In early drafts of the book Jaime, the Bullet Swallower’s grandson, was a much bigger character, and I crafted a whole world around him in Mexico City during the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. I regrettably had to cut all that out, but I’m actually turning that material into an all new novel, so it won’t have been in vain.

IR: This novel is so concerned with time, going so far as to quote Borges through the adventurous (and hilarious) Peter. In prepping for this interview, I came across a line from Borges’s The New Refutation of Time that made me think of your writing: “Our language is saturated and animated by time.” Your language certainly is. Time is the heartbeat of The Bullet Swallower, and the characters constantly cycle back to it: time’s passage, time’s lack, how much time must pass for responsibility to wane–if it ever does. Did you find yourself consciously grappling with time, or did it arise organically in the writing process?

EGJ: Yes, time was a huge preoccupation of mine while writing the novel. As I said Jaime was originally a much bigger character and so I had two timelines that were crisscrossing through the novel with a big collision at the end. This complex structure required that I have a tight grasp on when everything was taking place, and how callbacks and overlaps were introduced. As I was drafting I read the craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison. She focuses on story shape in her essays, but when we think about story shape we’re also thinking about time. The timeframe will dictate the story shape and vice versa. It’s all really interesting.

I also remember reading a line, probably in a Carlos Fuentes novel, about how in Mexico time moves in a spiral. It went something like, “How else can we live in skyscrapers in the city while there are peasants living in the dark ages out in the country.” And that really struck me, this idea of how time moves differently for different people. I am also obsessed with fractals, something I got into briefly in Mona, and which were a sort of foundational principle for this novel. The Sonoros are like a shape that keeps repeating generation to generation. I was a history major, and I have a healthy appreciation for how history repeats itself over and over. I mean, Trump is running for president again. Don’t tell me time doesn’t circle back on itself.

IR: I’d love to hear more about this story’s relationship with your own life, as The Bullet Swallower is based loosely on your great-grandfather. How did your personal ties to this story change your writing process, if it did at all?

EGJ: I tell a story in my author’s note that I had a cousin who was a huge movie star in Mexico in the 1960s. He wanted to make a comedic movie about my great-grandfather, the actual Bullet Swallower, but when he asked my grandfather for his blessing, he absolutely refused. He didn’t want our family’s history in the public eye, nor did he want the character turned into a joke. And this story was on my mind when I was writing the book. My grandfather died before I was born, so I never could have gotten his blessing. But I’m a fairly woo-woo person and believe in ghosts and prophetic dreams and whatnot, and so as I wrote I was sort of on the lookout for signs that I should stop, that my grandfather was upset from beyond the grave, or that my great-grandfather had a problem being a protagonist. And I never got any signal that they were upset with me, so I just carried on. But this was part of the reason why I pushed myself so hard and rewrote the book as many times as I did - I wanted their ghosts to be at peace with the final product.

IR: Pulling back towards your body of work as a whole: though wildly different novels, I found the protagonists of Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower to have a charming commonality. Mona Mireles and Antonio Sonoro are both defined by the promise of what they could have been, some bright destiny waiting just around the corner. What draws you to these complex, desperate characters?

EGJ: That’s super interesting. I don’t find a ton of commonality between the two books, though I haven’t thought about it too deeply, either. I can see what you mean about how they both feel they were meant for bigger, brighter destinies. I saw Karen Joy Fowler speak a few years ago and she said she’s so hard on herself when she writes, and is never happy with a book once it’s done. She tells herself, Well, that one didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, but I’ll get it right next time. And I feel the same way. The book in my head is always so much better than the book that comes out. It’s ridiculous, because I can also sit back and appreciate that it’s a good book and is something I’m proud of. But I can’t stop that little feeling of disappointment that I didn’t do better, and a companion feeling of spiteful ambition where I vow that I’ll get it right with the next one. So maybe I feel some connection with characters who are never satisfied with what they have and feel like something better is just out of reach. That’s sort of bleak isn’t it? Haha.

IR: Finally, is there anything about your writing process or journey that you’d like to share with aspiring writers?

EGJ: Writing is a hard career with a ton of setbacks and very few external rewards. So my advice is to be kind to yourself and celebrate every victory. So you didn’t write today because you worked at your job all day and then had to come home and deal with your kids and only had enough energy to do the Wordle and watch five minutes of Colbert? That’s ok. The writing will happen when it happens. You might have to take weeks off, months, years. And that’s ok. In the meantime your mind is your own and you can be thinking, questioning, daydreaming, observing. Juan Rulfo, who wrote what is arguably the most influential novel by a Mexican writer, was a tire salesman who spent years thinking about his novel, Pedro Páramo, before he wrote it down. So please don’t beat yourself up because of some notion that you need to write everyday. And when something good happens, celebrate it. Don’t wait for something major. Celebrate every victory, whether you finished writing a chapter or even just did some free-writing for thirty minutes. This slowly strengthens the part of the brain that’s responsible for validating your own work without needing recognition from other people. And once you’re writing for your own pleasure, no one can stop you.

……Photo credit: Nancy Rothstein.

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The Man Who Swallowed a Bullet and the Woman Who Wrote About It: A Conversation with Elizabeth Gonzalez James

EN: https://therumpus.net/2024/01/24/elizabeth-gonzalez-james/

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I’ll be honest when I say that a historical Western is not my cup of whiskey, but Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster, 2024) isn’t really that. It’s an intergenerational magical realism Western with a splash of sixties silver screen flair and a garnish of philosophical questions about fate.

I often think about my ancestors, their traumas, and how much this impacts present day, so I was compelled to read about a “cosmic debt generations in the making.” Are we all paying for our great-grandfathers’ mistakes?

Inspired by her own history Gonzalez James does what I hope to do: craft ancestral stories into something readers might care about, like the whispers of betrayal and tragic deaths in the backdrop of political tensions. It can be challenging to balance personal stories with the conventions of any one genre that will hold a reader’s attention, but luckily Gonzalez James has figured it out. The former Rumpus Interviews editor plucks ingredients and tenderly places them in a caldron much like one of her characters, Cielita, to create an alluring mixture of page-pulsing adventure, family lore, and forgiveness. The result is a novel that pulls in the best of so many genres, making it an appealing read for a kaleidoscopic intersection of audiences.

I was delighted to connect with Gonzalez James over email about poetic prose, the importance of empathy on the page, and the profoundest thing someone can do.

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The Rumpus: In the author’s note, you write, “Everything is true except for the stuff I made up.” The character of Antonio Sonoro, the Bullet Swallower, is based on your own great-grandfather, but there’s so much that fills in the space between history and imagination. How did you balance bringing someone so fully to the page that is also tied to your own history?

Elizabeth Gonzalez James: This was a process that took three years. I started writing a rough draft in 2016 but didn’t get a full draft until 2019. I would write a bunch of pages, realize I didn’t like the direction I was going in, start over, write for a while, quit, and start over. It was a nightmare. All during this time, I was trying to write a true story using my great-grandfather’s real name and real history, but the story was very hampered by this. After he was shot by the Texas Rangers, my great-grandfather hid out in an encampment of former slaves and then reappeared in Mexico after a year and rejoined his family. I eventually realized that I didn’t want to stick to this exact story. I wanted to play around with magical realism tropes and Western tropes and add a whole lot of craziness because that’s what is fun to me as a writer and a reader. But I think I had to try it the straight way before I could try it the slant way.

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Rumpus: It’s paying off! In particular, so much of the various physical pain—like getting shot in the face!—and even the emotional pain throughout the book felt embodied. How did you tap into this?

Gonzalez James: As I am lucky enough to have never been shot in the face, I had to do a lot of imagining about what that would have felt like. I looked at a lot of photos of WWI soldiers who suffered severe facial wounds during the war, and I used those as a pivot point from which to describe Antonio’s face after the wound. I also read first-hand accounts of what it felt like to be shot or stabbed on places like Reddit. According to survivors, getting stabbed hurts a whole lot more than getting shot, for whatever that’s worth.

Rumpus: One aspect that struck me was the stunning language choices. Every line is beautifully poetic yet moved the story forward at a page-turning clip. Tell me more about your writing process. Are you one to think of a metaphor, for instance, and find a way to write around it, or do these come about more during the revision phase?

Gonzalez James: I sort of forget what it’s like to write a book as soon as it’s done—much like giving birth. You’d never do it again if you really remembered what it was like! I believe that some of what made it through to the finished book is the same as it was in the rough draft, and some of what’s there was reworked a million times. So in terms of the language, I’d say there’s a bit of both in there—sometimes a great metaphor comes to me fully formed, and other times I put in something cliched until I can come up with a more precise and interesting way of saying it in revisions. And yes, I do read poetry for inspiration, a habit I picked up from Cristina Garcia. She reads poetry for ten minutes before she sits down to write. I don’t stick to that exactly, but I do try to read poetry as often as I can. I have also evolved a practice over the years of writing until I get stuck and then picking up some knitting or crocheting—I always have several projects of either going on at all times—and doing that for a few minutes until I have the next line or two. I can go for several hours like that, writing and knitting and writing and knitting. I finished a whole blanket during revisions for this book.

Rumpus: While some of the political commentary about borders, racism, survival, and violent masculinity was hard to read, it’s necessary to contextualize the realities Mexicans faced—and still face. Were there self-care practices that helped protect your mental health during the years-long writing of these traumas?

Gonzalez James: I was writing the novel during the Trump years, when I had to see children in cages, heard college students screaming, “Build the wall,” and saw literal Nazis march through the country vowing that Jews wouldn’t replace them. And though I didn’t intend for all of this to go into the book, it went in anyway. I think it would have felt false to not include it. So no, there aren’t any self-care rituals to sort of lessen the pain of knowing that half the country hates you. But the book was maybe a self-care ritual, I guess. It was torture to write, but now that it’s over I’m really proud of what I’ve done, and I feel that I’ve really contributed something of value to the world. And that feels good.

Rumpus: Your book is described as a cross of Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Márquez, so I’m curious what other writers influence your style and inspiration.

Gonzalez James: I’ve drawn a huge amount of inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, and I can feel their influence in my work. Probably Marilynne Robinson too. Vonnegut is so funny and fearless, and I think we share a similar sense of the absurd. Saunders is absurd, too, and I love that about his work. In his essays and lectures, he also emphasizes the importance of empathy when writing. When he’s revising, he always asks himself, “How can I love these characters more?” That’s something I try to emulate. And Robinson is such an erudite writer who’s highly influenced by her religious beliefs and her intellectual engagement with these beliefs. I do that a lot, too, not in any conscious way in which to copy her but just because I’m always thinking about religion and God and spirituality and because I think the big questions are the most important ones.

Rumpus: Westerns tend to be white heterosexual cis male-dominated with plenty of machismo. What aspects of femininity are brought to counterbalance the typical landscape? Do you think this book will widen the door for others behind you so there’s more diversity in literature?

Gonzalez James: I had to sort of un-female myself a little in writing this book because I had to think as a man, act as a man, respond to problems as a man. Not just any man but a violent, macho man from a rigidly patriarchal society a long time ago. It’s not a perspective that came easily to me at all. I originally had a lot more female characters in the book, too, and an entire feminist arc that happened in 1964. Unfortunately, they had to be cut because they weren’t gelling with the whole. But for the women who remain, Jesusa and Cielita, I hope that I gave them a little more agency and pluck than a reader might expect. It’s hard because women in Mexico in 1895 were not afforded much freedom, and I couldn’t make them act like women in 2024. Still, I tried to do right by them. As for opening the door, hell yes. I would love to think I did that.

Rumpus: In the author’s note, you mention the importance of the library as a source for your research. Every page is well-researched without it being heavy handed— the way trains operate, the movie studio scene of Mexico in the 1960s, sex workers in the 1800s of Texas, the riot in Corpus Christi. I’m curious how all of this research stayed organized alongside your own family lore?

Gonzalez James: I used Scrivener to organize my research and to keep track of chapters and drafts. No exaggeration—I would not have been able to write this book without Scrivener. And sadly, I switched computers in 2021 and in the transfer most of my old files were lost, including all the research documents I used to write the novel. But I know I read something like fifty or sixty books and took notes on each one. It was honestly too much. I’ll never write historical fiction again.

Rumpus: Were some of the primary sources that you used in the book based on actual wanted posters, the fake book excerpt The Ignominious History of The Sonoro Family or the YouTube videos of your cousin Lalo?

Gonzalez James: The wanted poster and the Ignominious History were completely fictional, though it would be cool to pull a Borges and just start referring to Ignominious History like it was a real book. I did watch the film El Tragabalas (“The Bullet Swallower”) from 1964, though as I explain in my author’s note, the film has nothing to do with my great-grandfather. It’s cool to watch my cousin’s videos on YouTube, though, and to read the comments and see how much joy he continues to bring to the world. I was even at a folklorico performance in Oakland once and recognized a dance Lalo made up called the Taconazo—they were performing it in the exact same way and were even wearing the same style of Tamaulipecan outfit he used to wear.

Rumpus: This novel echoes some of your own family rumors that someone was outcast for pursuing the knowledge of their ancestry. How has your family reacted to you undertaking this project?

Gonzalez James: Unfortunately—or fortunately—my father and his side of the family are all getting up there in years, and they haven’t read the novel and may not be aware that I’ve even written it. I suspect that some family members would react the same way my grandfather did when Lalo announced he was making a film about my great-grandfather: They’d be angry and would say that it wasn’t right. I imagine others would give their blessing. The people I really wanted to do right by were the spirits of Antonio and Lalo. I wanted to tell a great story that they could be proud of. And since neither one of them has visited me in my dreams, I assume they are pleased with how it turned out.

Rumpus: The structure of the book is in four parts, with a prologue and epilogue, and, for the most part, we toggle between two timelines, 1895 and 1964. How did you land on this structure and pacing?

Gonzalez James: I always intended the book to take place over two or three timelines because I always intended the book to be split between what really happened and then the movie version of what happened. I also have the third perspective of Maria Rocha as she records the history of their family and meditates on what it all means. Jaime’s part of the story was originally much, much bigger. The draft I submitted to my agent was over five hundred pages with Jaime’s story taking up half the book. But before we went on submission, my agent told me he thought I needed to take Jaime out of the story. I was very upset to hear this, but I knew that he was right. So I took an axe and cut him out of the story. The funny thing is that when the book sold and I was discussing it with the acquiring editor, he said, “It feels like someone is missing from this story.” I felt my soul leave my body. In the end I put Jaime back in but in little pieces because his stakes were never going to match up with Antonio’s. I couldn’t give him the same page count.

Rumpus: Yes, Antonio definitely drives the story. He was viewed as a violent outlaw to outsiders, but readers get to know of the nuances of his motivations and emotional journey—and he’s funny! What does humanizing a person known for the worst thing they’ve ever done do for us as a society?

Gonzalez James: This goes back to what I admire about Saunders and Robinson, which is that they really value the humanity in their characters, and they have profound empathy for them. I converted to Judaism in 2021, and one of the things I’ve learned is that, in the kabbalistic tradition, it’s believed that all people carry a piece of God’s divine light inside of them. This has become a guiding principle of how I live and how I write. Imagine what it would look like if we believed every person had the light of God inside of them, inside of themselves. Recognizing the divine in others is maybe the profoundest thing a person can do.

Rumpus: The setting is a character itself—each sunset described here is unique, and one character, Remedio, says he remembers places by the sky. What role does place have in your writing process?

Gonzalez James: I grew up in South Texas, and Texas still lives large in my imagination. My family still lives in Corpus Christi, and so I’m back there all the time. I’m always trying to soak it all in—the sounds of the birds, the smell of the air before it rains, the rainbow of colors in the sky as day turns to night and back again. I absolutely love describing setting. I could describe it all day long. In the spirit of leaning into the strengths you have as a writer, I try to make setting another character when I write and try to make the picture as vivid for readers as I can.

Rumpus: One theme of this book is time and how it’s not linear but spirals like the “echoes of another’s memories living within us.” How did you manage your own time and writing practice during this project?

Gonzalez James: My writing practice for this book was very rigid for as long as I could sustain it. I had little kids, and I would have to wake up at five in the morning sometimes to squeeze in a couple of hours of work before they woke up. In 2019, after deciding to re-outline and rewrite the entire book for the umpteenth time, I gave myself a pretty rigid schedule of, I believe, writing one chapter every week or every other week. When I re-outlined the book, the outline I came up with was twenty-two pages single spaced. I told you the draft was over five hundred pages! But I sat in my chair and had a finished rough draft after nine months. Just like giving birth. Now I would really like to write every day, but life keeps getting in the way and I’m trying to manage my expectations and be kind to myself. But ideally, I would like to spend my mornings exercising, doing chores, and answering emails, and then spend my afternoons writing. Someday, hopefully, I’ll get there.

Rumpus: Jaime Sonoro, the son, is “struggling to understand his history, to find his own light self in the murk of his ancestors.” Was the idea of understanding or claiming your history motivation in writing this novel?

Gonzalez James: Yes, I believe so. I’m Mexican American, and Mexican history, as well as the history of Latin America in general, is full of tragedy, violence, genocide. It’s weird being Mexican because you’re the product of both colonizer and colonized. You carry both histories inside you, literally, in your blood. In my genealogical research, I found out I had ancestors who were Spanish royalty, who owned silver mines in Mexico, and I found out I had ancestors who were slaves stolen from West Africa. When I write about “the murk of his ancestors,” I am speaking about myself, absolutely. We all probably carry some version of this. And the novel directly asks the question, “Knowing this, can we be better?”

Rumpus: Within this murk are shameful secrets that the grandfather Juan Antonio wanted to keep hidden for the sake of protecting them. Was writing this as fiction more freeing and fun than, say, a memoir about excavating your past?

Gonzalez James: I’m a fiction writer because I like to make stuff up. It’s just more interesting to me. But I think at some level, I’m always writing about myself. You know how Frida Kahlo did all those self-portraits, but sometimes she’s a deer, or sometimes she’s bleeding to death, or sometimes she’s just a beautiful face framed by flowers? I think I do the same thing. I’m always only writing about myself, but I’m hidden up inside my characters in a way that’s sometimes overt and sometimes not. I am planning a future novel about my mother’s side of the family, a dark and twisted tale of family secrets and snake handling set in the eerie badlands of suburban Detroit.

Rumpus: Whether it’s personal legacy or the larger history of a people, what do you hope readers, or perhaps even your own family, will take away from your book?

Gonzalez James: I hope they’re entertained. That’s always my goal. I’m asking people to turn off the TV and stop scrolling TikTok, so I have to entertain them. In terms of a takeaway or a lesson . . . I don’t know. I guess I would hope they get a better understanding of the border, of Mexican people, of the history of violence inflicted on Mexican people by white Texans. But what a reader takes away from a book is entirely up to them. That’s what makes it art: that people interact with it, take it in, make it their own, add their own personal experience. What they take away from that experience isn’t for me to say.

Rumpus: Antonio had sidekicks along his journey, but he felt lonely. As writers, we can feel isolated in our pursuit of a long project, including the time spent just thinking about it, in our heads and perhaps frustrated with finding the right tone or voice or structure. What community did you have along your ride?

Gonzalez James: I have an amazing writers group, the Lady Riders. Some of them were there when I wrote the first word of the first draft, and so they’ve seen the book in every possible incarnation and all of the messy steps along the way. They are enormously talented and are also some of my best friends, and I am so, so, so lucky to have them in my life.

Author photograph by Larry James

Christina Berke

Christina Berke is a writer and educator based in Los Angeles. She’s working on "Well, Body": a memoir in vignettes on body image, eating disorders, and childhood trauma. An excerpt of this was longlisted with Disquiet Literary International. Say hola at www.christinaberke.com.

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The Racket