Guest Post By Lucrecia Guerrero
Daniel Chacón |
“Mexican moment:
on a morning run, I pass a café not yet open. Mexicans clean with water hoses, blaring Banda. My stride turns into dance,” Daniel
Chacón recently tweeted. Yes, tweeted. A person who can observe and write such an inspired comment
in the immediacy of the moment is clearly an artist, one destined to
write. His artistry is not
limited, however, to writing. Chacón
is also a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a photographer/journalist
(www.soychacon.blogspot.com) and co-hosts, with Benjamín Alire Sáenz, on the
literary radio program “Words on a Wire” (KTEP.org). He has published one novel: and the shadows took him. To his credits add three short story
collections: Chicano Chicanery, Unending
Rooms, and most recently, Hotel
Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops.
In a recent
interview with me, Chacon described his circuitous route to creative
writing. In high school, Chacón
read dramas voraciously, especially those of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Attracted to “character-driven” dramas, Chacón understood, as he read,
that what “drives plot, the meaning, the themes of the play is character and
character need.” But although he enjoyed reading plays, he did not consciously
think of becoming a writer. When Chacón
graduated high school he had a blueprint for his future: major in Political Science at Fresno
State then continue to law school and fulfill his ultimate goal of attorney at
law. He would be a “responsible
citizen.”
Then during his
last semester at Fresno State, on a lark, he signed up for a class in
Fiction Writing. Chacón states emphatically that from
that moment he has “never turned
back.” Like the characters in all those plays he read, Chacón had
found his “need,” the need for artistic expression through the written
word.
Chacón
now passes on what he has learned about writing to students in his Fiction Writing
classes at UTEP. When I told him
that some teaching writers feel that teaching drains their creativity, Chacón
states that his teaching “reinforces and strengthens [his] position as a
writer.” He feels fortunate to
teach at a research institute where he is not required to teach outside of his
specific genre. When selecting
examples of published works for his class he selects those works which have
writing elements similar to his own.
Because Chacón has been working on a memoir for several years, he has
taught many courses on the memoir, assigning memoirs that he feels he can learn
from.
Although Chacón is
currently working on a memoir, for his fiction he finds himself increasingly
drawn to short pieces and to poetry.
Clearly this is not an artist who settles. Chacón described the stories in his recently published Hotel Juárez as “passages linking one
small room to another, creating an entire floor if you will, giving shape to a
story.” A definition which could
also describe Chacón’s development as an author, a complex artist whose talent
is composed of many different stories, rooms, and loops. As he continues to build his body of
work, we will watch as he “strides” and “dances” from one room to another. With the years, who knows what shape
the whole may take.
Unless otherwise noted, all the quotations are taken from my interview
with Daniel
Chacón: www.elpasotimes.com/.
. ./author-daniel-chac-n-work-interconnected-flashes
Lucrecia Guerrero grew up on the U.S./Mexico border, and her writing reflects her bicultural and bilingual upbringing. She has lived in the Midwest for years where she continues to write and facilitate writing workshops. Her short stories and articles have been published in various literary journals. Chronicle Books publishedChasing Shadows, a collection of connected stories, and more recently her novel Tree of Sighs was awarded the Premio Aztlán Literary Award.
Daniel Chacón, along with Melinda Palacio will be at Beyond Baroque, Sunday November 17 at 2pm, Open Mike to follow. Hosted by Jessica Ceballos. |
Upcoming Events for Daniel Chacón
November 17 at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd, Sunday, 2pm.
(Hitched Series hosted by Xochitl-Julissa Bermejo to follow at 5pm)
December 6 at the Nopal Festival in Austin, TX
December 9 with Jonathan Klein at Octavia Books in New Orleans, December 9 at 6pm
For more Information contact Daniel Chacón at imaginarywater.com
Lucrecia - thanks for this about Daniel. I agree, he is a "complex artist" with a great talent. For more about Daniel, here's the link to my interview of him back in April: http://labloga.blogspot.com/2013/04/daniel-chacon-and-hotel-juarez.html
ReplyDeleteLucrecia: welcome to La Bloga as a guest columnist! mvs
ReplyDelete