I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.

Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

The writers who have been serious about recreating American literature have always been far and few between. What we do have at the end of the 20th century that we didn't have at the beginning, at that time of the Lost Generation of rich white boys, is a mixture. We're now getting gay writers of color, let's say, and women of color being published. This is unprecedented.

Whatever it is that people find that they want to work on they also have to remember that they are human beings and they need to save some time for themselves for personal growth, for mental health, for their families, their loved ones so that they will have the strength to continue doing that work.

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.

There are things coming from me that I felt I wanted to talk about. My search for my own blend of spirituality, my acknowledgement of my sexuality, my being the single mother of a young man.