Ana Castillo makes me want to write. She makes me want to be a writer. To be honest, I am definitely reading as a reader. I have always read as a reader. I am pretty passive in my reading as well. I am also fairly easy to please. I love books. I love to read. Children’s books, YA Lit, fiction, non-fiction, self-help, instructions, recipes…seriously, I only wish I had more time to read read read! For this class, we are supposed to read as writers and I guess the fact that I have never really considered myself a writer might be getting in the way of that. I have always felt that people would probably not be interested in what I have to say. Or perhaps I am just not creative enough. I am hoping to change that view of myself, and this class was the first step in that direction. I am very good at getting lost in books. I am easily brought to empathize with characters I meet. What I have not learned to be very good at is extracting craft from the work. I am not very good at figuring out how the author drew me in and made me empathize with those characters. The subtleties and layers that I know reside within the pages remain within the pages. I am not a very good detective.
When I read Teresa’s letters to Alicia, it is like I’m there (or at least I enviously wish I was). I feel the words as I read them as though the scene is unfolding before me. The letters make me nostalgic for a nostalgia that was never even mine, wistful for memories I’ve never even had. However interesting I think the recounted history of travels is, it is the complex relationship between the women that makes me wish I was a part of their experiences. The torment and joys of growing into women, traveling unprotected, living unapologetically, one with the other, sounds so beautiful when recounted through Teresa’s poems and lyrical prose. Through this form, Ana Castillo makes the most average, the most frightening, the most horrendous experiences all seem beautiful. The young women’s experiences may not have all been wonderful, but they were all part of a learning journey that arrived them at the destination of themselves. If I could learn to steal one thing from Castillo, it would be her ability to turn even a bad experience into poetry. I don’t know if it is the tone she manages to find or the pure quality of her language and word choices. Perhaps it is both, and more.
Her language is honest and raw. I wish I could achieve that quality in my own writing without sounding contrived or vulgar. To be honest and raw yet still poetic and beautiful seems a wonderful trick to me, a gift I hope to achieve as I try my own hand at writing.
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