In my English classes, I often share several Sandra Cisneros essays and short stories.  My students seem to like both the writer and the woman behind them.   They connect with Sandra’s background.  She beat the obstacles of racism, sexism, and poverty in her world to become both an influential writer and activist.  Here is something I didn’t know: When Sandra put the finishing touches on her breakthrough book The House on Mango Street, she was not writing it in her hometown of Chicago, nor was she in Iowa or San Antonio, or San Francisco.  She was writing in her house on a Grecian island.  Jaja.  I know this because I’m now reading Sandra’s memoir Una Casa Propia: Historias de mi vida.    She begins the first chapter of this book with life on the island of Hydra.  She left the security of her writing programs and her writing friends to finish her book in a place no one would distract her.  In this book, Sandra invites us behind the curtain of her writing.  Very Cool!   We get to see her process.  We get to meet the characters from the stories we love.   I may have five or six of Sandra’s books on my shelves here in Mexicali, and I clearly remember I was there for the first one – Mango Street – when it came out while I was in grad school.  Nobody I knew at the time in any of my classes was reading many women or anyone of color.  Since those days, Sandra has become an important voice in American literature.  She writes with both poetry and dignity about her culture and sexuality.  She speaks honestly about her fears and her dreams.   I’m reading a lot of Sandra these days, for I believe classroom discussion of her life may inspire students to elevate their own writing.

I’m just getting started reading Una Casa Propia/ A Home of My Own in both English and Spanish. 400 pages.  Reading in two languages takes a lot out of me, to go back and forth from one to the other, but I would feel ashamed if anything I wrote here came out negative.   Sandra gives an intimate, detailed account of her writing life.  This book is like a biography of her writing process.   First, Sandra wrote much of her best stuff by hand;  then, she typed it all out on a portable typewriter.  This was BC.  Jaja.  Before Computer.  This book is dappled with pictures of Sandra in her writing stance: at a desk; in a patio; on top of a roof — all with her trusty journals in hand.  Why the “House” in the title?  Sandra says she has arranged this book like a “house.” When a reader opens up the book, each chapter opens up into a room.  Hallways connect her experiences.  There are stairways to take you higher…

I like reading of Sandra's relationship with her typewriters. In writing this book, she shares her life-long dreams of becoming a writer  -  with a typewriter and a house by the sea.  Remember:  Before Sandra, there were few women of color to become celebrated writers, so Sandra didn’t know how to do it.  How to live the life.  Like everything she did in her life, it seems, she chose her own path.  The typewriter became the only thing she could trust.  She devoted more importance to her typewriter than she did to her lovers. (That’s not  my inference; She said that.)  I’m not crying how slow I read in Spanish, when I read how painstaking slow Sandra wrote to get things right.  She would write her ideas over and over in longhand to the  point she could no longer read her own handwriting: ”Then I’d type the page clean again from the beginning, a process that repeated itself over and over , and which I enjoyed, because it allowed me to hear  the text, like a composer listening to music inside his head.”  I know.  I know.  I should have read Sandra’s book from beginning to end before I write about it here, but I just couldn’t wait. Currently, my semester is dwindling to an end.  Summer will soon be here.  I relate with Sandra’s struggle to find her own “space” to write what she wants to. She’s bent on sharing her personal experiences with her readers.  In real life, she’s often lonely and fearful, that is until she positions herself behind a typewriter.  Sandra provides a nice change from what my students are used to in their English courses.  I want to give them material they can relate to.   I mean diversity speaks, but you don’t have to be a Mexican or a woman to enjoy Sandra’s stories.  

Joyce Carol Oates is a writing machine.  She’s written over 50 novels and 36 short story collections.  When I say write, she writes her first drafts in longhand.   Some of these first drafts might reach 800 pages before she does any editing.  When she was  an undergraduate at Syracuse, she is legendary for completing a novel and then turning it over and writing another one on the back side. “Life is energy, “ she says, “and energy is creativity.”  

So, here is my favorite Joyce Carol Oates story: She wrote a novel about Detroit while she was living in London.   For me, it’s not what she wrote, but it’s how she wrote it. She came up with her idea running in Hyde Park.   Joyce is a self-admitted running addict.  She doesn’t do drugs.  She won’t event drink tea (because of the caffeine.)  But, she can’t go a day without running.  She says it’s when she gets her lungs pumping and her heartbeat racing, she connects with her inner spirit.   I suppose this is her runner’s high.  With most of us, we lose touch with reality, with Joyce, she creates a new reality.  Running fuels her writing.

At the time, she was living with her English Professor husband on his sabbatical  in London.  Here she ran, not for any creative inspiration, but for her homesickness.  She ran compulsively.  She believed that only running would allow her to feel like herself.  I’m not sure exactly of how it worked for Joyce .  Was she running along the lake?  Did a famous Hyde Park statue speak to her? Somewhere through her run,  she began envisioning Detroit streets, buildings, and expressways.  Her heart beating, the images became so clear in her mind.  Each day she returned to her London flat and wrote her Detroit novel  Do With Me What You Will.   How does she do it?  For her, writing is life. To stop would mean to extinguish her human spirit.

I don’t know the level of relationship between Sandra and Joyce.  I see that they share a space in an anthology titled Five Short Stories by Women.  I connect their dogged determination to stay true to themselves.   “Write your heart out,” Joyce says in one of her memoirs I have here on my shelves here in Mexicali.  “Never be ashamed of your subject, and your passion for the subject.” I enjoy reading about the beginnings of Sandra’s writing career in the famous University of Iowa writing program. Her stories were good enough to get her into the best of the best schools, but that didn’t mean she would feel comfortable or confident in her classes. She felt lonely and isolated from her wealthy, all-white classmates. When she would read passages from her House on Mango Street, she didn’t receive the respect or understanding she expected. Her poverty-stricken barrio in urban Chicago was a world away from anything her classmates had ever experienced. Sandra once said, “My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.”

I hope my students will discover the same things I do in the writing of Sandra and Joyce.  The writing decisions you make are all yours. Don’t be ashamed or intimidated. Take on your writing projects head on. Let your voice be heard.  Sandra and Joyce were both shy and awkward, but their writing set them free.  Your writing is your “juice.”