One character in Loverboys, Ana Castillo’s new collection of short stories, is a successful writer, despite something she calls the “thing,” which comes into existence when “all the voices of those who call writing a craft, who speak grammatically correct, who studied with this name or that one, well up in my head and tell me once again, each time I sit to do it, that I have no business doing what I’m doing. I don’t have enough credits, awards, no Guggenheim, no South of France-New York poet in residence, nada, hombre. It’s just me, desperately cutting an unknown path with a machete, trying not to remember but writing it all down anyway.”
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Castillo, like the character, is a “self-taught writer.” “I didn’t trust going to writer’s school,” she says. Early in her career there were few prominent Chicana writers to inspire her or to serve as mentors. In the intervening 20 years, Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, and others have brought Latina voices to the forefront of contemporary American literature. Castillo attributes these changes to decades of activism as well as to a steady chipping away at the old order.
Throughout the book Castillo delivers painfully detailed yet often comic insights into all kinds of pursuits. In “Crawfish Love,” a saleswoman accidentally reveals her attraction to a gruff waitress and describes “feeling something that I had not felt before . . . something like discovering you still have your name tag on on the street, but worse, more like a combination of the name tag, a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe when you’ve come out of a public restroom, plus, maybe, discovering afterward that you had a little spinach lodged between your front teeth.”
–John Sanchez
