Interview | Author Manuel Muñoz is not a token

  

FULL DISCLOSURE: Not only is Manuel Muñoz a good friend of mine, he’s a brilliant writer. We traded emails with Muñoz recently. He has a new collection of short stories out, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. Before going off to Harvard and Cornell, Muñoz grew up in a small blue-collar town you’ve never heard of in southern California. I say this because his work often chronicles the complex four-way intersection of Chicano and Latino and Literary and Gay — and because he has been both shunned and lauded for tackling those unseemly hush-hush subjects. As we expected, Muñoz’s responses are both engaging and thoughtful — if not thorough. We discuss what it means to be a gay writer anymore — or a Latino writer — or a Chicano writer who happens to be gay — or any and none of the above. – ANTONIO CERNA

What attracts you to short story writing? In both your collections Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and Zigzagger the stories are closely linked by character and place and theme. So, in a way, they read like a novel.

I’ve always been attracted to stories. Like poetry, short stories can keep offering you new ways to look at lives and situations in such superb variations of style and form. Novels usually can’t do that—novels tend to have one, established set of rules for how their particular narratives will work. Story collections can have ten. I’m working on a novel now, actually, but when I began Faith Healer, my first book had yet to even be accepted as a manuscript by Northwestern. I was working through a crisis of faith, confounded a little by the success I’d had in publishing individual stories in journals, but having no takers on the actual book. I began to wonder if it was even in the cards. I remember distinctly waking up one Sunday morning in September 2002—the 14th or the 15th—a very humid morning. I woke and ate breakfast and cleaned the kitchen, then started to mop the floor. The whole time, I was thinking about writing, if it was worth another shot, then I decided at that moment to just start a new collection. The three brothers in one of the stories from the first manuscript were in my head, and I began there (”The Good Brother,” in fact, is the story I began that September morning).

What was that like?

Slowly, the neighborhood began to take shape, but there were so many stories percolating that it was impossible to make them a novel. That would’ve required a whole different kind of structure. I focused on the stories alone. Sometimes a character who had already appeared made a cameo of sorts, and it became very easy to start imagining scenarios working this way: the neighborhood became very real to me. The stories came at an alarming rate, one idea sitting in my head ready for me to start on it as soon as I finished the story at hand. I think that soothed a lot of my typical insecurity: previously, I had always been nervous that a story idea would be the last one I ever had, that I might go months without direction. But knowing I had something up my sleeve allowed me to take my time, allowed me to pace the story at hand and finish it completely. It made the draft of the collection and subsequent revision incredibly easy. The novel, on the other hand, is much more difficult. It feels expansive and unwieldy and there are no ways for me—even with chapters—to feel as if something is being rounded and shaped so close to final that I don’t have to look at it again. The process is longer and more frustrating and it’s only when I get to the end of the entire draft that I will be able to look back and see what kind of structure has been put into place. With the stories, I was doing that every few months and I miss that reassurance.

How has your sense of what your doing as a writer evolved since Zigzagger?

I’ve learned a lot about being patient with a story and with the characters behind it. I found myself asking if the basic architecture of a story was in place before I began: that is, I asked myself if there were others characters who could tell the story, or if the story might be better served as a first-person narrative. With my first book, I found myself placing the control of language over everything else in the makeup of a story, probably as a reaction to the poetry I was reading. I wanted my stories to mirror how poems worked (at least in the inarticulate, fiction-writer’s way I approached them). With Faith Healer, I reminded myself that fiction has other elements that it must offer a reader besides language. Character became very key to me: these had to people who I truly believed in. In real life, I find that we rarely show a whole lot of empathy toward people, toward strangers, especially if they are not like us. But the more we are able to learn about them and their lives, the easier it becomes to open ourselves to hearing their experiences. So I worked on that. Latino writers–or any writers outside the mainstream—face a huge obstacle in obtaining readerships because of the unspoken assumption that these stories are only for these communities. But good, strong writing—particularly in characterizations—can trump all of those assumptions.

In what ways do you or don’t you think of yourself as a gay writer? And to what extent do contemporary “metropolitan” (i.e., white, urban, middle-class) sexual identity categories fit or not fit the world you’re writing about?

The phrasing of your question anticipates my answer: I don’t really think of myself as a gay writer anymore. I say “anymore” because, before my first book was published, I was listening to what press editors were saying about my manuscript: Latino audiences would not be receptive to these characters. That left me with only gay lit as any kind of safety, so I imagined myself as “belonging.” But when Zigzagger came out, Latino readers responded quickly, yet the book was difficult to find it in gay bookstores. It was hard to find a review (except for OUT).

 

 

 

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SIDE BAR: Emily Drabinski of OUT wrote, “Muñoz is the real thing—with prose both beautiful and quietly sad, he draws a compelling picture of the complexities of home.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Even Faith Healer failed to show up when it was released. These omissions really stung, especially when gay bookstores champion so many small-press authors. I wasn’t expecting any kind of praise—I just wanted to be part of the dialogue—but that didn’t happen. It should not have been a surprise: the literature is largely white, urban, and middle-class (and male, let’s not forget). If you’re an outsider to any of those categories, you’re going to have a set of concerns that are incompatible with that readership. And while I’d like to think that these readers are more open to other experiences, that clearly isn’t the case. I’ve had conversations with other writers of color about this, and it’s a tough situation to be in. Do we fight for inclusion by upping the ante via writing, producing the best work we can and defying the literature to ignore us? Do we submit to anthologies and broaden the scope of what’s considered a queer writer in this country? I’ve turned down offers to submit to anthologies for that very reason: I’m incredibly conflicted with the narrow range that queer lit has written itself into, and I refuse to be a token. But it requires a great deal of courage to be a writer who demands these barriers be broken down. I honestly don’t know if I have that kind of stamina to keep fighting against this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But writers of color—queer or not—have always faced this kind of exclusion, and we’ve trained ourselves to be better readers and writers for it. We read across the spectrum, across the genres, across the literary forms, and throughout the ages, looking for connections wherever we can, because “home” isn’t what it’s been promised to be.

I think that’s why those writers of color who achieve a certain level of prestige command so much attention—they keep reminding us that the narrow scopes imposed on them are not any kind of boundaries at all. They write beyond them. And in doing so, they place their respective literatures into the uncomfortable, but necessary, positions of answering to their initial exclusions: witness Baldwin, Anzaldua, and Lorde.

 

 

 

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Read more about the author at manuel-munoz.com

Read homo-neurotic’s Lambda Book Report review of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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