My last stop on the magical realism tour of the world is South Africa. Andre Brink’s Imaginings of Sand is an epic tale of several generations of white women living in rural South Africa. As in most of the Latin American tales, the political climate plays like a soundtrack to the magic that happens throughout […]

When I think back on it, I really don’t know what to believe about things my ex-boyfriend told me. His brother said to me after we broke up, “S- is the biggest liar I know.” Of course, at the time I was dating S-, I believed everything; I was under his spell. His youngest brother […]

Oh my gosh. There’s babies poppin’ out everywhere!
I slip back to northern Mexico with The Hummingbird’s Daughter where Teresita Urrea was a mid-wife and a healer. The book starts with Teresita’s own birth, and we see so many babies born through her eyes and her gentle, but strong hands. She brought life wherever she went, […]

Like Amy Tan herself, her main characters are Americans. They lack any insights into the spiritual world because their land is shiny and new, whitewashed and sometimes superficial. It is only back in the old country that we see spirits come to life, in a land with centuries of custom, tradition and ancestors who watch […]

We write together, me and my man. The way we’ve worked so far, he writes the first draft, the bones of the novel, and I come back behind and fill in the flesh, bring it new life. It’s kinda the way Banky and Holden create comic books together in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. Holden does […]

We arrive in China by way of San Francisco following Olivia and her half-sister Kwan in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. Living on a sphere, it is sometimes easier to travel West to arrive in the East; and halfway around the world is a further destination than all-the-way around the world.
East and West are […]

When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.
We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s […]

Another story that takes place in Northern Mexico is Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It’s a tale of being enslaved by tradition, and the quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions against the chains that bind.
It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, with lots of festivities happening around town. It’s not a huge tradition in Mexico, but here in […]

In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea takes us on a journey more than a thousand miles north of Colombia. We start in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico with the Urrea family and The People. From there we travel north again to Sonora, follow holy men into Chihuahua and even venture beyond the Rio […]

My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit […]