Dagoberto Gilb is the author of a novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna (Grove Press, 1994), and two collections of short fiction, The Magic of Blood (Grove Press, 1994) and Woodcuts of Women (Grove Press, 2001). A collection of essays, Gritos, is forthcoming from Grove Press in 2003. Gilb has won a Whiting Writers Award and received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. His stories and essays have appeared in places like The Threepenny Review, Harper's, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and DoubleTake. He teaches in the writing program at Southwest Texas State University.

Bill Kirchner teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles where, he writes, he "still thought of 'book' as a verb" until "the end of his teenage years." After getting degrees in religion and philosophy, Gilb worked construction for a decade and a half and lived for some years in El Paso, Texas. During this time he banged nails as a union carpenter by day and banged out stories by night and during periods of being laid off. He placed dozens of these stories in journals and magazines but, after a decade of constant publishing, he still had no book.

Finally, in 1993, The Magic of Blood was published by University of New Mexico Press. The following year, Grove Press picked up the paperback rights along with his novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna. The Magic of Blood won the Texas Institute of Letters' Jesse Jones Award, was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and received PEN's Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. Mickey Acuna was a New York Times Notable Book and Guggenheim came calling. After so many dry years the prizes, fellowships, and recognition began to rain.

In the citation for PEN's Hemingway prize, judge E. Annie Proulx says of The Magic Blood that "the reader tumbles into a Southwest world of bills and debts and being laid off, of old trucks, paychecks that bounce, greedy landladies, fights, cheap girls, drugs, unemployment compensation, difficult bosses, color of skin, language games, a hunger for work. The stories are leavened with compassion and humor and there is not a shred of sentimentality. The Magic of Blood marks the introduction of an important new voice in American literature."

Reviewing The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna in the Los Angeles Times, Luis Rodriguez writes that "Gilb's gift is in telling stories of regular dudes and dudettes, common folk and working class fools who are actually wise, intelligent, and closest to the human emotions others try to escape from. He tells their lives without a lot of glitter and glamour, in the voice of such people, rich lived-in voices you have to pay a listen to."

Whatever Dagoberto Gilb's stories are about, work is a constant presence in his characters' lives, in either the background or the foreground, whether they are doing it, looking for it, or avoiding it. In a piece penned for the Steinbeck Centennial that appeared in the New York Times. ("Sentimental For Steinbeck," March 18, 2002), Gilb writes, "Many have criticized Steinbeck -- he's sentimental, he's melodramatic. I remember thinking this, too. But if that's so, even if it's only that, here at the centennial of Steinbeck's birth, I'm sentimental for him now. Because so many people, and so many writers, have left behind or never learned respect for manual work, for people who carry and use tools for a living and get calluses and chapped hands and dirt under their nails, who bend and stoop, people who work by the hour or the basket, who build and fix things, who dig and plant and pick. The literary world is a powerful suit-and-tie business, and the well-dressed stories that editors look for are too much by writers whose game is played as professionally as a Harvard M.B.A.'s, whose marketing goals are not meant to cause readers to step outside the privileged cubicle to see who's sweeping the floor in the hours after they've gone home."

In the piece you wrote for the Steinbeck Centennial you talk about how, despite his failings, he understood things that too many of us have forgotten. Among those "that the West is not the East, that the West is a land unique and ruggedly beautiful, as are the people from it." What is it that the rest of us don't seem to get about the West that you live in and write about?

I just got off the phone from Michel Serros. She's writing for the George Lopez show. She's the only Chicana on a crew of 12 writers, and she was telling me how she has to battle for the simplest things -- what we take for granted will be challenged and questioned as though they know more about being Mexican-American than she does. They say, I talked to my housekeeper, and she says . . . That's Hollywood, where money is power and dictates "knowledge," even when it's cultural information they have hired her for.

That's similar to the literary world. Which is New York. New York publishes, so New York determines what is valuable and important. If you're publishing in New York, you're a national writer. If you give a reading there, it's a national reading. It takes much more for a writer not in the massive lumen of its city lights to be seen, and when a little light is shined in the wilderness of the West, they come at it with simplistic stereotypes -- what Los Angeles is, what Texas is, who Mexicans are, who Chicanos are, etc. (When you say desert, the image of cactus is a saguaro to those who don't know deserts. But a saguaro cactus is unique to Arizona, to the Sonora desert only.)

One other thing: I think living in a city is different -- it's about pavement and buildings and machines. You can barely see the sky. But in the West there is sky, nature is a leading character -- a mountain, a river, wind, sun, heat, rocks, dust. If, as an editor, this is something not in your life, it's not something recognized as interesting.

When I finish reading your stories I always feel like I've just been someplace, like if I were driving near the border and I came up on Romero's house from "Romero's Shirt," I would know it immediately. I'd recognize the El Paso neighborhood, the yard with the rocks lined up in the dirt to make a walkway that leads to the "tile and one-by tongue and groove overhang" of the front porch and its old furniture. Or I could be Jake from "Love in L.A." and be stuck in my car "slouched in a clot of near motionless traffic, in the peculiar gray of concrete, smog, and early morning beneath the overpass of the Hollywood Freeway on Alvarado Street." But wherever the story is, El Paso or L.A., it always exists in that very particular landscape and never in the non-geography of ideas. Not that your stories don't have plenty of ideas, especially about the problems of race / class / sex etc. But your writing reminds me that I can only understand those things by absorbing the small and not so small particulars of people's lives as they unfold in front of the backdrop of the places they live in. Is that why the connection between the landscape and your characters is so close in your fiction?

It pleases me that you bring this up. So often I will be reading fiction I don't dislike but I don't find myself caring about, and I've discovered that what's wrong was lack of place -- a fine coincidence that you tell me I have so much place in my own. What I think is that "region," any definition of that (to me, that can even be generic suburbia -- even if a part of me questions whether, ultimately, a suburbia is even generic -- that's another, longer discussion) is part of a story. Place should be considered as though a major character -- or the character's surrounding at least being defined by it. If it is a titanic wave, or a windstorm, or heat that curls asphalt, or perfect weather, that is important to a story because it has to be important to the character's way of seeing and talking.

I say place also defines in that it confines -- it's a restrictive form for fiction, like a sonnet has a certain number of line, etc. Place restricts, defines. I say this like it's an intellectual decision I make -- which is horseshit. I guess I'm making it sound that way because yours is an intelligent question. I pay attention to place in the same way I pay attention to people, to story. It is the story too. Being in Guatemala is not the same as being in Missouri or Spain or Germany or Texas or Mexico. Being in El Paso is not being in Los Angeles -- unless it is, in which case that's what I write about too. I like to read fiction that is set somewhere. When I read, I like to be there. When I am in another city, country, I am conscious of it, and I love that. I expect the same when I read.

You spent 16 years working construction. How did this shape your imagination and your stories?

I have no imagination, can only reinvent. I have no idea what writers who write from some office, whose life has been school and school, never having a loser job for a way long time, never having had a fight, never having anyone scary dangerous mad at them, never hit or been hit, never been fired, never quit, never desperate broke, never wandering wild thrilled or wild scared, always knowing what they are doing, planning this, planning that, being oh so perfect. Oops. I went off.

Writing is about where you've been, where you've come from, not only what you believe. Because what you believe is shaped by experience, and experience teaches by surprise, by sudden, unexpected blows, not reasoning, not by being clever, not by working plot and ideas. Lots of writers work this way, and lots of readers buy their work. Those are stories I might call based on prescription, not description. I can't do it, don't understand the game. I see myself as much as a journalist in this respect, a reporter, except I use "fiction" to tell the story I am learning because the information I am gathering isn't workable in the other way.

The story I am interested in is the one the surface story is paralleling, what it's really about that can't be verbalized another way. It reflects the journey that I find my life course is on. This idea of writing out of imagination, it fascinates me in principle. But if I worked from the ideas like that I would chose another profession, maybe one that made money. Those writers who work from "imagination" I think do that, because it's about gathering an audience, readers, making them want to read how clever, how smart, how deep. Not that I don't have similar practical wishes, but I write because I feel fucking nuts, that I have to put it down or my life will be digested into even worse shit. Or because I am so fascinated I am trying to make sense of it. Do I want readers to enjoy? Absolutely. But not by my wit or plot but with my discoveries or whatever someone might call it. This adventure. This mystery. I am logging notes and then I try to put something around those notes and make a story out of those and sometimes it's as though I've even captured something, and I surprise myself, shock myself for doing it. Always I am amazed at my need and want of it.

Okay, now to the answer to your question. I worked construction and it was a lot of year, years enough for children to grow. That's a lot. It's funny how even as I have said that, nobody really gets what that means about me as a man and a writer. If you were in the military one year that can be considered what you did for a life of conversation. But working, now, in these times. It's like, so what? Construction, the workers in it, getting up in the mornings, the union halls, all of that, that is still how I see work. I got into construction work because I always had to work. I have always had a job. Even in college, I would have at least one, sometimes four jobs. College, like writing, was what I wanted to do, but I always had to make money. After I graduated, I did construction because I could get that work and not others. I am big, and I could hump material until I learned the trade. I liked the physical work, getting tired. And I learned. I got to be a journeyman carpenter, union, and I was good at it and I am proud of that and still am. Writing to me is like construction work. Building. The rest of this metaphor discussion is easy.

English departments in general, and writing programs in particular, can be absurdly bourgeois places at times. What is it like to go from writer/carpenter to writer/teacher?

Weird. At first I didn't think I could handle it. I'd sit there, listening to what was being said, as though writing were some kind of dull geology course, and I (I don't sit still, I'm almost a frantic fidgeter), and I would tell myself it's only another hour or so, then it's only another 45 minutes, then it's only another . . . etc. I knew something was wrong then. If you shut your eyes and listened, you realized that someone listening, not having read the stories, would not be able to distinguish between being in a discussion about the best story ever read or the very worst. I thought I would lose my mind, my brain would blow all over the walls, my juices dry up -- that was the dust on those shelves. I'd force myself to calm down, remind myself that anyone I knew, worn down, banging nails, working cement, hard work, would say shut the fuck up, are you insane, you have the best job? And I'd listen to that advice -- I needed a job really bad and I had one. Because I could make in those hours what I would have to struggle to earn working 50 hours a week all year.

I didn't think I could do it. But I also loved going to college. When I got there, I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. Everything was news to me and I loved every subject. And so I try to do now what I loved then. Make it not "yawn yawn" but learning, what is great. I have learned a lot. I love books, I love reading, my favorite ethnic group is smart, and so I try to talk books and writers I love and try to learn while I'm there and I do too. Students who like me like me. Students who want a "mentor" who will hold their hand and talk them through their work or help them birth some inner self, I'm like, uh, sorry, find someone else.

So anyway, they hired a writer (I didn't take any English in college except those freshman comp ones, and the first time I flunked it and had to go to a different junior college, at night, to pass -- got a B in fact, then), and though I have helped at least four students get published -- two books -- and have gotten no bad student evaluations ever, teach freshman comp even, even though I have published more than I would bet the senior faculty combined, they just told me I am turned down for promotion and tenure. They thought I wasn't neat enough. I filled out one of the forms in ink, I was shown. I don't go to the meetings. I don't hang out. I write things and get them published, but they're not happy enough. That's what it's like to be at one of those places.

The dedication page of Woodcuts says, simply, "as a prayer / for love / to be forgiven." Forgive me for going all Oprah on you, but was there something personally redemptive about writing these stories? What are those eight words about?

Yeah, well, I went through . . . let's call it a little trouble. I tumbled and fell and almost ruined myself but I am struggling to get back up and work my way toward heaven. I want my children to love me as much as I love them, I want them to not be too ashamed. I don't know if I will or can be forgiven. I want to apologize, not make excuses. I have no good explanation for why my life spills out and over, why I am as I am. I am apologizing here as well. Woodcuts is about love. It's about loving women. I write fiction.

When I bought Woodcuts of Women I was standing in the bookstore and had just pulled it off the shelf when someone behind me said that she'd just finished reading the book. I asked her what she thought and at first it was the usual stuff about the stories; she liked the characters, the language. But then she said that what she really liked was that the book was sexy, that you weren't afraid to write sexy. I asked her what the hell she meant by that and she said that she was tired of reading cleverly written stories about love and sex that were so cold. She said that people get together for a reason and that there are always problems, but that people have their little moments and we should get to read about those too, in real stories and not just the phony version on crappy TV shows or in pulpy novels. She really said those things and then disappeared, I swear. If any of that means anything to you, what do you make of her reaction?

I'm plain complimented. Because around me, especially around Texas, where Chicanos are considered stupids, brainlessly driven by hormonal and native root juices -- where my Woodcuts book was only about cheap sex, men after women, you know, how we "Latin" males are. It was discouraging to me because I thought that, though yes I was dealing with a subject that can be puerile or cheap, can be commercial TV or "high" movie, I though I was trying to be honest, to look at love as close and carefully as I could as a man, as a literary writer -- as someone whose life has been lived with women. My best friends, the people closest to me, my mother. I need a woman, I am unhappy without a woman near me who I can listen to or share with or lean against. The stereotype of me I mostly don't understand. Like I wrote the book to score babes.

You published dozens of stories and wrote for years before your first book, The Magic of Blood, came out in 1993. What and/or who kept you going?

Disease. Instead of drugs, or alcohol, I write. I am not exaggerating. Writing destroys jobs and stains relationships just as those others -- particularly when you are younger, beginning, pushing forward. Was I bitter because I couldn't publish a book like I dreamed? Oh yes. I am tenacious though, and thought I was telling good stories, and once in a while I even thought I'd written something, if not good, unique. The rejections got tiresome. I was redeemed when the University of New Mexico published (I gave the book to them initially as an act of defeat, concession, that I was not going to "make it," that my work would be like archival material, not literature, because I couldn't get the big publishers) what New York would not, could not imagine was good or valuable. When the book started winning prizes, I didn't feel like celebrating. I was so relieved that I wasn't completely delusional about my own work. It's bad enough that you feel a little too different all the time. It's not as bad when "different" means you got something others didn't or couldn't. It's hard because fiction isn't -- shouldn't be -- preachy and banner-driven. I couldn't tell if I was too subtle (though I thought I was fictionally obvious) or I was plain wrong.

I know your work from your books, but in nosing around for this interview I found that you've recently been anthologized in the Grove Press pantheon alongside Beckett and Genet. Your stories are appearing more and more in creative writing, contemporary literature, and Chicano Studies textbooks and anthologies. I can even buy essays about you on those internet cheat sites where college kids go to purchase papers for their classes when they don't want to actually write them themselves. What does it feel like to have your writing put out there in those contexts, to know that you're being read and taught?

It's amazing. If it weren't for Grove Press books, I wouldn't have wanted to be a writer. Grove was always about the outsider, the not acceptable, writers who didn't have an edge. That it was kind of "hip" I didn't know about -- for me it was writing that wasn't ordinary, by writers who didn't know how to live ordinary either. Genet -- Our Lady of the Flowers, A Thief's Journal -- he's so great. He meant so much to me because he wasn't "good." It's hard to explain to people who don't understand what it meant to someone like me that a writer would write about not being perfect. He wrote about the forbidden, the unacceptable, and it meant everything to me. John Rechy's City of Night. Kerouac. Burroughs. Beckett. Octavio Paz. Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. I used to look around, stick those books down my pants, and walk out carefully, that's how much I loved them.

To the other, my work making the reprint world, well, I wish that meant more sales -- so I didn't have to deal with, e.g., this job situation I find myself staring at. Interesting that you, there in Pittsburgh, would bring up what nobody here in Texas seems even to know about, let alone appreciate enthusiastically. I hope that, if not sooner, not long after I'm dead, that my children's children will be able to read people who have grown up like them in books, be treated with respect and admiration -- what I feel like your question gives me, which I genuinely thank you for.

You have a collection of essays coming out next year. How close is writing fiction to non-fiction for you? What made you want to put together this book?

Yes, Gritos comes out next year, in the spring. I actually think fiction and nonfiction aren't so far apart. Fiction tells a deeper truth than "reality" telling can -- it is closer to myth in that it is about seeing a pattern, an image that resonates past a "real" moment. An event is not THAT event, but one we all know. Nonfiction also has its resonance too, but the fascination there, for me, is the detail accumulating in such a manner that it is a biology, like going through an organism and being struck by how it all fits so magically. And, where fiction alludes, without a march on the streets, a rhetorical essay can throw blows.

I put the book together because I realized I had a lot of pages, and there was a larger story being told: About a working man, a Chicano, coming out of a construction site hole, dreaming of being a published writer, who becomes one, only to find the other battles that are American.