No. TWO

SANTIAGO JOSE SANCHEZ

Brooks Earlier this year, you were in Los Angeles for AWP [Associated Writing Programs’ Conference and Book Fair] and one afternoon we were driving in my car, talking about our lives, and you said that when you were younger, you wanted to be a writer so you “could be judged on your own scale.”

Sanchez Mmhmm.

Brooks Tell me what that means to you.

Sanchez I think this is something I started doing in college. Boy, I wasn't thinking of being a writer when I was any younger than that.

Brooks Oh, really?

Sanchez Yeah, this was in college. I think that came about from feeling like all these things that I was good at in high school, all the things that had gotten me to college, I was no longer good at them.

Brooks Such as?

Sanchez Science and math, all those other parts of my brain that I was really focused on. I don't know, I felt like I was almost following a script that was laid out for me, and the script was you're a brilliant scientist, the son of a microbiologist and an engineer, and these are the next steps you take. But I was finding myself just less interested and realizing that my brain was just not actually meant to work in those fields. And I was trying to figure out what do I do without that? What else do I like? Photography and writing were the two things that l felt pretty clear to me as desires and passions, but I didn't know how to shape that into a career or what that would look like in college.

Brooks What kind of writing had you done before college, before you chose to pursue writing?

Sanchez In college, I was writing these little autobiographical, but very dreamlike….I don’t know, maybe I called them flash fiction pieces. That was kind of the first steps of me imagining a writing practice that took from my own life. I tried to make something a little whimsical, a little darker, a little bit more…I don't know, not quite reality. One of them that I remember was  about this boy, with whom I share some coincidences, named Elián Gonzalez…

Brooks I remember him, he was all over the news.

Sanchez He was the same age as me, and he lived in the same neighborhood, and I think we moved to Miami to that neighborhood the summer that he was being taken back to Cuba. Something about that story obsessed me. It was almost like a parallel life.

Brooks That could have been you?

Sanchez Yeah, almost something like that. Two boys in the same area whose lives are moving in opposite directions. Something about that felt very meaningful and I think writing about it was maybe the first time I felt like I could do something with these memories, these stories that seem to overlap and have parallels. Fiction seemed like the only way to explore that. But in terms of being judged by my own scale, I did always feel like I was very good at moving through a system and recognizing what I needed to do and who I needed to know. I was good at being judged in these ways that felt objective and really real. I was a super overachiever in high school.

Brooks You were a good boy.

Sanchez I was a really good boy…and then I didn't want to be a good boy anymore. I was like wait a minute. There are other people around me who aren't good or trying to be good in the same ways I am.

Brooks Oh, God. I know that feeling so well.

Sanchez Yeah. I think I first started by trying to write in a more academic way through anthropology, and that was such a good halfway point between those two worlds of science and fiction, which seemed so far away from each other. In anthropology, you could write about yourself, but it was still through this distance...there is some sense of being like an insider and an outsider, like you can see the thing from the inside and from the outside, like you have this special position. That felt really true to my experience of my life and my surroundings. A lot of the writing I did there was good and I was recognized for it, like my professor could see what I was trying to do. But in thinking about fiction, fiction was what I wanted to do. I didn't want to feel like I was creating knowledge, I didn't want to do something practical. I wanted to be able to make this thing whose value was very subjective.

Brooks Interesting.

Sanchez Yes. And I think that plays into individualism and wanting to feel special for who I am rather than trying to shape myself into this thing, into what I already know special looks like.

Brooks Right. You’re not doing what you're supposed to do because this is what your family tells you to do, what your school tells you to do, what society tells you to do. All these might be fine things, but maybe those things aren't right for you.

Sanchez I think in writing, you still are judged even though you aren't judged as you would be in a normal job, but I don't think you can ever truly escape being judged against other people. I had this fantasy of fiction that I could do this thing that could help me escape judgment or comparison, but that's not the way the world works.

Brooks Had you read much fiction before starting to write it in college?

Sanchez No, I hadn't. I had read a lot of YA books. I've taken a lot of literature classes and gotten a pretty good idea of the history of literature. But I was never a passionate reader or much of a curious reader either. I think partly that was because what I was being shown, what I was being told to read felt like homework and felt so far away from my life that it didn’t feel real.

Brooks What were you being assigned?

Sanchez I remember reading The Tale of Genji [Murasaki Shikibu, c. 1021], one of the first novels ever and I was like okay, cool, this is really interesting, but wow, it’s so old. We weren’t reading anything contemporary. I think maybe The Bell Jar was as close to the present as we got.

Brooks Oh wow. There is obviously a lot of the canon that one reads in school, but I guess I was lucky in high school. We read Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.

Sanchez Oh.

Brooks That was in the mid 1990s.

Sanchez Wow.

Brooks I was lucky. It was a public school, but I had good English teachers who were progressive.

Sanchez It wasn't until college that I began to love reading and began to love books. Part of that was just finding gay books.

Brooks Yes. What were some of those gay books?

Sanchez One of the first was Garth Greenwell’s book Mitko, which was this little novella that came out before What Belongs To You. Some English professor gave a copy to a friend and the friend gave it to me. It was this little book that we passed around that we all thought was incredible. There was also Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and Richard Siken’s Crush, which is poetry. It was these three gay books that I was so obsessed with in college. I think the things that connected all of them were that they were playful with language and less about plot and more about character and expressing psychology through language.

Brooks And you also saw yourself reflected in those books.

Sanchez Yeah, they were a bit of a mirror. They are also aspirational, they were speaking to this life that wasn’t about being “a good boy. “All of them have this naughty, sinister edge. Then I was also like hmm…

Brooks You thought Oh, you can write about this?

Sanchez Yeah, and you can live this.

Brooks Exactly.

Sanchez And, to be clear, I was never truly “a good boy.” I was good at playing the good boy, but I always had this double life where I was a naughty Queer boy. But by day I was a good boy. [laughs]

Brooks And this is reflected in your first novel Hombrecito.

Sanchez Yeah. Part of writing that book was trying to put those two lives in the same space. I think it kept coming back to fiction because it did feel like a medium where it is about creating a space that can hold as much as you can put into it.

Brooks For sure.

Sanchez All of these parts of my life were so separate, and it felt so exciting to put them on the same page and see a wholeness where in my actual life that wholeness was more difficult to perceive, where it felt more fractured. But in writing I could be all the things. I didn't have to choose, and it was better when it was all the things.

Brooks It's endlessly open.

Sanchez Yeah. That freedom was so mind blowing and kind of addictive. My first book Hombrecito felt so interested in this question of how do you live a life as a Queer immigrant person? and I feel like I have an answer for that question, and that is the book and it's my present day life. I’m trying to figure out now what questions I'm interested in. I am trying to figure out what want to write about, because I do feel interested in similar questions, but I don’t know if I can keep writing in a way that is partly autobiographical.

Brooks You will figure that out. I think that part of that feeling, if you’ll permit me, is due to your age. You're young and you've accomplished a lot. You've written an excellent novel that was very well received and now you’re working on your second book. I think it’s totally understandable that the first things that you write will largely be autobiographical because, even if your work isn’t explicitly autobiographical, you are still loading up your experiences, making some kind of record of them, however fictionalized they are.

Sanchez Yeah.

Brooks But then, as you move through your career, you've already done that, right? So you're not necessarily going to do that again. You will have new experiences, but you'll also find new ways to write, find new ways to think about writing. I also think, however, when you ask the question how do I live as a Queer person, how do I write as a Queer person, how do I work as a Queer person—you obviously figured out the answer to that in some way, because you’ve been doing it—

Sanchez Yes.

Brooks But that feeling, that question…I don’t think there is ever any real arrival at an answer. As you move through life, you constantly have to reassess, as an artist and as a human being. You never quite have the answer firmly in your grasp. I think that's why we keep working.

Sanchez Oh, I agree with you. There's this metaphor that I've heard people say that there's a point in writing a book where you reach the top of the mountain and you can see the way down, you can see what's on the other side. I'm very much lost, very far away from the top of the mountain. I don't even know where I'm headed, and it's such a different feeling than what I used to feel like. I feel so far away from who I was ten years ago when I first started writing Hombrecito. I guess I am being surprised by the strangeness, like how you can become a stranger to yourself, or how this thing keeps becoming, this thing as in life. No, there is no resolution. Or it's always gonna be a little strange, no matter what.

Brooks I think that's how life is. I think there are certainly moments of clarity and moments where you are able to understand something about yourself or about living, and as a creative person, hopefully that aligns with a time in which you're able to somehow concretize that through making work. But that feeling, that strangeness, I think that's just the nature of existence. But again, I think it is exactly that that compels you to keep writing, keep painting, keep exploring, keep trying to find new ways to work and to live.

Sanchez Yes.

Brooks So you're working on a new novel centered around the mother from Hombrecito.

Sanchez Yeah. I'm working on this novel that takes place several years after Hombrecito where the mom has this farm that she's been trying to make work in Colombia. She has this dream, this future home for herself and her retirement. Right now, in the writing, I’m finding so many challenges for her. All these things that make this farm not the perfect place for her; it’s not what she thought it was gonna be. She’s still fighting to have this fantasy of this place, but there are so many things that keep bumping up against her fantasy. I'm still interested in this idea of being an immigrant and having this other world, this other nation, this other language. She doesn’t actually have another life there, but she has the fantasy of another life there, and sometimes that’s enough to make your actual life bearable. But to sustain it, you do have to face the realities of it, and there are so many challenges.

Brooks Are you experiencing this with your mom in real life?

Sanchez Yes, in some ways. But in the book, I’m writing about how the mom has to actually face that other life, the farm in Colombia. Keeping that fantasy alive takes a lot of work. That’s what I’m interested in right now with the story: how hard you have to work in life. But there are so many other ways, too, where I am feeling out where the writing is going. I'm interested in the farm as a metaphor for another life, but I'm also interested in these autobiographical questions for the character, like I’m trying to figure out what are her questions. She who is not me but who is kind of playing my proxy. There are ways in which I’m writing in one direction with the questions that animate my mind and then there are these other moments where I realize oh wait, wait, wait, wait, this mother character, she is really here in Colombia to be near her mother and to reconnect with her sister and to try to bring her family together in some way. It has required more of imaginative acts to center and develop the story through her, through the mother, instead of through me.

Brooks The mother narrated a chapter in Hombrecito.

Sanchez Yes. The section at the end is narrated by the mother and there are ways in which I feel—not that it's an inauthentic rendering of her mind and character—that this is very much still through the lens of Santiago. And it makes sense in that work because it's a whole novel centered on Santiago, and in the very last moment you get to see, perhaps, what he imagines his mom is going through. But in this new book, I'm trying to let it be more centered around her. I'm having to think more about mother-daughter relationships, the relationships between sisters, and there is an element of play and discovery that is making it exciting to work on. Doing this is introducing other things that weren't there in the first book, which is something that I'm actively pursuing. I want it to be different than the first book, and right now I’m figuring out how to do that, or I am reflecting on what I did in the first book and thinking how to do it in a different way.

Brooks That's a lot to manage as you also try to write good prose.

Sanchez I know! I'm trying to balance it out and find some system that works for me because doing all those things at the same time is kind of overwhelming and paralyzing.

Brooks It is paralyzing to think about that many things at once. I think you have to work in sections in a way, like okay now I'm writing, literally writing and then you go back with the various lenses: are the relationships authentic, is the dialogue authentic, is it different than how I wrote before, and so on. You can't do all of it at once.

Sanchez Yes. It helps me to teach. I really love teaching, and any time before I start a semester I really think about process in order to feel prepared to talk about that with my students. The thing I've been trying to hold on to is that being creative does require periods of action and reflection, and it’s necessary to let those two things be separate when you are just writing. There has to be a time when you’re not thinking too hard about it, when you're letting that intuitive part of your brain work. You have to be able to shut out the reflective part, which is stronger in some people than others. For me it is a very loud voice. I am figuring out how to live and write with less reflection and more action.

Brooks In the right moments.

Sanchez In the right moments, yeah.

Brooks Having written a book already, is that something that gets easier over time, or could it even be harder this time?

Sanchez It's harder this time. Maybe I thought it would be easier, but I feel it is definitely harder. I think this is part of what it’s like just building a career around your art. It's as if there's more weight on it the longer you're working. Right now it feels as if there is pressure on me and this second novel to be good.

Brooks You’re releasing your “sophomore album.”

Sanchez Yeah, and it's supposed to come out in less time. I do know I just need to live more life and experience more, because like you said, with the first book I had a whole lifetime of experience to write about, and now I'm sitting down to write and sometimes I feel a little trapped having to be like okay, what's happened in the last ten years of my life and what could I turn into a story? I guess there is a fear that I won’t live my life in a full way because I'm thinking too much about how to tell the story of what I'm experiencing and living right now.

Brooks Yeah, that's a lot to think about.

Sanchez How do you keep that separate in your brain?

Brooks Making and living and reflecting?

Sanchez Yeah.

Brooks It's very challenging, especially as someone who works in multiple disciplines. I am a writer and a visual artist, although technically in the reverse order, I suppose. On one hand, I'm very grateful to have both of those avenues because there are times when an idea feels destined for words and and there are other times when an idea feels destined for the visual realm, but on the other hand, it can be so difficult to manage. I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, and truth be told, I've pursued a lot of them, I am pursuing them, but my desire to make more never ceases. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything I want to do, which is sort of good but also an exhausting way to live.

Sanchez I see that.

Brooks The number of things that I want to do and am doing are an issue in terms of being able to focus more directly on one thing. I am focused, and I work all the time, but sometimes think ok, maybe if I were only a writer, then I would have had more things published or if I were only a visual artist, maybe my career would be a bit further along than it is. But there is no way to know that. I am grateful for my gifts and skills. In the end, I come back to this place where I feel like if those things are a problem, they are a temporary problem and not a bad one to have. They’re a problem now, but in the long run, I know that I'm building a substantive body of work both with my writing and my visual art and that at some point the merit and volume of it will be apparent and undeniable.

Sanchez Yes.

Brooks At least on the best days that's how I feel. It is difficult to continue to push ahead with your own vision while still being cognizant of criticisms or responses from viewers or readers. Part of maturing as an artist, though, is learning how to take those comments and analyze them without letting them crush you or paralyze you. Instead, you figure out how to synthesize the feedback in ways that is useful to you, and that can only come through experience. There are things I know about myself and the work I'm making and the work I want to make that I didn't know a decade ago. Someone could have, back then, given me some criticism that might have really paralyzed me, and now I very well might get the same reaction from someone and I can easily dismiss it because I know okay, I don't care about that. But there are other things that may come up repeatedly in ways that show me I need to pay attention to them and try to figure them out.

Sanchez Okay.

Brooks Does that make sense? That was a lot of words. [laughs]

Sanchez No, it is helpful. It makes sense.

Brooks Good.

Sanchez I know I need to work more.

Brooks I think that is the only answer. The only answer is making the work. There is no other answer. That doesn't mean, of course, you have to work twenty-four hours a day.

Sanchez Right.

Brooks You need to live, you need to relax, you need to go to the beach, you need to kiss. Living will affect your work. But you do have to literally be sitting at the typewriter sometimes. [laughs] I’m sure you use a typewriter. [laughs]

Sanchez Right. [laughs]. Do you ever feel afraid of your own work?

Brooks In what way?

Sanchez I don't know…I think there are some things I know that I want to write, and then I ask myself why haven't I written them? I feel like the answer I come back to is fear of the pain, fear of having to find words for things that are painful.

Brooks That is something I understand well because there is a lot of pain in my work, or it is often referencing pain, or born from pain. My work in the last decade has become much more personal, much more reflective of my life. I think the work is so much better for it, but it is often difficult to make it and to share it because of that closeness, that realness. But I do it because it feels totally necessary. I have made some work, both visual and written, in the last few years about some of my relationships, and one relationship in particular that has meant almost everything to me, and it has been so hard to share that and also so hard to constantly live with those feelings through the making of the work, but I felt as if I had no other choice than to do it. Or if I had chosen to do something else, I would have been denying both my desire to make this work and, as I saw it, the knowledge that this is the work I need to make. The response to those works in particular has validated my choices; speaking of both the poems and the paintings, works about this person often get the strongest reactions, and people tell me they have so much feeling. Yeah, no shit, I want to say.

Sanchez I hear that.

Brooks Not everything is not autobiographical, but there is so much autobiography in the work. I don't know how to work otherwise.

Sanchez Right.

Brooks I have an ongoing fictional…project…let’s call it a project. There is a lot in there that's fictionalized, but there's also a lot in there that’s based in reality. I don't think I could ever work completely from fantasy.

Sanchez I don't think I can either, but one of the things I have heard in the last year from several people is the comment I'd be so interested to see what you would make if you weren't writing autobiographically.

Brooks But what does that look like? Let's say you decide to write a book about, I don’t know, a straight cattle rancher from Colorado who also races in monster truck rallies.

Sanchez Oooh, okay. [laughs]

Brooks I'm just making this up. [laughs] Whatever it is, it is something that seems very far from your life. We might think Santi doesn’t know about that. That’s not Santi’s life. Fine, the details of that book might be comprised of things that are totally alien to you, but the novel is still going to have human beings, interpersonal relationships, they’re still going to be formed by your mind, through your lens. The words you put on the page are still going to be reflective of your humanity, your experiences.

Sanchez Yes.

Brooks Even if you decide, okay, my personal philosophy or my feelings about life are X, Y, Z, and I'm going to make this book ABC, that is still somehow reflective of you, isn’t it?

Sanchez Yes, that’s a good point.

Brooks I think at some level, the artist is always present, and to me, that's a great thing. I recently saw this comment on Twitter where this guy was saying something to the effect of reading fiction is such a waste of time. Why would you ever read fiction? Why would you want to read something that somebody made up when you could read non-fiction, when you could read history, which shows what actually happened and what people actually did? I just thought that was the most narrow-minded, idiotic way of looking at the world, dismissing fiction because “these things never happened.” This is obviously someone who is ignorantly in denial about the profound power of art. And anyway, even if you are reading about George Washington crossing the Delaware, that book is the product of an author, and it’s the product of choices—what to exclude, what to include, and how to frame—made by a human being.

Sanchez Yes. In the first book, I did the writing without ever really questioning any of that, and now that question is in my head. It feels so silly to entertain that question or to fixate on it. I feel like I am questioning the value of what I'm making in a way that I wasn't questioning before, and I don't know why.

Brooks I think it's necessary and valuable to be introspective and self-critical and present in that way, but I also think you will never be able to completely remove yourself from the making of your work. I think trying to do that or expecting to do that is a totally futile endeavor. You matter, your experiences matter. Who you are matters, and that's why whatever novel you write, whatever painting I make, that is not a novel or a painting that someone else can make. That alone doesn’t mean it’s good, of course, but only you can make what only you can make. I think there is meaning in that, and it’s worth pursuing.

Sanchez Yeah. Wow. I feel like this turned into a therapy session for me and my heart.

Brooks I’m so glad. I love this. We have to be here for each other. I also think this is great for people to read, whether or not they are artists. It’s good to read about the questioning and the doubting. It’s so essential to the making of the work. I don’t think it gets easier to make.

Sanchez I don’t think it does either. I’m now in my early thirties, and I am feeling like oh, life is more cyclical. I keep learning the same things. It isn’t linear; sometimes it all feels very familiar to me and I feel have I not grown?

Brooks Yeah, didn't I fix this? Didn't I figure this out?

Sanchez You did. You figured it out, John.

Brooks [laughs] I don’t think so. But if you are asking yourself that question, I think—if you're kind to yourself—you will see that you have learned things and that you have made progress, and that there are things that you know now that you didn't know then, and there are things that you don't know now that you thought you knew then. I am in my late forties, and for me, that’s the part that has been such a shock over the last ten or fifteen years. Not that I thought I had mastered anything, but there are things I thought I understood about living or about being an artist or about love or about longing or other things and I have found that I’m not so sure. I guess I thought living, moving through time, would be more like I can bank that knowledge and then move forward with that, but is it like that? Some of that is true, of course. We do learn and carry knowledge and experience with us. But it’s not wholly cumulative in that way, at least not for me. It's always a few steps forward and then a few steps sideways and one step back. Nothing is perfectly linear. Not to be too Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now. [laughs]

Sanchez We’ll revisit you in ten years. [laughs] What will be the things that you look back on?

Brooks Yeah. [laughs] That’s a good question. Talk to me if I’m still around.

Sanchez I will. You will be.

Brooks So you just moved to Pittsburgh and you are going to be teaching at Carnegie Mellon.

Sanchez Yeah.

Brooks What are you teaching?

Sanchez I'm gonna be teaching Introduction to Fiction and an advanced fiction workshop.

Brooks Amazing. Can I ask what you're going to be teaching, or is that a secret?

Sanchez No, there's a gag order and I can't say. [laughs]

Brooks Could be, I don't know the ways of higher education these days. [laughs]

Sanchez I've broken it down into a system. I like to begin with really short things and work up to bigger short stories.

Brooks Finishing with The Tale of Genji. [laughs]

Sanchez [laughs] Yeah, we don't get that long. I've never been one to assign full books. I'd rather read one or two stories and really talk about them, or even read them together. I'm teaching a lot of my favorites. Jamil Jan Kochai has been someone that I keep teaching. He writes these really beautiful stories that play with form, and they're all about the same sort of family, except they're a little bit different in each story. He plays with that tradition of a linked short story collection, and that's the way I like making too, thinking of building something larger out of pieces. That feels really familiar to me. I’m also teaching Danielle Evans; I love to teach her. She writes a lot about adolescents, and her new book feels very contemporary. It deals with technology, with social media. The way that we all live online now is a big part of her book and that's something that I also like think about. Working on my new book, this mom character also lives online, and that’s new. Ten years ago, the online world felt like it was only for young people. Now, even if you're like in your sixties or seventies, a part of your life now is virtual.

Brooks Whether you like it or not.

Sanchez Whether you like it or not. Right now, I’m having my students read a lot of fiction that's literary and by that I mean I'm trying to get them to feel things about existing and living. The questions that I'm interested in are like how do we live without knowing how to live? and how do you make a life in a world where the life that is available to you isn’t the one that feel like the one you want to live?

Brooks Big questions.

Sanchez Yeah. I love teaching stories about characters that are sort of trapped by their circumstances, and there's almost like a magical thinking or an escapism to these characters. That feels even more true now. There are ways, in my day to day life, in which I can kind of disassociate from the political moment that we're in, and make it feel less than real. But when I’m in a classroom, when I’m talking to young people, there is like no escape from that reality. They feel more vulnerable than I do. And they make me face the fact that I'm also vulnerable,  too.

Brooks Right. And they also don't know anything other than the way that it is right now. They don't know that, just for example, it's not normal in this country for the President to say that national museums must resubmit their displays to make sure that they meet his values. They don’t understand how insane that is, how insane all of this is. They don’t have any history to fall back on.

Sanchez Exactly. And here I am with them in this classroom where I’m like let's talk about fiction.

Brooks Except, dear Santi, that some of the answers they need—and we all need—are in fiction, in reading and writing fiction.

Sanchez For me, the answers are in fiction, and, and I want them to see that. I want them to see fiction as this space where you can fit anything. I think it's the best tool we have to face moments like this where reality is crumbling. How are we supposed to ask these questions in any other form? I don't know.

Brooks It's clearly not working asking these questions in other ways, such as having a dialogue in the media or on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.

Sanchez Yeah. Maybe we just gotta start tweeting like Trump does. It's so crazy. Gavin Newsom is now tweeting in the same way. What? Where are we going?

Brooks It is so weird, but I guess that’s the point. I'm glad at least that someone is saying something back. Will it do anything? Who knows. Newsom is certainly not without criticism, but I’m glad he’s fighting back.

Sanchez He has all his faults, yes.

Brooks Yes, but it has been so evident over the last decade that trying to do what worked thirty years ago—or even fifteen—doesn't work.

Sanchez Right.

Brooks I don't know what the answer is, but whatever we're doing isn't working.

Sanchez Definitely not.

Brooks If it was working, that motherfucker wouldn't be there.

Sanchez Real.

Brooks Let’s leave Trump for a moment and return to your writing, the physical act of your writing. When do you write? Where do you write?

Sanchez I usually write at home, whenever I feel like it, I'm not disciplined. I procrastinate a lot, so I often reach these moments where I'm like okay, if I don't write right now, I'm gonna die. So I like coming to writing or I do come to my writing office with a sense of built up energy and pressure and I write incessantly. I'll build up to those moments and then I'll spend the next two or three days doing nothing but writing. And then I take some breaks to live and to reflect and read and then I come back to it. Something really hard for me to do is just sitting down to write, so paradoxically, when I finally do that, it’s also hard for me to stop because I know that this state of mind is difficult for me to achieve. Once I'm there, I don't wanna leave it.

Brooks I understand that.

Sanchez I just get really caffeinated. I don't eat a lot, I just focus on the writing.

Brooks Do you write with music or not?

Sanchez I'll do music but I’ll repeat the same album or the same song.

Brooks Oh, you write to music with lyrics? I can write with classical or ambient music, but I cannot write to anything with lyrics. Painting is different. I need music.

Sanchez I listen to stuff with lyrics but I stop hearing it after a while.

Brooks Because it's stuff that's so familiar to you?

Sanchez Yeah.

Brooks Like what?

Sanchez It always changes. I'll play something over and over again until my brain doesn't even process the sound anymore, it’s just this background noise filling up my sense of hearing so that I feel a little more focused and present. I don't want to  hear the space around me. I don't want to feel like I am in my apartment. I wanna feel transported, and hearing the same thing over and over again does kind of lull me into another world. Sometimes I'm like wait, is this like the most sustainable way to work?, but I do love the feeling of being completely absorbed in something, and I think it's a really rare feeling nowadays.

Brooks Certainly.

Sanchez And it is a hard way to live life, with a job, with responsibilities. I go through periods of dedication and then complete detachment.

Brooks All of that sounds pretty typical, I think. There’s nothing about writing or making artwork that’s easy and straightforward. For many people, myself included, I think it's an overwhelming feeling, an overwhelming state, and because of that, there will be times when you’re like okay, I'm really working and then I cannot work for one more second.

Sanchez Yeah. Good.

Brooks You’ve just moved to Pittsburgh and another life change is coming.

Sanchez It is?

Brooks Yeah, your boyfriend is moving in.

Sanchez Yes, Robbie is moving in with me, and that's something that feels really new for me and for my life. I was single through my twenties and was writing this book [Hombrecito] with a really deep sense of it being the first book of someone who's on their own and that was reflected in the characters, especially the main character, who is fiercely independent and an individual, almost to a fault sometimes. I'm feeling…I don’t know…challenged in a lot of these beliefs about myself through being in a relationship, and the idea of cohabitating with someone feels really new. That's something that felt really absent from the first book; every relationship felt very passing and temporary, with the exception of like Santiago’s relationship to his mother.

Brooks Oh, how interesting.

Sanchez And now the idea of being interdependent with somebody else feels new and interesting to me, and I'm finding various ways to explore that in fiction. I’m thinking too, about my mother's relationship with her husband and that's also something that's coming into the writing. I’m thinking more about the giving up of control over one's own life to live and experience life with somebody else. That feels like something that has never been a part of my life or process when I was writing the first book. I’m curious to see what else happens. I am thinking so much about relationships.  I keep coming back to the idea that I'm trying to make a life that gives me the stability and love I want, and these are qualities that makes life and writing bearable, but I am unsure about that same stability. It isn’t something I have had, and is it comfortable on me?

Brooks Yes. Wondering if you can make work while feeling so safe and stable.

Sanchez Yeah, and the push and pull of that too, the feeling of pushing back against that stability. But in order to push, you need to have something to push against, and it's interesting now having something that I can push against.

Brooks You all have been together for how long?

Sanchez Almost four years.

Brooks But you haven't really lived in the same place.

Sanchez No, we haven't. We’ve lived a couple of summers together now. But it'll be the first time that we're really living together.

Brooks Exciting. When does he come?

Sanchez At the end of August.

Brooks And he's coming from New York City?

Sanchez Yes.

Brooks To the big western metropolis of Pittsburgh.

Sanchez Yeah, we're gonna go full Appalachian over here.

Brooks The city of bridges, right?

Sanchez So many bridges. They had all the steel, so they made all the bridges.

Brooks It’s quite beautiful.

Sanchez Yes, it is.

Brooks Here’s to domestic bliss and good writing.

Sanchez Yes, absolutely that.

Other Swans Conversation No. Ten

Santiago Jose Sanchez (b. 1993, Ibagué, Colombia) (they/them) is a queer Colombian-American writer and educator. Their stories have been published in McSweeney's, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale University and former professor at Grinnell College and Oberlin College, Sanchez now teaches fiction at Carnegie Mellon University. Hombrecito, their debut novel, is now out from Riverhead.