Family tragedy, invisible groups, and naked wiccans with Luis Alberto Urrea

It's the season finale!

Happy TBM season one finale! This has been such an incredible journey and I am grateful to each and every one of you. But before we part ways for a few months, enjoy this episode in conversation with Luis Urrea about his mentorship by Ursula K. Le Guin, the tragic stories that shaped his life and his desire to tell stories, and the power of little miracles that we should all be attuned to.

Books On Tap

For the last episode, I sat down with my dear friend Luis Alberto Urrea discuss writing family in fiction. Luis is a multi-genre talent, having published pieces in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “The magic of words” is something he fully believes in, and what it means for him to have a platform is touched on as well. I highly recommend his latest novel, Good Night, Irene.

#FridayReads

Our #FridayReads are plentiful this week, with Persuasion by Jane Austen, Fantastic Pacific Crucible by Ian W. Toll, Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs, The Bone Orchard Mythos Tenement by Jeff Lemire, Young Goodman Brown and other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, Brushback by Sara Paretsky, Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson, Dragged Up Proppa by Pip Fallow, and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett.

Canon or Can It

John Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath may be a classic no more- listen to this weeks’ Canon or Can It.

Six Recs

My Six Recs this week are about regional truth: The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bettyville by George Hodgman, and The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang.

Find me on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: Across the Wire and Into the Beautiful North and The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urea, Persuasion by Jane Austen, Fantastic Pacific Crucible by Ian W. Toll, Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs, The Bone Orchard Mythos Tenement by Jeff Lemire, Young Goodman Brown and other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, Brushback by Sara Paretsky, Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson, Dragged Up Proppa by Pip Fallow, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urea, A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bettyville by George Hodgman, and The Late Homecomer by Kao Kalia Yang

Transcript:

Hello, readers! Welcome to my new show, The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This is a podcast where we'll dive into the hottest book world trends, address some of the great, or not so great, classics, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, Luis Urrea was kind enough to call into the show for a very special interview. Luis is a good friend of mine, and it was an honor to have him, and his dogs, as you’ll hear, join me for a conversation about his mentorship by Ursula K. Le Guin, the tragic stories that shaped his life and his desire to tell stories, and the power of little miracles that we should all be attuned to. Here we are talking about how Luis first knew he wanted to be a storyteller.

BP: So I want to talk to you, Luis Alberto Urrea, about writing family in fiction. You are one of the most versatile authors out there. You write poetry, you write nonfiction, you write fiction, but now that you've written about both sides of your family, your father's family, and also your mother, if not perhaps, you know, the rest of her family. I thought we could dig into that. Does that sound like something that is intriguing to you?

LU: Sure, because I wonder why I do it.

BP: There you go. So you wonder why you do it. Let's start there. When you wrote, what was the first one that involved family?

LU: Well, you know, they started cropping up in early stories and certainly in nonfiction, but just sort of peripherally. But you know, if you go back to my very first book, which is called Across the Wire, and it's a book about, you know, my service in Tijuana with the poor and so forth that was inspired by my father's horrible death in Mexico. So from the get go, but even before that, you know, this, that Ursula Le Guin discovered me when I was a kid. And she discovered me through the story I had written about my father's death. And she published it. So it was my first publication. You know, writing about my dad dying, which was verboten and taboo. And I think that kind of set a template in that I realized that so many people that I loved and witnessed and admired were invisible. So I thought, you know, the magic of words. All of a sudden, I have a pulpit, and it became really interesting to me to tell those stories.

BP: You were talking about the fact that so many people in your life seem to be invisible in the kind of, well, not any one kind of literature, in any kind of literature. And your writing was part of an effort to make them visible.

LU: Yes.

BP: And that involves, of course, the people to whom you were in service and also your family. So let's again talk about your father's death, which we don't have to talk about in detail, but about how you decided at that time in that first book, this is part of bringing my father back into visibility.

LU: Yeah, well, you know, it was, it was largely because of my father that all this got going. It was my mother, I believe, who made me a writer. We can talk about that…

BP: Oh, definitely.

LU: But you know, she instilled reading on me. She didn't approve of my mad magazines and famous monsters of film land magazine and my comic books. Dear boy. You know, she was a New York socialite who had fallen in with a man in Tijuana. Don't ask me. Life's weird, right? So my father's death, awful. I was, you know, 21 years old and he was killed by the Mexican cops, all kinds of awfulness. And I had to buy his corpse. They wouldn't give me his corpse, and he had died bringing me a graduation gift that had been soaked in his blood and urine when they got him and they didn't know it was in his pocket. So, a doctor …

BP: What was it?

LU: Huh?

BP: What was the gift?

LU: $2,100. I was his first child of various family units to go to college. And he hadn't gone to college nor had my mother, but you know, her whole life and society in Manhattan was college. What does she need? You know? So, the doctor who attended to my father as he lay dying, the police had kept him in the police station on a metal table in January in front of an open window. And my father was paralyzed and broken, and they called the doctor in to make basically a fake death certificate, and he reached in the pocket and he felt the cash, it was in American bills, and he knew if these guys found it, it'd be gone. So he hid it in his own pocket. Then he called my cousin in Tijuana, who by the way, is the model for the character of Atómiko who shows up in, Into the Beautiful North. I try to give, I try to give credit or at least a tip of the hat to everybody. So he drove all that way, 300 miles to my father and my father died in his arms. Then he brought the money and then the cops brought the corpse. I was waiting in the funeral home. And that's when they made me buy it. I had to spend the money to buy my father. So, you know, you can imagine the chasm was huge. And it had never occurred to me to write anything like this. I wanted to be Ray Bradbury. You know? Honestly, I wanted to be Robert Plant in Led Zeppelin, but that wasn't going to happen. That wasn't happening. I thought, you know, I'd get up my own jet and fly around the world because I'd written a couple of stories. It just doesn't happen that way. So anyway, I had written a story about his death. And my professor, Le Guin, came for a visit as a visiting lecturer workshop leader and this gentleman took her the story. It made me a graph that'll age me, and she asked to see me and I thought, oh hell no, I can't meet Le Guin. Are you kidding? I was reading Le Guin. I'd never met famous people and he dragged me to her apartment and you know, off we went. And so it came out, it was my first publication in her anthology. It was my first autographs I ever gave. ‘Cause, Southern California, me and my dudes, we hung out at the donut shop. And we were like, totally, everything was totally gnarly dude, you know, talking SoCal, and one of the guys came in and said, dudes, the dudes books’ totally at the bookstore and we were like…

BP: Dude's books totally at the bookstore.

LU: Totally at the bookstore dudes. So off we went and each one of my homies bought one and at the cash register they asked me to sign it. So I thought ‘oh Really?’ and a stranger, someone's mom obviously, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘excuse me, are you somebody?’ And I'll never forget it. I was like, well, actually I am. And so I signed hers.

That was the first autograph for a stranger I ever signed. Thank you, Ursula.

BP: You know, that is a really important thing for you to be able to answer. Are you somebody with, ‘I am’,

LU: I am! It was great.

BP: For you, that was an important moment.

LU: Yeah, it was.

BP: Because you actually, well I will say, your mother and you, your father too, you all knew you were somebody, but to be able to say to this stranger, probably a white stranger, am I correct?

LU: Oh, yes.

BP: Yeah. Yeah. To be able to say to this woman, I am, that, that's a powerful moment. And that also is something that affects what you feel you can write about.

LU: Oh, yeah.

BP: So, you know, one book, which is one of your sweetest, warmest, funniest books about a family gathering is The House of Broken Angels. And that is really about your Mexican family, right?

LU: Yeah, it is and it isn't, you know, it's a novel. So I was able to make things up and fictionalize. However, yeah, this, the whole book actually took place around my brother's death. My brother Juan was dying of cancer. And, the way I found out is a very wonderful, you know, this is another ‘Book Maven’ moment. My daughter and I, we live in Naperville, Illinois, not exactly an ethnic hotspot, but you know, it's nice. And, so we walked the river, or used to. And we were walking the river and cell phone rang and, you know, it was, is my niece, Millie, who became ‘la mini’ in the novel. And she's like, ‘Tio, Tio, hey, how you doing?’ I said, okay, walking on the river. She said, my dad wants to talk to you. I said, okay, put him on. And I got on the phone with him and he said, ‘carnal’, which is our word for each other, you know, flesh of my flesh, basically, which is very poetic, isn't it? He said, I need to talk to you. I have cancer. And I was just, I mean, he, you know, my big brother, he's the one who first passed me Ray Bradbury books through my dad, he would read English to learn English. So we talked and he said, it's not good. It doesn't look good. And I wanted you to know, and I couldn't think of anything, you know, you go blank and all I could think of, this will date me. I said, Oye, carnal, have you ever heard of this thing called the Facebook? He said, The Facebook? Qué es eso? And I said, The Facebook, people post stuff on The Facebook and then strangers read it and they talk to each other, it's really interesting. And I said, do you want me to ask people to pray for you? And he said, Well that would be nice, you mean gringos will pray for me? I said, Yeah. Yeah, would you? I said, No problem. I'll get right on it, because I didn't know what to do, and I put up a message and you know, I had followers already on there. So they all said, yeah, go Juan. Yay Juan. So we got about 50. And I called him and I said, Juan, you got 50 strangers praying for you. What? I said, yeah, that's great. Some are Mexican. Most aren't. Wow, that's great, thanks brother. And then it was a hundred and then somebody designed a logo for team Juan. He was really super thrilled and it got very active, okay. But my favorite moment, this is the Bethanne moment. A friend of mine from high school is a Wiccan, practicing serious Wiccan, spells the whole bit. And she writes to me, she says, I was really moved about your brother's fate and she had a coven, right? Whatever she called it, a gathering of other women, 13 of them. And she said, so with the full moon coming, we are going to go outside, sky clad beneath the moon, and call down, you know, a healing friend. So I called him, and I said, ‘Oye, carnal, guess what’? And he said, ‘What, what’? I said, Well, I have, there's a group of 13 Wiccans that are going to pray for you. He said, ‘que es eso Wiccans’? And I said, ‘witches’, ‘witches are praying for me?’ I said, yeah, but wait, so they're going to go sky clad under the full moon. He said, que es eso? I said, well, they're going to go out naked and talk to the goddess. And he said, witches are going naked for me. And I said, yeah, is that okay? And he said, I like it! You know, so, it's just every time you open yourself to each other, which we've forgotten stupidly. I think little miracles can happen and I'm not sure, I wish more writers paid attention to those things. But you know, what I thought was a curse was a blessing that people who couldn't communicate, would want me to help them communicate.

BP: Thank you, Luis. You can find all of Luis’ books wherever books are sold. Spoiler alert, we may get into a specific one of his during this week’s six recs. Now, let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we’ll see what you’ve been reading this week.

One more time, Friday Reads rounding up some posts and Jordan, my producer, is here to help me go through them. What have we got, Jordan?

JA: All right, starting things off today, we've got from Rob Palk reading Persuasion by Jane Austen on a paperwhite Kindle, haven't seen one of those in a while.

BP: Well, and that is exactly why I wanted to choose this. Hi, Rob, I am delighted to see you in the Friday Reads stream on this platform. And I love seeing the paperwhite because I have one too. I read on it, usually on vacation. It's my favorite for the beach because you can read on it without a glare. So I put mine in a Ziploc bag. It's cheap. It's cheerful. It works. But I also love, Rob, that you're reading Persuasion. Great choice. What's next, Jordan?

JA: Alright, up next we've got from Austin Worley, my hashtag Friday Reads this week, Ian W. Toll's Fantastic Pacific Crucible.

BP: So, the subtitle of this one is War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941 to 1942, and I wish that I could tell you the name of the sinking ship on the book's cover. I'm not enough of a World War II history aficionado to be able to tell you that, but it's pretty devastating. And we all know that the war in the Pacific was absolutely heartbreaking, terrible, you know, destructive. So I think this must be an excellent history. I don't know much about Toll, but I will definitely check him out. And that's one of the things I love about Friday Reads. You can find out about authors and titles you've never heard of before. So, on then, to one that I have heard of, Jordan.

JA :All right. We've got from Sandra Danby. I've just started reading Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson.

BP: Kate Atkinson has to be one of my favorite mystery authors. Case Histories when it came out, you know, some years back now was just the freshest look at going into a crime and her ‘Jackson Brody’ novels, Jackson Brody is everyone's favorite detective character. Death at the Sign of the Rook is Atkinson's return to more traditional mystery writing after a couple of other novels and a collection of short stories. I think everyone is going to love it, and I love this cover. Jackson Brody is back, and I cannot wait to see what he's up to this time. Jordan, what's our next one?

JA: All right, next we've got from Topsham Public Library up in Maine, and this is gonna walk through what some of the librarians and staff at the library are reading. Cindy's reading Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs. Dale's reading The Bone Orchard Mythos Tenement by Jeff Lemire. Jen's reading Young Goodman Brown and other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Catherine's reading Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall. And Linda's reading Brushback by Sara Paretsky.

BP: Very well done. Thank you, Jordan. Because we've got a lot in here. We've got all kinds of authors and genres and new and old, and I love these choices. Never stop tweeting Friday Reads Topsham Public Library. We love it. So now we've got something a little bit different.

JA: Okay. This one is from Paula Johnson. Weekend book pick: Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson. I've never been to a dog show, but like the author, I wondered if the show dogs were happy. I got oodles of answers in this fun to read book.

BP: I love the graphic here. We've got the, you know, trophy cup, and we've got the cover, and the cover of Dogland has, I believe, a long haired boarzoi. I'm not necessarily your dog breed expert. Being held in on a short leash by a woman with the prototypical flat shoes and sparkly suit that handlers tend to wear at the Westminster Dog Show and crofts and things like that. The subtitle is Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show for Tommy Tomlinson's book Dogland. That should be really fun to read. At this time when the dog show is going on. So one last Friday reads, I couldn't resist. What is it Jordan?

JA: All right. And this last one from Catriona McPherson, who says for hashtag Friday reads, here's a photo of the just finished Dragged Up Proppa (Pip Fallow), which was harrowing and the just started Janice Hallett's The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, which is already terrific. And I left my ankle in the pic so you can marvel at the lushness of my lawn.

BP: Hey, you are keeping it real, Ms. McPherson. And also, these are two really interesting books. Dragged Up Proppa has the subtitle, Growing Up in Britain's Forgotten North, and it's by Pip Fallow. I don't even know if I'm saying dragged up proppa the best way. I need a friend who grew up in the north also to say something like that. But I love the fact that it's talking about a region that is often forgotten. And Janice Hallett, I just want to say really quickly, if you're reading her books already, you know that these are mysteries with incredible puzzles in them. And the puzzles are wordplay, the puzzles are clues. The puzzles have structure involved. They are not simple. Okay. I don't even try to solve the puzzles. I just go along and read because Hallett is so smart. These are delightful. So thank you again, Catriona McPherson for stopping by and that's what we've got for this week. Thank you!

Talking to Luis, I got a sense of what it means to write about life in regions that don’t usually get written about. It got me thinking… While there are plenty of novels that illuminate on the hardships faced in different areas of the world, there are plenty in the canon that simply do not cut it. One of those books that came to mind was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In this edition of Canon or Can It, we’ll put the literary classic under our rigorous scrutiny to decide if it should remain in the canon, or if we should can it forever.

This episode of Cannon or Cannot is about The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

When Tom Joad gets out of prison, his family isn't home and his farm has been abandoned. The Dust Bowl has taken his land and livelihood and his family. And when he reunites with his family, they decide to head west, taking their former preacher with them on this journey to a better life. John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, follows the Joad family on their trek from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression.

Along the way, in the family's rickety truck, Grandpa and Grandma Jode die from the harsh realities of the road. When the rest finally make it to California, they discover there are more workers than there are jobs. So the wages are low and unfair, and the Jodes are forced to stay in crowded quarters known as Hoovervilles, and they ain't got no do re mi. The former preacher, Jim Casey, becomes a labor organizer, demanding fair wages and conditions, eventually getting arrested and later killed by a deputy. In retaliation Tom Joad kills the deputy, sending his family into hiding. In the end, Tom's pregnant sister delivers a stillborn baby and offers her otherwise unusable breast milk to a starving man living in a barn. And, phem, just some light reading for your Friday reset.

Look, I get it. The Grapes of Wrath is about social injustice, unfair labor practices, the evils of capitalism, you know, all the things your liberal arts professor somehow wove into his wedding vows. These are important and necessary in understanding what we talk about when we talk about the making of America, American exceptionalism, and American migration.

But do we have to learn about it like this? I must say, I stand ten toes down for John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, but maybe that's the Robbie Burns fangirl in me. Steinbeck misses the mark on this one. The Grapes of Wrath pauses plot to go on heavy handed, moralistic diatribes. In doing so, this novel cares more for its central idea than for its central characters.

Call it a personal preference, but I want my fiction story driven. I don't want to read a book where every character is a symbolic stand in. Tom Jode, the working man. Ma Jode, the unfeeling matriarch. Rose of Sharon, the mother, a life giving force, with an on the nose name to match. If you haven't guessed it already, I am kicking this one to the can. Let's reroute. To learn more about displacement in America, why not pick up a book by Tommy Orange, Ocean Vuong, or Louise Erdrich instead? You'll be better for it.

While The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t quite make the cut for the literary canon, here are six recs for books that might better represent the regional truths of this country, and the rest of the world.

It's time for me to do another Six Recs, six recommendations in three minutes or less, and I've got my producer Jordan as usual to time me. Jordan, are you ready with that stopwatch?

JA: We're ready to go. We're rolling.

BP: These are books about regional truth. The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urea is a book that is sui generis. It's by a man I consider a dear friend, and I'm proud to because this is about his work on the Mexican American border and a group of men who tried to cross that border into Arizona in 2001. I think it's required reading.

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel is something that shows flyover states can contain multitudes. We so often look over them. And thankfully, they also contain writers like Kimmel, who can demonstrate that in small town Indiana, there's a lot of wholesomeness, but there's also still darkness around the edges.

Speaking of darkness, unfortunately, Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial is about a Hurricane Katrina ravaged hospital fighting to survive in order to make sure there are more survivors of that disaster. It's all reported by Pulitzer winner Fink, who takes on questions of triage that became devastating at the time, and if you don't remember the stories, it was really tough. Nurses and doctors had to decide if they were going to actually end the lives of some patients they knew would not survive, and it was really, really harrowing.

But on to something more hopeful. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle is his memoir about his upbringing in the United States in the worst parts of Baltimore, but then being sent to some of the best education possible at D.C.'s Howard University an HBCU. And this is because Coates’ father was an imperfect eccentric, but he was determined that all of his seven children would cross the finish line of graduating from college. And even if that was a finish line set by the white patriarchy, he knew it was important for their futures. A really incredible book by one of our best thinkers about racism in the United States.

Bettyville by George Hodgman proves that the South is another country. They do things differently there. To paraphrase an old saying about the past being another country from L.P. Hartley's The Go Between. When George Hodgman, contentedly gay in Manhattan, moved back home to Missouri to care for his aging mother, chaos ensued but love prevailed.

Finally, to cover the Great Lakes region, we have a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang called The Late Homecomer, and it's what happens when you take Minnesota nice and fold in the story of the Hmong diaspora by an extraordinary storyteller whose flight from genocide will chill you to the bone before she then offers you soul warming evidence of survival.

That's it for this week's Six Racks. How did I do, Jordan?

JA: Well, unfortunately we did not save this stack of books from falling. We're at three minutes and 32 seconds.

BP: Okay. I'll take it. I will take it. Thank you so much as usual.

Well that does it for this episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. Follow us on Substack for daily posts about new book releases, commentary, and more. It’s free! Talk to you next week!

The Book Maven, a Literary Revue is produced and hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick.