02, 2015 spirited collection of lectures, essays and family memories, 'A House of My Own: Stories From My Life,' explores human yearning for home, a safe place where we can be ourselves. For Cisneros, the daughter of a Mexican-American mother and a Mexican father, it meant straddling traditional and contemporary cultures and setting out to find her place in the world. In 'Only Daughter' she tells the story of being asked to write her own contributor's note.
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She wrote: 'I am the only daughter in a family of six sons. That explains everything.'
Later she thought, 'I should have written: 'I'm the only daughter in a Mexican family of six sons.' ' Or, 'of a working-class family of nine. All of these things have to do with who I am today.' Being an only daughter had its advantages. Her father decided going to college was a way for her to find a good husband. The title essay recounts her early days of living and writing in Bucktown, 'a down-at-the-heels' neighborhood of Chicago, where Nelson Algren once roamed and not far from Saul Bellow territory.
She recalls an exhilarating time of learning and discovering how to be a writer, how to live alone, how to trust your own voice, how to teach students who 'have to defend themselves from someone beating them up' to write poetry. She goes to literary soirees, changes jobs, meets other writers and poets of color. 5 ejercicios de coordinacion oculo manual. She gets an agent. Her father finally understands she can provide for herself by writing.
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After leaving her hometown behind, she writes 'I no longer make Chicago my home, but Chicago will still makes its home in me.' 'No Place Like Home,' written in 2014 for the Thomas Wolfe Lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives a nod to the organic nature of this thing we call home.
'My writing is my home, now,' said Wolfe. 'We find ourselves at home, or homing in books that allow us to become more ourselves,' writes Cisneros. People, books, education and experiences influence and broaden her worldview, but also bring bittersweet loss. 'The paradox for a working class writer is that we are never more exiled from our real homes, from the blood kin we have honored on our pages, than when we have drifted away from them on that little white raft called the page.' When Cisneros was invited by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to lecture about an object in the museum, she decided to write about the museum's upholstery because her father was an upholsterer.
The lecture 'Tapicero's Daughter' takes a brilliant turn weaving together her love of textiles with stories of the family's faithful Sunday visits to the museums of Chicago, her father soaking his blistered feet after a hard day's work upholstering fine furniture for North Shore matrons, and her mother's calling as a 'supreme collector of anything found in thrift stores, garage sales, and liquidations.' This lovely essay pays tribute to her parents and calls out the differences and similarities between classes and cultures. This collection puts a gifted storyteller at your fingertips, one who offers a panoply of life in apartments, rented rooms and borrowed houses, a journey with a curious, lively mind and reflections on cultures, families and traditions. Cisneros eventually buys a beautiful home in San Antonio, Texas. Years later, seeking a less demanding lifestyle, she leaves for Mexico, where she now lives near the place her mother's ancestors lived. A writing machine. These two go hand in hand for me.
I feel like writing when I'm at home,' she writes.
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