Poet

I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about.

I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them.

I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma.

In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.

It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.

I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration.

I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.'

Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives.

'The Hummingbird's Daughter' took 20 years to write.

Many of us writers tour like a literary Bachman Turner Overdrive. We ain't pretty, but we're on the road. Many of us wish we were rock stars anyway. For my part, I live in my iPod. The musicians there are my constant companions on the road.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

Writers write without support.

I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.

We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.

The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.

I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write.