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Realism contains magic, author of L.A. Chicano stories says By
Katrina Cartwright Author Helena Maria Viramontes read from her recent works in the Eccles Conference Center Auditorium last week. Viramontes, who teaches creative writing at Cornell University, is the author of Under the Feet of Jesus and The Moths and Other Short Stories. She writes about the lives of the Chicanos she grew up with in East Los Angeles, she said. "For years I was an avid reader," she read from her recent essay Four Guiding Principles of a Lived Experience. "But very rarely did I come across stories of the people I love." In the essay, she told the story of a professor she had while attending the University of California at Irvine in 1979. The last conversation she had with him exemplified the wide cultural gap between them, she said. "The trouble is you write about Chicanos," she said, reading what her professor had told her. "You should be writing about people." Viramontes said she writes to help people find magic in reality. "I believe that realism has a lot of magic in it," she said. "My job as a writer is to present that reality and help you see the magic in it." She also read an excerpt from a novel in progress, Their Dogs Came With Them, which is set in East Los Angeles in the 1960s. She said she began writing it because she wanted to know why there was so much "brown on brown" gang violence when she was growing up. "When you're treated like dogs, you become like dogs," she said. The book has four main characters and 25 subcharacters, which she said makes it very difficult to write. She told about Ben, a subcharacter in his early teen-age years who is struggling with being a racial minority. "There was always someone in the lunchroom, someone who hated him because he was easy to hate," she read. During the question-and-answer session, Viramontes told prospective writers that anyone can write if they really want to. "If you truly want to write, all you have to do is do it," she said. "The only difference between me and you is I write and write more." Viramontes signed books after the reading in the conference center and at Hastings in Logan
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