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>> Hi, my name is Kali Fajardo-Anstine and
I'm the author of "Sabrina and Corina."
I'm here in Denver, Colorado and
I'm at my apartment right now.
My writing desk is actually right in front of
the computer and I'm over in my reading nook.
"Sabrina and Corina" is a collection of 11
short stories that are all focused on the lives
of Latinas of indigenous ancestry who are
from Colorado and Northern New Mexico.
My book comes out of my background and my
family history here in the American west.
And it comes out of issues
that I saw growing up.
A lot of "Sabrina and Corina" focuses
on violence against women, abandonment,
gentrification and a number of other themes that
were really close to home and things that I saw
in my own neighborhoods and I experienced.
"Sabrina and Corina" all the stories are focused
either in Denver, where my family has lived now
for five generations or they take place
in Sanwanita [assumed spelling], Colorado,
which is a fictional town that I
invented in southern Colorado in order
to set stories in the land of my ancestors.
My ancestors migrated north
to Denver in the 1930s.
One of my great grandfathers,
Alfonso, is from the Philippines,
one of my grandmothers is Jewish
from the east side of Denver
and my great grandmother
is indigenous and Mexican.
And I grew up with this incredible mixture
of cultures and histories and this sort
of convergence of the American west,
but I never ever saw any stories
like ours in American literature.
And I wanted to make sure that
I put our stories into books.
And when I was a little girl I decided
that I wanted to become a writer.
I started studying literature, I started working
at a bookstore in Denver called West Side Books,
an antiquarian and rare bookstore.
And I studied English at
Metropolitan State University of Denver
and that's really where these stories began.
I started writing about my old
neighborhoods, Denver's west side,
Denver's north side, Five Points.
And some of my stories are actually even
set on campus, Metro State, where I went.
I grew up in Denver, Colorado and
I come from -- I have six siblings.
I have five sisters and one brother and I
had this incredibly large Wild West family.
I knew my great grandmother, I knew her
sisters, I knew my great uncles and everybody
and all the cousins, everybody was
around over when I was growing up.
And they told us stories about where they
came from and my great great grandparents,
but when I would go to school I wouldn't see
any of us depicted in the history textbooks.
I didn't see our lives or
our histories in literature.
And this had a huge effect on the way
that I viewed myself and my family
and it had a huge effect on my self-esteem.
I actually dropped out of high school, I've
struggled with depression most of my life.
And a lot of those issues had to do
with not feeling good about myself.
So one of the things that I try to
do with my writing is to make sure
that I'm centering the lives of young
women and girls and older women.
Anybody who comes from my experiences and I'm
trying to make sure that our lives are visible
and we felt seen and that our voices are heard.
I grew up listening to stories constantly
and these stories they normally were short
in length, even if their tails were epic.
And the reason that they were short is simply
because they were told in the living room
or at the kitchen table or in the backyard and
we didn't have time to listen to stories over
and over and over again that picked up
where the other story had closed off.
So, to me the short story form is related
to oral story telling in my family.
I'm very inspired by the form, Alice Monroe
[assumed spelling] is one my greatest
influences, I love the work of Edward P.
Jones and William Trevor [assumed spellings].
I find the short story form to be such an
exquisite form that has a lot of flexibility
and that is robust and the voices
that you can include in it are just --
you can have so much room to move
around in the short story form.
Women's voices need to be heard
because we are human beings.
And I think people, for some reason, we
still are a subgroup of human beings.
And my, you know, my subjectivity
as a woman I never occurred to me
that I should write a book about men.
I have five sisters and I always got the
oral history in my family from women.
So at no point in my life did I ever stop to
think, oh, I should write really about men more.
Women's voices need to be heard
just for the fact that we are human
and our stories and our lives matter.
I think a lot about the fact that I
came to publish a book from a background
that wouldn't necessarily be considered the most
mainstream pathway to the life as an author.
As I said earlier, I'm a high school drop-out,
I'm somebody who went to a state college,
I didn't even know that you could study
creative writing as a Master's degree or a PhD
until the final semester
of my undergraduate year.
To me ingenuity in the arts means not all
of us have been given very privileged life
where we're able to stop working
and just focus on our writing.
We don't have very many spaces
within our homes sometimes.
I wrote a lot of the stories
in "Sabrina and Corina"
at public libraries, in the conference rooms.
I wrote the story, "Sabrina and Corina,"
in my parent's basement in an old workroom
that had been converted to a bedroom.
I wrote on the busses and
airplanes and anywhere I could,
because I didn't really have my own
office or any space to write in.
And I think that's ingenuity,
being able to create a way to write
and to have an artistic path, even when
the world is telling you that it's going
to be very difficult and it
maybe isn't necessarily for you.
I think that it is for all of us, we
can all choose to have an artistic path
and we can all choose to become writers,
but it does take a lot of ingenuity
if the cards are sort of stacked
against you and you have to find a way
to push through and write your work.
One of the things I'm known
for writing is about place.
And I've had such a pleasurable experience
being able to build the worlds that I write in
and being able to imagine these cities
and imagine these lives and
imagine these characters.
And I think there's a great deal
of logical world building, of --
there's a great deal of like reflecting
back and taking your memories and trying
to decide what is the story here, where do I
find the heart, beating heart of this story
and how do I present it to other
people so it's entertaining
and they learn from it and it's artful.
And I think that's what all of us doing as
artists and storytellers, is we're searching
for truth and we're trying to
find a way to present it in a way
that keeps readers reading
and keeps them turning pages.
For a lot of us we're given official stories
that come down through our history classrooms
and our English classrooms where we are
told, like, this is the most important novel,
this is what happened, this
is the official history.
And it's important to listen to other
voices, because truth can be subjective
and if we don't expose ourselves to a number
of different voices and viewpoints we can sort
of get locked in to thinking
that this is the only way.
And unfortunately if you come from a background
like mine where it's not the majority culture
or you didn't really see yourselves in
those books or in the history textbooks,
you're not going to be able to -- you're not
going to be able to imagine your subjectivity
in those spaces and you're not going to
be able to imagine yourself into history
and imagine yourself into a future.
Throughout history we've always been faced
with uncertainty and what gives me hope is
that the artists and the creators they keep
striving for justice, they never give up.
Generation after generation people have made
great strides to make justice and change
within their communities and
that really gives me hope.
And also just seeing new creations being
birthed, seeing new novels published,
new stories and seeing more and more
writers from backgrounds like mine
that weren't officially the
most majority culture.
Seeing their stories coming out and seeing more
and more getting through the gate gives me hope
that tomorrow can be better and that our
future as a country can be more whole
and more equitable and more rounded.
In my book, "Sabrina and Corina," one of
the story's sisters was set in the 1950s
and it's based on a great great auntie
of mine who was blinded by a man.
In the story she does not
receive justice for what happened.
I am now three generations later
writing short stories about it
in an act to seek some sort of justice.
But, no, I don't think that by writing that we
are able to seek justice, I think that we need
to keep acting on all fronts in trying
to change policy and change our viewpoint
and change our understanding
of other lives in the world.
And with that we might be able to move
towards more justice in this country.
I hope readers learn from "Sabrina
and Corina" that you can tell stories
that are both heartbreaking and
sad, but also filled with humor
and light and positivity and resilience.
I also hope readers will learn about
the place where I come from, Denver,
Colorado and I hope they'll learn
about my culture and my ancestors,
Chicanos of indigenous ancestry from the
American West and I hope they'll learn
about the lives of women and girls
from the American West, from this place
and I hope they'll see that the working
class people who are not the educated elite,
their lives belong in literature
and they should be centered.
I think humor is something that's built
into my culture, I think it's built
into our story telling traditions
and the way we tell jokes
and the way we share gossip with one another.
I think humor is just one of
the most vital aspects of life.
If you can't laugh at yourself I don't
know how you're supposed to going forward.
Yeah, I think humor just round out sort
of some of the pain that we experience
and within every moment you can sort
of look to see where's the positivity.
And humor also serves to be able to spotlight
some of the absurdities that we experience,
because sometimes some of the injustice is so --
it's just so bizarre and so hard to understand
that in a way itself it's not
funny, but sometimes it is.
It's humorous how the names of
neighborhoods in Denver have been changed
from the Northside to the Highlands.
Or it's humorous how that
they think this is okay.
I wrote "Sabrina and Corina"
for almost 10 years.
My first published story was in 2010.
I faced a lot of rejection.
I was not able to get a book
deal for almost 7 years.
My stories I had countless,
countless rejections for my stories.
I was told that they were all
the same or that the lives
of these people didn't make
sense to certain readers.
And, so, it felt like a very long process and
I think that "Sabrina and Corina" being honored
with something like the National Book Award
-- or the National Book Award finalist spot,
is such an incredible honor,
but I feel as though my people
and my readers catapulted
the book to that level.
Being on this trajectory I've been
on it my whole life and I'm just --
I am so proud that I get to be
a voice in American letters now,
especially because when I was coming up in
literature there was not a voice like mine.
And I hope that young writers or writers of any
age who feel like their stories should be told,
they can look at "Sabrina and Corina" and
say, "Wow, I can write a book like this
and it can be celebrated on the national stage,
on the international stage and it can be honored
with some of the greatest -- the greatest
honors that our country bestows upon books.
And, so, yeah, it's been such a
-- it's been a wonderful journey.
I can't wait to keep publishing novels that are
set here in Colorado in the greater Southwest.
And I just love being able
to give Chicanos from Denver
such a huge spotlight in
the world of literature.
I mean, I feel like this is -- I
feel that the revolution that is sort
of happening right now it's a symptom of so
much injustice that's been plaguing our country
since its inception and I hope that we can keep
pressing and pushing on these fronts in order
to make change for the generations
that are coming behind us.
I feel as though that these
can be very positive changes
and we're already seeing incredibly positive
changes that are coming out of these protests.
And just for all the young people
out there and everyone that's
out there that's hitting the streets and
protesting and writing their governor
and writing their lawmakers, thank you so
much for using your voice to show we matter
and that justice and change is possible.
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