I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
I spent 20 years of my career primarily being a writer for hire.
What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.
When I was in high school and college, my other real focus was, actually, fiction writing. So in college, I had done all these seminars with these various writers-in-residence.
I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.
I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.
At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
I come from a very small city in a rather remote part of America, where writers simply weren't part of the daily fabric.