Q. The American literary scene is populated by many regional writers like yourself, but few enjoy national audiences. Why?
A. Who was it that said, "The region is everything, the nation is a fiction" ? New York writers are really regional writers. It's just that one region purports to be the sensibility of the nation.
Q. Is geography destiny in writing?
A. Yes.
Q. How is that so in your case?
^ A. I am a native daughter of Los Angeles. I remember when it was like a tropical fishing village. There is so little tradition here that it lends itself to experimentation. No one's been watching for so long that you don't have to worry about taboos. Los Angeles is a new cosmopolitan refugee city for the world. It's a city of confluences. I'm addicted to the metallic, postapocalyptic sunsets, the tropical identity, the Santa Ana blowing through its hot Spanish mouth.
Q. As we've seen in the recent earthquake, nature here is unruly, unpredictable. How does this affect your writing?
A. Living the threat of arbitrary destruction keeps us on the cutting edge.
Q. Has being a Los Angeles writer worked against you?
A. Yes, in certain ways. There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.
California is looked at the way Italy used to be viewed in England. It's sexual and dangerous. Something could happen. A person could change. There is an element of hostility to Los Angeles that has a racist undertone. The fact that this is a Latin region, with its patios of bougainvillaea and its streets named for Spanish saints and psychotics. When you breathe the air, you become infiltrated with the idea that you are in another region entirely.
Q. In your recent book Palm Latitudes, you portray a world of poor Latin women. Why did you choose to write about them?
A. I lived in the barrio for ten years. I spoke the language. The Los Angeles novel, in a purely abstract sense, would not be about Anglo people. Palm Latitudes is a book that wrote itself out of the aesthetics of the region. My feeling when I came to the end of it was "Yes, I see that. The 20th century is increasingly to live in the palm latitudes."
Q. Your work is replete with apocalyptic visions: drug addiction, cancer, death, sexism, cultural brutalities. Do you consider these to be the major concerns of the age?
A. I've always been fascinated by the concept of the untouchable caste, whether it's cancer victims, drug addicts, Latin women, homosexuals. An overriding concern of mine is to touch the untouchables and to show their humanity. Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.
Q. You've said that the cutting edge beyond postmodernism in contemporary fiction is "feminine and tropical." What do you mean?