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251 Benjamin Alire Sáenz enjamin (Ben) Sáenz was born on August 16, 1954, in a farming community just outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. Sáenz grew up in a family of humble means; to make ends meet and feed their seven children, his mother worked as a cook and his father as a cement finisher. Sáenz grew up without books to read at home, but he was always drawn to the power of words—the words of his parents’ stories and later those words he found bound within books in the school library. From an early age, Sáenz instinctively felt that words, either written or spoken, in Spanish or in English, had the power to hold people together and create community. While literature played a central role in his elementary and high school experience, upon graduation Sáenz sought a different avenue to understanding the world: religion. After working for some time as a roofer, an onion picker, and a janitor, Sáenz enrolled in seminary school at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He graduated with a master’s degree in theology in 1980 and then joined the Catholic priesthood, where he was to spend the next seven years of his life. During this period, however, his passion for creative writing became more and more of an ache. So in 1988 he left the priesthood and enrolled in the creative writing program at University of Texas at El Paso. While at UTEP, Sáenz was taken under the wing of the late Chicano novelist and professor from Stanford, Arturo Islas. Greatly encouraged by Islas and with a greater confidence in his craft as a storyteller, Sáenz went on to pursue an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. He went on to a stint at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow, during which time he put together and published his first collection of poetry, Calendar of Dust (1991). Sáenz has since written and published critically acclaimed collections of poetry, novels, short stories, and children’s books, which gravitate around issues of displacement, class conflict, and the contradictions of family life. Frederick Luis Aldama: You’ve been many things, including a priest. Why also a writer? Ben Sáenz: I’ve always had this idea of myself as a writer. I’ve always enjoyed writing nonfiction. It was the only thing that interested me at school; it made me feel like I was a disciplined student. It wasn’t until I entered the seminary that I started writing poetry. I wrote and read a lot of poetry (really bad, frankly) during this period, especially Eliot, Pound, and Thomas Merton; he was very important to me. Later, when I was living in Belgium, I discovered Latin American and Spanish poets like Neruda and Lorca. After I left the priesthood and went back to school, I was either going to get into painting—I always laugh when I tell this story because it’s so silly, in some ways—but I either wanted to be a painter or a writer. So I decided to be a writer because I didn’t want to be a starving artist. F.L.A.: That’s interesting that you were in Europe when you discovered the Latin Americans. B.S.: In seminary I was exposed to many theologians and philosophers, even Karl Marx, but not to Latin American writers. In Europe I met people from Latin America who opened this door up for me. At that point in my life, I’d only read one Chicano author, Rudolfo Anaya. I really liked Bless me, Última, but didn’t love it. So, when I entered the University of Texas, El Paso, I started taking formal writing classes and formal literature classes. This is when I worked with Arturo Islas; he was a visiting professor at UTEP for a year, and he took me under his wing. He’s the one who told me that I should apply for a Stegner [fellowship]. At first, I didn’t apply. I didn’t think it was for me; I thought I wasn’t prepared for it. Eventually, I went to Iowa for a Ph.D., and Islas would badger me about the Stegner. During this period I’d written a novella for my master’s thesis, “City of the Conquered” (later published as Carry Me like Water), so I finally did apply in fiction and in poetry. 252 Spilling the Beans...

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