The University of Arizona Press
October 20, 2023
“Poets & Writers,” the nation’s largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers, invited 5 over 50 authors to write essays for the November/December 2023 magazine. One of them is Alma García, author of All That Rises. In the introduction, the editor says, “These first-time authors, who range from their early fifties to early seventies, remind us that time, and its inevitable passage, is a gift that enriches our personal and literary lives and that age can make us both robust and nimble, ready to persevere, to put words on the page.”
García explains her writing journey from short stories to journalism to debut novel. She writes:
Writing a book over a very long time is sometimes a deadly enterprise. Ideas drift. The end point disappears. A lack of urgency can overtake you. You might find yourself appalled when you pass your own characters in age. You become aware of your own mortality, of the soul-sucking thought that your best creative years already might be behind you.
But if you listen quietly, sometimes you’ll hear the truth of your own creative being whispering in your ear.
Read her beautiful essay here.
About the book:
In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.
