The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it at once more subtle and more powerful than science.
It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.
Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. Thats half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.
Ask any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.
I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools.
For fiction, Im not particularly nationalistic. Im not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasnt made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.
I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. Im thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.
A lot of attention has been paid in Latin America to the new generation of nonfiction writers, authors like Julio Villanueva Chang, Diego Osorno, Cristóbal Peña, Gabriela Wiener, Leila Guerriero, Cristian Alarcón, among others. These are writers doing important, groundbreaking work. So the talent is there, as is the habit of radio listenership, and what we propose to do is unite the two. We want to have these immensely gifted journalists - men and women who've already revitalized the long-form narrative - we want them to tell their stories in sound.
I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.
I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.
I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column.
There are stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside.
How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.
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 began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.
The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.
At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say.
Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.
I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.
