in his words
Question: You’ve lived most of your life in Northern New Mexico. How has that landscape shaped the way you write — and what you choose to write about?
Answer: How could it not? I don’t really consider myself a writer, I’m more of an observer and the people I have grown up here with are the most unique and fascinating band of misfits I have ever come across. I don’t possess the vivid imagination to make these kinds of characters up. At the same time, I’ve also heard witness to their struggles and plight and I want to depict that with honesty and compassion.
New Mexico has also immense beauty but there has been a constant tension here about who should possess that beauty and at what price? I find it constantly fascinating exploring that cost.
Question: Brothers in the Night is your first novel. Why this story, and why now?
Answer: Well to be honest, I’ve written at least six books but I chose to release this one now because it was the loudest toddler crying in the room, so to speak. This book is so fundamentally about America and the class struggle within and I have never seen greater civil unrest in my lifetime than right now.
I’m also a student of history so it’s both interesting and tragic to see us fighting the same fucking battles almost 100 years later. Until we learn from history, we are bound to repeat it. I hope this book raises some of those questions, perhaps we can learn from.
I also can’t help but think the fundamental question is this, is this fight inherently what it means to be an American?
Question: You’ve described the book as part of a genre you call “Norteño Noir.” What defines that space — and why is it so important to you?
Answer: Norteño refers to the fertile culture and deep history of Northern Mexico smeared across my work. We hear so much about the Deep South, Appalachia or the Great West, but so little about this incredibly fascinating sliver of Americana in its own. Just like all these other places, the history here has blood on its hands, sins we are still paying for. But there is also so much beauty in both the landscape and the people.
Noir indicates the dark yet accessible threads in my fiction. I grew up loving films like 12 Monkeys, Carlitos Way, and Unforgiven. What do all those films have in common? The protagonists are literally criminals, inherently both flawed and seeking redemption.
Noir is the space in between the good and the bad, where we all fall and some of us rise back
up.
Question: There’s a stillness to your prose — unhurried but sentimental. Where does that voice come from?
Answer: That voice comes from a shit-load of editing and word whittling! Look, I stand on the shoulders of giants, and to me there is no one greater than Cormac McCarthy. He writes with the prose of a poet and the precision of a surgeon. I try and do the same.
Question: The characters in this novel are wounded, but not broken. How did you approach writing about damage without dramatizing it?
Answer: Look man, I’m a punk rock hopeless romantic at heart. I’m also the guy that roots for the bad guy, the one that’s misunderstood, kicked every day. Many of the wounds you mention, are self-inflicted, many are not. I want to explore these ruffians bleeding out - fighting both themselves and the greater society - and then I want to explore their healing process - redemption, love, understanding of one self, maybe the world, if the world could be understood.
The drama here is really in the honesty. All of what I just mentioned is wild and heartbreaking enough on its own. It’s my job to just paint it straight.
Question: This is and isn’t a Western in the traditional sense. What tropes are embracing and which are dismantling here?
Answer: I’ve always loved westerns ever since I saw Unforgiven. I know I keep going back to that film but it was foundational to me. This book is about oppression in all its ugly guises, and there’s no avatar for a freedom more pronounced in American methodology than the cowboy so I thought that would make a dynamic juxtaposition.
Plus I just loved the idea of two cowboys engaged in a Heat style shoot-out in the mean streets of Chicago, lol. Michael Mann baby!
Question: How much of you is in this book? How much is biographical?
Answer: That’s a really great question. I’ve written something like 7 books now, and I can go back to any one of them and just read a few sentences and then know exactly where I was in my life. What I was struggling with. Even this book is about two cowboys in 1948 there is still so much of me oozing from the pages here, and my family for that matter. That what this book is also about, family.
But to answer your question more precisely, both brothers are struggling with their identity in their own way, and I had utterly lost sight of myself before I started writing this book. Unfortunately for me, it took me a lot longer to find myself again, than perhaps Billy and Jude, but here I am, by the grace of Dios.
Question: What kind of reader do you hope finds their way to Brothers in the Night?
Answer: Someone who is looking to be challenged by art. I hope this book challenges a reader’s own idea of themself or helps them realign. I hope the book is entertaining, of course, but the best art is like good New Mexico chile, it burns from the inside out.
Question: What should someone know about you before they turn the first page?
Answer: Nothing. Let the words speak for themselves.