I highlighted Luis Jaramillo’s first book, the short story collection —a gathering of 91 ultra-short chapters, some as brief as a sentence, that add up to a portrait of a family—as a for NPR. His first novel further reveals his wide-ranging literary talents. is a luminous, seductive, at times surreal chronicle of the lives of several generations of women who inherit a mysterious gift.
Through a literary form of time travel, Jaramillo’s own magical invention, their lives intersect in various incarnations of the shifting borderlands of El Paso and Juarez. Our email conversation between the West Coast and East Coast was followed by an in-person meeting for tea in New York City. * How have these past years of Covid and conflict affected your life and work, your teaching, your time on the water, the writing and launch of ? That’s a big question! When Covid hit, I was the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at The New School.
Like a lot of other people, my work turned into long days of Zoom calls. Students, faculty, and staff were going through extraordinarily difficult times. I had a couple hundred people depending on me to be stable in a world that wasn’t.
This made my regular writing schedule even more important—for many years I’ve gotten up every morning and written, no matter what. Through the stages of the pandemic, I worked with my agent on several rounds of edits for as we passed through the stages of Covid restrictions, and in the fall of 2022, .