INTERVIEW: Daniel Chacon

Each school year, the MFA program welcomes a Distinguished Writer in Residence to its faculty for an entire semester. Recent visitors have included poet Sharon Bryan, literary journalist Beverly Lowry, and novelist David Anthony Durham.

This fall, the program’s visitor is novelist Daniel Chacon. The Fresno native is teaching two courses: English 243, the fiction form/theory class, and English 263, the MFA fiction workshop. Chacon will make a public appearance Tuesday, Oct. 24, when he speaks on the topic: “Fresno: The Center of the Cosmos.” For details, check the MFA calendar.

MFAer Tabitha Villalba, who writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, recently interviewed Chacon about his writing process, the classes he’s teaching, and how he uses imagination in his work.

Ajua! Daniel Chacon is back in the central San Joaquin Valley and ready to join the creative writing program at California State University, Fresno, as a visiting professor in residence. Chacon, a graduate of Fresno State, has earned critical acclaim as a writer with his collection of short stories, Chicano Chicanery, and his novel, and the shadows took him.

After earning his Bachelor’s degree in political science, Chacon received his Master’s degree in English and completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Oregon. He has been teaching graduate fiction classes at the University of Texas, El Paso, for the past six years.

Being so close to the Mexico/California border, Chacon learned to speak Spanish 10 years ago for the sake of his Spanish-speaking students. The MFA program at UTEP has become bilingual, and Chacon has students that both read and write in Spanish.

Now, he is lending his expertise to fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry students of Fresno State for the fall semester.

Chacon feels that one of our goals, as writers, is creative development, and that focus should teach us that “art is inseparable from every other part of our lives.” Chacon admits one of the advantages of teaching is that he can focus his classes on what he is writing at the time. “I can’t separate teaching from writing,” he says. “Otherwise, I’d be teaching to be able to write.” He wants them to be the same for his students.

He has just finished a novel and is currently working on another, both of which delve into the world of physics, mysticism, and the imagination – the focus of the form/theory graduate seminar he is teaching. The class will explore authors like Kafka, Poe, and Borges, “unique among other writers” because they are able to create landscapes that are neither real nor surreal, Chacon said.

He will also assigns “etudes,” which are creative assignments based on the techniques of the masters or class discussion. “These are more than exercises, because in themselves they are works of art, or passages they can use for a larger work,” Chacon said.

Chacon cites his own novel as an example: “I have just completed a novel called Black Sound, and each stage of its creation has manifested itself in the classroom as in the writing. Many of the etudes I assigned my students I did myself, and most of them made it into the novel.”

“Black Sound was conceived, in part, as an exploration of the ‘dark spirit’ that we sometimes find growing in our work, sin querer,” he said. “Sometimes when we are writing, we encounter a force of energy that seems to have a life of its own, these times that the flow and rhythm of our language picks up an image or incantation that may seem a little dark or inexplicable, even to us. Sometimes, during the writing process, we know when to submit to this dark rhythm, and we don’t care, or shouldn’t, if it’s benign.”

According to Chacon, this is what Garcia Lorca, calls duende – meaning, “darkness in the work.” And this is exactly what the main character of his new novel is striving for.

Victor is a Chicano artist, Chacon said, “a talented painter who goes to France to study, where he meets and falls in love with an Arab woman. They get married and have a daughter, an Arabtina, and when the daughter is three-years old, the mother dies.”

For a while, the family lives in Los Angeles, but Victor’s desire to pursue his art leads him to make a life-changing decision – sell everything he owns and move to Michoacan, Mexico, with his 16-year-old daughter. They move to a very small town, Patzcuaro, which is near a lake, a city that is known for its “strange, spiritual phenomenon” and which also has the biggest Day of the Dead celebration in the world.

The story centers on Victor’s journey of finding this spiritual place, “outside of time,” which will allow him access to his work. Meanwhile, his daughter is developing her own artistic sensibility. This is a story about the development of their ways of seeing and how it affects both work and life.

Chacon had a similar experience himself. He took a one-year leave-of-absence – without pay – from his university to write. He sold everything he owned and went to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He wrote the first draft of Black Sound in four months.

Two years before he even started the novel, he spent a lot of time researching and thinking about it. He even spent three months in Paris drawing and painting and going to museums and galleries. He would sit for hours in front of paintings and try to draw some of the details. He learned the “difference between drawing with a pen or pencil,” even which pen he preferred over others.

Chacon said he won’t start a novel until he has the final image in his head. Then he waits a while, goes through a “labyrinth of reading,” thinks of a first image, and starts when he feels he is ready. He had the initial idea for Black Sound 25 years ago.

The newest novel he is working on now – the working title is So Easy – is a book where he has completed four chapters. It has a lot to do with physics, and it’s a novel that has been waiting to “burst out.”

Chacon said that many writers have ideas popping into their head all of the time, and they think, “Good idea – write that down.” Chacon doesn’t write anything down unless it is one of those ideas that “pursue” him. He feels that we act in ways that are part of our momentum, that we put direction into our lives unconsciously.

“If you trust those ideas that need to be written, they’ll pursue.”

Chacon writes: “The story carries its own form, and that form both (physics and mysticism will agree) comes from the emanation of the energy you access as you sit down to write something – a desire to write ‘something really good’ or something inspired by an image, or by a feeling – it is that emanation of will which gives form to a story or novel.”

As writers, we have to immerse our work in the world we live in and vice versa, from the books we read, to the perceptions we have about life and the world we create through writing. Creative development comes from focus. When Chacon is working on a novel, he doesn’t read anything that would fight against his focus.

“It sounds restrictive,” Chacon said. “But it’s incredibly liberating. Everything we read and do becomes a labyrinth. Passages, hallways, lead you to something else, one writer to the next, one archetype to another until you get closer and closer to the light. It’s different from a maze, which is meant to confuse you. Any passage you take in a labyrinth will lead you to something, and sometimes to very surprising places you would have no idea how to reach if you had tried to plan it.”

When focused, everything is connected through the subconscious, the imagination, through “chance,” and as writers, “we get to explore these metaphysical passages,” he said. The students of Fresno State’s MFA program are fortunate to have Chacon as a guide this fall.