Hypertext Magazine asked Blake Sanz, author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, “How did the decision to tell interconnected narratives affect the scope of the collection and why was it important in the context of borderlands and immigration?”
By Blake Sanz
I remember hearing Lorrie Moore talk in interview about how she decided to put together her 2014 story collection, Bark. She said something about how she’d written a bunch of stories over a few years, and at a certain point, she just felt like it was time to compile what she’d written since the last collection.
I was so floored by the simplicity and logic of that response, and I think applies here to an extent. I wrote a bunch of stories, and recently, it felt like it was time to assess what I had and try to put it out. It wasn’t exactly that I decided to tell interconnected narratives, so much as it was that, at least for some span of time, I was tending toward writing stories of a certain kind that were all clustered together in terms of style and theme. I am who I am, which is to say, the son of a Mexican immigrant to the US who chose to return to his homeland, and so it’s natural that I would be preoccupied in my stories with those kinds of concerns, from a number of different angles and perspectives.
Even more to the point of the stories’ interconnectedness, I’ll add that, in a basic way, the collection was limited by a need to be consistent about the details of recurring characters’ lives. I had a few stories that didn’t make it into the collection because, in them, I’d played with characters’ life circumstances—some versions of Tommy, for example, imbued him with one set of past experiences, and other versions of him had a slightly different past—and to include all of these in the collection would’ve been confusing.
But this question gets at something true. I’ve arranged the book in a way that’s meant to feel cohesive and whole. I’ve even structured it to have a section that, across ten of the stories, follows a Mexican father and his American son from 1968 through 2016. And that decision to follow these two people over so many decades, it felt important not only because I wanted to depict the ebbs and flows and emotional effects of their estrangement across a lifetime, but also because stories of immigration and diasporic families are big ones. They have effects that ripple out over decades. I wanted a collection that would reflect the grandness of that circumstance. One that would reflect the great emotional weight that accumulates over generations from a single person’s decision to leave one country for another, then to start a family that new land, and finally to leave that all behind to return to his birthland. There are oceans of regret and happiness and pain and joy that come from such a series of monumental decisions, and I hope that the book captures some of how those emotions came to be, how immigrant and first-generation sons and daughters come to feel the way they do about their homes and their families.
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Blake Sanz is the author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling (October 15, 2021; University of Iowa Press), which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. He has published fiction in Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and elsewhere. A native of Louisiana, he now lives in Denver, Colorado and teaches writing at the University of Denver. You can visit him at blakesanz.com.
The Boundaries of Their Dwelling: Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography. A Chilanga teen wins a trip to Miami to film a reality show about family while pining for the American brother she’s never met. A Louisiana carpenter tends to his drug-addicted son while rebuilding his house after a slew of hurricanes. A New Orleans ne’er-do-well opens a Catholic-themed bar in the wake of his devout mother’s death. A village girl from Chiapas baptizes her infant on a trek toward the U.S. border.
In the collection’s second half, we follow a Veracruzan-born drifter, Manuel, and his estranged American son, Tommy. Over decades, they negotiate separate nations and personal tragicomedies on their journeys from innocence to experience. As Manuel participates in student protests in Mexico City in 1968, he drops out to pursue his art. In the 1970s, he immigrates to Louisiana, but soon leaves his wife and infant son behind after his art shop fails. Meanwhile, Tommy grows up in 1980s Louisiana, sometimes escaping his mother’s watchful eye to play basketball at a park filled with the threat of violence. In college, he seeks acceptance from teammates by writing their term papers. Years later, as Manuel nears death and Tommy reaches middle age, they reconnect, embarking on a mission to jointly interview a former riot policeman about his military days; in the process, father and son discover what it has meant to carry each other’s stories and memories from afar.
