By Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
Ana Castillo reclined on the off-white gallery chair and I apologized for looking like a slob, but where I had to be next required more informal clothing, and so, I apologized —
“For not dressing professionally?”
Yeah, I laughed nervously, I’m driving to —
“A baseball game?”
She didn’t laugh but smiled flatly and I couldn’t tell if she was insulted or joking or not joking but kind of joking. I never do know. She wore white pants stylishly frayed at the cuffs and a white sweater beneath a denim jacket embroidered elegantly on the sleeves, a piece from a Spanish designer, but Castillo is not the type to give plugs and decides not to spill the label.
I’ve never entirely gotten a handle on Ana Castillo. Though, to be fair, who has? One of Chicago’s best living writers (and a 2022 inductee of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame), she’s often mentioned in the same breath as that other great Chicana writer from Chicago, Sandra Cisneros. She writes haunting fiction on life in Chicago and at the Mexico border. But she’s a better poet. And not too shabby a visual artist. And a good playwright. Also, as an essayist, she’s indispensable on feminism from the perspective of a woman with Chicago and Mexican indigenous roots.
Plus, she draws a pretty fun picture of … farm animals smoking cigars?
What is this? I asked her, standing before such an image, hanging now, alongside others from Castillo, through Oct. 9, at the Hilton Asmus Contemporary gallery in River North. It was made in 2021 at her home in New Mexico and the title is “El Club de las Xismosas Poetas,” and like many of her drawings here, it’s selling for about $2,900. A relative steal, particularly if you’re a connoisseur of art made by seminal literary figures.
“Who is this?” Castillo asked. “It’s haters! It’s called (in English) the Club of Gossipers. There’s a snake there, there’s a pig, there’s a goat, and there’s another little pig and that’s a rat. So basically, it’s the people who get together, sit around and talk about you.”
And the figures in the drawing above that smoking pig?
“I don’t know. You tell me. ‘Mother & Child,’ it’s titled.”
I see a cat, only longer, with wings. No, wait: two mice.
“Maybe. Whimsical pets. They are feel-good drawings and you could have them in your bedroom and see them every day. Those kind of drawings. Here is another one with animals. I have a tendency to draw like little hummingbirds but them, see, there are bugs crawling along the bottom. Because that’s what life is like. Where we live in New Mexico, we have dogs and we’re surrounded by turtles and frogs. In these kind of compositions, I tend to have the sea, earth, sky, the universe. You can also see snails here, and Trees of Life — I’m obsessed with Trees of Life. Oh, there’s a worm. I don’t know how many Trees of Life I have drawn. A lot. There’s the sun, the Earth. In my mind, it’s all part of reminding yourself of the environment. Environmental issues are very noticeable where I live. After I wrote (the 1993 breakout novel) ‘So Far From God,’ I was surprised to be recognized as an environmental activist because of that book. But that was my conscience coming out. I wrote about the day the dead birds fell from the sky. Which happened in New Mexico. A few years ago, universities started to look into that and try to figure out why. I found four or five (dead birds) and I thought one of the dogs was getting them, but no, these birds, they were just dropping out of the sky.”
Birds hit skyscrapers in Chicago all the time, I offered, lamely.
“I have a lot of windows at home it’s horrible when they hit windows, but no, I am literally talking about dead birds dropping out of the sky! (The universities) have come up with a lot of dumb things about these birds but nothing that’s like So this is why it’s happening!”
Castillo, who turned 70 in June, first left Chicago many decades ago, after graduating from Northeastern Illinois University; she headed to California to teach and help with the United Farm Workers movement there, led by Cesar Chavez. Ever since, she’s shuttled back and forth between the West Coast and the Southwest and Mexico and Chicago. “Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home,” her new collection of short stories, her first since 1996, features characters who occupy those very routes, particularly Chicago to Mexico and back. In “Ven,” a man reads his late sister’s diaries and retraces her footsteps in Mexico. In the title story, a wise high school graduate from Chicago is sent to Mexico by her father to find her mother, who abandoned the family several months earlier. In Castillo’s short stories, people in Chicago are often trying to unearth dark hidden truths.
She’s said reviewers have been characterizing her stories as about Mexicans “going back and forth.” But whereas “customary migration is them coming here to find ‘a better life,’ I found it interesting, and this wasn’t intentional, my characters go north to south — but move up in status. My family here didn’t have a pool or housekeeper. In Mexico, that might have been.”
She’s working on her next novel, “Isabel 2121,” using a related calculus: “There’s the future and past living simultaneously, based on string theory. So you have characters 500 years in the future, and characters at the conquest of Mexico, 500 years ago. It’s dystopian in 2121 and, for my ancestors, conquest was dystopian.”
She writes in the a.m. and makes art in the p.m.
The 20 pieces on display in River North are a sliver of hundreds of similar drawings she made in the past decade. It began in 2015 when she found herself with free time during a teaching job. She made the first drawings as a meditation, she said: “Hence the lines.”
Yes, the lines. Thin and tight and parallel, and there are so many of them, arranged into geometric blocks, swirling, like dizzying rabbit holes constructed of angular pinwheels.
Frankly, obsessive.
“It does seem I have gone mad,” Castillo said. “I did ask people if it seemed like I went mad here. They said, ‘No, not at all.’ They said it was ‘discipline.’” She drew the works freehand with a Sharpie and only occasionally employed a ruler. “‘Discipline’ doesn’t mean anything. I mean, I could have some obsessive disorder. I meditated years ago and you become accustomed to any ritual becoming a calming thing. We live in extreme quiet in New Mexico. We live in the desert. We hardly see anybody. You can see the sun set. Music from far off. Making lines like this, it’s like knitting a pattern of all of that.”
Castillo grew up on Taylor Street, crowded, very Italian.
“Then they built the (University of Illinois Chicago) campus on top of it and relocated everyone, including my family. But just blocks away. I was there 20 years. Then my family moved to Lakeview and bought a two-flat and I suppose we became North Siders.”
Were there ghosts? I asked.
Ghosts, imagined and metaphoric, float through much of her new book. “On Taylor Street? There were things no one in my family verified but I remember vividly. Ghosts in my culture, Mexican indigenous culture — we believe in ghosts. Everyone has a ghost sighting. The book opens with the dad saying, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I wanted to evoke the possibility (of ghosts), but it’s not the point. The point is the living. In ‘The Girl in the Green Dress,’ you have a woman hearing a story of a headless girl in the library.”
A Chicago Public Library branch.
“Right.”
And the librarian is caught overnight during a polar vortex.
“Yes.”
Why do you get to write about Chicago polar vortexes from the warmth of New Mexico?
“I know polar vortexes! I do! I know them well. When I was invited back to Dominican University — it was a vortex! They stay with you. In ‘Green Dress,’ that librarian is starting to freeze in there and go into hypothermia and she’s terrified at the possibility of a headless ghost and she’s thinking over her life and if she lives, she’ll make changes.”
We never learn what happens.
“I leave everything open, always.”
Indeed. As I’m leaving, just outside the gallery, the smoke from Canadian wildfires has made it to Wells Street and the daylight is unnerving. A commuter speed-walks past, staring into storefronts with his mouth shaped in a perfect “O.” A few doors down a woman sweeps dirt off the stoop of a Brazilian day spa as if she’s in a musical. She hums loudly and I wonder if there are Brazilian day spas in musicals. I don’t know why I am noticing this stuff, only that I am and those stories go on. As Castillo said, “We think a story is over, but there’s this other moment, then another year, and another time. And that is life. It is open-ended.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
