by Jennifer Levin on
“I LOVE MY SOLITARY LIFE,” says Albuquerque poet, novelist, and screenwriter Jimmy Santiago Baca. Abandoned by his parents as a toddler, Baca spent portions of his youth in a Santa Fe orphanage before being sent to jail for selling drugs at age 20. While serving a five-year sentence in a maximum security prison, Baca taught himself to read and write, penciling his first poems in isolation. His first collection, Immigrants in Our Own Land, came out in 1979, the year after his release. The 72-year-old of Indio-Mexican descent has written more than 30 books of poetry, essays, and autofiction, including the 1988 American Book Award–winning semi-autobiographical novel in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley. He wrote the screenplay for the 1993 film Blood In, Blood Out, which has grown a worldwide cult following. A limited edition 30th-anniversary tribute book was released earlier this year. “Everyone in this society is looking for the charmed life,” says Baca, who empowers the next generation by working with students and hosting an annual writing retreat in Albuquerque. “Real living takes place in chaos.”
The government schedules you to learn your ABCs. They schedule you to learn your addition. Anyone who differs from that schedule is either a dropout or a genius. I’m neither. I just had a desire to learn.
I’m very drawn to southern New Mexico. There needs to be a book written about that area in the same way that Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea.
There’ve been books where I just wrote 200 pages in two weeks and turned it in. They’re doing just as well as the books that I contemplated for 10 years.
I call it pickup writing—like pickup basketball. It feels so good to just write, to stream through it.
I never knew how many fans there were for Blood In, Blood Out. We had 2,000 people standing in the parking lot at one event for the 30-year anniversary.
I think everyone can feel a communal tie to the intimate language of the movie—bilingual language that’s completely understood.
I kind of backed away from the literary world because it was too pastoral for my taste. A couple of deer outside the window licking dew off a leaf. In this world?
I’m rereading Tolstoy. What a structure he has.
I know poets who spent their entire lives trying to be liked.
Put poets in chaos. Put them where men cry. Put them where people drop to their knees and pray. Put them in places where we act like human beings again.
“Redemption” is a cool word because it reeks of spirituality and change and empathy.
I don’t write novels or poetry or screenplays because I’m redeemed.
The criminal mind inside me never went away. I still want to go out and do drugs.
There’s a certain magnetism to someone who has suffered great loss. It shows itself in modesty, humility, and civility.
My grandmother was like that.
If I was a lousy father, I’d probably be writing lousy books.
I’m working on a screenplay for a major studio right now—and that’s all I’ll say about that.
I’m working on a trilogy: auto-fiction that covers my horrible marriages, addictions, and womanizing and madness and mental illness. Forty years of chaos, highly structured.