Writer Sandra Cisneros is a ‘Woman Without Shame’

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2022

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we’re joined by beloved author Sandra Cisneros! We discuss her first poetry collection in 28 years, Woman Without Shame (4:40), why she chooses to write ‘dangerous’ pieces (6:18), and the significance of her poem, “My Mother and Sex” (8:38). Then, we walk through Sandra’s coming of age between Mexico and Chicago (15:16), the sixth-grade teacher that guided her entry into art (19:39), her epiphanies on class in graduate school (23:49), the “Pilsen Bario” that shaped her seminal novel, The House on Mango Street (29:05), and how Studs Terkel informed her lifelong approach to story (30:17).

On the back-half, we discuss the loves and losses that inspired Sandra’s early sensual poems (36:36), how she documented her power through “Neither Señorita nor Señora” (40:04), a painful period captured in “Year of my Death” (50:30), the day her mother visited her writer’s office in San Antonio (57:56), and why she still has more to say (and write) at age 67 (59:59).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm David Remnickin each week on the New Yorker radio hour. My colleagues and I
0:04.8	unpack what's happening in a very complicated world. You'll hear from the New
0:09.2	Yorker's award-winning reporters and thinkers,
0:11.7	Gilani Cobb on race and justice,
0:14.0	Jill Lepore on American history,
0:16.0	Vincent Cunningham and Gia Tolantino on culture,
0:19.0	Bill McKibbon on climate change and many more.
0:22.0	To get the context behind events in the news, climate change and many more.
0:22.5	To get the context behind events in the news,
0:25.3	listen to the New Yorker radio hour,
0:27.5	wherever you get your podcast. Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm Sam by writer and poet Sandra Cisneros. Her debut book, The House on
1:18.8	Mango Street, told the story of a 12-year-old Chicana growing up as Sesnarrows did in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago.
1:27.6	The book was released in 1984, but since then it sold over 6 million copies and has become required reading in
1:36.4	middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country.
1:41.2	It also made her a key figure in the Mexican American artist movement
1:46.1	which aimed to tell our stories with candor and complexity. Those qualities remain in woman without Shame, her first poetry collection in 28 years.
1:57.0	These pieces, some of which you'll hear in this episode, range from tender to combative, as she reflects on the uphill battle on her
2:06.4	journey to become an artist, or the loves and losses she experienced as a
2:11.2	globetroting young woman. Like the work itself, this conversation plays like
2:16.4	her poetry. Stories fragmented, truth dispensed in fits and starts, chronology be damned.
2:24.0	We talk about growing up between the two worlds of Chicago and Mexico,
2:28.2	the influence of her mother and Studs Turkle,
	...

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