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SPEAK OF THE DEVIL: Olivas brings surreal elements into his latest short stories.
Pablo Serrano |
at age 3, Daniel
Olivas stopped speaking for an entire year. When his
parents took him for tests, experts told them that growing
up in a bilingual home was too confusing and advised
them to stop speaking Spanish to him. Olivas did start
talking again, but when it came time for school, other
kids teased the “little white boy” for not
knowing the lingua franca of his neighborhood, Pico
Heights in Los Angeles.
So there’s some irony in the fact that today,
Olivas, ’81, finds himself an emerging voice in
Chicano fiction. First came his novella, The Courtship
of María Rivera Peña (Silver Lake Publishing,
2000), then a book of short stories, Assumption and
Other Stories (Bilingual Press, 2003). He published
a second collection, Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual
Press) last summer, and his first children’s book,
Benjamin and the Word (Arte Publico Press) is due out
in April. Although he writes in English, his works center
on Latinos in Los Angeles, and Spanish expressions pepper
their dialogue. Olivas confesses he’s not fully
bilingual: “I struggle with my Spanish dictionary
and call my mom about the best phrase to use.”
A lawyer for 20 years, Olivas says taking up creative
writing six years ago at age 39 was a natural progression.
For one thing, as a child he loved reading. “My
father in particular was a voracious reader, always
pushing books at me and my siblings—things by
Joyce and Twain. I remember reading Don Quixote in fifth
grade—the English translation—because my
dad just loved books,” he says. His father also
wrote poetry and a novel Olivas regrets he never had
the chance to read because the manuscript “never
sold and he destroyed it.”
Olivas majored in English at Stanford, but he never
took any creative writing courses, “because I
thought that would be a frivolous thing to do,”
he says. But he was always working on a publication,
from the Chaparral, where he was staff artist
and art director, to UCLA Law School’s Chicano
Law Review, which he edited.
Writing turned out to be crucial to his career. Olivas
is a deputy attorney general with the California Department
of Justice, where he specializes in environmental enforcement
and land-use issues. “You win half the battle
in court with high-quality brief writing,” he
says.
“Writing a good brief is like writing a good story,”
the author adds. He chides lawyers who think doing a
brief is formulaic—“forgetting about the
human side, forgetting that a person is going to read
the briefs, forgetting that there’s a story behind
every case and behind every person involved in every
case. So that’s how I approach brief writing:
like story writing. Not that I put fiction in my briefs,”
he asserts quickly, recalling the quip of an opposing
counsel who said of his books, “Oh, now you’re
making money on the side doing something you’ve
been doing all along.”
In fact, that’s a fair observation, but not quite
the way his colleague meant. By bringing his real-life
experience to his fiction, Olivas creates characters
who ring true. A Los Angeles Times review of Assumption
and Other Stories noted, “Though some of the stories
are little more than sketches running two or three pages,
Olivas is adept at establishing character in a sentence
or two; he creates an image, a moment of self-deception,
in which we come to know these characters intimately.”
Some of his stories have strong autobiographical elements.
In Assumption’s “Summertime,” a white
supremacist sniper shoots children at a Jewish summer
camp. Olivas’s son, 13-year-old Benjamin, who
is Chicano and Jewish like one of the characters, witnessed
such an incident at his own summer program. Another
story, “New Year,” tells of a man whose
wife has just had her fifth miscarriage, echoing the
story of how Olivas first turned to writing fiction.
In 1998, Olivas’s wife, Susan Formaker, suffered
the fifth of six miscarriages. “I was helping
her and my son with their grief, but I wasn’t
dealing with my grief very well at all,” he explains.
“So I started to write.” That effort became
The Courtship of María Rivera Peña, “loosely
based on my family history—my dad’s parents’
migration from Mexico to L.A. in the 1920s. And the
reason that story came out of me is that it dealt with
all the good things in life, but also all the bad things,
the things where you don’t have control.”
Having made a start, Olivas decided that to continue
writing fiction seriously he needed to catch up on Latino
literature, which was absent from the curriculum when
he was studying Woolf, Shakespeare and Lawrence at Stanford
and during his time at Stanford’s overseas program
at Cliveden, in England. “I read House on Mango
Street [by Sandra Cisneros] and I just fell in love
with that book. It was a sock between the eyes. I read
Victor Villaseñor, and I grabbed Bless Me, Ultima [by Rudolfo Anaya],” he says. “That’s
when I really started reading Latino literature.”
Olivas captures diverse points of view in his stories—he
calls it the writer’s equivalent of character
acting. “Creating voices for characters very different
from himself is Dan’s specialty,” says Linda
Thurston, his editor at Bilingual Press. “For
example, in Assumption he takes on voices of an ordinary
man, a lesbian, a female criminal who has just committed
a murder, a criminal who is planning a hate crime, a
priest, a nun and many others. He seems to be able to
use any voice he wants and make it convincing.” Not a bad outcome for someone who was once mute.
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