Former El Pasoan wrote what she knew (with exaggeration)
Ramón Rentería
El Paso Times
Sunday, April 2, 2006
Christine Granados' characters resemble your Mexican-American friends, tias and oddballs in the family.
"They're
composites, exaggerated versions of my family and friends," Granados
said in a phone conversation from her home in Rockdale, Texas.
Granados,
37, is coming to her hometown to promote her first book, "Brides and
Sinners in El Chuco," a collection of stories set in El Paso.
"I
write what I know," Granados said. "I'm a chick, so I write about
chicks. All the women in El Paso are very strong individuals to be
living and surviving in El Paso."
Sometimes, it's a miracle Granados gets any writing done.
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Even when she's on the phone, plugging the book, she's busy tending to her boys, Esten Andres, 5, and William Celestino, 3.
Her
bio labels her a stay-at-home mom, but at 37, Granados has worked as a
newspaper reporter and once edited a high-profile national magazine
targeting young Latinas. She quit working full time in the late 1990s
to raise a family and returned to school to work on a master's degree.
She earned her journalism credentials in her hometown, at UTEP.
These
days, Granados writes a weekly column for the Rockdale Reporter, which
her husband, Ken Esten Cooke, manages, and still accepts free-lance
assignments from various newspapers and national magazines.
Granados
wrote most of the stories in "Brides and Sinners" while working on a
master of fine arts degree in creative writing at Texas State
University in San Marcos, where the prominent Chicano writer Dagoberto
Gilb encouraged her to write about her experiences as a
Mexican-American.
"I didn't read a story with a Mexican-American
in it until I was in college," Granados said. "If one of my stories is
in somebody's textbook some day and my kids end up reading it in class,
that would be real cool."
Granados is now working on a novel
about a bored housewife who has affairs with drug dealers, another
character she said is loosely based on someone else in her family.
So is all this book publishing stuff getting to her head yet?
"Yeah, right," she said. "I felt real famous in Waco reading to five people."
Ramón Rentería may be reached at rrenteria@elpasotimes.com; 546-6146.
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