Words of Wisdom from Sandra Cisneros
Visit Chicago magazine to learn about a few pivotal moments in Sandra Cisneros's life. "When I worked across the street from the Art Institute as an undergrad," Cisneros begins, "I spent a lot of time in that museum. Being near things of beauty nourished me for the next couple of hours of sitting in a cubicle, listening to people on the phone complain about the gas company." From there:
Art gave me an illumination and an imagination. It gave me a vocabulary.
I spent a lot of time contemplating life riding the L from Humboldt Park to the Lake Shore Campus of Loyola. I loved traveling behind the apartment buildings and would think, What if I lived there? I guess I’ve always been kind of a busybody. I like seeing other people’s lives.
When I was 21, I was hit by a car in Iowa City just months after I’d gotten there for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was frightening because I was all by myself. I had fought really hard for that freedom to live alone. So in the emergency room, when they asked if I wanted to notify anyone, I said no. I really wasn’t clear about what had happened until I showered and looked at my scraped and bruised body. I started to cry and realized, I’m not in control of this life I thought I was in control of.
I think depression is especially profound with artists. But if you come from a working-class family, you tend to dismiss it because your parents and your grandparents and ancestors had much more terrible lives than you. After I published The House on Mango Street with a small press, there wasn’t enough money to pay my rent, so I went through a period of great doubt. At 33, I didn’t have the things other people had. I didn’t have insurance or a car or a house. And I couldn’t face borrowing money from my mother and father yet again. It just felt easier for me to think of being dead. I had to call a suicide hotline.
My intuition told me I needed to go home for Christmas. When I got there, my mother said, “There’s a letter for you from Washington, D.C., and I think it’s good news.” I opened the envelope, and it was $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. Now I could pay all my loans back. More important, someone had decided my writing was worth living for.
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