Behind The Stack

Luis Jaramillo, "The Witches of El Paso"

• Brett Benner • Season 1 • Episode 7

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In this episode Brett sits down with author Luis Jaramillo to discuss, 'The Witches of El Paso'. They talk about the role El Paso plays, the tradition of passing down stories through family, and how magic entered his narrative. 

Luis website: https://www.luisjaramillo.com

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Hello and welcome back. So today on the show, I'm really happy to be joined by author Lewis had Emilio who's brand new book. The witches of El Paso comes out today. October 8th. A little bit about Luis. He is the author of the award-winning short story collection. The doctor's wife, his writing has appeared in literary hub bomb magazine, the Los Angeles review of books and other publications. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the new school. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford university. And an MFA from the new school. Find out more at Luis Hammad. Dot com and that web address will be in my show notes. So thanks for being here and enjoy this conversation with Luis on the witches of El Paso.

Brett Benner:

how is the weather in New York? Is it starting to cool off?

Luis:

Yeah, it's a little gray today. It's not really ever cool anymore. I think,

Brett Benner:

I know, so thank you so much for being here. It's so lovely to meet you. I absolutely loved your book. I thought it was just so fantastic and so surprising. I didn't know what to expect and I just thought it was really wonderful. So I'm, I'm thrilled that you're here. Before we dive into the book itself just a little bit about you. You are the assistant professor of writing at the new school and you grew up in Salinas, California, is that right?

Luis:

That's correct, yeah.

Brett Benner:

And now did you have brothers and sisters?

Luis:

I have one brother who I just saw yesterday. He lives in Pittsburgh now. That's where

Brett Benner:

I'm from.

Luis:

Oh, really? Where in Pittsburgh? He lives in Squirrel Hill.

Brett Benner:

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in the South Hills of Pittsburgh and then I went to Carnegie Mellon

Luis:

yeah, I'd never been to Pittsburgh before my brother moved there. And it's a very, it's charming. It's like, has a, I don't know, great art stuff. And that park that the universities are around is really great too.

Brett Benner:

Yeah, it's a great city. It was a great city to grow, to grow up in. So were you a reader growing

Luis:

up? I was a huge reader. I went to the library. I went to the bookstore. My parents always bought me whatever book I wanted, you know, I couldn't have anything I wanted in the rest of my life, but they bought me any book I wanted. When I went to a bookstore, I would always get a stack of books and just tear through Which, you know, in some ways was Good. I mean, yay reading, but it also taught me to read really quickly, which has served me well as a teacher and as, you know, doing things like this with other people, you know, having to read their stuff and then quickly be able to. synthesize some, some responses and questions. But I have terrible retention. So it's, you know, I can like hold everything for a short amount of time and then it gets kicked out of my brain.

Brett Benner:

If I retain anything from the book, For a long time, then I'm thinking that's a book that made an impact on me and that's, that's a great book versus the majority of it is within six months. I'm like, I might be able to give you broad strokes.

Luis:

Yeah, I don't know about you, but I very rarely remember plot. I remember some images. I remember some scenes. Characters, of course. But it's the, it's sort of an impression of the book that I remember rather than this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

Brett Benner:

Okay, so you went and did your undergrad at Stanford but you didn't start out as a writer, correct?

Luis:

I mean, I took writing classes my last year in college. My very first writing class was with Lan Samantha Chang, who now runs the Iowa program. Okay. She's a great writer, you know, short story writer and novelist. And it just, I was like, Oh, this is, this is great. Something that I, I really want to do, I, you know, because I loved reading so much, I always sort of assumed that I would be a writer, but you know, wanting to be a writer and being a writer are two different things. And it's much harder to actually sit down and, and try to produce something and see the broken thing that emerges in the first, you know, 20 drafts or whatever. Yeah, but yeah, land was just a great teacher and I had some other really great teachers at Stanford and then it took me a while to. I took sort of two years between college and graduate school. And then even in graduate school I was very undisciplined.

Brett Benner:

I was busy

Luis:

doing other things. I was, I had just moved to New York and I, you know, I had that's what I was focused on.

Brett Benner:

You had life. It was life. I had life. I was

Luis:

24 years old.

Brett Benner:

You had distractions. I was watching a video of you from the new school and it was from 2015 and you, you said you were writing a novel. Was that this novel?

Luis:

Yes.

Brett Benner:

Okay. So you were talking about the about practice and you were talking about also just what we were just speaking about, about the dedication to writing and writing every day. And you said, practice though necessary every time is only the road that takes you to the edge of the cliff. And you said, and I'm, I'm standing at the edge of the cliff right now as I'm writing this book. Well, now you're on the other side. So how do you feel?

Luis:

I can't even remember when I, where I said that or why but I, I, I do agree with that. You know, the jumping off the edge is necessary. And then I was to keep up the metaphor, you know, in the air for a long time to sort of flailing and trying to figure this thing out. And now here I am, you know, I have actual physical copies of the real book now and it's, it feels exciting, but at the same time. You know, part of me is like, oh, what's the next thing? Right. Which is not to di diminish this moment. And I know, and it's fun to see the book get out there, so the book, being out there means that people are responding to it and people who I don't know. Which is exciting and scary and sometimes not great. But then other times it's, it's just the way that people the, the things that people connect to are things that, you know, I worked on in private. And it's, it's, it's a very interesting experience to, to see that happen and to, to sort of feel that inner world.

Brett Benner:

Become real. Yeah. And that you've sat with for so long and these characters that you've sat with for so long. Yeah. It's, it's, it's wild. So for our listeners and viewers who don't know, can you give us a little elevator pitch on the book?

Luis:

Sure. I I'm so good at elevator pitches. I'm actually good at them for other people. So what I've been thinking about for this book is that. This is a story about two people who want to get out of their regular lives for a couple reasons. One of the characters and this storyline is set in World War II era El Paso, is an 18 year old and she has to take care of her sister's kids and is just really has very limited options in life. And so she. Calls out to be taken away and she is you know, in fairy tales you, to get what you ask for is the start of the story and sort of like the, where things start to go wrong. The other character, main character, and this is set in contemporary times, is a lawyer, a lawyer for poor people. She has, she's married, she has kids. And she's facing down middle age. And so for other reasons, she's, she's asking to be taken out of her life. And the way that she's taken out of her day to day life is by her great aunt, who's the other character now. In her 90s calls her to her house and says that she's just seen her daughter, who she left many years ago in another time. So this is all this is the start of the story, is the the skeptical lawyer is drawn into the world of her. Great aunt who is able to, to see the future and talk to the dead.

Brett Benner:

Yeah. Marta, who is the lawyer, I think is such a great character. It's such an interesting character because you've kind of created both sides of the Scully and Mulder X Files character where she's a lawyer. So she deals in facts and suddenly faced with this, you know, supernatural angle and, and, and also probably wondering if her aunt isn't a little bit crazy I love that it's about these strong women, but it's also so steeped in history and folklore and superstition. Where did this all come from? Where did you get this idea? And that's why I wanted to know, I wanted to know if you had sisters really. So it's interesting that you have a brother. No, you know, so many

Luis:

times I've written about a sister. I don't know where that sister is, but she's sort of haunting my, my stories and life. An older sister, I'm an older sibling, but there's an older sister around there somewhere in my head. Yeah. But the, the stories came from, some of them are, are drawn from family stories. And I wanted to my family's from El Paso. I've lived in El Paso for when I was a little kid and then visited throughout my childhood and, and later. But my dad's family's from El Paso for many, for a very long time, hundreds of years or sort of El Paso and New Mexico. And so a lot of the stories are just stories that have been handed down. So some folklore, some family stories, and then I did a ton of research too because I felt like I needed to really educate myself on the, the history of El Paso and Juarez and you know, colonial Mexico and lots of other things that didn't make it into the book. But you know, if you're from a place or sort of near a place and you've never stayed there before, it's really interesting to dig in and find actual facts about what happened and think about how. The way things are have a reason, a historical reason. I did want to write about El Paso is such an odd place. But the geography of the places. So. Interesting and beautiful and weird. And one thing that I've been thinking about recently is just the scale of things is, is feels very different than other places in the country, especially. Like this is in the book, but El Paso is right next to Fort Bliss, which is I think the biggest army base in the country. But if not, it's huge. It's the size of Rhode Island. Oh my God. Yeah. And then. So it stretches from El Paso then up into New Mexico where it touches White Sands Missile Range which is twice the size of Rhode Island. So there's this enormous piece of land in New Mexico and in Texas that, you know, if you'd sort of like mapped on. Eastern United States onto it, it's a lot of land and there's kind of nothing going on there. So there's that sense of isolation in El Paso because of that, you know, just because it's surrounded by vast deserts and mountains that, where people just don't live. And which is not how I grew up and not where I live now, certainly.

Brett Benner:

And it's also a very mixed community, right? I mean culturally and all of it. Yeah, it's

Luis:

a very, I would say the term is bicultural. I don't know exactly what the percentages of, you know Latinas versus white people in El Paso. But that's, that's basically the makeup. You know, sort of taking out Fort Bliss, which is of course very diverse because it's an army base. But yeah, it's, and you know, people just, people speak Spanish, even, you know, white people speak, speak Spanish, everyone speaks Spanish because you, you kind of have to.

Brett Benner:

It's also, it's a border town. So you're talking about immigration as well, which comes into it.

Luis:

Yeah. And so one thing that I find so fascinating about El Paso is that lots of immigrants do come through the the port and their immigration courts. And you know, there are people who sort of come through and then they ask for asylum and then have to be, and so the ICE sort of deals with them and then there are non profits that feed and house them and then usually they move elsewhere in the United States. But there's also this very stable population of people who live either in Juarez or in El Paso and they cross back and forth almost daily. People cross for school, for work, for entertainment, for to get dinner. You know, it's like, it's a really, it's really easy to cross. And even people who are Mexican citizens can get, I can't remember what it's called, but there's, you know, some special kind of pass that allows them to serve across back and forth. Because it, it needs to be open so that trade can happen for one thing. You know, the, there are these cities that are, I describe this in the book, but when you, you can walk from El Paso, downtown El Paso to downtown Juarez you just cross the street. It's a pretty small little bridge, and there you are in another country, and it feels like you're in another country.

Brett Benner:

How much, now, I don't know if you've discovered this in terms of your research, but how much has that changed, certainly at, like, post 9 11 or whatever, how is that locked down? I mean, there has to be Yeah, it's

Luis:

changed a lot to come into the United States. So when I was a kid, I don't quite remember this, but I've been told that, you know, when we would come back, you know, after going to lunch at the market or something. You would just say, American citizen, and then they would wave you through. So, so that, that has changed. Board of

Brett Benner:

directors.

Luis:

Yeah. And actually, I when I went recently, I was coming back and I made the mistake of saying, so the ICE agent asked me what I'd been doing in Juarez. And I made the mistake of saying, Oh, I'm researching a book. And so then he got like really serious and he was like, what does it have to do with trafficking? You know, it was like, and I got like all these questions and I was like, God, next time just say you know, I went for lunch. Yeah. Yeah. I would have loved it. Did you say no, it's about witches. I don't know what I said, but I was like a note to self. Do not write, don't claim to be a writer ever. It never works out.

Brett Benner:

One more way that writers are maligned all the time. So this character of Nana, I also find her completely fascinating. And what I love about about her is you really get to see her at two points in her life. You get to see her as this young woman. And then later in her dealings with Marta She's called now. Now I'm gonna I may mess up this pronunciation. So please correct me. Is it a guia? Guia. A guia. She's a guia. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Luis:

Well, so in the book, I say that she doesn't say that she's a witch, you know, bruja curandera, you know, like a healer with herbs and that kind of thing. She's a guide. And she thinks of herself as somebody who, you know, Is there to, to help people talk to people who passed on. And those are, so at one point in the book, she has other kinds of magical powers, but at the end of her life, what she still has is this ability to. to talk to people who've died or she thinks she does. I mean, it's something that I played around with a bit like, you know, what is it that she can do and what is it that she thinks she can do? But I think that she can see the other

Brett Benner:

side. Did you always know when you went into this, when you started this book that you wanted this to be about this magic element or there was that always there or is it something that kind of developed as you went through? Or how did that come up?

Luis:

Yeah, good question. No, I had no intention of writing about magic I mean zero like negative intention of writing about magic I really want to write about El Paso on the border and family stories and but that's not a story So it really wasn't until Nana appeared as a character and then That I kind of knew what to do. So I, I, she appeared, I wrote some scenes with her. I recently went back to look at some of those scenes and I was surprised. Like she like comes in and it's like, she throws the door open. She goes over to the plate of cookies and scrapes the insides of Oreos out with her teeth. Discards the cookie and then read someone's future in their teacup. And I was like, Oh, Oh, right. She really just doesn't kind of appears. And so I but I was like, I'm not going to write about somebody who can read the future. That's not going to be the main thing. But I went to the Swanee writers conference as a fellow. And part of the deal was that when the faculty members would, would look at as a submission or, you know, 15, 20 pages or something, and the writer Tony early looked at my submission and we sat down to talk and he was like, well, you know, this is a mess. But I was like, Oh, really? But he's like, but Nana, this character, this is where the story is. And I think that gave me the permission to, to go forward with her. And I, so after Samani I was going to start writing Nana's story. And I thought, okay, what I need to do is just really not try to do anything else to tell the story as it comes to me. And so I'd never done this before. I just handwrote the whole first draft.

Brett Benner:

And it really was just a linear thing.

Luis:

You know, it was, it was linear and not linear ask. Yeah, but it, it did prevent me from jumping around in time a bunch. I mean, there is time jumping around, but and I was just telling them a story in that draft, but yeah, it was, it was pretty linear because I couldn't go back and change things and I couldn't. Jump forward because it would disrupt, disrupt the flow of what I was writing.

Brett Benner:

So in other words, you almost just followed her story for a while and then you kind of filled in?

Luis:

Yeah, I mean, I did a whole draft I had and that story is very different from what ended up happening, I think.

Brett Benner:

But

Luis:

a

Brett Benner:

lot of the elements remain. And so one of the things, and this is not a spoiler, is Nena ends up at a convent. Can you talk a little bit just about convents at this time and, and, and, and what it was like for women who were committing their life to this?

Luis:

Yeah. So I had to do research about convents too. There never was a convent in Juarez in colonial Mexico because it was way too small. So in colonial Mexico, it was called El Paso del Norte. What is now what is which is south of the Rio Grande. But anyhow, the names have shifted same place. It was too small. It was too provincial to, to support a convent. But you know, I'm writing fiction, so I thought, well, I'll just make up a convent, that's fine. And you know, the convents were it's, it depended on, on what the order was you know, there are different kinds of orders of nuns but some of them were extraordinarily. Strict so that the women who joined them, when they joined, they wouldn't leave until they died and they couldn't ever see their families again. So it was really a very you know, almost like prison, you know, people were I'm sure committed to religion, some of them. But who knows about others of them? And one reason I wanted to write about convents is because I was thinking about choices for women then and now and during World War II times and how things have changed and not. But you know, in colonial Mexico, there weren't, there really weren't very many options. It was, you get married, you go to the convent or you're a servant. Kind of, those were kind of the choices. They're all kind of the same thing. They're all kind of, you are correct. But the content stuff is so interesting. have you read Matrix, the Lauren Groff book? Yes. Yes. I really loved that book. I read it after I wrote mine, but I just, I loved the, I mean, any story that's set in a place that has these really. Defined boundaries and rules you know, the, the drama sort of starts to creep in because people are going to break rules. And the hierarchy, which is fascinating. And hierarchy, right. So whatever hierarchy there is, you know, it's going to be subverted in

Brett Benner:

some

Luis:

way.

Brett Benner:

So your whole magic system and when you came up with this one of the elements being time travel. Talk about that for a little bit. And I'm curious would you love that ability if you could have it? Ooh,

Luis:

I don't think so. I think time travel, so time travel in the book complicates things, obviously. And so there's only really one instance in the book. There's kind of another thing that happens, but I didn't want it to be something that could happen a lot because for one thing, it makes things way too complicated. And on the other hand, it also makes it too easy to fix things. Sure. Sure. And so, and I wanted it to be an extraordinary thing that happened. That can't be undone. So that's how that worked. But the rest of the magic I'm in a writing group with the writer Alex Chee. And he read, he read, yeah, I

Brett Benner:

love Alex. Oh my God. And I've just, it's been this year for me, like I've literally going through his entire Canon. I just, I'm reading it with a group on Instagram, but Oh my God. Oh my God. They're just, it's been. He's incredible. Yeah, I reread

Luis:

Edinburgh recently and it's an extraordinary book.

Brett Benner:

I

Luis:

also really loved

Brett Benner:

the book about how to, how to be an autoboy, you know, how to write an autobiographical novel. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was, that's the second one I read, which I thought was just extraordinary. And Wow. Wow. So yeah, I got to see

Luis:

some of those essays in while he was writing them. So that was like It's such a good lesson in that, you know, even somebody like Alex Chee goes through more than one draft, and we know this, but it's also nice to see, see that happen. Anyhow, so he read an early draft of The Witches of El Paso and said you know, just sort of like thinking about magic. He was like, magic always complicates. And I think I put that phrase in the book. So magic is not something that solves any problem. It's something that maybe seems to solve one problem, but then leads to a bunch of other issues. So that, that was one thing that I was always thinking. And then just thinking about La Vista, which is what I call the, the magical force of the universe. I guess it's that's magic and things are complicated, but I also, it's like, you know, nature is complicated and it's not just like, nature's not working toward perfection. Nature is working toward destruction and then creation again, and this endless cycle. So that's what I was trying to get at with, with the magic that it's not good or bad force, but, but the, this cycle of creation and destruction.

Brett Benner:

Interesting. There's a line from the book that says magical thinking is believing that what you imagine is manifested in the real world. Do you believe that? Do you believe in that yourself?

Luis:

That you can manifest things in the real world? I, I do and I think that anybody who writes fiction or even nonfiction, but you know, especially fiction, it's really weird when you, you write things and then the world changes. So, you know, what are you changing? Is it just your perception? And then the world seems to change? Who knows, but you know, if we change our perception, we do change our relationship with the world. And I've written other places about how like weird things happened in the writing of this book too. Like there are ladybugs in the book because I, so I live in, in New York, in Manhattan, right by the Lincoln tunnel. On a pretty high floor, so there's, there's no greenery to speak of but for this whole kind of long stretch I kept finding ladybugs on the windowsill next to the couch where I write and, or I'd find them like crawling inside the lampshade at night. And I've just like, they were just, some of them were dead, some of them were alive. One morning I took a sip of my coffee and there was a ladybug in my mouth. Do you have a lot of plants? No, no, I've killed all of them. No. So I don't know where that came from or, and anyhow, so I, when that was happening, I was like, okay, I got to put these in the book. There's something here. I guess that was sort of the world influencing the book, but there's, I don't know, I think part of it is just the way that you pay attention to the world changes dramatically once you're starting to write about something.

Brett Benner:

Are you a spiritual person?

Luis:

Yes. I'm not a religious person, but I am spiritual. I'm always looking for, you know, what are we doing here? How do we live here in a, in a more peaceful way for ourselves and for others?

Brett Benner:

Yeah, I think there's a big separation between spirituality and religion. There's also, the book is very prevalent on themes of desire of all kinds, whether it's passion or family or even food. Is such a part of this at times in terms of eating. I don't wanna give anything away, but can you talk a little bit about this, about these, this, this theme of desire?

Luis:

Well, it's what makes us do things. Anything. Yeah. Sex, food, money, power, you know, those are the, the, the main things, but it's also what, what motivates or what, what propels stories too. You know, there's no story if there's no desire. And so some of the desires can stand in for other desires. So desire for power can maybe be in some scenes translated into a desire for food, for example. But also I just, I really love food and I love to think about food and I love to write about food. So and it, you know, when the best senses is smell too in, in And just to be able to use smell. And lots of different ways is, is effective and fun. But you know, food really allows you to do that in a way that. Communicate something that you can't communicate in other ways.

Brett Benner:

It's also, do you cook?

Luis:

Yeah, I like to cook.

Brett Benner:

I know you more of a cook than a baker or both.

Luis:

Yes, I'm more of a cook than a baker. I was, I, Baked bread for a while, like everyone else.

Brett Benner:

You had your starter during COVID. I

Luis:

did.

Brett Benner:

What do you, and what kind of stuff do you like to cook?

Luis:

Well, I mean, I, I guess I like to, I don't like to follow a recipe. Sometimes I do. But I like to, you know, go to a market, like especially a farmer's market and see what there is and put it together in different ways. So sometimes it's more of like, Oh, this is going to sound so silly, but like sometimes it's more Italian. Sometimes it's more French. Sometimes it's more Mexican. Sometimes it's more Indian. But you know, I, I have

Brett Benner:

my little methods. And are you a planner? Are you like, are you a weekly planner? Do you sit down to your husband and say, okay, let's, let's map out what we're going to have this week. And do one of you cook more? Does he cook?

Luis:

He, he cooks I do most of the cooking because I like to control things. And he would agree but I, I like to cook and no, I don't plan. It's, it's, you know, constant going to the store almost every day thinking. It's very European of you. Hey, well, you know, we live in, in the city, so it's kind of possible.

Brett Benner:

Yeah. You have access like that. Yeah. I always say my mother, my mother in law stays with us periodically for frankly, months, she comes in for months at a time but she does that where she would always get up in the morning and decide what she wanted to do, and then we'd go to the market. I'd always say it was so European cause she'd come home and have whatever, and then she'd make it, which was fantastic.,

Now.

Brett Benner:

you a salt person or a sweet person? Definitely salt. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, so

Luis:

Nenna in the book is definitely a sweet person. She's sort of all about the sweets and that sort of like, sensual

Brett Benner:

pleasure. Yeah, I'm a sweet person, 100%. Although I do enjoy, like, I enjoy a great, I enjoy a great meal, I enjoy salty foods, but, but if I have my druthers, I would pick a cake or a cookie or Are you a baker? I am like, I, my husband is like you, where he can take ingredients and kind of throw stuff together and doesn't really need to follow a direction per se. I am very methodical and need to, you know, know that it's a cup and a half of flour. I mean, for me, variation is like, if I'm making a loaf, I'd be like, Oh, let's try it with this blueberries. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. But and I love to bake. I just don't do it all the time because I I'd love to eat it, but don't want to eat it. If that makes sense. I love this quote and I would love to get your take on what this means to you, that's a point in the book when Marta is trying to discover what Nana, her great aunt is hiding. And she says, family stories, teach us how to live family secrets, teach us to kill parts of ourselves.

Luis:

Yeah, I was thinking about well, so I wrote a book of short stories, The Doctor's Wife, that I published, I don't know how many years ago, 12 years ago or something. And that idea was really central to that book. I was writing about it's fiction or sort of fictionalized, again, family stories but when my mother was very young, she was like seven, her younger brother died. He was not yet three years old and he had this disease, congenital disease that still doesn't have a cure. So I grew up knowing about this brother, this uncle who had died. And by the time I knew about it. He was younger than I was so just like almost three year old who had died was very fascinating to me But nobody ever talked about him Or talked about what that was like and I think that it really affected my mother and her aunt and my aunt and my uncle and They're growing up and their ability to deal with some things and so the, you know, maybe the thing that it taught them to kill was like, they couldn't really think about, well, you know, they were all bad warriors. They were you know, sort of convinced that they had to look on the dark side of things a lot of the time. So, but the flip side of that was, was that they also told all the family stories like they were jokes. So even like the, the. Sort of darker family stories. So the very first one that I wrote was that my uncle and grandfather were going I wrote that they were fishing, but they were actually going hunting or they were hunting in Washington state somewhere. So way out in the woods and my grandfather who was a doctor took a sip of his beer and a bee stung him in the throat. And so they're, you know, very, very, very far away from everything else. And so my grandfather very calmly. told my uncle, how, who was 12 years old, I think, how to give him an emergency tracheotomy. And then he ended up not having to do it, but that was one of the family stories that was told. It was like, Oh, isn't that funny? That time,

Brett Benner:

that time that we almost slit his throat open because of the B. Oh, we'd look back in fondness at that time. So he had swallowed the B in other words.

Luis:

He, well, the bee, sure. Had gone into the beer. He would have had the bee gone into the beer. Oh, the bee stung him in his, inside his throat.

Brett Benner:

Yeah. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So he had swallowed the bee.

Luis:

And there were quite a few other stories like that. So yeah, I think the, the way that our families teach us to interact with the world is, you know, there are some good things and some bad things and, and the family secrets, the things that we aren't allowed. So family secrets, aren't things that you necessarily things that, that you Nobody knows it's things that maybe people don't talk about, right? I mean, that's kind of what a secret is. Like I know when I'm writing, when I, when I'm, when I feel like I'm telling the family secrets, I feel like that's when I've hit the goldmine because I'm not holding anything back and that's, that's where the really good stuff is. But you know, we're taught not to tell the family secrets. That's sort of like one of the main rules and families in society. And, and what is that? What is it that we're trying to protect? And I think it, it, it varies by family, of course. But that protection is, is really I think damaging.

Brett Benner:

And it's also interesting too, because if we're just saying you're protecting the family. And we're, we're having a whole generation now of young people coming up who are very much living out in every kind of facet of their lives on social media. And everything is tell your secrets, tell your stories, tell all of these things almost on overkill, like, you know, you want to be like, Hey, hold that back.

Luis:

Well, that's true. That is, that is the flip side.

Brett Benner:

But I definitely, I think you're right. I know with my family there were plenty of things, you know, that were shut down you didn't talk about and, you know, family was family and you kept it within the confines of your home and it wasn't anybody else's business to be that way. Louise, this was so delightful. You are great. I'm so excited for you. Good luck with the launch. Yes. Good luck with the launch. Go out, get The Witches of El Paso. It will be also on my bookshop. org page, which you can get it through there. Wherever you get your books, buy independent and hopefully I will see you or talk to you soon.

If you liked this conversation, please consider liking and subscribing. I would really appreciate it. And if you have time, I would really love if you would write a review, all of these things help. If you're interested in watching this interview, you can head over to my YouTube page at Brett's book stack, and it will be there again. The book is available. As all books are that were talked about in this episode, on my bookshop.org page, have a good week, everybody.