spotlight on author maceo montoya

An interview with November 18 featured author Mateo Montoya
by Sue Staats

Maceo Montoya – painter, writer, educator – is an artist who moves in many directions. His painting and graphic art have won acclaim and awards, as have his novels. His most recent novel, the fascinating Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces, with its combination of narration, illustrations, and footnotes, seems an amalgam of those three disciplines – painting, writing, educating.  I thought, for this interview, I’d start with how Maceo Montoya identifies himself. 
 
Sue
You’re an artist in many media – novels, graphic novels, painter, other visual arts. How do you see yourself, primarily? Writer or visual artist? 
 
Maceo
I see myself as a storyteller. The different mediums inform one another, so whether I’m writing a novel, or making a painting, or writing a poem, I feel like, at the core, there's this desire to tell a story that has obsessed me, or that I can't let go. I never quite know what form it's going to take. I've tried to pay attention to whatever my tendencies might be. What are the kinds of stories that end up being stories or novels, or what are the stories that I end up telling through paintings, or prose poem pieces? So I don't really have an answer other than I just follow my intuition, and feel my way. It’s wonderful to be able to move between visual art and prose, thinking about how I can most effectively tell this story that has captured my attention, that I can’t move beyond until I express it.
 
Sue
It seems like all those artistic possibilities are present in the novel we’re reading from for our November event, Preparatory Notes For Future Masterpieces. I couldn’t quite categorize it, and judging from the reviews and interviews,  I'm not the only one! It's been called picturesque, comic, strange, hilarious, and heartbreaking. One of the characters in the book even calls the narrator the “Chicano Forrest Gump.”  How do you characterize this novel?
 
Maceo
I see the novel both as a work of fiction and as visual textual experiment. And I also see it as a work of cultural criticism where the nephew and the nephew’s friend and the professor that they send it to are reflecting on this narrator’s story, and what it means to Chicano literature, Chicano art, the Chicano community and how often stories from our community are left untold and undiscovered.
 
The way that I framed it was as this found manuscript that was the journey of a nameless artist who had big dreams, and was never able to quite make his mark in the way that he envisioned. But he had a burning desire to tell his story, and to be seen. I think it's just a fundamental part of who we are, this desire to be seen and to be understood and to be recognized. The narrator wanted to be recognized as a painter, and never was. But at the end of his life, he’s writing this story, and creating these drawings, and then they're left behind. Except they're found by his nephew and his nephew’s friend, who’s an amateur historian and they decide to send it to this Chicano Studies professor, who gets it published. 
 
Sue
I understand that you had a long, ten-year journey to publication of Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces. Can you tell me about that?
 
Maceo
Well, it’s been my process that I work on manuscripts for a couple of years. I send them out, I get rejections, I return to it, I set it aside. I work on other manuscripts. I’d been working on other novels during that time, and I had published some other work. But this was one that I kept returning to and really felt like, alright, this is something different. I felt I was charting new ground in my storytelling abilities, my writing abilities. Rejections can be helpful, because maybe the work is just not there yet, maybe it needs further revision. But there’s also this question mark. Is it not being accepted because people don't quite know what to do with it? This is a challenge for Latinx, Chicanx authors, and other marginalized voices, where there’s often the expectation that people read this literature because they want to learn about the Latino community, or they want to learn about Latinx immigrants. But this story was weird from the get-go. This guy is so focused on himself that he doesn't recognize the world around him. And I wanted it to be idiosyncratic in that way. I wanted it to be about this very specific character, rather than about any issue. Even though I had set out to kind of write this story about Chicano history, I realized that he was completely uninterested in Chicano history, he was interested only in himself. I really liked that self-absorption. We need characters like this, right?

And so the feeling that people didn’t quite know what to make of the story led me to include the footnotes, which are talking about these expectations of Latinx or Chicanx literature, the parameters that are placed both by writers within the community, but also by outside forces, editors and publishers, even the market. I felt that it would be interesting to find a way to weave them through the story. Because they felt part of the creation of the of the novel as a whole.
 
Sue
I love the multiple levels to this book, Did you have a model or structure by another author that inspired you?
 
Maceo
Well, for the initial voice, I had long thought of Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. These books have characters at the center of families that are metaphors for larger histories that are unfolding. And I wanted to write a story like that for Chicano history, where this character, who believes in himself as a history maker, actually runs into all of these different historical figures—Reies López Tijerina, Martín Ramirez, the outsider artist, and Oscar Zeta Acosta. These are all well-known figures in Chicano history, who aren’t well known otherwise, and I wanted to tell a story that was aware of that larger history. But the longer the manuscripts sat, the more I thought, here's a story about an artist. What would it look like if he were to make drawings that represented the stories he was telling. I really didn’t have a model for that. I was thinking of the illustrations that accompany Don Quixote or Alice in Wonderland, I love those books. I’ve always loved being able to thumb through a special edition of a book that's been illustrated. I decided to enter into not just the voice of this character, but also his hand. What would his drawings look like? 
 
As far as the footnotes, there are different examples. Junot Diaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a recent one. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig is another. Other works use footnotes for humor, or historical context, or material that occurs outside of the story—I was fascinated by those possibilities. But there wasn’t a specific example, and part of the fun was testing it out, seeing what worked.
 
Sue
I got the feeling that this book was fun—fun to write, fun to inhabit. I pictured you laughing as you wrote it. Did that happen?
 
Maceo
Oh, yeah. What drew me to this narrator’s voice was I never knew how his sentences were going to end. And it's often those surprises that provide the humor. My hope is that for the reader, whatever they expect to happen, that by the end of that sentence, or the paragraph, the narrator takes the rug out from underneath them. And, for me, it was a similar process in writing it. I’m years removed from writing that first draft, but yes, there was something very exhilarating in writing the first draft and seeing how this narrator would surprise me with his idiosyncratic way of thinking about the world
 
Sue
You sound like you really liked this character.
 
Maceo
Well, for sure. That’s part of what's wonderful about writing fiction, right?  You can take parts of yourself—and I definitely see parts of myself in the character—but then you push them to these extremes that you didn't know that you had inside. By the end, you feel a degree removed from your creation. All of that is a lot of fun, and exciting, for the unexpected that emerges.
 
 
Sue
Your written work is often humorous, so I was surprised to see, on your website, how serious, and often sad, your paintings are. Could you talk about why this is? Why are your primary artistic expressions so different from one another?
 
Maceo
The honest answer is I don't know. You know, I love humor, I love laughing. Humor is a big part of my family and the relationships I hold dear. My father, Malaquias Montoya is an artist, and his work, which emerged out of the Chicano movement, is very graphic political posters, and giant murals that address issues in the in the community. It’s very serious, very focused on issues. You don’t see the humor that my dad has. He's an incredible storyteller, and when he tells stories about his childhood, which was growing up in poverty as a migrant farm worker with an abusive father, every single one is hilarious, he tells it to make you laugh. But that doesn't come across in his artwork. 

So I’m aware of how can I capture all facets of my voice and what I'm interested in and what I'm drawn to. I feel fortunate that I have these different tools that I can use.
My very first novel, The Scoundrel And The Optimist, emerged from a painting that was based on a newspaper article that I read. As the border was becoming more militarized it was pushing migrants to find evermore dangerous ways of crossing. There was one paragraph about all the death, or near death, and one sentence about a 14-year-old boy who was found in the desert next to his dead father. I couldn't let that image go, and I ended up making a painting of it. It was a dark painting, very somber, very serious. I was in grad school at the time, a lot of people ignored the painting, or dismissed it. But I didn't want to let that story go. And I said, what if I could reach people by telling the story in a different way? What if I were to write that story about how that 14-year-old boy ended up in the desert next to his dead father?  So, I started to write it, and it came out humorously. I had this first sentence in my head, and it cracked me up, and I just ran with it. It was unexpected, but it felt like an impulse that I had to follow.

So – the paintings, they’re coming from a certain place that focuses on the darkness of the story. But when I explore the same story, or stories, through prose, they come out a different way. And I’m learning how to follow these impulses.
 
Sue
They should take a scan of your brain when you're painting and one when you're writing prose, and I bet that completely different areas would light up! 
Your father is a well – known artist and activist, your late brother was a well-known poet, you’re an artist and a writer. Sounds like you were fated to be in the creative arts – but I’m wondering if there was ever a time when you were tempted not to go into the family business?
 
Maceo
Oh, and my uncle was Jose Montoya, the poet.
 
Sue
Even more pressure!
 
Maceo
Yeah, I’m in the family business, but for much of my childhood, I was certain that I didn’t want to be an artist. I wanted to be a lawyer. I was always arguing, so they’d always say, oh, you know, you're gonna be the lawyer.  I think what I had in mind was that being a lawyer was a tangible service that you could provide to people, you could help them.  It felt to me practical and tangible, where with art, it’s harder to figure out what impact it's having. And I think that can often be the struggle for an artist. Does the world need another novel or painting by a Montoya? And so, even though I grew up in a family that was talking about the tangible impact that art could have, that it could change minds and uplift people, I questioned it. I wanted to have an impact in a different way. But – my senior year at Yale, I ended up painting a mural on campus. I collaborated with an artist named Francisco Delgado, and I just fell in love with it. The whole process, from putting up the scaffolding, to painting on the wall, to talking to people who pass by—I couldn't wait to get out there in the morning. I couldn't sleep, I was so excited about working on the wall. 
 
Sue
So when you called home and said to your family, hey Mom and Dad, I’m going to be an artist, what was their reaction? 
 
Maceo
It’s funny, my parents were always practical. I was going to get a van and fill it with paints and just go around and paint murals for people, that’s how committed I was.
 
Sue
Also, you were probably about twenty years old.
 
Maceo
That, too. But my parents, even from a family of artists, said, well, how are you going to get health insurance? How are you going to pay the bills? In the family business, being an artist is also being an educator. I resisted that for many years, because I saw how much time that that took, how much energy and dedication and commitment it took to be a good teacher, and I also know how long it takes to develop a series of paintings. I didn't want to spread myself too thin. I fought that battle for years before I succumbed and entered academia.
 
Sue
You teach at UC Davis.
 
Maceo
I'm in the Chicano Studies Department and I teach classes on culture, I do teach courses on literary criticism, but I've also developed a class where we read contemporary authors’ work, and study visual artists. Sometimes, we have filmmakers and last year, we had a comedian. I ask my students to attempt to work in that art form. It’s structured like a creative writing workshop. I also now split my appointment with the English department, and I teach creative writing classes there.
 
Sue
For the event, we’ll be reading the prologue to your novel, which introduces us to the narrator. He’s quite an unusual young man. Tell me, where did this character come from? Who is this delusional guy?
 
Maceo
Well, the narrator grows up in the backwoods of New Mexico, which is actually where my family is from. I grew up with stories about these little towns lost in the mountains of New Mexico near Albuquerque. He has this sense of himself as being different. He comes from the property class, his father owns land, but wealthy? We don’t know. He’s also very much focused on the fact that he has French ancestry, which he uses to forge a connection with the French painters that he comes across in a library book, and he wants to be like them. He uses everything to separate himself from others around him. He has a desire to be special, a great artist, to move beyond where he is. What can a Mexican American kid in the 1930s and 40s grow up to be? A farmer like his father, or can he have dreams of being a great artist in Paris? So, he could be described as delusional, but I also think he could just be described as young and idealistic and wanting something more from life. And the problem is, that everyone around him is telling him you can't have more than you know. That room that you inhabit is not your studio, it's just the room that you're sharing with your family that is dependent on you getting a job. A lot of the humor that emerges in the prologue and in the first chapter derives from how his version or his vision of the world rarely matches up with those around him.
 
Sue
You’ve been a featured writer at Stories on Stage Sacramento. What's it feel like to be in the audience and hear your words coming at you?
 
Maceo
Of course, I hear the voices of my characters, and I live with them for many years. So in some ways there’s a disconnect, because I can see the actor, and that actor doesn't necessarily look like the character that I had in mind. But then you get drawn into the story, and it comes alive in a completely different way. It’s strange for the author, but also very exciting, because you realize that's what every single reader is bringing to the story, right? No reader is hearing the same voice that I'm hearing, no reader is picturing the same character that I’m picturing. It really reflects the reading experience, which I, as the author, don't get to experience. I'm never inside someone’s mind when they are reading my book. It’s a moment where that reading experience of my own work is captured.
 
Sue
One interviewer said “Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces is a great example of what a multitalented artist can do when they are not preoccupied by the constraints of the culture at large.” What do you think they meant by that?
 
Maceo
I guess it could mean, is the narrator self-absorbed? Or it could mean me. Not that I would characterize myself as self-absorbed, but I follow what interests me and the questions that I have, and that I want to pursue. And that's what kind of propels me further and deeper to spend as long as I did on this novel. I really had to find new kinds of ways to make it exciting, to make it interesting. And I really pushed it until I felt completely satisfied with what was there. I didn’t worry about, you know, how am I going to get a novel and images published? How am I going to get the footnotes included, even though they can be viewed as such a departure from the story? It was really about pushing everything to its ultimate conclusion and feeling that I hadn't left anything out.
 
Sue
You’ve come out with a really different format and type of novel. Does this feel revolutionary to you? And do you think you’ll use this form, this type of novel construction, in the future?
 
Maceo
I feel like this novel, in a way, is a culmination of all the years of developing my voice as a writer, as an artist of this kind of visual textual play, and as a scholar and an activist involved in Chicano literature and Chicano art, the Chicano movement. And that, in many ways, it’s also (a culmination of) the swirl of ideas that have been going on inside of my head, and in my heart, for not just the last 10 years, but ever since I decided I wanted to be an artist and a writer. So, in pushing it to its conclusion, once it was out, I felt that I never had to write a novel like this again. Once it was created, once it was out there, once it had all been brought together, the declaration was that from now on, I get to push in any direction that I want to go.
 
Sue
That’s good news for us. Thanks, Maceo.
​
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
https://maceomontoya.com/

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