Grandmothers used to collect stray buttons just in case they'd need to replace that button that had somehow wandered off from your party dress or your winter coat. You'd open a closet and there would be a stack of cookie tins and boxes and jars full of the most magical buttons, all colors and shapes and sizes, just waiting.
The process of writing is like making a garment, and I often find myself making buttons long before I know what the dress they go on will look like. This idea of writing without sequence, without worrying what it is I've got or where I'm going, gives me freedom to just write, to collect strange ideas, funny images, clips of conversations, the most haunting and passionate memories, and get them down in words just in case I'll need them later. Sometimes a poem or a story will need something, I don't know what, to hold it together, so I'll hunt through my button box for something that calls out, "Here I am!" Sometimes a button waits a long, long time before it finds its place.
Grandmothers know: Never throw anything away. It might be just what you need someday.
Click on the images below to open an interactive window where you can click the yellow markers to read passages from my books. Find the magic button that opens a box of surprises you can drag to the tabletop and arrange any way you like. (Drag them back to the button box to get rid of them.)
The House on Mango Street
Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, this novel is Sandra Cisneros's greatly admired story of a young girl's growing up in the Latino section of Chicago.
Woman Hollering Creek
A collection of stories, whose characters give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border. The women in these stories offer tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
Hairs - Pelitos
This jewel-like vignette from Sandra Cisneros's best-selling The House on Mango Street shows, through simple, intimate portraits, the diversity among us. A Parenting Magazine Best Children's Book of the Year
Un excelente constructor de vocabulario, con nombres de objetos en Inglés y en Español, acompañados por ilustraciones, agrupados por tópicos como colores, juguetes, animales y herramientas.
Loose Woman
A candid, sexy and wonderfully mood-strewn collection of poetry that celebrates the female aspects of love, from the reflective to the overtly erotic. "Poignant, sexy… lyrical, passionate… cool and delicate… hot as a chili pepper." —Boston Globe
Caramelo
"Caramelo, published simultaneously in Spanish and lovingly, passionately woven from dust and glory, is a sweeping family history that somehow manages to interlace not just the Reyeses — those conjurers, enticers and troublemakers — but also all the rest of us, the good and bad together, the bitter and, of course, the sweet." — The Miami Herald
My Wicked Wicked Ways
Hailed as "not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one" (The New York Times Book Review), Sandra Cisneros has firmly established herself as an author of electrifying talent. Here are verses, comic and sad, radiantly pure and plainspoken, that reveal why her stories have been praised for their precision and musicality of language.