Daniel Chacon will speak as part of  the College of Arts and Humanities Lecture Series  at 7 p.m. Oct. 24 in the Alice Peters Auditorium of the University Business Center.  Admission is free.

Daniel Chacon

California State University, Fresno alumnus Daniel Chacon is back on campus this semester as the English Department’s Visiting Writer. Chacon, who has published two books, is teaching classes in the Master of Fine Arts program and renewing acquaintance with Fresno.
 
FresnoStateNews.com  wanted to catch up with Chacon, who left the area after getting his master’s degree in 1992. So we asked him what’s been happening.
 
Chacon:  I left Fresno to attend graduate school at the University of Oregon, and I have not lived here ever since. Of course, I’ve visited several times, because my entire family is here: my two brothers, my sister, their children and my only living parent, my father.
 
In fact, my father lives in the same house that I grew up in, in North Fresno, in an area once surrounded by fig orchards and tall, wild trees. It was a rural part of Fresno disconnected from the rest of the city by at least a mile, but now, of course, it is part of the urban landscape.
 
My first years were spent in Pinedale, but when I was about 6 years old we moved a couple of miles north up Blackstone [Avenue], near a place that used to be called Lakeside, which was later razed and they built a Montgomery Ward's, which I believe now is a Target.
 
While Fresno kept growing and growing (the poet Andres Montoya writes “and the owners kept owning and owning”), I was away teaching for several years at Modesto Junior College and then at a Minnesota State University and, for the past six years, I have been teaching in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Texas, El Paso.
 
I left Fresno to be a writer, that is, to go into the MFA program at the University of Oregon, and I come back to Fresno as a writer, the Visiting Writer at Fresno State, where I got both my bachelor's degree (in political science) and my master's degree (in English).
 
I have been writing almost every day ever since I left Fresno. I have completed five books, two of which are published, “Chicano Chicanery,” and the novel, “and the shadows took him.”
 
Three of the books exist only in my computer and on my USB drive: two novels and a collection of short stories, none of which I'm ready to release.  In fact, while in Fresno, I'm revising one of those novels.
 
FSN: Why did you decide to return to your alma mater to teach graduate students?

Chacon: Fresno produces some incredible writers. One cannot but think of [Pulitzer Prize winning poet and professor emeritus] Phillip Levine when one thinks about Fresno writers, but there are so many others, as we all know. A disproportional amount of writers come out of Fresno. That is not random. There is a reason.
 
Everybody who is or was here writing their incredible work contributes to an incredible assertion of creative energy into the Fresno landscape. We know that we can't assert our ideas on the entire concept of reality. In fact, reality is our idea, in many senses. So with so many writers in Fresno putting that much creative energy into the landscape, especially now with the great reputation of the MFA program attracting writers from all over the country, Fresno is a good place to write.
 
But that's not all. Take the Fresno landscape itself. What kind of energy is the Fresno landscape producing? What is the feeling in Fresno?  One of the things that I understand now that I've been traveling is that every place has a particular energy that may be unique to that place. We all know this. Many of us have experienced entering a new city, any city, and for whatever reason that city appeals to us more than others. Or the opposite: That place gives us the creeps more than others.
 
There is a feeling in Fresno, a specific energy, which is actually much like Stockton, I think, and of which I am not qualified to give a name. To name something is to assert a partial understanding of its properties, and I do not know what it is about Fresno's energy, but it is pure Fresno.
 
If you take this poetic tradition and sensibility or this poetic energy, this energy of art, and you take this other energy that Fresno’s earth is exuding, and if you put them together, you have an incredible landscape within which to explore the world of art.
 
Writing is in the air. You could practically leave your laptop in an open field somewhere in Fresno and come back later and look on the screen and the city itself would have written a heartbreaking poem. Of course, I’m exaggerating (plus, this is Fresno, the laptop would be gone), but it illustrates my point that Fresno produces so many good writers, in part, because it’s a good place to write.
 
To be in Fresno to teach and to write for one semester is an incredible gift. The MFA program, with Dr. Connie Hales and Steve Yarbrough and all the accomplished faculty and the talented students, is a gift in itself, yes? But it is also the place where I grew up. I return after years of travel.
 
Last year I told myself that I wasn't going to travel for the entire year, because the year before I had taken off from the university and went to Buenos Aires (a city whose energy I understand).  I said I wasn't going to travel for one year, but that year I ended up being invited to travel, everything paid. I traveled more this year than any other.
 
Usually I go away for summer and maybe winter, mostly to Europe or Latin America. But this year I was invited to Poland twice, to lecture, once in the winter and once in spring. I went to Buenos Aires for 10 days. I went to Mexico City. I was in Miami for a month teaching a class at the University of Miami, and New York City and Philadelphia, and others.
 
And right when I thought I would settle back down in my El Paso house, this opportunity in Fresno came up. This is part of my travels.
 
I'm returning to where I left, and everything is new, including my relationships with the people I love, my family, my friends. My Fresno.

FSN: You will be speaking as part of the Arts & Humanities Lecture Series on Oct. 24.  What will be your topic?
 
Chacon: I will talk about what it's like to return to Fresno after traveling all over the world and developing an artistic sensibility that ultimately led me to quantum mechanics and mysticism as metaphorical systems within which one can go deeper and deeper into one’s art, or the energy that feeds art.
 
The lecture is called “Fresno: The Center of the Cosmos.” In the title I'm actually kind of making fun of myself.  Essentially what I’m going to do is discuss the idea of wormholes in physics or correspondences in mysticism, which are essentially the same thing.
 
There is a particular energy an image might assert, and an artist, of course, is attracted to those images. Julio Cortázar, the great Argentine writer who lived most of his life in Paris, says the artist is a creator of images. What attracts us to some images over others?
 
Many people see what they are conditioned to see, and are attracted to images that are manufactured: those that evoke a particular way of seeing the world or that evoke a feeling, images that encourage a particular action, like to buy a product.  But even though we live within a culture that uses imagery to control us, many people are also able to see beyond. We get glimpses into something deeper. We human beings have had this experience, even if only for a limited time.
 
My argument is that development of that ability to see can lead one to images that evoke things more fundamentally than those images manufactured by the culture.  In some imagery, the energy is so great that you can experience the object of observation on a sublime level, which is to say, out of time, out of self. And if you can hone your ability to recognize those images, then you can experience the sublime at will.
 
You can recognize images that evoke complex feelings, archetypes, if you will. So, I have been walking around Fresno and driving around with a digital camera, snapping shots. I'm going to show some of the shots at the lecture and to discuss why particular images assert more energy or more power than do others and how Fresno is composed of this incredibly archetypal landscape. But it will be a fun lecture.
 
I'm not a physicist nor am I a mystic, I am a writer. I won’t take myself too seriously. It’ll be funny, I hope. The lecture in essence is a narrative about the artistic development of a Chicano boy from Fresno, who is now returning as a visiting writer.

FSN: What are you working on when you're not teaching at Fresno State?

Chacon: I try not to separate what I teach and what I'm working on in my own writing, so this semester I'm teaching a graduate forms class that I call physics, mysticism and the imagination. The texts that we use in that class and the discussions help me to articulate my ideas more effectively and to include other opinions in my thought processes.
 
So the novel I'm working on right now is about a young Chicano kid from a city like Fresno who becomes attracted to physics because of its language. That is, he doesn't understand a thing about it, but there's something about the language of physics, the verbal language and the mathematical language. It really impresses him. It seems to him to be elegant, poetic. 
 
One day the language opens up a breach in the fabric of space and he falls into the quantum field, an experience so incredible that it leads him away from his loyalties or prior social expectations (as a Chicano kid from Fresno) into a world where he completely immerses himself and isolates himself from others.
 
Some call him a sellout, a Judas to the Chicano Movement, because as a former Chicano student leader, he has removed himself from activism. The novel is called “Judas Bought a Field.”  I finished it over three years ago, but I’m revising now.

FSN: You've lived away from Fresno for a time, so we’re curious about what changes you've noticed in the community in the brief time you've been back.

Chacon: The obvious changes in Fresno are the growth and the economy, especially the price of real estate. When I left Modesto six years ago, I never thought the real estate boom would reach the Central Valley, but clearly it has.  And there's tremendous growth.
 
Still, there are as many similarities. The Chicano poet Andres Montoya, who loved Fresno, wrote a poem called “Locura”, which means madness, craziness. It’s about the street life in Fresno. One line goes, “They shot Efraín in the face.” That was something that really happened to a friend of his. The kid got shot in the face.
 
Fresno is crazy. There’s something unique about the streets of Fresno, something that prepared me to travel anywhere in the world. If you can negotiate the streets in Fresno, you can walk into a poor neighborhood in Havana, Cuba, or Buenos Aires or Warsaw at 3 o’ clock in the morning, and you will know how to survive. There's a craziness. The first week that I arrived, there were three murders in one night, and there was a shootout in front of Fresno State. That's something about Fresno that was true when I left.
 
Also, there's an element that I feel here that I don't feel in many other places: a harshness among people, a rudeness, I guess. You encounter this on the street. And perhaps it's because people are protecting themselves. It's not very easy to let strangers in when those strangers may stab you in the back, and certainly that aspect of life here has its manifestations on the superficial levels in which we culturally interact.
 
The other day I entered a coffee shop in Fig Garden and there was a line. I wasn’t sure what the line was for, to pick up an order or to order. I asked the people in line. A lady turns away from me and says, “Yeah! We want to order too!” She had such a sour, bitter attitude. I don't find that in very many other places in the world, but I find it constantly in Fresno. Before and now. 
 
Another interesting change to Fresno is the people who are hired to stand on street corners waving around signs. There seems to be some sort of subculture developing from this community in that the more attention they can attract to themselves and their weirdness perhaps the more they think they're doing an effective job.
 
There's this one woman, a large older woman, who wears this white T-shirt with an image of a young sexy, women in a bikini. She dances around with her skinny body transposed over her material body, and it’s striking and fun. People laugh and look, and she uses that to draw more people to her sign.
 
On Blackstone and Shaw, you see that some of these sign holders really get into it, as if they're performing, and in 100-degree heat! They work hard for their money. I admire that.

FSN: When can readers expected to see your next work published?

Chacon: Remember that Orson Welles commercial for Gallo wine many years ago? He sits in his armchair with a glass of wine. He takes a sip and expresses some feeling of ecstasy. Then he says, “Gallo will sell no wine before its time.”
 
That's how I feel about my work. Until I'm ready to release the two novels and collection of stories that are already written, I couldn't say when they’ll be available.  But I think they’re good. I think they’re my best work yet.