Sandra Cisneros: Once you can open yourself to joy, you feel as if you...

My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.

Sandra Cisneros

bags meals ideas

Mom used to walk with me for something like two or three miles to get to the day-old bakery. They had those machines where you buy doughnuts, those vending machines with the long johns and doughnuts. We would buy those bagels and pastries because that was our treat. And come back with shopping bags of these sweets, and who knows what was in it? That was what we could afford that could feed that many people.

Sandra Cisneros

shopping mom sweet

I grew up with this kind of grocery store that caters to the poor. They serve you the worst food.

Sandra Cisneros

poor grew-up kind

If we got an educational program going, we could tell people, "Instead of butter, use avocado." That's something we eat, it has the good fat, and it has a good texture, and it tastes better. Just imagine if you substituted that. Or if we switched to olive oil, the extra virgin olive oil, we could still have our taquitos, but put a little oil on them and put them in the oven and bake them.

Sandra Cisneros

oil educational people

I have this great fear of Mexico City. I won't go to Mexico City unless someone meets me at the airport and is with me. I just feel very vulnerable there.

Sandra Cisneros

airports mexico cities

Think about the books that you were reading at a certain crisis in your life, what you were reading, and that's because you needed them to nourish your alma.

Sandra Cisneros

reading book thinking

I prefer to go to the little towns now, because in little towns people are kind. I like going to Tepotzlán.

Sandra Cisneros

towns littles people

My trainer taught me, because he's Iranian, and that's a beautiful snack [pistachios]. I have some with me, actually, in my bag. You could eat that on a plane instead of the salted nuts. And a serving size a day is the size of your hand, not the size of your head!

Sandra Cisneros

snacks beautiful hands

I always have to have sweet and salty. I know some of you are going to say, "Oh, I tried dates. I hate them." That's probably because you had the ones that were on the shelf for three years. Go to some healthy place and get the fresh ones, and you will just love them. You'll start eating them and think they're so good.

Sandra Cisneros

hate sweet thinking

The writer Denise Chávez comments on poor food and what you associate with luxury food items. In fact, she wrote a whole book called A Taco Testimony, and though the title sounds light, it's a heavy book. It's about being working class and what kind of food is available to you that's cheap.

Sandra Cisneros

light class book

I think a lot of education has to be involved. If they would have alternative items, so that, say, for a dollar more, you can get breakfast tacos stuffed with egg whites, and olive oil, and avocado; not guacamole, because they put the salt in it. Just ask for fresh avocado slices, and you could have that.

Sandra Cisneros

oil eggs thinking

If you're poor, potato chips are the food of life for you. It's the caviar.

Sandra Cisneros

potato-chips caviar potatoes

You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.

Sandra Cisneros

being-yourself should-have thinking

Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.

Sandra Cisneros

community views might

I think that you need to have books that talk about the lives of the poor, and they need to be involved - involved in acquisitions.

Sandra Cisneros

acquisition book thinking

I have to take care of the house, and the dogs, and the Macondo Board meetings, all those e-mails, the letters that are going to fans. And you've got to pay bills. These things eat up your time. You have to prepare and pack to go on that trip. Then when you come back you have to file all that stuff, answer all that mail, and that's not even washing the clothes or any of that. So it takes as many days as I've been away to come back to normal and to get quiet.

Sandra Cisneros

clothes dog house

I don't want to blame anybody, but I just want to tell you that the process of writing is antisocial, so on the days that you have something really important to write, go from lying down directly to your notepad or your computer. Do not talk.

Sandra Cisneros

important writing lying

You know, we should have cards like the deaf have. "Can't talk, I'm writing today."

Sandra Cisneros

should-have writing today

What I recommend is this: after you've talked to everybody, go take a nap! Take a nap. Your body really needs to sleep. It's like washing your face. If you can't afford a three-hour nap, do a one-hour nap. If you can't afford a one-hour nap, do half an hour. If you can't afford half an hour, do fifteen minutes.

Sandra Cisneros

half naps sleep

That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.

Sandra Cisneros

meditation naps writing

Once you can open yourself to joy, you feel as if you've transformed your sadness into illumination, which is really all that art is. All we want to do is transform the negative emotions into light. We want to compost them into light.