KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE
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On Family History, Teaching the Craft, and Bouncing Back: Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Kirstin Valdez Quade Kirstin Valdez Quade received a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was the recipient of the 2013 Narrative Prize. She’s the author of the short story collection Night at the Fiestas (Norton), and her novel, released this year, is The Five Wounds (Norton). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Members of the Santa Fe Literary Review were honored to interview Valdez Quade over Zoom on February 23, 2021. SFLR Staff: To begin, please tell us about your connections to New Mexico in general and to Santa Fe in particularb—and how those connections have influenced your writing. Valdez Quade: My family has a long history in New Mexico. I was born in Albuquerque, and most of my extended family is in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. My parents and I moved away when I was a child, and I had a pretty itinerant childhood. We lived in many different places, mostly in the Southwest, but through all of those moves, my grandmother’s house in Santa Fe was the place we returned to, the place my sense of home and family and belonging centered on. I went to third grade at the St. Francis Cathedral School, I spent summers with my grandparents, I would go for extended stays. I loved—still love—being surrounded by family, and from the time I was a child, some part of me has been waiting and expecting to move back. I’m lucky to be very close to the elders in my family, to my grandparents and my great aunt, and when I was little my greatgrandmother took care of me while my mother worked. That sense of history and proximity to earlier generations and their stories of the small towns where they were born has been really important to my sense of my place in the world—and it absolutely comes out in my writing. So much of my fiction is about family and family history. On the page, I am able to return to this place that I love and that I left, and that I’m always longing to return to.
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Volume 16 • 2021
