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Saenz: And you know what? It was a slow burn.

I thought it was a way to cap a career.Ĭorchado: You’re talking about Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, published by Cinco Puntos Press?Ĭorchado: But then “Aristotle and Dante” comes along. The Faulkner was wonderful, but it didn’t sell me a lot of books but still, that was great. You sell enough books to live to write another day. We write books because we need to, because we feel a sense of responsibility, a duty. I had enough readers who read my books, my poetry or novels. And then we reach what we think is a peak in our career. Saenz: Every writer can dream this, right? And we always laugh at ourselves and say it’s never going to happen. So why is the sequel to Aristotle and Dante, now your new “highlight?” You’re the first Latino winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, for “Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club,” your ode to your beloved Ciudad Juarez, across the border in Mexico. The interview spanned two venues, and covered a lot of ground, so palabra presents here the highlights, edited for clarity and brevity.Ĭorchado: Ben, you’ve written so many highly acclaimed books. The autumn morning, the tree leaves yielding to a golden hue, and Saenz’s devil-may-care grin frame what, for me, is a perfect morning on the border. As I set up our long-planned interview for palabra, Saenz pauses to smell his coffee and savor a glazed donut. Let’s start there,” I say, sitting across from Saenz at an outdoor café with a mural of a Mexican man with an accordion and a white sombrero. It’s unheard of for a Mexican-American author, Saenz says, “and it tells me we’ve finally made it in Mexico and beyond.” Publisher Grupo Planeta reportedly paid six figures for the worldwide Spanish rights. The team of producers includes Derbez, Kyra Sedgwick and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also voiced the audio-book versions, including the sequel. The film adaptation is underway its cast includes Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria and newcomers Max Pelayo as Aristotle and Reese Gonzalez as Dante. This year, Time magazine called it one of the best YA books of all time. The novel, published in 2014, has won numerous accolades, including the Stonewall Book Award. But then he created Aristotle and Dante and his life took a turn. That book was supposed to mark the pinnacle of his career, Saenz says. It’s in this borderland that Saenz, a prolific writer and winner of the 2013 PEN Faulkner award for the book “Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club,” has found inspiration in a career that spans more than three decades. Like a true border resident, he’s wired in a way that his body and spirit hardly notice the international boundary line, or have a need for it. “And you know what? I haven’t changed one bit,” he answers, bursting into his signature laugh that fills the room and sets his dogs, Chuy and Rain, into spasms of yelping and running in circles.īorn and raised in a small farming town near Las Cruces, New Mexico, Saenz now calls El Paso and Ciudad Juarez home. In his house we end up waist-deep in boxes that hold his heralded young adult novel, “Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World.” It’s the sequel to the smash success, “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.” Saenz is pointing to 1,800 or so books piled in his living room, in his bedroom, and in the office - all waiting for his autograph. He says he’s at “the highlight of my career. Truth be told, Saenz is at the top of his game, so he no longer needs to be anywhere on time. He laughs mischievously when I break into a profanity-laced greeting. Still, he saunters in, an hour late, muttering something about a “strange night.” But otherwise avoids excuses.

He knows we’re meeting we’ve wrangled over when to finish the interview. We continued the conversation later, at his house in central El Paso. Maybe close enough to where he tolerates me calling him “cabroncito,” the off-color, multi-function slang derived from “billygoat,” which describes Saenz’s loveable restlessness.Īfter some chasing, I finally caught up to Saenz, first at a coffee shop.

Over time we’ve grown close enough that I call him Ben. He’s now reveling in his creation of characters who’ll live on forever, like Aristotle and Dante.ĭisclaimer here: Saenz and I are long-time friends. Writing helps him breathe, he says, and it’s his weapon in facing down a sense of loneliness made worse during the coronavirus pandemic.