first read Sandra Cisneros in college. 21 years old, heart stomped on by a half-Mexican chef, cute and cocky and all of 23, who announced one night, in the bed that we shared, which was really my bed before he moved in and claimed half, who announced that maybe, I don't know this is hard but maybe uh, he didn't love me. I told him maybe he could get his shit out of my apartment tomorrow. Only I didn't think he'd really do it. For the next three months, my bed was lopsided and covered in wet blue tissue. Oh I do love a good drama.

Anyway, I was taking a class called 21st Century American Literature and we were assigned "Woman Hollering Creek," the short story collection Cisneros tells from myriad female perspectives, although I admit I only paid attention to the brokenhearted ones. In the last piece, "Bien Pretty," the protagonist is an artistically blocked painter who falls for an exterminator with a silver tongue and a mighty ass. She resists, she's all tightly sprung skepticism, but he romances her hard, pretty words and high-voltage touch. Her heart cracks open. She falls in love with him, and he leaves her to go back to his wife and kids in Mexico.

I loved this story.

There's more, of course. After the guy bolts, our heroine languishes on the couch for days, drinking beer and living amongst the cockroaches overrunning her home. One day, watching another drippy telenovela, she begins to rally. "I want to see women who make things happen, not women who things happen to. Real women. The ones I've loved all my life. The ones I've known everywhere except on TV, in books and magazines. Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. And, above all, fierce." She climbs onto her roof at sunrise, alone, and paints the sky.

I wrote about five different imitations of this story, itself a rather banal (though passionately written) tale. In one version, the protagonist was a playwright. In one version, the protagonist was an actress. In one version, I was a poet. Did I say "I"? I'm sorry, I mean "the main character."

I bring this up because I'm about to interview Sandra Cisneros. I've mentioned before that I'm no good at phone interviews, and I'm not. Me preparing for a phone interview is like me at 15, asking Billy Crain to the High-Lights dance. "Hey Billy, I was wondering if you might hope to maybe go to the dance thing if you want sometime or not?" Disaster. Even if I didn't get nervous (I do), I don't know what to ask. I swear I have never finished a piece of literature, a book, or a movie that I admire and wanted to ask the person who made it anything other than, "Can I be your friend?" So I compose all these elaborate questions, hoping to come off as thoughtful and deep, only they're too complicated to figure out and the person just ends up going, "Uh, I don't know. I'll have to think about that." I think it was Frank Zappa who said, "Music criticism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." I think it was my friend Julie who said, "Why can't you just be cool?"

Part two tomorrow.