Ask the Author: Josh Barkan
Answered Questions (2)
Josh Barkan
Thanks, Angie. I'm glad you connected with "Mexico." I'm working on a novel now, set in NY. If you look a little below on the page about "Mexico," in the section with questions, you can see how I describe the new book. I'll be working on the novel this summer. Thanks for reading.
Josh
Josh
Josh Barkan
Thanks for the question. You are right--there have definitely been rumors that El Chapo went into some restaurants and took them over while he ate. Most of those rumors related to him in his home state of Sinaloa, but while I was living in Mexico City people started talking about him going in to a restaurant in Mexico City. I fictionalized this rumor. There never was a request by El Chapo for a perfect meal, and as far as I know, certainly not to an American chef. Often, when I write stories, I mix a variety of people I have seen and events I have heard about or experienced, directly. The chef in the story, for example, was inspired by a chef I met while I lived in Pittsburgh, in a totally different context. He was raising vegetables in an urban garden in Braddock, PA, where people are trying to revitalize a steel town that has lost most of the steel mills there. In some of the other stories of the collection the violence came out of more direct experience. In "The Painting Professor," for example, a friend of mine who is a painter (female and young, not like the protagonist of the story) has a painting studio in Puebla, and she described to me the shooting around her family compound. I had been to the compound many times, so that led to the story. In "The Kidnapping," my wife (who is Mexican), had her longtime dentist kidnapped. He was forced to take money out of ATMs every day and was then beaten up, in particular because he is gay, and then he was thrown out onto the street. But rather than have a dentist in such an event, I began to imagine a person more like a friend of mine who is a painter, who lives in the center of Mexico City. In the case of a story like "I Want to Live," it was reported in the press that a beauty queen was married to a narco and that she died defending her husband. That inspired the character Esmeralda. In the story "The God of Common Names," my wife told me about two real high school students in love, who had parents who were rival narcos. But I have no idea what school that was in. Then I thought of a totally different protagonist who was married to someone who was an Orthodox Jew, which came out of my own experiences when I first came to Mexico City when I met some of the Orthodox community in Polanco. In the story "Acapulco," a good friend of my wife's had his first cousin killed in Zihuatanejo, after being taken out to parties with a narco. That person was an architect, though I have never met him. So there is quite a mix of different places, reality, events and fiction in my stories. It is important to remember that these are definitely fiction stories--I take full liberty as I write to make up characters and explore their personal problems. But there is definitely quite a bit of "reality" in these stories.
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