Sandra Cisneros Delights Crowd with Excerpts

Tahree Lane, Blade Staff Writer entertains us with a story about Sandra Cisneros, who entertained and soothed an audience of 450 on Wednesday evening, reading from several of her stories and books.

Adapting her high speaking voice to more than a dozen characters in the small, illustrated Have You Seen Marie?, she was, in turns, a river, a girl hanging upside down, a deaf Mexican grandmother, a cowboy, a woman "as pretty as a mermaid" — all part of her San Antonio neighborhood she encountered when searching for a lost cat named Marie. Ultimately, the story was about her own loss and how Ms. Cisneros learned to cope with being orphaned at 53 by the death of her mother.

"It's for people who have their hearts broken in two," she said. Enjoying being read to, an activity that never grows old, the audience responded with soft chuckles and occasional applause.

Ms. Cisneros' appearance at the Stranahan Theater was part of the Authors! Authors! series presented by The Blade and the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library.

"Every story is medicine, every book is medicine," she said, particularly if it's read when one needs its message. The afterword of Have You Seen Marie resonates with people learning to live with the loss of a loved one.

"A part of them is born in you, not immediately, but eventually, gradually," she said. "Even sadness has its place in the universe."

Ms. Cisneros, 60, read for nearly an hour. She was born in Chicago, became famous for The House on Mango Street (1984), followed by the inventive Caramelo, books of poetry and fiction, the award of a MacArthur Fellowship, and years of work promoting Latino writers. She lives with five dogs in San Miguel de Allende, a mountain town in Mexico, and is considering writing a novella. For her, writing is a spiritual mission to promote understanding between disparate groups.

She was recently invited to speak in Mexico City at a forum about teachers and others who have disappeared, but was required to limit her message to 200 words.

She wrote a poem in which she called on grandmothers to form a brigade against violence. "Who do we revere the most? Mothers. The only ones holier than mothers are grandmothers."

Her final reading was an exquisite story based on the later years of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose work Ms. Cisneros saw this week at the Detroit Institute of Arts, along with the big art of Diego Rivera, Ms. Kahlo's perennially unfaithful husband.

It was an ode to the everyday beauty Ms. Kahlo created out of love for Rivera, and to the animals who gave her unquestioned loyalty.