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[...] Sometimes the fact that everyone in the world writes can be wonderful, because you find fellow-writers everywhere, and sometimes it can be a drag because illiterate jerks strut around sporting all the defects and none of the virtues of a real writer. As Nicanor Parra said: it might be a good …

Twenty days in Chile that shook the (mental) world that I inhabit. Twenty days that were like twenty sessions of humanity falling with a thud. Twenty days that would make anyone weep or roll on the floor laughing. But let’s start from the beginning. I left Chile in January 1974. The last time I fle…

And what is Ercilla left with before he writes La Araucana and dies? Ercilla is left with something — if in its most extreme and bizarre form — that all great poets possess. He’s left with courage. A courage worth nothing in old age, just as, incidentally, it’s worth nothing in youth, but that keep…

[...] everything that I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 1950s and who at a certain moment chose military service, though in this case it would be more accurate to say militancy, and we gave the little we had — the great deal th…

[...] a writer can have many homelands, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends greatly on what he’s writing at the moment. It’s possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one’s writing. Which doesn’t mean w…