Home / News Archive / NOCCA Creative Writing…
NOCCA Creative Writing Faculty Anne Gisleson featured in The Atlantic
| Posted on November 09, 2011 |
For the past few years, we’ve spent part of each summer in Mexico, to escape the dual waves of crime and heat that swamp our hometown of New Orleans in those unbearable months. Like New Orleans, with its jazz funerals and Mardi Gras mortality traditions, Mexico is known for its cultural braiding of life and death, not just with the famous Día de los Muertos, but in daily activity. Every morning, walking our kids to camp in the town of San Miguel de Allende, we’d pass a man building coffins, shop doors wide open, his finished wares on display, as precise and ornate as the cakes in the window of the panadería across the street. During the local film festival, the cemeteries hosted midnight horror movies, which we could not persuade any of our kids to attend with us. On the city bus, a portrait of a bloody, anguished Christ affixed behind the driver’s seat might accompany you on your trip.
No danger in any of that—it enriches your errands, makes you feel more alive. What’s always concerned me about our frequent trips to Mexico is actual danger, not from drug traffickers as my parents feared, but from the seeming lack of universal safety standards, the eschewing of seat belts in taxis, the happy crowding of the disturbingly dilapidated playgrounds, the guardrails that, when they do exist, seem to be always 4 to 6 inches too short. But Mexico is also the most family- and child-centered place I’ve ever visited, and my preoccupations seem to be a by-product of my 21st-century American momhood.