Writer’s work a roller-coaster ride of the mind
Writing can be an albatross around the neck. Or it can be an adventure of great expectations leading to profitable ends.
For Alex Z. Salinas, writing is a wild roller-coaster ride with its curvy twists and turns and highs and lows in a long journey of self-discovery.
With his graduate English degree from St. Mary’s University, Salinas trudged through the gantlet of erudite journals and little magazines that span the American literary landscape. He published poems, flash fiction and even op-eds.
It wasn’t long before the former Express-news intern burst onto the poetry scene with his debut collection, “Warbles,” published in 2019 by New York’s indie press Hekate Publishing, a bellwether of millennial writing. His second poetry collection, “Dreamt: The Lingering Phantoms of Equinox,” followed in 2020, exceeding his first with fireworks of alliteration and assonance and jets of metaphors and allusions, all dazzlingly colorful.
His third book, the debut fiction collection “City Lights from the Upside Down,” is just out by Austin publisher SAR Press, an imprint of San Antonio Review. He connected with William O. Pate II, the Austin publisher of the San Antonio Review,
an online journal, through email.
SAR press was founded in San Antonio in 2017 but has since relocated to Austin. Already a Kirkus review for Salinas’s collection is pending. SAR Press is one of the few indie presses maintained by an all-volunteer editorial collective, “not beholden to any institution, organization or ideology.”
We met at Viola’s Ventanas to talk about his writing and how he managed to pull off three books before reaching his 33rd year. “Is fiction your next pit stop?” He grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Funny you asked that,” Salinas said, “but I’ve written a third manuscript of poetry and steadily working so that it sees the light of day soon. It’s my strongest poetic output. I write fiction primarily from the mind, and poetry from the heart and gut; sometimes, all I want to do is write from my heart and gut, so that I jolt myself out of complacency. I’m probably more comfortable writing fiction, though writing poetry is more captivating.”
Salinas’ writing is fast-paced, jettisoning words at nanosecond
speed with audacity and wit magnifying pathos to inconsequential endings a la Anton Chekhov.
Most of his stories are firstperson with few omniscient narrators. A busy writer with an eye for detail and a spontaneous ability to size up potential stories, Salinas thrust himself into the literati by sheer force of will — and a blast of creativity. His style has a blend of Woody Allen and Steve Martin with existential bathos, as one story, “The Sad Tale of the Inflatable Wacky Tube Man,” is hilarious, almost whimsical. “That story arrived to me fast and furiously. I wrote the first version in a couple hours. I didn’t want to be heavy-handed with political subtext other than to tell an engaging, timely story by my standards. Plus, I’ve long thought that inflatable wacky tube men are deserving of fictionalization since they’re so bizarrely, ridiculously hilarious!”
“Any reason why your stories are generally first-person?”
He paused momentarily, mused and said: “While most are in first person, some of my favorites — like ‘Coke Machine’ — I wrote in third person. There’s something alluring in the challenge of landing on a first-person voice and discovering what’s wrong with said person’s manner of speaking and thinking — because all first-person narratives, in my opinion, are unreliable, as are all first-person stories constructed from memories of memories.”
While many churned out poetry and fiction during the COVID-19 pandemic, Salinas was busy at his laptop riding the roller coaster of the mind, finishing his upcoming novel, “The Dream Life of Larry Rios,” for 2022.
Alex Z. Salinas is a person of interest. Be on the lookout.