Rachel Yeates, Campus Carrier News Editor
Last Thursday, award-winning Mexican-American author Luis Urrea spoke about his colorful childhood, his writing process and his novel “Into the Beautiful North” as part of the Conson Wilson lecture series.
The book was required reading for all first-year students and is a story about a young woman who travels to the U. S. from her home in Mexico to protect her hometown and find her father an in the process learns a lot about herself and her own strength.
Between stories of his creative parrot-smuggling grandmother and the real-life inspirations for many of the novel’s characters, Urrea gave students thoughtful writing advice.
“In writing you have to use everything,” Urrea said. “Sorrow, joy, tragedy, God.”
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| Contributed by Public Relations Luis Urrea talks to students Elvis Diaz and Carolina Flores before his lecture. |
When asked why he approached some of the more sensitive subjects in his novel in a light-hearted way, Urrea replied that he worked to use humor as a connecting human force.
“Laughter is the virus that infects us all with humanity,” he said.
English, rhetoric and writing professor Thomas Dasher, also a first-year adviser, was very impressed with Urrea.
“Writers are sometimes not especially good at reading from their own work or talking about their work,” Dasher said. “But clearly he was quite effective.”
Dasher said that the majority of his BCC class responded well to the novel.
“We continued discussion the first day of class, focusing especially on their questions we hadn’t talked about during Viking Venture,” Dasher said. “I was really impressed by the questions they continued to raise.”
The first-year required reading program has changed significantly since Dasher began teaching at Berry. He remembers when, for multiple years, incoming students read “The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass.”
While he commended the visiting speaker who would come to campus to talk about the book, Dasher was glad when Berry began assigning more recently published works and inviting their authors, especially when those books were works of fiction.
Dasher feels past students connected more strongly to works of fiction and were able to have more meaningful conversations. He felt that this year’s choice followed that pattern.
“I was also glad to see, as we did last year, [the school] go back to a very strong work, a very strong novel, that I think asks the students to really consider a range of issues,” Dasher said.
In his talk, Urrea talked about stereotypes and gender roles in his novel, addressing one of his main characters who is gay and how that character, like so many others, was based off of a real person from his childhood.
He also spoke about his personal experience with the border patrol between Mexico and the U.S. and how security has increased tenfold since he was younger.
Jessica Cannon, a freshman in attendance, appreciated hearing Urrea’s take on these issues.
“My dad … used to work for the border patrol in El Paso,” Cannon said. “So I grew up seeing that side of it, and it was interesting for me to then see the author’s perspective.”
Freshman Allie Crain also enjoyed the lecture and commented that being able to hear him talk made the book more relatable and helped her understand Urrea’s “personal journey” that was his writing process.
“Being able to hear him talk about the characters and what influenced him … was amazing,” Crain said. “I had no idea that the characters were based on real people, so that was awesome [to find out].”