Winona León is a writer and artist from Far West Texas. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wyoming. An excerpt from her story “Collapsible” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Collapsible”?
While I still lived in Los Angeles, I often used to walk my dog in a small neighborhood made up of historic, single-family houses. One day, that entire neighborhood was demolished. Soon after, a luxury apartment complex took the houses’ places. The first line of “Collapsible” came very quickly to me after that incident. Of course, this was neither the first nor last time I saw this pattern of gentrification occur. Although gentrification is such a pervasive systemic issue, it was important to me that hope carried this story. I saw the special relationship between Consuelo and her grandfather from the very first draft, but it took time to understand how his stories fuel their survival and joy. My love of Los Angeles history and folklore helped me shape his stories.
As the grandfather’s tales and recollections are continuously interspersed within the narrative, storytelling acts as a true driving force of this piece and character’s decision making–as the narrator once notes, “She knows the power of words as well as her heartbeat.” Are there other stories that emphasize the power of words and storytelling you’d especially recommend?
Absolutely! The first that comes to mind is Scribe, a strange and absolutely mesmerizing novel by my dear mentor Alyson Hagy. I’d also say anything by Louise Erdrich, Helen Oyeyemi, and Italo Calvino. Recently, the dreamlike meditation on collective memory in Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the brutal mythologizing in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season have lingered with me too.
Did you do any research about the design of buildings to imagine what collapsible models might look like? Or did you imagine this original world wholecloth? Was there anything that didn’t make it into the story, but helped you start to see what it might look like?
I always imagined these buildings having a somewhat whimsical nature, but I had to consider more deeply their logic—how they opened, what they were made of, how each neighborhood differed. I dabble in visual arts, so sketching my ideas out and drawing a map of the city and forest where Consuelo’s family lived helped immensely. I also revisited the histories of real Los Angeles neighborhoods—Chavez Ravine, MacArthur Park, Downtown. The Castle was a real building on Bunker Hill, though it was destroyed in a fire. Overall, “Collapsible” was one of those stories that expanded as it evolved, especially when I began writing the mountain lion’s character.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Lately, the best advice to which I keep circling back comes from my former professor Brad Watson, who passed away this summer. Brad believed in having patience with the writing process. Often, you can’t solve a story in one or two (or even ten!) attempts. A story must simmer for a while before you can return to it. Learning to value rather than dread the time it takes to transform a first draft into a fully formed story has given me the freedom and courage to take more risks, dig deeper into the heart of a piece, and revise more coherently.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m knee-deep in the first draft of a novel that revolves around a brother and sister who can see possible futures reflected before them in desert mirages. The novel traces their shared, fractured childhood along with the sister’s adult journey to find her brother after he disappears. I’m also working on a short story collection set in California and Far West Texas.