JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET: I wish I could say that I became a writer, but I think I was born with this problem of being a writer, and that it was something I couldn't stop doing, even when I was trying to pursue other career paths. So I went off to college thinking, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to open up a clinic and come back home and be very, you know, save the community in these weird ways.
And then I got to college and almost right away was paying a lot more attention in my writing classes. And those were the classes that didn't feel like school. They felt like a club I was part of.
And so I found myself prioritizing that homework over the homework I had to do for my more serious classes, which then I figured out that's not even a fair thing to say. Those writing classes and my literature classes were, in some ways, my hardest classes, because they challenged me to think in ways that I had never been asked to think before.
So as a little kid, I was always writing down dreams. I would write down things I heard people say. And I would make little stories out of them. And then I would bring them to my parents and be like, I have to read you this thing.
And they were like, uh oh. They would look at me like, oh, she's got that thing where she might be an artist or a writer. And so they'd try to very gently steer me towards something-- with good intentions, steer me towards something that was maybe a little safer.
So I like to say that I tried to be everything else before I was a writer, and finally embracing the fact that that's who I was. And I was going to see the world that way no matter what. I was going to see the world and observe the world as a writer, even if I was a doctor or a lawyer. And I would always be fighting an impulse about who I am.
So the eureka moment was probably, though, in college, where I had a teacher say that the stories I was putting out, which were about or centered on characters that weren't regularly found in the canon, right, in established literature, of her saying that that was valid.
And she's a writer named Helena Viramontes. And she was a huge influence on me, just being able to not necessarily find my voice, but to understand that my voice mattered and that the characters I was putting on the page were worth reading about and deserved a place in literature.
And so for that reason, that was sort of a eureka moment, where she opened the door and said, you can walk through it if you want to, rather than me just hiding in a closet and writing about what I thought nobody else wanted to read about. She told me it didn't matter if anybody wanted to read about it. But the fact that it was that urgent to come out meant I was a writer.