Christopher David Rosales Is a Damn Bandit

Christopher David Rosales (@CDRosales; @chrisdrosales) is a Chicano novelist and short-story writer from Los Angeles. He is the author of three novels including SILENCE THE BIRD, SILENCE THE KEEPER (2015, Mixer Publishing) which won the Hispanic Scholarship Fund & McNamara Family Creative Arts Grant, GODS ON THE LAM (2017, Perpetual Motion Machine), and WORD IS BONE (2019, Broken River Books) winner of the International Latino Book Award. His award-winning short stories have appeared in BOTH SIDES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF BORDER NOIR (2020, Polis/Agora Books), among other anthologies, journals, and magazines in the U.S. and abroad.

Check out Christopher’s latest flash work at Shotgun Honey and Cleaver.

1. What is the best thing that has been said/written about your writing?

Steven Dunn blurbed my last book Word is Bone. Reading that blurb was one of those surreal moments in life where someone taps directly into what I hope someone thinks of my writing. I often not-so-secretly try to write in the voices from my upbringing in L.A., around Paramount, Long Beach, and Compton. Steven wrote: “Christopher Rosales’ writing in Word is Bone is so vibrant and dirty with street-level intimacy like a lot of hip-hop: think Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees” and Domino’s “Getto Jam.” These are stories from the stoops, laundromats, canals and alleyways, that show how a community weaves narrative webs to understand their own truths. So, here we go, here we go as the tune starts to bloom.” —Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat and water & power

2. What is the worst thing that has been said/written about your writing?

I once received a rejection from a journal that called a story of mine “ponderous,” which I took as a crafty way to say boring. I’ve always wanted to write work that was both exploratory and experimental but also entertaining. Boring—that’s a bad way to be in life and writing both.

3. What is the best writing advice you’ve been given?

One of my first writing mentors disabused me of the notion that I needed experience or even inspiration to write. He told me to do my job, and that way I would never sit down to write and not be able to do at least that: put words on the page. Ever since I’ve tried to stand by the line, “As a writer I’ve never heard a plumber begin a sentence with ‘As a plumber’.” I try not to be brooding in order to be serious.

4. What is the worst writing advice you’ve been given?

Probably that old gem “write what you know.” I write to learn through writing, not to hear myself think about what I’ve learned already. See comment above about being boring as hell.

5. Who writes like a Damn Bandit?

Percival Everett, always. Karen Tei Yamashita. Steven Dunn. Marream Krollos. Brian Evenson. Stephen Graham Jones. Hillary Leftwich. Yuri Herrera translated by Lisa Dillman. Marcia Douglas. Gabino Iglesias. I’ll have more links to authors on my website soon. The list goes on and on.