Notes on ‘Shall My West Hurt Me?’
Most people that read through the entirety of Shall My West Hurt Me?, as a collection, tend to tell me that Barley is their favorite character, the one that left an impression on them. It’s not my role as the author to dictate who should like what about my work, but I must confess that Inés, since her inception in this story, has solidly remained my favorite.
The characterization techniques I employed in The Stench are really brought to a culmination here. I employed that same skill of transformation here to what I would consider an augmented degree, and did my best to sustain the broken, yet emerging, mind of Inés to its inevitable conclusion, as well as the equally important perspective of her brother, Saúl. Instead of the highly obtuse and sophisticated prose I enlisted to articulate Barley Montrose’s point of view, Inés’ language is stripped back and simple, offering less of a stream of consciousness and more of a series of nonlinear fragments, each enticing and connecting to each other emotionally in a way that is less dense in allegory and illusion, but more rich with poetics. This change was marked by two new additions to my literary inspirations around the time of the story’s creation, which was from December of 2025 through January of 2026: the first, my growing admiration for poetry and poetic form; the second, a subsequent reading of the Diné Bahane’, the creation story of the Navajo people. In brief, I became deeply enraptured with the concept of emergence which the aforementioned creation story is focused on. To simplify—as I’m nowhere near qualified enough to give this topic the scholarly attention it deserves—the Diné Bahane is primarily the story of how the Navajo tribe emerged through layers of the earth, going upwards until settling in the fifth world, which is the surface of the earth we know. This notion of emergence can be seen, to my knowledge, in several levels of Navajo culture and art, and it takes up a deeper symbolic meaning in the past and future of the tribe. Knowing this, I wanted to explore the emergence of consciousness and awareness on a mental level; this endeavor resulted in Inés’ character, and her growing realization of the material conditions of both herself and her brother, and the swelling feelings that arise from her as this transformation occurs, culminating in an internal rebellion, the results of which are left unknown.
Inés is, in this narrative, a genizaro: a slave of the Spanish and later Mexican inhabitants of Abiquiu. The practice was widespread in several towns and villages throughout New Mexico, and the lasting trauma of such a barbaric practice can still be felt in many places, if one speaks to the right people. I’ve been to Abiquiu several times, and the magnitude of history is immediately apparent. Writing a story about what I feel is an unseen part of New Mexico’s history had been a desire of mine for some time, though I knew it would require meticulous preparation and careful respect. This is why Shall My West Hurt Me? consumed by far the most time of any story in this collection—the period of active writing took around two months. The style of oral retelling and my limited word choice made each sentence a struggle, though I took it as a puzzle which I enjoyed very much. I was often plagued by self doubt, and wracked with fear over whether I was doing such a serious topic justice, which only added to my generally languid and slow writing sessions.
Minimalism in prose is something I generally dislike and try to avoid. I personally feel that it limits otherwise great stories from exploring a major part of the art of writing, which is constructing compelling sentences that challenge and surprise readers while remaining penetrable, but stylish. That being said, Inés’s narrative required me to exercise my self control and avoid eating a thesaurus, and to capture the beautiful mind of a human being in chains without typically florid prose, and instead more restrained inner thoughts.
In the end, I felt that through this story I further developed my capability to capture the voice of someone far removed from my own experiences, and to fabricate that voice in a way that induces empathy in other people who experience my art. Inés, when I think about her, is alive, and still searching for freedom, both internally and externally, in a way that I think—though genizaros are long gone—will still be relevant, via means that the combined forces of history and fiction are startlingly adequate at invoking.
