How Should I Write about Love and Loss?: A Guest Post by Andrés N. Ordorica
This month’s Discover author, Andrés N. Ordorica, penned an insightful essay for us on the inspiration for his debut novel, How We Named the Stars. A tender story of love and grief, Ordorica brings us behind the scenes of how his novel came to be. Here’s Andrés, in his own words.
Paperback $17.95
How We Named the Stars
How We Named the Stars
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Paperback $17.95
The kind of debut that launches a career, Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named The Stars is beautiful and devastating, a tender and timeless tale about queer love, family and secrets. Inspired by the author’s own experiences, this story tugs on the heartstrings with immensely human characters and a genuine examination of love and loss.
The kind of debut that launches a career, Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named The Stars is beautiful and devastating, a tender and timeless tale about queer love, family and secrets. Inspired by the author’s own experiences, this story tugs on the heartstrings with immensely human characters and a genuine examination of love and loss.
Some of my favorite writers have worn many hats throughout their careers: Sandra Cisneros, Jenni Fagan, Jackie Kay, Edwin Morgan, and Colm Tóibín to name a few. Writers who have understood that for different stories, different mediums are required. While I first trained as a playwright, it was when I moved into poetry and prose that my world exploded into infinite possibilities. No longer was I beholden to production budgets or fitting a theatre’s theme for a season, or the likelihood that a set designer could create the world how I imagined. My 2022 poetry collection At Least This I Know (404 Ink) allowed me to tell a story that was deeply personal and very much rooted in the politics of the self. It allowed me to translate some of my own frustrations, joys, and anxieties of being a man trapped in a queer, immigrant and racialized body and it reflected back to me what have become mainstays across my writerly practice: love and loss.
How We Named the Stars is a coming-of-age story rooted in love and loss. But I always knew it had to be told in novel form. The ability to play with narrative devices, timelines, and location were essential to telling the story as it needed to be told. Training as a playwright and publishing a poetry collection have played an integral role in my style of prose writing. I thrive on description: capturing the feeling of heat on skin, the scent of a lover’s aftershave all these many years later, what it is to run under a bright winter sky. My prose writing is indebted to my poetic practice and my days living and breathing live theatre.
I am a writer who intends to always learn and always develop. And so, I hope to follow in the footsteps of those I look up to—understanding that every story requires its own unique vessel to truly come alive. The magic comes from trusting yourself enough to choose the right one for the story you have to tell!