I arrived at the University of Minnesota in 2012 after moving to Minneapolis from Mexico, where I had been doing field research with the Rarámuri, an Indigenous people of northern Mexico. I remember arriving with a suitcase I’d overpacked and a Word doc filled with notes. I had an idea for a book, a set of questions and experiences that felt urgent, but no clear sense of what form they should take on the page. Like many M.F.A. students, I arrived with conviction and uncertainty in equal measure.

In those first months, my days fell into a new rhythm shaped by classrooms, libraries, coffee shops, long walks across campus. I wrote constantly, testing scenes and voices, often circling the same material from different angles. During my time at the U, I drafted what would become the first bad version of Out of the Sierra. It was sprawling and uneven, full of false starts and wrong turns.

At the time, that draft felt like evidence that I was failing to find my way. In retrospect, it was evidence of permission. The M.F.A. gave me the freedom to write badly in pursuit of something truer. It took a while, but a couple years after graduation, I truly understood that revision was not a corrective measure, but the work itself.

The program also transformed how I read. At the U’s M.F.A. program, reading was never treated as secondary to writing; it was foundational. I encountered books I would never have found on my own, writers working in forms and traditions far outside my comfort zone. Those readings quietly reshaped my sense of what was possible. They helped me understand writing less as a matter of transcription and more as an act of arrangement: deciding what belongs together, and why.

I also formed friendships with writers who took my work seriously and expected me to do the same for theirs. We learned how to give feedback that was precise and generous. We were rigorous without being dismissive. Those relationships extended well beyond the program. Years later, those same writers continue to give me editorial feedback, and after Out of the Sierra was published, they helped connect me to readings and speaking engagements—carrying forward the collaborative spirit we developed together in afternoon seminars, where we handed each other manuscripts filled with handwritten notes.

By the time I left the University in 2014, I still didn’t have a finished book. Instead, I had something more durable: I had a practice shaped by discipline rather than inspiration alone, a reading life widened by curiosity, and a community that made writing feel less solitary. The campus had become a place where uncertainty was not something to avoid, but something to work through.

I still think about the moment I arrived in Minneapolis, fresh from Mexico, carrying years of research and experience without knowing how to hold them on the page. What the University of Minnesota gave me was the time and context to learn that shape emerges through commitment. I didn’t arrive with a book, but I left knowing how to stay with the work long enough to make one.

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