One semester in 1998—back when there was still a University of Southern Colorado—the poet David Keplinger asked me, “Who do you imagine you are writing to?” I think his lesson was about intimacy: how an imagined audience shapes voice. I have been obsessed with that question ever since.

I told him I imagined writing for and from my family and my Southern Colorado community. Stories the family usually kept secret or hidden. Stories lost to me.

He said, “Oh. I imagine I’m writing to my ex-girlfriend.”

Since 1999, I’ve been writing short stories drawn from my family and my community. My first book, The House of Order, is a collection of stories about growing up in Southern Colorado and the traumatic experiences I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand. My second book, Little Mocos, explores my father’s side of the family—his upbringing in and around the Bessemer neighborhood near the steel mill once called Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I). Carlos Montoya imagines my mother’s upbringing and the life of her father in the San Luis Valley, a man I never had the chance to meet.

The House of Order came partly from my Oregon State MFA program and partly from a failed novel, but mostly from my dead grandmother’s kitchen and the old man who wasn’t my real grandfather.

Sitting there early in the morning as compadres barged in for breakfast, and later in the day as family came by to talk and play cards, I learned how stories lived. The old folks talked for hours—always about the past, always intimately about their lives and experiences, always in a mix of Spanish and English.

With my grandfather, the stories were about the worksites of CF&I Steel and the pool halls around Huérfano County. With my grandmother, it was her drunkard father and the way he treated women. These stories were animated, raw, unfiltered. Over time, I came to treasure those kitchen talks and family myths. I sought them out, wrote them down, and hoped they might someday become a book.

The work lives in the tension between fact, memory, and the way family stories are told. In “Rabbit Story,” the warning comes early: “You can’t tell a man’s story unless you are for sure about the facts, Manito.” Yet family history arrives in fragments: omissions, rumors, stories half-told and forgotten unless someone presses for more. That uncertainty is where I write from.

And the language matters. The voices matter. The old neighborhood spoke with tenderness, insult, swagger, shame, prayer, and profanity all mixed together. In “Cabrón,” Spruce Street is remembered as “one nest full of cabrónes,” a record of how people named themselves and each other.

In “Family Album,” memory itself becomes unstable: “1815 Spruce Street never exists in those old photos,” and later the old albums become unbearable because “all they do is remind me of what I can’t seem to remember.” I keep returning to those gaps: to family ghosts, old haunts, and lives I can only partly recover.

I want to represent the old folks I’ve lost—their Spanish, their language—as well as my life now, as a community college professor and writer. I think often of the voice that insists, “You have to learn your family’s language. Tu sabes?” Writing is the only way I know to connect the people who raised me to the person I’ve become.

To remember Bessemer alive and as it was. To gather the old photos and stories and let them come together on the page. To honor the people who are gone, even when memory is fractured, denied, or incomplete. That is where the work begins.