Ask The Author: Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

In February, this wonderful piece of fiction from Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, “The Lights.”

1. Why did you choose to write “The Lights” in second person?

This started as an exercise from Noah Eli Gordon based on Eula Biss’s essay “Time and Distance Overcome.” I picked an object and researched it and let the research take me where it wanted to go. I picked traffic lights because I can be boring and read a lot about naked streets, which are just as exciting as they sound. I feel like traffic lights speak in the second person. They tell us what to do in command form through their colors. The voice and the lights expanded from there.

2. Should cakes be abolished due to the laziness we have about using them to celebrate any occasion?

I’m definitely pro-cakes but I think that they should be eaten in silence and alone.

3. How could you use “The Lights” in a corporate team builder?

Thank you for asking this. I think it’s actually the most practical and direct use for “The Lights”. I’m always looking for a use for these things. I should probably patent it and hold workshops. I can’t tell you how I would use it because of the patent.

4. How could Terrence Malick adapt “The Lights” into a film that I would actually watch and not yell at the screen for 167 minutes?

Multiply young Sam Shepard by 100 and make him play the cakes, the lights, and the bog. And add horses and fields of wheat, but no dinosaurs.

5. What would Kanye West do after reading this?

I don’t know him very well, but I suppose he might meet up with Bon Iver and build flutes out of squirrel bones. Actually, if they did that I would faint from happiness. They probably wouldn’t though.

6. What else is made in the mountains?

From my experience in Colorado, everything good but also everything really, really scary. Which makes them optimal to live near.