Andrea Chapela

speaker

348 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 Jul

Andrea Chapela’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton · Author Interview: Andrea Chapela · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

So you have, in English, there are so many good verbs.

And we don't have, like in Spanish, we had less verbs, but we had a lot of nouns and a lot of things to do with those nouns.

And so I think one of the main difference writing in English in Clarion was that when I write in Spanish, and I think that's the experience of most people that are writing in their first language, the language is just there.

And I trust the language to come.

I can think about other things.

So English, what made me do it, it would...

make me have to stop and think about language more, which was, I think, in that moment better because I would write slower and I would think, I would have to think about every word and if a word would work.

And I also had, while I was in Clarion, I had a friend, a native speaker, who would read my stories the night before I turned them in and tell me.

Because sometimes as a native speaker, what I feel is...

When you are writing in your first language or a language that you have experienced for a long time, limited, the words have weight to them.

They are not just words.

They contain so much of how you've used them and of the culture and of the feeling of them.

And in your second language, especially if you don't have, if you are not, yeah, if you don't, I don't know.

I think you have to have loved someone in the language to be able to have that someone of something.

I think that is very important because then it gets that kind of weight and that kind of past.

But I was living in the U.S., but my MFA was in Spanish and I had learned English since I was small.

But I still right now.

And back then, because right now I've been living back in Mexico for six years in the pandemic, and that's different.

But back then, while I had been living in the U.S., I felt the English was there.

But it's still what I remember the most is how slow I was at writing because I had no confidence that what I was saying was correct.

Showing 141–160 of 348 · page 8 of 18