IF FRESNO COULD WRITE

“The orange is in the basket.�

Gary Soto is on a roll. But tonight the noted poet isn’t perched behind a lectern in a packed Berkeley lecture hall or cozying up to literary wannabes at City Lights bookstore. Tonight, he’s standing in a cold, rather shabby meeting room of a small, Spanish-language Presbyterian church in a seriously un-swanky section of Oakland addressing a handful of recent immigrants.

Soto picks up an orange and presents it to the group. He waves the large piece of fruit back and forth, smiling, then drops it into a woven basket, which he places on the battered conference table in front of him. Nine pairs of eyes watch his every move.

“The orange,� he says, pointing to the fruit, “is in the basket.� He points to the basket. He waits.

“The orange . . . is in . . . the basket,� the rapt audience repeats haltingly, in unison.

“Very good,� Soto says, with the sort of satisfaction one might expect from someone who has just recited the most exquisitely crafted line of poetry ever strung together. “Very good.�

With props and refreshments in hand, Soto makes this 30-minute trek religiously two nights a week from his home in the tony Berkeley Hills to teach English to a revolving cast of fellow parishioners.

Not that he doesn’t have anything else to do. With the release last year of Soto’s “New and Selected Poems� (the collection that garnered him a 1995 National Book Award nomination), the Fresno-born writer has made the leap from respected insider to public persona. A university in Texas has asked him to give a reading, and a literary magazine in Massachusetts wants him to contribute a poem. He’s booked for an appearance at a museum in San Diego, and a literary conference in Southern California has asked him to speak.

But that’s only the half of it. Soto is also an enormously popular, award-winning author of children’s books. Since the 1990 publication of the critically praised collection of short stories titled “Baseball in April,� Soto has published almost 20 books for young readers, releasing five last year alone. He has also produced, directed and written two short films (one of which, “The Pool Party,� won a 1993 Andrew Carnegie Medal) and has written a play, “Novio Boy,� for high-school kids.

By the typical standard, the 44-year-old Soto could be considered overextended. But Soto is a man with a mission: getting Mexican American kids to read.

*

Soto wants Mexican American children to grow up with the one thing he didn’t have as a child: a belief that he could accomplish something worthwhile in this world. In his neighborhood--a rundown industrial section of Fresno--just getting by was tough enough. His mother’s wish was that he “stay out of prison.�

When Soto was about 5, his father died in a freak roofing accident after a co-worker carrying materials up a ladder fell on him, breaking his neck. The story, Soto says, is that the two men were drinking. The loss forever changed Soto.

“Even at that very young age, I was already aware of mortality,� Soto says. ‘At 5, I was thinking, “Man I’m 5, I’ve only got 60 more years. It doesn’t look good.’ �

Not that it ever looked good. Shortly before his father’s death, the family was uprooted from a neighborhood full of friends and relatives to a mostly white community where they knew no one. Their old house and neighborhood were demolished as part of an urban renewal plan. Three years after his father’s accident, Soto’s mother remarried. His stepfather was, Soto says, “undoubtedly the baddest dude in Fresno. He was a hard worker, but he was an alcoholic. He was very big and very dangerous--not with us, but with everyone else.�

In time, two stepbrothers joined Soto, his older brother, Rick, and his younger sister, Debbie, and life at home was less than ideal. His mother and stepfather fought a lot, and the children were more or less left to fend for themselves.

Gary found his niche early on. “I knew I was going to be in trouble, ever since I was in kindergarten,� he says. “That was going to be my way of life. And I got really good at it. I was paralyzed about being secure, being safe, you know? You weren’t safe at school, you weren’t safe at home. I’d say to myself, ‘I’ll just go to sleep and then I’ll wake up and I can go to school and maybe I can find a little haven there.’ �

But haven was hard to come by.

When referring to emotional issues (both past and present), Soto frequently drifts back and forth between referring to himself as “I� and “you.� “From when I was 9 until I moved out of the house at 19,� he says, “you just got by. You just lived there. You were waiting for the day when you could say, ‘OK, that’s enough of that. I’m gone.’ �

All Soto really wanted was to stay out of trouble--much like the title character in his 1994 novel for young adults titled “Jesse,� about a teen who quits high school to set up house and go to community college with his older brother, Abel: “ . . . I just wanted to be good,� Jesse says in the final chapter. “If I did everything everyone told me, I thought, I would get a job and live quietly.�

“I think a lot of people feel that way,� Soto says, at first reluctant to equate Jesse’s emotions with his own. “You don’t want to cause a lot of trouble; you just want to get a job, raise a family, be a decent person.�

*

Symbols connected to those early Fresno days--crooked teeth, a dog, small change (especially dimes)--are a Soto staple; perhaps no single image is more frequent, or more significant, than oranges. For Soto, they aren’t simply the quintessential California fruit, they are a treasure more valuable than gold.

“Oranges� is even the title of his most anthologized poem (which is also one of his favorites), an evocative piece about first love and the ache of desire:

The first time I walked

With a girl, I was twelve,

Cold, and weighted down

With two oranges in my jacket.

December. Frost cracking

Beneath my steps, my breath

Before me, then gone,

As I walked toward

Her house, the one whose

Porch Light burned yellow

Night and day, in any weather.

That universal quality is Soto’s stock in trade. Over the years, it’s brought him both praise and criticism. He has appeared regularly in a variety of publications--the New Yorker, the Nation, Paris Review, American Poetry Review and the Threepenny Review, among others. Closest to his heart, however, is Poetry magazine, which he has contributed to every year since 1974.

Joseph Parisi, the editor of Poetry, has been working with Soto since 1976. “From the earliest days,� Parisi says, “there was a freshness about his work--a directness, a particularly effective use of imagery. And the tone of voice was extremely engaging.�

“A lot of people try to write about childhood when they’re adults who don’t have a very good grasp or effective memory,� Parisi adds. “They can’t quite capture the innocence and sense of adventure and misadventure of youth quite the way he does.�

Some people, however, wish Soto’s work spoke more directly to the Mexican American experience. ‘In the Chicano writing community, about 75% like what I’m doing. The other 25% feel like I’m a sellout,� Soto says. “I’m not following the party line, I’m not writing about ‘The Cause.’ To that I say, ‘Shit, man, I don’t care.’ As a poet, you don’t care anyhow because you’re so full of yourself that you just want to do what you want to do.

“When I first started publishing, in 1975-’76, a lot of the rhetoric was that you had to be really nationalistic, you had to embrace a lot of the [traditions] of Mexico and the indigenous population of Mexico. But the work I was trying to do was so private--talking about loss, death; it really had nothing to do with the things that were Mexican as opposed to anything else.� Soto understands why this rankles some of his peers. “You’re given a talent,� he says, “and wherever the talent comes from, you might have a certain responsibility. I can respect that, but it doesn’t change the direction of what I’m doing. It can’t. Otherwise, it would not come out as something that was sincere and genuine and authentic.�

Even the notion of writing about certain cultural aspects of his own life that might seem fertile ground for contemplation--his 21-year marriage to his Japanese American wife, Carolyn, for example--don’t interest him. “It’s not really one of the issues for me. Yes, it probably would be a service, but that doesn’t mean I have to write about everything that I experience. Why would I want to write about that?�

Perhaps the harshest criticism Soto has faced has come from Harold Bloom, a literary scholar and author of “The Western Canon,� who groused in a 1994 Newsweek interview about the emergence of politically correct writing in general and Soto in particular. “Gary Soto couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag,� Bloom stated. It’s a phrase Soto remembers verbatim a year and a half later, although he insists that he’s “an armadillo to those kinds of statements.�

“What’s really tricky here is that a lot of people want a large, educated minority population,� he says, “but when you begin to compete at the same level it’s, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t that good.’ �

*

Oddly enough, despite the undeniable bleakness that surrounded him, Soto cherishes the memories of his own young life in Fresno--perhaps because he occupied a world of his own creation.

“We lived right next to a junkyard--and it was a really cool junkyard, man. I remember the first image I ever had in my life,� Soto says. “I must have been about 3 1/2 or 4, and I had been given some M&Ms.; I was saving them for a time of day when nobody would see me eating them. I remember looking out onto the junkyard, and the sun was down; it was already dark. And we didn’t even have a bedroom; my brother and I shared a converted sun porch. But eating those M&Ms; one at a time and looking out at the junkyard; it was an exquisite feeling. It was a beautiful area. It was broken, it was just so sad, but it was absolutely stunning.�

Although his memory can be hazy on certain fronts, Soto can remember the most minute childhood details with an almost eery clarity: the cacophony of sights and smells he and an uncle encountered strolling through Chinatown on a Saturday afternoon, the giddy pleasure of stomping down the street with squashed Pepsi cans attached to your feet, the almost comical machismo of an adolescent boy trying desperately to convince himself and his best friend that they aren’t too ugly to attract girls.

Yet judging by his poems--the narrator is often a melancholy 5-year-old--Soto spent the first several decades of his life focused not what on what he was living through but what he had lived through. “For me mentally--even in my adult years, until I was about 35--I didn’t even know I was awake,� Soto says. “I thought everything mattered back then.�

His job was to figure out what it all meant--and to find a little slice of something for himself in the process. Consequently, Soto has been searching for beauty all his life. “I think even in sadness there’s a certain beauty and satisfaction,� Soto says. “It’s bittersweet almost.�

The theme occurs repeatedly in his work. In the poem “Waterwheel,� the 5-year-old subject is waiting in the rain for a friend who has promised to give him a tiny clamshell that holds a miniature Chinese garden. He waits and waits (“Sure, my hair was wet / And I was beginning to shiver�), but his friend never materializes.

In “Learning My Lesson�:

When I was five I found

Beauty--a girl on a box

Of soap--while fooling in

An alley with my brother

Who was all gum and

Better looks.

In “There�:

I’m looking again

For a brother, his voice over my

Shoulder, behind a shed or the blue caravan of blushes--

Looking for the rain that ends beautifully

In the trees.

Soto found his voice while in college. He attended Fresno City College before transferring to Fresno State College (now Cal State Fresno) in 1972, where he took a class with Phillip Levine and discovered poetry--a beat anthology, featuring works by Edward Field, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. It was, he says, “the first time I realized you could have a poem about an audacious experience. I remember thinking, ‘Gosh . . . that’s racy. I like that.’ �

His style was decidedly unbeat. “Since I was not a well-educated young person, I was scared of making grammatical mistakes,� Soto says. “The actual act of writing poetry was scary because everyone around me was doing other things--going off, getting jobs, mowing lawns, getting in fights, getting drunk. Who among us was writing poetry? No one.�

Levine played a key role in Soto’s early development. These were the days of the so-called Fresno school of poets--in addition to Levine, a number of other respected poets taught at Fresno State, including Peter Everwine, Robert Mezey and Charles Hanzlicek; Soto’s classmates included Leonard Adame, Ernesto Trejo, Jon Veinberg and Omar Salinas. Although Soto studied with Levine for just two semesters, they were pivotal ones. Levine taught him how to analyze and critique a poem. But, perhaps more important, Levine sent Soto to a writers workshop in Wisconsin. It was the first time the 19-year old had been outside Fresno.

“I came back from there, man, and I had these incredible poems inside me,� Soto says. “That summer, I really turned the juice on. I had a great spiritual kind of literary awakening. I wrote most all of my first book that summer.�

That first book is “The Elements of San Joaquin,� a gritty, angry collection of poems about the laborers and farm workers of the rich, agricultural region that was published in 1977 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

“I felt like I was the only person alive in Fresno. Everybody else was like molecules; they were just wandering around by themselves. I would look around and go, ‘Whoa . . . whoa . . . whoa. Look at this; write about that; write about this; write about that.’ The sentence tumbles out rapid-fire in a single breath. “The anger just came out in this flood,� Soto says. “And once it came out, that was it.�

It was followed by “The Tale of Sunlight� (1978), “Where Sparrows Work Hard� (1981), “Black Hair� (1985), “Who Will Know Us?� (1990), “A Fire in My Hands� (1991), “Home Course in Religion� (1991), “Neighborhood Odes� (1992), and the many children’s books. The awards (two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and two prizes from Poetry magazine, to name a few) were almost as abundant.

Somewhere in the middle of all that productivity was perhaps the darkest period in Soto’s adult life: a six-year stretch beginning in his late 20s when he could barely function. By then he had moved to Berkeley and was teaching at the university. “I was trying to do ‘Black Hair’ and write out of this depression,� Soto says. “I was trying to write poems of joy, connected with family, in spite of all the things that were inside--these incredibly dark clouds. “Plus, ‘Living Up the Street’ (a book of childhood recollections) was started, and it was really heavy to write. I’d wake up exhausted and I’d look at the page, and then I would try to do this thing. And it would come out, but very slowly. It would be like running up the hill with weights.�

Soto declines to even speculate about the source of his depression, saying, “I think it was some chemical imbalance.� As for what brought him out of it, he says he doesn’t know that, either. All he knows is that once “Living Up the Street� was finished, “it all got better.�

*

Soto didn’t plan on writing children’s books. But after he published “Living Up the Street� in 1985, the letters from kids started pouring in. And they still come, by the boxful. “Being a contemporary poet,� Soto says, “you get maybe five letters from fans, saying, ‘Hey, you’re really good.’ And those are really appreciated. But when you get hundreds, somethin’ else is happening.�

With that, Soto disappears for a few minutes and returns with a knee-high box stuffed with letters. They are generally a couple of paragraphs long. Some are the inspiration of a teacher who’s apparently devised a clever alternative to the book report. There’s a line or two of introduction (mostly about how they’ve done the same kinds of things he has written about), then a sentence about whichever part of the book they most enjoyed reading. Then, inevitably, comes the plea: Please, Mr. Soto. Please, please, please, Mr. Soto, write me back. It doesn’t have to be soon. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Just let me know that you’re really there. Your friend always.

Unlike his early years, Soto now loves school. Last fall, he visited about 12 of them--grade schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges. The visits multiplied, he says, because once the letters started coming in, he realized he had to go out and meet his readers.

But it’s more than just that. “I wanted to instill, especially in Mexican-American youth, that there are writers, people who are doing things,� he says. “What’s particularly damaging for young kids--I remember some kids telling me, ‘Man, it’s not cool to be Mexican.’ Gosh darn it, I hate that feeling: ‘Man I don’t want to be Mexican; we don’t got nothin.’ �

“The thing is, with blacks you’ve got Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Oprah, Bill Cosby--you have names, stars out there. Incredible, successful people--across the board, from politicians to literature to arts and sports. Mexican-Americans have some very talented people, but we don’t have that kind of exposure. I think the time might come. I’m not sure when, though.�

In the meantime, he keeps meeting and greeting. A trip to the Imperial Valley campus of San Diego State University, where close to 500 people showed up, is fairly typical. ‘It was an unbelievable experience--the love and attention they gave me,� Soto says. “I gave a poetry reading and a prose reading that were highly goofy, highly charged. They had never seen anyone do anything like this before. It overwhelmed them. They would literally touch me.

“I would go through a hall and people were just touching me because there was that connection of love going on. It’s wild. The only thing I can do is respond by writing these new books. I’m thinking, if we can have this continuity of a set of books for them to read, it would be like . . .�

It would be like nothing he ever experienced as a child. Before writing “Baseball in April,� Soto says he didn’t know children’s literature even existed.

“I had no idea,� he says. “I wrote my first one and thought, ‘I’ll publish it and see what happens.’ The book, a collection of short stories, was rejected by as many as a dozen publishers. “I kept looking at the writing and thinking, ‘The writing’s pretty good. Somethin’s wrong here,’ � says Soto.

Finally, Diane D’Andradne, senior editor of the children’s book division at Harcourt Brace, picked it up. “Baseball� was a home run--garnering overwhelmingly positive reviews and winning a number of awards. And it’s still one of Harcourt’s most consistent sellers.

The key, says D’Andradne, is that Soto is honest and true to the childhood experience. “I think that’s one of the reasons he’s very popular,� she says. “At the same time, when he talks about this stuff, he doesn’t give messages. These things are a part of the world that the child is walking through. But Gary’s not didactic.�

“I deal with kids all the time,� she adds, “and as an editor I feel there’s no sense lying to them. A lot of time we pretend to our children that life is peachy-keen. And we do not want to hear that they have encountered difficulties.� In Soto’s stories, the adults are often neither Ozzie nor Harriet. The dad might be a house painter, the uncle could sport a tattoo, or maybe mom has a temper. Politically correct is not a notion that concerns Soto.

And he has, in fact, received some criticism for a picture book published last year, “Chato’s Kitchen.� Its main character is a cat from East L.A. whose best friend, Novio Boy, bears all the trappings of a gang member. Some parents have been less than thrilled that one of the few picture books about and for Mexican Americans seems to show gang life in a positive light. “The sad thing is there’s only me doing this,� Soto says. “If this was just one among 20 Mexican American picture books published every year, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.�

But it seems the discussion will continue. Soto sold a sequel to “Chato’s Kitchen� and his next young-adult novel, “Buried Onions,� focuses on gangs, this time in Fresno. The title refers to a layer of onions buried underneath Fresno that is making everyone there cry.

“Do we need another gang representation?� Soto asks, anticipating the question. “I would say we need a literate one.� Not all of Soto’s children’s books are controversial. Some critics complain that his characters are on the saccharine side. Even he describes a book he’s now working on as merely “cute.� For Soto, sometimes entertainment is enough.

“There’s some children’s literature that can be enjoyable to read maybe once or twice, but it’s not by any means an attempt to be lasting,� he says.

The truth is, writing a classic isn’t part of Soto’s mission; building a library by and for Mexican Americans is, and to that library he wants to add plays. His first stage effort, “Novio Boy,� has been performed a number of times.

Then there are the two short films he wrote and directed. The award-winning “The Pool Party� was shot in 11 days, and he hopes it’ll be the sort of film that schools show to kids year after year. “I want it to get where the kids say, ‘Oh man, “Pool Party� again? I hate this guy.’ Which is great, you know? You need that kind of reaction. It’s beautiful to have something to react against instead of living in a vacuum--no one’s responding; nothing’s happening.

“I think the idea of trying--’Hey, man, let’s go; everybody’s gotta dance, we gotta move, move’--I’m making the kids, you know, dance. I’m trying to make them appreciate themselves and appreciate literature and appreciate the possibilities of establishing themselves in this country. Of belonging.�

*

You might think that after growing up surrounded by so much ugliness, Soto would relish his comfortable life here in the Berkeley Hills. For the past 16 years, he has lived here, written here, taught here, raised a child here. But Berkeley is not his home, nor will it ever be. Ask him about Fresno and the stories pour forth. His whole countenance lightens; his lithe body almost instantly energized as he leans into his words. He’s so desperate to express his attachment that he grabs the nearest napkin to draw a map of his old haunts--sketching a line from one landmark to the next, rattling off anecdote after anecdote attached to each spot along the way. The mention of Berkeley elicits a series of deep sighs.

“Livin’ in this place,� he says, standing alone in his front yard, surrounded by quiet beauty, “is like livin’ in a cemetery.�

The trouble is, here in this beautiful house with its extraordinary view, there is no connection to family, no sense of community. “I think a lot of writers value place, they value where they grew up,� he says. “I wanted to try to build on these feelings that were inside me about losing this place. I used to have dreams where I was rebuilding the house that was torn down. It was obviously a deep symbol. I’m trying to rebuid this area, this place.�

Soto maintains several ties to Fresno--he’s a member of the Fresno Poets Society and the Chicano cultural group Arte Americas--but stays in Berkeley while his daughter, Mariko, 17, attends college. As soon as she is ready to venture out on her own, Soto says, he and his wife will return to his beloved Fresno. But for now he remains. “I’m doin’ my time,� he says, shaking his head.

As for Berkeley itself, he’s done his time. This semester was his last as professor of English and ethnic studies. He resigned last year--disgusted, he says, by the university’s lack of commitment to minority faculty. “There’s all this clamor now to do away with affirmative action,� he says, “and I’m not really sure it ever worked for our faculty. I think it worked through the status of Mexican-American students in the University of California system. But recruiting faculty is a big, fat failure.�

Another reason for his departure was his own status within the English department. After more than a decade of teaching, he still had not advanced beyond the associate level and didn’t see it happening. Yet as his displeasure with teaching was escalating, so was his success in children’s publishing. When he reached the point where he no longer needed his teacher’s salary, he reduced his load to part-time. Before long, he quit altogether. He might have stayed, Soto says, if he had felt he was having the sort of impact on his college students that he was having with young Mexican American readers.

When he visits a junior high or high school, Soto says, there are banners all over saying, ‘Welcome Gary Soto!’ The kids “just go wild,� he says. “Where in the world am I going to discover that at Cal Berkeley? It doesn’t happen. “I’ve gotta tell you,� he adds defiantly, as if willing it to be so, “I’m gonna have more of an effect on Mexican American youth in this state than anyone else. You can’t imagine the kind of influence I’m going to have.�

Momentary grandstanding aside, he doesn’t consider himself a leader. “I’m a cheerleader--a cheerleader for literature. We need young people, in age and in spirit, to pick up books. Start getting this machinery built. Some people say it’s foolish to be on this mission because the task is so large--it involves millions of people. But that’s OK, you know? I’ve got a lot of years here, I think.

“We’ll just hit ‘em, man--one school after another. We’ll just get ‘em all.�