Q & A ...

... An Interview with Richard Rodriguez : Booth Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I was an accidental writer at the start. I was in graduate school, preparing to become a teacher of English—probably at the college level—when I found myself the uneasy beneficiary of affirmative action. Ultimately, I left the university (and abandoned my teaching plans) in protest against affirmative action. And it was only then—within the loneliness of my life outside the academy—that I felt impelled to write about what education had done to and for me (how it had changed my life) and living within the illogic of “the minority student” that I turned to write an intellectual memoir. My first book, Hunger of Memory, gave birth to the idea that I was a writer.