Introduction by Lise Olsen
El Paso author Daniel Chacón likes to weave stories and dream up characters in the middle of ordinary episodes of life. The titular character of his new short story collection, The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions, came to him as he was walking his dog in Pecos, the windblown West Texas town where his father once lived. “It was really weird because there’s a lot of meth heads and there’s a lot of boarded-up windows,” he told the Texas Observer. He remembers spotting an ad for a manager at a fast food restaurant, one of the town’s best-paying jobs. The story took off when he thought: What would have happened If I had come up here after graduation?
Chacón is originally from Fresno and got a master’s degree in creative writing in Eugene, Oregon, but for decades El Paso and the border has been his home. A longtime professor, Chacón currently serves as chairman of the University of Texas at El Paso’s creative writing program, which bills itself as the nation’s only fully bilingual program, and he hosts a Sunday public radio program on KTEP called “Words on a Wire.”
