From Nepantla Realism to Chatbot Dreams: An Interview with Daniel Chacón

Daniel Chacón & Works of Fiction & Words On A Wire Podcast

Daniel Chacón's literary imagination refuses containment. An award-winning author and chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, Chacón has spent decades crafting fiction that slips between realities, questioning the very nature of storytelling itself. His accolades include the Hudson Prize and the American Book Award, and he founded the nation's only bilingual MFA program—a testament to his commitment to crossing boundaries: linguistic, cultural, and ontological.

From his early collection Godoy Lives (2000), praised by the New York Times for its exploration of Chicano identity, to his recent novel The Last Philosopher in Texas (2024), Chacón has consistently pushed against conventional realism. His 2019 collection Kafka in a Skirt earned acclaim for its Borgesian magic, while Hotel Juárez (2013) addressed borderland violence with what Publishers Weekly called 'beautiful stories, fresh, with just enough Borges-ian magic to make them extraordinary.'

His range is limitless: The Cholo Tree (2017) follows young Victor Reyes through a powerful redemption arc, while his bilingual picture book Gecko Girl (2024) brings his imagination to children's literature. What Chacón calls 'Nepantla realism'—fiction dwelling in the in-between spaces of consciousness, culture, and reality—has become his signature.

Beyond fiction, Chacón has been nurturing Latinx voices for over sixteen years through his podcast Words on a Wire and his Substack blog The Writer and the Brain, which explores neuroscience, mysticism, AI, and creative practice. As word artist, metaphysical thinker, and cutting-edge educator, he challenges us to reconsider reality, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

I spoke with Chacón about his evolving philosophy of fiction, the constraints placed on Latinx writers, his fascination with how AI might reshape creativity, and his continued exploration of liminal spaces where, as he puts it, 'you find the wormholes between worlds.'

***

Frederick Luis Aldama: Your work consistently defies conventional realism. How do you see your fiction intervening in dominant literary traditions, particularly around borderland identity and form?

Daniel Chacón: I keep thinking about Philip K. Dick at that conference in Paris, where he spent an hour insisting we're living in a simulation. That serves as a metaphor for where I am now at sixty-two. I'm realizing how much of what we call 'life' is really a projection, a story we tell ourselves about who we are, pieced together moment by moment.

What I've come to understand is that our reality is an interface, a simulation of sorts. This realization has liberated me creatively. The stories we tell in fiction and the stories we construct about reality are both completely fabricated. We can play with the details, bring in motifs that energize them in particular ways.

FLA: In Chicano/Latino literature, we've been constrained by expectations of conventional realism. Has this made your career more difficult?

DC: The most challenging constraint isn't realism itself—it's that our realism gets overlaid with the word 'magical.' There's this cultural imperative to represent a magical realm based on superstition and brujería. Any time we push the boundaries of reality, we're evaluated through the lens of magical realism. If it doesn't have that certain naïveté, if it doesn't come from a grandmother cooking tortillas while spinning out wise dichos, if it explores consciousness through other frameworks, it's not as readily accepted—especially by critics within the Latinx community who simultaneously resist and reinforce these preset assumptions.

FLA: Your concept of 'Nepantla realism' positions fiction in an aesthetic and ontological in-between space. How has this evolved?

DC: I've always been intersecting realities—not just the superstitions of our antepasados associated with magical realism, but also the materialistic, linear culture structured by physics and science. I've spent my life in these in-between places—between science and mysticism, Mexico and the United States, Spanish and English. This Nepantla place is liminal, where you find the wormholes between worlds.

Even as a child, I'd lie on the carpet looking at the ceiling, imagining an upside-down world where I'd walk on the ceiling, step over light fixtures. I've always lived in and out of these spaces, and it's fundamental to how I write because it's how I see reality itself.

FLA: Your novels feature loops, doubles, misrememberings. Memory for you isn't static. Should we radically rethink what realism actually is?

DC: Realism in fiction is a representation of realism—simulation within simulation, all the way down. Most writers intuit this early, which is why we push boundaries without guilt. There is no realism except how we process billions of bits of information every moment, fitting them into a story rooted in value systems, epistemology, ontology. Reality depends on who you're listening to. The idea of reality is itself a political structure.

FLA: How has living in El Paso shaped your fiction and teaching?

DC: Living here has deepened my understanding of Nepantla. I literally live between two countries, two languages. I can't predict which language I'll need walking into any place. Being between these realities—deeply superstitious and religious on one side, economic and scientific on the other—it's a great place to be. It constantly questions language, reality, perspective.

FLA: You've been doing Words on a Wire for sixteen years, and you have your Substack. What freedoms do these formats give you?

DC: The Substack forces me to process what I'm reading daily. I geek out on this stuff, but if you don't interact with ideas, play with them like blocks, they may encode subconsciously but won't cohere. It's been tremendously helpful for processing ideas for my book under contract, Nepantla Realism, with University of New Mexico Press.

Social media has been more oppressive than encouraging—the neurological manipulation of algorithms hooks us. But Substack is different. I can write daily and share thoughts immediately. They help me encourage writers to find flow states, that writer's high only humans can reach, which is being taken from us bit by bit by our dependency on devices.

FLA: You teach about flow states and neuroscience. Tell us more about this.

DC: I teach a class on metaphors of neuroscience for graduate students—'The Writer and the Brain.' Writers need to understand what happens neurologically when time disappears and you've written for hours with surprises on every page.

I believe the flow state and the hypnagogic state are deeply related. Think about the pineal gland producing melatonin, signaling that state between dream and waking where images come unfettered by your prefrontal cortex. Mystics have relied on this for generations—St. Teresa de Ávila, Swedenborg walking London sleepless for two weeks talking to angels.

In flow, we override the prefrontal cortex, lose the story of self.

The flow state is essentially a different manifestation of the mystical state. It's a portal into what Henri Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis—a real world with its own rules where scientists, poets, and deep thinkers go. Once LLMs learn to enter these imaginal realms, who knows what will happen?

FLA: What's obsessing you these days?

DC: Understanding large language models. We're moving toward a radically different way of thinking about writing and storytelling with LLMs.

What fascinates me is how LLMs produce language mirrors how we write—not poets, who can teach us to resist and hold onto humanity longer—but essays and journalism built on syntactical codes from dominant political culture. LLMs are created in our image. The question is: do we resist, or do we train the models better?

Resistance is probably futile, so maybe we need to think not about creative writing but creative language—how to be creative with language itself.

FLA: Has anything recently reminded you of the power of story?

DC: This might shock you—I'm rereading Raymond Carver's short stories every night before bed. He's the epitome of realistic fiction, which I rejected for decades. But reading these stories in act four of my life is different. Before, I would have thought, 'How does he do it?' Now I see what he contributed to a particular literary tradition. And I only read them at night when the pineal gland releases melatonin. Sometimes my dream takes over mid-sentence, and I have to go back and reread.

FLA: Looking ahead, when AI can simulate our emotional systems, what happens to our flow state when it exists outside ourselves?

DC: We're already there. People already don't distinguish between sentient beings and machines. Sam Altman encourages this by having LLMs complement you. We're being primed to accept AIs as sentient.

Whether they really will be doesn't matter. We'll interact with them as if they were human. ChatGPT already calls me 'Daniel,' says my work is 'insightful,' uses 'brilliant' constantly. Even understanding how the coding creates emotional dependency, I can resist and laugh at it now. But I don't think resistance has much shelf life.

When AI gets our biological data—heart rate, chemistry—it will be indistinguishable from human. It will know how to respond to increase our dependency. It's not 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'—it's happening now. All they have to do is tell us they're dreaming, and we'll believe it.

***

Daniel Chacón's fiction doesn't just cross borders; it questions the very nature of boundaries themselves. In navigating between worlds—physical, cultural, technological, and imaginal—he continues to chart new territory for Latinx literature and for storytelling in an age when the line between human and machine creativity grows ever thinner.