Writing at the Edges: Antonio Farias on Violence, Tenderness, and Truth

Antonio Farias and his debut novel, In The Company of Wolves

Antonio Farias brings an extraordinary range of experiences to his debut novel. An Ecuadorian American Army veteran (Airborne Infantry), he holds an MA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA from UC Riverside. Currently serving as Vice Chancellor for Access and Campus Engagement at CU Denver, Farias champions making education work for all. His work has appeared in Sudden Fiction Latino, Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul, Latino Boom, Urban Latino Magazine, Tilde, and Bilingual Review. When not long-distance running, adventure motorcycling, and fly fishing, he’s working on his next novel, which explores intergenerational stories of family, silence, and resilience.

I sat down with Antonio to discuss his debut novel In the Company of Wolves, which takes readers deep into the New Mexico borderlands, where young Jaime Cieza navigates family secrets, generational trauma, and the haunting presence of wolves—a story about what we inherit, what we survive, and how we find our way home.

Frederick Luis Aldama: You're an urban-shaped Latino, yet you chose to set your novel in rural New Mexico. That's quite a shift.

Antonio Farias: It is and it isn't. I grew up in Ecuador—I'm an immigrant. My earliest memories are of being on the finca by the waterfront, going with my father in the saddle to get the cows, trying to get on top of a mule and surviving. The rural, the ocean, the water—that imprinted me.

Then we moved to New York, which became home. But every time I've had the chance to leave the urban, that's where I find solace and peace.

Deserts aren't dead—they're alive. If you're patient and silent, things appear, because you're the intruder.

FLA: You recreate the plains, the topography, the smells and sounds of New Mexico so vividly. Have you spent a lot of time there?

AF: No, I haven't. But I've been deeply influenced by Mexican-American and Chicano writers from the Southwest. This book is, in many ways, a love letter to the Southwest—especially Colorado and New Mexico. It's also a homage to Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, which was seminal for me. The main character's name was Antonio, and I thought, "Okay, there's an Antonio in the world." That mattered.

For me, deserts aren't dead—they're alive. If you're patient and silent, things appear, because you're the intruder. Wolves, horses, scorpions—things you'll never see driving on the interstate. That's why I ride my motorcycle: it slows me down. Four hours in the woods with no headphones makes you realize we don't need to keep repeating the same daily grind.

FLA: Women feature prominently in Jaime's life—strong women.

AF: The mother and grandmother are compilations of the strong women I've experienced in my life. The grandmother embodies generational wisdom—not from college education, but from intuitive, passed-down knowledge: cures, recipes, sayings I still remember.

These aren't autobiographical characters, but they're compilations of different human beings whose voices live in me. Even though I haven't been writing straight for 30 years, I've been collecting voices and experiences.

On Masculinity and War

FLA: You present a range of masculinities—the absent father, the uncle. Tell us about these father figures and how Jaime navigates them.

AF: Research shows it's hard for men to make friends, especially later in life. Even young boys—we're locked into social media. We don't hang out, don't just talk. And we have terrible models of masculinity.

 We don't often allow men to cry, to hug, to say 'I love you' without some qualifier.

As a former Title IX officer, I saw that sexual violence on campuses was almost always perpetrated by men. That made me think deeply about how we socialize boys, the silence around vulnerability. We don't often allow men to cry, to hug, to say "I love you" without some qualifier.

In the novel, there's the absent father, yes, but also the uncle who steps in—not perfectly, but with his own kind of care. These fragments become the scaffolding for how Jaime learns to be a man. And it's not linear. It's messy, layered, full of contradiction—just like life.

FLA: There's tenderness there too. The uncle is rough around the edges, but there's something soft.

AF: Exactly. That's real. A lot of men I grew up around didn't have the words, but they had the gestures. A hand on the shoulder. Taking you fishing. Fixing something with you. They passed on love in ways that weren't verbal. That's why the novel lingers in the silences, in the spaces between words.

I wanted to push back against the flat stereotypes of Latino men. Too often we're cast as either hyper-macho or absent. But there's a spectrum of masculinities—complicated, vulnerable, tender, wounded, and also capable of deep love.

The Weight of War

FLA: How would you characterize the absent papá and the tío Julio? What choices is Jaime making among these models?

AF: It's about broken families. War breaks nations, but it also breaks humans. We thank people for their service, but we don't see the cost—especially to the families left behind. Once we thank them, we put them away in a closet, or wrap them in a flag and sing songs. We don't talk about the trauma of war.

Latinos have served in every war since before we were a nation, and yet we're erased from the record.

Both the papi and tío served in Vietnam. Both were broken. One survived but came back shattered. The other didn't return. That's generational—the abuelo served, the bis-abuelo served. Latinos have served in every war since before we were a nation, and yet we're erased from the record.

This novel is a way of putting us back into the story, but also asking: how do you pick up the pieces? The absent father is a conversation Jaime longs to have but never can. The uncle becomes the bridge—he looks like the father, and he explains death.

Then there's Kiko, the older brother, who immediately follows the generational call to duty into the Marines because that's what he thinks manhood is. Jaime, the younger one, isn't swept up in that. His lessons come from nature, from animals. The wild teaches him in ways words cannot.

The Company of Wolves

FLA: Why wolves? Why do they matter, literally and metaphorically?

AF: Wolves are fascinating, especially when we talk about masculinity. The common metaphor is "alpha wolf," "alpha male." But that's a myth. Wolves are not solitary creatures. A lone wolf will be dead within weeks. They survive only in packs.

The so-called alpha wolf isn't the loud, aggressive one. It's the quiet one, the steady presence.

The so-called alpha wolf isn't the loud, aggressive one. It's the quiet one, the steady presence. The alpha doesn't bark or growl—it leads through calm gravitas. When wolves move through snow, it's the elderly wolves who break the trail. They set the pace. The strongest are in the back, watching over the group.

Wolves dismantle this idea of dominance as leadership. They show us cooperation. They've also been demonized in the Southwest ever since settlers brought cattle and sheep. Wolves were just hunting as they always had, but ranchers saw them as threats to commerce and eradicated them. That's the larger metaphor: the clash between the old and the new, the wild and the industrial.

Writing Violence

FLA: Violence is everywhere in your novel. How do you write violence in ways that don't sentimentalize or repulse but instead draw us into its shades?

AF: For me, the best way is tangentially. Never directly. You approach it, then veer away. There's a scene where a German pilot lands, trekking through. The grandfather had served in the Navy during the war. That interaction isn't described blow by blow. It's more about how the family processes it—the silence, the gestures, the lingering presence of violence without having to name it.

Violence leaves traces. It's in the way someone doesn't answer a question. It's in the quiet of the dinner table.

I don't put violence in the center. I let it come in at the edges, through memory, through consequence. Violence leaves traces. It's in the way someone doesn't answer a question. It's in the way a door is shut too quickly, or in the quiet of the dinner table. That's how trauma shows itself.

Literature, for me, is the only way I've been able to make sense of it. To find some language—sometimes broken, sometimes incomplete—but still a way of saying: this happened.

The Power of Distance

FLA: The period feels specific—early to mid-'70s—though you don't spell it out.

AF: Exactly. You can tell the Vietnam War is just ending. The struggle for civil rights—the Black and Brown movements—are there, but on the periphery. Setting the book in the '70s gave me distance. I know what it's like to be a kid in that time. I can't write Gen Alpha or even Gen Z—I'd need a team of young fact-checkers.

By setting it in the '70s, I could create an authentic world and still let the bigger issues—war, civil rights, erasure—be present as shadows. The desert becomes my shield. I talk about things by not talking about them. By omission, the reader feels the weight of war, of struggle.

That's what the civil rights movements were about: solidarity across difference. Not just Dr. King, not just a "Black movement." It was Black, Brown, Jewish, White, poor. I didn't want to preach in a YA book. I wanted to leave breadcrumbs so young readers would get curious and seek out what I didn't say.

The Writing Life

FLA: Can you share how writing this novel tested your limits—the daily writing, balancing job, family, life?

AF: The story started ten years ago. I set it aside, worked on another novel. Then the pandemic hit. Like many of us, I suddenly had time. I could reset my schedule. I even baked bread. And I came back to this story.

Every time I sit down to write, the voice is there: Who do you think you are? And every time, I have to answer it.

But the why has always terrified me. No one in my family was a writer. First-gen kid to college. To say, "I'm going to be a writer"—how dare you? Imposter syndrome, right? Who do you think you are? There's already a Junot Díaz, already a Latino writer. The market says there can only be one.

Every time I sit down to write, the voice is there: Who do you think you are? And every time, I have to answer it. The pandemic gave me a chance to answer differently. To say, no, I'm not giving up on this again.

Writing every day wasn't easy. I still had a day job, family, obligations. But I carved out hours—early mornings, late nights. Little by little, the novel came into being.

FLA: Were you able to leave in the middle of a scene and come back weeks later?

AF: For me, once a character comes to me, it's almost like a ghost—they're there. I can pick up anytime. Ten years later, I went back and read the story, and Jaime was still there.

I also followed Hemingway's advice: leave a scene midway. Leave it at the inflection point. Sometimes I wanted to keep going, but I'd already hit my page count, and I had to get to work. The characters never failed me. They wait. It's fiction, not magic, but once they solidify in my head, they just live there patiently.

Literature as Salvation

FLA: You mentioned rage and coming out of the army angry. How did you know literature was the way through?

AF: I didn't know. I stumbled into it. At Berkeley, my first class was Greek texts. We opened The Odyssey, and the first word was rage. That hit me like a lightning bolt. It named what I was feeling.

Literature saved me. If this book can do even a fraction of that for a young reader—slow them down, make them feel seen, give them courage—then that's the reason.

Literature saved me. Coming out of the army angry, broken, I found a home in words. And if this book can do even a fraction of that for a young reader—slow them down, make them feel seen, give them courage—then that's the reason. That's the why.

At some point, you stop asking "who am I to write this?" and instead you say, "who am I not to?"

FLA: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

AF: Write. And then write again. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait for the perfect moment. The characters will be patient with you, but you have to show up.

Don't fear failure as much as you fear success. Because if you succeed, you'll have to keep going. But that's the joy too.

Don't fear failure as much as you fear success. Because if you succeed, you'll have to keep going. But that's the joy too. You get to keep going. Most importantly, know your why. Why are you writing? For me, it's because literature saved me. If you know your why, it'll pull you through the doubt, the rejection, the imposter syndrome.

In the Company of Wolves is available now at all major booksellers.