On Wednesday evening, Notre Dame's Institute of Latino Studies (ILS), in partnership with the St. Joseph County Public Library and Library of America, hosted poet and debut novelist Maria Kelson to speak on her 2024 novel, titled “Not the Killing Kind.”
Kelson’s novel follows single mother and teacher Boots Marez as she tries to prove her adopted son Jaral’s innocence following his arrest for the murder of one of her former undocumented students. Set in northern California, the story places undocumented communities in the limelight, highlighting several of their hardships.
Kelson served as a fellow of the Center for Women’s Intercultural Leadership at Saint Mary’s College from 2003 to 2005. Afterwards, she worked as an associate professor of English at SMC until 2006.
“I loved teaching at a women’s college. It was an experience that I haven't had before or since. I loved emphasizing women's success and getting to know young women writers through my classes,” Kelson said.
She has published two collections of poetry, “How Long She’ll Last in this World” in 2006 and “Flexible Bones” in 2010. Her poetry was also featured in an anthology of Latino poetry compiled by the Library of America in 2024.
In addition to her presentation, which consisted of a reading of several of her works followed by a Q&A, Kelson visited two Notre Dame classes and took part in a lunch colloquium with graduate students pursuing creative writing.
On Thursday, Kelson will be interviewed for the second time as part of the Letras Latinas Oral History Project. Her first interview was conducted in April of 2007. Afterwards, Kelson will spend the afternoon at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art as the inaugural artist for a new initiative between the museum and the ILS.
Professor of the practice and director of Letras Latinas Francisco Aragón said the programming and her visit to the museum are a “direct response” to the University's “Notre Dame 2033: A Strategic Framework,” released on Aug. 30, 2023.
“We're really trying to do more programming that involves, in one way or another, the community. Whether it's Notre Dame going into the community to do an event, or whether it's having an activity on campus that's specifically tailored for members of the community. That's the main message I'm trying to get across for this event, and that’s the reason we’re not doing it on campus,” Aragón said.
Aragon said he hopes for this partnership with the county library to become an annual event in the spring with other Latino writers and authors.
The initiative with the Raclin Murphy Museum will be a three-year long process resulting in a published collection of works that will focus on the visiting writers' inspiration from the museum’s permanent collection.
“Any visiting writer we bring, we try to send them to the museum to spend time and fill the notebooks with the goal of them eventually producing creative written works that are responding to the art,” Aragón said. “In September, we're going to be bringing another series of poets who will be doing the same, but on a Saturday, will actually teach a workshop at the museum exclusively for community members, not students, but people in the community.”
The moderator for Kelson’s Q&A and her interviewer for the Letras Latinas Oral History Project is first-year PhD student Paulina Hernandez Trejo, a recipient of the the Joseph Gaia Distinguished Fellowship in Latino Studies. She prepared for the role by reading all of Kelson’s works within the past few months and watching her original oral history interview.
“As I read her works, I noted how Maria grew as a writer, changing and adopting her craft as she saw fit through the stages in her life,” Trejo said. “Seeing her work … it's not evolved in the sense where it's like, ‘Oh, and now it's better.’ It's like, she's always been her. She's always been great. Seeing how someone can grow like that, I hope I can also be someone like that.”
“Not the Killing Kind” took Kelson 12 years to write and she created eight drafts of the novel before publishing. Kelson said she took her time with her third publication, as she used it to teach herself how to write.
“Sometimes I focused on, ‘Let me make my sentences tighter, not so rambling.’ Sometimes I focused on towards the end, ‘Let me look at the end of my chapters and see if they inspire someone to turn the page.’ So I had to focus on different aspects of the book in each of those drafts,” Kelson said.
She shared that much of the inspiration of her work comes from the experiences she’s had throughout her life, as well as from reading other Latino literature and her imagination. A combination of all of these perspectives led her to write her novel with characters and a storyline she, herself, would want to read.
“There are some models for Latinas in mystery and thriller fiction, but not many. So in particular, I wanted to see a Latina professional who wasn't a law enforcement professional … I wanted to write a different subgenre which has a main character who has a normal job, an ordinary job, but finds themselves in extraordinary circumstances,” Kelson said. “I wanted it to be a Latina professional, because I felt like that was an underrepresented character type in the genre, and that's important to me as a Latina woman.”
Kelson mentioned how the purpose of her work is to humanize marginalized groups, which drives her to continue writing from her Latina and Chicana perspectives.
“I hope to give readers an opportunity to experience those things as a human would experience them rather than a news item,” Kelson said. “Both the poem El Villain and the book have these immigration raids in them, and that sort of cultural artifact of our time, the image of the United States immigration raid, is such a distinct and, to me, offensive form of state violence because they take place, often, in a setting where the targets are doing things that would be considered positive.”
