Many aspiring novelists will lament that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do their craft. But you won’t hear that from Antonio Farias, CU Denver’s vice chancellor for Access and Campus Engagement. By day, Farias guides efforts to create a space where everyone—any learner at any stage of their life—can reach their academic and professional goals at CU Denver. It’s a big job, but he finds time each morning, before daybreak, for a writing practice, which is one way he fuels his creativity and gains inspiration for the work ahead.
Farias has always been a voracious reader and began taking creative writing courses when he attended community college. As his academic career grew, including bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of California, Berkeley, and a career in higher education leadership, Farias continued to write in his spare time. He even obtained a Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Riverside, in the midst of his professional career. In many ways, the two endeavors seemed interconnected and complementary.
One of the class exercises in his Master of Fine Arts program forced him to write in first person, something he wasn’t keen to do. But the assignment developed a character that he couldn’t let go of and led to a novel he had to write. That debut novel, In the Company of Wolves, will be released on Tuesday, Sept. 9, by Arte Público. The young adult novel follows Jaime, a preteen who must move from New York City to New Mexico and is grappling with the impact of the Vietnam War and his own identity as he grows up. On the eve of publication, we sat down to talk to Farias about how the story developed, where he drew inspiration, and what section he can’t stop thinking about.
So, you wrote a book in your spare time! How did that happen?
It has been, literally, decades in the making, but not just this particular book. Writing, for me, has been something that I have always had quite a passion for. When I was in the Army, I would write because we were bored as hell and we were out in the field. I would write little, short stories or vignettes. They were goofy and they were typical guy humor type stuff, but it kept morale up.
You continued to write short stories, even signing on for a second graduate degree, focused on creative writing. It was during one of your classes that the idea for this book developed. Then what happened?
The book came out of an exercise where one of the faculty challenged me, as an experiment in class, to write a story in first person. I hated first-person, but I tried it because I respected these faculty. And I actually liked it, and the character came to life, and so the main character was born 10 years ago.
And then I put it aside. Life happened, growing up, trying to raise a child. And then [the pandemic] hit and everyone went home, and lives changed, and we were trying to figure it out. And I got into a routine of writing and I finished the draft during [that time while I was still] in Florida. And then I polished it, submitted it, and it got picked up.
Give us the details.
It’s coming out on Sept. 9. Arte Público is a press that I’ve always respected because they were one of the originals. Thirty years ago, when I was in Berkeley doing literature and ethnic studies, no one was publishing Latino writers. Now, Latino writers are everywhere. They’re popular and they’re selling. Then, Arte Público was the mothership. So, in many ways, it is an honor to go through them because of their lineage. It’s kind of cool.
Is it strange to transition from writing—which is so private—to doing publicity for the book?
Writing is no problem. I like it. I enjoy it. It’s something that I do. I do it every morning. But to actually go out there—even having this conversation—I feel weird. I don’t like the “I.” Part of why I don’t like the “I” thing is culturally I did not grow up in the “I” thing. In my family, it was always “we.” It was always “you and your brothers.” We’re very communal and never lost our sense of a debt owed to the generations that came before us.
The Army? The same thing. There was no “I.” We were a team. Everything happened because of “we.” The work I do here is never about Antonio’s plan, it is always about our plan, right? I believe in the collective inspiration, but writing is a very singular, individual thing. And that’s where I’m struggling to get out of the “we” and into the “I” that is required to be a public author.
Tell us about the book.
I wrote it as a coming-of-age story. It’s set in the ’70s because I didn’t want to set it in contemporary times and partly because that’s the world that I grew up in—the ’70s in New York City. I purposedly wrote a story about a boy because, right now, we’re not writing a lot about boys coming into healthy manhood. The book is about war and sense of duty, even as it tears apart families. The book is also about loss and finding hope in something larger than oneself.
The story starts on the East Coast, but is mainly set in the West, in New Mexico. Are the places central to the plot?
This book could be read as a love story to New Mexico and to the culture of this land. Places, in many ways, can be characters—and they take center stage.
Who inspired you as a reader?
I grew up reading John le Carré. I was a huge John le Carré fan. I loved spy thrillers as a kid and my library didn’t have any because we had a broken-down library. I would take the train from the Bronx all the way down to Manhattan and go into—back then it was B. Dalton—I would go there and I’d go way back in the spy thriller area. I didn’t have enough money to buy the book, and the library didn’t have it, so I would just be there all day and just read voraciously these John le Carré novels.
And then I got introduced to the boom generation of Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. All of these writers wrote grand epics of people who were absent in my history books, my people. And then, as I went to college, I was exposed to [William] Faulkner and to Toni Morrison. All of these writers who are writing these epics about the forgotten people of the Americas, and yet my aspiration was if I could write one small, tiny book that a couple of people read that has some emotional resonance that could outlive me, and inspire others to write their stories, I would call it a win.
That makes me think about your work at CU Denver and about higher education, in general. It’s often about connections.
One person at a time. That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s why I work in higher education because I do believe all of us are educators because we can impact not just the students but each other. All it takes to change a culture is every single person doing just one small thing and caring about someone else.
Do you have a favorite moment in the book?
The scene that I think resonates most with me that I’m still struggling to understand what it means to me is the scene where Jaime initially meets his uncle. It is this young boy who’s lost a father, whose older brother is not necessarily there for him at the moment. And he meets this elder that can help [him]. It’s not violent. But I’ll just let it go that there’s a knife involved and potentially scorpions.