Cañón, James (1968- ) Colombian-American novelist and short-story writer. Third son of José Cañón and Blanca Vergara, he was born on June 19, 1968 in Ibagué. Cañón’s father was from a native Indian/peasant extraction in rural Colombia, an almost illiterate man who only attended two years of elementary school. However, he was a successful businessman. His mother was from working-class stock and never finished high school. She was his father’s secretary before they fell in love and moved in together. His father continuously traveled; he grew up mostly in the company of his mother and his paternal grandmother, both of whom had a major influence on his early life and, later, on his writing. He moved to Bogotá in 1987 to go to college and graduated with honors in 1990 with a B.A. in advertising. After working for four years as a copywriter, he decided to move to New York City in 1994 to work and to study English for a year, but he decided to stay. With neither English nor a resident card, his first job was cleaning the bathrooms and floors of a fast-food court in Manhattan. He moved from school to school and from job to job until the Spanish department of an advertising agency hired him in 1996. The following year, he decided to take an expository writing class at N.Y.U. Every week he was asked to write three to five pages on any subject; he wrote short stories. Even though they showed glaring mistakes, his teacher loved them for his narrative voice and a style all his own. By the end of the quarter, he had already made up his mind: he wanted to be a writer. He quit advertising and started making a living as a part-time waiter, which allowed him time to write. He’s been writing ever since.

His first short stories were autobiographical to some extent; two were published in anthologies of gay Latinos: “The Two Miracles of The Gringos’ Virgin” in Bésame Mucho ( NY: Painted Leaf Press, 1999), and “My Lessons with Felipe” in Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999). In 1999, he enrolled in the graduate program on creative writing at Columbia University, where he started working on his first novel, Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), which has been translated into seven languages and published in more than twenty countries. It was originally inspired on an article he had read in a Colombian newspaper about a mountain village where Communist guerrillas had taken most of the men away. “What happens to the women who are left behind?” he thought. “They would be virtual widows, made to fend for themselves for the first time in their lives.” Although he knew they could survive without men, what he wondered was how they would go about it, and how this process would transform them as individuals and as a society. His novel is his answer to that question. “Writing my first novel in my second language was not a choice,” he said. “I conceived the idea originally in Spanish., wrote a few pages, but it didn’t feel right. Then I wrote a chapter in English and, though it was clumsily worded, I felt good about it. I realized that English offered me an original, unbiased perspective on the Colombian conflict.”

Articulate, funny, imaginative, sarcastic, sweet, and direct, Mr. Cañón’s sweeping novel grabs you by the throat on a rollercoaster of pyrotechnic verve and panache, where homosexuals and heterosexuals, pagans and believers concoct a better society where everyone is respected as equals. If Che spoke of the “new man,” James leads you by the hand to a new Utopia where women teach men how to become compassionate human beings.

Tales . . . is currently nominated to the 2008 Lamda Literary Award, as well as to the 2008 Edmund White Debut Fiction Award.

He lives in New York City where he is working on his second novel. “All I can tell you is that it will be about religion, tolerance, and displacement,” he says. “It will have a strong heroine who makes a perilous and life-changing journey. It will be poignant, funny, subversive, and unlike anything you’ve ever read before.”

―Miguel Falquez-Certain

Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States, vol. 1, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson (Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood Press, 2009).

FURTHER READING
Kirsch, Jonathan, “The Feminine Mystique,” The Washington Post, February 18, 2007
“Books Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, March 19, 2007.

For further information, visit www.jamescanon.com