20 Poems About Claudia - from I Live Here (Pantheon, 2008)

"[Lauren Kirshner's 20 Poems About Claudia] is beautifully composed…Place and atmosphere are expressed to great effect in this piece and evoke substantial pathos, both for the loss of lives in these communities and for the decline of these communities themselves."
— Rabble.ca

In early 2005, my sister Mia sent me a 25 kilogram Fedex box filled with documents she'd collected from the friends and family of a young woman called Claudia Ivette Gonzales who was murdered in Juarez, Mexico in 2003. Mia had asked me to write a short story about Claudia for her book I Live Here based on the material in the box-- interviews with Claudia's friends and family, photographs, police reports, audio cassettes--and my own research.

I began to write what I imagined would become a coherent narrative, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, held together by an omniscient narrator. I thought it would be a short project. Yet, very soon into it, I realized that it was the voices of Claudia's friends and family—the voices that I could hear in those audio tapes, and not a narrator I had invented--that mattered most to Claudia's story, and that would describe her life most faithfully.

The final product is not a neat narrative. It is a collage of found objects of life joined by my interpretation and attempt to understand them. But the emphasis falls on the themes Claudia's family and friends emphasized themselves. The narrative also includes my readings of photographs of Claudia and of Juarez, quotations from taped interviews, police reports, and Claudia's family and friends.

View an excerpt from 20 Poems About Claudia
©I Live Here, by Mia Kirshner, Paul Shoebridge, James MacKinnon and Mike Simons, Pantheon Books, a division of Random House.