Ghosts of Chavez Ravine

The tricky part about using sports as a literary device is that sports exist in a place always something more than distraction, yet less than pure metaphor.

As a result, the result is usually cliché and usually some version of the underdog story.

But in his 2016 short story collection titled ‘Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul’, published by the University of Arizona Press, 16-year Anchorage Firefighter Bryan Allen Fierro manages to escape that trap. The Los Angeles Dodgers, beloved by literally every Latino in the East LA neighborhood he grew up in, appear subtly, yet prominently in each story, but exist more as a stage prop, part of the scenery. As a result, they become more a symbol than a metaphor and help Fierro knock it out of the park in delivering his thesis: What it means to be Mexican-American.

“All of the stories have a smattering of me in them,” Fierro said. “The stories have a light paint brush stroke of the Dodgers and I allowed it to naturally happen as they occur. It’s not overt, minus the title story. Other stories, the Dodgers are kind of in the background — somebody is wearing something or says something. It’s very light, but it is a state of mind and that kind of pulls it together.”

All of the stories take place in the 1980s, and are largely autobiographical. It concludes with the lone story that doesn’t take place during Fierro’s youth, ‘The Fortress of Solitude’, which surrounds the probably apocryphal story of then-Superman George Reeves, visiting Chavez Ravine in 1957, as young Mexican boys were playing baseball in the ruins of their schoolyard being turned into, what would become, Dodger Stadium.

This gentrification by bulldozer rather than Starbucks, remains an issue for the neighborhood 60 years on, and the irony of Latinos universally supporting the team, whose stadium built upon arrival from Brooklyn, that displaced a neighborhood, is felt palpably through Fierro’s book.

In Fierro’s case, that contradiction plays out in language. As a child he was discouraged from speaking Spanish.

“I like to joke that there’s this 2-year-old version of me who spoke Spanish with my grandmother when my mom wasn’t around… They did that in an effort to help me assimilate, but ultimately it’s been a detriment,” Fierro said. “Now in schools you have immersion programs and a second language now is a currency in so many different ways.”

Fierro credits his love of writing largely with his disdain for math in school.

“I avoided math for so long and had some excellent teachers along the way that a couple of them said, ‘hey, you’re kind of good at this story thing, you should really pursue it,’” Fierro said.

Fierro attended the University of Colorado and after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he signed up for the U.S. Border Patrol. At the same time, he’d sent off graduate school applications to Cornell, Notre Dame and the University of Alaska Anchorage, the last of which sent him a letter of acceptance just days before he was to report to border patrol duty.

“Alaska seemed like somewhere to go for two years,” Fierro said. “I was hired as a Border Patrol officer the same day I checked my mailbox and it was from UAA — a full ride. I thought, ‘do I want to watch a fence rust in Yuma, or go to Alaska?’ I chose Alaska and made the trek up here in 2003.”

From a family of first responders of every sort, Fierro began in Anchorage as an EMT, paramedic and the last 11 years a firefighter, posted at Station 8 out on O’Malley Road.

Few writers get to see the kind of human drama Fierro does on a daily basis, and few firefighters are able to approach their jobs with the eye of a writer.

“I get to go into people’s homes when they’re having one of worst days of life — it’s an unplanned humanity collision. People who call 911, you see people at most fragile, most vulnerable state. The most important thing is to have compassion,” Fierro said. “That compassion of work in fire service, in literary (life) it’s the compassion you have for your characters and that’s how I feel about taking care of people. That said, one allows the escape from the other. “

Fierro’s work bears a considerable resemblance to that of Dominican author Junot Diaz. Fierro said he was first introduced to Diaz as an undergrad at Colorado.

“I was reading a lot of beat writers, for whatever reason, and a professor of mine took all my work and said, throw it in the trash and start over,” Fierro recalled. “He gave me four books to read and one of them was ‘Drown’ (by Diaz) and it really changed how I felt about story.”

After getting ‘Dodger Blue’ published, Fierro wrote a screenplay called ‘The Inside Passage’, which won him a Rasmuson Foundation award two years ago. It was a semifinalist at the Nashville Film Festival, and he’s still pitching it to studios.

He’s begun work on his next novel about his neighborhood in the time of Richard Ramirez, the infamous ‘Night Stalker’, who was captured just blocks from Fierro’s home when he was 14.

“It was during the hottest summer in recorded history and I always wanted to write about it,” Fierro said. “That age sticks with you and my character happens to be around that same age, learning about love and loss and transforming to a teenage young man… trying to find your through that with this disruption. What does it do to that? It changes family, community, so an open and abundant community that resides together now has to lock themselves behind closed doors with bars on windows.”

Last weekend, Fierro was an invited faculty member at the annual Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in Homer. Despite being active in the Alaska writing community pretty much since his arrival, it was his first visit to the conference.

“I’ll be trying to show writers how to maximize their works, how to engage the process, and at the same time, I’m a student of it all also,” Fierro said beforehand. “I look forward to that and hope it re-energizes me and helps me focus when I come back on my next project.”

In his 16 years in Alaska, Fierro has noticed a strong contingent of local authors in Alaska, but isn’t sure whether than there’s more here, per capita, or whether it just seems that way because he’s so involved.

“There’s just a really good close-knit community here that supports itself. You do that and you’ll have people who grow into it quickly; they’re going to support one another,” Fierro said. “Maybe it’s just so concentrated because we’re so isolated, but it has a lot to do with the writing community itself. We all are kind of close-knit and happy for the successes of one another. That kind of cascades into writers helping writers get better.”