“Alma wasn’t so sure it was a great thing for her friend to be so rootless. A writer needs to be grounded or the force that through the green fuse drives the flower is going to incinerate it.”

The casually poetic tone of this passage reveals Alma’s literary influences even as her musings deliver an ominous note of foreshadowing about her own eventual fate. Alma believes that the creative force that flows through artists and writers can be destructive if it is not properly channeled. From her perspective, being grounded in a sense of place and belonging can help that creative energy to be channeled in a healthy direction, thereby evading the manifestation of Stories as a Force of Destruction.

“So, it’s a true story, not like you made it up? It was a question readers often asked. Alma was weary of explaining that a novelist should not subject herself to the tyranny of what really happened.”

Several times throughout the book, characters ask whether a story is true. For Alma and other writers, however, relaying the facts is not nearly as important as conveying an emotional truth; to this end, fictitious plots or situations sometimes articulate a philosophical message better than the dry elements of reality ever could.

“To close a story, the old people back home would utter a chant. Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. This tale is done. Release the duende to the wind. But how to exorcise a story that had never been told?”

This chant signals the end of a story and also releases the duende, which is a spirit or an enchanted being, such as an elf. In this context, the duende is akin to the energy that surrounds a creative work. Alma believes that holding too much of this creative spirit inside can ultimately damage a person, and the novel implies that this is what eventually happens to her.