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By Lydia Gil

LYDIA GIL: Tell us a bit about your literary background and how it intersects with your legal background.

DANIEL OLIVAS: I majored in English Literature at Stanford University but, instead of continuing along that track, I went to law school at UCLA. I have been a lawyer with the California Department of Justice for the last twenty years where I have worked on cases in the areas of antitrust, environmental law, and consumer protection. I started writing fiction rather late in life at the age of 39 in 1998. Now, over ten years later, I’ve had five books of fiction published, edited an anthology, with two more books on the way in the next two years. My legal background intersects with my literary background primarily in the kind of people who populate my fiction: my characters (who are mostly Chicano and Mexican) come from all walks of life, from people who work with their hands to lawyers and judges. Also, because I am a trained lawyer who works with words all the time, I’m a very fast and efficient fiction writer. I never suffer from writer’s block. A lawyer can never say: “Oh no! I can’t finish this brief!” You have to get it done. I have the same approach with fiction writing. A blank computer screen does not scare me.

LG: How did your recently published collection of short stories, Anytwhere But L.A., come about?

DO: I found that throughout the last few years, many of my stories involved characters who had escaped Los Angeles (my hometown), wanted to escape the city, or simply had no connection to L.A. I like to have a theme for my collections (this is my third story collection), so I pulled together the stories and found the title in the words of one of my characters in the story “San Diego” to be a perfect fit. He utters the words, “Anywhere but L.A.,” after his wife has died and he needed to escape the city because everything reminded him of his wife. Also, I think natives of Los Angeles have a love-hate relationship with the city. It has so much to offer yet it can be maddening in terms of traffic, crime and smog.

LG: I'm not familiar with your earlier work (except your book for children, which my daughter loves). Is there a thread that runs throughout your work, or is each project completely different in nature and execution?

DO: If you were to look at all of my books, I think you would find that I’m not afraid to confront tough issues such as racism, sexism, dysfunctional families. But I often use humor in my stories even as I write about matters that normally would not be humorous. In the end, the important thing is to tell a compelling story and not be predictable. I think fiction should disturb the reader, in every sense of the word.

LG: What role does the "city" play in your writing? Is it necessarily tied to the Latino experience?

DO: I think that city life in the United States has allowed Latinos to thrive in ways that other settings have not. My grandparents came to Los Angeles in the 1920s and made a good living even though they had little education. My father’s father was a cook. My mother’s parents worked in a laundry. My parents took advantage of the low-cost city college system to improve their lives. In the mid-1960s, with five young children at home, my parents went to community colle

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