Everything he’s done, from serving as a Marine to working at the former Joder Arabian Horse Ranch in Boulder, has fed his career, says Christopher David Rosales

Christopher David Rosales hadn’t yet seen 25 years of life when he enrolled in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing in 2007. But he’d already accumulated more life experience than many people twice or even three times his age.

He grew up in Paramount, California, a largely Latino city in the South Central area of Los Angeles, where his family had lived for generations. 

At 3 a.m. on the day following his graduation from high school, Rosales boarded a bus for boot camp with the U.S. Marine Corps, graduating just 10 days before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 

He had performed his own songs at L.A.’s famous Whisky a Go Go club on Sunset Boulevard, following in the footsteps of such legendary acts as The Doors, Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses. 

He’d worked in wildfire prevention in northern Arizona.

“Son, you are going to get all the life experience life can hand you, all the experience you need,” Rosales (MFAEngl’10) recalls his undergraduate mentor, Rafael Zapeda, at California State University, Long Beach, telling him, “If you are going to be a writer, that’s your work, so write.”

More than a decade on, Rosales has found success in both writing and academia, and recently published his new book “Word is Bone.” His resume now includes three consecutive Thompson Writing Awards from the Center of the American West; three published novels; a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver; a stint as the Writing Fellow at the National Archives at Philadelphia; and a position on the writing faculty at Boulder’s Naropa University.

Everything he’s done—from serving as a Marine to working at the former Joder Arabian Horse Ranch in Boulder—has fed his career, Rosales says.

“I’m still part musician, and when I talk to students I sometimes revert back to a musical analogy,” says Rosales, 36. “I tell them to learn all the riffs you can, learn jazz, learn everything. Break the rules, get out of the box, and then come back to the things you love.”

His own literary roots go back to childhood, when, his father would retell—verbatim, from memory—stories from the Amber novels of the late science-fiction and fantasy writer Roger Zelazny. He loved reading so much as a boy that his parents had to physically drag him out from beneath the covers, where he was reading with a flashlight, to go to school in the morning. He wrote his first novel, a fantasy, in fourth grade.

“I disappeared into these other worlds,” he says. 

He published his first short story in 2007, following it up with dozens more stories, essays and book reviews. In 2015 he published his first novel, “Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper,” a mélange of magic realism and dystopian fiction set in a violent, gritty 1990s L.A. His second novel, “Gods on the Lam” (2016), was another genre-busting work, set in the firefighting world he’d come to know while working in northern Arizona.

His new novel, “Word is Bone,” published in February, tells the story of an ex-con named June’s return to his native L.A. to bury his father in 1999. 

“It’s a crime story, though I see a lot of (Cormac) McCarthy, Faulkner and (Flannery) O’Connor in it,” Rosales says. “I really wanted to take Southern Gothic and drop it into Southern California.”

Even as it flirts with surrealism, the novel has been praised for its vividly realistic depiction of a time and place unfamiliar to most Americans.

“If all stories are really either about someone leaving town or someone getting to town, then ‘Word is Bone’ is, pretty much, all stories,” says Stephen Graham Jones, author and professor of English at CU Boulder, “but in a way that's so particular to southern California and the nineties that you'll find yourself looking down at your own feet, expecting them to be wrapped in June's cowboy boots.”

For Rosales, telling stories set in the city where he grew up is a way of giving back.

“I see it as giving a voice to a community that doesn’t necessarily get heard,” he says.

Rosales ticks off an impressively eclectic list of influences, from Zelazny to O’Connor, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison. He is now at work on a new novel, which he describes as a modern retelling of Graham Greene’s thriller, “The Third Man,” set on the U.S.-Mexico border rather than Venice, Italy. 

“It’s about trying to shift our country’s relationship to Mexico,” he says. “It’s a thriller, but I’m always going to trick you. It’s not just about being thrilled, but about being real.”