“My father told me about a killer who would tremble if he hadn’t killed someone,” Patricia Cisneros Young recalled.

 “I don’t know what possessed my father to tell me that story about a year ago,” said Cisneros Young, an adjunct faculty member at UTB/TSC who took that account and others and transformed them into “South Texas Tales: Stories My Father Told Me,” a collection of nine short stories based on the lives of people who lived in Brownsville and Matamoros.

 “The people are real, the stories are fiction,” Cisneros Young explained. “So many people have stereotypical views or perspectives of this area and they’re wrong. They don’t understand the people who have lived here since 1749 and the people who have built their homes, their lives, in this area. … Many people have told me, after they have read my book, ‘You know, I finally get it. … I understand how the Rio Grande is a comma instead of a period in a sentence.’”

Cisneros Young’s inspiration for the collection came from her family and the stories her father would tell her as she was growing up.

“He would tell us stories about people who lived in Brownsville/ Matamoros and I always imagined how they lived,” she said. “He just turned 80 years old and I realized that if I didn’t write these stories down, people’s names down, and start fictionalizing their lives, giving them voice, they were going to disappear. No one would ever know what Brownsville/Matamoros is really like.”

The stories center on the universal themes of love and loss, triumph and defeat.

Cisneros Young said she writes only “about what I know, the [family] conversations that I’ve heard”  while growing up.

She said her family was very religious.

“They clung to the rosary, you know, they clung to the church,” Cisneros Young said. “They were extremely faithful and their faith was very simple.”

For the last three years, Cisneros Young has been an English teacher at Rivera High School. She graduated from UTB/TSC with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.

She credits Associate Professors Noor Islam and Teresa Cadena and Professor Mimosa Stephenson with helping her become a writer.

“Those professors helped shape and discipline my writing,” Cisneros Young said. “They gave me the ability to write with structure. [They] were amazingly instrumental with me becoming a writer.”

She will sign copies of “South Texas Tales: Stories My Father Told Me” ($12.99, Tate Publishing) at a brunch scheduled from 10 a.m. to noon May 17 at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore on campus.

 “You will meet the characters again,” Cisneros Young said, adding that the collection is the first volume in a trilogy.