Anaya. Old Men. Death, Dying, Sorrow.

Michael Sedano

After my wife's diagnosis of dementia of the Alzheimer's type I sent myself into a spiral of shock, sorrow, suffering, endurance and all-around general aporia. It didn't help I was disabled from both shoulders and I was totally unreliable in event she fell. And she fell a lot.

She went to live in a locked door memory care unit, then had surgery for an infected leg. Five weeks in a superb skilled nursing facility and Barbara regained alertness and energy. She walked steadily and confidently. I healed and have strength in my arms again. I brought her home.

Nothing's going to change. Alzheimer's is a "progressive" disease. Aporia is worse than mere depression. It's helplessness mixed with keen awareness of why, aporia blends sorrow suffering irresolution into one nauseating bundle. It is what it is.

Enduring this mishmash of peccant humors wears you down, aguantando doesn't help, don't just stand there and take it, find places to keep growing.

 Aguantar doesn't work. I remind myself I know that, after painful experience. I remind myself also that pain and misfortune are universal. Reading how others passed into and through profound loss creates time you didn't know you had, when a reader gets lost in contemplating her or his own experience like those reflected through words, realizing "it's not just me."

For myself, early in our diagnosis, I read stuff to fit the mood and our progression, poets like Donne and Hopkins, poems like "Invictus," and "Do not go gentle". Caregivers I know delved deeply into nonfiction, medical and neurological books and resources.

One book I recommend to all, now in the hour of our suffering, or out of interest in literary fulfillment--but you'll need it one day--is Rudolfo Anaya's The Old Man's Love Story. Own your own copy and read it regularly. It's important.

Here's a link to the publisher's direct-sales website. 

Back in 2016, Jesus Treviño and I took a roadtrip to Alburquerque to interview Rudolfo Anaya on his most recent books at the time, including this important contribution to United States letters. We had fun. Anaya had read my review and affirmed my view of it. I had to restrain myself from a Sally Field "he likes it!" moment, but that added to the fun. I excerpt the interview addressing The Old Man's Love Story to conclude today's colum. Here's a link to a Latinopia video from that interview.

To begin today, I resurrect my review from 2015 of the story. La Bloga's first review is Manuel Ramos' review of The Old Man's Love Story in the May 17, 2013 La Bloga-Friday (link)

From La Bloga-Tuesday, February 10, 2015 (link)
Rudolfo Anaya. The Old Man's Love Story. Norman: U Oklahoma Press, 2013.
ISBN: 0806146486
Michael Sedano

Everyone dies. My grandmother died. My mother died. I died. In Rudolfo Anaya’s The Old Man’s Love Story, the old man’s wife has died. How do you go on after death? What of your own? Where do dead souls go?


The widower struggles with grief, memory, and life after death. This is Anaya’s own story--he pulls no punches--but elects to tell this deeply personal story from the safe distance enabled by a third person narrator.

The third person voice allows the mourning man to step outside himself to address an audience, organize the events and relate what happened to a character called “the old man” as he goes about resolving the consequences of life and death.

In this voice, Anaya crafts a barely-controlled narrative of his own roiling emotions, enriches the text with literary flourishes, allusions, motifs, and keen detail, ultimately presenting a meaningful look at death, grief, and living. Beyond its profundity, The Old Man’s Love Story is a scream of pain you need to hear.

It’s not a fun read. Some readers won’t be ready for The Old Man’s Love Story, especially younger people who see themselves invincible. Nor will those with a low tolerance for cultura “get” it. The book deals with issues those people haven’t dealt with, they have no skin in the game. So it goes.

Near death experience patients like me, readers in serious infirmity, and generally, gente aware of cucui and other spirits are ready for The Old Man’s Love Story. It won’t haunt you but starts a conversation that’s probably overdue. Carpe diem. The old man is not afraid of dying but frustrated at everything he’s going to miss.

The old man has spirits in his life and many moments of communion. New Mexico cultura informs the old man’s spiritual and metaphoric view with cloud formations, water, land, soul, various people’s gods. He views his own memory as thrusts from a hellenistic muse whom the old man names Memoria.

The old man's wife speaks to him, offers comfort, and urges him to go on living. He cannot summon her but with a sense of normalcy accepts her presence whenever she appears. “Magic realism” outsiders might term such moments in the narrative. For the old man, and Anaya, conversations with the wife are the most normal things a grieving man does.

Grief comes with memory. Random events and artifacts trigger memories of courtship, travels, life together, her personality, having sex. Each memory fills the old man with pain at her absence magnified by his understanding of the finality of this emptiness. Because grief and memory intertwine but are not the same, the widower finds himself unable to unravel the tangle. He cannot control memory and his grief is inconsolable.

As the old man’s suffering persists unabated, a reader begins to sense thoughts of suicide in the old man’s struggle, notes of surrender that would leave writer and reader deadened with depression. No one wants to read that. Yet, a fleeting thought, a word here, a conclusion there, Anaya sets the reader on edge, the outcome for the old man in no way assured.

As the book begins, with the old man’s bereavement finding its first expression, it comes with a sense of excitement for the dead wife’s next self:

Her journey into the world of spirits was a new adventure, but damn! He knew nothing of that world! He could only imagine it! Like imagining heaven. He worried. Was she okay? What if she lost the way? But she loved adventure. It was part of her nature. Now she had entered a country of spirits, from which no one returned.

Her spirit had lingered a while. Shortly after she died he had seen her walking down the hollyhock path. Dressed in a flowing Mexican skirt, the bright colors she loved, and a white blouse, stepping as lightly as an angel. She had turned and looked at him. 43

But the old man struggles with being separated. His wife’s disappearance from his garden, the hollyhock path, their time, has made his life chaotic, him irrational. At one manic point he surrounds himself with photographs, lies on the floor a shaman willing her back from death, Mictlán, the other side, wherever, just come back. Therapy doesn’t help.

He seeks refuge in reasoning and science. The old man learns about brain chemistry and the brain’s engrams, the loci of memory. He is not consoled that surgery or time will erase memories. Once the memories are gone, she is gone. The old man desperately needs the life memory sparks in him, memories don’t hurt all the time. He persists until he can answer ill-understood questions.

He questioned his own concept of the spirit world.
“It’s not out there,” he whispered. “It’s in me. The world of spirits is my memory—I am the world of spirits!”
Why was he surprised? He had searched for the meaning of life and death, the knowledge that was the bedrock of so many cultures, the truths written in esoteric gospels, a faith held in the human heart since the beginning of time.
He had known this all along. One of his characters, an old woman on her deathbed, had told a child, “I will live as long as you remember me. I live in your memory.” 130

Anaya arrives at this consolation for the old man via a stream-of-consciousness narrative that spills freely out of the writer. The loose style that flows from idea to idea looking for a logical connection can pose a challenge to inattentive readers. This is the way the man’s mind works, how a writer thinks. It’s best to pay attention.

The constrained rambling style of The Old Man’s Love Story stands in tribute to Anaya’s late wife, who was the writer’s editor. The writer is allowed free rein on this manuscript. Anaya seems to be telling his readers, this style is appropriate to this occasion so she’s letting me slide on some of my excesses and more abstract ruminations.

Students of Chicana Chicano Literature will find The Old Man’s Love Story illuminating for its insights into elements of the writer’s life and career. Readers curious about Sonny Baca’s heightened spirituality across the four novels of that series see its origins in the author’s lifelong relationship with spirits and spiritual practice. Anaya accepts that La Llorona frightened him as a boy, perhaps in the guise of grasping ramas in the bosque, but that was La Llorona pulling his hair in the darkness.

Writers will note Anaya’s sense that his characters spring sui generis from their own dimension. Just as spirits are, characters are.

And it’s true, that was his background but the more he wrote the more he felt the pull of the spirit world. The voice of the story was not completely his. He was moved to write the tragedies and comedies of those characters who came to visit him. 54

It’s that sense of spirits and literary characters that lets the grief-stricken mind lose itself in beauties of a garden path before a moment later seeing his dead wife pulling weeds. He’s comforted by their conversations, her advice about getting a girlfriend, helping him close doors and open others in efforts to define the old man’s loneliness and depression, and find a way onward.

Which he does. That is not a spoiler but a final reason to read The Old Man’s Love Story. The last handful of pages, when the issues have reached what resolution exists for one man, sparkle with vision. The old man finds his respite not in a particular spirit but the spirit of life itself, and with that final rainbow along the hollyhock path the old man understands.

His ancestors had come and stayed to raise crops in the land of the pueblos. We worked hard, the old ones said. Our backs broke and our hands were stained with blood. But one afternoon lived beneath this sky provides enough beauty to fill our souls for another day’s toil. The earth provided, the sky rewarded. 168

Order The Old Man’s Love Story from your independent bookseller or via the publisher's website.

NDE Addendum. Anaya's speculation about whether, and what the other side is like are right on. The other side is there. I saw it last July during emergency surgery. I returned with the ancestor's message on my lips, struggling to share it. "Sage" they said without speaking. "Burn sage" I finally said when I found voice. The old man's conversations with his wife don't surprise me but I envy them. Souls cross back and forth for important reasons. In early January I was certain an upcoming surgery--a consequence of July's--would kill me again, this time for sure. In December I was saying good-bye to people, cooking last meals, doing uncharacteristic things, walking on eggshells. One morning I smelled my dad's smell in bed next to me, felt him holding my hand--my dad never held my hand tenderly or otherwise--and in the instant felt assured I would live because he told me, again without speaking. A few days later I went through the operation easily and near painlessly.

Excerpted from La Bloga-Tuesday August 9, 2016 (link)
Interview with Rudolfo Anaya: The Old Man’s Love Story and The Sorrows of Young Alfonso.
Michael Sedano, with Jesus Salvador Treviño

Jesús Treviño and I arrived at Rudolfo Anaya’s house mid-afternoon and spent several delightful hours videotaping (link) while we chatted about Rudy’s four most recent publications, Poems From the Rio Grande, Randy Lopez Goes Home, The Old Man’s Love Story, and The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. . . . 
This interview transcript picks up in mid-conversation. We had been discussing the connectedness between three novels, poetry, and how themes, images, and ideas recur and parallel one another in Anaya’s career and especially these most recent publications. As the Latinopia video illustrates, Anaya reflects on the soul, creativity, and his body of work.

•mvs: The themes are coming back, like you say, it’s a cycle. As a preamble, a couple questions on The Old Man’s Love Story. Some people say writing is a form of therapy. Was The Old Man’s Love Story a therapy for you?

•RA: Was The Old Man’s Love Story therapeutic for me? Absolutely. The Old Man’s Love Story is about grief, and my wife had just died, I was going through grief. A woman came here, you know they have grief counselors. She gave me pamphlets, that didn’t do it for me. Some people said get into a group that is talking about grief. I thought, no my grief is too personal. I don’t want to talk about it, to other people. And so I started writing, using the tool I have used all my life, writing. What I know best was the way to express my grief, was to write about it, was to write these passages that the old man goes through. Yeah, that’s therapy.

•mvs:The old man wondered before his wife died, what she saw. He’s in a part where he’s talking about soul and how imagination is pure, like the soul is pure. Have you found out what the old man’s wife was seeing before she died, was it soul?

•RA: We’ve been discussing the idea of soul, the idea of essence. And I have written many places, “The creative imagination is the soul.” My and yours and everybody’s imagination that creates is soul. Soul creates. And on a personal level, in The Old Man’s Love Story, I would say that my wife was a very creative person. She was very intelligent very loving. She was into reading esoteric stuff that was very interesting, building up her soul. That’s what we all do, we build soul. We build soul. Like a brick at a time. Absolutely, she was building, she still is.

•mvs: The soul is eternal. In the hollyhock garden the old man spoke with her soul in the hollyhock garden. He was looking for it. Can one produce that communion by looking for it, or does it simply appear because it appears?

•RA: For me the communion with my wife is always there. It’s not that I ask for it, it’s just there. The scene in the garden, the hollyhock garden, I can take you to the back yard where I have a little ramada with grape vines and a nice swing. And I’m sitting there, and my wife appeared. And she started walking down. In June I have beautiful hollyhocks out there, beautiful; the whole garden is full of color. And she started walking down the hollyhock path and that's when she turned and told me she was going. So she knew all along. We know all along. It’s not a secret. Some of us don’t pay attention to our soul, to our creative imagination.

What did Wordsworth say, “this world is too much with us, late and soon getting and spending, little we know that is ours.” Getting and spending, and not paying attention to that which is ours, the soul. And it’s always there. It’s like I am sharing something with you very personal. That my wife is always with me. She is in this room, she’s in the photographs, she’s in the chair that she loved to sit in to read. On and on, it doesn’t go away.

And it gets better when I’m gone and I go to her. Then we’re gonna take a trip. The first trip we’re gonna do is take us to Mazatlán. We loved the beach in Mazatlán. We loved the people. We had such good time. We already made a deal, the moment I’m gone like that, vamonos, we’re gonna fly to Mazatlán.

•mvs: It’ll be a good trip.
•RA: Oh man, la playa de Mazatlán, the gente. Beautiful.

Review: Rudolfo Anaya. The Old Man's Love Story. News from SE to NW.

Rudolfo Anaya. The Old Man's Love Story. Norman: U Oklahoma Press, 2013.
ISBN: 0806146486

Michael Sedano

Everyone dies. My grandmother died. My mother died. I died. In Rudolfo Anaya’s The Old Man’s Love Story, the old man’s wife has died. How do you go on after death? What of your own? Where do dead souls go?

The widower struggles with grief, memory, and life after death. This is Anaya’s own story--he pulls no punches--but elects to tell this deeply personal story from the safe distance enabled by a third person narrator.

The third person voice allows the mourning man to step outside himself to address an audience, organize the events and relate what happened to a character called “the old man” as he goes about resolving the consequences of life and death.

In this voice, Anaya crafts a barely-controlled narrative of his own roiling emotions, enriches the text with literary flourishes, allusions, motifs, and keen detail, ultimately presenting a meaningful look at death, grief, and living. Beyond its profundity, The Old Man’s Love Story is a scream of pain you need to hear.

It’s not a fun read. Some readers won’t be ready for The Old Man’s Love Story, especially younger people who see themselves invincible. Nor will those with a low tolerance for cultura “get” it. The book deals with issues those people haven’t dealt with, they have no skin in the game. So it goes.

Near death experience patients like me, readers in serious infirmity, and generally, gente aware of cucui and other spirits are ready for The Old Man’s Love Story. It won’t haunt you but starts a conversation that’s probably overdue. Carpe diem. The old man is not afraid of dying but frustrated at everything he’s going to miss.

The old man has spirits in his life and many moments of communion. New Mexico cultura informs the old man’s spiritual and metaphoric view with cloud formations, water, land, soul, various people’s gods. He views his own memory as thrusts from a hellenistic muse whom the old man names Memoria.

The old man's wife speaks to him, offers comfort, and urges him to go on living. He cannot summon her but with a sense of normalcy accepts her presence whenever she appears. “Magic realism” outsiders might term such moments in the narrative. For the old man, and Anaya, conversations with the wife are the most normal things a grieving man does.

Grief comes with memory. Random events and artifacts trigger memories of courtship, travels, life together, her personality, having sex. Each memory fills the old man with pain at her absence magnified by his understanding of the finality of this emptiness. Because grief and memory intertwine but are not the same, the widower finds himself unable to unravel the tangle. He cannot control memory and his grief is inconsolable.

As the old man’s suffering persists unabated, a reader begins to sense thoughts of suicide in the old man’s struggle, notes of surrender that would leave writer and reader deadened with depression. No one wants to read that. Yet, a fleeting thought, a word here, a conclusion there, Anaya sets the reader on edge, the outcome for the old man in no way assured.

As the book begins, with the old man’s bereavement finding its first expression, it comes with a sense of excitement for the dead wife’s next self:

Her journey into the world of spirits was a new adventure, but damn! He knew nothing of that world! He could only imagine it! Like imagining heaven. He worried. Was she okay? What if she lost the way? But she loved adventure. It was part of her nature. Now she had entered a country of spirits, from which no one returned.
Her spirit had lingered a while. Shortly after she died he had seen her walking down the hollyhock path. Dressed in a flowing Mexican skirt, the bright colors she loved, and a white blouse, stepping as lightly as an angel. She had turned and looked at him. 43

But the old man struggles with being separated. His wife’s disappearance from his garden, the hollyhock path, their time, has made his life chaotic, him irrational. At one manic point he surrounds himself with photographs, lies on the floor a shaman willing her back from death, Mictlán, the other side, wherever, just come back. Therapy doesn’t help.

He seeks refuge in reasoning and science. The old man learns about brain chemistry and the brain’s engrams, the loci of memory. He is not consoled that surgery or time will erase memories. Once the memories are gone, she is gone. The old man desperately needs the life memory sparks in him, memories don’t hurt all the time. He persists until he can answer ill-understood questions.

He questioned his own concept of the spirit world.
“It’s not out there,” he whispered. “It’s in me. The world of spirits is my memory—I am the world of spirits!”
Why was he surprised? He had searched for the meaning of life and death, the knowledge that was the bedrock of so many cultures, the truths written in esoteric gospels, a faith held in the human heart since the beginning of time.
He had known this all along. One of his characters, an old woman on her deathbed, had told a child, “I will live as long as you remember me. I live in your memory.” 130

Anaya arrives at this consolation for the old man via a stream-of-consciousness narrative that spills freely out of the writer. The loose style that flows from idea to idea looking for a logical connection can pose a challenge to inattentive readers. This is the way the man’s mind works, how a writer thinks. It’s best to pay attention.

The constrained rambling style of The Old Man’s Love Story stands in tribute to Anaya’s late wife, who was the writer’s editor. The writer is allowed free rein on this manuscript. Anaya seems to be telling his readers, this style is appropriate to this occasion so she’s letting me slide on some of my excesses and more abstract ruminations.

Students of Chicana Chicano Literature will find The Old Man’s Love Story illuminating for its insights into elements of the writer’s life and career. Readers curious about Sonny Baca’s heightened spirituality across the four novels of that series see its origins in the author’s lifelong relationship with spirits and spiritual practice. Anaya accepts that La Llorona frightened him as a boy, perhaps in the guise of grasping ramas in the bosque, but that was La Llorona pulling his hair in the darkness.

Writers will note Anaya’s sense that his characters spring sui generis from their own dimension. Just as spirits are, characters are.

And it’s true, that was his background but the more he wrote the more he felt the pull of the spirit world. The voice of the story was not completely his. He was moved to write the tragedies and comedies of those characters who came to visit him. 54

It’s that sense of spirits and literary characters that lets the grief-stricken mind lose itself in beauties of a garden path before a moment later seeing his dead wife pulling weeds. He’s comforted by their conversations, her advice about getting a girlfriend, helping him close doors and open others in efforts to define the old man’s loneliness and depression, and find a way onward.

Which he does. That is not a spoiler but a final reason to read The Old Man’s Love Story. The last handful of pages, when the issues have reached what resolution exists for one man, sparkle with vision. The old man finds his respite not in a particular spirit but the spirit of life itself, and with that final rainbow along the hollyhock path the old man understands.

His ancestors had come and stayed to raise crops in the land of the pueblos. We worked hard, the old ones said. Our backs broke and our hands were stained with blood. But one afternoon lived beneath this sky provides enough beauty to fill our souls for another day’s toil. The earth provided, the sky rewarded. 168

Order The Old Man’s Love Story from your independent bookseller or via the publisher's website.

NDE Addendum. Anaya's speculation about whether, and what the other side is like are right on. The other side is there. I saw it last July during emergency surgery. I returned with the ancestor's message on my lips, struggling to share it. "Sage" they said without speaking. "Burn sage" I finally said when I found voice. The old man's conversations with his wife don't surprise me but I envy them. Souls cross back and forth for important reasons. In early January I was certain an upcoming surgery--a consequence of July's--would kill me again, this time for sure. In December I was saying good-bye to people, cooking last meals, doing uncharacteristic things, walking on eggshells. One morning I smelled my dad's smell in bed next to me, felt him holding my hand--my dad never held my hand tenderly or otherwise--and in the instant felt assured I would live because he told me, again without speaking. A few days later I went through the operation easily and near painlessly.


Mailbag: Caribbean via Tucson
Greater Antilles Island Focus of Talk

La Bloga friend Tom Miller joins a panel--tomorrow in Tucson--addressing growing interest in Cuba, given prospects for increased communication with the island nation.

Mailbag: Pacific Northwest
Seattle Teatro Announces New Web Presence

Rose Cano,  eSe Teatro - Artistic Director announces her website, http://www.eseteatro.org now features easy-to-click links and a cycling banner featuring the company's programs. Let's get on with the show, ese.

Review: The Old Man's Love Story/Rudolfo Anaya - Desperado News

The Old Man's Love Story
Rudolfo Anaya
University of Oklahoma Press - April, 2013


Patricia Anaya died in 2010. She and Rudolfo Anaya had been married for forty-four years. Each excelled individually as teachers and writers, and together they created a strong team devoted to one another and committed to making the world a better place. They established scholarships, literary awards, and other charitable projects as they worked with various organizations such as the Rio Grande Writers Association. They were a force to be reckoned with, major players on the cultural and educational stages, not only of the U.S. Southwest but worldwide.

Patricia encouraged and nurtured Rudolfo's writing. He has often acknowledged the important roles she played in his writing: muse, editor, reader, critic, fan. His latest book, The Old Man's Love Story, is a deeply personal account of life without his beloved wife.

The narrator is an "old man," never named but Anaya does not hide that he is writing about himself. Several references in the book refer directly to Anaya's previous literary works. For example, the old man speaks about one of the characters in a work in progress, Randy Lopez (Randy Lopez Goes Home, 2011). Other comments in the book reference early works such as the pivotal childhood accident from Tortuga (1979), and youthful adventures on the streets of Albuquerque that frame Heart of Aztlan (1976.)  Of course, the back story from his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), also makes an appearance.

The old man's emotions are raw and brittle. At times, his story drifts into a dreamland of memory and yearning, and we can only guess whether the old man is living what he talks about or simply thinking about it, fantasizing. One passage retells how the old man thought he saw his wife in a downtown mall. He had driven, slowly, of course, to the mall and immediately regretted his decision. The place was too loud, too busy, with too many rude young people. But out of nowhere he recognized a bright-patterned blouse and colorful Mexican skirt. The clothes had been worn by his wife, of that he was sure. He became tremendously excited and anxious. He called after the woman wearing the clothes. "Amor! Amor!" She ignored him. She obviously was a homeless person of the streets. It made no sense to the old man, who was almost traumatized by the incident. Only after his shock subsided did he remember that he had given his wife's clothes to a shelter.

Anaya's writing is infused with his uniquely religious understanding of the natural world and of the spiritual nature of existence. The Old Man's Love Story exists in the spirit world, but it is a very real world to the old man. Spirits and living memories exist along the banalities of life for a seventy-five year-old man. The spirit of his departed wife eventually visits him and guides him through the stages of grief. She encourages him to move on, to preserve her memory by making new memories, and to escape his sadness by living life with the same exuberance and hope they once shared. She talks with him, comforts him, listens to his prayers. His pain is deep and Anaya does not shy away from opening his wounds for readers.

It is a difficult time, exacerbated by the old man's aging process. He complains about his aching body, his dwindling memory, his lack of appetite. The personal gives way to the universal. Some of his comments are litanies of problems that all of us over fifty recognize. The simple activities of daily life torment him. Here's his take on showering:

"Everything took time, especially reaching down and scrubbing his feet. His back hurt. Need a stool in here, he thought. Hard to bend down.  Even taking a shower had become a chore. Took forever. When he was done he sat on the toilet seat and towel-dried himself. He wouldn't shave. What for?"

The old man is haunted by the spirits of his past life with his wife. He imagines and re-imagines their numerous trips to other countries, especially Mexico. He submerges himself in remembering the most minute detail of their life together, including sensual and erotic lovemaking. Some of the passages were difficult to read because it seemed as though I was prying into very private territory, into Anaya's heart and soul. I can only imagine how difficult it was for him to write the words. And yet, it is obvious that Anaya wanted this story told and preserved.

Eventually the old man begins a new relationship. The spirit of the deceased wife tells him that it is time for a "new phase." A transition. A time to learn to love again. Establishing the new relationship is not a simple matter, and guilt and self-pity play their part in the evolution of the story, as well as a few humorous observations about love and sex among the elderly.

The story is not quite done when the book ends. In fact, the journey of the old man and his wife continues on various levels. But the old man accepts that love can conquer grief. "He knew the only way out of an existential crisis was to get going. That meant caring for family, community, and the poor of the world. Care for the earth, mother of all. Not to receive, but to give, as long as he could."

The Old Man's Love Story doesn't solve the Great Mystery, as the old man refers to the puzzle of the interaction of life/death, but it does give us essential tools for dealing with that mystery: hope, humor, a bit of sadness, and, most important, love.

Desperado News

Crimespree Magazine Presents a Desperado Give Away. Plus a New Short Story. Interview

Crimespree Magazine has this announcement on its website:

This week (May 17), in conjunction with Friday Reads Facebook page, we are giving away copies of Chelsea Cain’s KILL YOU TWICE audiobook,  Dana Cameron’s SEVEN KINDS OF HELL ,  Manuel Ramos’ DESPERADO and Daniel Stashower’s THE HOUR OF PERIL audiobook.

To be entered in the drawing shoot an email over to Jon?@crimespreemag.com (remove the question mark) And put CONTEST in the subject line. Also please put your address in the body of the email
We will pick the winners on May 24th. When we do the drawing we will be sending an extra something for one lucky winner to be picked from the comments section of the Friday Reads face book page, so after you enter, go leave a comment!
____________________

The latest issue of Crimespree (#51) includes an interview of me conducted by fellow crime writer Steven Torres, as well as my short story When the Air Conditioner Quit. A bit of border noir. Hope you pick up a copy of the magazine. You can look at the interview online at this link.

Finally, I'll be readin', signin', and talkin' on May 19 at 7:00 PM at West Side Books, 3434 W. 32d Avenue, Denver. Come by for an informal evening of conversation about readin' and writin'. Should be fun.

Keep on Readin'

Later.

Interview with Rudolfo Anaya. Mid-day Floricanto. Union Floricanto. On-line Floricanto.

Interview with Rudolfo Anaya: The Old Man’s Love Story and The Sorrows of Young Alfonso.
Michael Sedano, with Jesus Salvador Treviño


Jesús Treviño and I arrived at Rudolfo Anaya’s house mid-afternoon and spent several delightful hours videotaping while we chatted about Rudy’s four most recent publications, Poems From the Rio Grande, Randy Lopez Goes Home, The Old Man’s Love Story, and The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. In the current edition of Latinopia, Trevino presents the first video of our conversations. Click to navigate to Latinopia.

The following transcribes the latter part of conversation. Here, the questions, •mvs for Michael Sedano, •jst for Jesús Salvador Treviño, transition from discussing The Old Man’s Love Story into The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. Click here for Manuel Ramos’ La Bloga review of The Old Man’s Love Story, and here for Michael Sedano’s La Bloga review of The Old Man's Love Story, and here for Sedano's review of Randy Lopez Goes Home. Click here for Sedano’s review of The Sorrows of Young Alfonso.

We had been discussing the connectedness between the three novels, the poetry, and how themes,  images, and ideas recur and parallel one another in Anaya’s career and especially these most recent publications. As the Latinopia video illustrates, Anaya reflects on the soul, creativity, and his body of work.

•mvs: The themes are coming back, like you say, it’s a cycle. As a preamble, a couple questions on The Old Man’s Love Story. Some people say writing is a form of therapy. Was The Old Man’s Love Story a therapy for you?

•RA: Was The Old Man’s Love Story therapeutic for me? Absolutely. The Old Man’s Love Story is about grief, and my wife had just died, I was going through grief. A woman came here, you know they have grief counselors. She gave me pamphlets, that didn’t do it for me. Some people said get into a group that is talking about grief. I thought, no my grief is too personal. I don’t want to talk about it, to other people. And so I started writing, using the tool I have used all my life, writing. What I know best was the way to express my grief, was to write about it, was to write these passages that the old man goes through. Yeah, that’s therapy.

•mvs:The old man wondered before his wife died, what she saw. He’s in a part where he’s talking about soul and how imagination is pure, like the soul is pure. Have you found out what the old man’s wife was seeing before she died, was it soul?

•RA: We’ve been discussing the idea of soul, the idea of essence. And I have written many places, “The creative imagination is the soul.” My and yours and everybody’s imagination that creates is soul. Soul creates. And on a personal level, in The Old Man’s Love Story, I would say that my wife was a very creative person. She was very intelligent very loving. She was into reading esoteric stuff that was very interesting, building up her soul. That’s what we all do, we build soul. We build soul. Like a brick at a time. Absolutely, she was building, she still is.

•mvs: The soul is eternal. In the hollyhock garden the old man spoke with her soul in the hollyhock garden. He was looking for it. Can one produce that communion by looking for it, or does it simply appear because it appears?

•RA: For me the communion with my wife is always there. It’s not that I ask for it, it’s just there. The scene in the garden, the hollyhock garden, I can take you to the back yard where I have a little ramada with grape vines and a nice swing. And I’m sitting there, and my wife appeared. And she started walking down. In June I have beautiful hollyhocks out there, beautiful; the whole garden is full of color. And she started walking down the hollyhock path and that's when she turned and told me she was going. So she knew all along. We know all along. It’s not a secret. Some of us don’t pay attention to our soul, to our creative imagination.

What did Wordsworth say, “this world is too much with us, late and soon getting and spending, little we know that is ours.” Getting and spending, and not paying attention to that which is ours, the soul. And it’s always there. It’s like I am sharing something with you very personal. That my wife is always with me. She is in this room, she’s in the photographs, she’s in the chair that she loved to sit in to read. On and on, it doesn’t go away.

And it gets better when I’m gone and I go to her. Then we’re gonna take a trip. The first trip we’re gonna do is take us to Mazatlán. We loved the beach in Mazatlán. We loved the people. We had such good time. We already made a deal, the moment I’m gone like that, vamonos, we’re gonna fly to Mazatlán.

•mvs: It’ll be a good trip.
•RA: Oh man, la playa de Mazatlán, the gente. Beautiful.

•mvs: Let me segue into The Sorrows of Young Alfonso in the point of the soul, and seeing, speaking, communing with the soul. You raise the point about the quantum physics that when you look at something you change it. How does that theory affect your perception, or your interaction with the soul, what are you seeing?

•RA: It’s just a theory. It’s very true whatever this idea if we look at an object we change it. And it must change us, too. It’s a reciprocal, it works both ways. The quantum mechanics idea is not very far-fetched from my definition of soul. Everything I look at is changing, nothing is standing still. If there’s a particle in the universe you cannot know its position and its speed at the same time. It’s impossible. It’s moving too fast so you measure the speed then you lose sight of where it is. But the soul can do this. The soul can change and be changed for its own good, you know. So we become better persons. So we’re more alive when we see a tree, the sky, the clouds are building. The cloud people are coming today, by the way. I hope it rains. Every day I sit out in my portal and when the clouds start building over the mountain I tell my housekeeper "Nora the cloud people are coming."

I’m changing the way I look at things, it’s nature. Nature is in the garden. It’s not just up in the mountain in the wild rivers. It’s all around us in the little casita even if you have only one bush. Or if you only plant one tomato plant. It’s the natural world, it’s all around us. We’re in it. We’re part of it. You see how we change it? If you’re in it you’re changing it, it’s changing you. I grow every time I can be more responsive. There are times when we’re not too responsive to this thing that we’re in, that we call nature. We’re lazy, or we’re too busy, we don’t have time. We’ve got to get and spend, most of the world is out there getting and spending. But if you stop, the natural world is all around, it’s changing and it’s changing you.

•mvs: You mention “bilocation” two or three times. Where does the theory of bilocation fit in that?

•RA: A very famous figure, como se llamaba, María de Agreda, she was from Spain? She was a nun. And they say that she could bring herself to New Mexico, to Texas, to this area. And people have talked about is it possible that your body can go somewhere else? Yes. We dream. We dream, everytime you dream you go somewhere else. So whether you believe this idea of this nun whether she came here or not. They say she’s still in her coffin, she hasn’t decomposed. She’s still dreaming.
Que no?

•mvs: A poco.
•RA: Algo asi, that’s what I think.

•mvs: So your out of body experience, and our deaths, are they bilocational, are they dreams, are they our soul temporarily separating and coming back?

•RA: My out of body experience I describe during the swimming accident when I was paralyzed in the water and I was going to drown and I saw my soul rise is real to me. It’s real. When I look back on it and I think about it often because the image is so clear in my mind what happened that afternoon. It’s part of something I had to go through in order to be here.

•mvs: When you’re out there, do you have a shape? Everything is external to the perception; there’s no you there. Do we use literature to fix the location of that idea of that pure imagination?

•RA: I think you’ve answered your question, que no?

•mvs: I’ll take that as an answer.

•RA: The thing is we tend to separate body from soul too much. This is my body and this is my soul over here. When this body dies my soul goes off somewhere. Or if I have an out of body my soul is lifting somewhere and it comes back. You need body for soul to grow and you need soul for body to grow. The question is, are they that separated? Like I say, when I had that experience it’s one of the most real things that’s ever happened to me. So it’s a difficult question to answer but it’s an interesting question that we should go around and think about all the time. Because we do write about it. I wrote about it in, The Sorrows of Young Alfonso.

•mvs: A technical question about The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. You mentioned you’d come full circle now in The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. The characters, incidents, the images, the places many of them are not repetitions but new explorations.

•RA: They’re from Bless Me, Ultima.

•mvs: There’s Randy in there. What motivated you to write The Sorrows of Young Alfonso?

•RA: Agapita said the world is full of sorrow, so I had to start writing. What did she mean? And then Alfonso—my middle name is Alfonso by the way. So I am in many ways the character in the book and I have as every person in the world, I have experienced sorrow. And so maybe that’s what led me to write. What are the sorrows that I have gone through and how have they built me, how have they made me? And so I started writing.

Of course you know the title comes from Goethe. He wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther. I borrowed his title. My wife and I were in Heidelberg once, very much Goethe country. Hearing about him, and I had read The Sorrows a long time ago when I was a student. I also borrowed the idea of the letter writing. And of course it’s not at all like Goethe’s book, it’s not a romance or letters to the woman he loves or anything like that, it’s an exploration of sorrow. And some of them are very personal, that I write about, are autobiographical.

•mvs: So Rudolfo Anaya is Alfonso?

•RA: Rodolfo Anaya is Antonio, a Chicano in China, Sonny Baca, Alfonso.

•jst: I read it as Rudy looking back with love and compassion to his childhood, to the young Rudy. A kind of love treatment of you dealing with yourself as a young man.

•RA: The Sorrows of Young Alfonso is me looking back at my life, just like I did in Bless Me, Ultima. Young Antonio lives in this small town of the llano and now I have young Alfonso living in this small town of the llano. And describing town characters bigger than life. I tried that in Bless Me, Ultima. I often said one reason I wrote Bless Me, Ultima is the people around me were so beautiful. They shouldn’t pass away forever, I could capture them in a book. The Sorrows of Young Alfonso is very much like that.

I was delivered at home by a couple of older women who lived in the village. And so I have Agapita. I make those women bigger than life by giving Agapita this character and this role in the story. It is she who begins to teach Alfonso about a little bit about life, a little bit about the llano, nature, the animals, the respect he owes them. And then it moves on to realistic scenes. Alfonso getting thrown by the train is me at that diving accident, except that I chose not to go to the diving accident, I chose to have it in the village.

And if you look at the village where I was born the geography’s there. You can go today. The railroad tracks are still around. It’s deserted now but the houses are there, there are two or three families living there. I chose to go that route, that made a different way by which my main character gets hurt, and therefore he has to go through life hurt.

Is that me? Yes, it’s like I said a while ago, I am the main character of every book I’ve ever written. Part of me.

The characters take on their own life, of course. And to repeat, I always thought when I wrote Bless Me, Ultima that the people were beautiful. Poor people, small town, rancheros, sheep herders, no education. Some of them were drunks, they were beautiful. Like Narciso. Narciso is the town drunk and yet when Antonio sees him he is a god, he’s big. He comes walking across the llano like Walt Whitman does later in a poem, “Walt Whitman Strides Across the Llano of New Mexico.” Who is that? It’s Narciso. And he was a real person, and they were beautiful. And perhaps I’ve gone back, in The Sorrows of Young Alfonso to make sure they don’t disappear. Go back and describe the village and the llano and nature and the stories that Agapita makes up, how she teaches him the zodiac how she teaches him about the animals of the llano, what to believe in.

And that’s what I did with Ultima in Bless Me, Ultima. This woman who was a healer who helped the people, is the same as Agapita. It’s almost the same person in time and memory traveled from when I wrote Bless Me, Ultima in the 60s, to recently when I wrote The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. And during that time I have developed other main characters that have come to me; usually the character comes to me and says to me "write my story". That’s the way it goes.

Does that happen in a poem? In my fiction I’m dealing with characters. A poem can be about a tree or a river. Those are characters, too. But mine are human characters and they appear and they say "write my story" and that’s where it takes off.

I guess that’s where Agapita appeared. How many years later, over 40 years since I wrote Bless Me, Ultima. And she appears again because they’re strong people. The curanderas were the healers, they helped the people. We had no doctors. They had to take care of the village, of the ranchers, of women giving birth. I honor them. Somewhere I call them the first spiritual feminists. The first spiritual feminists. Because they were spiritual, that’s what they dealt in. They were women who were strong. Did their thing. They learned curanderismo, and practiced it and weren’t afraid. When they were called witches, they weren’t afraid. They were going to go into the soul, they were going to heal the soul. And then some people would say "look what she did, she’s a witch". She has to be strong, the curandera has to be strong, and in that sense they were the first spiritual feminists.

Randy Lopez Goes Home was the beginning of how to deal with my wife’s eventual death. I had finished the novel and my wife was ill but she read it. She really liked it, "you’ve got something there" she said. So it was a preparation for both of us. Me writing it, she reading it. As I talk what story is all about, we share.

After she dies, the difference there is, I’m dealing with my grief. It’s the second step of where did she go? Where does soul go? Como dice la cancion, a donde van los muertos, where do we go? So we’re back to what I said earlier, in terms of a world view. What do I believe. I’m very eclectic. My altar has my mother’s statue of la Virgin de Guadalupe, all my photographs, a bottle of booze. Then I have this idea of the consciousness of the universe, that I am a part of that. I think the old man comes to the conclusion that his wife is there, is waiting for him. In a slightly different time space than he is living in, because he’s still here. And between here, and there, is a very small space.

•mvs: Last questions. Looking at nostalgia, memory, sorrow, as different varieties of the same thing, and looking at The Sorrows of Young Alfonso, as a book that had to be finished because the publisher demanded it to be finished--because it’s not done yet. What do you want readers to say when they close the book? "Hot damn, that was a good book!"

•RA: Absolutely, that’s what every writer wants.

•mvs: Any take away message that the reader should stop and contemplate when they finish The Sorrows of Young Alfonso?

•RA: I have to say that about every book. Yes, some of my books, especially Bless Me, Ultima have been more popular, it’s still in print after over 40 years. But every book was important at its time. It had a certain reason for being written. By the time I get to The Sorrows of Young Alfonso, I think I’ve hit a really good height in terms of the character, the story, the way I told it, how it unravels and how it ends. I feel really good about it. I want it to do well. But as I say, I feel that way about every book.

You’ve gone through this journey. I’ve become that person in the novel that I’m writing. Can’t be separated. I am full of joy or I am suffering, as my characters are. By the time I get to the end of a novel it’s, "shwe man, where have I been?" Where have I been, I’ve been lost in that book I’ve written. I must be humble but I really think when I finish a book, I say, "wow that’s great." Because I invested a lot of me in it. You invest your most important part, your creative imagination in creating a story. You’ve got to be pleased at the end.

•jst: How would you like to be remembered, in our community but also obviously the world community because you’re now a world-class writer and you’re recognized not just by Latinos but by writers across the United States and the world? How do you think you will be remembered?

•RA: Up there in the clouds traveling with my wife back to Mazatlán, I hope people say that I did some kind deeds.

Michael Sedano, Rudolfo Anaya, Jesús Treviño, Oso

Mid-Day Floricanto
Michael Sedano

The invitations arrive with frustrating regularity. A fabulous lineup of poets reading at fabled venues. Wondrous foto opportunities, poets I've not heard, or not often enough. Then I confirm the time: 8 p.m. Ten p.m. Driving at night, staying up late. Drat, two activities I cannot or prefer not to do.

Gerda Govine hosts "Poetry Within Reach"

That's why I was jumping with excitement when the invitation arrived to a mid-day poetry reading at the Pasadena Senior Center. Poetry Within Reach readings, hosted by poet Gerda Govine, take place on Wednesday afternoons. A perfect hour for retired tipas tipos like my wife and me.

Marcia Arrieta and Teresa Mei Chuc are on the bill on Wednesday, August 3. It's my first visit to the Pasadena Senior Center.

Marcia Arrieta reads in English and Spanish

Marcia Arrieta is a poet, artist, and teacher, who has an affinity for islands, gardens,

and travel.  The author of two poetry books: archipelago counterpoint  (BlazeVOX, 2015) and triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme (Otoliths, 2011), she has an MFA

from Vermont College. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry/art journal—

www.indefinitespace.net.

A veterana of English Departments in LA high schools Roosevelt and Franklin, she equipped generations of students with awareness and love for poetry. Opening her reading, Arrieta remarks,

I believe poetry and writing and art are vital for the soul & spirit—so now I would like to share some of my work  with you—my poetry tends to be minimal, language based experimental in nature—often visual—somewhat different.

Teresa Mei Chuc reads in English code-switching to Vietnamese on occasion

I have had the opportunity in the past to hear Teresa Mei Chuc read one or two poems at Avenue 50 Studio in nearby Highland Park. Today's Poetry Within Reach event is my first opportunity to enjoy a full program.

She is a wow.

Reading from several publications, Chuc's work haunts her listener with matter-of-fact readings remembering bodies pushed into the sea as survivors float on, poems drenched in agent orange producing misshapen embryos. There are lyrical pieces on roses, grandmother, children, and relationships.

I buy her collection, Red Thread Poems from Fithian Press, to add to my library.

Two programs remain in Poetry Within Reach reading series. Details at their Facebook page:

August 10, 2016 12-1 PM at Pasadena Senior Center
Hazel Harrison Clayton
Victor Vazquez

August 17, 2016 12-1 PM at Pasadena Senior Center
Dr. Mel Donalson
Carla Sameth

Poetry Within Reach is a project of the Border Council of Arts and Culture/Consejo Fronterizo de Arte y Cultura (COFAC) funded by the City of Pasadena Arts and Cultural Affairs Division in collaboration with Side Street Projects.


National Writers Union Activating in Los Angeles

There is a personal payoff for my attending the recent meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Writers Union. The hosts are Terry Reyes and David Trujillo. Terry and David were students with me when I was a Speech Professor at Cal State LA, ya hace años. And we were members of the fabled Teatro A La Brava, Terry an actor, David a writer, I the Director.

Those were the days, gente.

Left, David Trujillo, Ed Carrillo

These days, Terry and David are actively retired in a comfortable home in the hills of Highland Park. Today, their activism devotes itself to writing for social justice and righting writers' rights through efforts of a national organization, The National Writers Union.

Offering a cafeteria plan of services, NWU features Spanish Language, Journalism, Book divisions, a highly valuable Grievance and Contract assistance service, and generalized services to freelancers or writers looking to turn their words into cash.

Membership dues flow along a sliding scale based on the writer's earnings from writing. Visit NWU.org  for details on the union's services and membership.

In addition to the speakers, Ismael Parra--local chapter chair, Elle Febbo--Chapter Chair for Southern California, David Trujillo, Eric Gordon--Past Chair, several writers, members and visitors alike, shared their own work during the evening.

Upper left, speakers Ismael Parra, Elle Febbo, Lower right, readers Thomas O'Shaughnessy, Eric Gordon

Clockwise from upper left, readers Sarah Forth, Dan McCrory, Colby Wagenbach, September Williams.

Not pictured: Michael Sedano who read his 500 word memoir, "Snowy ride up the mountain."

A rich variety of readings held the group's attention. An historical essay on Nipomo, a thoughtful essay on talking and speaking Spanish, excerpt from a novel-in-process, a theatre review, Sedano's army memoir, an experimental prose-poem, a chat. Such diversity reflects the NWU's goal of "all writers, all genres, all media."

Ed Carrillo captured my attention with a memoir from his days teaching high school, including a hostile vato named Luis J. Rodriguez. Carrillo memorializes a moment during a drive back to Alhambra from a research trip to the LA Public Library when Rodriguez declares his intention to write a novel. The other kids laugh it up until Rodriguez, the alfa dog riding shotgun, turns and delivers cachetadas, promising an ass-kicking if it persists. That is the moment Always Running was born.

I'm talking to Carrillo about doing a guest column for La Bloga sharing a version of that chapter of his in-process memoir. A ver.



9th Day of the 8th Month of the 2016th Year of the Modern Era: La Bloga On-line Floricanto
Katie Hoerth, Linda Romero, Victor Avila, Ana Chig, Nancy Green

Daughter of the Valley By Katie Hoerth
I Cry By Linda Romero
The Black Handkerchief By Victor Avila
Laboral Por Ana Chig
Rage By Nancy Green

Daughter of the Valley
By Katie Hoerth

Teach her tongue how to roll the names of flowers
tickling her toes, the lantana, nightshade,
primrose. Crown her ebony curls with willow.
Teach her the word for

beauty. Show her summers were meant for sipping
raspas in the shade of mesquites, sun a
mango color turning chamoy by evening.
Teach her the word for

joy. Then let her listen to chachalaca
songs at dusk, the chants of cicadas, chanclas
rapping on caliche, the mix of lenguas.
Teach her the word for

harmony. Now make her see her reflection
in the mirror, see her own birthplace, gaze
at this flat vale, viridian river, Eden.
Teach her the word for

home.


I Cry
By Linda Romero

I cry because there is hate out there,
a hate that kills innocents wanting to see
a movie one night, taking their families
with money they probably saved up for,
for joy

I cry because hate targets gay club goers who seek
acceptance and belonging … do we not
all seek the same?

I cry for families who are told their loved one
is not coming home tonight because of the color
of their skin

I cry because children have to learn lock-down
Drills at school instead of art, music and drama

I cry for those who fear mornings when wives or husbands
leave for work, afraid they won't be home for dinner;
they want only to keep the peace in their little
part of the world for their families

I cry because our children won't always know who the bad
guys are because sometimes they wear uniforms too

I cry for a world where children are safe at school, doing
homework with friends over pudding pops and peanut
butter and honey sandwiches, and love conquers hate



The Black Handkerchief
By Victor Avila

for mg

Because I did not have
The power of a corrupt government behind me,
Or the farce of a cowardly media
That failed to speak the truth on my behalf.
Because they had threatened me
At gun point thinking it would be enough
To guarantee my silence—
Or because so many had disappeared already
That I would be too scared
To raise my voice.
But today I realized—
“What else can they do to me
That they haven’t done already?”
The mothers of Juarez cry out for their
Murdered daughters
And the ghosts of forgotten men
Haunt the very bridge you hung them from.
What else can you do to me?
You took everything from me
And that was your biggest mistake
Because you also took my fear.
And now I am no longer afraid…
If I don’t speak up now
I have only myself to blame
When the police come knocking at my door.
Are those their very trucks approaching?
And this simple piece of cloth
Once insignificant now stands for something more.
I wave it in the face of those cowards who took the 43.
I lift it high in my angry fist waving it, waving it.
I will no longer use it
To wipe away my tears or those
Of my brothers and sisters.
It is my banner in the face of overwhelming odds.
It lets the world know that I am not defeated,
That Mexico is not defeated,
And that we will bring the 43 home.


Laboral
Por Ana Chig

El día se abre entre rostros y pasos.
Suelto la mano de mi hijo.
Atrás queda el temprano patio infantil, la higuera,
los cuervos, las letras, los números, las palabras.
Siempre a la derecha escenas…
−no he de nombrar la exclusividad de la miseria humana−,
la prisa en el pensamiento y su agenda,
¡Oh, el horizonte!
A veces siento la ruptura de los diálogos con ella–la poesía.
La marcha del autobús intenta adherirme a su designio.
Es tarde, no se llega, me distraigo ante el último celaje
de la bruma levantándose de los cerros.
Entonces, enciendo las maquinas,
me programo al ruido simultáneo,
al olor del papel y la tinta impresa, a los propósitos del calendario
a la rigurosidad de la postura erguida−sucedánea fórmula de la estabilidad.
Y sin embargo, todo es tan jodidamente bello
hasta el me-ca-nis-mo hiriente, artificioso, del desasosiego.


Rage
By Nancy Green

Rage wears a mask,
appears calm, pleasant,

sharp as a razor, convinces
others to let their guard down

Deep in her soul rage listens,
scouts the territory, scrutinizes

the intentions of others,
selects the best strategy to follow

Rage contains anger, nurtures
concern, cultivates willpower,

patiently uncovers historical
facts, discards wishful thinking,

false illusions, patiently unfolds
linings of hope, faith, determination

Rage moves forward in unity,
cautiously steps into a place

of certainty, acknowledges
divine intervention, genuine support

All in one deep breath
rage inhales purpose,

sees the light at the end
of the tunnel, thrives in the
knowledge that change
is inevitable

embraces hard work as
a human right, a human

value to be cherished
with honest integrity

Rage knows her power,
her ability to destroy

racist assumptions fostered
by a system of white supremacy

Rage knows her strength
to wave off petty attacks

Rage explodes freely, fiercely
overcomes useless resistance,

exerts a will so strong
civilizations transform

to change the course
of history


Meet The Poets
Daughter of the Valley By Katie Hoerth
I Cry By Linda Romero
The Black Handkerchief By Victor Avila
Laboral Por Ana Chig
Rage By Nancy Green

Katherine Hoerth is the author of four poetry books. Her most recent collection, Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots (Lamar University Literary Press, 2014) won the Helen C Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry. Her work has been published in journals including BorderSenses, Tupelo Quarterly, and Pleiades. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and serves as poetry editor of Amarillo Bay and Devilfish Review. Her next poetry collection, The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press in early 2017. She lives in deep south Texas.

Linda Romero is from Harlingen, Texas. She has been published in the Valley International Poetry Festival Boundless anthologies since 2010, Along the River 2: More Voices from the Rio Grande (VAO Publishing), and Twenty: In Memoriam (El Zarape Press). She serves as Executive Director for Vidas Cruzadas, an outreach program geared toward creative arts in McAllen, TX.

Victor Avila is an award-winning poet. Recent work has appeared in the anthologies Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice and The Border Crossed Us. Victor has also written and illustrated several comic books. His latest Eyes of Demon the will be published in November through Ghoula Press. Victor has taught in California public schools for over twenty-five years.

Poeta, editora, creativa gráfica y promotora cultural. En 2012 funda y dirige la revista mensual de poesía Frontera Esquina en la que participan escritores, poetas, ensayistas  y artistas plásticos de la región fronteriza de Baja California y California, Estados Unidos.
     Durante este periodo coordina y dirige presentaciones literarias, recitales de poesía, festivales, exposiciones de pintura, en diversos foros culturales de la región.
     En 2014 consolida el proyecto editorial independiente Nódulo Ediciones que publica: poesía, cuento, ensayo, novela, periodismo cultural y cuento infantil.
     En 2015 forma parte del jurado para el Premio Nacional de Poesía Tijuana que convoca el Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura.

Nancy Lorenza Green is an Afro-Chicana writer & musician from El Paso/Cd. Juárez who recently released "Aura," a CD dedicated to the Ancestors that features Native American and Asian flutes and distributed by CD Baby. Check out her You Tube channel nancydelsegundo or contact her at nancygreen9@yahoo.com for presentations or to purchase CDs directly from her.



Photography note: The portraits of Rudolfo Anaya are mis-watermarked as ©2015. They are © 2016. To run a photograph, contact the photographer for permission and to receive a properly watermarked foto: msedano@readraza.com