Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Los Angeles Libros Festival 2023


From https://www.lapl.org/libros-fest


Viernes 29 de septiembre de 2023 

9 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Evento virtual para las escuelas

Transmitido en vivo vía YouTube

 

Sábado 30 de septiembre de 2023 

10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Biblioteca Central

630 W. 5th St.

Los Angeles, CA 90071

 

Un festival del libro bilingüe para toda la familia

Los Angeles Libros Festival ofrecerá dos días de programación en vivo con cuentacuentos, autores locales e internacionales, talleres de arte, conciertos y mucho más.

El viernes, Los Angeles Libros Festival será virtual con todos los programas transmitidos en vivo vía YouTube.

El sábado, el festival se llevará a cabo en persona en  la Biblioteca Central en el centro de Los Ángeles.

·       Participa en el reto en línea para acumular insignias virtuales y la oportunidad de ganar libros.

·       Explora el calendario de eventos del festival.

·       Llévate a casa los libros del festival con tu tarjeta de biblioteca o compra tus copias en la LA librería.

·       Lee el blog del festival.

·       Aprende más sobre los autores, artistas y narradores orales que participarán este año.


Para información adicional o para comunicarte con el comité organizador, envía un correo electrónico a librosfest@lapl.org.

  


Friday, September 29, 2023
9 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Virtual School Day

Streaming live on YouTube

 

Saturday, September 30, 2023

10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

 

Central Library

630 W. 5th St.

Los Angeles, CA 90071

 

A Free Bilingual Book Festival for the Whole Family

Los Angeles Libros Festival will offer two days of entertainment for all ages featuring Spanish-language and bilingual storytelling, performances, workshops, and award-winning authors.

On Friday, Los Angeles Libros Festival will be virtual with all programs streaming live on YouTube.

On Saturday, the festival will be held in-person at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.


For additional information or to contact the planning committee, email librosfest@lapl.org.


Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Way-Back Machine: Cocido Is Soup For the Ages

Michael Sedano

I've been eating Cocido as long as I remember food. Today's La Bloga-Tuesday column isn't that old, but it has some miles on it. The recipe first saw our screenpages as part of La Bloga-Tuesday piece on November 17, 2015 (link). when we celebrated the Bluebird Reading series that wound down to the last songbird at that time.

We remember you, Bluebird! Órale, what a memorable reading series!

With weather changing from balmy to breezy to downright miserable it's time for nourishing, hot, ever-ready comida. Soup is just the food to meet those standards. This beef vegetable soup--restaurants call it cocido de res, caldo de res, or just cocido--is easy to prepare. In cold kitchens, leave the pot on the stove on low flame to fill the room with aroma and keep the soup hot, and ready to eat, at the drop of a ladle.


The Gluten-free Chicano Cooks
When the weather outside turns frightful, it’s time for Cocido


The Gluten-free Chicano's second-earliest memory of food grows out of visits to my grandmother’s home on Lawton Street in Redlands, California. My mother would go to visit her mother and as soon as I stepped down into the kitchen, gramma would sit me at the rough plank table, turn to her wood-burning stove and ladle out a steaming bowl of cocido. She kept of pot of cocido going every day.

Same thing when we went to visit little gramma--my mother's grandmother--at the Las Cuatro Milpas tortilleria on Mt. Vernon in San Bernardino. There was always a pot of cocido going, along with a guisado and beans, and the world's hottest chile salsa--the air around it made me cough.

“No, gramma, pica!” I would object as she crushed toasted chile japonés pods into the caldo. I don't remember her exact words but it was something about the picoso being good for a boy's growth, how it would keep me healthy and strong. Especially that chile japonés, and sometimes a chile piquín. She was right.

The other day, a doctor walked into a hospital room I was occupying and asked if he was in the wrong room, “I’m looking for a seventy-year old man,” he declared. I tell everyone I owe my youthful appearance and resilience to eating chile every day. A day without chile, my motto goes, is like a day without sunshine. Except when I was in the Army where there was no chile to speak of (Korean chile was insipid and had no bite), I've enchilared myself nearly every day of my life.

A week without cocido is somewhat similar. I never tire of the rich beef broth and soft-cooked vegetables of my favorite food. In the twenty-some years I worked in Vernon, California, I lunched on cocido two or three times a week. Diana’s on Pacific, Avila’s El Ranchito on Santa Fe, and Millan’s mariscos on Soto, all in Huntington Park, were in a race for the best non-homemade cocido in El Lay. For The Gluten-free Chicano, the measure of a Mexican restaurant is the quality of its cocido de res.

But homemade cocido is always the best, for three key reasons: First, cocido is easy to make. Second, you have left-overs. Third, left-over cocido tastes even better the second and third day.

Ingredients – These vary based upon what’s in the reefer. In this instance, The Gluten-free Chicano forgot the carrots and ear of corn.

Beef rib bones.
Celery stalks and the root end.
Onion.
Garlic.
Red papas.
Tomato (fresh or canned).
Cabbage.
Garbanzos.
Bell pepper.
Carrots.
Helotes (or frozen cobbettes).
Cilantro.

Cook by feel--Have a sense of what you're doing and visualize the final product.

Use a large soup pot. Salt and pepper the meaty bones then brown them with sliced onion and diced garlic in a little olive oil.

Add your water (make two quarts or a gallon, depends on how many mouths you're feeding, or who is eating), a pinch each of salt and coarse ground black pepper, a handful (a cup) of dried garbanzos, the root end of a head of celery, the carrot ends, and bring to a boil.

Cover the pot, boil on medium to high flame for half an hour or longer. The wafting perfume of the broth will beckon household members to the kitchen and everyone can stand around and get hungry. It's the smell of home sweet home.

Cut the vegetables into spoon-size or slightly larger portions. Cut the cabbage in quarters.
Use the entire pepper and pull out the stem later.

Add the vegetables to the boiling soup stock. Cover and simmer on medium flame
an hour or longer, or until the meat falls off the bone. Add the corn on the cob in the last ten minutes if you like
a crispy bite, otherwise put the corn in along with the other vegetables.

This is medium flame, doesn't touch the bottom of the pot. This lets the soup cook at a leisurely pace that
intensifies and melds all the flavors to full wholesome richness.
Serve generous portions of vegetables and broth in large bowls.
Garnish with crushed chile japonés or chile piquín. Serve with lemon or
lime halves. Restaurants serve chopped onion and fresh cilantro, and
room-temperature rice. A spoonful of rice dipped into the
hot soup cools off the soup. If you're avoiding complex carbs, no rice.


Get a good quality tortilla de maíz. If possible, a tortilla made without guar gum or preservatives, just corn, lime, and water. For wheat-eaters, a freshly rolled tortilla de harina hot off the comal is a good option. Don't place flour tortillas against corn tortillas or you contaminate the gluten-free food.

A successful bowl of cocido leaves nothing but huesos and maybe a bit of cabbage stem.
¡Provecho!

Monday, September 25, 2023

Una celebración internacional para el Mes de la Herencia Hispana por Xánath Caraza

Una celebración internacional para el Mes de la Herencia Hispana

Xánath Caraza

 


Quiero comenzar la semana con una invitación para el 11 de octubre en la Ciudad de Kansas para celebrar el Mes de la Herencia Hispana que organiza el Dialogue Institute de Kansas City, la Cámara de Comercio Hispana de Kansas City y la organización Tamale Kitchen.  Habrá una cena para recaudar fondos.  El Doctor Eyyup Esen será el invitado distinguido, así mismo Murat Akyuz presentará cómo trabajar con caligrafía turca y Belma, estudiante de secundaria, leerá un par de poemas en español. Tengo el honor de ser la poeta destacada de la noche. Ojalá y nos puedan acompañar.

 


El 11 de octubre en la Ciudad de Kansas se celebra el Mes de la Herencia Hispana organizado por el Dialogue Institute de Kansas City, la Cámara de Comercio Hispana de Kansas City y Tamale Kitchen. No olviden que la cita es el miércoles 11 de octubre de 6:30 a 8 p.m. en la sede de la Cámara de Comercio Hispana que se encuentra en 107 W 10th Street., en la Ciudad de Kansas, MO, 64105. Este evento es gratis y para toda la familia. Los esperamos.

Friday, September 22, 2023

New in Paperback for September



Here's a rundown of new paperback releases for the month of September. Quite an interesting pair of books. And, as someone recently said, it's okay to buy books you may never read. You're buying art, supporting writers and bookstores, and odds are that you are going to read some of your stash. Happy book hunting art patrons, and the hoarders, too.

Also in paperback for September:

The Hacienda, Isabel Cañas
Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez
two books in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger series --- The Passenger and Stella Maris

_________________________


Murder and Mamon
Mia Manansala
Berkley - Sept. 19

[from the publisher]
Lila Macapagal’s godmothers April, Mae, and June—AKA the Calendar Crew—are celebrating the opening of their latest joint business venture, a new laundromat, to much fanfare (and controversy). However, what should’ve been a joyous occasion quickly turns into a tragedy when they discover the building has been vandalized—and the body of Ninang April’s niece, recently arrived from the Philippines, next to a chilling message painted on the floor. The question is, was the message aimed at the victim or Lila’s gossipy godmothers, who have not-so-squeaky-clean reputations?

With Ninang April falling apart from grief and little progress from the Shady Palms Police Department in this slippery case, it’s up to Lila and her network to find justice for the young woman.

The Calendar Crew have stuck their noses into everybody’s business for years, but now the tables are turned as Lila must pry into the Calendar Crew’s lives to figure out who has a vendetta against the (extremely opinionated yet loving) aunties and stop them before they strike again.


_____________________________________


Never Whistle at Night
Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.
Vintage - Sept 19

[from the publisher]

Featuring stories by:
Norris Black • Amber Blaeser-Wardzala • Phoenix Boudreau • Cherie Dimaline • Carson Faust • Kelli Jo Ford • Kate Hart • Shane Hawk • Brandon Hobson • Darcie Little Badger • Conley Lyons • Nick Medina • Tiffany Morris • Tommy Orange • Mona Susan Power • Marcie R. Rendon • Waubgeshig Rice • Rebecca Roanhorse • Andrea L. Rogers • Morgan Talty • D.H. Trujillo • Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. • Richard Van Camp • David Heska Wanbli Weiden • Royce Young Wolf • Mathilda Zeller


Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.


Later.
____________________________

Manuel Ramos writes crime fiction. Read his latest story, Northside Nocturne, in the award-winning anthology Denver Noir, edited by Cynthia Swanson, published by Akashic Books.

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Chicanonautica: Bharat, Aztlán, and Other Places, Real and Imaginary

by Ernest Hogan

New words. I keep learning them all the time. With new words come new worlds. They change your perceptions and conceptions. That’s why language is always an issue. 


I learned a new one recently: Bharat. It’s what they call that subcontinent that the Anglos have been making us all call India for the last few centuries. It’s been around for millennia. Somehow, it’s taken me sixty-seven years to learn it. 


Empires die, but their symptoms live on.


In Bharat, it and India are used interchangeably. Right-wing factions want to go back to the Sanskrit original name. Of course, it’s sending out shockwaves.


Changing names changes things. As a Chicano trickster satirical science fiction writer, I mess around with names, it’s fun, and a special sort of magic.


I renamed the Pacific Northwest Sasquatchlandia after visiting it. 


The old name and my old conceptions didn’t fit my newfound knowledge and experience.


I call the region where I live Aztlán. No, I am not part of a separatista movement to secede from the United States of Norteamerica (Would it even be possible? I should ask a lawyer sometime . . .), I just don’t see my homeland as afar-flung southwestern quadrant of an empire that rotates on a Nueva York/Washington D.C. axis, and I recognize and respect our ancient civilizations and their modern manifestations.


My life, and writing, is richer for it.


Now, India is in a position to become its own Aztlán. Decolonization happens, cabrones.


This will not just change perceptions and conceptions in Bharat, but all over the planet.


Take the controversial word Indian . . .

 

It’s universally used and catch-all term for brown-skinned peoples who are not considered civilized. Similar to the way Martian is used for people from other planets.

 

What if, through the magic of bureaucracy (we all know how powerful that is) India ceases to exist with the right sequence of keyboard strokes—what we used to call “paperwork.” Poof! No more India, only Bharat.


What about all the brown-skinned who have had the label Indian inflicted on them all these centuries? Without an India, can there be such a thing as Indians?


Can we imagine a world where there is no such thing as an Indian?


All around the planet, people will have to be redefined. A lot of us will have to redefine ourselves. Come on over, baby, there’s a whole lot of transmogrification going on!


New words. New worlds. Probably chaos. Bureaucrats, keepers of political correctness, and those who worry about cultural appropriation will be horrified. The electronic paperwork will take generations.


And someday, for good or ill, whether anybody likes it or not, will people be born on Mars. Wonder what they will call themselves?


The ancient trickster, deep inside me, smiles, with sharp teeth.


Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, has been an Indian, a Negro, and “stupid fucking white person” from time to time. Watch for his new story collection: Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions.

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Farewell Cuba, Mi Isla


By Alexandra Diaz 

 


Publisher: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books 

Language: English

Hardcover: 336 pages

ISBN-10: 1534495401

ISBN-13: 978-1534495401

 

Alan Gratz’s Refugee meets Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising in this middle grade novel about two girls fleeing 1960 Cuba with their family inspired by award-winning author Alexandra Diaz’s family’s history.

 

Victoria loves everything about her home in Cuba. The beautiful land, the delicious food, her best friend and cousin, Jackie, and her big, loving family.

 

But it’s 1960 in Cuba, and as the political situation grows more and more dangerous, Victoria, her parents, and her two younger siblings are forced to seek refuge in America with nothing more than two changes of clothes and five dollars. Worse, they’re forced to leave the rest of their family, including Jackie, behind.

 

In Miami, everything is different. And it’s up to Victoria to step up and help her family settle into this new world—even though she hopes they won’t be there for long. Back in Cuba, everything feels different, too. Jackie watches as friends and family flee, or worse, disappear. So, when she’s given a chance to escape to America, she takes it—even though she has to go alone. Reunited in Miami, can Victoria and Jackie find a way to bring the rest of their family to safety?

 

Based on Alexandra Diaz’s mother’s real experiences as a Cuban refugee in America, this is a moving and timely story about family, friendship, and fighting for your future.


 

Review

 

"This is a moving, poignant read." -- Booklist

 

"Readers will be able to relate to the coming-of-age elements while learning about an important and difficult part of Cuba’s history. An evocative and transportive read." -- Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW


 

Alexandra Diaz is the author of The Only Road, The Crossroads, Santiago’s Road Home, and Farewell Cuba, Mi Isla. The Only Road was a Pura Belpré Honor Book and won the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, as well as numerous other accolades. Santiago’s Road Home was an International Latino Book Award gold medalist and an ALA Notable Children’s Book. Alexandra is the daughter of Cuban refugees and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but got her master’s in writing for young people at Bath Spa University in England. A native Spanish speaker, Alexandra now teaches creative writing to adults and teens. Visit her at Alexandra-Diaz.com.

 

 

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Stepping Into the Stream Twice: LéaLA, Poesía En Nuestras Tres Idiomas

Reading Dialectal Material: Raza Eloquence and Poise
Michael Sedano



It didn't take long for the Spanish-language bookfair, LéaLA, to mezclar its Castellano-centric bent with its eye on the local market, only, it's about time. That long. Sunday afternoon, at Los Angeles' La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, three local poets read casí exclusively in Spanish at a highly professional, ambitious, and grand book fair. Dozens of publisher booths provided extensive choices of nonfiction, fiction, poesía, children's literature.

Next year when LéaLA hits town, LéaLA will be a must-attend event. If you find the LA Times bookfair a diverting few hours, LéaLA will prove itself a diverting three days, it's that good.

Olga García, Angelina Sáenz, GusTavo Guerra Vásquez

Maybe with the GOPlague shutting down public gatherings, LéaLA was making its come-back in a big, splashy way, taking over the grounds of the Olvera Street museum. Or, it's me; I. I've been out of circulation the past five years and I'm rediscovering the outside world after Alzheimer's. 

The poets spoke highly and pleased as ponche to be reading in Spanish only. The reading, organized by Angelina Sáenz, featured extraordinary Chicana writer Olga Garcia and, new to my ears,  GusTavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez. Guerra's debut in my ears showed Sáenz' genius in pairing the two voices whose comic antics don't conceal incisive understanding of identity, language, indomitability.



Garcia opens the reading with her wondrous war correspondent reporting from the war against the cucarachas infesting her kitchen, Ana Leticia Armendáriz: Matando cucarachas. The story is a highlight of Olga Garcia's rare gem, Falling Angels, Cuentos y Poemas. 

Garcia's account of a lone hero battling hordes of clever insidious roaches keeps the audience laughing with familiarity and recollecting their own battles versus relentless living condition.



Olga Garcia's a tough act to follow and GusTavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez is up to the task. Órale to Angelina Sáenz for the pairing.



GusTavo Guerra shares the Chapino view on living in the U.S.A., something's Guerra's been at since age of nine and has a couple of college degrees under his mortarboards to show for it. 

Guerra has a hilarious takeoff on the names we call ourselves: "Chicano" "Chapino", how about, "Chapinchicano" "Guatemalcano"? Guerra's permutations on things we can call our gente once we've gotten over here makes a witty observation on the witlessness of ethnic divisiveness.



You ain't heard nada yet. The long-time Californ' writer delivers a syntax lesson in verse inspired by how raza locals gave him shit for saying "Vos" when he was first here.

Angelina Sáenz speaks with sonorous authority in fluid Spanish in a formal style. A poet of short lines and short poems, Sáenz confesses she worked really hard to translate her English-language work into today's Spanish translations. I couldn't discern the sound of work-in-translation, while another listener told me she heard word-for-word translation, English poems in Spanish.


Ni modo. This is good work in English and effective meaning in translation. Angelina Sáenz work comes unadorned with complicated word play against fancy comfortable settings. Hers is the poetry of the single mother, home from working the graveyard shift, tired but dedicated to making lunch for the kids. She will rest, grateful her duty is done, uncomplaining and fulfilled.



The Q&A in Spanish draws an emotional response from a woman who exults at hearing poetry in Español right here en mero el Lay. Enthusiastic give-and-take among the panelists share experiences and concern that Spanish is getting systematically erased in schools and society. Yet, the poetry and conversation illustrate how universally communicative Spanish is among people separated by dialect, geography, and politics.

The final questioner, a noted academic, asks about the sources of poetry, expressing interest into inspirations and motives these poets find writing in Spanish, and the motives and sources for writing in English. The question has seven clauses, each more intricate than the antecedent and would be wondrous in the linguistics seminar.

Sáenz smiles at the questioner, thinks about the question's complexities, how her panelists will compose complex answers and, and...and issues a simple succinct pura Chicana response, "¿Y que chingado Te importa?"





Everyone's Talking About the Chicano Spaceman 

La Bloga's Ernest Hogan was talking about not one, but two, Chicano spacemen, way back in 2009. (link). Then, in September 2013 (link), La Bloga-Tuesday covered a Keynote Address at University of LaVerne by one of those spacemen, José M. Hernández.

Hernández is the subject of a streaming--not in the theatres--biopic you may have heard about, A Million Miles Away. There's high excitement about the movie so La Bloga shares its 2013 column today, including a live video of the real Hernández.


The keynote speaker offers a genuinely heroic role model, astronaut José M. Hernández. A migrant farmworker born on this side, Hernández describes his fruitpicker upbringing crawling through mud so that the siblings enjoy taking off their Levi's so stiff from mud they stand on their own. Born here, during picking season, the future astronaut's siblings were born in Mexico, during the winter.

Hernandez' speech is puro chicano mezcla. Wacha:


You can take the boy out of the fields but you can't take la cultura out of the boy. Hernández' speech is a classic example of mezcla, or code-switching expression. His polished presentation identifies José M. Hernández as a perfect candidate for any school looking for bilingual role models for kids with their own ad astra per aspera dreams. Hernández' biography sells out in English from La Verne's bookstore, only a few Spanish-language copies remain.

Hernández' father approves the ten-year old's dream to be an astronaut. Set a goal, know what's expected, where you fall short, work to achieve. Otherwise your future is here in the fields picking strawberries con la familia. He applies eleven times and is denied. On the twelfth application, he wins appointment.

Monday, September 18, 2023

SOME SEEMINGLY RANDOM EVENTS


By guest essayist Jennifer Silva Redmond

My mom was born in 1940, to a Mexican mother and an Anglo father, in that far-flung part of Mexico now known as East LA. Her parents divorced when she was young, and my mom split from my own Anglo dad in 1968, when I was seven. We all spent a few years in the hippie beach town of Venice, which I still consider my hometown, then Mom took us kids traveling around Europe, since my dad worked for Pan Am. That sojourn was followed by two years in Northern California and Oregon. We moved to San Diego when I was eleven and soon settled in the barrio of East San Diego.

I got into reading and writing very early, which lead me to reading scripts and doing theater as a preteen. At 14, I did the first of two plays at the Old Globe Theater, then went to a local performing arts college on scholarship, after testing out of high school at 16. I enjoyed studying acting, especially the summer school quarter at a campus just outside of London, but was sick of school by then, so I moved back to LA at 19 and started auditioning. I lived in Venice, waited tables in Santa Monica, and got (very) small parts in Hollywood.

My dream was to be a Broadway actress so I accepted a nanny job that took me to New York City. Once there, I became a “Californian,” which of course I’d never thought of myself as before. Once they heard where I was from, people would ask, “Then why are you here?” I could see their point—the extreme hot/cold that is NY’s weather, the indifferent concrete jungle of Manhattan, the cold, crowded beaches and lakes of the rest of the state. I got cast in an eight-month touring show in Florida, which felt more like home, with its acres of orange orchards and long white-sand beaches.

By 1989, I was a 28-year-old aspiring actress, back waiting tables and doing way-off Broadway shows. On a short trip home to San Diego for the holidays I met my old boyfriend Russel Redmond. The timing was right and he proposed and, even more important to me, he followed me to NYC with his grandmother’s ring. But one snowy day in March, we came up with the idea of kicking off our marriage with a three-month honeymoon sailing to and around Baja California’s Sea of Cortez. We got married in San Diego and soon set sail on his 26-foot sailboat across the ocean border, bound for Cabo.

My experience in Baja to that point was limited to day trips to Tijuana and weekends in Ensenada. Sailing was a new world, too; I had spent only a few weeks on the boat in a marina when we set off on that first 1000 mile journey south. The life-changing voyage was full of firsts, like my first time on solo watch enroute to the Islas San Benito during which my mindset went from wary paranoia to a kind of cosmic acceptance in four hours; my inner and outer awareness grew with every nautical mile.

We stopped in Cabo, beat our way up to La Paz, then continued north into the Sea of Cortez. I traded auditions and lunch shifts for wandering empty beaches, exploring cactus-covered canyons, and snorkeling with curious dolphins and colorful reef fish. After three months, we had not begun to see all Baja had to offer, so we cinched our belts, ate lots of rice and beans and fresh-caught seafood, and spent nine more months sailing turquoise waters and making friends in the plazas, markets, marinas and fish camps of that desert peninsula.

I quickly fell in love with Baja and its people, in small towns and fish camps, and in the capital city of La Paz. Along the way, I discovered, or rediscovered, my own Mexican-ness. My Spanish improved in the supermercados of Loreto and La Paz, at stops at the tiny tiendas of scattered fish camps, and the frequent trips to immigration offices. My daily journal writing evolved into stories, poems, and essays. To my amazement, I found that doing theater was not the only way for me to be creative and share my emotional inner life with the world. By the end of 1990, I’d chosen a pen name that included my grandmother’s maiden name, Silva, and started to become the Latina writer I am now.

I began editing for other writers in 1996, and in 2000, started working for Sunbelt Publications, a San Diego publisher that specializes in Baja and Mexico. In 2011, knowing editing was my calling, I gave up my days in an office cubicle writing budgets and grant proposals, and went back to working directly with authors. Me going freelance also allowed us—since Russel was teaching at San Diego City College by then—to continue exploring the West Coast on our sailboat during summers. By 2017, we both were working 100% online. I’m still Sunbelt’s Editor at Large, so I have the best of both worlds.

Over the years, I sold some short nonfiction pieces to magazines like Science of Mind, Sail, and Cruising World, plus anthologies that included A Year in Ink, and Dime Stories, which kept me believing that I had a future as a writer. I was especially thrilled to place a piece of short fiction in the anthology Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature. There I met Daniel Olivas and Melinda Palacio, who both wrote for La Bloga. My husband and I wrote three screenplays together, set in Arizona, Mexico, and California, which kept us traveling to locations to get the feeling of the places just right. We rewrote one of them, El Camino Real, as a short film which got made and even played at a couple of film festivals.

These seemingly random events all led me to start rewriting many of the pieces that began as journal entries so long ago. Soon, I had a rough draft of a memoir of my first year at sea. Being an editor, I kept revising and rearranging the manuscript as we sailed north to San Francisco in 2020, and on to Washington’s Puget Sound in 2022. Luckily, I found the perfect publisher who found me the perfect editor; eventually they said it was time to stop rewriting and publish the book. That memoir, Honeymoon at Sea: How I Found Myself Living on a Small Boat, is published by Re:books of Toronto, Canada. I couldn’t be happier that circumstance made me an “international author,” since I have led such an international life.

If you want to follow us on our ongoing sailing adventures—yes, the honeymoon continues!—here is the link to my Substack, Honeymoon at Sea. To buy/pick up my book at an indie bookstore, or order online and support an indie bookstore, click the link on bookshop.org. You can also order the book at Sunbelt, and see their other cool books and maps and everything else under the sun, at Sunbelt Publications which is a great way to support a small publisher and a regional book distributor.

*         *         *

Jennifer Silva Redmond is a writer and freelance editor from California, whose memoir Honeymoon at Sea is coming out from re:books of Toronto. Her essays, articles, and fiction have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, and on sites such as Brevity. She is on the staff of the Southern California Writers Conference and San Diego Writers, Ink, was prose editor for A Year in Ink volume 3, and co-founder of the critically acclaimed Sea of Cortez Review. Formerly editor-in-chief of Sunbelt Publications, Jennifer is now its editor-at-large. She lives with her husband Russel, an artist and teacher, aboard their sailboat Watchfire, somewhere on the West Coast of North America.