Fire burns nothing but stuff

Late-breaking News
Lisbeth Coiman reminds that this Saturday, January 18, the popular and arrestingly interesting panel of other-than-Mexican immigrant poets (link), returns to the Los Angeles area.

Coiman writes: On Saturday 1/18/25 at 2PM at the Eagle Rock branch library, @viguerespertalicia @tue_my_chuc and @parchitapoet will be in conversation with @thelma_t._reyna. Our Immigrant Hearts is a discussion series created by Thelma Reyna in which three to four poets of completely different backgrounds discuss about what brought us to this country and under what circumstances. We will be happy to see you there.

Fire burns nothing but stuff: Two Reports

Michael Sedano

Painting by Margaret Garcia

La Bloga-Tuesday welcomes the temporary return of an OG La Bloga veterano, the founder himself, Rudy Ch. García. Motivated by the horrendous California firestorms, García's essay ruminates upon background causes and humane remedies to moral and actual conflagration. 

First, a personal note. 

It all burned down, the house I moved into with my daughter and granddaughter two years ago, following the death with Alzheimer's Dementia of my wife, Barbara. We'd been married 54 years when I lost her and despite my numbed devastation, I found new hope in my daughter's dream house. 

The fire knocked me down after I'd finally gotten back on my feet. My daughter and granddaughter are Sedano Women. This means they're strong, smart, indomitable. We shall rise again. 

Me, I numbed myself during Barbara's five year journey to the end of Time, and the fire hit me with less impact than it should have. I have nothing, the fire ran away with all of my stuff. 

In the days since the house went into ashes, I've begun remembering the stuff I left behind when I made my break for it, at Amelia's insistence. 

I thought sure the fire was too darn far away to reach all the way to our home. My daughter thought otherwise and insisted I head from the hills down into Pasadena where I now reside in a motel with the clothes on my back, a camera, and my laptop computer.  

The Arte. Ironically, one of the first lost paintings that comes to mind is a Margaret Garcia fire painting, her birthday gift to me back in August. (Not the one pictured above, since mine is ashes). Then more paintings, lino cuts, sculpture, serigraphs, my prized Diego Rivera etching. 

My clothing. Cashmere sweaters that were birthday and Christmas gifts from Thelma Reyna. My bespoke suits from Korea that still fit, casí. My other cameras. My spare change. My... 

One day soon, the insurance company will want an inventory. Maybe when I go through the rubble (once the blockade gets lifted) I'll have a more complete notion of what I lost when I say I lost everything.  

But it's just stuff. 

Each item stands as a token for memories, and those are indelible. I remember how Barbara fell in love with Garcia's "Dancing In the Moonlight." I asked Margaret about it and she told me "Cheech owns it." Barbara pined for the image. Then one holiday sale at Frank Romero's Frogtown studio, I walked in the front door where Margaret sat smiling. I smiled back. She points up at the wall above her. She'd made a version of "Dancing In the Moonlight."

 

"Dancing In the Moonlight" by Margaret Garcia

Barbara loved her copy of the work. I don't have Barbara, and I don't have Margaret García's pastel anymore. But nothing can deny me those memories, García's smile, Barbara's joy unwrapping the work. 

The move from my old abode, empty but for memories, to my daughter's house on the hill that itself now is only memories, creates new memories. Important, vital, alive memories. All that stuff is gone and all those memories spring forth when I begin to count the stuff I lost. 

I treasure the memories and will miss the treasures, but so it goes. It is what it is. Only Time will deny me my memories.

Here's a Rolling Stone article by Nancy Dillon that recounts the immediate aftermath of our fire (link), and the foto of our home, before and after.

Top: foto Amelia Sedano. Bottom: Nancy Dillon Rolling Stone 

Note: Gente are kind and generous. As Rudy Ch. García recounts below, our local community is filling with aid workers and supplies to give to people who lost it all.

As word got out about our fire, I've been inundated with kindness and offers of help. Thank you, my friends, my daughter is on top of it and is making all the business and legal arrangements we need to rise from the ashes. 

However, if anyone knows a three-bedroom house with yard to rent in Pasadena, South Pasadena, or Arcadia, please let me know. 

Guest OG Columnist Rudy Ch. García 

Watching news of the devastation from California fires evoked memories of devastation from Israeli bombings of Gaza caused by Zionist greed for land that’s not theirs. Or the greed of fossil fuel investors putting profits ahead of even their own neighborhood’s interests.  

Hearing that one of the California homes lost belonged to LaBloga’s own Michael Sedano brought up the memory of Manuel Ramos and me, and Em, as he’s known, to establish La Bloga and carry on “the torch” passed to us by Teresa Marquez, over twenty years ago. 

Another reminder to the devastation was last week’s NPR news piece (link) the type of information that should be broadcast to the MAGA world, as well as news about the 100 Mexican firefighters sent to help southern California. 

Another memory: A house burned to the ground, along with a nearby tree. A distraught mother. Forty years ago. Mi amá. Caused by arson, not by Global Warming. The arsonist never caught, though it might’ve been a rival curandera using matches more than magic. 

Twenty years later my sister’s home would burn, possibly from bad wiring, also caused by greed that creates poverty among us, and poor construction based in meager incomes.

But there’s a higher level than that, a higher understanding that Californio individuals and families are experiencing. Witness the outpouring of food, clothing and other donations from other L.A. residents and groups. Higher like the NPR immigrants who went to desperately aid homeowners with incomes much higher than theirs. Not because they were brown like them, most of whom weren’t. Not because they were neighbors in neighborhoods unaffordable to people like them.  But because of something higher that I call EnComun, a term you can’t google. 

EnComun includes elements of survival of the species, protection of one’s own kind, even spiritual connection to a plight the immigrants know firsthand from their own lands, where cartel greed and corruption greed and corporate greed in power ruins their entire country.

Putting out wildfires ravaging even cities only battles the effects of Global Warming. But the immigrants likely know that too. Nevertheless they braved smoke and heat and some danger by going into those areas. 

No doubt other nationalities, US citizens, doused what they could as well. Just as western states and Canada have mobilized extensive agency support to reciprocate last year’s assistance under Biden.  We doubt many southern California multi-millionaires went to grab buckets to fill them with their own swimming pool water and help neighbors. But we also doubt any would raise their hand if asked how many invested fortunes in fossil fuels. 

But we need not worry about people who can afford more than one mansion, employing immigrants to tend their gardens and keep their pools clean EnComun. 

When enough of us realize we need to grab buckets and garden hoses to stop the mega-millionaires, politicians, bureaucrats and other empowered enablers from interfering in preserving the land, water, air and all the organic life, then EnComun could proliferate.

Instead of just sending Michael Sedano and other victims our thoughts, prayers, commiseration and sympathy, send them pledges that the greed that burned their homes will be uncoupled from positions of power by us all. 

When EnComun spreads, even injured wildlife, native trees, bush and grasses, insect life, and the earth, water and air can be connected to our everyday life. The day I flew into SanAnto to see mi amá’s charred rubble of a casa, a jumble of emotions filled me. Vengeance against the arsonist. Anger at the poverty we grew up in and she would continue living under. Eventually she would lose all the small houses on her rural property to unscrupulous and inept actions by extended family. No EnComun there at all.  

Working through my jumble at mi amá’s, we searched the ashes and soot for fotos or anything that could be salvaged. There was casi nada. Then we hired a bulldozer to rid the site of the debris.  

That night we were as EnComun as we’d ever been, unaware that decades later the results of Global Warming would reach literally the entire planet. But that night, armed with a bottle of Presidente and a case of beer, we all drank, chatted, joked and eventually laughed. Even mi amá got peda, something I’d never seen. Nor ever after.  

I hope some of the burned-out Californio residents might find ways to connect with the immigrants and others, EnComun or just in common. Both “sides” deserve to find solace and stronger connections in the extended times that are coming for us all. And likely more scalding for many more of us until greed’s stranglehold on power is smothered out 

Gracias, R.Ch.Garcia rchgarcia.com

Coming Full Circle in Twenty Years of Poetry

Melinda Palacio, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate

This column was first published in the Santa Barbara Independent.

Photo by Michael Sedano

  

The Santa Barbara Writers Conference began last Sunday. The conference has been an important part of my life for the past twenty years. I’ve participated as a volunteer, panelist and workshop leader at the conference. I wrote the poem that launched my writing career those two decades ago, “How Fire Is a Story, Waiting.” That poem that won first place at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 2003 became the title poem of my first full length poetry book in 2012, published by Tía Chucha Press. 

 

The poem is about a memory I have of my grandmother playing with the stovetop’s fire. As a child, I watched her cook and she would tell me stories about her life and our family. One day, she showed me how she could catch the fire in her hand without burning herself. I was mesmerized, and smart enough to realize I shouldn’t try her trick. I had already gotten into trouble for playing with matches and showing my young neighbor how to light a match on the side of the matchbox. To this day, my grandmother’s words, falling into the fire, continue to be a source of inspiration. 

 

I remember the day I workshopped the poem in Perie Longo’s class. After the workshop, she asked for a copy of the poem. I thought she was going to mark it up and give me suggestions for improving the poem. I had no idea she would nominate me to win the poetry contest at the weeklong conference. However, I do remember the confidence I received as an added bonus. The win encouraged me to try other genres, short stories and fiction. 

 

Two years later, at the conference, in 2005, I won honorable mention in fiction. But it wasn’t until 2011 that Arizona State University published my novel, Ocotillo Dreams, about the 1997 immigration sweeps in Arizona. Part of the publishing game is showing some sort of track record. In my queries for Ocotillo Dreams, I was able to say I had won first place in poetry at the SBWC and honorable mention in fiction. Every award and publication showed publishers I was serious about my writing career. 

 

I didn’t have the kind of overnight success that draws people to desire a literary career. My poems and book manuscripts have been rejected hundreds of times. It wasn’t until five years after the breakthrough poetry win that my first chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won a publishing prize. The Fire poem didn’t make it into its own full-length book until nine years later when Tía Chucha Press published How Fire Is a Story, Waiting in 2012. 

 

Fast forward to two weeks ago at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, I participated in a poetry panel for Tia Chucha Press, the imprint started by former Los Angeles Poet Laureate and author of Always Running, Luis J. Rodriguez. I read from the one copy I have of How Fire Is a Story, Waiting. The book is officially out of print. The good news is Tía Chucha Press is reprinting the book. The title poem is also a song now. I never thought I would add songwriter to my writing resumé but over the pandemic, I became obsessed with learning the guitar and ukulele. Songwriting was a natural next step. I’ve enjoyed incorporating music in some of my poetry readings. In addition to writing new poems, finishing a second novel, my latest project is writing companion songs for some of my poems. I was surprised when I thumbed through my journal, looking for poem ideas and discovered I had a song. After writing the song, I wrote a companion poem for the song. 

Poetry and Songs at the Botanic Garden

 

This week, after a four-year hiatus, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference returns for its 50^th anniversary. I will join the faculty and volunteers and I will be a special guest in Perie Longo’s class and celebrate my 20^th anniversary as a returning poet and now Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. 

 

 

 

How Fire Is A Story, Waiting

Melinda Palacio    

 

 

My grandmother caught the flame in her thick hands.

Curled fingers made nimble by kaleidoscope embers.

Fire burns hot and cold if you know where to touch it, she said.

 

I watched the red glow spit and wiggle as it

snaked down the thin timber, a striptease, 

born out of the festive sound of a half-filled matchbox.

 

Through orange windows framed by obsidian eyes, I saw the child she once was. 

A little girl who raised herself because her mother had a coughing disease.

Blood on her mother’s handkerchief didn’t stop her from dreaming.

Maria Victoria was going to be a singer with her deep, cinnamon stick voice. 

 

She watched novelas in the kitchen while waiting for dough to rise.

Her body, heavy with worry for two families and three lifetimes.  She tucked

Mariachi dreams under her girdle. Lullabies escaped on mornings 

warmed by her song falling into gas burners turned on high.

 

The flame on a stove was never the same.  It had a bad hangover,

didn’t remember the many matches lit when its starter broke down.

 

My grandmother rolled paper into a funnel, 

stole fire from the pilot to light the stubborn burner on the right.  

Crimson burned blue on the white paper, its folded edges 

curled black like a lace ruffle on a skirt.

 

The finicky flame can’t comment on its magic.

The thousands of tortillas and pancakes cooked over the years.

How I burned myself roasting a hot dog campfire style.

How a melted pencil smudged under my sister’s eyelid makes her beautiful.

 

My grandmother noticed the time, almost noon.

She needed to make three dozen tortillas to feed her family of thirteen.

The show over, she blew the match into a swirl of gray squiggles,

snuffed before it had a chance to burn hot on her finger.

 

Funny, how fire is a story, waiting.