poets-from-california

"... '. At the end of his , Hemingway writes of , “I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.” That line, and his portrayal of their marriage in his memoir—so poignant and steeped in regret—inspired me to first to read biographies of her, and then to write a novel, ', which tells the whole of their wildly romantic and ultimately tragic love story from her point of view. All the biographers agree that of Hemingway’s four wives and numerous conquests, Hadley’s the one who is changed for the better by knowing him. She blooms. When the two meet in 1920, Hadley’s a quiet, twenty-eight-year-old near-spinster. Her life has been difficult, strained by illness and death, and she’s all but given up on love and happiness. Ernest bowls her over with his aliveness and intensity. Though she can’t help but be anxious about his attractiveness to others, she takes the risk."

"I want to believe that it is sometimes our greatest and most difficult pain that leads us to our lives' purpose."

"Don’t try to impose your will on a book before you know what it is—or what it needs. Writing is a kind of trust exercise: you do the work, you show up again and again, and over time the story begins to meet you. It’s like standing at the edge of a clearing, palm open, trying to lure a wild animal out of the woods. Little by little, it creeps closer. And listen to your obsessions. Whatever you can’t stop thinking about—that’s your compass."

"I would suggest that any time a group of people participates in an antilinear thinking, any time a group of people practices customs and beliefs, contrary to the norm, any time a group of people begins to speak negatively and unflatteringly of God and the state, any time a group of people organizes itself into a cohesive whole with a language that tells the truth as it knows it and experiences it-and calls that language art, poetry, song, sculpture, work, study, lovemaking, child-rearing, or what have you then the powers that be order in the troops. And the troops stand guard, infiltrate, imprison, and in various ways attempt to control all of those who would subvert the "natural" order of things, the construction of the world as we know it today: patriarchal and imperious, bloated on its own self-importance, pompous, cruel, and dominating."

"The purpose of ritual, ceremony, and prayer is to open ourselves to that power, to bring into our everyday, existence the knowledge and memory of that time, to reinvoke it and reparticipate in it. And the gate through which we enter the dream world, the world of time immemorial; the place of inception, conception, and perception, is language. For without language, there are no stories; there is no speaking and singing the world into existence."

"Lesbian images and language, especially the images and language of lesbians of color-because we have lost more than many others may be some of the most subversive texts being written today. It isn't just the challenge to the state's notions of normalcy as represented by someone like Jesse Helms. Our challenge to authority does not come alone in the area of reimagining and reconstituting our sexuality. For years now we have reconstituted on some level the family, the community, the schools, and perhaps even the military. The meaning and value of these institutions have come under scrutiny and reevaluation and change by those of us who have functioned in and survived them. We lesbian writers have taken it as our responsibility to articulate our survivals and transformations in this war on our integrity. We represent a challenge to the Western way of thinking at a primal level. The more we tap into those tribal roots and quench our thirst on the milk and honey of our mother tongue, the more we can withstand the shock of living in this deadly and soul-annihilating system. We have to scramble their messages and learn to read the code we devise out of it. We have to go into the place of the great solitary vision of our own being - a being intimately attached to and integrated with the net of all being and beings - and humble ourselves and ask for a song, a vision, a dream, a language that promotes and heals, that nurtures and provides. We have to humble ourselves, perhaps before the little bug that causes the mirage or before the northern flight of birds, on whose shiny backs we may find the words that ensure our survival and the survival of those who come after us."

"…For me, interviewing was like being a detective and listening for cues into a story. Ana Deavere Smith says that as an actor she listens for emotions. As a writer I listen for both emotions and details. People sometimes get emotional and sometimes they get descriptive when recalling a memory. Sometimes it seems people are visualizing what they see. Other times memories involve the senses, like the smell of burnt beans, or nana’s eucalyptus leaves…"

"…There’s momentum about making our presence known. We’re here. We’re Latino playwrights and theatre professionals. Eventually there’s going to be a tipping point and more of our stories will become part of the American canon. I write what I know and for now I focus on Latinos because going through school, I longed to read about my experience…"

"…I believe that the more specific you write, the more universal it becomes. I see plays that aren’t Latino all the time. Why shouldn’t my work speak to a broad audience? What if theatre becomes a little more balanced? I believe that as the Latino middle class grows, they’ll buy tickets if there’s theatre for them."

"This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…"

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"Living on the hyphen is a complex cultural existence at times, and we’re often pulled in many directions where allegiance is always demanded. It is a fractured state of being, though I don’t think it’s necessarily bad; at least the having multiple ways of looking at life-the Mexican and American/the male and female. Where that goes awry is when we want to make one way of approaching life, The One Way. That’s where things begin to disintegrate, loyalties are questioned, and patriarchies are born…"

"It is an American story. And it’s a Mexican story. I’m the child of immigrants. Being the child of immigrants is always this liminal space of, where do I fit in? It is complex. And the older I get, the more complex it becomes. I was born here. What I celebrate is the America that I grew up in—it’s very brown, it’s very Mexican…"

"It’s easier for me to point out what makes bad literature: forced language, too much description, poor word choice, writing things just for shock value, shitty plots, clichés, lack of research, lazy writing, people who are trying to write “diversely” for the sake of diversity. Good literature is the opposite of that…"