ELECTRIC NOISE: RAFAEL TORCH: WRITER

It speaks for itself. Start at the beginning and pace yourself.

Sort of reminds me of those posts Reginald Shepard wrote
at Harriet/Poetry Foundation.

Casa Azul: Interior (San Antonio, TX)

Congratulations, Lorraine!

A short story collection by a Vanderbilt University professor described as “an amazingly original Flannery O’Connor/Loretta Lynn collision” is one of five nominees for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Homicide Survivors Picnic by Lorraine Lopez, associate professor of English at Vanderbilt, will compete with books by Sherman Alexie, Barbara Kingsolver, Lorrie Moore and Colson Whitehead for the award, which comes with $15,000. The other four finalists will receive $5,000.

The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in America.

“This is truly an amazing honor,” said Lopez, who teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Vanderbilt. “I have long admired the other finalists and am thrilled to be in such esteemed company.”

The winner will be named May 8 at the 30th Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

“Overwhelmed by book-length stories and storytellers, we three writer-judges had to knuckle down and settle in for some serious summer, fall and winter reading and inner-listening,” said judge Al Young. “We managed to come up with five lingering beauties that freshly express the complex ways Americans believe and behave.”

The other judges were Rilla Askew and Kyoko Mori. The nominations were announced Feb. 23.

Homicide Survivors Picnic illustrates the lives of men, women, teenagers and children at turning-point moments. The title story follows a single mother as she drives her pregnant teenage daughter and son to a gathering for survivors of murdered loved ones.

“An amazingly original Flannery O’Connor/Loretta Lynn collision, this collection lets us witness the indomitable spirit and forces us to take pure joy in all we really ever have a chance at: flowed, gorgeous, weird, rollicking, screwed survival,” wrote critic Heather Sellers of Homicide Survivors Picnic.

For more information on the awards and The PEN/Faulkner Foundation, see www.penfaulkner.org.

Message from Michael Nava

Dear Friends:


Many of you know me as the author of the Henry Rios novels, published between 1988 and 2000, which won a total of six Lambda Literary Awards. These books traced the life and the cases of a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer, Henry Rios, through the dark days of the AIDS epidemic. When I retired Rios in the last novel, Rag & Bone, I made him a judge. For my work I was honored with the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in LGBT Literature.

Now, I am trying to see if life will imitate art. I am running for the San Francisco Superior Court, attempting to become the first openly gay judge of color in San Francisco’s history. I have been a lawyer for 28 years and most of that time working as an attorney in the California court system; currently I am a staff attorney for Carlos Moreno, a justice on the California Supreme Court. I am unquestionably qualified for the position. I also would represent San Francisco’s values of social tolerance, progressive politics and community and reflect San Francisco’s rich diversity.

My opponent is a sitting judge appointed by the Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the time of his appointment, my opponent did not work or live in San Francisco and had a long record of supporting conservative politicians including George W. Bush. A partner at a big law firm, he wrote himself a check for $50,000 to begin to fund his campaign.I am reaching out for help to those of you who know the Rios novels or who support the cause of LGBT equality. Many of the elected officials of San Francisco have rallied behind me, and I have raised nearly $65,000, but this is going to a tough race because of my opponent’s deep pockets. I am asking you to go to my website http://www.navaforjudge.com to learn more about me, to join my Facebook fan page and, above all, to make a donation to my campaign; even a $25 donation by enough of you will help me level the playing field. You can make a contribution on-line at my website or download the donor form and mail one in. Thank you so much. 

Respectfully,
Michael Nava

One of the "Nifty Fifty": NY Times

Most architects live to build. Teddy Cruz lives to lay the economic, social and political groundwork for buildings — specifically, housing and small-scale commercial centers for minority communities, most of them in the rapidly growing area between San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico, where, Cruz said, “some of the richest real estate in the world is 20 minutes away from some of the poorest.”

The NY Times on Tato Laviera

Poet Spans Two Worlds, but Has a Home in Neither
By David Gonzalez for The New York Times

His poems, in countless anthologies and five of his own collections, are considered part of the Latino literary canon. His plays and lectures have earned him honors etched in flowery superlatives on plaques. But Tato Laviera would rather possess a more prosaic document, written in legalese.

A lease.

Mr. Laviera has known his share of troubles in recent years, including diabetes, blindness and dialysis. But in December, life became infinitely more complicated when he underwent emergency brain surgery. Too unsteady to return to his Greenwich Village apartment, he checked into a nursing home for physical therapy.

Two weeks later, he fled.

Complete story is here.

Laviera reads from his latest book, AmeRícan

from THE NEW YORKER BLOG:

ONE YEAR: STORYTELLER-IN-CHIEF

Posted by Junot Díaz

It has always seemed to me that one of a President’s primary responsibilities is to be a storyteller. We all know the importance of narratives, of stories; they are part of the reasons our brains are so damn big. We need stories, we thrive on them, stories are how we shape our universe. Tolkien could have been talking about the power of stories when he described his One Ring: stories rule us, they find us, they bring us together, they bind us, and, yes, they can pull us apart as well. If a President is to have any success, if his policies are going to gain any kind of traction among the electorate, he first has to tell us a story.

Re-visiting THE ART OF EXILE

"Carolyn Forche brought the traumatic to powerful witness. But her voice was not a voice like this: quiet, tender, the voice of a Salvadoran who escaped but who never escaped. Archila shows us his country’s fragile and exquisite terrain, his people’s untrammeled spirit, the wounds an immigrant hides, an LA where he comes to manhood, where he becomes a teacher, where he carries the dead & lost: Memo, Chico, his mother who could never have his safety.  They carry him, too. His poems carry us. In America he goes to the place of the forgotten and recognizes himself."

Comments stream:

“That book got a wonderful review in the magazine I edit, MultiCultural Review. After the review came in, I went out and ordered my own copy of The Art of Exile.”

In Praise of the E-Flyer (courtesy of PALABRA)

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE:

And HERE you can sample

Daniel Olivas' short story

"Franz Kafka in Fresno,"

which he has recently gifted 

to readers of La Bloga.

Being Bilingual Is Like

Don Share, poet and senior editor at Poetry, has a wide-ranging, interesting post he titles "Speaking English is Like"---an allusion to the title of the opening poem in Kristin Naca's Bird Eating Bird. In addition to Naca's work, he also references Craig Santos Perez and his blog post at Harriet about "U.S. Hispanics." But the post really drew me in when it began to hone in on the subject of bilingualism. At one point, he quotes the Irish (as in Irish language) poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who, in an essay, writes:

"Does a bilingual existence really, as many claim, lead to a genuinely stereoscopic and enriched view of life, or is it the cause of mental astigmatism and blurred vision, a sense of displacement, a deep anxiety? I have found at times that the inner contradictions bilingualism entails cause psychic pain: sometimes it is as if a civil war were going on inside me, and the sheer effort of maintaining a standoff of the warring parties is deeply exhausting. All my energies get sucked down into the subconscious, with a depression characterised by overwhelming lethargy as its most obvious physical manifestation. Even in better times there is a constant restlessness. Is this feeling of being unsettled, vaguely in exile from somewhere I know not where or something I know not what, connected with the sheer complexity of Irish history - or is it just an ineradicable part of the modern condition?"

And then Don Share writes:

"I wonder how that would sit with American poets who are bilingual."

Well, that would depend on which bilingual poet you were to ask, and what trajectory that particular poet has had with his/her bilingualism. "American poets who are bilingual" is as heterogeneous a group as American poets. 

I read Nuala's excerpt, and it underscored for me what "bilingualism" has not meant in my life. If anything, any "sense of displacement" or "psychic pain" or "constant restlessness" has come from having to contend with external attitudes that, in ways explicit or implicit, suggest that my condition as a bilingual citizen of the United States somehow renders me "foreign" ("You speak English without an accent") in the country I was born and raised in. Consider this article about an independent bookstore in New Haven, CT, which is requiring it's Hispanic employees to only speak in English, because its management wants to "make our customers feel welcome and comfortable" !

 My bilingualism---that is, my capacity to read, understand, write, translate from, translate into (with help), and speak Spanish---has given me an "enriched view of life." I consider myself very lucky in this regard, because I imagine (I have no reason to doubt Ni Dhomhnaill's sincerity) that this may not be the case with other people's relationship to their second tongue.

But I would also echo Don Share when he says, "I don't feel at all superior to a monolingual person." Which is not to say that there aren't Spanish-speaking Latino/as who view non-Spanish -speaking Latino/as as somehow less "Latino/a" or  somehow inferior because of this fact.

Ironically enough, the poet who first instilled in me the notion that my Spanish was an asset was John Montague, who was a visiting poet at UC Berkeley when I was an undergraduate there. A seminal moment for me, then, where my biligualism is concerned, was a visit to his office hours to show him a poem that included some Spanish. The lesson he imparted in that one hour visit remains to this day. And he's the Irish poet whose work I first fell in love with, and still love. 

Reading Nuala's passage also reminded me of the reaction I had the first time I read Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory in 1982, when I was in high school. It underscored how two people with very similar linguistic backgrounds----having Spanish play an indelible role in our respective childhoods----could then diverge radically in our linguistic journeys due to Roman Catholic nuns paying a visit to a private home to tell a set of parents to cease speaking to their children in their mother tongue. I've said it before: I feel grateful that Sister Mary Stevens, my first grade teacher, never paid a visit to my home!

Having said all this, I love Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's work and had the immense pleasure of spending an afternoon with her over a few pints of beer in Davis CA in the spring of 2000. Our point of concurrence was our love of literary translation. I took the opportunity to ask her something I knew and know to be true for me. I confessed that working on the translation of a poem (from Spanish to English) and coming to a place where I felt good about the English language poem I'd come up with gave me as much satisfaction as an original poem of my own I'd been working on. She said she felt the same way, and I believed her.

my thanks to Don Share whose post prompted these jottings

CANTO COSAS: volume IV: Steven Cordova

Foreword 
by Alberto Ríos

ORDER IT HERE

Poetry Daily: Canto Cosas Poet Featured

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