The Politics of Political Writing: A Normal Interview with Ru Freeman

By Mary Pickett

Mary Pickett: You live in Philadelphia. Do you like it?

Ru Freeman: I love Philly. After I graduated from Bates College, I was in Philadelphia for a few years. I like the fact that Philly is a working-class town. I spent a lot of time in New York, which always feels unmanageable, but Philadelphia has a lot of what New York offers and it’s manageable and friendly and real in a way that I relate to. I used to live downtown and I liked it a lot. I live in the suburbs now, and I don’t like that so much. [Laughs]

MP: You currently teach at Columbia University. What courses do you teach there, and how does your teaching inform your writing?

RF: You know, I really enjoy teaching and I think it’s because I didn’t go through any writing program, so every time I teach I really have to put a lot of thought into what it is I’m going to talk about and think about the students, and come up with something brand new.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to teach whatever I want. For instance, in the fall, I’m teaching a class that I call “12 Takes on Love.” It’ll include 12 different books, such as Toni Morrison’s Love, Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying, Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Twelve different texts all dealing in some way with love, whether it’s between parents or lovers or friendships. I have to go back and read those books and think about what pedagogy I might want to exercise in each of these texts and that’s the learning experience for me.

I think all of that feeds my writing because that’s how I came into writing – by reading, not through completing any kind of writing program. I’ve never actually taken a writing class. I guess this experience does a double-duty; it allows me to teach a class and teach myself.

MP: I wasn’t aware that you didn’t take any formal writing classes. Growing up in Sri Lanka, did you just know that you wanted to be a writer?

RF: Well, I came from a family of people who write; it was something that everybody in the family did. From that point of view, it has always been a part of my life. It was always going to be in my life, no matter what I ended up doing.

MP: At what age did you move from Sri Lanka to the United States?

RF: I came to go to college. I came to the U.S. because Sri Lanka was in the middle of political problems and all the universities were shut down, so that was the reason for me to apply and try to go to the U.S. My goal when I came here was to finish undergraduate as soon as I could and go back home, but that didn’t happen, obviously. I ended up staying longer than I’d intended to.

MP: You received a degree in labor relations.

RF: Yes, looking at female migrant labor in the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There’s a lot of migrant labor there, particularly women who go out to work as domestic aids.

MP: I wanted ask about your involvement as editor for the powerful anthology Extraordinary Rendition, which was released last year. How did this publication come to be? How did you get more than 60 writers to contribute their voices to this cause?

RF: Well, it wasn’t easy. [Laughs] A lot of life is diplomacy – you have to know whom to ask and what to ask and how to ask. You have to figure out the perfect pitch. You can’t ask each writer in the same way; some will do it, some are going to need persuasion, and some are going to need others to write before they even write. But all of them want at some level to do something. They just don’t know exactly how to approach it because, in general, American writers don’t get involved in politics or political speech much, in comparison to our fellow writers in Europe or anywhere else in the world.

This was a learning experience for me: You figure out how to do it and then you do it. It was an interesting experience and I’m really glad that I did it. There were writers that supported me in helping me to find others – it all connected in a very good way. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of because it wasn’t just me writing a book; it was me having really to work with all these kinds of writers and the different moving parts to get it published: the cover that came from a painting by the South African artist, Marlene Dumas, who gifted it to us for our use, to the blurbs, to the publishing, to all the events that came after.

However, there was one notable absence from the book – it’s so illustrative of the way that these kind of books work. It was a beautiful essay about the way Palestinians are covered in the news by Laila Lalami, which had appeared in the Daily Beast, and they paid her some small amount. They would not let us carry it without paying them an exorbitant amount of money that we could not possibly afford. And they wouldn’t release it for us to carry, even with an acknowledgment. It seemed really deliberately restrictive because the essay is online; anybody can read it for free, but they wouldn’t let us put it in this book. So you start to think of the politics behind these kind of decisions. Her essay was really good and she was really disappointed. She wrote to them and said, you didn’t even pay me that money for my essay, but you’re preventing them from using an essay that is now online, free for anybody to read.

MP: It sounds like developing this anthology was complicated! Now, I’d like to ask about your two novels, A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane. They both contain main characters whose storylines interweave and find surprising but strong connections. I was wondering what techniques did you use to craft these characters? Did you already have these connections in mind when you began writing?

RF: With my first novel, A Disobedient Girl, I knew that two stories had to come together. I didn’t quite know how, but I knew that they had to at some point. So I guess I was developing each of their stories and at the back of my mind, I knew [they had to come together]. That’s all I kept in mind. If I think too hard about what it is I’m doing, it’s very hard for me to write. So you could keep something inside, sort of off to the side of my head, and think, ‘Okay, it’s going to have to come together later’ and then I compose the story and see how it comes together.

With On Sal Mal Lane, all of those characters were connected right from the get-go. I knew this family was moving in [to a new neighborhood] and that all the different characters on this road were going to get involved somehow, for better or worse, at different degrees. At the end, it’s the matter of following that central idea to its conclusion.

In terms of technique, with these two stories in particular, because I’m familiar with the place, it wasn’t as difficult to keep it in mind as I wrote. With the new book that I’ve just finished, that was harder, so I have more notes and maps and a chart that tells me what’s happening in each section.

MP: So would you say that because both of your published novels take place in your home country, it was an easier writing process?

RF: The little details that you have to think about arose more organically because I knew [the location] very well. What I really had to keep track of was the story itself, not so much all the other little things that you need to deepen a story, like the places in any one country. You have to really root a story in that place and that’s harder if you don’t know the place.

MP: You mentioned that you’re finishing up a new book. Can you talk a little more about that?

RF: It’s not set in Sri Lanka. [Laughs] It takes place in other foreign countries and the U.S., but it’s got some of the similar themes of social dislocation and war, topics that I like to write about.

MP: Most of your writing takes a strong political or social stand, and you identify yourself as an activist. You have this power in your voice that comes out in all your writing; a sense of dominating the conversation your writing enters into. Did you have to practice to get the strong voice you have now, or was it inherent?

RF: It’s an interesting thing. I think there’s two parts to it; one is that when you grow up in a country that is very political, you become very comfortable disagreeing with people about politics. You’re around politics all the time. In the U.S., you tend to avoid it; it’s almost bad manners to bring up politics with people you’ve just met. You just don’t do it. If you sense that they’re going to be in disagreement, you just dance around it and you go talk about something else. And that’s very unfamiliar to me.

There’s a Malaysian writer called Preeta Samarasan. She and I had this huge disagreement on Facebook and then all our American friends were just horrified, like ‘Oh my gosh, you must not be talking to her anymore.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I think I’m going to take my whole family and stay with her in France.’ [Laughs] The argument on politics is very separate from the friendship that we also have. Yes, sometimes it can get very ugly, but you don’t avoid the conversation just because you’re friends.

There was a huge conference at Virginia Tech on post-war writing. Both my brothers are journalists in Sri Lanka and I was invited to do one of the keynotes. When I finished, there was a Q&A and my brother got up and he asked these really challenging questions and there was a part of me that thought, ‘You are my brother, you shouldn’t be making me have to fight to look good here.’ [Laughs]

MP: He was putting you on the spot! [Laughs]

RF: Yes, but at the same time, it’s just normal. That’s what you do; you ask the question. I grew up in that way. That comfort, I guess, to have an opinion and be OK in saying it.

But the other part of it is that these are the issues I care the most about. I don’t write about things – it sounds stupid to say it – I don’t write about things I don’t care about. For instance, the destruction to the environment in the U.S. and around the world is a big issue and yes, I care about it. I hope we do better [at protecting the environment] in the U.S., but it doesn’t inflame my passion. I don’t get passionately worked up about the environment. I see it in its place with other things, but public education, racial injustice, war. … There are other issues that really get me going, so that’s what I write about.

MP: Do you find that you use a similar tone of voice across all formats of writing?

RF: When I write political essays, I’m very direct, very forceful about what I think about. But when I write fiction, and more personal essays and poetry, the voice is gentler, much more compassionate. There’s much more space for a point of view that I don’t agree with. So although I’m dealing with these bigger issues that generally people avoid talking about [in the U.S.], I think in the prose it’s probably more accessible, even to Americans who might be offended by people directly presenting things. That’s what I think happens when I write fiction, because I think of it as conversation that could possibly lead to a larger conversation. That doesn’t happen when you just have a strongly-held opinion and don’t allow for anybody else to have one, too.

MP: Because you write in so many different forms – poetry, essays, prose – I’m wondering, do you prefer to write in one style over another?

RF: I like the novel more than the short story. I guess that would be one preference that I have, although I write both. I’ve actually been writing more poetry lately than working on the edits of the new novel, so I guess the hierarchy at this moment would be: poetry, novel, short story. [Laughs] The political pieces have to be written very quickly, because something’s happened and you want to talk about it and it has to be talked about now. There’s a charge that comes from writing that kind of stuff. The latest thing that I did was write an essay for Panorama about my time in West Texas with cowboys who are pretty much the polar opposite of me. [Laughs] But it was a really amazing experience, so I wrote a bit about spending a day with them.

I’m always looking for the thing that connects people; in fiction, that’s my goal. I’m very interested in making the fiction stand in a way that allows people to see that yes, it happened in Sri Lanka, but it’s not only about Sri Lanka: it’s about the way we go to war, it’s about how increments lead to huge social changes that are really destructive, it’s about how politics affects ordinary people. And these are bigger things than just what happened in Sri Lanka; what happened there is just a way of talking about those larger issues. So if you look at the cowboy essay, that, in a nutshell, also demonstrates how I look at things.

MP: I love that. By doing that, you’re making your writing more universal. Someone could pick up your novel and find connections with the individual stories of your characters, while also learning about the hardships of war. Final question: If you had to label yourself as a ‘fiction writer,’ ‘poet,’ or ‘political writer,’ which would you choose and why?

RF: I am a writer; that’s what I do. Everybody has something they might consider the thing they do well, or like to do, or want to do. For me that’s writing. It’s always been there; it’s something I did as a young child. It is how I feel I could be useful to society. There’s a strong necessity for us to be contributing members of society in whatever we do. By ‘contributing members of society,’ I mean as agents of social change, as people who mend things, and transform the environment in which we find ourselves.

So for me right now, as a member of the literary world, Extraordinary Rendition is my way of transforming that corner of the universe that I have some say over and writing’s how I do it. I could certainly walk on the streets and knock on doors, and I’ve done that, but other people can walk on streets and knock on doors and I can do the writing part. We all contribute the little things that we can and for me that’s writing, so that’s why I consider myself a writer. Wherever I find myself, that’s a big part of what I do to contribute to that place.

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Ru Freeman serves as a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She won the 2014 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman.

Mary Pickett is a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at California State University, Fresno.

A Book is a Machine for Thinking by Joshua Leon

A Book is a Machine for Thinking by Joshua Leon

Little boxes pile atop one another in varying shades. An omnipresent gold bounces from surface to surface like a ricocheting laser beam. The perfect sunset. I’m half blinded and cold, but this is the only place to be alone. The fireworks are about to begin. The essay is just a jeremiad on urban planning, but serves my own purpose as an instrument for free flowing thought. I hum a few bars and chunk a few sentences on to the page. I am finally free.

From this midlevel plateau my surroundings tower over me in a series of awesome symmetries. Each time I peer away from the screen to bathe in the tableau— and it is impossible not to—the surrounding sheaths of glass and stone look a little taller, almost never ending. I pound forward. With no room in my hands to have carried my research papers up here, I have only faint confidence that these words contain much more than literary truths. Forget it, I tell myself, let the story bleed in to fiction.

From here the urban mystery begins. Images of firelight appear as the sky gets larger. Even over this artificial place there are stars, like you might see above a campground, although conveyor belts of jumbo jets continue disappearing into them. I gradually forget whatever it was I was trying to say. Cognitively speaking, it might be time to recalibrate. My attention turns to the stick figures behind each newly appearing window, looking busy even at home. Busy doing what?

Threats to these meditative moments inevitably pile up. Knowing this makes me nervous. Sooner or later the phone will ring. A group of screaming kids may decide that now’s the time to crowd the deck. Hunger will seep in. Even on the clearest of nights I somehow get hit in the face with droplets of something. Is there an oncoming storm?

Never checking the weather, I wouldn’t know until it was too late. Some gravitational force or another tells me to keep moving when all I want to do is sit still.

Now is the time, when everyone is home from work but has yet to leave for dinner—the precise point in the day when light abounds across the skyline. Decision time. I am still alone, hiding in the budding green gardens no longer quite visible. There is precious time left to think. On the other hand the essay is now a glowing blue mush on my screen. The chill is just a little strong. There are a few too many droplets from nowhere. There are, in short, the natural and social forces that jolt us out of all still moments.

An oncoming migraine clinches it. This increasingly common handicap instigates feelings of weakness, numbness. Things begin to wobble. All the while creative infertility disables me. Then a light breeze blows through the garden, amplifying its scent tenfold.

This remarkable ambient change offers a beachhead of encouragement, but recedes as quickly as it advanced.

I opt to go, and this is when things get strange. I live only a few floors down, but no one is home. Even though someone should be home. I call every person I know, but no one, neither family nor friends, are reachable. Odd, but the city below offers reassurance. There are still people on the ground, going about their business as usual.

Everything will come together in time. Funny thing is, the thought of time horizons unsettles me the most. When will things come together as they always do each evening?

I’ve completely forgotten what day it is and whatever happened this morning. From here, gauging elapsed time increasingly becomes a problem. I recheck my e-mail for any signs of my own little social network within this vast web of urbanity. It’s mostly a series of baffled missives from my editors. All I learn is that the deadline passed for the article weeks ago. The safest place from here is down there. It’s time to leave.

Reinhold.

Forgetful though he can be, he fully remembered the previous night’s contretemps. Beth took the revolutionary position, thus discounting the very reason they were there, to celebrate the publication of very-reasonable-political-commentary. It was only two champagne glasses in when she suggested capping all property holdings at $500,000 per household. That technically would’ve meant the official confiscation of their own apartment, but only if you count the value of exchange and not use, she iterated. One eye glanced at the flat screen.

As it happened, the very informal launch party for Perspectives On Global Development had coincided with the day a grand jury oddly exonerated Darren Wilson, the police officer who lobbed a fatal fusillade of bullets into Michael Brown for the apparent crime of stealing some cigarillos. There were televised riots on the streets of an any-town called Ferguson, Missouri, and everyone in the room was looking for a reason to be pissed.

Beth was getting dangerously oppositional, taunting the mild liberal sensibilities of this circle. How could they not have positive feelings about the political violence they were watching? Before anyone said a thing in response, a group of doctorates fumigated the room with the shared scent of self-satisfaction. Here was an opportunity to educate, because God knows talking is a hell of a lot more satisfying than listening. The latter has the bonus of making someone else feel small even if no one actually learns anything.

At judgment stood Beth, one of those hysterical yet carefree radicals expressing her own kind of intolerance as storeowners saw their inventory carried off into the streets, as police and protestors invited mutual self-destruction. Pity, because through my own mind ran only magical feeling, enhanced by the dimly lit windows surrounding us like a universe of holograms. This was the great metropolis at night, and it was mine.

Vaunted names flew free and easy, the kind of use to any reasonable person’s advantage no matter what their actual political stripe. Names to bring out when some unreasonable person needs a lesson in being chaste and rational. What would Gandhi do? What would Mandela do? What would King do? Beth was visibly irked in front of the cult-of-reason. “They would have behaved very well in acquiescence to your status quo,” she mocked. “Because everyone knows MLK was a good white liberal.”

Faces turned from white to red.

Though few intellectuals really understand the subterranean rage in the public mind, it’s hard for me to argue that there isn’t some rage there to be understood—that there isn’t some reason for it. There it was, after all, on television. Of course there was something else Beth’s guests made sure to say without saying, which was that she was a just a librarian and they were intellectuals of the authentic kind. They wrote books while she stacked them. A reader and not a writer, she couldn’t credibly hold them to account for what went unsaid in obscure volumes like Perspectives On Global Development.

Whatever she said from here on warranted collective scrutiny, no matter where the conversation meandered. In fact it veered in to the most personal of sinkholes—the completed book whose still-warm advance copies were displayed proudly on the kitchen table, beside the cake and liquor.

Even though Perspectives will sell at most 600 copies across the Anglophone world, she respected the undertaking. She respected it because this labor of love had lasted five years, and especially because that labor belonged to her husband, however uncompensated. In fact she respected the endeavor precisely because it went uncompensated. All those warm nights on their building’s well-manicured roof deck where he could really write swiftly, crouched over his Mac like a little hermit half-aware of his remarkable surroundings.

When the topic came up she fell square into the bear trap set for her hours before.

She tried to tread lightly on his work while laying waste to his arrogant colleagues. Of course this indelicate balance toppled quickly.

“The politics in Perspectives is fine, but the prose is an exercise in conformity, concealing what it tries to reveal, reinforcing what it tries to break down,” she said, thumbing through its pages. “Look at this passage, where he points out that the richest 85 people control more wealth than the bottom half of the world population. This is a statistic, and you know what Stalin said about those. He’s giving us plenty of information but evoking nothing from within us.” This is where she didn’t want to be, thrown in opposition to her only ally left in the room.

So far so composed, but from there she faltered, ending with this: “You people are the real reason nothing happens in this cruel, dreary decade.” Down in the depths of their condescension welled a certain volume of puzzlement from everyone in the room who had written a dissertation—other than Morris, who stood by unperturbed. This was the kind of educated-enough person their sundry theories of social change were supposed to win over (none were quite aware that being a librarian required at least one advanced degree).

They departed collegially but with a collective air of failure. For an academic, not impressing someone like Beth was like a salesperson finishing the workday with no commission. Hangovers are always worse when this happens. However unpleasant the night had been, the clock read late. They had worked overtime, hacking at her for hours with no tangible quarry.

Later on Beth reflected that the social sciences—from which the balance of these acquaintances hailed—are peculiar in their lack of persuasiveness. This is particularly so in relation to their natural scientific counterparts. Whenever a social scientist drops an apple, the damn thing flies upward or diagonal, not neatly downward as time honored laws of gravity would have. Ceteris paribus. Beth was the apple that just wouldn’t land where her betters said she should. Why they didn’t embrace that I’m not sure.

“I supposed I’m just not a very convincing radical,” her partner concluded. He was the only one not angered by her lack of deference, who in fact shared her misgivings. He raised his head as if smelling fine perfume that wasn’t there, carrying a peculiar air of contented detachment. I’ve seen this before. I wonder if he knew of the changes going on inside, ever so gradually. There would come a time when he’d achieve the perfect balance of detachment and lucidity, like the great artist Willem de Kooning toward the end of his career and life.

And then there’s the place where I stood, which I kept undisclosed that night. An unapologetic member of the one-percent, I had every reason to welcome Beth’s “cruel, dreary decade.” Then again she was right, it is boring, static, reactionary.

“I was a neurologist turned investor,” I volunteered, “a one-percenter and a self- unaware Marxist. Self-unaware in the sense that I won’t cash out of my stock portfolio, and have a habit of absconding with property of all kinds. I get away with it by paying for the stuff, knowing all along that my right to possess comes only from having deeper pockets than others. Lately I’ve been stealing—from auction—the late paintings of de Kooning. During his Alzheimer’s years.”

And then I recalled the events leading to my invitation here, how I fell into Morris’s good graces. If for no other reason than puncturing the ennui—the very one she laments—I allowed them in whenever they would pound on my conspicuous bright red door.

Beth Morris is gone another day. I suspect the one-percenter in this. True, he was agreeable enough around our set, a man who can move in all crowds. He was agreeable, like a nonplussed thief discussing his own role in the big robbery. He’s the reason why I meander through this city, at this hour.

I stomp forward in the midnight freeze, pounding Reinhold’s red door a few times. Returning, pounding on it again. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, that door opened. And the one-percenter did a strange thing: let two people off the street into his elaborate quarters. This is a quiet corner of the city at this time of night. It is a place where people from all over the district go walking late, looking for permission to think.

It is also densely populated, so we couldn’t have been the only ones listening. We debated what made those sounds, Satie, Debussy, and Ravel resounding all over the neighborhood. Was it a real person on a piano, or a stereo? The safe bet was that this came from a fancy record player. The kind that had speakers built in to the walls.

Morris knocked on the door to thank whoever this person was, and get an answer to a question that bugged us for years. This is frowned upon behavior in an eternally suspicious city where you don’t just go knocking on doors, although I couldn’t see the harm. Morris is in some kind of danger because of it. He had been home, but this couldn’t have been a desertion.

It turned out the music was a little experiment to see who would come around.

Your curiosity would go rewarded, Reinhold said, annoyingly addressing Morris and not me. Morris, who admittedly had something in common with this person. Morris, who would stay awake all hours working on his obscure articles. Morris, who doesn’t know how to turn off that kind of impulse, who thinks writing for no one is its own reward.

My husband actually needed convincing to turn in his tenure portfolio. He had intellectually abandoned the daily stresses of academia. We’re talking about a private catholic college, and Morris is a left wing atheist. During the day he played the part, followed by drawn out complaints by night. No work place would allow him to be his genuine self, he insisted. All workplaces made caricatures of us. Interpersonal mutilation was the real reason managers existed. The great nameless problem of the workplace was exacerbated in an era of unpaid interns to bully by fiat.

The most important advantage of wealth is never having to expend mental energy in service to someone else. For this reason Morris retained enough envy toward Reinhold to offset inevitable resentments. This parasite—my metaphor, not Morris’s—used his surplus time to cultivate something important, the mastery of classical music. Meanwhile everyone else plies forward in directions not of their choosing, over longer hours, for lower wages.

We quickly discovered that it really was him at the piano, which was a shiny grand fitting comfortably within its own echo chamber. All night he pounded the keys, pushed on by inertia, hardly napping. He could play for the philharmonic if he wanted to, not just finance it. We became his regular audience, arriving and leaving as we liked, on the grounds that we never interrupt him during a number. He played his moods, lurching from queer silence to galloping codas.

He was the kind of person who seemed to leave an opium trail in their wake, intoxicating urban adventurers like Morris. Strangers came and went, presumably those brave enough to walk in on these semi-public performances. Alternatively, this could have been some loose cult, counting those coming and going as its members.

Now I feel so empty, robbed. Maybe those migraines Morris complained about weren’t migraines. In fact, things were turning glacially different over time. He was getting less angry at things, disengaging. His usual story telling veered into hallucination. I edited the odd tangential passages out of Perspectives, which he said was his machine for thinking.

Reinhold said revolution wouldn’t be initiated through ballot boxes or legislation or political activism like social scientists believed. What he and his apparent followers wanted was a revolution in thought and expression. It would come to us like a language, and it was the job of painters, musicians, filmmakers, and writers to invent that language, to break through what he called this period of reaction. Would he steal my husband, in his delicate state, for this purpose?

Reinhold thought there was ground left to blaze in stream-of-consciousness prose, from which might spring a manifesto. Where other writers have long experimented with this, Morris could execute it honestly, dispassionately, until the words turned in to music. No more tenure pressure killing the imagination, no restraint of any kind. Reinhold would look over his shoulder, guiding, instigating, and if necessary invent themes for Morris to interpret.

Sooner or later, Reinhold says, all thought will come in expressionistic forms.

So goes the revelation: I know Morris was kidnapped. Isn’t kidnapping an act of violence, inviting retaliatory destruction out of necessity? To not act would be pliant in the face of a powerful person’s capricious experiment, run on others.

I close my eyes for clarity. The sequence of events unfolds this way: Morris shows up at the red door. He grows blank like a whiteboard undergoing erasure, ripe for manipulation. Reinhold, a neurologist, must’ve recognized the symptoms. Willem de Kooning, he would say, executed much of his best expressionism after his mind started going. Furthermore Reinhold was vaguely aware there were outtakes in Perspectives that would connect meaningfully. They would fit together what’s left of Morris’s broken mind like pieces of glass.

There were real de Kooning’s hanging on his walls, by the way. It is an extensive collection of the artist’s late canon, when he somehow painted three hundred of his best abstract works.

The emergency operator didn’t buy the theory. That left confrontation. My next stop is to the hardware store to pick up a crowbar, or maybe a bat, or both. With that I’ll be back at that conspicuous front door, and dismember it at the hinges. Reinhold I still play for them once in a while, not holding the attack too much against her. Her freshly unemployed husband is more restful than she has ever seen him. His medical advice is simple: don’t do too many things at once. Finally, the joyful simplicity he long sought. The two of them hold hands, strolling the ritziest sidewalks, alight with a turn-of-the-century European pastiche.

From here on, everything hinges on how things seem rather than how they actually are—that is what I know about these cases. Morris’s mental state could make him look cured for the day, or afflicted, I told Beth. Do not take Morris out of his routine. Let him work on his new book if he wants (for which he may produce an intelligible draft). I walk to their neighborhood frequently, giving Beth words of optimism.

My mind returns to the crunch of glass crystals under my feet, to the pounding of my aging heart that night. That is how I learned her husband had been missing. The costly mess revealed in her a repellant conspiratorial mindset. There lurked an inner sense of personal disempowerment that forces faulty connections between disparate facts.

There must still have been some rightness in her busting up my mansion. What’s scary is that her eternal suspicions of me might be true. Guilt lies not in fact but in thought. Maybe I’d like to see things change, or maybe I just want to see things break. Besides, her budding conspiracy theory came during one of those lonesome times when the mind spins its shrieking wheels the loudest.

Today I see them pass by, not far from the cold grass where they found Morris after he did not come home. She is good with Morris, able to string together happiness moment by moment like an artist. They are getting further away, passing the mansion, disappearing into the vast green swirl of the park. He looks fine, but she knows problems are brewing. The trees roll gently by, a park of dreams. Problems are brewing, but things are plenty tranquil now.

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Joshua Leon has recently written for Dissent, Third World Quarterly, Metropolis, Peace Review, The China Beat, Cities, Brooklyn Rail, Monthly Review, Z-Magazine, Asia Times, Epoch Times, Arch Daily, Urban Omnibus, and Cambridge Review of International Affairs. His book The Rise Of Global Health came out this year.

Wet: h.koppdelaney via Foter.com / CC BY-ND

A Normal Interview with Daniel Chacon

By Monique Quintana

Monique Quintana: I’d like to talk about the concept of story and how it has evolved in your experience. This semester, I assigned my beginning fiction writing class to read your short story collection Unending Rooms, and several of my students told me that the book overturned their expectations of what a story could be. They felt liberated. Can you talk about what your expectations of a story were growing up, and how those expectations have changed?

Daniel Chacón: Like a lot of writers, I went into writing stories without any sense of craft. I was going on the impulse, the knack. Bernard Malamud says we write because we’re good at it, and I think that’s true—people who write and have that impulse and give up everything to get an MFA and study writing are probably good at it. I had no sense of craft at first, but I knew what I liked, and I knew how to follow language and a character’s need into a story. My first workshop professors said I was being experimental, but I didn’t know I was being experimental. Then I went to the University of Oregon for my MFA, and I studied under one of the greatest writing teachers I ever had. His name was Ehud Havazelet, and he taught us form. He wrote on the board, “Form is necessity in a work of art.” Of course, I rejected it because it was craft, because I was a Chicano and we didn’t need form; we didn’t need craft. We just needed expression.

When I graduated with my MFA, I saw how ridiculous I was being to reject the concept of craft, so I dedicated myself to studying form for about five or six years, and I got to understand what form is. Form is not formula; form is not structure. “Form is necessity in a work of art,” means, to me, that a story should contain all the elements necessary for the ultimate impact, and that all the elements should be so intertwined that if you pulled one aspect out of the story, the whole thing would collapse. This helped a lot because I was writing a lot of character-based stories.

If you look at my first book, Chicano Chicanery, most of the stories are very character based. There was still some weirdness going on because I can’t help but contain the way I see reality, which isn’t necessarily linear or material; but nonetheless, they were the kind of stories you would see in mainstream literary journals, characters with an ambiguous ending. But once I understood what form meant, and once I understood how to enter into a story – which I do through language and I do through syntax – once I got to that point where I understood form – and I don’t think you could ever say that you’re a master at form, but that you’re going towards mastery of form – I started to write stories that were influenced by form and the way I hear character. They just started coming out that way.

I didn’t set out to write experimental stories. I always tried to write a conventional story. But if I was going to be honest with the language, and I was going to be honest with the character, they just kind of went where they did. If you look at Unending Rooms, people would say to me, “You’re writing experimentally, you’re writing theme-based stories,” but they’re really not. I’m following language. If you’re authentic with your own language and your own syntax, it leads you to a direction where you see how reality functions.

I remember in the first workshop I taught, all the young nineteen-year-old males were writing stories with imagery that was male-centered, often centered in their libido, and it’s not they were setting out to write that story, but that’s what was on their mind. That was their reality. They were always thinking about that. I think that you don’t have to assert a political agenda, or a philosophical agenda, or a theme. If you follow language, if you study craft and form, it becomes intuitive after awhile. If you study Kung Fu, you have to learn a lot of forms, and it seems weird and unnecessary, but once you practice those forms over and over again, when you’re walking down the street and somebody taps you, you just get into the stance—what you’ve studied has become instinctual. So it’s a combination of studying form and staying instinctual to the voice and the syntax.

MQ: I found it interesting when you recalled how you were initially resistant to form because of your because of your Chicanismo. I found the way you use form to be very Chicano.

DC: I don’t set out to write Chicano literature, but I can’t separate my writing from my Chicanismo. I can’t separate my culture; I can’t separate my experience from the way I see the world and the way I admire stories. I used to read a lot of Malamud and Flannery O’Connor, but when I got my hands on Cortizar, when I got my hands on Borges—the Latin American writers, I loved the way they told a story, because I was already doing that unconsciously in my writing. It’s a different way of seeing the world.

When Cisneros came out with her novel, Carmelo, she used a lot of footnotes. When people asked her about her experimentation, she said she wasn’t being experimental, she was just being Mexican. I really think there are cultural differences to how we see reality. Ultimately, I think when we create a landscape, whether it’s fiction or poetic, we’re creating a reality. For me, reality is not really that linear. People might think I’m weird if I were to explain some of the things I’ve seen and some of the things that have happened to me. They would say, yeah, that can’t happen, but that’s just the way life is for me. I think a lot of it had to do with growing up in a Mexican family. I had grandparents that were from Mexico and didn’t embrace the narrative traditions of the mainstream.

MQ: The concept of rooms is pervasive in your fiction, especially in Unending Rooms: Stories and also in Hotel Juarez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops. Is there ever any space that is sacred for you, where you feel the need to write it as close to reality possible? You’ve written about Fresno, Paris, El Paso, Juarez—is there any space, landmark, relic, that you feel you have to capture truthfully, or does it all become fiction?

DC: I think what’s sacred is syntax. If I begin to enter into a landscape, and that landscape presents itself in a particular way based on the syntax and the characters’ yearning, I find it a reality that may not be your neighbor’s reality. There’s a quote by the poet Evelyn Underhill. She says that reality is entering into the illusions of your neighbors. So if I’m following into a story, and I enter a landscape that most people wouldn’t consider real, I don’t think that’s necessarily a reason for me to stop. But if enter into a story and suddenly the syntax stops, and it seems forced, and I begin to assert myself too strongly into the story, and it fights the language, then I know I’m not being authentic, and I stop.

Fighting with ego is different than fighting with duende. Borges said that fighting with duende is when you don’t want to let certain things into you work because it doesn’t fit your preconceived image of it. I keep going back to a quote by Borges: “If a writer achieves what he set out to achieve, it’s really not worth much.” So, I have to be true to the language and the character, and inevitably how I see reality. I think the only sacred space is not in time space, but in language, in rhythm.

MQ: I just realized that I’ve been trying to write stories about Fresno-specific places, like the Rotary Playland or Pizza and Pipes. I think it comes from a desire to retain those places in my memory. I find that when I try to capture every minute detail, I feel stifled.

DC: I think what’s happening when we experience that as writers is that we’re entering the story image first. We have a lot of poets on my “Words on a Wire” radio show. I mostly interview poets because I want to learn from poets. One of the questions I frequently ask them is how they enter into a poem. Almost all of the beginning poets say image and almost all of the more experienced poets say syntax. When we enter with an image, its just like we’re entering with an idea, because an image in not disconnected from a meaning for us.

I used to go to Rotary Playland in Fresno a lot as a kid. If I set out to describe it, then I’m saying I want to write about an idea, something that is meaningful to me, and I think that’s what kills a story, when we try to write ideas. However, if I’m writing a story about a little boy in Fresno, growing up in the 1970s, and I follow desire and I follow syntax, it might inevitably end up at Rotary Playland. As you follow language and image authentically, then the images come out. Even if you’re struck by an image, you’re probably simultaneously struck by some sort of syntactical, rhythmical expression of that. You’re really entering with sound. I think the more you study your craft, the more inseparable your syntax becomes from your imagery. We love entering into a landscape as readers and writers and the only key to that landscape is language.

I’ve been reading about the brain and how the whole frontal cortex of the brain was created for us to move along the landscape—that’s also where we create poetry. There’s a connection between movement and poetry. Poetry isn’t static; it’s all about movement. There’s a squirt fish that moves in the water, but eventually finds a home and stays there for the rest of its life, and it starts to eat its own brain. What a lovely metaphor. The movement of poetry and the movement of fiction are like walking into a landscape. As the poet Billy Collins would say, we enter into landscape through language, it’s the only key, it’s the only wormhole into the parallel universe of the poetical landscape, of the fictional landscape.

MQ: Since we’re speaking of writing as a transient act, do you see your projects as separate entities, or does one project birth another?

DC: I really believe that I haven’t written a single book yet. I’m still writing it, and I don’t think the book will be written until I die. I called my third collection Hotel Juarez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops. One of the things that loops means to me is that images come back, and although there may not be a thematic connection, there is a release of energy. If you bring up an image in one story, and then it comes back in another story, in essence, you’re releasing energy from one story to another. These loops are like wormholes. You’re going from one time space to another, and if you’re aware of that, then you can manipulate the energy in such a way that it is in dialogue with the earlier use of that image. If you use it several times in different works, the image becomes more powerful, and it releases even more energy. Even if the reader isn’t aware that you’re doing it, the fact is that the image is vibrating with energy from these other stories makes it a more powerful image.

In my first book, there’s an image of a tubercular bookseller and he’s trying to convince another character, who’s walking around Mexico City very alienated, to buy a book. That tubercular book sales man has probably showed up three or four times in my work, not intentionally, but because that image probably carries for me some kind of meaning, so he keeps showing up, even though he’s a different character. He showed up in Poland one time and again in my story, “Page 55.” That’s a loop.

It has been said that people write the same story over and over again, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I would say that a person is developing artistically and developing as a human being at the same time, because ultimately, there’s no separation between the two. Our obsessions might change. I used to be obsessed with things like time travel, and now my obsession is the brain. Even though our obsessions change, we want there to be development.

MQ: This winter I visited Paris and London for the first time, and I was blown away by how differently race and ethnicity work in those places. It made me think about your stories and also Garcia Marquez’s 1992 short story collection Strange Pilgrims. He was writing about Latin Americans travelling through Europe. I think your work complicates this concept because you’re writing about Chicano-identified characters travelling through Europe. Can you speak about your own experience in Europe and how it informs how you craft characters?

DC: Going to Europe was very similar to the first time I went to Mexico City. The first time I went there, it became exceedingly clear that I was a U.S. citizen, that I was a pocho, even though I identified as Mexican and Chicano. It was an interesting experience for me because it added a complexity to my identity. I wasn’t going home, like I thought I was. I was going into a land where I was a foreigner. I remember, in Chapultepec Park, there was a clown that was doing a sort of stand up comedy, and I walked up to the circle to watch, and the first thing he said was, “Hello, gringo!” in a U.S. accent, and all the Mexicans started laughing, and I wondered how they knew. That was a very othering experience for me, but ultimately a very positive one.

When I went to Paris for the first time, two things happened. If I claimed to be Mexican, people believed me. I could be a Mexican there, and I could speak Spanish there, and they wouldn’t recognize my gringo accent. That was really liberating. One time I spent three months there during the height of anti-Americanism because the “great” president George Bush. There was all the tension between the U.S. and France—people in the U.S. wanted to call French fries “freedom fries” and such. All the White people from the United States that would go to France would say they were Canadian, even though everyone knew they were lying. I would claim to be from Mexico. When I was interacting with the French, I would always speak to them in French and Spanish until they asked me if I spoke English. I would always assert my Mexicanidad. It really made me feel at home in Paris, because Mexicans were so much more accepted there than people from the United States. There is a Latin American community there.

The only people that didn’t buy my accent were the Mexicans. I would tell them I was Chicano and they were OK with that. It allowed me to negotiate Paris in a way I couldn’t have if I was puro gringo. I got to hang out with the Arab men that were hanging out in the Plaza. I would buy from them, and we would exchange numbers. They were very nice to me, and I felt very much at home in their community. However, I also can’t escape my Americanness. So I had multiple identities. It alienated me in a positive way. I was living in a particular way, a way that was more complex than just being a tourist. Anytime you’re pushed away, you’re othered, it allows you to observe a culture in a way that you couldn’t if you were fully a part of it.

I think every writer has had that experience where they’re with their family, and they feel like they’re fully a part of it, but then something happens where there’s a shift of perspective, and suddenly they’re observing their family and they don’t feel a part of the family, and then they write about it. I think the more you’re othered, the more you’re able to see multiple realities simultaneously.

MQ: Connected to the idea of “the other,” I appreciate how your characters don’t fit into the binaries of “likable” and “unlikable” characters. I don’t think fiction could exist without the misfit characters.

DC: To have a fleshed-out character, they can’t be fully evil. I’ll use driving as a metaphor. If we’re driving, and some asshole pulls in front of us, and we’re honking our horn, and we want them to die, we’re essentially wishing death on ourselves because we’ve all done the same thing. People do shitty things. One of the weaknesses of the human brain is how we attribute consciousness to other beings, and in that attribution, we give look at them through a singular perspective. It justifies the way we judge. We can’t do that in fiction, unless we’re really using characters as a theme, as a symbol. We have to attribute a consciousness to them that is more complex.

MQ: In putting your collections together, was there ever any piece that you were particularly devastated about excluding?

DC: I have no trouble killing my babies. In fact, I like it. I learned a long time ago not to be in love with anything I write. Even if it’s really wonderful writing, who cares? I will kill as many babies as I need to make the book better. I will cut off fingers; I will cut off toes.

MQ: [Laughs.] What happens to these pieces? Do they go off into the ether? Are they get used in another project?

DC: When you’re working on a book for several years, you don’t always have distance. So you don’t always know what to cut off, what to kill. The makes me think of the character, Victor, from the “Je Suis Chicano” section of Hotel Juarez. I was working on a novel for ten years, and I got to the point where I didn’t believe in it. I thought it was the worst thing I had ever written. I got the idea to mix it all up and tell it as flash fiction. I took two stories from it. One became the “Je Suis Chicano” section of Hotel Juarez and the other became “Cherry Auction,” a piece in the same book, where a Chicano artist learns that he has talent.

So the other day, about a month ago, I woke up at 3 a.m. and I had a heavy heart. I wanted to be promoted to full professor, but I’ve only had two books since I’ve gotten tenure. I’ve been working on a collection of poems, but I don’t feel it’s ready yet. I still want a lot more time to learn more about poetry. I just wished I had a book. I fell back asleep, got up at about 7 a.m., and I went to my desk to write for a day, to work on my poems. As I’m going through my list of documents, I see this document called, The Last Chicano Novel. I thought, what the hell is this? I opened it up, and it was the novel that I had been working on for years before I cut it up into pieces. I had no idea that I saved it. I thought I had killed it. There were parts of it in Hotel Juarez, but there it was, in its entirety. Three hundred and fifty pages. I read it that morning and I thought, damn, this is good! I thought it was horrible when I was writing it, because I didn’t have that distance. But that morning, I knew it was ready to send out. I took two days to edit it, and then I contacted the publishers of Hotel Juarez because they did a great job with that book. I sent it to them, and two days later they emailed me and said that they loved it and wanted to publish it. A day later, I got a contract. So, from the time I woke up at 3 a.m. wanting a book, a week later, I had a contract for a book that I didn’t even know that I had.

MQ: So that book is The Cholo Tree? When is that book coming out?

DC: Yes, it comes out in 2017. The main character is Victor, a Chicano artist from Fresno who learns that he has talent and ultimately goes to Paris.

MQ: So, Victor is a loop?

DC: If you look at all the details, you can’t say it’s the same guy, but really it’s the same guy. I don’t think that material reality is as important as energy. So, I don’t care if there are contradictions because it’s the story that matters. I’ll just be like Whitman and say I contradict myself.

MQ: Besides compiling your own books, you’ve done the same for other writers. You’ve been putting together Andrés Montoya’s posthumous collection, A Jury of Trees. Can you speak to a moment in that experience that particularly resonates with you as an artist?

DC: When I first got the manuscripts, there was a stack about a foot high, all kinds of notes. They were hard to go through because everything was handwritten. There was one complete manuscript and I thought, maybe I should publish this, but then I found other poems, so I decided to take the completed manuscript and make it one of the sections of the book. I found these poems that he had written in the hospital when he was dying, and they were amazing. They were Rumi-like. They were beautiful, mystical poems from a man who knew he was dying and felt closer to his deity, closer to his source. When he was dying, he was so full of joy. When people came to visit him in the hospital to cheer him on, they would leave cheered on by him. The poems he wrote then are so beautiful. I transcribed them and put them in the collection. To me, they are the essence of his spirit, and now I can’t imagine the collection without those poems.

MQ: I’ve always been drawn to writing that celebrates joy and death simultaneously.

DC: There’s a mystic Sufi poet named Rabi’a. She had a mystical experience where she came into her source, her god. She has a poem where she says, “One day he did not leave/after kissing/me.” It’s so beautiful because the speaker was used to all the men in her life just leaving. It’s so beautiful. I find Andres’ poems from when he was dying to be at this level. I’m having trouble with my own poetry, and I’ve realized that I should be writing as if I were already dead, as opposed to poetry I just want people to read. Andres was writing poetry as if he was already dead. It’s some of his most beautiful work, and it wouldn’t have been possible if he weren’t thinking about death.

MQ: What keeps you writing?

DC: What else is there? When the disciples were following Jesus and others started to abandon him, he turned to those remaining and he said, Are you going to abandon me too? And Peter said, What else is there? I love that answer. What else would I do? You’re it! That’s the way I feel about writing. What else am I going to do? I’ve got to do something.

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Daniel Chacón is the author of four books of fiction, including Unending Rooms and Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. He won an American Book Award, the Pen Oakland, and the Hudson Prize. His novel, The Cholo Tree, is forthcoming in 2017. He is cohost of the literary radio show and podcast, Words on a Wire.

Monique Quintana is an M.F.A. Fiction candidate and president of the Chicano Writers and Artists Association (CWAA) at California State University, Fresno. She is working on her first novel, Chola Mona Lisa.

Tunnels by Marytza Rubio

Tunnels by Marytza Rubio

Tijuana

Epifania Fogata gave birth to three girls and four boys. My dad’s bedtime stories were full of defeated warriors and lost battles. Each night my grandmother asked him, What did they do wrong? How could they have won? When he was a teenager, he was entrusted with details of an inherited revolution. Two of his sisters were sent to schools in New England and one was sent to Paris. His brothers were taught to dig.

The walls along the border between Mexico and the Unites States disrupted the natural migration pattern of every living creature that couldn’t fly or swim. The mountain lions and jaguars suffered tremendous losses to their populations. They would have become extinct if not for the ingenuity and vast underground network built by the Fogata Landscape Company. When the mountain lions discovered they could travel under the freeways, their populations boomed and spread across Southern California. Moving the jaguars required meticulous planning. The Fogatas devoted decades preparing for their journey.

Nha Trang

After we all graduated from high school, I moved to L.A., my sister stayed home, one of my cousins became a trophy wife, and her sister backpacked across Southeast Asia. At the farewell barbecue before Miriam’s trip, she asked my dad if he had anything she could take for him when she visited Vietnam. Miriam told us about a documentary she’d seen about veterans who went back to the jungle to do a burial ceremony for the lives they’d taken—and for the parts of themselves now lost. She said she’d be happy to take something or bring something back if that would help him heal. My dad said he had nothing to heal, he was A OK, baby and served himself another plate of ribs.

Laguna Beach

Miriam’s sister Molly Bianchi (née Maricela Fogata) lived in one of those seaside cliff homes that was always in danger of burning down during fire season or falling off the edge of the earth during rainy season. The house’s fragility was part of its cachet: We can afford to be destroyed. The last time I visited that house I was twenty years old. My dad and I had taken a day trip to the beach and stopped in to visit Molly and her new husband. They were overseeing the construction of a gazebo for their telescopes. I saw in her face what my dad was asking me to fight. I saw my cousin get uncomfortable when the man working in her yard asked her a question. The question is in choppy accented English and it frustrates her, and when my dad interjects to interpret, she demands that my father, a veteran and her elder, speak English, please, and she and I never spoke again.

Santa Ana

On my way out of my parents’ house, I carried a blanket and wrapped it around my dad’s shoulders. He leaned forward in the lawn chair with his hands clamped together and his black wiry eyebrows tangled above his eyes. I let him know I was leaving and would be back the next weekend. When he didn’t respond, I moved closer to his good ear and repeated it. He said, “We’re running out of time.”

I took a deep breath and looked at my watch. There would be another train. I sat on the asphalt and joined him in his silence. Coddling him would only upset him and reminding him to have patience would anger him. I picked up a fallen leaf from the avocado tree and started to pinch off the browned pieces when the squawks of Santa Ana’s emerald parrots cut through the dusky sky, loud enough to distract my dad from his brooding. “Next time, bring me a dessert,” he said.

At the train station, a woman talking on her phone said it was “the strangest Monday ever.” She said global warming had made Friday the 13th come late, and what we really had to worry about now was Monday the 16th. As she said this, flecks of ash from the wildfire swirled around us and settled on the train tracks. The latest casualty was some billionaire’s multi-million dollar Laguna Beach house. One of his houses. The winds were forecasted to pick up again that weekend. The news would call it the “Santa Ana Wind Event.” It felt good hearing my city’s name on the news. It felt good to make people afraid.

A bearded man sat across from me on the train and asked for a piece of paper. He said he needed to write down an idea. All the passengers ignored him, so he started to recite his thoughts. I reached into my purse to find my notebook, hoping if he had something to scribble on he’d stop talking. I tore off a few sheets and handed them to him. The man mumbled I was “one of the good ones” before snatching the paper out of my hand and sprawling out in the middle of the aisle to write in silence. I looked down at my notebook and touched the embossed gold dove decorating the cover. The printed text below read We have so many dreams that we cannot talk about them all which I first misread as We have so many dreams that we cannot talk about them at all.

Los Angeles

When I arrived at the Little Tokyo station, my favorite man greeted me with a white rose. He asked me about my visit with the family and his voice jumped up an octave the way it did when he talked to children or homeless dogs. I didn’t respond. We walked past the sparkling metal and glass of the Japanese American Museum and slipped through a gap in the brick wall and down a narrow alley into our restaurant. This is where we came whenever we needed to feel right again. We never said it out loud, to do so would destroy the dream, but when we came here, my fiancé and I pretended we were in Tokyo. The lights of the Los Angeles skyline blurred away and the hammering steel blades of a vigilant helicopter warped the audio fabric of our conjured Japan.

Chicago, Denver, San Francisco

The explosions occurred in the late evening, when the office workers and executives had gone home and the cleaning crews had just arrived. One hundred and forty-seven dead. The targets were undocumented—it took years to uncover their true identities. A smaller explosion with a bottle rocket occurred at a nativity scene in Phoenix, but no souls were claimed. It was later determined to be an act of vandalism not related to the bombings, yet the image of the bubbling plastic of the Virgin Mary’s face become a symbol of national mourning to some, a declaration of war to others.

Himeji City

We got married in my parents’ backyard. The ceremony was celebratory enough to be special but subdued enough to be appropriate. Only his parents and my parents attended, and the next morning we boarded a plane to Japan. I needed distance from the States. Mid-flight, I told him I was going to quit teaching ESL because an old friend of my dad’s had asked me to care for his flock of trained pigeons.

Asuncíon

There are two Guarani phrases I retained from once working with a Paraguayan teaching assistant: Mbaé’chepa and Ipora. This knowledge and a valid passport were the two things that qualified me to record the vocabulary we’d use to build our code. My husband insisted on coming with me and I pretended to put up a fight but knew I would be more productive if I didn’t spend so much energy missing him. “Do you think is going to work?” he asked me the third week in. I only had a page and a half of words we could use. The phrases needed to be simple to scramble and decode, and concise enough to be legible on the small scroll we’d tuck inside our pigeons’ anklets. “Don’t worry about writing a complete sentence,” he insisted, but I couldn’t shut off my years of being an English instructor. “They don’t need to make sense, just get the point across.” He was right, words were all I needed: Coast, Hill, Beast.

Erupt, Earth, Run.

Santa Ana

When I was a newborn, there was a disruptive humming above the kitchen stove that concerned my mother. After complaining about the noise to my dad, she took me out for a stroll. My dad then dragged in a ladder from the backyard and crawled into the attic to investigate. The attic was a glorified crawl space full of itchy insulation, hot, dark, and only one way in, one way out. When we returned from our walk, the humming had stopped and my mom found my dad sitting in the living room staring at the wall, his face pale and wet. He told her he’d gotten trapped. He said that because everything was so dark, he didn’t know if he was left or right or day or night or city or jungle. When he heard his heartbeat echo in his ears like a desperate alarm, he decided to crawl backward, hoping that going in reverse would bring him to the edge of the attic door. If his foot dropped into an open space, he would survive but until it did, he believed he would not. He said this while holding me in his arms, rocking me back and forth and telling me he was sorry.

Montebello

My aunt Christina bought a cap-gun from the neighborhood paletero. As a joke, she fired it at my twenty-six-year-old dad when he was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. His shocked face drained to khaki, like when he got lost in the attic and when they told him he had to have surgery and when they covered his body several hours after I told him, for the second and last time, I loved him very much.

Santa Ana

When I was a little girl, my dad showed me how to set up pigeon traps in our backyard. We’d prop a cardboard box up by one corner using only a twig from our avocado tree, then tie a string around the twig. Dry cat food was the bait. The pigeons swooped down and pecked around the trail leading to the trap. They always did a hesitant little dance when they reached the outer rim of the propped-up box. My dad held his hands like a conductor and I held the other end of the string, waiting for his cue. “Uno, dos, y…” he’d draw out the “y” until the curious bird took its place in the center of the trap. “Tres!”

We set every bird free. The point of the traps wasn’t to collect pigeons. The point was to learn timing.

Tijuana

We arrived at Las Playas to scatter my dad’s ashes. His soul inhabited the altar in my mom’s living room and his name was engraved on a rock inside the Japanese garden next to City Hall. I insisted we wait until a full-moon weekend to scatter his ashes. My Tio escorted us out into the ocean on his boat, far enough into the water where the waves were still enough to reflect the sky, but close enough to shore that I could see the flickering lights of the candles on the sand. My sister read a poem and my mother gave the ocean a bouquet of gardenias and white roses. We poured my father into the moon. The boat lolled atop the rippling waves. We each heard our name echoed in the laps of water. I could clearly see him, smiling and clapping his hands: Uno, dos. Uno, dos. Uno, dos, y…

Laguna Beach

I broke my fifteen-year silence and left a message for Molly to join me in San Francisco for my sister’s book signing. She ignored me. Molly always wanted to be white so she never developed the instincts of a brown girl—there are unexpected gifts that accompany being hated and underestimated for who you are. One of them is sensing when you are in danger. Molly rejected us—and her full self—but our family still honored blood: The Fogata Landscaping crew did not connect her yard to the underground migration network. They did not spare her neighbors.

The sleek black jaguars roared as they burst through the ground, hungry and determined to reclaim their land.

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Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, California.

www.marytzakrubio.com

AdrianMalec via Foter.com / CC BY

last blues on red hands by Charlotte Covey

last blues on red hands by Charlotte Covey

the ocean stayed

silent; waves quiet, sand

still. windows half-opened made the world

blur— soft light, longing to

kiss my skin. your hands

on the steering wheel, paled

under pressure, a vein in your forehead,

teeth biting down on your

tongue. you washed over me, & i left

musty indoor air, ripped upholstery,

climbed down rocks & shells

to the place where the sand is

wet. it was the first of the

year; i held my

breath, standing at the water's

edge. i wonder if you were

watching me. wonder if you

drew blood when you bit, the way you

drew a circle on my neck with

your mouth. i wonder if you scrubbed

the stains left on the passenger

seat— rusted red, dripped from slits on

dimpled knees made with drunken

fingers & sharpened nails.

---

Charlotte Covey is from St. Mary's County, Maryland. She is currently a senior studying Creative Writing and Psychology at Salisbury University. She has poetry published or forthcoming in journals such as Salamander Magazine, Slipstream, The MacGuffin, SLAB, and The Summerset Review. She is co-editor-in-chief of Milk Journal.

Jo Naylor via Foter.com / CC BY SergioMonsalve via Foter.com / CC BY-ND