El Gran Midwest Viaje

In less than two months, I’ll be leaving Iowa City, my home of three years. Due to my lack of (car) wheels, my knowledge of this city consists of a one-mile radius, and I know even less of the state. So I was thrilled when two dear friends from Washington DC swept me up for a three-day road trip.

Our first stop: the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum and Library. (Did I mention these friends were from DC? Yes indeed: one is a political biographer and the other works for the Obama campaign, so presidential libraries are their thing.) As it turns out, this man Hoover was orphaned in West Branch, Iowa at the age of 10, educated at Stanford, honeymooned in China during the Boxer Rebellion, became a wildly popular president without ever having run for political office before (and then became a dreadfully unpopular one after the Great Depression), and then retired at the swanky Waldorf Astoria in NYC. After getting our history fix, we romped around Main Street, which consists of a Pink Pony Ice Cream Parlor (where ice cream bars dipped in chocolate cost 85 cents), a classical guitar maker/tuner/seller, a quilting store, a wine bar, and a number of abandoned buildings.

From there, it was off to El Patio in West Liberty, aka site of the best Mexican food for 75 miles in any direction. West Liberty has

The Torture of Solitary

April marks the 40th year anniversary of solitary confinement of the Angola 3 (two elderly Black Panthers doing time in Louisiana). The Wilson Quarterly just published an essay I wrote about their plight, and the tens of thousands of other prisoners enduring this mental torture in the United States. Here is the opening segment:

Here is what I knew about Joe Loya before stepping into his car: During a 14-month stretch in the late 1980s, he stole a quarter-million dollars from 30 Southern California banks by donning a tailored suit and, occasionally, a fedora, striding up to bank tellers, and, in a low and smoky voice, demanding all their money. His panache earned him the nickname “The Beirut Bandit” because, he said, “no one could believe a Mexican from East L.A. could be so smooth.” He was finally bum-rushed by undercover agents while reading the newspaper at a UCLA campus café. (His girlfriend had tipped them off.) As he served out a seven-year prison sentence, he grew increasingly violent, once chomping off a chunk of an inmate’s ear for snaking his copy of Playboy. When his former cellmate was slaughtered in their old cell, Loya was pegged as a primary suspect and consigned to Security Housing Unit—otherwise known as solitary confinement—for two years, until cleared of the charges. He was released in 1996, at age 35.

All of this, I could handle. But when he started careening 77 miles per hour down the freeway, slicing in and out of traffic, I worried. Tall and husky with mocha-colored skin, Loya was wearing Ray-Bans and a pinstriped shirt untucked over jeans. His temples were flecked gray.

“There is something seductive about solitary confinement,” he mused, dodging from one lane into the next. “It is the myth of the American male: I walk alone. There is a sense that solitary is a kind of adventure, and men love adventure.”

We narrowly avoided sideswiping an SUV, which blared its horn.

A Sort of Homecoming

I’m happy to announce that The Florida Review has just published the first chapter of my thesis/next book. It’s called “A Sort of Homecoming” and here’s a little taste:

I am so starved for company, even a dead man’s would do.

Stamping on my boots, I follow a trail leading into a desert jungle thick with yucca and mesquite. Rain is so scant in this swath of South Texas, trees grow out instead of up, fusing together like brush. In some patches, you can’t see but two feet beyond. But it’s noisy here—gloriously noisy. Beetles munch through mounds of deer dung. Orange-bellied orioles and dust-colored sparrows twitter from treetops while flocks of chachalacas cluck about. My boots trample footprints, paw prints, hoof prints.

A chain link fence appears up ahead, enclosing acres of cleared land. The ranch hands call it Cowboy Cemetery. I pace among the graves, peering at the sunken stones. In the olden days, families carved the names of their departed into planks of wood and thrust them into the soil. Those crosses have largely eroded, with only the cement markers remaining. I hunt for Silvas and Quintanillas: members of my cowboy tribe. This quest seems promising at first. Practically every stone bears a Mexican surname. But after an hour-long search, I realize that none are mine.

My disappointment is bitter but unsurprising. Two years ago, I moved to Mexico to unearth my mother’s roots. I scoured the countryside for months searching for something familial, even convincing Mom to join me for a stretch. Together we set out for the tiny village in Tamaulipas where a rancher named Richard King recruited his cowboys a century and a half ago, my great-great-grandfather among them. We interviewed everyone who crossed our path there, from shop owners to officials to the area’s eldest resident. We related how, in 1853, the bulk of the village’s citizens gathered their burros and their chickens, their pots and their blankets, and marched several hundred miles north to forge a new life in Texas. But when they led us to their cemetery, we found no tombs to prove our ties, no ancestors to anchor us. Only sun bleached ribbons blowing in the wind. Like here. Like now.

Hola & Upcoming Events

Bienvenidos to my little bloguito!

2012 has been totally loca! It started with a distance-learning class I co-taught with Tijuana poet/journalist/badass Mariana Martinez-Estens in conjunction with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. We gathered fourteen writers from ten nations to discuss immigration in creative nonfiction. It was a powerful experience for us all.

This spring, I presented on two panels at AWP in Chicago: one on immersion writing, led by Robin Hemley, and one on writer’s residencies, led by Wendy Call. I also gave readings or seminars at Washington University in St. Louis, U-Mass-Lowell, University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill, Florida International University, and University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

I’ll be graduating with my MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa in May and will then join Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez for a reading at the 8^th International Conference on Chicano Literature in Toledo, Spain. In July, I’ll teach a travel writing seminar at Pine Manor’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program in Boston, and will then move to Canton, New York to spend a year as the 2012-2013 Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University. I’ll be teaching two classes there: intro to creative nonfiction and experiential writing. In November, I’ll join my Iowa gente at the 2012 NonfictioNow Conference in Melbourne, Australia, and in fall 2013, I’ll be moving to the South to be Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Here’s hoping our paths cross somewhere along the way. Gracias!

 

Introducing Pico Iyer

As some of you know, I’m on the verge of completing my MFA at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Last night was the highlight of my entire experience here: I was asked to introduce my literary idol, Pico Iyer, at a reading he gave for some 250 writers and students. I thought I would share it here, as a tribute to my long-time muse.

We have gathered here tonight for the pleasure of hearing Pico Iyer discuss his latest book, The Man Within My Head, about his lifelong fascination with the writer Graham Greene. The irony of giving this introduction is that, for the past 12 years, I have been fascinated with Pico Iyer. So, before he dazzles us with what it’s like having Mr. Greene inside his head, let me share what it’s like having Pico inside my own.

It started with an essay he wrote for Salon in 2000 called “Why We Travel.” Having spent years trying to justify my own wanderlust to my family, I was startled by the way Pico so eloquently and elegantly captured the drive inside me:

“Travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home…. I tend to be more easily excited abroad, even kinder.”

This essay became my manifesto, and when I began to read his many books—Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Falling Off the Map—I picked up other insights as well, such as:

“Everything is interesting if you look at it with the right eyes.”

Interview with Carolyn Nash

One of the sweetest joys of teaching is reveling in your students’ successes. So I was thrilled when I arrived home yesterday to find RAISING ABEL in my mailbox. I worked with its deeply talented author (who is publishing under the name Carolyn Nash for this project) last summer at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. She astounded us all with the power of her story about raising two adopted sons, one of whom had suffered extreme abuse in his previous family. Here is an interview she recently conducted about adoption, writing, and life. 

Tell us about yourself.

I am the very lucky mother of two sons, 21 and 6. I say lucky because they are adopted and I swear I got the two best in the world. What are the chances? I mean one, sure, but two? Unfortunately, my older son didn’t come to me until he was almost 4, and much happened in his early years. My younger son came to me at 3 weeks and is deliciously obnoxious as 6-year-olds are supposed to be. I have never married, the reasons for which, along with the story of my older son’s life, are chronicled in Raising Abel.

When did you begin writing?

I began writing in earnest in high school. I remember getting all wrapped up in a story of two brothers on a coach in the 1800s going somewhere, always in constant danger. I wish I still had that story. It would be fun to see how my writing has changed. Through the years I’ve worked on numerous short stories, and have completed three novels in addition to Raising Abel. Besides stories published in a newspaper for which I worked many years ago, Raising Abel is the first story or book that I have published.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

That’s actually an important question for me. I am plagued by self-doubts, like many of us. Last summer I went to a writing conference on the northern coast of California. As part of the registration, I was required to submit a sample of my writing. I submitted a chapter from my unfinished memoir, Raising Abel, and thought no more about it. A few weeks later I was notified that my chapter won not only first prize in the conference writing contest, but also a fellowship that paid my

Libro-Traficantes!

As y’all may have heard, Latino Studies has essentially been banned in the state of Arizona. My amazing friends at Nuestra Palabra, a literary arts organization in Houston, Texas, are currently organizing a Librotraficante caravan to Tucson to smuggle “wet-books” across the border. Author and activist Tony Diaz explains:

 

And here is the official press release:

HOUSTON, TEXAS - Local literary nonprofit Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say is organizing The Librotraficantes Banned Book Caravan from Houston, Texas to Tucson, Arizona leaving Houston on Monday, March 12 and culminating in Tucson, Arizona Saturday, March 17.

The caravan will be filled with authors and activists who will be taking banned books back into Arizona, to give to students.  The bus will include banned authors, new authors, as well as concerned advocates of First Amendment rights of Equal Protection and Freedom of Speech.

The Caravan will be making stops in Texas, New Mexico, and, of course, Arizona.

Banned writers have embraced the caravan and will participate along the route, including Mac Arthur Genius recipient Sandra Cisneros, who kicked off our fundraising efforts by making a generous donation; Guggenheim Fellow Dagoberto Gilb, whose work recently appeared in the New Yorker and Harpers; and best selling author Luis Alberto Urrea, who was the first