Comadres Forever

I lost my closest friend, Carolynn, in 2009. She had fought colon cancer with her unique tough fortitude for several years and seemed to be winning. I had to be out of town for a period of time, and when I returned, something had changed. Carolynn was depressed and talking about being ready to die. Now, I wasn’t hearing any of that, and soon her attitude brightened back to its normal state, but not soon enough. As if it had only been her great positive, cancer-can’t-beat-me attitude that had been keeping it at bay, her cancer returned with a vengeance in a final onslaught she no longer had the strength to battle as she’d done for so long. It’s a loss I have never completely overcome.

But her cancer is not what I want to write about. Last night, I participated in a Twitter party to celebrate and promote the new anthology of Las Comadres, Count On Me:Tales of Sisterhood and Fierce Friendships. (Las Comadres is the wonderful group that organizes the National Latino Book Club, among many other great projects.) The talk during this Twitter party (look for its record at #lasComadres #LatinoLit) centered on the concept of comadres, the term that can include special mentors, sisters from another mister, friends of the closest stripe, etc. I ended the evening thinking of Carolynn.

Sometimes things happen in such strange ways that we feel they were meant to happen. A self-taught handspinner with both wheel and spindle, I had tried for years to connect with the local guild. No one replied to emails or snail mails. I met a rep at the Renaissance Fair who gave me an officer’s phone number. When I called, it had been disconnected. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, someone replied to a letter sent several years earlier with the date and place of their next meeting. I attended, as did another new person who’d just moved from Cleveland to Kansas City. She asked if we could go to lunch afterward since she knew nothing about KC and wanted me to show her around a little.

Carolynn could seem brash and abrasive when you first met her, and I hesitated, not sure I wanted to get involved with this loud person. Fortunately for me, I agreed and led her to a good local restaurant. That was the beginning of a great friendship. Carolynn was without inhibitions, and sometimes she did and said things in public that could make me cringe—because I still cared what others thought and she didn’t. I soon came to see, though, that she had the biggest heart in the world and a wide-open mind thirsty for all the knowledge she could find.

Soon enough, I left the local guild because their focus was not on spinning and they assumed that all members would be suburban housewives with lots of time on their hands, a class I hardly fell into. I was there only long enough to meet Carolynn and forge an unbreakable friendship. But why did I never hear from the guild until suddenly Carolynn would be there, a new person also?

Carolynn was a serious book person and reader. Her house, like my own, was full of bookcases and books. We traded back and forth and bought each other books we knew the other craved as gifts. We talked ideas and emotions and people we loved and worried about. She was older than me and larger than me in physical body and in her presence in the world. She was a total support to me as I went through severe difficulties with my mentally ill daughter. When I was in a toxic situation as a board member for a local nonprofit, it was Carolynn who kept telling me, “You have to tell them no. You have to protect yourself.” Until it finally sank in, and I did just that. That was the wonder of our relationship—we were always completely supportive of each other and fiercely protective of each other.

She wanted desperately to stay alive until my youngest son came home from graduate school. She had always adored him and had a special relationship with Joseph. She tried to hang on, but she missed him by slightly less than two weeks. I had been accepted to Macondo and given the great honor of the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award in those final months of her life, and she celebrated with me, as she had the acceptance and publication of my books of poetry. She said, “I love seeing your success. I feel like I’ve been working toward it myself.” And, of course, she had. When I considered postponing my trip to San Antonio for the week-long Macondo Workshop, she wouldn’t hear of it. “I’ll be doing it vicariously through you. Don’t worry. I’ll hang on. I’m not leaving without saying goodbye.” But she did. Some things are not in our control, no matter how strong we are.

I have some of her clothes that I wear often when writing. They’re big on me and comfortable, and it feels like Carolynn is right behind me when I wear them. I feel her presence often, even without the clothes. Like my beloved grandmother, Carolynn is one of the ancestral spirits who support me and guide me. Chosen family, in her case. She never got to see me win some major national awards for my poetry or the success with my novel, and she’d have been so excited and as proud as if it were her own because Carolynn was the most caring, generous person I’ve ever known. But I believe her spirit’s enjoyed it along with me. There are times I feel I could pick up the phone and call her, and I remind myself that I don’t need the phone now. Some people are so innately good that they can never truly leave us.

¡Adelante, Carolynn!

 

And a lovely time was had by all.

Marjorie Agosin, my dear friend and wonderful writer and activist, came and went in a whirl of motion and words. She arrived at the airport Monday afternoon, and we sounded like schoolgirls, hugging and squealing with joy at seeing each other again.

I am always surprised when I see Marjorie again, because in my mind, I remember her as taller. She is tiny, in reality, but she's such a larger-than-life mind and presence that my mind plays the trick on me of remembering her as only slightly shorter than I am.

I had cleared everything else off my calendar for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, in order to drive her around and take care of her and enjoy her company. So, in between all the events and interviews on her itinerary, on the city streets and the highway to and from Lawrence, Kansas, we talked and talked. We talked about mutual friends, about Macondo, about teaching, about how necessary it is to be optimistic and have hope if you are to remain an activist in this world, about our children and husbands (we are both extraordinarily lucky there!), about the Midwest, about Chile, about Kansas City and Wellesley as places to live, about politics, about culture and identity, but above all, always and over and over about writing. I am exhausted from all the events and driving, but so energized for all my writing projects. Talking with Marjorie is like plugging into a battery of creativity!

At her first major event, a talk and reading at the downtown branch of the Kansas City Public Library after a reception featuring Chilean sea bass in honor of Marjorie, we had a full house in the stately Helzberg Auditorium, and Marjorie kept the audience mesmerized. Afterward, the Q&A went on and on until I finally had to cut it off to allow time for book signing and a dinner with the Latino Writers Collective and some of our friends and supporters afterward. The diverse audience drew from various neighborhoods of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area with people from the inner city to some from the wealthiest suburbs. Yet they made an emotional community, drawn together by Marjorie's openness and her stories and poetry. They stayed late, talking with Marjorie and each other afterward and making connections they might never have made otherwise.

The next morning was full of interviews, and then we were off to the University of Kansas in Lawrence. First on the schedule was a discussion with graduate students from creative writing and Spanish/Latin American studies. This was a great group of students with incisive questions and discussion. Marjorie was as generous as she always is and connected some with academics who were doing research in their fields of interest. She even advised a young novelist on how to market his manuscript.

After a lovely dinner with some of the department chairs who made her visit to KU possible, we went to the KU Student Union to another stately room for another mesmerizing talk and reading by Marjorie, followed by more curious questions and a book signing. It was stimulating and great, but tiring--and was followed by the hour-long drive back to KC.

On Wednesday, it was so sad to say good-bye at the airport and know it will be months until we see each other at AWP. But what a gift this visit from one of our time's most gifted and remarkable women was--for all of us!


... And then, straight from the airport to Avila University to take part in a Latino Writers Collective reading. But that's a story for tomorrow.

Fear of Nature

I'm just back from Macondo in San Antonio. It was wonderful to see all my friends, even though I wasn't able to take the workshop I'd planned and signed up for with terrific writer, Carla Trujillo--even though we drove two days to get there, spent the day and gave a seminar, then drove two days to get back.

My plans were changed because I don't want to have an unbroken bluegrass front lawn in my front yard. One whole side of it is native plants, herbs and drought-hardy perennials. In the spring and early summer, it's a riot of flowers--daffodils, tulips, Mayapple, yellow bells, Siberian and bearded iris, peonies, gayfeather, roses, sage, peppermint, fennel, rue, lilies, daylilies--but in mid-summer when the heavy heat and burning sun hit, the herbs get leggy and nothing's blooming but the purple coneflowers and Blackeyed Susans. It's at this time of the year that my neighbors, who cut down trees and shrubs and dug up perennial flowerbeds when they first moved next door in order to have nothing but grass and two hanging pots of plastic flowers, call the city on me for "rank weeds over ten inches tall."

The city usually sends me a warning notice. I call and explain that these are not weeds but native plants and herbs. I agree to trim the most unruly (mugwort and lemon balm) back some, and that's usually it. This year there was no warning notice. Just a summons to court with the threat of arrest if I didn't show--and the option to plead "guilty" and send a fine of $125 and cut down my plants. And so the battle was on.

Unfortunately, court landed in the middle of Macondo week, but Ben and I were still able to keep our commitment to give a seminar on small press publishing and book contests there and to see many of my dear Macondo friends. Before Macondo and now afterward, it's hard work outside in terrible heat. 112 degree heat index, anyone? (San Antonio was a blessed relief in that regard, though it was 102 and 103 degrees when we were there. It's much drier than KC and thus the heat is not as oppressive.)

We are turning one long garden bed into four smaller ones plus a patio. (I'll post photos when we're finished.) We are corralling mugwort, tansy, sage, lemon balm, and costmary with tomato and peony cages. We are putting in ticky-tacky fence bed edgings and paver walkways. We are transplanting a rose, three hybrid daylilies, three bright orange Oriental lilies, five Blackeyed Susans, six native daylilies, eight Stargazer lilies, and twenty Siberian iris to the front beds of the garden. All of this is designed to make it more apparent to the eye of passing yard police that this is a garden, not weeds. (Though how anyone could not see it is a garden right now when about twenty naked ladies, otherwise known as surprise lilies--the native American amaryllis--are glowing pinkly right in the middle of it with tall gladiolas with large white and peach bloom spikes beside them is beyond me!)

I am trying to be non-confrontational. I have been gathering information on how much better these plants are than a lawn, and I have been gathering information and trying to get some testimony from yet another city department that has been trying to persuade everyone in my neighborhood to take out lawn and plant rain gardens just like mine. The city has designated my neighborhood as a pilot project called Target Green, and if everyone does as we have done, the city will be spared the million-dollar cost of installing new storm sewers. I'm willing to make cosmetic changes that cost money and effort (neither Ben nor I are in good shape for heavy garden work right now) if that will make it easier for my neighbors and the city to live with my garden. What I am not willing to do is to rip out my plants and put in bluegrass lawn, which is even worse than concrete since it absorbs little stormwater and requires massive water resources and toxic chemicals to thrive in this climate.

I live in the middle of the big city of the metropolitan area, Kansas City, Missouri. Another friend who lives in one of the Kansas-side suburbs just had his city on his neck over sunflowers he had planted in his front yard. Yes, he had to yank out his sunflowers--the state flower of the state of Kansas. I've been reading in this area now as I do research, and I'm finding that cities and towns all over the country are doing amazing things to people for trying to grow native plants. Some have been thrown in jail. Some have had their gardens clearcut by city contractors and then been charged hundreds of dollars for it. It all seems to fall under the heading of "property values." For some reason, people think a neighbor's yard that's not all lawn lowers the value of their property. Many of these people making these complaints are quite conservative, get-government-out-of-our-lives-type people--except when it comes to their neighbors' yards. Then they want government in front and center dictating to those neighbors that they must conform.

I think it's a control issue, of course--and as my sunflower-loving friend says, "These people don't have enough to do in their lives!". But also this is a symptom of our society's fear of nature and the natural world. This fear is a sickness, I believe, since we are a part of the cycle of nature and the natural world, no matter how we want to pretend we're not. In cutting ourselves off from nature, we are cutting ourselves off from our source, our ground.

So, at any rate, that's all the news from here, except for the wonderful bit that my book, Heart's Migration, is one of three finalists for the Thorpe Menn Award.

Now, back to digging in the earth. Which is good for the soul, if not so great for the back and joints. I go back to court on August 13. I'll post the results here.

Back from Macondo--Part Three

After the Friday vision session

Friday began with a vision and planning session where members of the foundation board and this year's participants looked at what worked and what didn't and planned for future growth to keep the foundation and the workshop strong and supple enough to meet the needs that the future would bring.

This discussion continued at a long lunch. Then the final afternoon seminar on translingual writers (those who write in a language other than their first language), which engendered an energetic discussion because we had so many translingual writers there.

Friday evening was our culminating public event. It was held at Casa Navarro, an historic building complex in downtown San Antonio. It kicked off with live music by Orqestra Tropicante.

Josslyn as Lady Day

Josslyn Luckett, emcee of many disguises, was in Billie Holiday mode as she hosted the evening. The dynamic writers reading were Liliana Valenzuela, John Olivares Espinoza, Jessica Lopez, Elaine Beal, Francisco Aragon, Deborah Miranda, and the magnificent Ruth Behar, introduced by Sandra Cisneros.

Liliana Valenzuela reading

Jessica Lopez reading

Francisco Aragon reading

Elaine Beal reading

Deborah Miranda reading

Ruth Behar reading

An after-hours party

Macondo is the brainchild of the incredible Sandra Cisneros, author of the novels, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, the short fiction collection, Woman Hollering Creek, and the poetry collections, My Wicked, Wicked Ways and Loose Woman. She started the Macondo Foundation to help talented mid-career writers who were also involved in community-building. She started the Macondo Writing Workshop around her kitchen table. Sandra is still at the core of what Macondo is, although she has a dedicated board that makes decisions and sets direction for the foundation now and has done the necessary planning to ensure that the foundation will survive long after she is gone. But Sandra is the soul of Macondo.

La Sandra

Sandra having fun with Jennifer De Leon

Sandra and the Macondistas, those who belong to the Macondo community and return year after year, have written a code of conduct that every writing workshop/class/community would do well to study, The Compassionate Code of Conduct. And they are serious, very serious, about adhering to it. To read it, go to the Macondo website. This community that Sandra has fostered is like an ideal family--if your family were other writers who were also committed to creating a better world in one way or another. And I feel privileged and proud to be a member of that community.

Thank you to the Macondistas who took photographs--Deborah Miranda, Liliana Valenzuela, Jennifer De Leon, and any other I've forgotten.

Back from Macondo--Part Two

After the workshops, we attended seminars
(Seminar on writing short pieces with Belinda Acosta and Beatriz Terrazas)

Macondo Foundation staff sold Macondo bags and took donations at all the readings
Pictured here: Olivia Doerges and Yvette De Chavez

Resistencia Bookstore, founded by the late raulrsalinas, sold authors' books at the readings

Me, Jenn De Leon, Sebha Sarwar, after we read Wednesday night
with Liliana Valenzuela, Jenn's and my Macondo buddy.

Sebha reads on Wednesday night

Jenn reads on Wednesday night

Marjorie Agosin reading Wednesday night

La Marjorie reading Wednesday night
(She brought tears to my eyes with her dramatic, heartfelt reading.)

Josslyn Luckett emceeing Wednesday night's reading

Thursday night's readers with some from Wednesday,
Rene Colato Lainez, Reggie Scott Young, Ching-In Chen, Jenn De Leon, Charles Rice-Gonzales, Josslyn (again emceeing), Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Margo Chavez-Charles

Fan Wu reads Thursday night

Ching-In Chen reading Thursday night

Celeste Guzman Mendoza reading Wednesday night

From Wednesday on, we had readings by participants every evening. I read on Wednesday evening with Vincent Toro, Rachel Jennings, Celeste Guzman Mendoza, Sehba Sarwar, Reggie Scott-Young, Jennifer De Leon, and the marvelous Marjorie Agosin introduced by Ruth Behar. We had a wonderful violinist and tango dancing. As with each evening's program, Josslyn Luckett hosted with humor and style.

Thursday evening, Fan Wu, Ching-In Chen, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Margo Chavez-Charles, Rene Colato Lainez, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest read with Pat Little Dog, the recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award from the Macondo Foundation. We had excellent mariachi music, and as usual, the party continued into the night at several venues around town.

More Macondo later.

Back from Macondo--Part One

Macondo! What a magical word--and what a magical experience this summer's Macondo Writing Workshop in San Antonio was! I was in a workshop called Casa/Hearth/Diaspora with Marjorie Agosín and Ruth Behar as leaders. Other workshop members were Richard Blanco, Celeste Guzman Mendoza, Margo Chavez-Charles, Toni Margarita Plummer, Vincent Toro, Levi Romero, and Rachel Jennings. This group of writers was awesome! Ruth and Marjorie were extremely generous with their time and attention to our work, and they were full of fun and corazon. My fellows in the workshop were a diverse and highly accomplished set of writers who were all pursuing ambitious writing projects involved with the workshop's theme. Some were working in poetry as I was, some in fiction, and some in creative nonfiction, but all of us were trying to define, find, or recreate home and roots in our work. And through the loving respect and careful attention we gave each other's work, we came to consider each other familia. It was difficult at the end to say goodbye to these people I hadn't known just a week earlier.

The Casa/Hearth/Diaspora Workshop Family

Vincent, Celeste, Toni, Richard, Ruth, Marjorie, Levi, Margo, me, Rachel

If that had been all Macondo was, it would have been a gift, but Macondo is even more. Vincent Toro, who was in my workshop, runs a summer youth program for a local arts center and had asked others coming to Macondo if we would be willing to come work with his young people one morning. Six of us said "yes," so Wednesday morning we rose early and made our way downtown to the theatre where Vincent's teens were waiting for us. We thought we were going to teach them something about writing and maybe a little about performing their writing. Boy, were we mistaken! These kids are already dynamite young writers and performers. They performed a small fraction of their usual show to our enthusiastic cheers. We read some of our work to them and later shared some writing exercises we've found helpful. San Antonio must be so proud of these young people!

Charles, JP, Ching-In, Jessica, Joslyn, and me with Vincent's whole group of talented kids

And there was still much more to Macondo. I'll have the second part of this up tomorrow.

Catching Up--Book and Reunion--Amid Pre-Macondo Jitters

I'm resigned to being a lazy blogger. This summer has been so packed with activities and tasks, and I've been in and out of town so much that I have not kept this blog up the way I had hoped. I have nothing but the highest respect for those people who blog daily. I can't even seem to manage weekly, which is what I was hoping for originally.

Part of what has made this summer a madhouse has been all the attention my new book has been getting--a very good thing from my point of view. Interviews and readings take time, and when placed in an already crowded schedule, they will squeeze out things like updating a blog. But aside from being important to sales of the book, they are just plain great fun. Here's a link to a radio interview on KCUR, Kansas City' NPR station.

I also did something I've never done before. I went back to Manhattan, Kansas, for my high school reunion. I had been out of touch with my graduating class. They couldn't find me, and when I would leave my contact information with the high school (as I did several times), it never made its way to those organizing reunions. Finally, an old friend from high school found me on the internet and reconnected me with my high school class. (Thanks big time, Bill!)

Manhattan High School (Old that we attended on right)

Konza Prairie, the landscape surrounding Manhattan, KS
(c) Bill Curnutte

I don't know that I expected much out of the reunion. I wanted to see people again that I had known when we were very young, and that was about it. What was so surprising was the instant sense of connection with these folks I hadn't seen for decades. And my own teary sentimentality when Norman Byers, our class vice president, led us in the school anthem! We toured the old school, and when we walked into the auditorium where I had performed so often with many of these same classmates, it almost felt as if I ought to be walking up onto the stage to sing and whirl with Pops Choir or walk with exaggerated hip swings (that always embarrassed me), pig in arms, downstage singing Moonbeam McSwine's part in Li'l Abner. Very eerie sense of deja vu!

It was terrific fun, though, to reconnect with so many classmates, who have turned into very successful--but more importantly, truly nice--people. It's very odd but very satisfying to feel this sense of connection to these people who have not been a part of my life for so many years but who are nonetheless important to me, though I had not realized it. Now, we're planning the next reunion in five years and trying to stay in touch in the meantime. Go, MHS Class of 1964!

Part of why things have been so hectic lately is that I'm trying to take care of everything that needs doing before taking off to San Antonio and the Macondo Workshop next week. Very exciting! I've been fortunate enough to get into the Famosa workshop with Ruth Behar and Marjorie Agosín, Casa/Hearth/Diaspora. (My husband's incredibly jealous since he knows Behar's and Agosín's work from his own work in Jewish studies!) They've given us some interesting preparatory work, and the manuscripts from the other workshop members are widely varied in style and universally fascinating.

I'm looking forward to seeing the fabulous Sandra Cisneros (founder of Macondo) again and other friends, Francisco Aragón and Ellen Placey Wadey, as well as people I only know from email or from their work, such as John Olivares Espinoza, Margo Chavez-Charles, Rachel Jennings, Levi Romero, Vincent Toro, and Richard Blanco. I'm nervous, of course. I sent in drafts of poems I'm working on, as requested, not finished work. I hope that in the workshop I'll get a better handle on this book I'm writing. It seems as if I'm writing in two very different styles--and each is a departure from my usual style. I don't know at this point if I'm breaking important new ground for myself or wandering down dead-end roads stylistically.

So back to trying to get everything taken care of before I leave, especially getting all the content for Tercera Pagina to Tina Landis for the Latino Writers Collective blog. We're growing so--with new members all the time. It's wonderful to see an organization that used to just be five or six of us about to hit 50 members in number and grow beyond that.

I'll try to get an entry up soon after I return from Macondo about that experience. Until then, read and write and be happy!

Exciting Links--At Least for Me

First of all, tomorrow Garrison Keillor reads my poem, "The Sun Grows in Your Smile," on the Writers Almanac, then on June 27, he reads "Meditation on the Word NEED." Both poems are from Heart's Migration. Here's a sneak preview of tomorrow's. And here's a sneak preview of June 27th.

Next, here's the lovely post Francisco Aragon wrote on Letras Latinas today. Francisco is a consummate encourager and supporter of writers. At the AWP earlier this year, I watched as he introduced people to each other, helped them make crucial connections, opened doors for them, made opportunities available to them--constantly! And I never saw him look as mischievously happy as when he had been able to do something kind for another writer. The world needs more Franciscos--that's for sure!

Finally, my dear friend, Denise Low-Weso, who will be relinquishing the mantle of poet laureate for Kansas to Carryn-Miriam Goldberg on July 1, sent around her final official Ad Astra broadside, and this one was about me. The Lawrence Journal-World and several other papers picked it up and ran it as an article. Denise has been a superlative poet laureate who's worked overtime to bring poetry into the everyday lives of Kansans and to showcase poets with Kansas roots. I'll be at the Lawrence Arts Center on July 1 to cheer her out and cheer Carryn in. And to read for the launch of a new anthology in which I have a long poem.

I also received the manuscripts for my Macondo workshop with Ruth Behar and Marjorie Agosin. Wonderful work by a fascinating group of writers. Of course, I'm so excited to be going to study with Behar and Agostin. I'm absolutely looking forward to Macondo!

What a lovely day! Hope yours has been just as fine.