Report on Sandra Cisneros' Visit to Kansas City

Gabriela N. Lemmons introduces Sandra Cisneros Thursday, April 16.

Sandra Cisneros holds up photo of herself when she first wrote The House on Mango Street.

I'm late getting up any coverage of Sandra Cisneros' visit to Kansas City. Mainly, it's because of a continuing overload of work and deadlines. But I don't want to let too much time go by without scribbling a few lines about what was a phenomenal experience, both for me and for the Latino Writers Collective. And for that matter, for Kansas City!

Kansas City loves Sandra. There's no doubt about that. Over 800 people turned out at the Central Library (a huge refurbished bank with marble halls and wood paneled offices) to hear Sandra talk about the books she's currently working on and read from the new preface to the 25th anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, as well as a wonderful excerpt from a new book talking about the pivotal role libraries played in her life and success.

Sandra Cisneros shows audience photo of her late parents.

Later during the long, stimulating question and answer session, the dialogue ranged from the need to write down the stories of the people we love or someone else will write them without knowing the truth to how to balance one's desire for creative success and one's need to serve the community to "female agency." ("Do you mean feminism?" Sandra asked as the audience roared in approval. "Well, yes, I'm a feminist.")


After the standing ovation that she had truly earned, she sat for hours and signed books, giving so generously of herself when she was very tired. Every person who came through the line that snaked around the entire interior of the library to the entrance, got to talk to her as long as s/he wanted, was allowed to hug her and have a photo taken with her. And she gave the same consideration to the ones carrying their old books as to the ones with the new edition just purchased at the table run by Rainy Day Books--and just as much to the young people carrying no books and asking her to sign their flyers of the event. I have seen and brought in a lot of writers and speakers, some very famous, and I have never known anyone to give so much of herself to her audience and fans.





The next day was the same as she spoke to over 200 high school students at the Plaza Library and then spoke to each individually as they lined up as everyone had the night before, even though there were no books for sale. I watched those kids, many of whom had come in with sullen faces or trying to look blasé and cool, walk away starry-eyed and full of ambition and hope.



Later that evening, she spoke and read in Spanish to new immigrants on Southwest Boulevard, giving a dramatic performance from her novel, Caramelo. And again, she ended by speaking and listening to each of the 60-some attendees with exquisite focus and attention on every one of them.


It's no wonder that Kansas City loves Sandra Cisneros-- and wants her to come back. I've been receiving emails and phone calls ever since from people wanting to know when she will appear again. Word is circulating quickly around the city about this remarkable visit. In talking with the Library folks, who also want a return visit, we decided that next time we'd have to get an even bigger venue just to hold all the people who will show up for la Sandra.

Also, as the Latino Writers Collective has learned, Sandra is a true mentor of writers. She has given much encouragement (read: a real push) to members to apply to the Macondo Workshop. She has said she will help us bring in other great Latino writers. She has shown real interest in our work in the community and in our books.

Phenomenal visit, phenomenal writer, phenomenal speaker, phenomenal woman. One of a kind.

(Photos copyrighted and courtesy of Oscar Pedroza.)

New Chapbook From Cherry Pie Press, Pale Leaf Floating By

http://cherrypiepress.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-chapbook-pale-leaf-floating-by-gaye.html

Sandra Cisneros comes to Kansas City in Tercera Pagina Reading Series

The Latino Writers Collective presents

Tercera Página Reading Series

with

Sandra Cisneros

“Poetry is the forbidden room in the house of the spirit. It’s where you write about the things you cannot speak. For me it’s about breaking taboos. It’s the place where you think the unthinkable, say the unsayable and, even worse, set it to paper. It’s the most subversive act I know.” --- Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is a national treasure in Latina literature. Her The House on Mango Street (1984) is required reading in schools across the nation and is celebrating its 25^th anniversary in 2009. The founder of the Macondo Foundation and Writers Conference and the organizer of the Latino MacArthur Fellows, los MacArturos, for over thirty years Cisneros has published stunning poetry, novels and short stories. Besides the “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation, her many awards include, among others, the American Book Award, the PEN Center West Award, the Lannan Foundation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Texas Medal of Arts, and two honorary doctorates. Her books, The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Bad Boys, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Loose Woman, and Caramelo, have been published in over 20 languages and included in many anthologies and textbooks.

Reading, Reception, and Book Signing

6:30-9:30 p.m.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Central Library, 14 W. 10^th Street

Call 816-701-3407 to RSVP. Reservations required.

Book of Kells: New Poet Laureate Named

This is a wonderful and witty post on Kelli Russell Agodon's blog.

Book of Kells: New Poet Laureate Named

Why Poetry? And What Is Its Role in Our Contemporary Culture?

My friend, Maril Crabtree (a poet herself), is giving a presentation to a regional group of librarians and had asked a few of us for our thoughts on these questions:
Why do you (and others) write poetry?
Why do you (and others) read poetry?
What is poetry's place in contemporary society?
How can libraries promote poetry?

Good questions all. Here are my answers.

Why do I read and write poetry? Because it takes me places I would never otherwise go. I love to enter the imaginative play of a poem, whether reading or writing it, and find out to what unexpected places it will take me. Even or especially when writing a poem, I’m heading off on a journey whose end I can’t see. This is, of course, not what many readers or non-readers of poetry expect or want to hear. They want to think that I had it all plotted out, an interior rhyme 3 lines in, alliteration in lines 5, 7, 11, etc. Of course, I don’t. A poem written that way might be an interesting exercise to try and might even turn out well, much as poems do when the poet uses a traditional form such as a sonnet, which dictate certain rhymes and rhythms on certain arbitrary lines, but the best poems, certainly the best free verse poems, rise organically from the initial idea and the choices the poet makes along the way as s/he develops the idea and all the thoughts that cluster around it and its children, picking and choosing among them with each choice leading to many other choices. I try to explain it to young children by telling them it’s like one of the “choose-your-own-adventure” books or games. Each choice you make takes you down a different road and leads to different choices. That’s why there can be so many excellent but different poems on a topic such as love or birds.

The reader does best if s/he also views each poem as an adventure, wondering where it will take him. Each poem should be approached on its own. Some may be like a walk through the park, pleasant but not thrilling. Some may be like a trek through what s/he knows is familiar ground, but in the night with fog camouflaging everything and making it strange and even scary. Some may be like fighting through an unmapped jungle, sweating, tripping, stumbling, only to finally break through into a clearing that is unearthly in its beauty and total improbability. And these are only three of the multitude of possible adventures the poem can become. But like all adventures, any good poem leaves the reader changed at the end of it, even if others cannot see this in any way. Inside, the reader is a slightly different person for having gone on that adventure and can never quite be the same person who started out on it.

The role of poetry in contemporary society is what it has always been. The first poets were priest(esse)s, and the first poetry was intended to show the way back to the harmony with the natural world and the divine that humans inevitably wander from, to show the ways we have fallen from this wholeness and to show the ways in which we can regain at least a small measure of it. This is what poetry is for. You will tell me that quite a lot of poetry fails at this, and I will nod and say that it always has. What survives from ancient times are the best of works, but I am certain from my own studies of times past that there were more that were almost great or merely good or even quite poor in quality. As Donald Hall says in his famous essay, “Death to the Death of Poetry,” “…you must acknowledge that most poetry is terrible--that most poetry of any moment is terrible.”

As to how libraries can promote poetry, one key way is to buy it and make it available to patrons. It is constantly disturbing to me to go to public libraries and look for books of poetry by acknowledged masters of the art, not highly regarded contemporaries with one or more awards but poets who are anthologized and taught in textbooks, only to find that the library either never had that book or got rid of it during some purge or other and too often to find the books of one of these acknowledged masters at a Friends of the Library sale for pennies when the book cannot be found on the shelves in that library. To be fair, I will point out that this is also a problem with bookstores, but that makes the library’s role even more vital. So the first way libraries can promote poetry is to stock it on their shelves.

Another way would be to review poetry books in the library’s newsletter, blog, website, or other format. More poetry books than ever are published today, but vastly fewer are reviewed. How can the person who wants to learn about poetry but feels unsure of his or her ability to judge it sift through all the titles or even learn of them? A library with a regular poetry review column in some form would be doing this reader a great service. Or a regular article by poets and/or critics that would lead the reader through a deep consideration and discussion of one poem—this would be a great aid also. The schools often have no idea how to teach students how to read a poem, and many people who are drawn to poetry are afraid of it because they don’t know how to read it. All they know is that it takes a different kind of reading skill than a mystery or magazine article and they don’t have it. As Walt Whitman said, “Great poetry needs great audiences…” and knowledgeable readers

Another Great Writer of Color: Lorraine Lopez and her Gifted Gabaldon Sisters

[This is a review of The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters by Lorraine López that I posted on this blog a while back. I'm bringing it forward into my Books of Interest by Writers of Color series. I will be looking at her newest novel soon also.]

I first met Lorraine López at Con Tinta in Chicago earlier this year at AWP, the national conference of writers and university writing programs. López is one of the organizers of Con Tinta, the annual pachanga of Latino writers and their literary allies from around the country. She is also a veteran of the famous Macondo writing workshop. A professor at Vanderbilt University, López is a charming, soft-spoken woman, whose second book of short stories will be published this fall by BkMk Press at UMKC. [This book, Homicide Survivors' Picnic, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction, making López the first Latina to become a finalist for that prestigious award.]

López’s first novel, The Gifted Gaboldón Sisters (Grand Central Publishing), raised high expectations since her first short story collection, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories (Curbstone Press), won the Latino Book Award and other awards, and her young adult novel, Call Me Henri (Curbstone Press), won the Paterson Prize. The Gifted Gaboldón Sisters exceeds those expectations handily. Four young sisters depend on the family’s mysterious and ancient Pueblo servant, Fermina, after their mother’s death. Early in the book, Fermina dies, after promising each girl a gift. Throughout the book, the story of the sisters’ journey to adulthood with the special gifts endowed by Fermina—Bette’s stories, Loretta’s healing, Rita’s cursing, and Sophia’s laughter—alternates with Fermina’s own gripping story of kidnapping and slavery told to a writer long before the girls were born. The two threads come together as the adult sisters, in a time of crisis for each, journey together across the country and into the past to discover who Fermina was and what kind of magic their capricious gifts really came from. López peoples her book with characters so fresh and alive you expect to meet them just around the block. The rich, vivid writing entwines the reader deeply in the lives of the girls, their relatives, and their lovers. Fermina’s story enlightens and interconnects with theirs from the distant past. The book’s theme focuses on the lives of women in the past and present, how the distant past informs their present identities, and how they overcome or make peace with the limitations life hands them. This is a book you will go back to again and again.

[López is one of the most gifted writers of fiction today. She writes from a position of respect and caring for even her most hapless and out-of-control characters, allowing the reader to see through her eyes the possibilities and hope at each one's core.

Her novels are published by a major publisher, and here's the Amazon link. If you'd rather buy Homicide Survivor's Picnic from the small press that published it, here's that link with a video of her reading it, as well. Readers of this blog will know that I always encourage folks to support the small and university presses who publish most of the new writers in this country.]

Back to the usual format of this series on writers of color at the end of the week.

Latino Writers Collective Poetry Anthology Finalist for Another Book Award

All right!! Primera Página: Poetry From the Latino Heartland, the anthology of poetry by the Latino Writers Collective, was named a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Finalist in the category of anthology. The winner will be named at Book Expo America. We were a USA Book News book award finalist earlier this year tambien. So the Latino Writers Collective is celebrating tonight.

Also, I submitted my application for Macondo. Wish me luck, everyone. I'm going to be submitting a spate of applications for writers residencies. I've got this novel to write and I need the uninterrupted time and freedom from interruptions to get it down. So wish me barrels of luck, por favor.