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In the text, “gun-shaped speculum” implies violence, and, in our interview, Myers emphasized the speaker process to which we women subject ourselves voluntarily , Zapata wrote me in our Spanish-language email interview

Portrait of Us Burning: Poems by Sebastián H. Páramo | ISBN: 9780810146488 Oct. 15, 2023 | pp. 112 | Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? This could be the room, the desk, the city, an MFA program, a fellowship, or any other environmental factor (you only wrote when it rained, you always wrote with fresh flowers in the room, etc.). For many years, I wrote in bed on a laptop. When I started my MFA in 2010, I didn’t have a dedicated desk, I’d find myself in the Sarah Lawrence College library basement in the computer lab. Later, when I was juggling three jobs to live in my six-floor walk-up in Harlem, I’d find myself in diners or coffee shops open late because my apartment was oftentimes not comfortable. Think Coffee on 8th Ave was fairly consistent. Mudsmith, a coffee shop/bar open until midnight became my staple when I moved back to Texas and became involved in the Dallas literary arts scene. Finding a routine was important after the MFA and I started to develop that when I did my first writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Two weeks wasn’t enough time but it was the the perfect way to frame my writing routine as part of an artist community. It was March and still snowy then. I could see outside my studio window and take writing breaks. I could lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling. I had to learn that was okay for me. Eventually, when I started my Ph.D. in Denton, Texas, Aura Coffee and the occasional bar that served kombucha and coffee on tap would become my offices. I was fortunate to have the support of funding my program and an editorial fellowship that provided me with the time and space to write. I don’t think if I chose to make it in the private sector I’d have the same opportunities to pay attention to myself and my work and I feel lucky for it. I’ve also benefited from having a partner at times and family and therapy to place me in a much better mental space to write and challenge the questions I found myself asking. When I was finishing the book, I was also at the University of Texas at Austin’s Dobie Paisano Fellowship program, where I spent four months and some change on 250 acres learning how to establish a writing routine after the Ph.D. During the pandemic, this work became an environmental reckoning for my writing process, mental state, and the questions that would help bring me to my next book. I like this question because environmental factors for me are not just physical spaces, but also small rituals that we give ourselves and also can gesture towards saying something about our positionality. My parents immigrated here to provide better opportunities for me and I must acknowledge that I’ve likely benefited from being a man and white-passing (or as one person has put it, ambiguous ethnic), which is something I’ve been thinking about with my recent project. What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing? How did writing this book transform you? The earliest poem dates from nearly twelve years ago. But I’ve been writing since high school and I had no patience for much revision early on. Workshops in undergrad and grad school definitely helped me pay attention to patterning elements in my poems, but I was very slow to revise the book or even treat the poems as a book for a long time. I remember receiving the advice that I shouldn’t rush a book during the MFA. It’s better to wait for the poems to come and see what you have after writing them. In New York, I felt that pressure. Everyone seemed to have a book or be publishing a book. I had to learn to follow the language and give myself permission to become obsessed with a subject. When I started to search for my obsessions, my poems were more successful at being placed for publication. I wrote and revised poems based on submission deadlines or whenever I was invited to readings or participated in open mikes. I became part of the Spiderweb Salon, an arts collective in Denton and I learned to collaborate and open myself up to writing that wasn’t so academic. I gave myself permission to become more experimental. Through the collective, I had the opportunity to participate in projects that stretched my imagination. I also attended workshops at Sewanee and Bread Loaf and met with other poets as an editor which helped me think about new ways of looking at my poems. From these friendships, I frequently found myself in 30/30 challenges. Focusing my practice and learning my obsessions helped me focus on the subject of my manuscript. It actually took me a long time to find a way to write about my family and share the vulnerable voice of the poems. While I don’t write every day, I found the challenge of 30 poems in 30 days useful and for the past few years, these 30/30 challenges have given me more and more poems that are not so terrible. I’m pretty flexible about the rules, but I frequently ask friends to join me in accountability groups and will now take on 30/30 challenges sometimes more than a few times a year. It helps when you have a book project and a deadline. Mine was defending for my dissertation defense for my Ph.D. and submitting to book contests. I finally had enough pages of material when I reached this stage and started to find the shape of my manuscript. One of my mentors, Jehanne Dubrow, recommended I try to use two sections for the book. Because I started to treat the family poems, wherein, memories were portraits, I used that to frame the first section “Portrait of Us” as a title. The second section is titled, “Burning.” Together the first section establishes the sense of family trying to hold it together with their dreams and ambitions. The second section starts to ache and burn and complicate that struggle. Because it relies on semi-autobiographical material, I also decided to use creative nonfiction techniques and speculative, surreal fiction to inform how these portraits have “memory gaps.” Some of the poems also comment on the unreliable narratives that come from remembering complicated childhoods. Some of the poems like “Footage of Me Tomorrow” use erasure to more explicitly play out these memory gaps, but the poems also comment on these shifts in memory like “Portrait of a Reunion” in the first half and “Portrait of the Unsaid.” Ultimately, I consider my writing process as an evolving one, but I like to frequently challenge how I’m writing my poems and I’ve come to appreciate the active cultivation of writing as a ritual for myself to process the world and make myself think harder by asking myself to pay attention to what I’m seeing and understanding. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. Portraits are an obvious influence. I mentioned a little about this when discussing the editing process, but once I found the obsession or framing for the book, I leaned into it. Thankfully, I had poems and memories to latch onto. I mainly wanted to reference Mexican painters and artists. I started with Diego Rivera because my family had this print of his in our kitchen growing up. I remember really admiring ekphrastic poems a lot, but I find myself gravitating towards cinema and borrowing visual elements and breaks in my own work. I also expanded ekphrasis to include film and have some poems that are in conversation with The Lion King and Paris, Texas. I also mention Norman Rockwell as a contrast to the Mexican artists. For this reason, I considered how memory could be unreliable and I used erasures on my own poems to gesture or hint at this idea. I was lucky to have “After El Hombre"by Rufino Tamayo" on display at the Dallas Museum of Art for an exhibit I did with the Spiderweb Salon collective. We had a huge group of participants find art in the museum and write poems inspired by the artwork. We recorded them and had them on display for a month and attendees could dial our poem in a special rotary phone that we pre-programmed with a number that corresponded with our selected artwork. People could then listen to the audio recording. I challenged myself to see if I could use these ekphrastic poems to comment on the art but also have them converse with my own questions and way of seeing the world. What role does the poet play in the 21st century? The poet will remain important because language is important. I believe in the power of poetry to give voice and names to things that we find hard to say. Others may see poetry as a hard space to enter because it seems lofty or inaccessible or it’s siloed inside institutions. But I’m glad for any space that gives people an opportunity to share their voice or say something they didn’t know they could. I understand why people may feel that poetry doesn’t have the power to save democracy or stop wars, but teaching poetry has a lot of power. Poetry is our oldest form of storytelling and I believe people need to feel empowered to speak out for themselves or for those who cannot. I find Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” a text that my students readily connect with. Recent data shows that more people are actually reading poetry these days. In the U.S. we have more MFA programs, writers in the schools, and more magazines and presses than ever before. Art becomes harder every year because poets continue to raise the bar with what language can do. I wouldn’t say it’s important to read every poet who’s writing today, but I believe it’s important to pay attention to the world and to continue to find ways to articulate what that world looks like. We have more writers than ever and sometimes they need to say something familiar, but I always ask myself and my students, how can I say this like only I could say it, right now? Sometimes that means retelling the same stories or the same feelings that people always have about the world. The world is overwhelming because of how much information is out there and poets are trying to make sense of that information like they always have and they want to speak for themselves and their communities. I believe anyone thinking about the urgency to say something meaningful about their people or their community has the spirit of a poet. As a poet, I’ve chosen the medium of language to say something about my world. My book comes from that thinking and the questions I ask come from thinking about what it means to live in the 21st century in America. I’ve carried those questions into my writing life too. You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book? “We lend each other tools. We learned the American tongue.” and “What if / I’m like him? Lighting the last of a cigarette—becoming night.” Community and friendship are sustaining factors for many writers. Give a shoutout to some of the folks who have held and supported you in your writing life. I’m very grateful to friends like Anthony Cody, who have been supportive from the beginning and rooting me on. I’m grateful to Diana Khoi Nguyen who has been very supportive and inspiring through her own work. I’m grateful to my friend courtney marie for inviting me many times to participate in Spiderweb Salon events. Ángel García, Sara Borjas, Eduardo Corral, Greg Brownderville, Mike Soto, Dorothy Chan, and many others have been people who have supported me through their work and feedback. Many more are listed on my acknowledgments page. I’m grateful to have met them in the community and to continue to be in the community with them. I’m a big believer in the writing community. For me, writing is a social practice. Whether I’m reading other authors or wanting to say something about the world, I want to feel like I’m having a conversation with the world. Reading these poets and having conversations with them about their work has been sustaining. I’m very glad I’ve decided to edit a magazine and start a reading series because they’ve kept me in the community even without a writing program. I’m a big fan of the poets I get to publish or invite to participate in events. While my roles may seem like they hold power, I believe anyone can start a magazine or series and I always hope some of my students will invent their own scene or community! Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it? My new project is searching for a title and has had a few. I won’t share it here, but it does follow a character I’ve named the Tejano. I’ve written over 100 pages of poems and drafts. Some of them are published and others are always being revised. It’s a love story for the end of times and it explores the history of Texas by way of speculative literature. I’m re-writing Texas folktales and considering the mythologizing that happens when it comes to the history of Texas and Mexico. There’s a love story, creation stories, apocalyptic stories, and stories about identity. My family didn’t share a lot of stories growing up. I had to dig for them. My first book came from asking about these origin stories. My project expands on those questions by going beyond my own personal history and asking about the stories we tell. Right now, it’s finding its shape. But I’m expanding the speculative portions by writing about cowboys and Mars and outer space. Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023). His poems have recently appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and elsewhere. Sebastián received his MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas. He is the founding editor of The Boiler, Poetry Editor for Deep Vellum, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. Photo credit: Paxton Maroney

Amor entre aguaceros/Love between downpours | $20 | Alegría Publishing | November 2023 DM author through @poetatico on Instagram for signed copies. Copies available through publisher here. What is poetry for you? Poetry is a window and a mirror. It enhances our senses through the challenge and invitation of reading someone else’s life experiences. It is a door leading to empathy and understanding. Poetry gave me a voice when I was undocumented, helped me speak from such place of adversity and armed me with opportunities to learn from my immigrant experience. What are some key themes present in your book? The key themes in my book are nostalgia, homesickness, family, memory impressions, and identity. What was the impetus for this body of work? My friend and poet, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, brought up the topic of memory migration during one of our conversations about poetry. He mentioned the power memories have to shape our imagination and how poetry feeds from this intention. I kept thinking about my reliance on objects, photographs, family, stories and nature reinforcing memories that keep me close to Costa Rica. I found myself traveling back in time with the intention of piecing together as much of my past as my memory allowed and my poetry could show. Throughout my collection, the rain is used as a catalyst for some of my deepest moments of contemplation. What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing? Some poems came to me after speaking with my family members, remembering through them and some others arrived during instances where an object, such as the coffee mug in my first poem Time in a coffee mug/El tiempo en una taza de café, took me on a journey of introspection similar to Proust’s madeleine. I wrote some shorter poems as prologues to longer pieces and included photographs that I took during my writing process. I wanted the reader to have more windows to look at my book from and share places that inspired my writing directly. One of the most important decisions for this book came with making it truly bilingual. I would write one version in Spanish and then approach the same idea in English. While they are presented in both versions and translated, each poem is its own experience once read. I want my poetry to be as inviting to those readers who speak one language and to those who can speak both. How did writing this book transform you? English is my adopted language and sometimes I feel like there’s glass between my words and my voice. Writing this book definitely helped me face that feeling and embrace the fact that such vulnerability leads to authenticity. I’ve performed poetry from this collection live in different environments, from film festivals to open mic events, and there’s this feeling of community when I hear a snap from someone’s fingers after a line in Spanish and then another one when I read an English one. I feel like the glass is gone when I read in front of people and I let poetry translate what I’ve experienced. What are your favorite lines from your book? “The moon has brown eyes and they look at summer with curious delight” “My teacher molds a tiny copper bird with clay of words” “Antes de retirarme, Nostalgia abre sus manos y me muestra el corazón de mi infancia diciéndome que seguramente se me cayó en algún lugar entre California y de donde vengo” “Y le otorgaré un anillo de agradecimiento a la melancolía que le permite a mi país ser un colibrí esmeralda de cola blanca mariposeando en el bosque lluvioso de mi corazón” Jean-Pierre Rueda is a Costa Rican poet and writer based in Compton, California. Jean-Pierre released his first Spanish poetry collection Herencias through Alegría Publishing in 2021. His book discusses love, family, heritage and celebrates historical Latinx figures as monuments of artistic and cultural success. Jean-Pierre released Amor entre aguaceros/Love between downpours on November 2023 through Alegría Publishing. Jean-Pierre Rueda writes poetry to build bridges between his experiences as a Costa Rican immigrant growing up in California and the importance of art in the Latinx community to maintain their heritage alive. Photo credit: Juan Escobedo

Buy: ...after...   | World Stage Press | 2015 | ISBN: 9780985865931 Buy: En una Esquina de tu País,  | Poetry Ambassadors Press | 2024 | ISBN: 978-1963261004 Buy: In a Corner of Your Country   | Bellucci, Palms & Carmichael Publishing, LLC | 2023 | ISBN: 9798985915327 How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you? It wasn’t just memory that got me started. It is easier for me to share thoughts in a story. One afternoon after school, when I was nine years old, my older sister and I were acting out a few of the scary stories our mother and father used to tell us just before bedtime. I began asking my sister how to spell out titles of stories, such as  El Padre sin Cabeza  ( The Headless Priest ) and  La Carreta Chillona  ( The Screaming Wagon ), only two of many horror folk tales. The titles’ phrasing comes directly from the traditionally spoken folklore my parents, aunts, and neighbors would tell all of us children. My sister and I wrote them out on the yellow-beige plywood wall that separated our bedroom from my parents’ and brothers’ sleeping spaces. I was in third grade at that time and would have wanted to discuss at home what “writing” was about, because, even in those early days, written words had power and sometimes made me nervous. I was never going to write or speak in public. I had no confidence in my ability to read aloud nor to write on chalkboards. At home, though, playing with siblings, sounding words aloud or writing them was about having fun. We did not get in trouble for writing on our bedroom plywood wall, other than eventually having to paint over it, only to write on it again.  In all six years of elementary school and into junior high education, writing or reading homework was not especially exciting to do at school, or at home. “Reading” or “writing” in school boiled down to basic grammar learning. It often required writing over and over las planas  (writing lines) to improve calligraphy or vocabulary, which in a way I enjoyed at home, for it was like pretending to do something perfect on the lined pages of my copybook. I remember feeling good about writing lines at our table in our candle-illuminated common living space.   In junior high, I remember reading national writers: Cuentos de Cipotes  by Salvador Salazar Arrué/AKA, Salarrué ( Kids’ Tales);  a novel entitled  Jaragua  by Napoleon Rodriguez Ruíz; and the novel, Cenizas de Izalco , by Claribel Alegría & Darwin J. Flakoll ( Ashes of Izalco ); La Divina Comedia ; El Cid , and poems by Alfredo Espino, and Rubén Dario, and a few other writers.  Not until I got into high school did I read more complex writing. At first, as I entered El Centro Nacional De Artes , the only arts high school in El Salvador, where I studied drama, I felt discouraged about my abilities in writing or reading. During my high school years, I engaged substantially in literature, or better yet in fiction adapted for theater: El Principito (The Little Prince ) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; La Gaviota  ( The Seagull ) by Anton Chekov. I read Cien Años de Soledad  ( A Hundred Years of Solitude ) by Gabriel Garcia Márquez; chapters of Don Quixote  by Miguel de Cervantes; El Extranjero  ( The Stranger ) by Albert Camus; and writings on aesthetics. I appreciated very much that theater professor Orlando Amilcar Flor encouraged me to read incredible books he lent me…books by Chekov, Gogol, and Pushkin and The Actor's Manual  by Constantine Stanislavsky, all of which we studied intensely in the last year of high school in drama. Maestro Flor exposed us all to serious art in plays, poems, and songs.  That’s when I started writing little monologues. It began in a journal of what I did in theater classes which I kept every day for three years of high school. It was nothing fancy or serious, just little thoughts and feelings stirred up in theater class discussions or by doing theater exercises or acquiring vocabulary I did not yet recognize or understand easily, especially in the Stanislavsky theater manual.  Theater was the vehicle that got me into writing. Improvisation made me forget the fear of writing on a page, or even on public walls during necessary protests during the civil war raging in El Salvador. That era still impinges on my memory to this day, with memories of writing what was going on in my head, never just one memory at a time, as we might sometimes wish. I connected seriously to the English language in the mid-1980s while in exile in Canada. As I was learning English, I was connecting its words in my mind in terms of theater; I was writing for acting. This worked for me both in Canada and eventually in Los Angeles, California, where I rejoined family also in exile in 1989. Throughout the early nineties, I wrote monologues and a play, some of them in poetic rhyme (I was reading a lot of poetry by Pablo Neruda and listening, to Violeta Parra and Silvio Rodriguez songs), and began performing my works in places wherever I could, in cafes, cultural centers, and churches. It was not easy to be both an actor and writer, an artist and refugee and to express myself in a place no one was asking to hear or see my work. No one was clamoring for a Salvadoran woman actor, writer, immigrant, and soon afterward, a mother to fit well into California’s 1990s. In the early 1990s, I decided to attend community college to continue studying theater and film. To my surprise, it wasn’t easy to simply study theater. I was required to start from zero, taking all general classes to get into the arts. I think I had nearly three hundred units of university credit when I transferred to UCLA. I wrote essays in my English classes which my English 101/102 teachers told me were more like stories than essays. This kind of writing got me into UCLA, into the English department, and into English Literature, where I got into this thing called “the writing craft.” I was accepted into creative writing seminars that explored writing short stories and novels, with all this happening in English, a language I was continuously acquiring. I found myself in a nest of learning techniques to tell my stories, to portray characters I had met throughout my childhood, stories from where I belong. Ironically and sometimes ambivalently, I was writing them in English, a language I always associate with imperialism.  However, after having read the short stories of Jamaica Kinkaid ( Girl ), Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, and James Joyce, to name a few, I kept saying to myself, “I can do my stories, to write them like these writers.” While at UCLA, I submitted a story to the University of Texas, Austin to the literary arts journal Analecta24 . Out of hundreds of student submissions, only a few were selected, and my story was one of those stories. That was the moment I felt I was a writer. With reader reactions to my story, I understood finally the power of putting a story on public “paper.” How did your relationship with your family influence your writing?  Above any academic learning, I thank my parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, my whole extended family, and even the neighbors where I grew up because they were first in teaching me to tell stories, even though the craft of writing eventually came academically.   I kept constant contact with older family members, especially my parents when I first wrote short stories. I benefited, not only as a child from their everyday stories, but even when I was writing, I would ask my parents for details and to correct me for errors in information within a story. I would talk to them long distance from exile to ask a lot of questions about dates, and place names, and to run possible character names by them. They were proud I could write and that I cared so much about being culturally authentic whether the characters’ names I was writing could exist in reality or not. I was writing about a world we knew together then. They did not control any story I was inventing. My parents and aunts always gave more than I asked for, as though they knew intuitively how to weave fiction into reality and vice versa. I am very grateful for that, for their intense love that fills my head with stories and history with pieces from their childhood dreams and community life. When I read my stories to my parents, sisters, and brothers, they listened to the details. In the end, my parents would say things like, "Ah, you are a shaman  or bruja  of the past. You heal our past with your art, and you transform it into a future.” I think I influenced my mother, too, as she started writing and drawing, and after she passed, then my father followed my mother’s example and started drawing his stories as well. They and their generation are nearly gone now, and yet ever present in their influence on me to be authentically truthful in my literary fictions. I stay connected to and still consult with all my family whether close by, here in the US, or very far away in Latin America or Europe. I also rely on readers and writers for feedback in both English and Spanish, for which I am very grateful as well. Is there a connection to your past in your books? Like many authors, my first book drew from childhood memory, but as crafted fiction, not memoir. I created art from characters and circumstances, some of whom surrounded me in varying degrees in childhood or adolescence. And since I was an outsider in exile, away from my country, parents, friends, and family, in writing short stories for the first book ... after …,  I built a house of stories, an art piece related to all the political wars that displace communities and create refugees around the world.  Books are places, like houses in which to find nurture. Of course, a house holds information from past circumstances and experiences, but when I wrote this first book, ...after... , I went into it in my own shamanic way.  ...after...  was a continuity of connection with the womb, with the spirit of the world of these stories, to a community, to nature, to sounds inside the familiar circumstances of my characters. I felt that way when I wrote my first book, and at the same time, I enjoyed learning and exploring the craft of short story writing.  With my poetry book, “ In a Corner of Your Country,”  the structure, images, and metaphors are differently, constructively, and consciously connected to a theme, related to displacement, exile, immigration, to children, and to women, even though these genres can be differentiated.  In poetry, I incanted words that relate facts, not all from my personal past, not specifically to anything that happened to me but to fictionalized others who feel a little as though they could be relatives, neighbors, or friends. During the years I was writing these poems, I collected many emotions, but especially frustrated ones, sometimes mine, but mostly others’, to set the discussion about a past, a present, and a future happening in my head while I wrote, but always connected to the mixed community in which I live now.     Some of these poems I wrote specifically for theater performance, and I performed them, sometimes alone, and sometimes with others. Some poems were commissioned for specific events for an art museum, for galleries, and for universities. The book of short stories flowed easily as one world, whereas the book of poems played within my mind for a while. I thought of them viscerally, as film or theater, visually and carnally embodied, quite spontaneously.  When I write a poem, I usually read it aloud and act it out with movement and dance to feel its touch on my skin. I guess if there is a connection to the past, it would go through the first art I studied, in shades of theatricality that simply show up. In it, I might touch a past, which is where we all start. Did another art form influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc.   As previously mentioned, both theater and dance movement influence me as a writer, just as my writing is directed toward these art forms. These influences stem directly from studying theater in high school in El Salvador. Without that background, I do not know whether I would have become a writer or would call myself an artist today. In the early 1990s, some months after moving from Canada to Los Angeles, my entire interest focused on writing theatrical monologues (and finding other writers’ poems or stories) to turn them into theatrical collages accompanied by music, dance, and simple body movement and expression. I would write words and create sounds to fit them, by recording street, nature, and human sounds, and incorporating them into theater and dance, sometimes on my own or in collaboration with other artists.  More and more it occurred to me that writing became a necessity then and now to tell stories that were/are absent in our communities and for me. So, by writing fiction, poetry, and plays, I discovered that I served as a vessel to drink from or a vehicle for sharing our experiences bilingually and altogether as refugees, outcasts, (im- or em-) migrants, displaced persons, deportees, expatriates, all of us migratory birds living in exile. Some stories from  ...after...  I have adapted into multidisciplinary theatrical performances.    Writing for me starts in a rather solitary space since solitude plays a role in the process of any writer. Because I come from within a group of twelve siblings and my parents’ close relations, I was around people all the time. Like people, I saw that words dance and perform together. This is my heart as a writer and actor. I remember in the early 1990s having met a highly skilled Mexican actor, who was looking for another actor to do bilingual clowning for birthday parties or other celebrations in homes, salons, and cultural centers. I told him, “That's me!” Although my English was good, for me acting was challenging to mold my English into performance.  Clown-acting in English has parallels in the Spanish-speaking worlds.. So, I took theater classes and speech classes in English. At the exact time I was clowning in one kind of performance, I started writing stories to perform and came to understand that the audience in the future will be more humane, bilingual, and multicultural, I hope. What are some key themes present in your books? ...after...  (World Stage Press, 2015)  is a book of short stories that unfolds in the context of families within a community before and during the civil war in El Salvador. In some stories, the theme of coming-of-age is present, as well as themes of human existence and survival in civil war, under repression, in friendship, and family relationships among mothers, daughters, fathers, siblings. As a book of short stories, each story carries its own narrator. Because the reader encounters a commonality among these characters, s/he may have the illusion of reading a single novel made up of interrelated stories. Yet each story stands complete and alone. Each narrator goes through an existential moment whereby each one questions everything within their circumstances in a single story. As an example, in the short story, "Alma About Four-Thirty in the Afternoon," the narrator Dalia’s circumstances unfold existentially among friends, family, and community in the actual setting of the civil war in El Salvador.  In a Corner of Your Country  (Bellucci, Palms & Carmichael. LLC Press, 2023),  a book of poems intentionally written for and actualized as theatrical performances, creates an entirely different literary experience. Thematically, most of my protagonists in poetry, but not all, tend to be children and women. The word corner  becomes both a metaphor and symbol for dealing with angles…angles out of which I, as a poet, see the past in and from the corners of my present situation. In these poems, I explore feeling space and time and the burden of memory in the neither-here-nor-there, as they relate to displacement, exile, and emigration, with women and children as protagonists. The version in Spanish, En una Esquina de tu País, (Poetry Ambassadors Press, 2024) . Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew?   New writers, please read a wide variety of authors, especially in the genre you write. Write every day if you can, every single day to be more precise. Make a schedule that you can keep, and do not let anyone break that schedule.. For those who need to work 8 hours a day, scheduling is important. In my case, in the beginning, I was very spontaneous when I wrote. I had a notebook that I carried with me, so I jotted things down when I was working, walking, or cooking, because I had so many ideas or characters in my head. I had to write them down right away. Otherwise, they would escape. Although not every writer keeps or follows a schedule, find whatever works for you. The idea is to write, write, read and read….   Now with cellphones, you can record or speak your ideas or take a photo to create an image that helps in your writing. If you want a literary career, but do not have it, I recommend taking creative writing classes, writing craft workshops, joining writing groups so you are networking with other writers and hearing about potential publishers. Attend other authors’ readings, especially of writers who inspire you to write more. However, remember that people in academia will not make you a writer; they can only teach you or train you writing craft and techniques. Be a good observer and listener in your circumstances.     Do public readings of your writing, if you are willing to share it. Also, look for submission opportunities and follow their guidelines closely. Build your own writing platform. Get your own writer's website and be active on social media to build an audience, but don't let that make you forget to keep writing. I wish someone had told me this a long time ago. Had I known this part when the Internet came into existence, I would have begun that work years before I did. No one else can do that for you. Also, I got into the platforming experience after I had already long behaved as a cultural activist and cultural organizer to create and boost a community of artists/writers and thereby an audience. Plan to be alone for hours because writing requires isolation... I wish I had gotten more involved much earlier in how publishing is changing and how it works at this moment.  Carolina Rivera Escamilla is a writer, actress, and documentarian based in Los Angeles, California. Born in El Salvador, she studied theater arts, and earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, along with studies in Spanish Literature. She went into exile to Canada in the 1980s. She is a Pen America Emerging Voices Fellow. Her first book of short stories, titled ...after... , was published in 2015 (Worlds Stage Press). Her first book of poetry, In a Corner of Your Country , was published in 2023 (Bellucci, Palms & Carmichael. LLC Press). The Spanish version, En una Esquina de tu País , was published in March 2024 by Poetry Ambassador Press.  She is also the director, screenwriter, and producer of the documentary "Manlio Argueta: Poets, and Volcanoes". Her publications include Collateral Damage, Women Who Write About War Anthology, (University of Virginia Press), Migrant Anthology, Somewhere We Are Human, (Harper Collins Press), The Bomb Literary Magazine, Altadena Poetry Review Anthology, (Golden Foothills Press), among many others.

Buy: Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma   by Sonia Gutiérrez | El Martillo Press | Publication Date: 2024 | ISBN: 979-8-8689-0730-2 | 182 Pages | $16.98 What are some key themes present in your book?   Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma  (El Martillo Press, 2024) explores a variety of themes, including love (the human connection), the spirit world, racism, homophobia, white supremacy, sustainability, by honoring the environment. As a Chicana/Latina ecofeminist poet, my bilingual poetry advocates for the planet and humanity’s well-being.   What was your writing process? Your editing process?   Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?   Some poems in Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma  originated from pressing thoughts that demanded my attention. I needed time to think, to sit down, to write, and to type the poem—the message—into existence. My poems like luminous fantasmitas haunted me until I set them free. I recorded the idea on my iPhone, on a napkin, or wherever inspiration struck; the early drafts of these poems could take a day, a week, months, and sometimes, though rarely, even years to complete. I envision the poems in this collection as precious diamantes from deep below the Earth; as a poet, I have broken through the surface and must share an important message with humanity.  How did your relationship with your family influence your writing?  My parents are illiterate, yet they are the true poets in my family, making me a descendant of Oral Tradition. My mother, Estelita, would call me to dinner using poetic language: “Sonita, afila tus dientitos porque ya casi está la comida” (“Sonita, sharpen your little teeth because food is almost ready”). Who else speaks like that? My mom, a poet now in the spirit world, would share these loving words. For me, poetry comes from a place of curanderismo but with words.     Growing up, my father spoke with the eloquence of a poet or philosopher. He would sit my sister and me down in a chair and pose philosophical questions to us. At times, I would respond with a blank stare, and my father would say, “No estás lista.” (“You are not ready.”) My parents are my literary maestros; both taught me the richness of Oral Tradition, to think critically about the world, and to engage the listener with sacred palabras.  How did writing this book transform you?   This fourth book, Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma , saved me. I remember driving to Rosarito, Baja California, my second home, and immersing myself in my writing, specifically my manuscript, Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma . I had never approached poetry in this way, but it made sense at the moment.  Writing poetry is my flow—my happiness—what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow theory. Since 2023, the worst year of my life, marked by a toxic work environment and a breakup, I needed to self-medicate myself, and for me, that medicine came through poetry. I knew continuing to work on the poetry collection during that difficult time would heal me, and it did! Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma  was the antidote I needed. This latest book, released in 2024, truly saved me.  You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book? Opening line from the first poem, “Wicked World,” in Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma , a bilingual poetry collection I was five / Tenía cinco Last line in the last poem, “Cosmos”  And, you, who are you? / ¿Y, tú, quién eres? How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?   During my time as a graduate school attending California State University San Marcos, I found myself guilty for not affording gifts for my beloved parents and best friend. And that’s when the voice came to me. My voice. I heard my voice say: “You do not have money, but you have words.” That’s how poetry came to find me. I began writing poems for my best friend, Rich, and my parents on special occasions. In my early twenties, when money was tight, I would craft poems, buy the coolest, affordable frames at Pic‘N’Save, and gift framed poems to my loved ones. You know, reflecting on your questions, I realize that I was a writer at eighteen without even realizing it. At the start of classes, my English professors would showcase my work, by reading excerpts from my essays and poems during the first five minutes.  Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it?  Yes, I’m working on two: The Adventures of a Burrito Flying Saucer and Sana Sana Colita de Rana: Poems to Not Perish / Sana Sana Colita de Rana: Poemas para no morir . For this question, I will focus on The Adventures of a Burrito Flying Saucer,  an illustrated book. During the pandemic, musician and poet, Profe Francisco J. Bustos provided an online platform to foster community, the Puente Drum Circle. Bustos encouraged attendees to write “a la brava,” on the spot, and so that day we all wrote about food. The idea of the burrito flying saucer came out on paper effortlessly—a story that I had been contemplating in my imagination. For this book, the voice I heard in my head was the Alacranes Mojados’s lead singer, Chunky Sánchez, whose music I admired and listened to during my college days. I also had the honor of reading alongside Chunky Sánchez for Georgette Gómez’s Fundraiser when she was running for San Diego City Council. In The Adventures of a Burrito Flying Saucer , I personify the burrito, much like the badass Chicano Chunky Sánchez. In this book, the burrito tells the story of the history of the burrito and four Chicanitas who are embarrassed to eat burritos at school. I dream of collaborating with Chicano artist, El Moises, for this project.   Sonia Gutiérrez is the author of two full-length bilingual poetry collections, Spider Woman / La Mujer Araña  (Olmeca Press, 2013) and Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma  (El Martillo Press, 2024), recipient of an honorable mention for the ILBA’s The Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award—One Author—Bilingual, and the novel, Dreaming with Mariposas (FlowerSong Press, 2020), winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Award 2021, the International Latino Book Awards 2022, and the ILBA Book into Movie Awards 2023. She teaches composition, critical thinking and writing, and creative writing. Sonia Gutiérrez is currently working on her first illustrated book, The Adventures of a Burrito Flying Saucer and Sana Sana Colita de Rana: Poems to Not Perish / Sana sana colita de rana: Poemas para no morir, a bilingual poetry collection. She lives in the Californias. To learn more about Sonia Gutiérrez and her work, visit www.soniagutierrez.com .

I will be interviewing debut Latinx authors across genres about their writing journey and editorial experience These interviews will constitute the body of the column, and I’ll include framing and book excerpts when

At the time, there were about 60 hour-long interviews with Latinx poets and writers. The profile features a reading from Noel, the trailer highlighting his original Oral History Project interview , and a link to the full interview in the archive.

The Oral History Project videos While the poets were on campus Letras Latinas took the opportunity to interview Watch Alaina Johansson interview Sheryl Luna This is actually the second time Luna has been interviewed The last interview was in 2005. Watch Kristyn Garza interview ire'ne lara silva Watch Francisco Aragón interview Adela Najarro The photos

The series features book reviews with snippets of author interviews woven in. Meet the Author: Interview with Brittany Torres Rivera Introduction to the Series Variations on the Body

I’ve been interviewed by its blog and judged manuscripts for the Andres Montoya Prize.

In our email interview, she shared the importance of writing to both sisters: “Writing is one of those One of the interviews with Ana reveals Liliana’s kinship with a sparrow that they hoped to set free.

Dozens of interviews with sculptors, artists, musicians, and writers about the process of creativity.