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The Rendering by Anthony Cody | June 2023 | Omnidawn | ISBN: 9781632431141 In an interview with The Guardian

Thanks so much for taking time to read my work and complete this interview. I had the incredible pleasure of interviewing Myriam Gurba recently for my school and a student asked

For our next 20th Anniversary event , Letras Latinas is headed to San Antonio, Texas. Letras Latinas collaborated with the legendary Macondo Writers Workshop to bring Michelle Otero for a public reading as part of the Guest Faculty writers at Trinity University in the Ruth Taylor Recital Hall on July 27, 2024 at 7:00- 8:15 pm. Otero is also providing a free community workshop called How to eat a Memory at Gemini Ink on July 25, 2024 at 10 am-12 pm. See Macondo's website for more details. For many years, the Macondo Writers Workshop has a haven for writers. On Macondo's website, writers Pat Alderete, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Larson, Olivia Mena, Amelia ML Montes, and Carla Trujillo describe Macondo as a place named "after the mythical village in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . During the week, the participants would leave the time and place of their ordinary lives. Macondo was and has always been a soul family. Writers from across the country felt at home in the sweltering heat of South Texas. During the day they would hone their craft and their stories in the Macondo Writers Workshop, 'to inspire and challenge one another in order to incite change in our respective communities' through each other’s writing." We spoke to Macondista, Michelle Otero, about her recent book Vessels: A Memoir of Borders (FlowerSong Press), her previous chapbook Malinche's Daughter (Momotombo Press), and what she's looking forward to this summer at Macondo Writers Workshop. Brent Ameneyro (BA): A story being told out of chronological order can strengthen the arrival of certain moments of tension. It is also a way to mirror the way memory often works: fragmented, a little chaotic. In addition to writing Vessels  in this way, you also chose to jump back in time to before you were born, to your ancestors’ stories. Time becomes fluid as the reader bounces around in what feels like an eternal story, one that started long ago and is still being written off the page. Can you speak on the impetus behind the way you approached time and storytelling? Michelle Otero (MO): Trauma has a way of compressing time, of making certain events feel present, even if they happened years or decades or centuries ago. This was certainly true for my grandfather. After decades of relative good health, my grandma’s illness and death triggered his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and reminded all of us, in the words of his psychiatrist, that “every day is an anniversary for Mr. Moran.”  I also wanted to convey the sense of history walking in circles, patterns repeating themselves, inheritance, how each generation does some of the work the previous generations did not complete, how we keep revisiting old wounds until we make a conscious effort to heal them.  Writing this book is one of the ways I hoped to lighten the load for future generations.  Laura Villareal (LV): Vessels: A Memoir of Borders  includes essays from your chapbook Malinche’s Daughter  published in 2006 by Momotombo Press. I really admire the hybrid form you chose for Vessels . I think we often think of genres as being very separate, but Vessels  is a masterpiece of hybridity. It resists our expectations of how a memoir should look by intertwining poems and fictions. When you wrote those first essays in Malinche’s Daughter , did you already know the essays would be contained in a hybrid book like Vessels ? Did you ever have any hesitations about writing a memoir in this way? Were there any books that influenced your writing of this book? MO: Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed A Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A Harrison, Candelaria, Fletcher Nance Van Winckel’s workshop on hybrid forms  Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street When I wrote Malinche’s Daughter , I was still in my MFA program at Vermont College, and though I was focused on creative nonfiction, I appreciated being in community with poets. (A trusted friend advised me to spend as much time reading and listening to poetry as possible. Write poetry. Read poetry. It will make your prose better.) My grandma’s voice required this hybrid form. The short pieces I call The Grandma Poems started off as overburdened, not-so-lyric essays in which I was trying to put the reader in my grandma’s kitchen or hospital room. It just didn’t work. And then I re-read Woman Hollering Creek  by Sandra Cisneros and remembered how much I loved her short poems with long titles, how the title both rooted and launched the poems. So I went back to my ladened grandma pieces and stripped away everything but her voice. In the end, both on and off the page, it was my grandma’s voice that could make or break anyone in our family.  I remember Denise Chávez starting an Acknowledgments page with “Who says I can’t have 3 pages of Acknowledgments?” So, who says I can’t write a hybrid memoir? I started the book in lyric essays, but the more time I spent with it, the more my grandma and Malinche and Coyolxauhqui asked to be written as poetry. BA: Mythology and history make their way into the book. Did you do research or did you pull this all from prior knowledge and memory? What was your writing process? MO: Yes and yes. Research, memory, dreams, prior knowledge, serendipity.  I don’t know when I first heard the name Malinche, but even that first encounter had echoes of Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman.  Cortés’s wily interpreter. She was a teenager. She was given to the Spaniards.  I kept trying to go back to a time when women were safe.  The curanderismo course at the University of New Mexico.  Traditional Mexican healers.  Some of these practices seeped into me through ceremony. My own healing journey.  BA: I like the way characters are given nicknames, it reminds me of the way one might tell a story to a friend: Bad Boyfriend, Physician Assistant cousin. Aside from avoiding potential grievances from including real names, it feels like there was also a creative aspect to this decision, creating a universality to these characters. Was this intentional?  MO : For Bad Boyfriend, especially, I wanted to create the feel of an archetype, rather than a traditional character. In early drafts, I felt I was writing the case against a particular partner. See, everyone? See how bad this person was to me? That didn’t serve the narrative or me. Then I tried to make the reader fall in love with this person, just as I had fallen in love in real life. When things finally clicked was when I realized that what mattered was not him or how bad that particular relationship was, but Michelle’s pattern of choosing men who were unavailable.  I also wanted to give the sense that there are so many things over which we have no control. My grandmother’s illness and death hit us suddenly, and as it was happening, the doctors and nurses—even the attendant controlling access to the critical care unit—didn’t feel like human beings with whom we might relate, or who might offer us comfort, but forces delivering life, death, good news, bad news, comfort, distress. For so long, this was also how I felt about romantic love, like relationships were something that happened to me and the object of my affection had the power to accept or reject me.  LV: In the Acknowledgements you write, “One good thing about working on a manuscript for eighteen years is all the helpers who show up along the way.” As much as the myth of the solitary writer persists in popular media, I always appreciate hearing about all the writers who championed and shepherded books into the world. I was moved by the scenes within the memoir where Stephanie and Karen helped you get back home to Las Cruces when you were overwhelmed and grief-struck. It illustrated such radical care from your fellow writers and friends. We should all be so lucky to have fellow writers like that in our lives. How much of the book is shaped by your relationships with other writers? MO: Even the mythical solitary writers had someone to cook and clean for them. I don’t imagine these were healthy relationships for the partners doing the cooking and cleaning.  I wanted a low-residency program because I wanted to stay in my community while I was practicing my craft.  This book wouldn’t exist without my community.  LV: You will be attending the Macondo Writers Workshop as a featured writer this summer. Summer workshops like these are such essential gathering places for writers that often result in lifelong friendships and pivotal spaces that help launch projects in new directions. As a Macondista, has this workshop influenced or guided your work in any ways? Outside of Macondo itself, is there anything you’re looking forward to about spending time in San Antonio? MO: My first Macondo in the summer of 2006 was like an MFA program in one week. I had just returned to the US from Oaxaca. Malinche’s Daughter  had come out a few months before and caused a rift in my family. I came back to the US feeling homeless and untethered. Here I had done this brave thing, and it caused me to lose people I love. I felt like San Sebastián, shot full of arrows, but still alive. What’s the point of speaking the truth if everyone is going to drop you? I cried through Sandra’s critique of my work.  Migas and café con leche at Cascabel. Anything from Vegan Avenue. Michelle Otero is the author of  Vessels: A Memoir of Borders ,  Bosque: Poems , and the essay collection  Malinche's Daughter . She served as Albuquerque Poet Laureate from 2018-2020 and co-edited the  New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023  and  22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso,  a tribute to victims of the 2019 El Paso shooting. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Brent Ameneyro is the author of the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the collection A Face Out of Clay  (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024). He is the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review . Laura Villareal  is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving , (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI , among others.

March 2024 | Black Lawrence Press ISBN: 9781625570673 | pp. 80 [A note: The images woven among this interview

The original Letras Latinas Blog featured interviews conducted by students at University of Notre Dame The interviews were a mix of genuine scholastic curiosity and an earnest searching for answers to life's Often, these interviews were students' first public engagement with the literary world and, at times, Villamil Durán interviewed Sheryl Luna about her latest collection Magnificent Errors.

Buy: book of provocations by mónica teresa ortiz | $20 | July 2024 | 110 pages | ISBN: 978-1-7376050-6-5 Laura Villareal (LV): Your chapbook have you ever dreamed of flamingos?   was my first introduction to many of the poems in book of provocations . One of the most admirable qualities of your poetry is your thoughtful engagement with theory, philosophy, politics, and the work of other writers. I’m usually not a fan of notes sections but yours is as rich as the poems themselves. Of your writing process in the notes you wrote, “ I find myself in what Harmony Holiday calls ‘the purgatory between   recovery and relapse,’ searching for poets whose words move us to   act, to ideas that live within poems. For me, poetry is an (in)direct   action, an intersection of commitment and practice.” At what point in your writing life did this focus/ethos crystalize for you?  mónica teresa ortiz (mto): I have always been a curious person. Whenever I read anything, if I see a name, a place, another book, that is mentioned, I look it up. Rabbit holes hate to see me coming. But I want to know who the writer was reading, or what theory led them to the place they arrived. I think historical context and culture is important to being a good reader. And I am also interested in place – what was the architecture of space like for them?  For my notes section, I wrote an excerpt about that “crystallization” in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, in Spring 2021 . But I had been thinking about those ideas for a long time. Commitments in both politics and poetics are a choice by many before me. I have been blessed enough to be around people who are committed to practice and action. I was only able to articulate it more clearly, after 2020, after COVID-19 came.  LV:  On a similar note to my previous question, your work seems rooted in a line of questioning that considers what a poem can / cannot do, especially how poems live within the greater context of the world. Your poems often mention poems, asking questions like: “what does it mean // that I write // little poems // in wastelands // I call home.” I was very struck by the statement in “un/writing nature,” “ Stella says that poems will transport us to freedom / if I don’t seem that excited / it’s because I am working / to decentralize the poet / to use my words as documentation of specters”  I was reminded of a craft essay by Ana Portnoy Brimmer , where she writes “I like to think of organizing as a site to draft revolutionary poetics, and poetry as a site to revise revolutionary politics. As interlocking affairs.” Poets are always quibbling about the power of poetry in politics. How do you view the capacity of poetry? What are its limits and what are its powers?   mto:  Poetry is not directly material. We aren’t poets to make money. But I do believe poetry can be an intervention in spaces that can disrupt. There is a reason many poets have been assassinated, from Guatemala to Italy to Chile to Lebanon, and even here in the US. Refaat Alareer was assassinated by Israel. Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels was murdered by the state. Assata Shakur is still exiled. Why is language so dangerous to the state? Through the mutual aid effort, Workshops for Gaza , I have seen poets, myself included, use what we know and have access to as a material contribution to immediate needs. Workshops for Gaza offers workshops to the public, and instead of the funds going to the facilitator, the funds go directly to Palestinians facing and surviving genocide. That is one way poets can directly impact material needs. We also have to continuously speak out. Since October 7, 2023, there have been many poets who have stood with Palestine. But there are those who refuse to speak, witness, or risk anything. There are poets whose language are interventions as well. I look to Aurielle Marie, Rasha Abdulhadi, George Abraham, Solmaz Sharif, Ariana Brown, Zaina Alsous, Jacqui Germaine, Sasha Banks, Fady Joudah, Harmony Holiday, Mosab Abu Toha, Omar Sakr, some of our living poets. LV:  Oh, I really love that response because it illuminates both the power of language and action. I particularly like the description “poets whose language are interventions…” I think mentioning poems within a poem tricks the brain into snapping back into the reality so we can see what you’re documenting for what it is: intersectional struggles, genocide, climate collapse, and disaster capitalism which is all happening now. Too often new poets are told to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” but I think it’s necessary to also recognize the necessity for clarity in poems that do the work of documentation. When working with poems, how do you decide when to prioritize the explicit and when to embrace the oblique?  mto:  I want to be clear with commitments, even if perhaps sometimes that opposes tradition with poetry and with form. I prioritize an idea or intention, rather than an image. I know that’s not a popular approach, but I began writing poetry after 9/11, during the early onset of the invasion of Afghanistan. My first interactions with living poets were those who were exiled, dispossessed. I don’t know that I embrace the oblique so much as I embrace the truth of what is happening around me.  LV:  I heard recently that Layli Long Soldier won’t use metaphor anymore in active resistance to likening anything to what it's not. It feels essential for us to witness and document with the kind of clarity you use.  Texas is full of exceptional poets like yourself who illuminate our numerous ecoregions and landscapes. The poems in book of provocations  poems transport us to numerous places, but I especially love how vividly you portray the Texas Panhandle’s landscape. How does landscape inform your writing? mto: Gaston Bachelard wrote that “the poet speaks on the threshold of being” in the Poetics of Space . I grew up in a rural place alienated from cities on the threshold of prairies, which existed long before me and will long after me. I look around me and try to be in relation to the land and water around me. To ask for kinship. LV:  I resonate with that as someone who grew up in a rural area. With many of your poems, it feels like they move based on accumulation that results in revelation. The revelations don’t necessarily come at the end of the poems, but there’s a momentum to the imagery you choose to place next to each other. Your poems are so smart and layered and plentiful, so I often feel like I need to sit and think them through.  mto: Thank you. I appreciate that.  LV: You have a couple poems for the Stridentists and in the notes you say, “I’ve long been interested in the Infrarrealist movement and Stridentists, and this book provoked many ideas, including both of these poems.” I don’t think we hear enough about Mexican or Latin American artistic movements, so could you talk about them for those who might not know about them / the movement? How did you learn about them and how has their work informed yours? mto: My MFA is from the University of Texas at El Paso, and most of my classmates were Latin Americans. They were from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico. That broadened my literary landscape. They introduced me to books that informed much of my understanding of Latin American politics and history. I also lived in Barranquilla, Colombia in 2008 and in 2009, and I read a lot of Colombian writers and poets then. I began to learn that many movements circulated in Mexico, Central and Latin America. Like the surrealists – Andre Breton and Leonora Carrington – who spent time in Mexico, and the influence of the Avant Garde around the 1920s, gave rise to the Stridentist. Manuel Maples Arce was one poet I became interested in. There’s a book on the Stridentist Movement, by Elissa J. Rashkin, who quotes Maples Arce: “the artist creates his own truths and meanings” but also that “truth is subjective; meaning is unstable and depends on context.” So I found that interesting – provocative if you will… but for me, it really always returns to Bolaño and Infrarrealismo in the 1970s, which is birthed in between the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City in 1968 and the assassination of Allende in Chile in 1973. It is a complex history, but the appeal for me is the idea that poets can have commitments to ideas other than poetry. So that’s where I hope to place my work. But I am also blessed to be learning constantly from contemporary Central American artists, poets, and filmmakers that also inform my work. Liberation is not just an idea, but a word, and a practice. I think that’s what I have carried with me from these other poets.  LV:  Your book is split into 3 sections titled “terrestrial,” “celestial,” and “afterlife.” I like the idea of a book being divided into these more mythic landscapes. Could you talk a bit about the process of organizing book of provocations ?  mto: I organized the collection while I was in Mérida. During that time, poet Ariana Brown held several workshops on organizing and assembling a poetry manuscript, which was amazing. She’s a great facilitator. We read Sasha Banks’ book, america, Mine . That workshop was instrumental in the process of organizing my collection. And just being there in the Yucatan, learning about Maya history in Mexico. And of course, I have to give a lot of credit to my editors, Claire Bowman and Annar Veröld. I gave them bones and they sculpted it into a body.   mónica teresa ortiz (they / them) is a poet, memory worker, and critic born, raised, and based in Texas. Laura Villareal   is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving , (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI , among others.

TRP: The University Press of SHSU) | September 1, 2024 Note: Frontextos are woven throughout the interview

Buy: Fabulosa ISBN:9781956907094 | $18 | JackLeg Press | pp. 76 | Publication Date: June 10, 2024 What are some key themes present in your book? Fabulosa includes memory, poetry itself (there are several ars poetica poems), love for beauty and art, and the remaking of a self, among others, but I hope readers will mine their own themes. Can you talk about your use of form and theory? The forms in Fabulosa include tercets, couplets, the prose poem, and one monostitch, among others. It’s a conscious decision to include a variety in my work. But that has less to do with form, per se, than it has to do with the visual aspects of making a book. I like being able to page through a book and sense the differences in how each poem was made. Perhaps that’s a naive restlessness on my part. Even eye candy. But part of this, too, is being drawn toward poems that seem to have an organic, inevitable quality to them: they were hewn in this manner because they had to be. More broadly, the book divides into three sections: “Noir & Glitz,” “Wolf Behind the Saint,” and “In the Director’s Cut.” Those section titles derive from phrases contained in the book’s opening poem, which is a blueprint. That opening poem also includes the first mention of gloves, which become a recurrent motif, and it also introduces elements of crime and glamour that reappear later, too. Even the notion of a “plot” comes around again, in a poem titled “On the Failures of Plot.” Writing Fabulosa taught me something about theme and variation. I learned how to write this book in the course of writing it. You could say that the form (of a book) is both made, and revealed. I also learned that I was wrong: I used to think that content determines the form, but in this case, because I kept returning to that opening poem in various ways, I’ve found that now and then, setting the form will generate the content, it can in fact go in more than one direction. Poetry is vast enough for contradiction, revision, and exception. Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew? Read widely. And don’t think of inspiration as a lightning strike. The material that finds its way into a poem is often subconscious. You may be gathering ideas without realizing it, or thinking for many years in silence, or observing details that will only resurface much later, even when it looks like you aren’t writing. People can teach you technique. But no one can teach you perception and instinct. Those are both more bodily, I think, and they refine with time. If I had any advice for my past self, it would be to write with greater abandon. I wish I had known sooner what it looks and feels like to go for broke. What’s your favorite line(s) from your book? “I wanted to write, but none of the words / meant saudade” makes me think about the perpetual search for language and the inadequacy of words, even poetry, to express memory, longing, and experience. We are haunted by much, and poetry haunts us, in turn. Is there a connection to your past in your book? Yes. A few poems revisit late adolescence. A few are set in Panama and Pittsburgh, where I once lived. More widely, a few poems include aspects of the past that I’ve never lived. Whether it happens through a glancing, lighter mention (of Gloria Swanson, for instance), or a reference to history (the Doomsday clock), these poems gesture toward knowing that the past is never as distant as it seems. How did writing this book transform you? Every book makes its own demands and creates an atmosphere. In the moment when I am writing an individual poem, I don’t necessarily know what the larger landscape is even going to be about. I do know that I can trust that the act of writing one poem will lead me into finding the next. Fabulosa reaffirms this for me. It’s like walking through a series of doors. And the longer I write, the more I can live with uncertainty about understanding the “how” or “when” surrounding all of this. As far as transformation goes: it would take the next book to show what’s changed. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. While writing Fabulosa, I listened to the Ludovico Einaudi album In a Time Lapse. The book includes, too, poems inspired by Bruegel, Bosch, Tamara de Lempicka, Olympic figure skating programs, Dior’s Bar suit, and TV dramas. In many ways, this book is a museum of influences. Art is often in conversation with other art, and my poems reveal their sources. I would not have become a poet without other books, and all of the arts. Born in the Republic of Panama, Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), which won the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024). A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, she freelances in Arizona. www.karenrigby.com

My hope for this interview is that through my questions our readers and I can get to know you. 

Madder: A Memoir in Weeds by Marco Wilkinson Coffee House Press | October 12, 2021 | 208 pages | ISBN: 978-1-56689-618-4 Laura Villareal (LV): I want to set the scene a little bit for readers. You and I met at a 5-week interdisciplinary residency at Oak Spring Garden Foundation. The residency is housed on Peter and Bunny Mellon’s 700-acre property that has a farm and multiple gorgeous gardens. You asked a group of us how we each got into our respective craft one day after lunch while we sat in one of the gardens. You wanted to know what our spark point was— what triggered us to pursue our craft. I loved your story about how you came to writing. Could you tell it again? Marco Wilkinson (MW): Well, one place to begin that story, is at the very end of 2010. I had been the farm manager for a regenerative-practice farm that was part of a larger non-profit. It had been an amazing and amazingly difficult year and I can honestly say I had engaged in wholehearted effort: 100% -- more than 100% of my life – had been devoted to my work. At the end of the growing season, the entire staff was unceremoniously laid off, and I was left with this gaping question of what to do next. My partner is a writer and he had heard me hemming and hawing about how I would like to also write “one day.” “Now’s your chance,” he told me as I was licking my wounds after losing my job. So, in my mid thirties, I applied to Stonecoast, the low-residency MFA program. The irony is that 12 years before I lost my job at that farm, I had been an English major who, in the midst of a personal crisis over not knowing who my father was, got my BA, turned my back on literature and academia, and apprenticed on an organic farm in rural Pennsylvania. That launched me on my career as a horticulturist and farmer, which culminated with me, if not turning my back on farming, then at least deciding to engage the world in a radically different way. My day job became teaching sustainable agriculture and English composition classes at the local community college and my nights were spent making my way through my MFA. The funny thing is that I went in thinking I would write essays on farming and ecology, and instead I found myself plunged right back into that initiating crisis of my missing father way back when. I tried to plant a nicely rowed field  but instead all the weeds burst forth. LV: Your memoir primarily focuses on your search to know who your biological father was which became a well-kept family secret or a “willful forgetting.” Everyone told you his name was Donald Wilkinson. I think sometimes we try to understand family, especially parents, in order to better understand ourselves. I also think secrets reveal a lot about what’s being intentionally obscured. Did you learn anything about your family as you worked to find out who your father was? MW: That’s a great question. While the book is about coming to terms with this overwhelmingly absent father, it’s also as much if not more really about the one who required/demanded/ensured his absence, my mother. She and I have never had what I would describe as a particularly “good” or “easy” relationship, precisely because of her denial that there ever was a father, and so as I began writing this memoir I had to reckon with how I would depict her. In my imagination, she reared up in my life like a monster, a kraken, a catastrophizing shadow. Part of the problem is that she is incredibly private, revealing even to me very little about her life before me.  When I started writing, I also went about “researching,” which in this case meant asking relatives the impertinent questions I’d held inside me a whole lifetime. They were incredibly generous, telling me story after story I’d never heard. I think the first thing I learned in the process of writing Madder: A Memoir in Weeds was that all I had to do was ask, that it was in fact possible to be in relationship with all these other people who my mother’s silences had closed me off from. The second thing I learned when I started to put some of these stories down in writing was empathy. My mother has through my writing of this book, despite her mortification and horror that this book exists, become human to me. A complex, hurt human worthy of love and care even in the midst of what I perceive as her grievously mistaken decisions. LV: In the van on the way to Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland we talked a little bit about identity and our relationships to being Latinx. Your last name Wilkinson doesn’t automatically trigger recognition of your Uruguayan heritage. You described yourself as “cryptolatino.” Could you define that and talk a bit about what that means as you move through the world? MW: This feels so tricky to address. My last name, “Wilkinson,” comes from the name, “Donald Wilkinson,” my putative father all through my childhood. The few times I asked who my father was, that was the one and only name provided. The reality, as far as I know, is that my mother married Donald Wilkinson in order to secure citizenship, only for him to turn out to already have been married. Nevertheless, she kept his last name. (How much must she have hated her family to be happy to get rid of her family name? Or how xenophobic had she found the U.S. to be that she thought it prudent to hold on to a “white” name?) And so I too, was born a “Wilkinson.” That last name, the fact that I grew up like all my cousins speaking English in response to my mother’s and relatives’ Spanish and so have no accent inflected by mother’s native tongue, and that my heritage as a Uruguayan is completely (as far as I know) from Europe and so my skin is “white” all means that, in my experience, the casual observer does not read me as Latinx.  And yet I am. I drink maté, love a good asado and some morcillas dulces, grew up on a staple diet of milanesas and tortillas, speak Spanish fluently, have gone back to Uruguay many times to be with family. The rac(ial/ist) dynamics of American culture, though, mean that because my skin is light, my voice is bland, and my last name is blander, I must actively assert my Latinidad. This is undoubtedly a privilege with very real effects in my life, but it has also for me always felt like a curse. LV: The memoir also focuses on your maternal family’s life in Uruguay and in the U.S. Growing up you spent time living with extended family like your Tí’Bibí and your madrina Teresa, her husband Andrés, and their son Andrés since your mother was often working. I guess this is a question of nature vs. nurture, but who in your life has had the most impact on who you grew up to be and the person you are now? MW: Probably more of us than we know grew up in familial realities that explode nuclear stereotypes. Yes, from my earliest days to about five or six, my Tï’Bibí (short form mangling of “tía Bibí) was the primary figure in my life. I have vague but potent memories of being potty-trained – by her. I have memories of being put to bed in a crib and the glass animal figurines that lined a windowsill beside it – in her house. I remember her making tallarines caseras (homemade pasta) by hand, rolling out the dough and cutting it into thin strands with a knife and then opening all the cupboard doors of her kitchen and hanging the pasta to dry on them through the afternoon. Then, as a child up until about eleven or twelve, I would sleep over at my Ina Teresa’s (short form again for “madrina”) because my mom worked third-shifts at the chemical factory. I remember many hours watching TV, playing with their dogs, doing homework at their dining room table, mostly withdrawing into myself because by that age I felt the weight of the weirdness of being someone “extra” in the nuclear family of my madrina, her husband, and their son. When I think of the bright sides of my life and personality, these two women come to mind. They were the ones who were most present and nurturing. When I feel hopeful and alive, that is them in me. My mother, on the other hand, was in many ways my “father.” She was the provider who worked 12-hour shifts and took every opportunity for overtime and clean houses on the side on top of it all. Her sternness precluded questions, fostered silence. She is my shadow, the one who fed from an early age my tendencies to self-criticism, the negative, the doom-addled. But she is also someone who would give of herself selflessly if someone needed assistance without a second thought. Her simplicity – her simple silence, her simple work ethic, her simple generosity – is also my inheritance. Though I yearn for the light and though most of my childhood was spent there (even if feeling misplaced there), I would say that the shadows of my life are long and lasting. LV: What I immediately loved about Madder is the formal flexibility of it—it’s rangy and fragmented. At times your prose is richly narrative, at other times it has all the sensibilities of a lyrical essay. You’ve invoked the metaphor of plants, most often “madder,” as a framework to guide the book. The structure feels alive and shapeshifts as your story unravels. It often renders surprising parallels between relationships with people and relationships among plants. For all these reasons, it's truly a memoir I know other poets will adore. What was the process behind choosing this structure and these— I guess I’d call them form(s)— to house your memoir? Were there any books that inspired this form? MW: The first book I read that opened up the possibilities of creative non-fiction was Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. No surprise I suppose that it’s a poet’s memoir that caught my attention. I love how it opens with a ghostly visitation and wanders restlessly, lusciously, through Lee’s life. It carries a prosaic narrative thread but Lee feels completely at ease with embroidering the prosaic fabric with lyric language, sometimes language whose beauty seems to be there only for its own sake. There are whole paragraphs and pages of rhapsodic flights that, even after I’ve read and taught this book many times, I still can’t claim to understand.  That feels really fundamental to me when thinking about creative nonfiction. Yes, facts matter. But so do fantasies. So do (mis)perceptions. So does pleasure in language. If we’re ready to accept that the Enlightenment aspiration for total knowledge is no longer a possible project, then of course our lives (and memoir is, after all, about how we structure our lives through remembrance) will be haunted houses, crumbling houses, houses with drafty windows and slanted floorboards, houses that house not only our selves but also rats in the walls and roaches in the backs of the cupboards. Because of all that, and because my memoir was predicated on accurately (in some way truly “factual” at some deep level) depicting my experience growing up in the absence of a father and the shadow of a mother, and because that absence and that shadow came alive in my life through withholding and secrecy, it felt like the fragment and the vignette were the most appropriate form to tell this story in. (And maybe the only way to tell it, in the manner of reliving trauma in small manageable bites.) Because my life (still) doesn’t make sense to me when I look back on it, it also felt like it was completely appropriate to write a memoir that in many ways is a collection of essays. They don’t all fit together neatly because that’s just how I experience my life. When I re-member it, it’s in pieces. So there is a through-line of three main chapters, but sprouting up around them like weeds are all these other pieces (a foraging list, an erotic encounter with a masseur in southern India, mushroom hunting with a mentor in the Catskills, a retelling of Cenicienta’s (Cinderella’s) story). How else could it be? You might call it being experimental or rangy or eclectic, but really I want to make a claim for this being non-fiction in a really deep way, for it being accurate not only in content but in form. LV: Your background as a horticulturalist informs much of your memoir. Bunny Mellon who was also a horticulturalist, once wrote, “gardening is a way of thinking.” Michael Pollan said something along the same lines in his book Botany of Desire and that the “seeds” of his book were planted as he was sowing seeds. I wonder, how much of this book began as you worked in gardens and on farms? MW: It’s funny. When I think about the trajectory of my career/life with plants, you could say it has been one deepening mistake. Of course, I mean that a bit tongue-in-cheek. After my stint on the Pennsylvania farm, I committed formally to working with plants by training as a horticulturist at Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a year and then continuing that training at a school for horticulture in the Hudson Valley called Stonecrop Gardens. This is where I learned botany, and the practical skills of pruning and planting, and long lists of scientific plant names like a doctor learning the names of all the bones in the body. At Stonecrop, without warning one day we’d be led into a room filled with forty small glass vases each with a twig or a leaf or a flower if you were lucky. From scant evidence and without any preparation we were expected to give the common name, scientific name, plant family, and place of origin for each of them. Scoring a 30% on these exams could be considered a worthy effort. Regularly, at least once a week, one of us students could be found weeping after a long day or week. It was grueling and immensely satisfying to distill into one’s body and mind this essence of crafting beauty from plants via this discipline of ornamental horticulture. I worked for the next six years or so in gardens both private and public, eventually working as a horticulturist at The Cloisters, where I first encountered my book’s namesake “madder.” But right from the beginning there had always been this nagging feeling that perhaps there was something immoral, decadent, privileged, about growing plants for beauty’s sake alone. That’s when I found myself returning to farming after a move to northern Ohio and for three years or so, I worked raising vegetables in rows and beds, hacking down lettuces with field knives, tearing kale and chard leaves off one or two from a plant down rows hundreds of plants long, running harvests through the wash bin stations and the industrial-size salad spinners, driving them to our local farmer’s market, putting them in the hands of my neighbors. Such satisfying work! But some time at a permaculture center in the Argentine Andes and later a certification in permaculture design, as well as a long-time interest in foraging made me feel like there was something not quite right about this large-scale model of growing foods (I say “large-scale” when the farm I worked at was only a few acres. How much more so, conventional monoculture farming of thousands of acres!) by focusing on them as resources or units or pounds. I found myself increasingly wanting to understand what was available to me in my environment, what was being offered to me by the world, rather than laboring (and what labor farm work is!) away at the imaginary idea that food comes only from my own hands. So I really started investigating wild edible foods and foraging. At that point, I was relishing all that the weeds I had hitherto been battling had to offer and what it might mean to live a life of relationship with them. This all a really long way of saying that I find myself now gardening my yard in San Diego as a garden/farm/foraging space, planting primarily edible or otherwise useful plants in ways that I find beautiful (not so my neighbor with his astro-turf lawn. I am the anti-Christ as far as he is concerned), and also giving space and appreciation over to those plants that grow there without any intention of mine. The mallows, the sweet alyssum, the goosefoot, the nasturtiums, the chickweed. All of these weeds have their place, their beauty, and their uses as food. All three of those experiences – gardening, farming, foraging – culminating in the last informed my writing process. My horticulture training and practice gave me the deep fund of knowledge to weave botany and mycology and plant folklore into Madder: A Memoir in Weeds. Farming and foraging gave me the experiences and the insights to draw from to think on the page, even if obliquely, about how humans relate to the more-than-human world. My hope is that this book is read not only as a literary work where weeds and plants and fungus appear as metaphors for human experience, but also as a work in which human (my) experience is read as a metaphor for better understanding the world around us. I sincerely hope readers learn something not only about me but maybe more importantly about plants and foraging and “weeds,” that their relationship to “weeds” shifts in some positive way and that maybe they even take some of the foraging instructions in one of the pieces in book and try them out. LV: You write, “For much of my adult life I have worked my mind through folklore and Latin names, soil and air; worked myself into this semblance of a garden, staving off the weeds. But the more I garden the less I weed.” As someone who loves folklore, I enjoyed the inclusion of plant lore like that of Our Lady’s bedstraw. In the library at Oak Spring, there’s a section of books on weeds. It’s amazing to read how many are edible or medicinal. Weeds usually carry a negative connotation in our culture—they’re something to be removed or destroyed. This viewpoint is not shared elsewhere in the world. In your memoir it feels as if you’re in the weeds so to speak of family history and you’re balancing the concept that weeds can be at once bothersome but also beneficial. You write, “A weed is of no use to one who has no use for it.” How did you decide which weeds to highlight as a framework for the book? What use did you have for weeds in this book? MW: It started with two images, one that made it into the book and another that didn’t. One of my earliest memories was playing with my two older cousins, the children of Ti’Bibí and Ina. We half-stepped half-slid our way down what seemed an immense hill to me as a young child and on the way down burrs from burdock plants stuck on my clothes. When I was a little older and in Cub Scouts, the other boys and I played in a homemade fort under a thicket of bushes and balls would be made of collected burrs from burdock plants and hurled at each other. It also happens that burdock, known in Japanese as gobo, is one of my favorite vegetables, and one day I was in a grocery store picking some up and these two memories flooded into my mind as I realized that in this story I was trying to write I was a burr myself, this hanger-on, this pest, and that the burr and burdock might help to explain my mother’s own childhood and migration to the US. Once burdock offered me the specific metaphor and the more general conceit of the weed, I started thinking about what other weeds might prove useful metaphors. Though I am a Zen Buddhist, I was raised Catholic and I kept finding myself returning to the mythology/cosmology of Christianity. At the same time I remembered growing madder in the gardens at The Cloisters in New York City and researching the folklore associated with it and its close relative, bedstraw. I also immediately was drawn to the sonic/homophonic orbit of “madder-mater-matter.” By this point I found that the weeds began to take over, impelling the kinds of stories I might tell, offering structure. The last major weed, shepherd’s purse, is one I’d often read about in foraging guides as a worthy green for salads or stir-fries, but I’d never seen one before. Then, one day, walking back to my car after teaching classes at the local community college, there was one solitary shepherd’s purse plant growing at the edge of the lawn by the concrete walkway. In full flower and with its beautiful lobed foliage, it felt like it was a messenger waiting for me. The next time I came to campus and looked for it, it was gone, dutifully ripped out as just a “weed” by the grounds crew. I had been stuck on how to write into my adolescence and early adulthood, where I knew I wanted Madder: A Memoir in Weeds to end, but this experience with the shepherd’s purse made me lean into the name of the plant and the image of the seedpods, the so-called “purses” or bags that also look so much like hearts. Imagining shepherds wandering the hills with just a bag, their heart, to carry gave me the structure of travel and desire and searching for that chapter of the book. I did indeed have a use for weeds. They helped me make sense of my life. But also they are useless, that is, they have a life apart from usefulness or uselessness. And that’s my life, too. I hope that readers find in this memoir a lesson in finding a way to see people and the more-than-human world around them – be it plants or animals or landscapes – as valuable simply for existing, for simply altogether making up the world as it is. In the opening of the book, I write, “Remember that the little and the useless are what knit the visible world together.” That for me feels like the central point of the whole book, whether thinking of my life or the life of that shepherd’s purse plant quietly blooming by a walkway or a bedstraw plant scratching its way up through some shrubs or a burdock plant’s burrs catching a ride on the hem of a shirt. LV: Writing memoir must be tricky. Besides revealing your own life, everyone else in your orbit—friends and especially family—are open to speculation and examination. Our stories are inextricably bound to the stories of other people. In your book the narrative is often interrupted by parentheticals where your family interrupts to say, “You’ve got it all wrong.” Also, these interruptions are visually offset from the body of the text through centering like this: (“You’ve got it all wrong. This is not how any of this happened,” my mother says.) In this way you’ve given agency back to your family to dispute the narrative you’re crafting. Were the voices of your family in your mind as you were writing? How did you make peace with the inevitably that memory is flawed? MW: Their voices were and weren’t present. I did worry about how to write a book all about not knowing the facts of my life and about those facts being actively withheld. Given that this was the thing that must never be spoken (at least according to my mother), how would she and others receive it? “Madder” refers not only to mothers and the dye plant, but also to anger. This book was born out of anger at this secrecy, and so I decided when I started writing that I wouldn’t speak to my mother about it, knowing that her response would likely be to try and shut it down and that regardless of her response it would warp and deform my own ability to recover my story. I also decided that I was not going to worry about this issue of disputed truths or the potential for hurt feelings until I had completed the whole thing. My hope was that by the time I had finished a solution might magically appear, but the whole way through the worry gnawed at the back of my mind. One day, sitting there worrying, I heard my mother’s voice clearly in my head: “You’ve got it all wrong. This is not how any of this happened.” It suddenly seemed obvious that this antagonism to my narrative, my reality, rather than requiring a response and rebuttal, might simply be given space and presence. Like the weeds, why not appreciate and encompass that which is unwanted, and in giving it voice undo its power to silence? I never approached this memoir from a place of articulating and defending a series of true events. What events? I hardly knew any of the events that drew me into being. Rather this was about searching through the fog of memory for bits and pieces, more blind exploration than surveying and map-making. So the flawed nature of memory as a recording device wasn’t a problem to be solved or skirted. Instead it was that “flawed” nature I wanted to explore, letting fantasies and hypotheses and theories and the pleasure of language serve as real and true “facts,” landmarks toward a map of “the little and the useless.” LV: It seems as if most of what you learned about your father was hard won. At one point you write, “My father’s presence at my birth is something I only learn about well into my thirties. This story is still unfinished, dripping and spilling across decades of my life.” How long did it take for you to get the answers you were looking for? MW: Lol, I’m still looking. It was conversations with relatives, particularly my madrina and my cousins, that revealed so much to me, once I was able to get over the hurdle of feeling like asking anyone any questions at all would be a betrayal of my mother. Every time I broached the topic another morsel of information would be revealed. I don’t think any of them were trying to conceal anything. Far from it. I think my madrina especially was wondering why it took me so long. But it took many separate discussions for each new memory to surface. I learned that my tío Julio (Ti’Bibí’s husband) had been good friends with my father. I learned that my father had left my pregnant mother, returned for my birth, and then left months later on Christmas day. And then, years after this process of conversations started, I learned something detailed at the very end of the book that reoriented everything I thought I knew about my childhood. Even within the past year, I’ve learned major new things about my father, but that’s a story for another time. LV: I absolutely loved the essay/section on fungi/mushrooms which weaves your experience of learning to forage and Jae Rhim Lee’s green burial project (a mushroom shroud/suit) with a contemplation on death and the afterlife. Of the afterlife, you beautifully put it as, “Smoke, spores, this swinging door, this future life.” It’s moving to read about how fungi are excellent stewards of the earth. Admittedly, this essay/section felt like an outlier in terms of its image system and topic. For writers who are grappling with what to include in their manuscripts, could you tell us about how you decided what essays/fragments/verses would go into the final draft of Madder? MW: I’m not sure if this book would look this way if it hadn’t been begun as my MFA thesis. It was a time of a lot of experimentation and roving about for writing material. I was trying lots of things and, as someone in the CNF track of my program, that meant writing about all sorts of experiences in my life. I have to credit my partner, a poet, for encouraging me to think capaciously about what might “fit” into this book. I knew this was a book about my mother and my father, and once I knew I wanted to alternate and give space to expressing this absence of my father in my life, it made sense to think about all the places where his absence either distorted my life or was filled in by substitute fathers. Thus an essay originally published as a lyric set of foraging instructions can become a searching plea to not be left behind. An essay about getting a shave from a barber in Kerala and another about a man showing me how to find mushrooms in New York can both absolutely be about my father, the one who never taught me how to be a man like these two incidental figures did. I think it’s completely fair to be adventurous in understanding one’s life as a whole indivisible thing, contradictions, ellipses, and all. What can be important is the skeleton, the overall structure and frame you give to a project as a whole. Then part of the pleasure for a reader can be to puzzle out how to think about the pieces hanging off this skeleton. LV: I’d like to hear more about one of the final parts of your book titled “Succession.” For that sequence the pages are split into a white half with black text and a black half with white text. The language is fragmented so at first I wanted to read it as an erasure because I felt like I was hearing echoes of the book’s earlier pages, but then I wondered if it was more of a palimpsest. Could you talk about “Succession?” MW: That piece initially appeared in a different form in Seneca Review’s “Beyond Categories” issue. It was printed as one long scroll as part of an amazing box of material text-objects that was a supplement to the issue’s traditional journal form. “Succession” is still up online at Seneca Review’s website where it can be downloaded (https://www.hws.edu/offices/senecareview/beyond-category/succession.aspx). When printed it is approximately three feet long. I knew that this piece would be super-important to include in the book as part of the concluding movements of the memoir as a whole, but it just wasn’t possible to include it as the fold-out I imagined, much to my chagrin. (I’ve since learned that even today, fold-outs have to be individually hand tipped into books at the printers, a cost that would have been exorbitant.) After feeling sad for a little bit about the impossibility of including it in its original form, I took on the challenge of rethinking how it might be presented. This meant reimagining and revising the piece into two iterations. The first tinkers with the formatting so discreet pieces of the sideways scroll could inhabit each page. From verso to recto there is continuity but then the page flips. I had always thought of the original piece as being divided between conscious expression “above ground” and subconscious fragments composting “underground.” Reworking it for the book opened up the possibility of using that stark division between the black and white parts of the page to emphasize this aspect that was already there in the original. In the original, one could read each level of the piece as a single sentence. The codex format of a book prevented that continuous flow, so in the second iteration in the memoir, what were first read as fragments are coalesced into clear sentences, letting whatever glimpses of meaning a reader might find in the first iteration be confirmed or challenged or complicated in the second. I’m really happy with the way it turned out and now think of it as a blessing that I had to re-approach this piece for the book. “Succession” began as a visual exploration of the ecological idea that one landscape or environment and its suite of organisms sets the stage and makes possible another and then another and then another. Literally, succession is about how bare rock can be a home for lichen which can set the stage for mosses which can be a nursery for seedlings which can then end up sheltering shrubs and then trees. Life can move from bare rock to forest (or savannah or wetland or some other ecosystem), and underneath it all at each step the soil is growing and becoming deeper and thus able to support more and more complex life-forms. But “succession” is also about sons coming after and inheriting from their fathers. And it’s also got the notion of “success” haunting it in the shadows. I tried to take my family history and play with those ideas while visually imagining an ever-growing landscape and the kind of underground currents girding the whole thing. LV: Can you tell us about your next project? What have you been working on? MW: In the past year I’ve learned a whole bunch of new information about my father. I always imagined the story of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, which ends more or less somewhere in my twenties, would continue, but I wasn’t sure how. Now, with the new information I have, I feel new energy for the task of writing not about the absence of my father but about the search and the discovery of his presence scattered across continents and families’ lives. So that’s one project I am working toward. The other is, in a way, the kind of book I thought I would write in my MFA, a book of essays about farming, foraging, environmental practice, Buddhism, queerness. I’ve spent the past twenty-plus years on this evolving plant-worker journey of wanting to find a way to live in/with/as the world, and I’d like to share some of the thoughts I’ve had and experiments I’ve engaged in along the way. One of those experiments, as you know because you saw the process unfolding when we were together at Oak Spring, was to hand –cut my overgrown postage stamp lawn in San Diego and bring it with me to Oak Spring where I taught myself some basic basket-weaving techniques in order to construct a basket, a pair of sandals, and a hat from that grass. I want to think deeply about how to live in/with/as the world around me. Marco Wilkinson is the author of the lyric memoir, Madder: A Memoir in Weeds (Coffee House Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Ecotone, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of Literary Arts in the Literature Department at University of California San Diego. Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI, among others.

Colson | Washington Writers' Publishing House | May 16, 2024 | ISBN: 978194155139 Entrevista en español Interview

Buy: Kinds of Grace Publisher: FlowerSong Press Release Date: May 2024 How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you? When I was about five, I wrote a picture book called Pig Girl. I illustrated it too. It’s about a girl who turns into a pig because she’s so messy; it was a gift to my mother who often said I didn’t clean my room enough. Definitely probably passive aggressive. Still, it was the messy, loving work of a 5-year-old. My mother was actually delighted and said “Write more books, Jennifer!” I remember the feeling that maybe I could write another book after she expressed such excitement at my writing. I was always thinking of stories and poems ever since I can remember. Even in preschool I didn’t have the language for stories but I was dreaming them up with toys and my imagination. I’d go around as a kid cajoling my brother to act in plays I’d written. My mother would also read poems to me and I’d write my own response poems. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, a poet and a writer. What was the impetus for this body of work? Kinds of Grace started after I finished my first book, a cross-genre poetry & prose collection called SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, which was published back in 2017. Shortly afterward, I wrote a poem called “Apagón” about Hurricane Maria after just coming back from PR and finding out about the blackout, and a few other poems about loss. I put the poems aside, not ready for another collection and I wasn’t aware of a throughline yet. After I experienced a mental break in 2020, I had to dig my way out of recovery and I chronicled some of that journey in poetry. I also wrote about love, pain, Puerto Rico, being a Black woman in America, living in Fort Pierce, moving to Houston, finding personhood. I realized I had enough poems for a collection in the summer of 2022 and I sent the book out a year later after going through several revisions and deciding I wanted to publish it. I was so happy FlowerSong, and Edward Viduarre saw my heart. But it started with “Apagón” before I knew there would be a collection coming together. How did writing this book transform you? I learned how to forgive myself, give myself grace, come into community with those similar to and dissimilar to me. I wasn’t the same person as I was beginning the book, I was wholly changed. After it was done, I felt as if I inhabited myself more, understood myself a bit more, understood those I loved around me more. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. Live music definitely informed this book. I would go to coffee shops in Houston and work on Kinds of Grace while listening to Spanish music. I definitely wanted the piece to have a certain musicality so listening to live music helped. I love dancing so I spent a great deal of time in my office, dancing out the jitters. 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? The first line of the book is “I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree” and the last line is “But I know no matter what,/The next moment comes.” I think these speak to each other. The first poem “The Past” is about letting go of that which binds you, of those who you loved and are no longer in your life, of the self you used to be. After the journey the speaker(s) undergo throughout this book with mental health, self and loss, the conclusion is that there is comfort in knowing that we won’t remain in any fixed state, the next moment will always come. There is always hope. William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why? An apple. I have an attachment to them. They’re something soothing about the shape and texture. I also love the color red so Red Delicious are my jam. I had an apple tree outside of my house when I was a child and I would pluck apples and think of the individual fruits as memories. If I took a bite, I’d indulge in a memory. Plus, I practically gorge on apples. So definitely an apple. What are you currently reading? I have my TBR ready to go for the spring. I bought Annell Lopez’s I’ll Give You a Reason, Jose Hernandez Diaz’s Bad Mexican, Bad American, Marcos Carlos Griffin’s American Daughter, Phillip B. Williams' Ours, Michael B. Wang’s Lost in the Long March, Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals, January O’Neill’s Glitter Road, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Piedra, Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud and Jen Fawkes’s Tales the Devil Told Me. Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home and Kinds of Grace. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.