…for saying that bombs are falling in El Paso and then trying to cover up your ignorance by claiming you were just referring to what’s going to happen in the future. I hope El Pasoans show you the boot at election time.
Archive for the 'El Paso' Category
What does it mean to have a home? Is it a place or the people in a place that make something “home”? I happen to think it’s both. Our attachment begins to the people in a place, but every place’s unique history produces a particular emotional and cultural aura.
For years, I’ve considered El Paso home. What I love about El Paso: my family, my two best friends and their families, my husband’s family, the gang at Cinco Puntos Press, the latino culture, the interesting and complex history of the Border region that is like no place else in the United States, the immigrant sensibility of “work hard and don’t blame anybody but yourself if you don’t succeed,” the Mexican food (!), J-Town, the mixture of Spanish and English, and the glorioius desert landscape of mountain and plain.
Lately, the idea of El Paso as “home” has been changing to “El Paso is my hometown.” Continue reading ‘Home and Community’
Lately, I’ve been longing for a mentor, the kind of kick-ass mentor that doesn’t exist in real life: somebody that I talk to a few times a month, who can guide me not only through the various genres in which I write (nonfiction, y.a. fiction, the occasional bad poem) but also has the knowledge and wherewithal to help me navigate the business of writing, that is, meeting the appropriate contacts, how to get publicity, where to submit, etc.
When I was in Chicago this past week for the annual AWP conference, a fellow writer asked me, “Who do you read?” Continue reading ‘Kick-ass writers’
On Monday, my parents flew to Ecuador to take a much-needed break from the daily care of my 99-year-old Grandma.
They left me in charge.
Grandma still lives in her own little house in my parents’ backyard–her own private assisted living. Every morning, my father types up the daily cryptoquote from the newspaper, in letters large enough so she can see them, and takes it over to her. He gives her eyedrops for her glaucoma and other eye conditions, washes her breakfast dishes, then goes back to work. Continue reading ‘Adventures with Grandma’
My previous post about The Cool Kids reminded me of the panel I organized for REFORMA’s National Conference in September. The panel consisted of the only 3 y.a. writers that I am aware of who have ever had a published young adult novel set in El Paso, Texas–J.L. Powers (me), Benjamin Alire Saenz, and Claudia Guadalupe Martinez; more depressing still, or perhaps more exhilarating still if you want to be unique, we are among only a handful-and-a-half of y.a. writers who have set our novels on the U.S.-Mexico Border. We were discussing why there are so few novels for teenagers that are set on the peripheries of our nation. Now, by peripheries, I don’t mean necessarily the borders, because teenagers in Minnesota are still growing up in mainstream society, whereas teenagers in El Paso are definitely not!
Benjamin Alire Saenz began to get quite excited as he discussed how the gatekeepers in the book world–agents, editors, publishers, and then librarians, teachers, and booksellers–have ghettoized literature about latinos set in a predominantly latino world such as El Paso. He mentioned how one of his books received a review that said something like “even though Saenz’s novel is set in El Paso, its themes resonate with the human condition, with things people everywhere grapple with.” (I’m paraphrasing.) Ben wanted to know why nobody ever writes a book review that says “even though so-and-so’s novel is set in New York, its themes resonate…etc. etc.” Ben sure knows how to stick it to The Man! I love the fact that he has remained faithful to his values, of writing about Latinos, of writing about El Paso, from El Paso. That fame and fortune aren’t why he writes.
I’m still young enough that fame and fortune seem elusively tantalizing. But when I really reflect on it, it’s nice not to be completely in the limelight. I remember remarking to Sara Zarr once that I wished my books sold as well as hers, and got as many reviews as hers, and she just said, “Careful what you wish for.” Touche!
Here is the text of the speech I gave at REFORMA’s national conference last weekend, for those who are interested.
When I was a teenager growing up in El Paso, I was a voracious reader, consuming on average a book every day, most of them young adult novels. In all those young adult novels I consumed, I only encountered the world I was growing up in once, in a suspense novel by Lois Duncan. In the novel, a teenager’s sudden and mysterious death in Albuquerque draws his sister into a world of danger. To fulfill one of her brother’s debts, she ends up smuggling drugs across the El Paso/Juarez border. Okay, so….the world portrayed in that novel was not EXACTLY my world, my border, since I never encountered the harsh world of drug smuggling. But it was the closest I ever came to seeing my world in a book as a teenager. And it made it seem–well, exciting. Different.
My parents rather unusually chose not to live in the neighborhoods where other professionals gravitated. Continue reading ‘Facing Two Worlds: Growing Up On La Frontera’
Recently, I wrote an article for El Paso Magazine and interviewed Claudia Guadalupe Martinez, whose new young adult book Smell of Old Lady Perfume, is due out from Cinco Puntos Press in July. I’m republishing the interview in its entirety here, since most of it couldn’t be used for the short article.
Q. What inspired you to write Smell of Old Lady Perfume?
Martinez Answer: My dad passed away when I was eleven. Back then, we didn’t really talk about it. We were kind of expected to be strong and not to burden my mom any further. When you grow up in a community where you have a lot of older brothers and sisters, they affect how you should act and carry yourself, and I remember them telling us to be mature about it and not be a burden to her and try to be strong, which is not very realistic for a kid that age. We just dealt with it internally, so when I started writing about it, it was an opportunity to deal with it externally. Continue reading ‘Smell of Old Lady Perfume–Interview with Claudia Guadalupe Martinez’
Although I am a huge fan of the ability to easily publish things on the internet–maybe I’m more into free culture than I realized–I’ve also wondered how many problems crop up. I’ve looked occasionally at ratemyprofessor.com, and though I’ve never been rated (either my students don’t love me enough or don’t hate me enough to rate me, though actually I think it has more to do with the lack of technological know-how among El Paso community college students), I’ve frequently wondered what I would do or how I would feel if one of my students wrote a bad comment about me. The New York Times today has an interesting article about what happened when some teachers at a very elite private school in New York City privately logged on to Facebook and found some hate groups directed at themselves. Scandals like these lead to questions about what “free speech” really is and really means, what privacy is and what it means, and whether posting something on a supposedly “private” site like Facebook (which is still accessed by millions of people) is actually “private” or whether it’s “publication” and thus subject to defamation claims.
I might not make any friends with this observation, but I’m also *really* not trying to piss anybody off when I say that lately it has struck me that so many children’s writers are middle class white women. There is a class, race, and gender correlation that is hard to ignore and hard to explain (though maybe the answer is obvious to everybody else?) I think part of it may be that middle class white women have at least enough spare income and spare time that they (we?) can afford to take the time to write. Maybe also the idea that  literature promotes a certain cultural and intellectual and moral reality that is important for children to imbibe through story is an idea that middle-class-white-women are particularly susceptible to.
I know quite a few children’s writers, and almost all of them (including myself) have been and are white middle-class women. I say this, but then I just looked at wikipedia’s list of “important” children’s writers and it’s true that there are an awful lot of men on that list. Still, I would venture to say that most of the writers on that list are white. Jacqueline Woodson isn’t on there. Neither is friggin’ Mildred Taylor, for God’s sakes, and if she isn’t on the list of important children’s writers, then there’s something wrong with the list. (Not that wikipedia is the end all be all! and yet! and yet!….)
I would like to see more publishers willing to take a risk and publish men and women of color who write for children. Hell, I would like to see more men and women of color write for children, which is in part the subject of my panel, Y.A. YA!: Writing Y.A. Fiction for Latinos, featuring Claudia Guadalupe Martinez and Benjamin Alire Saenz and moderated by me, to be presented at the Reforma National Conference this coming September. Â
Some guy is going around America, correcting the typos he finds on signs. Here’s what he found in El Paso…
