Thank you very-- thank you very much.
It's amazing reading.
And now we have about 15 minutes for some questions.
Anyone want to start us out?
OK.
Well, I have a question about the sort of editorial process.
I mean, you're both editors.
And this-- the new Camino Del Sol anthology
is a wonderful achievement.
I wonder if you might talk a bit about the process?
You want to talk about process?
Oh, sure.
Yeah, I am working as an editor now
and have done little editing projects here and there.
I think what I've learned about editing my own poems
and about editing the work of others
is that there's always that one--
there's always that one level deeper.
And this is something--
writers have to keep reminding themselves there's always
that one level deeper beyond "that's
a nice sentence" or "that's a great description" or "that
sounds like an interesting event."
Well, those are all things that make for good conversation--
a good description, an interesting event.
But there always has to be that one level deeper
to make it good literature, that one--
sometimes you use the word urgency--
that one extra sense of urgency.
So I don't know if this answers your question,
but I think what I've learned by editing
is how to listen for that undercurrent of urgency
in other people's work.
And in my own work, I've learned how
to listen for that a little bit better.
Does that answer your question to some degree?
Really, my process is a little bit different.
Maria edits for a journal.
And so this journal--
we also had an anthology a while back too, huh?
But for my project, and I never really thought--
the many roles that I have, I never thought that editor will
be one of them until I was challenged by Patty Hartman,
who is in the room, to edit this anthology--
this idea of putting together the best of-- it's
sort of morphed to something a little bit different.
It's still the best, but it's a little different project
in which I was going to look at 15 years of the Camino Del Sol
series which is an amazing series.
And I praise it everywhere I go.
And it's a series that I keep coming back to as a critic,
as a book reviewer.
I'm so proud of this series.
And so when I took on this challenge, now
it became my opportunity to shape something
different from what I had read because all of these projects,
all these novels and story collections,
there are so many ways to enter the book.
And, as a critic, I find one way.
I identify that one way, and I introduce that to readers.
And, you know, readers will disagree, they'll agree.
Or, if they want, they can compare different reviews
to see different ways that reviewers enter a book.
So I thought, here, I'm going to have an opportunity
to enter the anthology, enter the whole 15 years,
that whole history of this project.
And so I was very attuned to politics.
Politics is very dear to me.
I feel like ever since I became a proud Chicano, that I said,
well, there's no going back.
I'm going to be political no matter what I do.
Even when I'm not political, I end up being political.
So, at this point, I said, well, I
guess that's something you can control after a while
so why not just own it, own up to it.
And so that's what I did with this selection was
to really have my political lens but without compromising.
With political poetry, political writing doesn't always have to.
Without compromising craft, without compromising
the beauty.
Because, at the end of the day, all these writers-- nobody
sets out, or at least I don't think
these writers did, set out and say,
I'm going to write a political poem.
They said, now I'm going to go write poetry.
And, so, when we write, whenever we sit down and create,
these different influences, whether or not we
have control over them, inform and guide us.
And I think that, for the Chicano Latino writer,
especially writing in these times,
we just cannot escape politics and the political arena.
Your question?
Thank you both.
I've been really inspired by your readings.
My question is related to family history.
My father is a poet.
He lives with me.
He's 77, and he drives me crazy reading his poetry to me.
And I feel like I need to honor him before he dies.
He's very healthy.
And he's hard of hearing, so he said
it was too frustrating to come.
But he came last year.
So my question to you is, how can we honor and respect
our elders' writing and encourage it and get
it published and keep it true to their view of the world?
And my father writes a lot about immigration
also and homelessness.
He takes the bus all over Tucson, so he sees the world
and interprets it.
And, of course, I'm biased.
I think his poetry is very clever and bright.
And he writes it in Spanish.
So what tips can you give me on living with a poet?
That's a great question.
OK.
Yeah, all right.
I don't know about tips for living with a poet,
but I'll give you my husband's Facebook info.
You can friend him and commiserate.
But your other question about lifting up our ancestors
as our writers and our ancestors as voices
in our literary traditions, I think
that in some cases with writers in their 70s, writers
in their 80s who have these sort of cultural gems in a way
at their disposal and when they're distilling
their memories of their own lives
and how their own lives interfaced
with political activity of their own time,
I think that sometimes self-publishing is the way
to go to kind of preserve what he's done.
I mean, when you're a younger writer starting out,
there's a huge stigma against self-publishing.
But when-- pardon the frankness, but when the clock is ticking,
I think, more overtly--
I mean, nobody can predict their future or their lifespan--
but I think that that's the way to go with the proviso that--
this is a trend that I've seen-- that some of these writers
can work with professional editors, can work with people
who can advise them in terms of how to shape a work like that.
Then you'll have it as a document and as a record.
And then if something comes of it after that,
after it has appeared in a self-published form, great.
If it ends up getting picked up by a commercial press, great.
But I think there is a commendable trend these days
of these seniors who never would have thought
of themselves as professional writers
but he probably thought of himself as a poet
his whole life just sort of taking things
into their own hands and saying, I'm going to hire an editor,
I'm going to get this book out, I'm going to get it done.
And so that's one approach.
There's a number of approaches.
But to very directly answer your question,
how do I preserve and honor his work as a writer,
that's one way to think of it.
Does that address what you raised?
Yeah.
Just to add to that, there's technology.
The wonderful thing about technology
is that there are possibilities and resources available to us
now then ever before.
I mean, I really regret that I never
had a chance to record my great grandparents when
they were alive.
You know, I didn't have the kind of technology
that would preserve itself.
And, now, with the--
you can upload things on the computer on the internet.
And it sounds like it's an amazing oral history what
I'm hearing here.
So the best way to really preserve and to document that
would be to record.
And because there are so many things
that are going to be lost--
whenever one of our elders dies, we lose so much.
And, my family, we've gone through it so often now where
we lose family recipes, we lose [SPANISH],,
we do, we lose part of our migration history
because they seem like they're going to live forever.
They're always going to be around,
so we just call them up and ask if we need to know.
But, you know, it's not the way it works.
Thanks.
Once again, I'd just like to thank.
You we both did a great job of reading.
As a result, probably, a lot of people in the audience
have the power of poetry flowing through them.
The question I have is of the last poem that was read.
Did that come to you as one long unfolding,
or did it come to you more in segments?
Well, going back, it's inspired by the pillow book, by this--
I think it was an 11th century courtesan, Sei Shonagon who
kept a personal diary.
And if you ever have a chance to look at it--
I use it so much in my writing classes
whenever I have students that say they've got writer's block.
It's always an excuse-- writer's block.
And I use it as a way to generate writing.
And this pillow book is interesting.
It begins with this woman writing things--
very simple things like things that are red,
things that are cold, things that are hot.
And then, eventually, you can see
how she is educating herself, and they
become more and more complex that by the end of the book
you feel as if she has really moved
into the other areas of this world of hers--
not just colors and temperatures, but emotions
and complicated emotions.
It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
And it's something I've always wanted to do something with.
And I thought about in what other area, in what other area
would this apply-- this idea of bringing out
a very sacred voice, a voice that is perceived
as not worth listening to, a voice that
is a silence that is ignored.
And, at the wall, the border crossers--
we know their tragedies and we know that part of the story.
But we don't the other parts.
And I thought, well, it's almost like a mirror,
you know, that of Sei Shonagon So I
thought I'm going to write this long piece.
And it's really short compared to what Sei Shonagon
she wrote a whole book.
Mine has only like a three or four pages.
So I conceived it as something long,
but I also knew that I had to end it somehow.
And so it's a very short journey.
I thought, well, that's another one--
that it's a very long journey that's cut short so tragically,
so quickly.
Time for one more question.
Oh, gosh.
Nicole, you didn't tell me about this part.
You have to run all the way across the auditorium.
How do you bridge the gap between ego and opinion?
When you have something that you feel is really tight
and poetry is so subjective, and then
you have an editor that maybe wants to rearrange things
in a different form, are there problems with that?
Have you had to deal with that?
The question was bridging the gap between ego and opinion
and then, more specifically, how do
you deal with editorial differences of opinion.
And, in my case, I haven't necessarily, I don't think,
had to deal with too many editorial
differences of opinion with the University of Arizona Press.
There have been some cases where we looked at some of the poems
in here that are more risky that I didn't read out loud today,
and we had to sort of consider them together.
But I always felt like that was a joint process.
We were considering the poem and its consequences together.
Where I come up with differences of opinion is with my friends
and my writing groups-- various writing groups
I've been a part of.
And I'm not speaking of Rigoberto here
I should just say.
But others of my writing friends have at various points
said of some of the poems in here, take this poem out.
It's too political.
This poem doesn't represent you well,
or this poem has too strong of a voice
or is too strident, too opinionated.
And so how did I deal with that input?
I think I have never rejected someone's opinion out of hand.
I like to try and consider it and consider
what the implications of the suggestion are.
And then I look at the poem again,
and I say, well, what do I really want this poem to do?
What do I really have to say?
What can I not not say?
What do I have to say?
What does this poem have to have to say?
And then, whatever that is, I let
it live as it is, regardless of the peck, peck, peck, peck,
peck, peck, that happens because you can't please everyone.
Does that answer your question?
All right, let's thank our readers Maria Menendez
and Rigoberto Gonzalez.
Thank you so much.