Thank you very much-- 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-- 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 we 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 I 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.
I know Maria edits for a journal.
And so this journal--
we also did an anthology a while back, too.
But for my project-- and I never really thought,
you know, the many roles that I have,
I never thought the editor would be one of them
until I was challenged by Patty Hartman, who was in the room,
to edit this anthology.
This idea of putting together the best
of-- which 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 readers will disagree, they'll agree, or if they want,
they can compare different reviews
to see different ways that the reviewers enter a book.
So I thought, well, I'm going to here-- is here,
I'm going to have an opportunity to enter the anthology,
into the whole 15 years, a whole history of this project.
And so I was very attuned to politics.
Politics very dear to me.
I feel like ever since I became a Chicano, 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 not 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 to say,
I'm going to write a political poem.
They say 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 right in these times, we just cannot escape politics
and that political arena.
Any questions?
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 wouldn't-- 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.
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 voice--
as, you know, 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 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 it-- 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 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,
you know, 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?
Just to add to that.
There's technology-- the wonderful thing
about technology is that there are
possibilities and resources available to us
now than 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 know, you can put it--
upload things on the computer, on the internet.
And it sounds like it's an amazing oral history.
I mean, 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.
In my family, we've gone through it so often now,
where we lose family recipes.
We lose the rituals.
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.
Once again, just like to thank you.
You 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 the last poem that was read,
did that come to you as one long unfolding,
or did it come to you more in segments?
Yeah, that's you.
OK.
Well, you know, it's--
going back, it's inspired by the Pillow Book.
By this, I think, it was 11th century courtesan,
Sei Shonagon, who kept a kind of personal diary.
And in this-- 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,
or 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 am I--
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 silenced, that is ignored.
And I thought, well, you know, 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, this is-- it's almost
like a mirroring of that, of Sei Shonagon.
So I thought, you know, I'm going to write this long piece.
And it's really short, compared to what Sei Shonagon has done.
She wrote a whole book.
Mine is only like three or four pages.
But-- 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, so
tragically, so quickly.
Time for one more question.
Oh gosh.
Cybele, you didn't have to tell me about this part.
We 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, do you have-- is
there-- are there problems with that?
Do you have-- 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 Gilberto 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--
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 that
happens, because you can't please everyone.
Does that answer your question?
All right.
Let's thank our readers Maria Melendez Gilberto Gonzalez.
Thank you so much.