Linda Rodriguez has published one novel, Every Last Secret (Minotaur Books), winner of the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, two books of poetry, Heart’s Migration (Thorpe Menn Award; finalist, Eric Hoffer Book Award) and Skin Hunger, and a cookbook, The “I Don’t Know How To Cook” Book: Mexican. She received the Midwest Voices & Visions Award, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, KCArtsFund Inspiration Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Rodriguez is a member of the Latino Writers Collective, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime.
Linda Rodriguez
As someone who is proud to call Linda friend, my less-official praise poem is this: She is tireless--as a writer, a community organizer, a critical thinker about her craft and the body politic. Both in her poetry and prose is a deep rooted sense of personal justice, of infinite care and a strong belief in the need to do good, be good and walk in beauty. This is our conversation about writing, and her book, Every Last Secret.
When did you begin writing? Why?
I had a childhood that made Mommie, Dearest look like a fairytale, and reading and writing helped me survive it. So I started writing when I was quite young—poetry and stories that I wanted to think of as novels—but I really bega
Dream in Color: How the Sánchez Sisters Are Making History in Congress.
Congresswoman Linda Sánchez and Congresswoman Loretta Sánchez.
NY: Grand Central Publishing. 2008.
ISBN: 9780446508049``
Michael Sedano
The first time I heard of Loretta Sánchez, I smiled in admiration at the woman's gumption.
LULAC Santa Monica had invited Lalo Guerrero to perform on a Saturday afternoon. I left a business meeting and sped across town for the opportunity to hear the legend.
Before Lalo and his son took the floor, a woman in a red power suit spoke first. She announced she was running in Orange County against Robert K. "B-1 Bob" Dornan. A major league pendejo, Dornan nonetheless held a stronghold in the pendejo heartland of Southern California. I wanted to give the woman an abrazo of consolation out of puro admiration for her ambition and fearlessness.
Menso me, totally menso me for being an unbeliever. When, a few months later, I read the news of her by-the-skin-of-her-teeth victory, I stood and cheered that Loretta Sanchez had unseated B-1 Bob. Dornan's outraged braying was music to my ears. What a delight that not only had he lost his seat, he'd lost it to a Latina. Darn me, I cannot find my photos of Loretta addressing LULAC.
Better news than bidding adieu to the right wing extremist is the fact Ms. Sanchez has kept on winning that seat. Más mejor, now her sister, Linda Sánchez, has taken a neighboring district seat. The Sanchez sisters are the first sisters to sit in the US Congress at the same time.
They have a biography coming out in September. Look for news of their book tour coming to a bookseller in your town soon. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book, revealing and inspiring. Young adults and middle school children will find the book totally accessible. Because of this, it's an important title to get into their hands, especially with election time hard upon us.
The upcoming election will likely grow poisonously divisive and extreme as right wingers grow increasingly outraged that gente decente are finding their voices and places under the electoral sun. There's a lot of force in the truism, "tell a lie often enough and people will believe it". Similarly, persuasion research indicates that credibility redounds to messages that come from powerful sources like electronic media. Dream in Color can provide an effective antidote to the poison cable and broadcast media has already begun feeding to your kids and voters.
Special Offer for La Bloga readers from Hachette Books / Grand Central Publishing (five of us, at any rate).
Receive a free copy of Dream in Color: How the Sánchez Sisters Are Making History in Congress. The publisher will mail a copy to the first five gente who click here and type in a mailing (No PO Boxes) address.
Please, get your copy, read it, and let's have a La Bloga discussion of it when I review it couple of weeks from now. Maybe by then I'll have found my photos of Loretta and Lalo.
Just Out.
I just received my copy of Olga Garcia Echeverría's Falling Angels. Cuentos y Poemas, from Calaca Press. Garcia numbers among la chicanada's best poetas, so I'm looking forward to reading her first collected fiction, along with the twenty-two poems. A quick glance at the table of poetry contents highlights some work previously available only on spoken word CDs from Calaca, like "Sonia on Hope Street" and "Meztli Chingona." Look for my review of this title next week. In the meantime, treat yourself to your own copy by contacting Calaca at the publisher's website, http://calacapress.com/index.php, or their MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/calacalandia.
Can you believe it, the third Tuesday of August already! Please join me next week to discuss Olga García's latest work from Calaca, plus a review of John Darnton's Black and White and Dead All Over, and who knows what the week will bring? In the meantime, enjoy the columns of my La Bloga colegas and remember, La Bloga welcomes your comments--click on the comment counter below and type away. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. If you have an arts or literature review, an announcement or extended point of view on a subject of interest, click here to start the invitation process. Atentamente, mvs
STORMING HEAVEN'S GATE -- photo by Graciela Iturbide
This is a multicultural anthology of spiritual writings by women. In rediscovering spirituality in a female context, this is ideal source material. By ‘source’ I mean personal soul food to feed my own yearnings, ground water for the wellspring of my daily life. Storming Heaven’s Gate skillfully bridges the everyday with the divine, featuring the writing of Pat Mora, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde. I would like to comment specifically on the work of these women and its impact on my creative life.
Pat Mora’s contribution is a list poem, in which she invokes the Goddess through her many Aztec names. In a cry for wholeness and renewal she calls on Coatlicue, Tlaliyolo, and the Virgin de Tepayac/Guadalupe. Coatlicue is the serpent mother, representing all and nothingness from whence all emerges. Tlaliyolo is the creator/destroyer of worlds, and the Virgin of Tepeyac/Guadalupe is the eternal maiden, ever able to renew herself across the ages. The world springs forth, eats itself, springs forth again, dissolves itself in velvet blackness, and rises again, as one, as many, divine and common. These facets of the divine reflect exactly the kind of sensual, radiant cycle of spirituality that are the hallmark of Storming Heaven’s Gate.
Creatively and personally, I needed to engage the Goddess in a Latin context. In doing so, I found freedom from restrictive ideas of female identity that have been Catholicism's and colonialism's legacy. It is precisely the idea of sin, of the inherent pollution of women’s bodies, that had to be broken through for me to fully claim my creative energy and direct it.
As I continue to try to make new work, I have to reach out for connection in an ever-deepening way. My personal spirituality is being plumbed for imagery, for language, for a way to connect with something larger than myself.
Ironically, and in a way I can only begin to comprehend, this spiritual connection is plumbing me as well. What I mean here is that I can't forget that writing is my tether to something divine. Personal success, critical or audience acceptance needs to remain a secondary consideration, as much as care about those things. ‘What is being worked though me?’ is the question that I have to ask myself, the question that demands an answer at the end of the day.
In 'brothers, part 6,' Lucille Clifton cries out to a silent God who turns a deaf ear to suffering. She asks:
tell me why
in the confusion of a mountain
of babies stacked like cordwood...
tell me why You neither raised your hand
nor turned away...why You said nothing. (p.28)
I can feel my own tears lodge in my throat as I write this. What a terrible beauty exists in her description of both a personal and global apocalypse. Her wound, her grief, the abandoned bodies of nameless children, unsaved, unprotected.
Clifton asks the eternal question of a God she desperately wants connection with but does not understand. I remember my own rage at what I saw at the time as God's silence in the face of my own childhood abuse. I see now that what happened was part of my story unfolding, the catalyst for who I've become. It was a singular gift, a defining moment, in which I had to choose to live and to transform. In my case, that moment is where I encountered a God/Goddess.
Lastly, Audre Lorde illustrates the kind of language and imagery I can only hope to achieve someday. She was poet, theorist, theologian, lover, survivor, and griot - someone who once tore down the Master's house and built a temple to the New/Old Mother. One poem in particular kept speaking to me, even in dreams after I read it for the first time. In it, Lorde writes:
Attend me, hold me in you muscular arms, protect me
from throwing any part of myself away. (p.67)
How perfect this quote is, to its vision of encountering the very dark and moving into the light. How moving it is to hear a call to restoration and rebirth in a woman’s voice, shaped by She-Who-Is.
Lisa Alvarado
Benjamin L. Carp is an Assistant Professor of History at Tufts University. His new book, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution focuses on political activity in colonial America’s five most populous cities, tracing how everyday interactions in taverns, wharves, and elsewhere slowly developed into more serious political activity. In the original piece below Carp shows up the progression of violence in the colonies.
September 1764: the lawyer John Dickinson lodged a protest against the Pennsylvania Assembly’s petition to the king for a royal government. Assemblyman Joseph Galloway was outraged enough that he followed Dickinson out of the State House in Philadelphia and tried to seize Dickinson’s nose and whack him with his cane. Dickinson struck back with his own stick, and the two grappled until bystanders broke them up. (more…)
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Mil gracias, Lisa! It's an honor for me to be featured on La Bloga, one of my favorite blogs of all time.