Author: Marcos McPeek Villatoro
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Art and Madness
There are studies on the connection between the artistic impulse and mental illness. The best are books written by Kay Redfield Jamison, especially her “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” In that book, she charts hundreds of writers, from George Gordon Lord Byron to Virginia Woolf, and reveals how the mental illness…
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El Testimonio: The Latino Memoir
Every once in a while, I do a Spanish podcast on The Writing Bull. This is a little cut of me recording it, in my “studio.” In this film, I talk about my own quest to regain my Salvadoran roots in my life, which I did, an obsession that began in high school and has…
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“We Look At the World Once, In Childhood”
I’m not much of a Louise Gluck lover, I find her poetry a bit distant, cold; but I sure like that one line she wrote, We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. To think of our entire life, and that, all that happened after our childhood is the memory, and…
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Francisco Aragón: Literary Activist
Poet Francisco Aragón is doing is doing more for U.S. Latinx literature than any person I know. While writing his own work, he’s also always pushing and promoting the literary works of others, namely, the new Latinx writers on the block. He’s the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, born and raised in San Francisco, CA. He…
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Writing from the Classroom: Ailyn Hernandez-Bazan, First Generation College Graduate and Its Discontents
Ailyn Hernandez-Bazan was a student in Literature and Contemporary class, which I taught this spring. She is a first generation college student, a cultural phenomenon I know well–to be the very first to go away to college, and all that means, how it changes our relationships with our loved ones. It begins with thanksgiving, then rips through…