Category: El Testimonio
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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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My Homeland: The Mission District, San Francisco
The above is a shot of the house we lived in when I was a toddler, Mission District, San Francisco. That’s my daughter Emily. I’m heading to San Francisco this week, to get away for a few days. It’ll be my vacation this year. Two of my kids live there, so we’ll hang out. And…
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Insanity: Look Up the Facts Then Face Them
These are some of the books I’ve read to understand better what happens in my bipolar brain. They help me live with the disease, work with it, manage it as best as possible. Again, books, books, books—how do people go through life without them? The information in these tomes isn’t pretty. Here are some tidbits…
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Psychiatrists are Crappy Poets
Don’t get me wrong, I love psychiatry. It has given me the language to understand what happens in my mind when I am sick. Diagnosis is a wonderful, wonderful thing, because, once you diagnose something, you can focus on strategies to confront it. That’s what you get from studying the disease you suffer. But psychiatrists…