Category: Our Words, Our Lives
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Grading Their Final Papers–and the Semester Ends!
My students are now done with me. They handed in their final papers today, both classes–Literature and Contemporary Issues, and a Nonfiction Writing Workshop–and now can go on their merry way to sweat over other essays and papers and exams, oh my… But, I’m done. Oh yes, I have to grade the papers, and that’s…
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Witches and Tamales
My mother Romilia had a husband before she met my father. She was fifteen, he was twenty-even. They say that another woman was after him in the town, and her mother cursed him for not marrying her daughter. “May he die within the first weeks of their wedding!” Well, he did. Just a few months…
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What I Reap From Mamá’s Stories
It’s been fun to post my mother’s memoir here on The Writing Bull. And it’s just as fun, and even more meaningful, to listen to her stories. Which, I have heard all my life. I have known, for decades, about her murdered father–my grandfather Pilar Reyes–who was shot in the street by some guy named…
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The Massacre of 1932
After my father’s murder, and my mother and I had to flee, my grandfather ¨Papa Polo” was the main figure in my life. Grandmamá had one of the women to be responsible about my care, which was not the best but nevertheless made my character of a survivor all through my entire life. Because of…
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Why did they murder my father?
My mother, Amanda, continues with her memoir–and the questions of why her father was murdered. My grandmamá Martina’s servants gossiped about my father, Pilar Reyes, and his murder. He had been the ninth of twelve children, all who lived in Berlín, the town where I was born, in the northern mountains of El Salvador. They…