Tag: autobiographical novel
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 4
I forgot to mention, the 1967 Mustang plays a big role in this novel. It’s practically another character. It’s the summer of 1978, a few months after Tony cut his wrist. The whole family knows about it, but, unlike other families who try to avoid such difficulties and pretend nothing’s wrong, the women of the…
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 3
In this part of the novel, you get a real taste of what some of us call “internalized racism.” This is when a non-white person starts to believe, on a subconscious level, what the racist world says of him: in young, sixteen-year-old’s Tony case, he’s seen as a mongrel, the mix of a white man…
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The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 2
Tony and his Salvadoran-Appalachian family attend his uncle Jack’s funeral, where the mourners aren’t mourning–either the men are running in just to make sure he’s dead, and the two dozen women are lining up to look at their old lover one more time. Here, we learn why Uncle Jack is so important to Tony–we go…
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Audio Book: The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, Part 1
In the first pages of the novel, we meet Antonio “Tony” McCaugh Villalobos, an Appalachian-Salvadoran writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and far from his Salvadoran roots. He’s just published his first book, a literary novel, which means he didn’t get any money for it. He’s trying to write his next novel, but has writer’s block.…
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Next Week: Audio Book Podcast
The last few weeks, The Writing Bull Podcast has focused on different tricks of the fiction trade, from creating interesting characters to outlining your plot. Those were writing classes. Now, it’s time to take a field trip. I’ve recorded my novel The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones for the podcast, and will play it all next…