Tag: Creative Writing
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The Rules of Racism: You Can Only Speak One Language (and it damn well better be English)
In class, I teach how creative writing can rouse memory, strong emotions, sharp images, and that, if a student keeps writing, she will surprise herself with her words. Something will come out that she hadn’t planned, an insight, the true emotion over whatever it was she wrote down. She might cry. She might bang the…
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Escaping the Monolingual Cage of America
According to the above photo, I’d been out drinking the night before. I don’t know what my first Spanish word was, but I do recall an image, ever so slight, of me on the toilet, yelling, “Mamá, I just finished caca-ing!” My mother has assured me that I could say much more than caca, that…
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When Our Children Die
I don’t know if Martita is still alive. If so, she’s thirty. But I have my doubts. At the time, her hair, once Guatemalan-black, had turned a dry, dirty-straw color. It was starting to fall out. Her stomach, held in place by weakening muscles, had gotten more distended in the weeks following, crammed with worms,…
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Love, War, and Revolution, Central American-Style
Michelle and I moved to Central America in the mid eighties (that pic is of us in our first glory days of living in a Nicaraguan war zone). We were part of a small population of liberals who were protesting U.S. policy in the region. We moved to Nicaragua, to gather reports on atrocities that…
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Writing from the Classroom: Jessica del Castillo and the Fascistic Principal
This is an essay by Jessica del Castillo, a student at Mount St. Mary’s University. I remember doing this “knock-out” trick when I was in school…surprised no one got killed doing it. Ms. del Castillo brings the anguish home, of having to deal with a fascistic principal. When I was younger, I was easily…