Tag: El Salvador
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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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War Moments: The Orange
I will never forget the man with the orange. Michelle and I were packed in the back of a truck, alongside twenty other hitchhikers. It was six in the morning and already hot as hell. Nicaragua during the dry season–the dust, the winds, the sun that decided to get closer to the region that day,…
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The Art of Fiction: Outline Your Novel, or Don’t…Or, Yeah, Maybe
In class, the subject always comes up: should you outline your story, or not? That is, should you make a road map for your novel, one that you will follow like a disciple, from page one to the climax, three hundred pages later? Or, will you dare to step off the outline, if the story…
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Through These Words, I Rise
In order to rescatar mi lengua (rescue my language) from an anti-Spanish childhood (my white father had ordered Mamá not to speak to me in her native language when I was a child), I studied like a fiend. Every night, before moving to Nicaragua in 1985, I memorized thirty Spanish words a day. Before getting on the…