Tag: latino culture
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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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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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Weed Out the Gringos
Before we moved into the Nicaraguan war zone, the group we were with, Witness for Peace, trained us for our jobs, which was, put simply, to get in the way of Reagan’s illegal Contra army. Wherever there were gringos, the Contra didn’t attack. That would make for bad press: If Ronald’s boys ended up killing…
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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…
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Finding My Latino Roots in a War Zone
Michelle and I flew into Nicaragua in the fall of 1985, a country that gringos weren’t supposed to visit. Ronald Reagan was at war with the country. The Nicaraguans had run Somoza out of the country, the bloody dictator whom the United States had propped up for decades. The Sandinistas were now in charge. And…