Tag: racism
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Our Guns, Our Madness
Dear Reader: This is from the archives, I wrote it after the massacre in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, it’s a timeless piece, and will remain so until this country gets rid of its guns. I know madness. I have manic depression and have been hospitalized when paranoia seizes me from the shadows without warning—the belief that…
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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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Poetry and Injustice
This week we pulled over from our regularly-scheduled program of. . .whatever it was I was gonna teach–maybe it was the villanelle form; anyway–we got off track in order to discuss the United States’ president’s decision to end the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). The basics: DACA promised the children of immigrants two…
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Fiction: Pick a Chaos, Any Chaos
Every novel needs a little chaos in it. That’s what ignites the story. The novel begins with a character or two in their regular, everyday lives (that could be anything from a pimp drinking coffee at Starbucks, to an astronaut doing her daily orbit around Mars). Then something happens to them, an event or a…