Tia Chucha Press will be publishing The Flood
I was in my early twenties, 23, 24, I forget which. I hadn’t yet moved out of my parents’ place, the apartment we’d lived in since we came to the US in 1980, on Gramercy Drive. It was right after college and I was working a stupid job and a “film distribution” company, my job pretty much consisting of covering up for my boss, who was banging the secretary (which is why I was answering the phones), whenever his wife called.
It was a time, I remember, when I was writing a lot. It was the beginning of my insomnia years, which would last for at least 6 years and still comes back now and again. Each night, I would pull out my word processor and sit at the dining table while my brother and my parents slept, unable to use my typewriter because it was too loud. And I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Poem after poem.
On one of those nights, I read an article in the LA Times about a new book that had been written by a local writer. His name was Luis Rodriguez. The book was Always Running. The next day, my girlfriend and I went to the bookstore, the long defunct Bookstar inside the Beverly Connection, and picked up a hardcover copy. I came home, laid down on the floor, and started reading. Over the years, I have spoken with so many writers who grew up in Los Angeles that were equally impacted by Always Running, by Luis, by his work through the Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore. He has truly been a figure that many of us have looked up to.
I couldn’t tell you now all the details of the book, even though I read it 4 times over the following 2 weeks. I can tell you, though, that I remember the need the character felt to write, to escape his life and write, to write so he could escape his life. I can tell you that it helped me breathe, that it gave me the courage and strength to sit at another blank sheet of paper, that it made a little less afraid to look into a future I couldn’t really grasp. It didn’t matter that the gang-life Luis wrote about or East LA or anything was foreign to me. What mattered was that he was writing about a young man who knew that writing was going to save his life.
Last week, I heard from Luis about the manuscript I originally submitted to him at the beginning of 2009, a poetry collection about 120-pages long. He said that Tia Chucha Press wanted to publish my book, The Flood, my first book. He said that he loved my writing. He said congratulations. One of my literary heroes telling me that my work is good, that I should be proud, that the time I have put into writing so far was worth it.
I thought about my mother back in that time when I was lost in the pages of Always Running, how she stood in my room, stared at the mess on my desk, the stacks of writing on the floor, the typewriter on my bed, and in her frustration and worry for a son that was showing all the signs of amounting to nothing, yelled out, “Why do you keep writing all day? These poems are all going to end up in a trash someday anyways!”
The thing is, she was right. Many of them have literally ended up in the trash. So many others got lost in one or the other of the 15 times I’ve moved since then. But some have survived. They have survived and flourished. They have become a collection. They have become a book.
I don’t know how to express how I feel about it. It’s somewhere between ecstasy and relief, sprinkled with fear because fear never goes away.
Well, there is one thing I’m sure of. I’m sure I am proud. I am proud of my book and the poems in it. I am proud of the title piece, “The Flood,” the damn epic poem I’ve been working on, choking on, for some stupid fucking reason for the past 8 years or so, a 50-page (so far) poem that somehow has found a way to be published.
Oh, one other thing – I am sure, more than ever, that I will keep writing.
