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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.

Blogging on The Nervous Breakdown

I’ll be blogging on The Nervous Breakdown, hopefully at least 2 times a month, hopefully 4 if my lazy ass can my act together.

So my first post is up. It’s the newest edit of an older poem, “tides.” I edited most of my work while putting together two manuscripts for submission. This one I included in a collection called Once I.

Moral of that story is: submit poetry manuscripts every so often; it might be the only way I can go back and edit my poems.

Moral of this story: if you love me (or hate me (or are ambivalent)), go read the poem on TNB and follow me on it.

Foot problem is back. This time, the hand too.

I woke up in the middle of the night upset because I could feel my foot starting to hurt again. It comes, once or twice, every year. Starting at the foot/ankle area, feeling as if I’d tweaked it or something, then rising up my leg and my foot solidifying until I can’t put much weight on my right foot.

But this year, it’s been the worst. This year, it didn’t start at my foot. It started at my hand and my wrist. Same side, the right one. It’s the most physical pain I have ever felt. It’s felt like someone was pulling my hand off my wrist. Five days.

It’s been getting better and I thought it was over with, that this year was the Year of the Hand, but now it’s moved to my foot.

I’m trying to just let go, not fight the pain, listen to it until it tells me what I’m suppose to hear.

No, not Manny

It’s such a sad day. I’m not a big Dodgers fan. I used to be until they unceremoniously got rid of Tommy Lasorda.

But I’ve been a HUGE Manny Ramirez fan since his Indians days and even through the years when he destroyed my beloved Yankees. I wanted so badly for the Yankees to sign him away from the Red Sux.

And since he’s been Los Angeles, what he’s done for the team has been pretty unbelievable. The guy is a baseball hitting genius.

Now this. My two favorites, he and Barry Bonds, both gone. Sad.

There are a whole bunch of things I believe in regards to steroids and sports (baseball especially) and race that I don’t want to get into right now. Sorry Dodgers fans. I was starting to like this team again.

So slow

I’m getting tired of watching these other teams play while waiting for the Lakers’ next series to kick off.

Considering Tumblr

i’ve been considering moving my blog to Tumblr lately. i just love how slick the interface is.

anyway, it’s not customizable and i don’t think i can move the content from this wordpress blog to that, but…

i think it would help me be more regular in posting things, because of its simplicity and its interface.

we’ll see.

The One and Only – Snoop

Happy as Vermin

Thanks to friends who came out to The Mountain Bar last night to hear me read at Vermin on the Mount. And to the strangers I got to meet, especially the dude who bought me a Booker’s before the reading started.

Both Gary Amdahl and David Francis were great, each doing his thing so professionally. And I’m rather happy with the short story I read. It was a first draft that I’d finished hours before the reading. I’m excited to be spending the next month or two rewriting it.

It’s funny. As you read your story in front of people like that, you can feel where it works, where it doesn’t work, where it’s lacking drive and where you feel you hit a stride. And it’s not necessarily a uniform opinion because others will like and dislike different things about what you wrote.

I feel like I’m getting a little more comfortable tackling short stories. I’m learning to move beyond the anxiety of form and letting writing be writing.

So thank you all. Thanks Jim and his wife.

Here’s a little section of the story which I think I’ll be keeping:

from “Wallpaper”

my parents have taught me how to fix myself. he was cutting a pvc pipe. cutting at the pencil lines he’d measured off. he didn’t slip. it wasn’t a slip. it wasn’t an error. i saw it. it was precise as always. he’d built many things that could survive korean winters and the flooding streets of paraguay. he’d built airplanes with chopsticks to force me to make up a childhood of flight. it was two things he’d meant—the placement of his left thumb, the cutting motion of the saw, clashing. he pulled off his wife beater, wrapped it around his thumb and hand as i watched the sweat soaked fabric turn pink, then leaned down to pick up the fallen piece from the floor. he washed away the blood and the dirt, the shavings from the cutting, then wrapped his thumb back together with black electrical tape, awake for the next week in pain as the piece glued itself back to the body, moaning through the night on the couch in the living room because mom wanted to sleep, then at the end of it, over a breakfast of boiled hotdogs and ketchup, unwrapping the healed thumb, smiling, waving it in front of my face until i grabbed it with both my hands, pulling it close to my face to study it, the evidence of the pain, as my breath touched the back of his hand. and he was saying, the soft meat between his teeth when he still had them, see this? this? this is how you get better.

REMINDER: I’m reading at The Mountain Bar on Sunday night!

Come join me this Sunday night for another Vermin on the Mount, a very cool literary venue that takes place in at The Mountain Bar in Chinatown.

You can check out the Vermin blog, where you will also find posted my interview (Converminsation!) with Jim Ruland.

See you all there!

Info below:

Sunday, 4/5
8 PM
Vermin on the Mount
@
The Mountain Bar
473 Gin Ling Way
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(Chinatown)

Featuring:
Gary Amdahl
David Francis
Chiwan Choi

Host: Jim Ruland

FREE!!

Another great Tongue & Groove

It was another great show at Tongue & Groove on Sunday. Conrad has done a remarkable job over the years creating and nurturing this literary venue. Hats off to him.

I was especially excited to read with Neil Aitken. I’d read his poetry before. He’s good.

And he didn’t disappoint. I appreciate how tight each poem was, worked without feeling overworked. And the last poem he read, about his father and the voice they shared, was hot!

Oh, and the singer – Maria Orieta. Stunning voice. Buy her CD!

Anyway, I read a set of older poems that I recently edited. This was the first time I’ve read the new versions. And I’m happy to say – I like them. I think the edits are very good.

So here’s one of the poems I read.

***

pig

one of my boys from the neighborhood,
who used to live with his senile father,
liked to kill stray dogs
that wandered into his yard.
each dog would take about two days to die,
but the last one, a brown pit,
no more than three months old,
that one lasted an extra day.
he’s now found an apartment he wants to
move into in culver city—
old building, wooden floors, checkered tiles
in the kitchen.
it’s rent control
but it’s currently occupied
so he’s just waiting for the sick old woman
who lives in that unit to kick it.
he’s got his little niece, who lives
in that same building with her mother,
updating him on whether woman’s dead yet.

lately, i’ve been dreaming
of a pig,
the same one,
over and over.
the pig’s not large.
the pig’s not drunk.
the pig is real.
i have it pinned down on the ground,
like a wrestler,
flipped over on its back.
my left hand on its chest
between the two short front legs
is holding it down in place.
the squeals sound like portuguese curses
and i’m good at pretending i’m deaf.
holding the pig steady,
i cut into its belly
with the old can opener i hold in my right hand,
making that up and down motion,
trying to cut a perfect circle of meat.

i see my neighbor across
vacuuming the floor around her kitchen.
she once told me,
when we were sitting drunk by the pool,
that when she was a little bitty thing
she was taken to parties at her church
where people stood in a circle in the basement
and sang hymns and lifted up their hands in praise,
and when the songs ended
she was traded, swapped for other kids,
as a man in a tie roamed the room
with a videocamera.

back to the pig.
i put the pig flesh into my mouth and bite
and it’s chewy.
my teeth can’t break through the surface.
i try to chew a couple of more times
and give up
because
it’s never the taste
that i wanted.

Converminsation with Jim Ruland of Vermin on the Mount

Jim Ruland, the badass, hard-working, man of the people host of Vermin on the Mount (one of my favorite LA literary venues) has posted my Q&A with him.

This is in advance of the reading on April 5th.

vermin.jpg

There’s also his converminsations with the other two readers, David Francis and Gary Amdahl.

And don’t forget to check out all the previous posts with all the previous writers.

I especially LOVE the fantastic posters he has made for each reading. Big up, Jim!

Vermin on the Mount – Sunday April 5th, 8 pm. The Mountain Bar in Chinatown LA.

Dream City 1908

One day, I will return to Barcelona.

One day, I will stay there.