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The 10th birthday of When the de la Cruz Family Danced, my 68th birthday, and other numbers
Today is my birthday and I’m 68 years old. Ten years ago today, I celebrated the publication of my first book When the de la Cruz Family Danced.* My father, to whom the book was dedicated, never got to read it. He had been dead eighteen years. He died the year I turned forty when…
Read MoreFarewell, Henry Darrow
The High Chaparral first aired in 1967. I was fourteen years old and a semi-regular viewer. When I watched, I watched for one reason – Henry Darrow who played Manolito Montoya. He was handsome, charismatic, and Mexican. Or rather, he played a Mexican on TV. Henry Darrow, born Enrique Delgado was Puerto Rican. What mattered…
Read MoreA little boy walks toward the future …
I think about the future a lot lately, like every day, almost endlessly. For one thing, I turn 68 in a few months and the future is not as long or as far away as it once was. For another thing, I have a grandson now, and I wonder what the future means for him.…
Read MoreDecember ends 2020 at last already
It’s time for some brief reflections on this pandemic year that nevertheless had its moments of grace and illumination for me as I hope it did for you. It goes without saying that it leaves lots of room for improvement. The dispirit of Christmas On my morning walk, I often pass a house that…
Read MoreReading books during a pandemic
There’s a terrible inequity in asking people to please read my new book Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories when I’ve been unable to read more than a few books since the pandemic disrupted our lives and unsettled our psyches. While many others found solace and refuge in books, my brain failed to connect with words…
Read MoreThe Pandemic Days of Our Lives
In which my new book of fiction launches amid the reunion of a young family separated by the pandemic, a marriage ceremony, and a first birthday. Plane travel We’re supposed to drive, but the fires up and down the West Coast mean unexpected closures of the interstate in some areas and lanes clogged with evacuees…
Read MoreArrivals
September was all about arrivals – three of them, all occurring within a ten-day span during a pandemic, with fires raging in the West, in a country swirling ever deeper into a shithole of its own making thanks to a morally bankrupt administration and, as been recently revealed though long suspected, a literally bankrupt unbillionaire…
Read MoreWhat Angie Rubio Owes to My Junior High English Teacher
In less than two months, Angie Rubio will enter the world as the shero of her own relatively ordinary, yet microaggression-ridden life when Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories is released from Jaded Ibis Press on September 21. You can pre-order your copy from the terrific folks at Elliott Bay Books. Writer Kathleen Alcalá sums up…
Read MoreSmall presses, important voices
Without the existence of small presses, it’s pretty certain I would not have two published books and another forthcoming to my name. Small presses, some of which release only a few books each year, are run with limited resources by small, dedicated staffs. Many were established to publish books that have been overlooked (or underlooked?…
Read MoreLeaving Ecuador and a Loved One During a Pandemic
When your grandson’s birth is preceded by eleven days of street protests in the heart of Quito, does the smell of tear gas penetrate the womb, do the whir of helicopters and the boom of explosions echo inside the uterine wall, does all of it presage more disruptive events in his life? Ilio’s was not…
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