P.S.

Making my dawn Dad rounds today. Cahyo's eating her cereal and getting ready for the last days of school. Megan's already gone. Eric will sleep for another six hours!

But, apropos of the posting yesterday about the writing life, I just wanted to add this note. I went to an educators' convention last night at Chicago's National Museum of Mexican Art. I signed autographs, with no break, from 7:00 to 9:30. Wore out three assistants. Signed 500 books.

Two and half hours of autographs!

One Christmas, when I was dying in San Diego--of boredom, poverty, despair, worry and doubt, my mom had hit rock bottom. I had come back from living in Hollywood, and I was working in Mexico with the poor. Living where I dropped--my mom's house, my brother's back room, friends' apartments.

Christmas Day.

My half-siblings had invited us to Christmas dinner. My mom thought she'd been delivered and didn't have to buy food for the day--a real blessing. Then the sibs didn't show up to get us when they said they would. We waited two hours, worrying as I have always done. I had no money to save my mom--and how could I get her a Christmas meal on Christmas morning?

When I called them to ask them what was happening, they told me they were too busy to drive up to my house to pick us up. I could hear the family partying in the background. My family.

One of the missionary gang from Pastor Von's church--Jeff Huckabone--stopped by to wish us a Merry Christmas. He was upset, so he and I drove to 7-11 and found a can of ham for my mom.
I was living a Christmas not unlike those of the poor I worked with in Tijuana.

God is hard-core: I never figured out how evangelists got private jets and mansions.

That year, friends, my mom gave a present. It's all she had. A small sheet of stamps so that I could submit one more story or poem to try to get published.

If you had traveled back in time to that young man's Christmas Day and told him he'd have a house, kids, happy marriage, books galore, money, not one but three vehicles, and would sign books for two and a half hours straight, he would have fallen to his knees and wept.

Get to work.
L

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Keep Writing

I'm lying. I never, once, learned how to stop worrying.

However, fans always ask me how I made it. Hmm. I don't believe I've made it, see--though I couldn't tell you what having made it means. Rich? Signing autographs? Or maybe happiness? What is it?

What I have always done is managed to continue writing. Faith may by shaken. It's not just the earth that has fault-lines. But sooner or later, if you want to survive, you are given enough grace to shed the desperation. And then you see it's all a silly game, the "making it" career path. Really. Believe me. Nobody was as desperate as I was.

I lived in abject grubby poverty, man! I lived with my mom! No stove, no oven, no heater, no plumbing in the kitchen! I was like some strange backwoods madman with 150 cats locked in his trailer. Well, maybe not so much.

But I was desperate to have publishing success not only to save myself, but to save my mother, and to save the orphans and garbage-pickers I was working with in Tijuana. Sure, I wanted to be famous. Why lie?

But here's a small story for you, just to let you know that it's what is in you, not what is in the world, that matters.

I had escape San Diego's doom and poverty to Harvard. 1982. I was amazed to meet a Chicano poet there of some repute. I helped him start a lit j0urnal. Already, I was making it more than I ever imagined I would--teaching writing at Harvard? Editing a lit mag? Shazam! And because of that lit mag, I met all these interesting people--I met Martin Espada and Jimmy Santiago Baca, I met Sandra Cisneros, I met Ernesto Cardenal, I met Ricardo Sanchez and all kinds of other poets and writers.

Turns out, the typesetter of the jrnl was a Boston area political poet. He had this book of poems, very slim, and he was a member of a well-known small press and NYC lit mag. I had done the artwork for the cover of our own mag's first issue. So, I guess, he saw me as an artist. It never, apparently, occurred to him that I wrote or could write--that art was a distant secnod and a hobby, not a calling.

Anyway, he asked me to illustrate his little book, and his fancy small press would publish it. So I did. And they did. And the book sank into obscurity like all middlin' small press political poetry chapbooks tend to do. But people were very kind about my surreal artwork.

OK. Now. I had been working on a semi-epic long poems for years--since I was nineteen. It was inspired by so many things--Whitman, of course. But also Ferlinghetti. Later, Antler's Factory. And movies: The Wild Bunch. It grew and mutated, it was called, at that time, "Mexico." As it followed me through the years, from San Diego to Mazatlan to Boston, it consumed everything in its path--my dad's death, my own bouts of para-typhoid, Under the Volcano, Octavio Paz, rock and roll--it was just this odd beast.

So I sent it to the New York lit jrnl/small press! Why not! It was my life's work! Of course, I couldn't send it all, so I cut it down and retitled it, "Ghost Sickness."

Well, they rejected it. No big deal. But the poet whose book I had illustrated sent this amazingly condescending letter that now, years later, gives me big chuckles. But in it, he asks if I have ever heard of these nice things called poetry workshops. I could also get some poetry text books and see what poems are all about. Maybe take a few night classes to get acquainted with poetry.

As is often the case, the joke's on the writer, and the writer has to maintain an smile.

I put that long poem away, feeling mighty friggin' bad about the whole thing. It sat in the carboard box of doom from 1984 till around 1994 or 1995, when a friend of mine in Boulder started yet another lit mag and asked to see some fresh work. Now, granted, I had published Across the Wire. And I was in the rpocess of winning the Western States Book Award for Poetry for my first book of poems, The fever of Being. So, I guess, people were paying closer attention.

I was curious what they'd think about poor ol' "Ghost Sickness." So I gave it to my pal Naomi. And she published parts of it in the jrnl. And Adrienne Rich saw it and took the entire thing, with edits replaced, and published the whole doggoned thing.

Where?

In The Best American Poetry 1996!

Yes, indeed. The same exact text that was so unready in 1984 was among the best in America in 1996. Untouched. Unedited.

Now, did the editors of that first mag pick up the book and say, "Wow--this guy needs to try this neat-o thing they call a poetry workshop"?

Did any of those eds get their work in The Best American Poetry?

I'm tellin' ya, friends, all you can do is go to work, pack a good lunch, and bang away. Judges are all around you. Most of them suck blood. You have to put on your band-aids and walk on. If it's good, it will find its way into the world.

Ha ha! Hahahahaha. How can you take it seriously?

Now get to work, you--
L

Immigration Monday (Slight Return)

I could not resist a couple of interesting stories.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Texas Mayors Sue to Stop Fence

www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/16/america/NA-GEN-US-Border-Fence.php

Arizona Lawsuit Over Border Fence Construction Waiver

www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/209442.php

A Cut Above--San Diego Adds Razor Wire

www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-border_bdmay18,0,2373426.story

Conspiracy Theories--Paranoia Is The Right Philosophy

Hurricans As Immigration Filters

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5784300.html

This Ain't Summer Camp--Concentrate!

www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-detention18-2008may18,0,2430780.story


It's Not Just the American Border

The 400 (Italy)

www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1593449920080515

Tibet (Thanks, Clarke and Grace)

www.tibetaid.org

"Sorry to take up all of your sweet time,
Give it right back to you one of these days.
If I don't see you no more in this world,
I'll see you in the next one, and don't be late."
--Jimi Hendrix.

Communication Breakdown

What does it mean? Words fly around me like bees. Messages rattle in the weeds. Words are living things, funky little buggers, precocious and flirtatious and some of them have stingers. I feel like a bee-keeper, like Tomas Urrea of Albuquerque whom you might have met in one of the "Wastelander's Notebooks" sections of this blog. Mostly, I enjoy their honey. Sometimes I get zapped. Is it the same for you?

I finished Into the Beautiful North. Sent the revisions to my editor in NYC yesterday and today. Nowadays we do it all electronically. No more stamps for me. But, you know, I have to let Cinderella do that bee-keeping because I don't know how to smoke down the hive and get out the panels.

Some things fly at me that are weird. Not as weird as the whistling maniac in the elevator I told you about. But weird like, I get fan mail here at my house, but my number and address are unlitsted. So how are you guys finding me? How paranoid should I be that high school kids can track me down? It's a compliment, right? Good thing we keep our trash cans inside the garage!

Or the email I got last week from somebody in Baja asking me if I knew anybody who did windows. WTF, as Eric would say. I think I should follow this line--if I could turn my books into employment opportunities for undocumented workers and the poor in Tijuana, I'd get some kind of UN award.

One of the healers who helped teach me stuff for Hummingbird's Daughter has cancer. WTF again.

Some are bumble bees, some are honey bees, and some are killer bees. Last week, a historical writer and researcher wrote to me to tell me that my work about Teresita was "disappointing" and revealed nothing new. Today, I got word from the Apache medicine man who was the model for Manuelito in the novel that the book is a ritual of initiation, and each section is carefully designed to reveal deeper and deeper medicine-truths to readers. Which do you listen to? Well, my training in self-doubt and self-loathing dictates that my writing is, in fact, disappointing. My research sucks. But then, there's that little taste of Chiricahua Apache honey. There's the realization that I was intending to write THAT book, the book "Manny" is talking about. Not the erudite historical tome. The book that wants to enter dreams.

So many bees flying around, you get confused.

If Buechner is right, that life itself is grace, then I accept words--even stinging little bastards--as grace. What's the option? Silence.

By the way, I traded some funny e-mails with Sheriff Ogden in Yuma today. And I started writing Hummingbird II. Are you ready? It's a love story.

XXX, L

God Talk Writers' Meditation

If you don't like this sort of thing--run away! Theology with no apologies. But I believe what he says.

Frederick Buechner:

"I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living...opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly...If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace."

Stupid Happy Mother's Day Catastrophe

Here's one for immigrant haters! Rain all night We got up and had a calm happy Sunday/Mother's Day morning. Cinderella made about 500 banana bread loaves which I'm not supposed to eat. She went upstairs for a nap.And Eric moseyed down tothe bsaement to drum. "Dude," he called. "Basement's flooded." I yelled, in irritated dad mode, "What do you mean, FLOODED?" He said: "Like, flooded. Completely flooded." I dashed down there and the basement was flooded. Hours of swamping and moving water to the drain hole. Everything soaked and wrecked. Poor Cindy out of her nap and into the water. When we walked, there were actually waves. Called the plumber: billion dollar repair job. Now, dig this: I am having two bathrooms put it. And I'm sending C to Seattle to see her mom and take her to Alaska. Uh, and I am going to try to dive across country this summer paying--oh--$11.98 per gallon. Sump pump's dead, and the back-up's dead. Why? because the lawn guys--damned Mexicans!-- moved the sump-pump discharge pipe out of the way and didn't put it back, and the pump has been pumping water back into itself till it blew up! Call the Minutemen! And call Jerry Lewsi, because I'm going to need a telethon. Oh, well, what's money for? And, you know, it isn't a tornado or a cyclone. And Eric and I had a swell time bonding underwater.

Good advice now that Spring is here

For all these years
you've protected
the seed.
It's time to become
the flower.

--Stephen C. Paul