—ANAÏS NIN
The late Chicano poet Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado once wrote that being a Chicano writer was like being in a constant state of pregnancy—always full, heavy with story, in the throes of creation, but never birthing a “baby.”
That’s exactly how I felt the day I decided that writing was what I wanted to do. At the time I worked as a millwright, maintaining the engines of an overhead crane above four electric furnaces at a Bethlehem Steel mill. I had on a scuffed hard hat, greasy uniform, tool belt, and steel-toed shoes. It was a substantial job. I should’ve been content. Instead, I felt as if my poems and stories were being drained out of me with every pouring of melted steel, every searing blast, every pounding forge. Sorrow came in waves. Perhaps depression is a better word. It struck me that if I didn’t do something about this writing thing soon, I never would.
The year was 1978. I was twenty-four. To stay out of the trouble I was frequently in during my youth, I had turned to industry and construction. I learned skills like pipefitting, rigging, mechanics, welding, and framing homes and warehouses. This was the right thing. But, newly separated from my wife and two babies, I was alone, afraid, unsure, drinking too much. I felt this was my last chance at bringing out what ached inside, before it became a rotting, dead thing I’d carry around.
I had been writing for years already—in my teens, in juvenile hall, in jails, on homeless nights, or in my garage room. And a few adults in schools and in the community had stepped up to help. Unfortunately, I was unprepared for the possibilities that lay behind my scribbling. I often sabotaged opportunities.
But, finally, on that day in the steel mill, I made a life-changing decision—to quit everything and become a writer, even though I had no idea what I had to do to achieve this. It was extremely difficult to let go of a hard-to-get, good-paying job in the skilled trades. That was all the work I knew, beyond street crime, which I had promised myself I’d never do again for the sake of my son and daughter. While these jobs stabilized and helped structure my life after the destructiveness of my youth, it wasn’t enough to keep me—or my marriage—going. I felt a pang in my craw, an inexplicable and perhaps nonsensical invitation from the universe to gather my faculties and write.
My own family and most of my friends thought I was nuts. A writer? Who writes? What kind of life is that? You should be happy just getting a regular paycheck. So quitting became an act of desperation, of lunacy, one that flooded me with nagging doubts. Yet it was also a way to avoid dissociating due to trauma and betrayal. I needed to “get back into my body.”—to go through a door that opened when I dropped into pain, to not allow anger, blame, and defensiveness to close that door.
The first thing I did was take night classes at East Los Angeles College: creative writing, journalism, and speech. During the day, to bring in money, I worked as a framing carpenter and later as a mechanic/welder. By 1980, I gambled all this away and walked into the Boyle Heights offices of Eastern Group Publications, on Soto Street near Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Avenue). They published seven weekly East LA newspapers, including the Eastside Sun and the Mexican-American Sun. Run by Dolores and Jonathan Sanchez, Eastern Group took a huge risk, allowing me to write news and a boxing column and take photos. (The newspaper chain finally shut down in early 2018.)
That summer, the African American journalists and publishers Robert Maynard and his wife Nancy Hicks accepted me for their eleven-week Summer Program for Minority Journalists at the University of California, Berkeley. SPMJ also got me my first daily newspaper job, at the San Bernardino Sun—when the city had the second highest homicide rate in the country. I saw far too many dead bodies from murders, suicides, drug overdoses, car accidents, and natural disasters.
Unfortunately, due to my activism, a right-wing newspaper editor blacklisted me so I couldn’t work in Southern California daily newspapers. I ended up working for a public employees’ union during the largest union-representation battle in US history, to represent mostly clerical and blue-collar workers in the University of California system. (The union won.)
To keep my hand in reporting, I freelanced articles on indigenous and campesino uprisings in Mexico, including takeovers of land and government buildings. And I was in Nicaragua and Honduras during the Contra War—at one point, Contra rebels shot at me with high-powered rifles, and they twice deployed US ordnance bombs in my direction. Somehow, I emerged unscathed.
I also managed to write poetry and short stories. I took part in the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, in its Barrio Writers Workshops and reading series, and in putting out the magazine, ChismeArte. I did radio reporting and editing at KPFK-FM (Pacifica Radio) and California Public Radio. I wrote for publications like Catholic Agitator, Q-vo magazine, and Santa Barbara News and Review.
In those early years, L.A. Weekly bought a few of my pieces, including one entitled “Raids in Huntington Park: The Question of Rights for Illegal Aliens” (their title), which helped stop the INS policy at the time of raiding elementary schools that left schoolchildren stranded when migra officers rounded up their parents. Published in March 1980, this article received the 1981 Twin Counties Press Club Award for Best Freelance Story.
I had a few setbacks: After my first marriage ended, I went to live with my parents for a few days. That’s when I found out the plywood murals I had painted as a teen, and had stashed in the garage, had been thrown away. I also learned my early writings, which I had carefully stacked in a grocery bag, were also trashed. My mother thought these pursuits were a waste of time. And another time, I walked into a writer’s workshop with a scrapbook of poems and stories. After looking at some of my half-assed work, the facilitator turned to me and said something like, “Man, you can’t write for beans!” He was right. However, none of this stopped me.
In 1985, I ended up in Chicago, where I wrote for political and community publications (People’s Tribune, Letter eX, the Chicago Reporter, etc.). The stories I covered included police terror, labor strikes, and the undocumented, including how the US government in the 1980s used migrant children as hostages by holding them in unmarked motels so their undocumented parents would come get them—and then get deported. Our efforts helped stopped this practice.
For a while I was in the printing industry as a typesetter, including for Chicago’s archdiocese. And I managed a reporter/writer job at WMAQ-AM news radio on the night shift and weekends (in those years, the station was variously owned by Westinghouse, CNN, and NBC).
By 1988, I became active in Chicago’s vibrant poetry scene, home of Slam Poetry. I helped create a not-for-profit literary arts organization called the Guild Literary Complex with various activists, including my friend, the poet and visionary behind the Complex, Michael Warr. I did poetry workshops in homeless shelters as well as juvenile lockups and prisons. And I participated in the first Slam Poetry Tour of Europe with six US poets (Paul Beatty, Neeli Cherkovski, Alan Kaufman, Dominique Lowell, and the incomparable Patricia Smith).
After a number of rejections from book publishers, I decided to publish my first book myself. Poems Across the Pavement came out in 1989, with the help of book designer Jane Brunette, who is of Menominee-French-German descent. The late Gamaliel Ramirez, a Puerto Rican artist, did the cover art. The City of Chicago and the Illinois Arts Council provided funds. I typeset the book after hours at the publishing house Jane and I worked at. I was thirty-five. This book is how Tia Chucha Press began. Jane has been designing our books ever since.
Curbstone Press of Connecticut came out with my next poetry book, The Concrete River, as well as the 1993 hardcover edition of Always Running. Curbstone’s cofounders, Judith Doyle and Alexander “Sandy” Taylor, worked hard for my eventual impact on US letters. Sandy became a friend and mentor before his untimely death in 2007.
Always Running sparked surprising acclaim. I appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, National Public Radio (including Fresh Air), This American Life, and in various other TV, radio, and print venues (including Entertainment Weekly). I quit all my jobs and toured thirty cities in three months.
My world changed with this book, which came out a year after the Los Angeles Uprising. It was one of a handful of publications about LA gangs, which politicians and some media blamed for the destruction that followed the acquittal of the police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King.
Since then my writings have appeared in anthologies and textbooks such as The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Indivisible: Poems for Social Justice, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion, Writing for Life: Paragraphs and Essays, In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry, and others.
Staged productions of my poems, stories, and memoir have been produced at the Nights of the Blue Rider theater festival, Club Lower Links, and the Firehouse Theatre in the Chicago area, as well as by the Cornerstone Theater Company at the Mark Taper Auditorium in LA’s Central Library and at the Ivar, Montalbán, and John Anson Ford theaters in Hollywood. A play based on two of my short stories, Miss East L.A., drawn from a film script by John F. Cantú, was produced at Casa 0101’s Little Theater in Boyle Heights. In 2019, the first full stage production of Always Running, adapted by Hector Rodriguez and myself, made its world debut at Casa 0101’s main theater.
I’ve written poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction, and audiobooks, e-books, handmade limited-edition art books, CDs, short films, videos, and plays have been created from my stories and poems. More recently I’ve moved into blogging and podcasts. And I’ve become a script consultant on three TV shows, including FX’s Snowfall, cocreated and produced by the late John Singleton, dramatizing how crack first invaded the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles with CIA complicity.
Tia Chucha Press continues to grow, now with a catalog that includes more than seventy poetry collections, anthologies, chapbooks, and a CD. Our roster of writers includes Patricia Smith, David Hernandez, Dwight Okita, Virgil Suarez, Afaa Michael Weaver, A. Van Jordan, Terrance Hayes, Tony Fitzpatrick, Kyoko Mori, Linda Rodriguez, Patricia Spears Jones, Chiwan Choi, Alison Luterman, Luivette Resto, Peter J. Harris, and Mayda Del Valle. Many of these poets have gone on to win National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prize nominations, Jackson Poetry Prizes, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards, and others. Elizabeth Alexander became one of only four poets to read at a US presidential inauguration, for President Obama.
In 2017, Tia Chucha Press released the first literary anthology of Central American writing in the United States, The Wandering Song, edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar. Later that year, we published the poetry of abandoned girls from Our Little Roses girls’ home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, entitled Counting Time Like People Count Stars, edited by Spencer Reece. Thanks to Spencer, and to Diana Frade, cofounder of Our Little Roses with her husband, Leo, Trini and I spent a month in Honduras in late 2016 teaching poetry to the girls as well as in a coed bilingual school inside a walled compound surrounded by one of San Pedro Sula’s poorest neighborhoods.
A recent top-selling TCP book featured the songs and art of Louie Perez, a founder of the renowned East LA band Los Lobos, entitled Good Morning, Aztlán.
I’m all about books. Somehow that fading dream in the steel mill found root and soil—even when I received enough rejection slips to wallpaper my house.
The best assurance I was on the right path occurred when my mother visited Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and bookstore for the first and only time. This was a few years before she died—at the time she was in remission from lymphoma, had suffered through three hip-busting falls, and was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She walked in unsteadily, using an aluminum walker. I began to tell her about what Trini and I were doing with this enchanting space that offered a bookstore, an art gallery, a performance stage, arts workshops, and a full coffee bar. Tia Chucha’s, named after my favorite aunt, also drew on indigenous cosmologies from Mexico and US Native peoples, in recognition of my mother’s heritage.
As I talked, to my dismay, my mother began to cry. I stopped and in Spanish asked her, “Amá, why are you crying? I didn’t create this place so you’d be upset.”
She then turned to me—keep in mind, I was in my early fifties—and in Spanish said, “I think, mijo, you’re finally going to be okay.”
The biggest hurdle I had as a young writer was learning to write. I didn’t get much instruction in the barrio schools I attended, and I also dropped out at fifteen. I do recall key teachers in my elementary school who recognized my potential: Mrs. Graf gave me my first “A” for a couple of sentences I did at age nine, around the time English began to kick in for me. In sixth grade, Ms. Krieger had the notion for me to write a one-page speech and read it to the whole school for Flag Day. I balked at first, super-shy kid that I was. But somehow I mustered the nerve and did it. And then there was Mrs. Isabel Thurber, a school administrator, who years later saw a ream of my badly typed writings and had it retyped on expensive onion paper. There were also high school counselor Paula Crisostomo, a leader of the 1968 East LA school walkouts (or “Blowouts”); Ernestine Bacio, a home-school liaison; and the mentor I’ve called Chente in my memoirs.
These are the angels that show up, seemingly out of nowhere, at various times when one embarks on that destiny road. These guardians see the child, even if that kid is in trouble, mixed up, foolish. They somehow sense a possible life for the youngster, often when their parents don’t. Nonetheless, even though I was intelligent and capable, I had to confront the fact I didn’t know how to write.
Learning grammar, syntax, and spelling didn’t prove as big an obstacle as finding the time to practice and the will to keep trying even when I frequently failed. I had learned a few things from my working life: to “punch the clock,” give it all you got, make mistakes, and keep going, even with more mistakes. I learned what many have understood for generations—the only discipline that matters is self-discipline.
In writing, as in any artistic endeavor, nothing is guaranteed. You may not get published. You may not become known. You may not even be able to earn enough to pay your bills. But if this is the heart of what you care about, then you have to do it and do it as well and as persistently as you can.
Yes, there are obstacles: unsparing critics, friends who don’t understand, mothers who get rid of your writing, love interests who don’t support your calling, kids who resent your divided attention. Of course, be present to the important people in your life. But none of them should stop you. It’s about a primary agreement to live out your inner story—as Michael Meade says, “the story written on your soul the day you were born.” It’s a story you have to bring to life. Secondary agreements are important. These include marriages, children, work, home, status. Don’t neglect them. But hang on tight to the first agreement between yourself and the universe. This is the source of real authority, which has roots in “authoring.” This is where you enter the realm of ownership, responsibility, and, ultimately, freedom. There are many obstacles arrayed against the poet, writer, musician, and artist in this society. That’s on society. But if you give up, that’s on you.
Examine. Evoke. Express.
These are the “three Es” of writing as I teach it. Like Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Using linguistic tools a writer can dissect the inner workings of one’s life, as well as the time, place, and conditions surrounding such a life. “Examine” means that if one is a house, a writer should check out all the rooms, including the basement where the secrets, shames, and terrors reside. “Evoke” means to mine the depths, bring out the grief beneath all the rage. Notice how at the bottom of raging waters are dismissals and deceits—but also excavate the gold beneath the mud. To express requires the use of craft to make music out of misery, give shape to the body of trauma to an effective and captivating degree in songs, poems, stories, scripts, plays, essays.
A resilient and patient person is what happens when heart, mind, and spirit come together, and these in turn intersect with outside energies and relations. Resiliency is having the capacity to remain essentially intact despite uncertainties, fears, and all manner of struggle. It’s not just trudging along. This is true for persons as well as institutions. We have to own the problems so we can own the solutions. If we can’t even recognize we have fundamental problems, we can’t envision which way to go.
What I’m really teaching when I teach writing is not about masterpieces outside of oneself—a great poem, painting, musical piece, or whatever. Yes, these are beneficial. But people who create these works are also in a creative process. They are works of art. Ultimately the real masterpiece is you.
To revisit Lalo Delgado’s statement, I learned at one point that a baby can only be born when the womb begins to push the fetus out. A baby’s first breath sends a signal to the mother’s brain that in turn signals the womb to begin the labor process. The baby is actually secreting a substance in the lungs called surfactant, needed for the baby to breathe outside the womb. Consider this a metaphor for art, writing, or any destiny decisions:
Be that breath. Start the signal. Begin the laboring process to birth your light.