Tag Archive for: Linda Rodriguez

2024 Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Juliana Aragón Fatula

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Dear Reader,

Just so you know, I’ve switched to every other month so this is my first post and I’ll be back in April 2024.  As for what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve been away from home staying with a friend and working on my novel. I’ve made the changes suggested by my editor and have been killing my darlings. I’ve cut 1/3 of the pages and will be rewriting scenes that were too distracting from the plot.

This is my first attempt at writing a mystery novel. It’s taken me years but life gets in the way. When I’m away from home staying with my sister/friend who gives me a room of my own, I can write freely without interruptions. At home, I’m always distracted by my husband, the doggies, laundry, etc. Here I write and read and do research and enjoy the process as it should be with no one but me and my characters.

I have a fabulous editor who is working with me from Macondo. Macondo Writers Workshop is a weeklong experience for professional writers. The Macondistas recognize their place in our society. They are professional or master’s level of writers. I signed up for the writing workshop called Chuparosa con Ganas.  Translated this means butterflies with desire. I accidentally sent my editor an email with Chupacabras con Ganas in the subject line, oops. We had a good laugh.

Her notes to me were thorough and professional. She told me what I needed to hear. The good and the bad. I have thick skin and have done several workshops over the years and received critiques of my writing but as a poet, not a novelist. I’m learning and becoming a better writer because of listening to those master writers who critique my work and give me positive feedback. I’ve also critiqued writers and given my feedback on their writing. I enjoy the experience of workshopping. I miss the camaraderie and passion of working with other writers.

I was invited and accepted to blog for the Stiletto Gang, thanks to Linda Rodriguez, a Macondista. I met her at an AWP conference in Denver many years ago. She has been instrumental in my writing my first mystery. So I share a post every other month for the Stiletto Gang; she also writes once every other month. I’ll be her partner in crime.

It’s been a year from hell for me but I’ve taken my lemons and made margaritas. Emily Dickinson said it best.

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—

Emily Dickenson 1830-1886

Last year I lost my only child, Daniel. This year I’m saying goodbye to my sister, Judy. The circle of life teaches us about death and makes us appreciate our loved ones while they are here on Earth. This post is dedicated to Daniel and Judy.

Juliana Aragón Fatula, a 2022 Corn Mother, women who have earned accolades for community activism and creative endeavors is the author of: Crazy Chicana in Catholic City, Red Canyon Falling on Churches, winner of the High Plains Book Award for Poetry 2016, and a chapbook: The Road I Ride Bleeds, and a member of Colorado Alliance of Latino Mentors and Authors, and Macondo, “a community of accomplished writers…whose bonds reflect the care and generosity of its membership.” She mentors Bridging Borders, a Teen Leadership Program for girls. No justice no peace.

 

Existing While Brown or Black in America

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Existing While Brown or Black in America by Linda Rodriguez

In all the turmoil around #BlackLivesMatter and the extrajudicial killings of Black men and women by police right now, I notice the inevitable outcries from parts of the White community that the police wouldn’t shoot and kill these people for nothing, that they must have brought it on themselves in some way by their own lawless behavior. Perhaps. But when we have stringent, trustworthy investigations, again and again we find that these people did nothing so major that it would have warranted taking their lives. Still, to many White, middle-class people who are never hassled and threatened by police as they move through daily life, it seems that surely all these unarmed African American, Latino, and Native men killed by police every year must have brought it on themselves through some fault of their own.

So, allow me to tell a little story from my own life. In Kansas City, Missouri, where I live, the police used to be as undisciplined and out of control as some of the worst of police forces we’ve recently seen. A crisis finally forced the city to crack down, bring in a strong police chief to rebuild the force, and reorganize the police force around the motto of “Protect and Serve.” It never became a perfect police force, of course, but for a while it was plagued by less racial profiling and unnecessary civilian deaths than most urban forces today before lamentably reverting to its old forms.

Back in the 1970s when Kansas City’s force was so much like the departments we’re seeing on the news right now, pointing loaded rifles and screaming obscenities and death threats at unarmed demonstrators and reporters, I lived with my late first husband, Michael Rodriguez. Mike was a decorated veteran of Vietnam, married to me with two little kids, working a white-collar, full-time job as manager of a printing supply company branch, going to college at night, and the most non-violent and non-criminal person anyone could imagine. He went through some of the worst fighting in Vietnam as a medic, refusing to carry ammunition in his sidearm because he could not bring himself to kill anyone.

A fire station stood on the corner of the block where his company offices were, and several of the firefighters who were also Vietnam veterans had made friends with him since this was when no one in this country wanted to hear what these guys had gone through. This fact later saved his life.

One cold evening in winter when twilight came early, Mike was the last one out of his office, as usual, since he locked up at night and opened up in the mornings. He found his car’s battery had died and called a cab to come take him home. While he stood outside his own offices, long-haired but dressed in a business suit, waiting for his cab to arrive, two policemen pulled up, got out of their police cruiser, and started harassing him. They shoved him back and forth between them, called him racial slurs, searched him, and found nothing but his wallet, keys, and a tube of prescription ointment for psoriasis in his pockets. One then told the other, “We could shoot this motherfucker and say we thought that tube was a gun.” Kansas City police had just shot a fourteen-year-old African American boy three days before, claiming they thought the comb in his pocket was a gun—and they got away with it.

Mike thought he would die on that spot, leaving me a young widow with a baby and a toddler and no way for his kids or anyone to know that he had never done anything to deserve it. His firefighter friends had seen what was happening, however, and came out calling his name and asking what was going on and if he needed help. The cops told them to go away, but the firefighter veterans stood there watching and witnessing until Mike’s cab came, and he got safely away. Clearly, they saved his life that night.

If you talk with people of color, you will hear story after story like this. A friend of mine who is a White mystery writer married to an African American (extremely successful) artist just went out and bought all new dress business suits for her husband who, like most artists, normally wears jeans and T-shirts to work in, in the hopes that this will keep the New York City police from stopping and harassing him as he must travel through her city from home to his workplace and back. He must dress up for the commute, only to change into jeans and T-shirt at work, and then reverse the process to go home. White people don’t face this kind of treatment by law enforcement in their own lives, and it sounds so crazy and unreal to them that they assume people of color are exaggerating or making it up out of whole cloth, understandably, but this kind of harassment, threat, and fear is a part of daily life in communities of color all over this country.

Racism is a horrible and unjust fixture of American life, but just because you are White does not mean that you are safe from its destructive consequences. If allowed to flourish openly and unchecked, it won’t stop with communities of color. With the rising militarization of the police forces of large cities and small towns, I would caution my White friends to learn from our experiences. If this kind of behavior is allowed to continue and grow, it will eventually overflow into the White communities, beginning with poor and working-class communities and eventually moving up the socioeconomic ladder. It’s a matter of power and control, even beyond the matter of race and ethnicity.

Whether we know it or not, all of us in the United States have a vested interest in this situation of extrajudicial killings by police forces. Americans need to have a thorough reorganization of every police force in this country. We also need a national discussion of the growing militarization of our police departments, large and small, and what we as citizens want to do about this growing threat. The stakes in this situation are high, and the costs of failure for us as a nation and individually will be unimaginably horrific.

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, was published in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet  Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda  or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.

¡AY, QUÉ LÀSTIMA!

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¡AY, QUÉ LÀSTIMA! by Linda Rodriguez

The men—husbands, father-in-law, cousins—sat in the living room on the flower-covered couch and armchairs or sprawled on the shag carpet in front of the televised football game, beer cans in all hands. The only differences from the majority of living rooms across America were the brand of beer (Dos Equís or Carta Blanca), the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe above the couch serenely presiding over the laughter and profanity, and the Spanish phrases casually sprinkled throughout the Midwestern English.

“First down! Yeah! Let’s do it again! ¡Otra vez!”

The women, not unlike those in my own father’s family, sat at the kitchen table and stood at stove and counters, preparing meals and gossiping about absent members of the extended family in the same flat Midwestern accents sparked with Spanish phrases. “¡Ay, qué lástima!” was the most frequent. What a shame, or what a mess, or what a tragedy. It was used in all three cases with only a change in tone and the context to indicate which.

Young newlywed with feminist ideas (after all, it was the beginning of 1970, a new age), I planted myself defiantly on that floral couch at my husband’s side. I had grown up playing football with my many brothers. I could yell for a field goal or first down with the best of them. I was going to be an equal, not shunted off to the kitchen to gossip with the women.

And other than a frown from my forbidding father-in-law (who, I was convinced, hated me anyway) and a raised eyebrow from one of my husband’s older cousins, I encountered no real resistance. Most of the younger generation thought it was cool. Oh, I knew the women in the kitchen were shaking their heads, clucking tongues, and whispering about me.

“What can you expect if Mike marries some half-breed Indian girl? ¡Ay, qué lástima!”

So why did I give up my place in front of the TV and under Our Lady’s protective gaze to spend decades of my life in the steamy kitchen, patting out tortillas and clucking my tongue at the latest escapades of Manny, the drunkard second cousin once-removed (“Of course, he’s still a primo. His mother and grandfather are, aren’t they?”) and the no-good mujeriego that poor Lupe married (“¡Ay, qué lástima!”)?

I simply grew up enough to understand that the conversations in the kitchen were more than just gossip. There was always some of that, of course, but on the whole, what was taking place was of greater importance. That kitchen, as were so many, was the central hub of the web that was la familia, embracing not only distant blood relatives but godparents and godchildren, as well as in-laws of in-laws. In that kitchen, behavior was examined and evaluated, true, but usually through the lens of the good of the entire family. And the verdicts would later pass to husbands over meals or in bed back in their own homes.

“Jacinto needs to lighten up on that oldest boy of his. If Chuy can get a scholarship, why shouldn’t he go to college? One of his brothers can take over the shop.”

Over the years, as I added my own children to that family web of relationships, I learned to value the women’s kitchen-talk in a different way. Raised through my adolescence in the ultimate-individualist WASP world of my mother’s family after the divorce, I had made that competitive ethos my own, but this other way of granting importance to the good of the family and the community resonated with my early memories of my Cherokee grandmother and my father’s people. American society outside would always push the concept of each individual for himself or herself, but there was a place as well for these older ways, ways of considering la familia, the group, the tribe, trying to keep it strong and thriving, and trying to keep each member linked to everyone else in a web of love, loyalty, and concern.

Those children I gave to the family web are grown now. With so many of their second- and third-generation peers, they’ve moved away and live on the furthest fringes of the web. Like the tias who taught me to make tamales and enchiladas, along with more important things, I pull them back in as much as I can, reminding them of their obligations and ties to the family, nagging my youngest to call his prima who lives in his college town.

“But, Mom, I don’t know her! She’s not going to want to hear from me.”

“She’s Aunt Mary from Chicago’s oldest boy’s granddaughter. She’s family. Of course, she’ll want to hear from you. A friendly face in a town where she’s a stranger and brand new? Just give her a call.”

I see the same attitudes of wanting to ignore or forget family ties other than the immediate in others of my children’s generation. The media are full of voices telling Latinos to assimilate, but that’s something they’ve been doing quite successfully for as long as they’ve had the chance. The trick is to do that without losing the cultural and familial richness that is their inheritance, is in fact one of the many gifts Latinos have to offer Anglo America. That family closeness and consideration for the welfare of the community that is the extended family web has long disappeared from much of the Anglo American culture. If Latinos were to assimilate that… “¡Ay, qué lástima!”

 

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, was published in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet  Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.

The Arts Are For Everyone!

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The Arts Are For Everyone! by Linda Rodriguez

A few years ago, I was giving writing workshops at a local high school on the wrong side of the tracks. These kids had already been through lots of trauma and stress, though they were only in their teens. These particular twenty kids, however, fell in love with writing, and it offered them a way to deal with broken families, broken hearts, and broken promises. They learned that on their own without me.

I was there to show them that writing can offer them even more. It wasn’t easy at first. Some of them started out prickly. It’s natural when life’s been a hostile environment to be always on guard. It took patience, but we got past that, and they wrote some phenomenal poems.

In the last workshop I had the joy of telling them that their work would be published in an anthology of Kansas City student writing and that they would give a public reading at The Writers Place, the city’s stand-alone center for writers and literature. They were pretty excited. This was a kind of validation that they almost never get. And since the poems to be published were from a workshop we did around identity and specific imagery, it was a special kind of validation. They opened their hearts on the page about the good and bad things in their families and their lives, and society said, “You are great just as you are!”

Out of the school population of 348, these twenty kids are winners. They may not be the only ones, of course, and they may not all go on to college. However, they have learned to use language to help themselves through tough times. They have learned to use language to form images of who they are and where they want to go, and that’s a prize of incomparable worth.

 

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, was published in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda  or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.

CINCO DE MAYO – More Than Mexican for a Day

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CINCO DE MAYO – More Than Mexican for a Day by Linda Rodriguez

It’s time for the drunks to fill the bars and overflow into the streets again, time for posters and commercials of sultry señoritas sucking down cervezas while their whirling skirts of many colors reveal slim brown thighs, time for The-Holiday-That-Coors-Built in its neverending need to sell beer. For the umpteenth time I answer someone, “No, Mexican Independence Day is September 16.” Like St. Patrick’s Day and the Irish, Cinco de Mayo’s become the day everyone becomes “Mexican,” shouts “¡Olé!” while chugging drinks, and dances to “La Bamba.”

The sad thing is that Latino kids born or raised here think it’s the major Mexican holiday, too. In Mexico, no one celebrates it, except one town, Pueblo, and its surrounding area. Like the Irish saint’s day, it’s been usurped by the U. S. liquor industry and transformed into commercial America’s version of another country, always reduced to the lowest common denominators—booze and loud drunks and big bucks for big companies. The country of writers like Sor Juana, Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes, artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Orozco and Siqueiros, and composers Hilda Paredes and Silvestre Revueltas has been reduced to Get-Drunk-With-The-Frito-Bandito.

There is an upside, however. Latino communities across the United States have hitched a ride on the commercial juggernaut and organized fiestas and cultural programs around Cinco de Mayo. If you leave the borrachos in the bars to their pretense and head for community-sponsored events, you can see traditional dances performed in the beautiful costumes of various parts of Mexico and richly dressed caballeros showing their skills on brightly caparisoned horses, you can hear mariachi music—and ranchero and norteña and the many other varieties of popular Mexican music—you can visit colorfully creative exhibits by Latino artists, and you can sample the mouthwatering foods and tempting craftwork of local individuals and organizations.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” is working for these communities as they try to channel all that commercial marketing energy into inspirational, creative events to educate the whole community and their own young people about the cultural riches and diversity that Mexico and the other countries in Latin America have brought to the United States over the many centuries that these Indigenous and mestizo cultures have mixed into the American melting pot.

So this Cinco de Mayo, if you want to be “Mexican-for-a-Day,” don’t head for your local watering hole. They’ll just give you the same old stuff with a little sombrero stuck on it. Instead, check out the events listings for places and organizations with names like Guadalupe Center, El Centro, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the amazing El Grupo Folklorico Atotonilco, Trio Aztlán, Gran Desfile de Caballos, and many others. Then, dance to La Bamba and shout “¡Olé!” and other gritos not from commercially produced drunkenness but from sheer joy and exuberance. Now, that’s Mexican.

 

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, will publish in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet  Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.

The War Against Women That No One Wants to Admit–and a Poem

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Trigger Warnings for child molestation and abuse and for sexual assault and domestic violence.

Whenever I read this poem in public, I preface it with a statement that there is a war against women taking place, followed by the current statistics on sexual assault, rape, physical assault, and murder, statistics that have risen every time I check them again and which are always worse for women of color and Native women. I don’t read this poem in public much, however, because it makes men uncomfortable–they shift in their seats visibly–and it brings so many women up to me afterward in tears to say that this poem was about their own lives. I have begun to feel that I should provide a therapist to the audience before I read it.

As we live through the nightmare created when Rowe v Wade was cast down by the Supreme Court, however, this poem feels appropriate. This is, ultimately, what patriarchy comes down to–women and girls at the mercy of men hurting them, simply because they can. We can always hope that they won’t–and not all of them do–but ultimately, they can. And they can get away with it over and over again, while women who try to keep them from getting away with it suffer and pay a huge price. Nothing there has really changed since I was a girl, except that women are generally less and less inclined to go quietly along. Our rage has grown too great. Though things were supposed to have changed, our current situation has shown us that they haven’t. But they will. They must.

P.O.W.

Before I fall into the past,

I drive to the library,

thumb open a book

about the death of a child

in Greenwich Village and

plunge

back

in

time

to trash-filled rooms smelling

of milk, urine, beer and blood,

doors locked and curtains drawn

against the world,

dirty baby brother caged in a playpen,

mother nursing broken nose,

split lip, overflowing ashtray,

and father filling the room to the ceiling,

shouting drunken songs and threats

before whom I tremble and dance,

wobbly diversion, to keep away

the sound of fist against face,

bone against wall.

 

The book never shows

the other little brothers and sister hiding

around corners and under covers,

but I know they are there

and dance faster,

sing the songs that give him pleasure,

pay the price for their sleep

later, his hand pinching flat nipples,

thrusting between schoolgirl thighs,

as dangerous to please as to anger

the giant who holds the keys

to our family prison. Mother

has no way to keep him from me,

but I can do it for her and them.

 

Locked by these pages

behind enemy lines again

where I plan futile sabotage

and murder every night,

nine-year-old underground,

I read the end.

Suddenly defiant, attacked,

slammed into a wall,

sliding into coma, death

after the allies arrive,

too late, in clean uniforms so like his own

to shake their heads at the smell and mess—

the end I almost believe,

the end that chance keeps at bay

long enough for me to grow and flee,

my nightmare alive on the page.

 

Freed too late,

I close the book,

two hours vanished,

stand and try to walk

to the front door on uncertain legs

as if nothing were wrong.

No one must know.

I look at those around me

without seeming to,

an old skill,

making sure no one can tell.

Panic pushes me to the car

where the back window reflects

a woman, the unbruised kind.

 

In the space of three quick breaths

I recognize myself,

slam back into adult body and life,

drive home repeating a mantra,

“Ben will never hurt me–

All men are not violent,”

reminding myself to believe the first,

to hope for the last.

 

II

 

Years later, my little sister will sleep,

pregnant, knife under her pillow,

two stepdaughters huddled

at the foot of her bed,

in case her husband

breaks through the door

again. Finally,

she escapes

with just the baby.

 

My daughter calls collect

from a pay phone on a New Hampshire street.

She’ll stay in a shelter for battered women,

be thrown against the wall

returning to pack

for the trip back to Missouri,

a week before her second anniversary.

With her father and brother,

the trip home will take three days,

and she will call for me again.

 

Ana and Kay, who sat in my classes,

Vicky, who exchanged toddlers with me once a week,

Pat and Karen, who shared my work,

and two Nancys I have known,

among others too many to count,

hide marks on their bodies and memories,

while at the campus women’s center

where I plan programs for women students

on professional advancement

and how to have it all,

the phone rings every week with calls we forward

to safe houses and shelters.

 

In my adult life, I’ve suffered no man

to touch me in anger,

but I sleep light.

 

Published in Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

Linda Rodriguez’s 13th book, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, will publish in May 2023. She also edited Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueña Poets Look at Their American Lives, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology, and other anthologies.

Dark Sister: Poems was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her three earlier Skeet  Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. She also published Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop.  Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, was optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rodriguez_linda  or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/rodriguez_linda.

October Is Breast Cancer Awareness Month–Message from a Survivor

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by Linda Rodriguez

 

October is my birthday month, which makes it quite an important month to me. It’s also Domestic Violence Awareness Month, a topic about which I, unfortunately, have a great deal of experiential knowledge from my childhood. Most well-known, it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I’d like to talk about breast cancer for a few moments today, since I am a survivor and getting every woman out there into her doctor’s office for mammograms and other breast check-ups to get the drop on this disease is something that is dear to my heart. 

In 2014, I developed odd symptoms in my right breast. My most recent mammogram had shown no problems, several specialized mammograms and ultrasounds showed nothing now, and the most common advice was to simply keep an eye on it. Fortunately for me, my primary care physician took the conservative view and wanted me to see a surgeon. The surgeon took down a detailed family history and, at the mention of my younger brother’s death from familial kidney cancer, mentioned that this type of cancer that runs in families often shows up in the women in breasts and ovaries. I was a little peeved that no one had seen fit to tell me or my younger sister about this problem leaving us at higher risk for these common female cancers. My wonderful female surgeon said, “Let’s go take a look around and see what we’re dealing with.” So we scheduled exploratory surgery of that right breast in a little over a week’s time.

The problem turned out to be nothing more than a benign cyst, as expected, but in the taking of a lump of tissue to learn that, my surgeon discovered a malignancy on the margins. Suddenly, there were more tests that showed nothing. Then, a week later, there was another surgery. The first surgery had been a lumpectomy, but my surgeon laughed and called the second surgery a “chunkectomy” and wound up taking half of my right breast. They found a number of malignancies in this chunk of tissue, including right along the margins, once again. By this time, I had acquired an oncologist and an oncology radiologist, in addition to my surgeon. They were a very puzzled team. In the pathology report, they could see all of these malignancies, but in all of the diagnostic imaging reports, nothing showed up. At this time, a regional conference, dealing with this issue in all of these fields, brought specialists from five different states right here to Kansas City, so my team took my case to the conference, and the entire conference consulted on my weird case, only to decide that they could not see anything, even knowing where to look. Therefore, we were on to another surgery, the third in the same month, the pain and stress of which was wearing me down. 

Two days before the surgery, they sent me in for a breast MRI, and for the first time, they had images of the malignancies in the piece of my breast that remained–many, many of them. Suddenly, we knew we were looking at a radical mastectomy. We didn’t know what we might be faced with beyond that, and the prospect was frightening.

The surgeon found even more malignancies than she was expecting, and the lymph glands she found were so disrupted and tangled that day that she feared the malignancies had metastasized, so she sent them to a specialized pathology lab several states away. They took several weeks to send the report back to us, weeks in which fear only grew of what that report would be.

All of this happened as my third novel was released, so I was a frantic patient in more ways than usual. Finally, we had the blessed news that we had caught this before the cancer had spread out of the breast, and it was merely to be a painful process of various treatments and recovery, we hoped. We still had no clear idea what was going on over in the left breast. It was a long, miserable process, but eventually, with the help of a wonderful team of health professionals, I am a successful survivor, and I’m grateful.

Consequently, I want to share a warning with all of my readers out there and a poem. Visit your doctor regularly for breast exams and mammograms. Take the threat of breast cancer seriously, but don’t let the fear of it keep you from actually doing the things you need to do to prevent it or to take care of it. Even if you have a weird or advanced case, as I did, your chances of survival are good, and the better you are about taking precautions and following your doctor’s advice, the better your chances of surviving and thriving will always be.

 

WRESTLING THE BODY,

this old bear

made clumsy and slow

by years,

battles lost and won,

scars, stiffnesses,

incisions,

I envy those girls

in bathing suits

and tennis shorts,

flexible, strong,

with no idea

their own breasts,

prized, displayed

with pride as they run

into and out of summer,

could kill them.

 

Linda Rodriguez’s fourth Skeet Bannion mystery, Every Family Doubt, the follow-up to Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, Revising the Character-Driven Novel, and her co-edited anthology, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, will publish in 2023. Her novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and books of poetry— Dark Sister, Heart’s Migration, and Skin Hunger—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book, Midwest Voices & Visions, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships.

Rodriguez is past chair of AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus and Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and member of Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

IN PRAISE OF HOME PLACES—TALLGRASS, A POEM

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by Linda Rodriguez

One of my favorite places on the planet is the Flint Hills of Kansas. The Flint Hills is the largest surviving Tallgrass Prairie in the country, 4.5 million acres of bluestem and wild animals and cattle and tough people, all survivors. I went to school there, and my parents are buried there.

My computer operating system keeps showing me scenes of landscape from around the world that are supposed to be breathtakingly beautiful, and they often are. Still, I know people who drive I-70 west or east through the Flint Hills and insist that the Kansas landscape is just flat and boring. I insist that they must be lying or blind. The Flint Hills inspire me so much that I’ve written a number of poems about them, and I thought I would offer this one to remind us all of the quieter beauty that often surrounds us while we are seeking after what we consider the exotic or fashionable.

 

TALLGRASS

The prairie is a tough place.

Formed when the Rocky Mountain

rainshadow killed off the trees,

millions of buffalo grazed its big bluestem,

turkeyfoot, sideoats, switchgrass, grama, Indiangrass,

sweetgrass, prairie dropseed, buffalograss,

for millennia, but, big as a nightmare

when you encounter one up close,

the buffalo never defeated the prairie.

 

Summer in tallgrass lands is harsh—

blazing hot sun, only occasional rain in torrents.

Summer turns the plains into grassy desert,

But those grass roots plunge deep, deep into the earth,

some twelve or more feet under the surface.

The soil under a prairie is a dense mat

of tangled rootstock, rhizomes, tubers, and bulbs.

Those roots hold out against drought

and preserve the soil against thundering

gullywashers and toadswampers.

Summer never defeated the prairie.

 

Sometimes lightning strikes,

and fire races across the landscape

like water poured out on concrete,

spreading out with amazing speed and inevitability.

The prairie compensated by making seeds

that need to pass through flame to germinate.

Fireproof seeds, what an invention!

The tribes learned to set controlled fires

to bring back gayfeather, blazing star, prairie clover.

Now, ranchers burn the prairie each spring.

Fire never defeated the prairie.

 

As for winter, the waist- and shoulder-high grasses

triumph over the snow, spreading

large swathes of sun-colored grasses

across the scene, only occasionally punctuated

by a spread of snow along the meandering paths

where animal and human feet have trodden.

The prairie just absorbs the snow,

swallowing it down to build stronger, deeper roots

to withstand summer’s hot, dry onslaught.

Winter never defeated the prairie.

 

Buffalo, white-tailed deer, antelope, pronghorns,

gray wolves, coyotes, bobcats, cougars, red foxes,

black-footed ferrets, badgers, shrews, skunks,

raccoons, possums, black-tailed prairie dogs,

jackrabbits, prairie chickens, bull snakes,

and the occasional human for centuries

made trails and paths through the grasses

by trampling them down or cutting their stems.

If paths are not continually maintained

by a great deal of manual labor,

they disappear like smoke.

The prairie will always take them back.

The only thing that ever defeated prairie

was a man with a steel plow.

 

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publishing, 2018)

 

Linda Rodriguez’s fourth Skeet Bannion mystery, Every Family Doubt, the follow-up to Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, Revising the Character-Driven Novel, and her co-edited anthology, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, will publish in 2023. Her novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and books of poetry— Dark Sister, Heart’s Migration, and Skin Hunger—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book, Midwest Voices & Visions, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships.

 

Rodriguez is past chair of AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus and Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and member of Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

 

A Whole Industry Built on Vibes!!

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by Linda Rodriguez

This past week, we have been treated to the spectacle of the heads of of the hugest publishing companies in the United States sitting in a federal courtroom under oath, testifying about the publishing industry. We have heard things that were patently untrue, even if the CEO making the statement is sworn to tell the truth under pain of perjury, things such as, “$100,000 is a relatively small advance anymore”. Cue writers across the land for insane laughter at this preposterous statement.

We have heard things that were quite unbelievable and yet, apparently, true, simply because they were unfavorable to the executives testifying, their publishing company, and the cause for which they are suing. Statements which admit that the current CEO of one huge publisher has totally mismanaged his company (but he still wants the government to allow him to acquire another huge publisher, apparently so that he can mismanage that one as well?), or that even the largest publishers have absolutely no idea which books will sell or how to sell the books they have acquired, or the admission that they give no marketing budget and make no marketing efforts for the vast majority of their books which fall below the $250,000 advance mark.

These court proceedings have been live-tweeted by reporters for several industry publications and others with a strong interest in the industry. Their live tweets have been seized upon by writers across the country, who have been simultaneously horrified and stunned into laughter by some of the incredibly ignorant and inept statements these CEOs have made under oath. As one writer tweeted in all-caps response after a CEO agreed laughingly with the judge that their P&L statements had no validity, “An entire industry run on vibes!!”

Most of us who have been involved in this industry and with the Big Five publishers for any length of time have not been surprised at much of what has come out in this hearing. It tallies with what we have experienced and what we have suspected all along. We have had few
doubts about the mendacity and ignorance of the people in ultimate power at these houses (as opposed to their hard-working and wonderful editorial staffs). How could we, especially after seeing and experiencing events such as the purge by one of the houses in this case of all of its
cozy-mystery writers, no matter how successful, and of their knowledgeable cozy-mystery editors, only to sign a new set of inexperienced cozy-mystery writers for vastly smaller advances than normal? (Perhaps this irrational act played a part in the fact that this company had a
disappointing record of sales for the past few years and its CEO had to publicly admit to mismanaging it?)

But even veteran writers have been stunned by the sheer extent of the lies, the ignorance, and the deliberate mismanagement this week’s testimony has displayed publicly. These men are being paid multi-millions of dollars per year, yet are clearly incompetent in their roles. At least, if the goal is what the company publicly states it is–to acquire and publish books successfully and profitably.

On social media, writers across the country are moaning, laughing, and despairing as they read about each day’s testimony. I find myself wondering how many writers, who would otherwise have had a career with traditional publishers, will turn to self-publishing in disgust at the practices so callously outlined, most of which exploit, abuse, and humiliate the very writers upon whom this industry rests. This trial has only begun. We have weeks more of this testimony ahead of us. Will publishing ever be quite the same afterward?

Cover Reveal–Every Last Secret

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 by Linda Rodriguez

I’m excited to announce that on Tuesday, September 7th, the first of my Skeet Bannion mystery novels, Every Last Secret, will be re-released in ebook and trade paper format in a new edition with new covers. This is a thrill, especially, because readers have asked for a paperback version of these books for a long time, and my former publisher would not bring them out in that format. All three of my Skeet Bannion mysteries will be released with new covers in these new formats as a prelude to the launch at the end of the year of the 4th Skeet Bannion mystery, Every Family Doubt.


 This is the book that first introduced Skeet Bannion, Cherokee campus police chief in a small river town and former Kansas City, Missouri, homicide detective. Skeet has left the big city and come to this bedroom community to escape her drunken and disgraced policeman father and her ex-husband, who refuses to give her up. She’s tired of the grim toll that being an urban homicide detective has taken on her and is looking forward to a more peaceful existence in this quiet, little town. 
Still, murder happens everywhere, and when it happens in her town and on her campus, Skeet moves back into the investigative mode and obsession with justice that made her one of the most successful big city homicide detectives and the highest ranking woman in that police force before she resigned. No one kills someone on her watch and gets away with it scot-free. Little does she know that this case will change her entire life.
I hope the many fans of these mysteries will enjoy this peek at the new cover of the first of them. Keep an eye out for the new edition of Every Last Secret in paperback for the first time, coming Tuesday, September 7th.

Linda Rodriguez’s 12th book is The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology. Her 11th book was Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology (edited). Dark Sister: Poems was her 10th book and a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published in 2017.  Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee detective, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2021. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film. 

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com