Tag Archive for: Linda Rodriguez

Cormac McCarthy Loved My Dog

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
((This
is an older blog that I am reposting for two reasons. The first is that I have
been quite sick and have no voice, so am not able to write a new blog, since I
must use voice recognition software to write more than a few lines, and the
second is that yesterday we had to say goodbye to the thirteen-year-old dog
this post is about. So this is a memorial of the dog Dyson once was.)
I’m a big rescue-animal person. I’ve had
rescue dogs and cats all my adult life. When I’ve lost a dog to the cancers and
other vicissitudes of old age, always a heartbreaking situation, I go looking
for a replacement in the dogs on death row—those scheduled for euthanasia. I
have found so many wonderful dogs in this way.
I’m thinking about this because next week is
the adoption anniversary of our current dog, Dyson. Five years ago this fall,
we had lost our much-beloved sixteen-year-old Husky-Sharpei, who’d been adopted
at seven on what was supposed to be the last day of her life and given us so many
more wonderful years. After grieving for a month, we began looking online at
the adoptable dogs of local shelters. Hearing that the Kansas City Animal
Shelter was overcrowded, we decided to go visit and adopt one of their
desperate dogs slated for death.
I walked into the shelter the week before
Thanksgiving with certain criteria in mind. I wanted an older female dog who
was already housebroken and calm. I knew older dogs were harder to find homes
for and figured I’d be able to choose among several older females. No stubborn,
rambunctious, untrained young males for me. I was no longer the young, strong
woman who had trained such dogs years before.
As luck would have it, someone showed us an
emaciated, big, male dog with a

strange brindle coat, starved and sad-eyed, who
was scheduled for euthanasia the next day. He walked placidly for me on the
leash and looked at us without hope. My husband and I were hooked by those big,
sad eyes. Even when we were informed that he had heartworm, which costs hundreds
of dollars to treat, we weren’t dissuaded and signed up to adopt him that day,
all the time telling ourselves how crazy this was. As we signed papers and laid
down money, people who worked at the shelter began to filter into the office.
“Are you the folks taking Dyson?” they would ask, and then shake our hands and
thank us, telling us what a good dog he was. Then, we found out he was about a
year old, big as he was—and that he was a breed of dog we’d never heard of
before, the Plott hound.

Dyson, who should have weighed at least 70
pounds at that time, was so starved that he weighed less than 40 pounds. (The
second photo is of him then, the other photos of him now.) He had never been
neutered and never been in a house, we discovered. We would have to keep this
long-legged creature crated for weeks at first because of the heartworm
treatment. If he became too active, he could have a stroke. What possessed us
to continue and sign up for this dog, I can’t begin to understand.
Thus began my education in the dogs Cormac
McCarthy calls “the ninja warriors of dogdom” and of whom he says, “They are
just without fear.” Developed by a German immigrant family (from whom they get
their name) in the Great Smoky Mountains who never sold any outside of the
family until after World War II, Plott hounds are the state dog of North
Carolina. They were bred for centuries as trackers and hunters of bear. They
are practically triple-jointed and can perform acrobatic feats while avoiding
the claws of huge bears they have brought to bay. They are highly valued by big
game hunters all over the world, who pay thousands of dollars for trained Plott
hounds to use to hunt bear, cougars, and other large predators.
We don’t hunt. While on a leash for walks,
Dyson constantly charges into the hedges and emerges with a big possum or feral
cat in his mouth, which we’ll make him drop—always uninjured since he has the
softest mouth. Other things we’ve discovered about Plotts are that they are
extra-smart and yet goofy and playful. And so he is. Also, loyal, affectionate,
protective, and he loves fibers and textiles, often in early days pulling my
knitting out without harming it and lying before it confused at why he couldn’t
do what Mommy does with those sticks.
Though he was the opposite of the placid,
female, older dog we wanted and he truly does seem to be without fear, Dyson
has been the perfect dog for us, always a source of fun and joy. And the
inevitable mischief that a young, boisterous male (for once he regained his
health, he regained his personality) commits is a small price to pay for the
love he shows when he lays his massive head in my lap and looks at me with love
in his big, now-happy eyes.
That lack of fear that McCarthy so admired and
the resilience that allowed Dyson to bounce back from abuse, starvation, and
potentially fatal illness are two qualities I’m trying to achieve for myself as
a writer. Dyson refuses to believe that he can’t take on any challenge that
presents itself. He’s absolutely sure that he’s equal to any task. Such
confidence drives out fear, and I’m trying to cultivate it in myself. I suspect
that belief in self is also linked to the resilience Dyson has exhibited, that
ability I desire to be able to recover from professional, physical, and
financial disaster. The sad dog I rescued has become my senzei in professional
matters. If Dyson had opposable thumbs, how would he handle this? has
become a recurrent question.
(Farewell with all
my love and a broken heart to His Majesty Dyson the Toy King Sweetie Boy
Rodriguez-Furnish.)


Keeping a Writer’s Journal

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I have kept journals
for many decades. Even before my creative writing professors encouraged me to
keep them, I kept writer’s journals after reading that writers I respected,
such as Virginia Woolf and Madeleine L’Engle, had kept writer’s journals. I
have stacks and stacks of them, and periodically I wade through years of them,
reading and mining for ideas and memories.
You will notice I did
not say I’ve kept diaries. A diary is an account of your day-to-day activities.
A writer’s journal is the artist’s sketchbook of a writer. It holds the raw
material, the thinking on paper, that goes into learning how to write better
and into creating minor and major projects.
A writer’s journal may
have accounts of daily activities in it, along with discussions of current
events, descriptions of the striking woman seen at the coffee shop, the idea
for a new novel, the first few paragraphs of a short story, lines or whole
stanzas of a poem, descriptions of the sound water makes dripping from trees
into a fountain at the park, pages of location or historical research, a scary
near-miss turned by what-if into the germ of a story or novel, lists of words I
love, scenes recaptured from my childhood or other past moments, and much, much
more. Writing exercises. Lists of possible titles. The initial sketches of
characters. Accounts of dreams. Rants and complaints and a good bit of whining,
as well.
Now, I also keep
computer journals as I write each novel. This is where I go deeper into
character, work out plotting difficulties, set myself goals for the next
chapter or section of the book, and keep track of things that impinge on the
writing of the book. Older versions of this are what I turn to when I need to
find out how long I think it will take me to complete some phase of the new
book. Also, it’s where I look for encouragement when going through tough times
on a book. I almost always find I’ve made it through something similar before.
I keep my journals in bound books between novels and in addition to the novel
journals kept on the computer.
I can’t tell you how
many times I’ve found ideas or characters or settings for stories, poems, and
books while going back through these journals—or found ideas that connect with
other ideas I have to complete the concept for a novel or poem. Also, as I look
through them, I can see on the page how my writing has improved over the years.
I consider these journals necessities for my continuing growth as a writer.
Just as a musician continues practicing the scales and more ambitious exercises
daily, just as a painter continues sketching constantly, I keep opening my
journal and writing down a description or an idea or a question I’m wrestling
with or a character I’m exploring. Madeleine L’Engle called her journal work
her “five-finger exercises,” comparing this work to the concert pianist’s
practicing scales.
I often tell young
students to keep journals, even if they don’t want to become writers. I believe
it will help them navigate the fraught waters of adolescence. I know it helped
me come to terms with a damaging, abusive childhood and write my way out of the
anger, pain, fear, and shame it engendered in me. I’ve used journaling as an
effective therapeutic technique with incarcerated youth, and I believe it’s something
anyone can do to help them work their way through emotional pain and problems.
I have plain spiral
notebooks, composition books, three-ring binders, and an assortment of bound
books of many sizes and appearances. I have heard some people say they could
never write in a really beautiful bound book because it would intimidate them,
but I write even in the gorgeous handmade ones friends and family give me as
luscious gifts. The act of writing is what keeps me from becoming too
intimidated to write.
If you’re a writer, do
you keep journals? In notebooks or on the computer or both? And if you’re not a
writer, have you used a journal before to work through thorny issues?



Linda Rodriguez’s 11th book, Fishy Business: The Fifth
Guppy Anthology (edited), was recently published. Dark Sister: Poems
is her 10th book and was 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 2020.
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



Writers Don’t Come From Nowhere

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I’m a poet and novelist of Cherokee heritage
who writes about a Cherokee protagonist and also reviews books, so people send
me just about every novel written that has a major Indigenous character in it.
A terrifying number of them are romances with generic spray-tanned hunks on the
cover, love interests who are half-Cherokee, half-Navajo, half-Sioux, or just
plain half-Indian (these authors don’t seem to know any other of the 500+ tribes
exist) and written without the least tiny bit of knowledge of any of these
different cultures.

I also get contacted repeatedly by people
who want me to give them a crash course in being Cherokee (or even just Native)
because they’ve decided to make the protagonists of their books, or even a
whole series, Cherokee (or just Native). These are people who know nothing
about the Cherokee, not even the most basic information, and apparently have no
Cherokee friends or acquaintances. My attitude toward them, I’m afraid, is not
much more sympathetic than toward the authors wanting reviews for their books with
“Native” characters. Basically, these folks are saying to me, “I want an
‘exotic Indian’ protagonist and the Cherokee are the most famous tribe, so I’ll
choose them, but I have no real interest in the culture or knowing anyone in
it. I’m too lazy to do any research on the most documented tribe in American
history (the Cherokee were over 90%
literate in their own written language and had a bilingual newspaper long
before the Removal in the 1830s), so please do my research for me—and maybe
I’ll use it or maybe I’ll just do what I want to do, whether it’s true to the
culture or not, while putting your name down as the ‘expert’ I consulted.
Because I clearly don’t give a real damn.”

Indigenous cultures have been
misrepresented by Anglo anthropologists and folklore collectors for centuries.
An awful lot of books, especially novels, written by outsiders to a culture end
up written from the viewpoint of caricatures rather than real people, and the
culture is presented as a collection of stereotypes of that culture (often
derived from those misrepresenting researchers). These books almost always, in
one way or another, diminish or denigrate those cultures.

Still, as writer/editor, Bob Stewart, once
said, “Writers don’t come from nowhere.” He’s absolutely correct in saying
that, and it speaks to a constant problem I see with manuscripts. Among other
things I do to make what is laughingly called a living, I screen manuscripts
for several national book contests, evaluate manuscripts for several university
or small presses, and review fellowship application packets for two artist
residencies. One of the problems I constantly encounter when reading slush pile
or contest entries or fellowship application manuscripts is the writer who
seems to come from nowhere and to exist in no particular space in the world.

Unfortunately, I read a lot of manuscripts
with good technique but no life, and with no roots, history, or culture to feed
them, they’re not likely to ever develop any. These writers are trying to be
universal, I suppose, but they haven’t learned the lesson that the specific and
particular embody the universal and make it come to life.

Everyone comes from somewhere. Perhaps
from an urban slum, perhaps from a pristine upscale suburb, perhaps from an
up-and-down series of foster homes, perhaps from great wealth or poverty or
anything in between. Everyone comes from some place, some culture, some family.
Somewhere where people talk and think a certain way and hold certain
expectations. Too many otherwise good manuscripts, however, exist in limbo, in
a cultural vacuum.

I suspect, in part, this has become so
prevalent because writers think their own backgrounds are not interesting or
“exotic” enough.  It seems to me that
America has a paradoxical relationship with difference.
We fear and hate the different, the Other, but we also exoticize it, investing
it with greater interest and excitement than ourselves. These attitudes are
actually two sides of the same coin since exoticizing the Other renders it even
more foreign and Other and thus worthy of fear and hate. The result for writers,
however, is that many writers feel their own backgrounds can never match the
interest of the Other.

One evening at a lively, crowded Latino
Writers Collective event, a young woman was talking with two of us and the
half-Iranian wife of another member. This young woman lamented that she had no
culture to draw on for her creative work and wished she were Latino or Native
American or Middle Eastern since that would give her cultural richness to write
about.

As I questioned her, however, I found that
her father had come from Norway as a young child with his parents and her
mother’s father emigrated as an adult from the Ukraine—two places rich with
history, art, culture—but she knew nothing about them, had pretty much scorned
them.  I recommended she learn about
where and what she came from instead of wishing she were someone else, someone
“exotic.” These cultures and the upper Midwestern place in which she’d grown up
were her donnée, her given.

In a wonderful short story, Daniel Chacón
has a Native American character and  a
Latino character—the only students of color in their MFA program—discuss their
fellow students at a party: “They don’t even recognize what’s good about their
own cultures, so how can they recognize it with anyone else’s?” one says to the
other.

All writers have roots, the details of
memory and obsession that make up their backgrounds and their finest, most
charged material. I know a gifted poet who grew up in a trailer in a mining
town in the Appalachians. Rachel has struggled to get an education, ending up
with a Ph.D. from a highly regarded university. Always, she felt looked-down-upon
because of her hillbilly background and accent.

Instead of running from it as many have
and trying to pretend to be from one of those upscale suburbs, when Rachel
writes, she writes powerful poems from those very roots. And her poems are compelling
in large part because of
those roots. She writes about the prejudice she’s run into all her life, about
the poverty and ignorance she left behind, but she writes also about the good
in her culture, the richness and humor of the stories, about the art (mostly
unrecognized as such by mainstream America), and about her family.

Roots isn’t just a
miniseries. Ancestral culture is something we all have, whether we know it or
not. It’s a little easier for those of us who can’t escape it because of the
faces, eyes, and hair in our mirrors or the names or accents that set us apart
from the mainstream. For us, it becomes one of our obsessions because difference per se is an obsession with
most Americans. And because, too often, difference
equals less than to a number of
Americans. This fact, underlined by radio and television daily, leaves us scribbling
away to try and show that our people, our cultures, our languages are rich and
beautiful and not less than anyone
else’s.
We all have our own specific roots, though,
every one of us. And even if we’ve fought hard to escape from them, they leave
a lasting impact on us, on the way we use language, and on our worldview. Witness
F. Scott Fitzgerald who returned to the status of the once-poor outsider
futilely trying to enter the ranks of wealthy society and win the rich girl of
his dreams for his greatest work, The
Great Gatsby. If Fitzgerald had tried instead to write from the viewpoint
of someone born to that wealthy stratum of society, think what his novel would
have lost. If we try to whitewash our roots out of existence so we’ll fit in
better with the homogenized culture around us, we’ll inevitably shortchange our
work.

Increasingly in America, many of us are now
what the Indigenous community (using imposed BIA terminology) call mixed-blood,
what the Latino community (using imposed Spanish colonial terminology) call
mestizo. We can pass as homogenized, middle-class, white/Anglo Americans
(though many doing that are not really Anglo-Saxon, such as my friend of the
Norwegian-Ukrainian background).

It’s almost always easier that way—leave
behind the non-Anglo-Saxon background, the poor or working-class background.
Leave behind the chance of ethnic slur (there’s one for just about every
non-English background). Leave behind the chance of socioeconomic slur (poor
white trash, trailer trash, redneck, anyone?). But I believe the decision to
leave our histories behind is a mistake. When we do this, we rob ourselves of
riches we can use to make our writing come alive.

Two of the most powerful aspects of
writing that has a unique voice, writing that comes alive are detail—the detail
that only you would have noticed and invested with emotion—and obsession. The
best writers write from their obsessions, and obsessions start in childhood and
adolescence. They start back there in their family histories and the cultures
in which they grew up. Dorothy Allison and Sharon Olds grew up in familial
cultures of childhood sexual abuse. That’s one of the obsessions that fuel
their work, but each one’s work is still very different from the other’s because
they also grew up in different social cultures, Allison from a very poor rural
Southern background, Olds from a working-class urban Californian background.

We all come from several different
cultures at the same time—familial, social, educational—and these may change as
we grow and age. A friend of mine was born in Colombia and came to this country
as a young boy. When Joe arrived in this country, he and his brother knew no
English, so his mother, who had immigrated several years ahead of her children,
refused to speak Spanish with them, insisting they speak only English. Though Joe
has never lost his slight Spanish accent, he had to work hard as an adult to
regain his fluency in Spanish. His education was all in American schools and
universities, so, often, the topics of his poems and stories may not seem
outwardly Latino. He will write about classical Greek myths and classical
American myths, such as Hollywood stars, because these were part of the culture
in which he was educated and grew up. Still, Joe’s stories are also rooted in
the experience of that young boy whose mother left him with relatives for years
and would only speak a language he didn’t understand when they were finally
reunited in a strange, new country. Joe’s stories and poems are always rooted
in the experience of being an outsider, even in his own home.

Language is a key to culture. Scientists
tell us that people with different languages think about the world in different
ways. Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee once spoke about this and about the way that
knowing multiple languages opens up your world because you learn to see the
world from different perspectives and experience reality differently depending
on the language which you are using as you experience it. She grew up in a
border area where everyone had to know four or more languages just to transact
the business of daily life. When she moved to the United States and later
Canada, she was amazed at the narrowness of thought she found among monolingual
North Americans.

The language of your home will influence
the way you think even today. But we’ve all gone to college and learned to
homogenize that language or idiom out of any distinctiveness–so we won’t be
viewed as “low-class” or different in some other way. I know. I spent critical
growing-up years in Oklahoma. You can still hear a little Oklahoma in my
speech. When I was growing up, though, we called a “washcloth” a “warsh-rag”,
used “y’all” all the time, and instead of saying “I’ll pick you up” or “I’ll
give you a lift,” we said, “I’ll carry y’all to church with me next Sunday.” In
my memory are stocked a slew of phrases like that and other odd word usages.
They feed my writing.

I know. I know. It sounds like the old
“write what you know” stuff, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to set limits, however.
If you find yourself obsessed with some other culture in which you didn’t grow
up—the way John Steinbeck did with the Okies of the Dust Bowl—throw yourself
into that culture. Live with it and learn it. Steinbeck “embedded” himself with
the Okies as they trekked from Oklahoma to California and as they tried to live
in California. That’s the way he was able to write The Grapes of Wrath with such powerful authenticity.

Writers who ignore their own roots often
try to write from the viewpoint of someone very different from their own
experience—without bothering to learn much about that community. When you read
their work, you can tell immediately that they have no real basis in that
character’s world. It rings false, and that’s always a death knell for any
writer, whether poet, writer of fiction or nonfiction.

If you’re going to write from inside a
character from a different culture, spend real time in that culture with its
people. Talk with them, but more importantly, listen to them. Ask questions.
Learn the culture. I guess it is the old command of “write what you know,” after
all, or rather, what you have taken the time to learn about.
My advice is to root yourself as a writer.
Go back to your own origins. Mine your memories, seeking those
emotion-freighted, telling details and your own obsessions. Learn about your
own history and culture—all of it if you’re a mix of more than one, as most of
us are. Remember the language and idiom of your earliest family. And if you
want to write about cultures and people foreign to your experience, root
yourselves just as deeply in those also.

Find your roots as a writer, and I believe
you will find your voice. Isn’t that what we all look for when we read—a unique
and distinctive voice that allows us to see the world in a way that’s slightly
different from the way anyone else does? What’s the old adage about giving your
children roots and wings? Well, give your writing roots, and you’ll give it a
chance to take flight.
Linda Rodriguez’s 11th book, Fishy Business: The Fifth
Guppy Anthology (edited), was recently published. Dark Sister: Poems
is her 10th book and was 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 2020.
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

The Red Pen of Doom Murders The Fountainhead

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I like to read other
writers’ blogs, because I can often find out new ways of doing things, get tips
on all aspects of the publishing game, and just find someone who understands
what we’re all going through. Sometimes, a writer will do unusual things with
her or his blog that really sets them apart and causes me to place them high on
my list. 
Such is The Red Pen of
Doom, the blog of Guy Bergstrom, a journalist and speech writer. Bergstrom has
valuable writing tips, random reviews of books, movies, and TV shows, social
media wisdom, and weird news of the publishing and real worlds. I find this
eclectic mix amusing, useful, and always interesting.
I must admit that my
favorite post on his blog, however, is “The Red Pen of Doom Murders The
Fountainhead.” This is part of a series of posts where Bergstrom takes on well-known
novels as if he were the English 101 professor and they were freshmen themes.
They can be absolutely delicious fun, but none of them is as hilarious as this
one, which looks at Ayn Rand’s famous novel, The Fountainhead.
My favorite line in his
post, I believe, is “Otherwise, I don’t hate her
writing per se. I merely despise it.” It’s tough to choose, however, because
this post is loaded with zingers. 
So
enjoy, and when you finish, check out the rest of his blog for some actually
good practical advice on writing and publishing, as well as other interesting
tidbits. He’s also around on Twitter @speechwriterguy. Give him a follow.

Linda Rodriguez’s 11th book, Fishy Business: The Fifth
Guppy Anthology (edited), was recently published. Dark Sister: Poems
is her 10th book and is 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
2019. 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

My Best Friend, the Kitchen Timer

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I have a new best friend. Well, not really new. We’ve been
very close before, and then as the press of daily life and work took over, we
started to see less and less of each other. You know the way these things
happen—not because of anything either of us did but the world got between us.
I’m sure you have friends like that. It’s not that you aren’t still friends,
but just that you don’t have the chance to see each other that much anymore.
Then, one of you goes through some kind of crisis, and suddenly the other is
there with support and whatever help you need, and you’re reminded of how much
this neglected friendship means to you and swear you’ll never let the world and
work get in the way of it again.
When I had to leave my fulfilling career in higher education
for medical reasons, it was devastating. At first, the doctors couldn’t figure
out what was physically debilitating me, so couldn’t really give me much help.
Eventually, they diagnosed me with lupus and fibromyalgia and prescribed
steroids and DMARDS (disease-modifying drugs) to protect my organs from further
damage and help begin to control the overwhelming fatigue, joint and muscle
pain, and muscle weakness. (Fun lupus fact of the day: As with most autoimmune
diseases, lupus has no medicines developed specifically for it, but uses
organ-transplant-rejection drugs, cancer chemotherapy drugs, and other similar
powerful and expensive remedies.)
Determined to become active again and work at the writing
career I’d originally aimed at before being derailed by family needs into
higher education administration, I began to use a kitchen timer to help me
return from the helpless mists of illness. I would set it for fifteen minutes
and walk around the house, then go lie down to recover, set it for another
fifteen minutes and sit down to try to write, then go lie down to recover, set
it again and do a simple household chore that didn’t involve a lot of exertion,
then go lie down, on and on ad infinitum throughout the day. My rheumatologist
was impressed with the recovery I made with this simple routine and told me he
wished he could get his other patients to do the same. Over months and months
of this, I slowly built up a reasonably normal life again. I was actually able
to function and to build a new career.
As I grew stronger and busier, I used my trusty kitchen
timer less and less. It was nothing my friend had done, of course. Life just
caused us to drift apart. Until another disaster stuck—breast cancer. After
three surgeries in two months, culminating in a radical mastectomy, I found
myself weak, fatigued, in pain, and brain-fogged from all the medications and
treatments. Suddenly, my dear friend showed her loyalty and support again and
helped me rebuild my strength and life.
We had been once again drifting apart when my last
chemotherapy treatment suddenly included a new additional infusion, and the
combination tipped me over into a massive lupus flare, even once the terrible
chemo side effects settled down somewhat. Only this time, I couldn’t take the
medications that helped suppress the flare because of interactions with the
chemotherapy and other cancer meds which were still circulating in my body.
Once again, I was knocked flat, and my loyal, too-often-taken-for-granted friend,
the kitchen timer, came to my rescue.
We were in the middle of downsizing a big, old house in
which my family and I had lived for 42 years. I put off the realtor’s
walkthrough for another month. I was also in the midst of writing another book,
which had a publishing deadline that I couldn’t really put off. So I rose in
the morning, ate breakfast, took what meds I could and waited for them to go to
work. Then I set a timer and handwashed a few dishes (no dishwasher in that old
house). I couldn’t stand in one place for long without pain and weakness in leg
muscles, but the warm water helped me get my hands to function. When the timer went
off, I sat down to try to write a few words, setting the timer because sitting
for very long caused problems with my knees and hips and writing on the
computer or by hand for very long caused cramps and pain in my hands, arms, and
shoulders. When the timer went off, I moved to the heavily-cushioned recliner
to elevate my legs and rest my arms, setting the timer again. When it went off
next time, I packed items for giveaway in boxes or filled trash bags and
recycling bins from cupboards, closets, two attics, full basement, and garage. And
eventually, we got through the move, things got better, and I neglected my old
friend again.
Now, once again, my dear pal has turned up when I need her
most, proving to be a most loyal and devoted friend, as I struggle with the
aftermath of a shattered shoulder, destroyed rotator cuff, and the onset of yet
another auto-immune disease. With her invaluable help, I feel sure I will do
what I must and still recover my strength. I’ve come to realize that the
problem with our relationship lies with me. I forget that I need to pace
myself. I forget that I need the help of my friend, the timer. I get busy and
self-involved and forget that I need this friendship. I have vowed that I’ll
not make that mistake again.
Do you have friendships that have drifted apart for similar
reasons? Is there a good friend in your life that you see less and less often
as you get busier?
Linda Rodriguez’s Dark Sister: Poems is her 10th
book and is 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
2019. 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

Fishy Business – Guppy Anthology – The Motivation Behind its Capers

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Fishy Business – Guppy Anthology – The Motivation Behind its Capers by Debra H. Goldstein

Fishy Business: the Fifth Guppy
Anthology edited
by Linda Rodriguez was officially released last weekend at Malice Domestic. The
submission call required the story to include a caper. I blanked when I thought
about writing a caper. The only caper(s) that came to mind were the ones I get
at the deli on my bagel, nova lox, and cream cheese. And that’s when it hit me –
I should build my caper around what I knew. The result is Nova, Capers, and a Schmear of Cream Cheese.

Reading
the fantastic twenty-one other stories in the anthology, I wondered about the motivation
behind each one. So, I asked:

Did
your personal background play into your caper story? If so, how. If not, what
was the motivation behind your story?


Rita A. Popp – Windfall

The call for caper stories for Fishy
Business fired up my inner Nancy Drew. As a girl, I loved reading about
Nancy fearlessly sleuthing in the dark of night with a flashlight. For my story
“Windfall” I imagined two girls sneaking into an empty house in pursuit of some
sort of hidden treasure. I made the house an old adobe in New Mexico, my home
state for many years, and drew on my experiences teaching community college
students for the contrasting characters of the two girls. So yes, my personal
background played into this story. It was a fun one to write, and I hope
readers will enjoy the caper aspect of it.  


Susan Alice Bickford – Payout
Payback

Absolutely.
Silicon Valley, where I have spent past 28 years, is a place of mythical
success but a lot of that is based on luck. Should you take a chance on this
job or that? What is the upside? How many commas do you have in your personal
net worth? This leads to a great deal of envy and even deceit based on power
and greed. The perfect fertile garden for growing–and justifying–bad
behavior.

Vinnie Hansen –
Room and Board

I’ve been living in Santa Cruz, California, for over
35 years. Its unique environment creeps into all my mysteries. Although I’m not
a surfer, you can’t live here without a bit of surf culture rubbing off. I’ve
stood on the cliffs above Steamer Lane or The Hook many a day admiring the
riders on the waves. And I’ve visited the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, ranked
one of the best surfing museums in the world, many
times. From a special trip my idea for Room
and Board took hold. When I created my characters, I thought of my
neighbor’s twins. They’d grown up fifty yards away, swinging by our house at
the end of Trick-or-Treating so we could dump all our remaining candy into
their bags. They once spontaneously scampered up our towering liquid amber to
rescue our cat. My husband and I sadly witnessed these handsome, likable boys
sink into drug addiction. They gradually wasted away until they were nothing
but skin and bone and hollowed-out eyes hurrying down our street to their next
fix. My stories are always built of these Lego pieces of my life. How they snap
together is a creative, magical surprise—every time. 

James M. Jackson – Power
of Attorney

Two of the themes I write
about are financial crimes and abuse of power. Power occurs when people have
unequal footing. Attorneys, with their knowledge and often positional
authority, often find themselves in positions of great power. With great power
comes great responsibility. In the US, we have a growing population of elderly,
who, because of frail bodies and/or minds are at risk of abuse. The
intersection of these two groups of people was fertile ground for me to explore
through my story.

My personal experiences
shaped the story in two ways. In recent years, I have taken over responsibility
for my mother’s finances and have had to deal with an advisor who I did not
think always had my mother’s best interests in mind. I played soccer in the
distant past and many of those details in the story come from my personal
experience.

T. Y. Euliano – For
Want of a Grade

Though I never decided to steal an exam, my story is
based on my background as a physician who took the MCAT many years ago. As the
mentor to many pre-med students, who invest thousands in test prep resources, I
realize how valuable a stolen entrance exam might be. Because the exam is now
computerized, I had to set the story back before 2007, when it was still
printed in paper booklets. Hence the reference to MySpace instead of Facebook.
It was fun trying to go back in time.


Joan Leotta – It Tastes Like
Cardboard

Not long before the anthology call came up I heard a
news story about a company that put actual wood shavings into some fiber
formula…if memory serves, it was ruled ok by FDA that they did this! So, when
the caper challenge was posed, I decided a flimflam artist who did not hurt
people with her product would be my heroine. I like to cook, so her prowess in
the kitchen is fun for me. Of course I put her in jeopardy because of her poor
choices..but that’s the fun of this story.

Susan Daly – My Night
with the Duke of Edinburgh

My Night with the Duke of Edinburgh takes place in
1951, when Princes Elizabeth and her husband the Duke made a cross-country tour
of Canada. Well, I wasn’t old enough for that tour, but I was up for
many others in subsequent years. I think the massive excitement generated by
the Royal Tour made for a great backdrop for my caper story, when I have a
group of students do a little activism. 

K.M. Rockwood – Scrabble-Rousers

My story, Scrabble Rousers, is based on people I
have known. Old folks who are losing some control over their lives, but still
know what they like, and are not above a bit of chicanery. Young care-giver
types who are determined to “improve” the lot of their clients, whether the
clients like it or not. And my grandmother. She lived to be 104. Volunteer
church ladies would come to the nursing home where she resided for the last few
years of her life, and ask her what she’d like to do. She’d look vague, say,
“Oh, I used to play this word game. Scrabble, was it? Could we try that?”
They’d smile, get out a Scrabble game, and she’d beat the pants off them.

Anna Castle
– The Lost Mine of Don Fernando


My parents retired to Taos, New
Mexico. My mother’s masters degree is in Anthropology and she has long been a
student of the indigenous cultures of the Southwest. She has lots of great
stories, and likes to share interesting things that she reads. She told me about
the Battle of Cienegula in 1854, which took place just north of Taos. A group
of Jicarilla Apaches and Utes defeated a troop of American dragoons. Somehow
that intrigued me. Then I was researching mining fraud for my Moriarty series,
which is all about fraud in the late nineteenth century, and discovered there
are in truth lots of lost mines in the New Mexico wilderness. So then my mother
told about the terrible abuses perpetrated by the American government on the
Apaches in particular and this story came together. It was a lot of fun to
write and I hope to meet all these characters (except the bad guys) in another
story.

Beth Green – Exit Interview

I didn’t pull inspiration
for my story Exit Interview from my
personal experience directly. Instead, I thought it would be fun to play on the
“right man for the job” trope in heist films. For example, in the Oceans
movies, Danny and Debbie Ocean pull in members of their crews based on the
individual’s special skills. Since I wanted to write a slightly satirical
story, I decided to see what would happen if you hired an assassin to do a
thief’s job. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say it doesn’t quite work out as
the client planned!


Raegan Teller – The Great Negotiator

Once you read my story, you’ll understand why I hesitated in answering this question truthfully. The way it happened is that my husband and I were sitting around one evening, sipping a glass of wine and fantasizing about, well, let’s just say, a certain person in our family. What if …? After we finished laughing until we were crying, I sat down and wrote The Great Negotiator. Okay, I’m probably in trouble now.


Chelle Martin – Nine Lives of Husbands & Wives

No, my personal background has nothing to do with
this story. I’ve never swindled anyone, gone through a bad divorce (happily
single), or even owned a cat (allergies). I just decided to write a “cat
story” and somehow it turned into “Nine Lives of Husbands & Wives”. A
few friends have gone through nasty divorces, so maybe they influenced the
storyline a bit. Otherwise, it was just a fun story to write.


Buylink:  https://www.amazon.com/Fishy-Business-Fifth-Guppy-Anthology/dp/1479441376 
https://www.amazon.com/Fishy-Business-Fifth-Guppy-Anthology-ebook/dp/B07QVDWTM8


CONVERSATION WITH MY MOTHER’S PICTURE–for Mother’s Day

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
It’s
spring, and the holiday to honor mothers is right around the corner.
I lost my mother, whom I adored and with whom I had a fraught
relationship, before she turned fifty, so this holiday is always
difficult for me, even though that was forty years ago.

As
we approach Mother’s Day, the airwaves are filled with commercials
for gifts for mothers and suggestions for special ways to “spoil
Mom” and celebrate this May holiday. You can’t escape them. So,
this poem is for all those who, like me, have lost their mothers and
find the day’s celebrations bittersweet. 



CONVERSATION
WITH MY MOTHER’S PICTURE

You
and Dad were entirely happy here—
you
in purple miniskirt, white vest and tights
(you
always wore what was already too young
for
me), Dad in purple striped pants,
a
Kansas State newsboy’s cap
made
for a bigger man’s head.
You
both held Wildcat flags and megaphones
to
cheer the football team who,
like
the rest of the college, despised you
middle-aged
townies, arranging for their penicillin
and
pregnancy tests and selling them
cameras
and stereos at deep discount.
But
you were happy
in
this picture, before they found
oat-cells
in your lungs.

After
the verdict, he took you to Disneyland,
this
man who married you and your five children
when
I was fifteen. He took you cross-country
to
visit your family, unseen
since
your messy divorce.
He
took you to St. Louis
and
Six Flags Over Texas and to Topeka
for
radiation treatments.
I
don’t think he ever believed
you
could die. Now he’s going
the
same way. And none of us
live
in that Wildcat town with the man
who
earned his “Dad” the hard way
from
suspicious kids and nursed
your
last days. For me, this new dying
brings
back yours, leaving me only this image
of
you both cheering for lucky winners.

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

The Book-Awards Game of Chance

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Next
week at this time I will be on my way to Oklahoma for the Oklahoma
Book Awards. My newest book,
Dark
Sister,
is a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry. Needless to say,
I am both delighted and excited.


Dark
Sister
is truly a book of my heart, focused on my family and my ancestors,
and since it was published right as I went down hard with this
shattered right shoulder and destroyed rotator cuff and continued
with severe illness this past winter, I have not been able to do what
I would have wanted to do to promote this book. It essentially was
just dropped on the world without much notice, and that has broken my
heart. Consequently, seeing it get this kind of recognition from the
knowledgeable judges of a major award is wonderful. There are so many
fine books published every year that it becomes pretty much a throw
of the dice whether or not your book will have a chance at awards
recognition. I have to admit I have been much luckier in this regard
than most people, for which I am truly grateful.

One
of the happiest elements of this situation is that two dear friends
of mine are also finalists for this book award in other categories.
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe is a finalist in fiction for her fourth Sadie
Walela mystery novel, Betrayal
at the Buffalo Ranch,
a terrific mystery that I had the pleasure of blurbing. Traci Sorell
is a finalist for her beautiful and ALA-award-winning bilingual
Cherokee-English children’s book, We
Are Grateful/Otsaheliga.
We think it may be the first time that there have been three Cherokee
finalists for this book award.


Next
week, I will be traveling down to the award ceremony with lots of
anticipation and trembling. The other finalists have very
high-quality books and simply being included among them is a terrific
honor. Whatever the final outcome of the ceremony, I intend to be
celebrating in a huge way with my friends and the new acquaintances I
will make that evening. That this ceremony takes place in Oklahoma
where I have many friends and relations is simply the icing on the
cake. I intend to have one heck of a good time, with a
much-anticipated visit afterwards to Tahlequah where I spent many
summers with my beloved grandmother as a child.

So
next week at this time, give me a thought and maybe cross your
fingers for me and my lovely book, as well as for my pals, Sara Sue
and Traci. Whatever the outcome, we are going to PARTY—in a
responsible, old-lady way. Given my physical condition, I may come
back a total wreck, but I will certainly be a happy one.

Linda Rodriguez’s Dark Sister: Poems
is her 10th book and is 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 2019. 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. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

We’ve Been Here All Along: 13 Ways of Looking at Latinos in the Midwest

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by
Linda
Rodriguez

(This essay was just published in the anthology, Stranger in a Strange Land, which benefits the ACLU. Featuring
Walter Koenig, Linda Rodriguez, Patricia Abbott, Teresa Roman, R.C.
Barnes, James B. Nicola, Eric Beetner, Katherine
Tomlinson,
Heath Lowrance, Kimmy Dee, Mark Rogers, Sheikha A., Mark Hauer,
Berkeley Hunt, Manuel Royal, Kathleen Alcalá, Christine Mathewson,
Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw, Zoe Chang, and James L’Etoile.
Wonderful
reading! Makes a terrific gift, as well. Check it out. 



We’ve
Been Here All Along: 13
Ways of Looking at Latinos in the Midwest

1.

Here
in the middle of the country’s heart, I live surrounded by the
liquid names I love—Arredondo, Villalobos, Siquieros, Duarte,
Espinoza. We are a secret pool in the middle of this dry, often
drought-cursed Bible Belt, petitioners of La Virgen de Guadalupe and
Tonantzin with tall flickering novena candles set out on household
altars, devourers of caldo, horchata, albondigas with tongues that
roll “r”s and hiss our “z”s, dark faces, eyes, hair among all
these pale ones.
How
did we come to be here in a land covered in ice half the year? How
did we come to this place where no parrots fly free and flowers
freeze to death? Surely it was not our doing.
2.
Though
larger totals of Latinos were driven out of the border states during
the Depression’s forced deportations, the usually isolated
communities in the Midwest were hit the hardest—in some cases,
losing over half their population overnight. Those remaining kept
their heads down, hoping to avoid another violent outbreak. They made
their children speak only English.
Though
that had not mattered. Many of those shipped to Mexico were citizens
who spoke English fluently and little, if any, Spanish.
The
Midwestern communities became even more invisible. They just wanted
to be left alone.
3.
         When
Federales chased Pancho Villa and his soldados over the countryside
in and out of the small farms and ranches and the dusty little towns
that supported them, each side of the conflict when it stopped for a
rest would force all the men and boys in a village or on a farm to
join its army. Worn out from the constant warfare of Mexico of that
time, those men and boys—and their families—wanted to be left in
peace. They fled to cities where men in suits from the north offered
them money if they would migrate to the land of gringos to work on
railroads or in meatpacking plants. The old streets-of-gold promise,
and it sounded much better than getting shot in one army or another.
Taking their families, they moved north to Chicago, Kansas City, and
Topeka.
4.
Ironically,
when the U.S. entered World War II and needed cannon fodder,
politicians remembered those English-speaking, American-citizen kids.
They sent military recruiters south. Large numbers of boys, driven by
force from their country to a land where they didn’t speak the
language and never fit in, signed up to go to Europe and the Pacific
to fight for the country they loved—even if it didn’t love them.
If
you didn’t read about this in your school history books, don’t be
surprised. Neither did I. This whole episode was like the internment
of American citizens of Japanese descent in camps during World War
II. After the paroxysm was over, we as a nation only wanted to forget
what we had done.
5.
The
oldest Latino community in Kansas City, Kansas, was built around an
entire village removed from Michoacan and settled into broken-down
boxcars beside the Kaw River. When I was younger, you could still see
the boxcar origins of houses in the Oakland community of Topeka,
Kansas, and the Argentine district in Kansas City, Kansas. Around the
core of boxcar, wood siding was added. New rooms and additions were
built over the years to make real homes.
Few
of these houses have survived the past four decades, but I still
remember them, always surrounded with luxuriant vegetable and flower
gardens in the tiny yard space around the houses—an emphatic
statement of a people who could indeed make silk purses out of sows’
ears or real two- or three-bedroom homes out of broken-down boxcars.
6.
In
2007, Kansas City, Missouri, had a new mayor. He had just appointed a
very active member of the local Minutemen organization to Kansas
City’s most powerful board. I
found the local Minutemen chapter’s website and read a call to go
door-to-door in Kansas City, demanding to see proof of citizenship or
legal status and making “citizen’s arrests” where the occupant
could not or would not show these. It was clear from the rhetoric on
the website that these would not be random visits but would target
homes with occupants who had Spanish last names.
I
took this threat personally. So when my friend Freda asked me to come
to an emergency press conference to show solidarity, I did. Leaders
of Chicano/Latino civic organizations formed the Kansas
City Latino Civil Rights Task Force to fight this appointment. We
were sure this would all end quickly. We were wrong, of course. It
took over six months of constant effort, national groups cancelling
conventions in the city, and the cooperation of African American,
Jewish, and Anglo groups. Along the way, something happened that I
have still to forget.
After
one meeting, my friend Tino of LULAC emailed me, “This is what the
Minutemen want.” Attached was a documentary video. The black and
white photos of Latino families being forced into crowded boxcars
reminded me powerfully of similar photos of Jewish families being
loaded onto trains in Nazi-occupied areas of Europe during the same
years.
7.
When
the Great Depression hit, citizens of Mexican ancestry made a great
scapegoat. Demagogues, sounding much like people we hear over the
airwaves today, blamed them and called for mass deportations. Groups
of armed vigilantes, most supported by local, state, and federal
government, beat and kidnapped men walking down the street to work or
home, visited homes with threats of violence and arrest, and drove
families out without any of their possessions. They forced huge
numbers of people without any of their belongings or food or water
into railroad boxcars where the doors were locked shut and the people
eventually dumped out in Mexico. The
elderly, babies and pregnant women, those already sick—physically
or mentally—suffered the most, and many died along the way.
Twenty-five children and adults died on just one of these trains on
its trip to the border.
8.
When
my children were small, I would take them with me to the Westside, to
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where the grandmothers sold fresh
tamales every Saturday to support the church. We would enter the cool
basement where las Guadalupeñas would coo at Crystal and Niles en
español. Crystal would respond by dancing around and laughing. Niles
would try to hide his face in my pant legs, clinging tightly and
crying until he pressed new creases. The old women would pack the
still-steaming tamales, wrapped by the dozens in foil, into a paper
bag and call out goodbyes to el niñito timido.
On
the way to the car, I would promise if he stopped crying we would
visit La Fama, the panadería, for Mexican bread. We picked out
thick, sugary cookie flags and pan dulce, carrying them all in a
paper bag that began to show grease spots from the sweet treats
inside before we got home.
Or
perhaps I would hold out the prospect of a visit to Sanchez Market
for chicharrones, the real thing, large, bubbled, almost transparent
from the deep-frying that made them so light and crunchy. While
there, I would stock up on peppers and spices that couldn’t be
found anywhere else in town as the kids relished their big chunks of
fried pork rind.
Back
then, we gathered around the church and food—at weddings, after
funerals, for quinceañeras, after First Communions, and at
fundraisers for American GI Forum, the organization founded by
decorated, returning Latino World War II veteranos when the American
Legion wouldn’t allow them to join.
Many
women had a specialty food—tamales, enchiladas, mole, tostadas,
arroz con pollo, sopa—that they were asked to bring. You always
wanted to go if they had Lupe’s mole or Jennie’s enchiladas. They
were better than you could get anywhere else unless you were lucky
enough to belong to Lupe’s or Jennie’s family. But these women
were generous and always shared with other families who were
celebrating or mourning or just raising money for beloved causes.
9.
Many
of those driven out in the 1930s were legal residents or citizens,
naturalized and native-born. Children born and raised in this country
were forced into a country they did not know with a language they did
not know and often compelled to leave behind the birth certificates
that proved their citizenship. Sixty percent of the 1.2 million
people driven out of the country were citizens. Many of these
families who were marched to the railroad cars and shipped out like
so much freight owned their own homes and even had small businesses.
All of this was forfeited to the mobs that kidnapped them and sent
them out of the U.S.
10.
I
listen for the broken truth that speaks of what’s been stolen,
what’s been cracked and smashed. Bit by bit, I try to put together
pieces, fragments of what was, stories for my children to live on. I
refuse the blindness and forgetfulness that would render me
acceptable in my country’s eyes, this country that lies about what
it did to its indigenous roots, about who provides the necessary
labor for all the luxury in which we live. Our comfortable lives are
built on bones, and how we long to forget!
11.
Herbert
Hoover never made a formal policy of forced deportation, but elements
within his government, along with state and local governments,
arranged for the railroad cars and gave approval to the vigilantes.
In some cases, it was actually government agents who drove people out
of their homes. At times, private institutions also financed
deportation boxcars. For example, the archdiocese of Kansas City,
Kansas, paid for boxcars to take families out of the city, many of
whom had lived there and worshipped as faithful Catholics since
before the turn of the century. In fact, in southern California,
hundreds of families were rounded up in 1931 as they attended
Catholic services on Ash Wednesday.
12.
In
Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, we have a large
Chicano population that has been in the area since the turn of the
twentieth century with third-generation and fourth-generation adult
U.S. citizens who speak primarily (and often only) English, have
college educations, and work as professionals. We also have a large,
newer population, deriving from Central and South America as much as
from Mexico, as often as not completely indigenous with little or no
Spanish, speaking Nahuatl, Quechua, Q’eqchi’.
I
have often thought the great public horror evinced about this new
wave of immigrants is due to their indigenous nature. The United
States can hardly bear to see such large numbers of indigenous people
as anything but threat when this country has worked so long and so
hard at wiping out its own indigenous peoples through violence,
disease, “education,” and the blood quantum rule the BIA has
imposed on our indigenous nations that still endure.
My
son Niles took a one-week European vacation. He flew home from London
by way of Detroit. In Detroit, this non-Spanish-speaking,
second-generation American citizen (on his father’s side), born and
raised in Kansas City, Missouri, was held for over 24 hours by
immigration authorities and refused entry into his own country, even
though he had a passport. They were certain he was an illegal
immigrant from Mexico trying to sneak into the U.S.
         Neither
his valid documents nor his non-accented, perfectly colloquial
English could outweigh his brown skin and Spanish last name. He was
released and allowed to enter his own country only after his white
boss confirmed over the telephone that he was a citizen and had been
gainfully employed in a high-level professional position for seven
years.
         To
me, this is doubly galling because Niles is not only Chicano but also Cherokee and Choctaw. My children and I have several lines
of ancestors who go back to the time before there was a United States
of America. I have always since wondered just exactly how many
illegal immigrants from Mexico named Niles have flown to England and
toured the Continent before trying to sneak into the U.S. on a flight
from London.
13.
People
always are surprised to find Latinos in Kansas City—anywhere in the
Midwest. We’re only supposed to congregate in Miami, New York, El
Paso, Phoenix, and LA.
Sometimes
I want to ask, “Who did you think picked all those fruits and
vegetables from the breadbasket of the country? Who worked in the
meatpacking hellholes, if not the Mexicans and Indians? Who kept the
trains cleaned, painted, and running, if not the African Americans
and Mexicans?”
Always
the invisible poor, laborers doing the work no one else wanted. Now,
it’s roofing and gardening, cleaning hotel rooms and offices at
night.
We’ve
been here a long time, long enough to lose our language sometimes,
while we were gaining diplomas and degrees, but never to lose our
culture completely. The newcomers make you nervous, afraid. But we’ve
been here all along—you just never noticed.

Drugged Dreams

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
For
the past several months, I have battled an infection of lungs,
sinuses, and tonsils, which also triggered my asthma. That meant
coughing, lots of big, loud coughing spasms. I mean, coughing that
rattles the windows in my house and those of my neighbors. (I have
been known to break ribs from coughing before.) 

Multiple rounds of
antibiotics had the infections under control eventually, but the
asthma—and the coughing—has been another matter. Consequently,
I’m still inhaling and nebulizing as I try to shake the last of it,
and in order to sleep at night without hacking my lungs out, I’m
taking codeine cough medicine.

This
means weird dreams. That phrase seems redundant. Dreams are, by
nature, non-rational, of course. But these drugged dreams are
something else. Much more vivid and bizarre. The dead walk and talk
again in my dreams right now. My children, the youngest of whom just
turned thirty-five, are babes in arms and toddlers again in these
dreams, even as I’m still a child myself, a sibling to my own kids.
Every morning I wake in wonder at the strange, technicolor movies
I’ve just experienced.

Since
I’m a writer, I write them down in my journal. Each morning I sit
with my cup of tea and record another outlandish dream—a house
suddenly filled with feral cats and I can’t figure out how they’re
getting in or how to keep them out, a strange conference at an
unknown university where I’m responsible for one of the programs
when hundreds of ninjas attack, a ballroom dancing scene where I’m
Ginger Rogers in chiffon and stilettos and only my unknown partner’s
hand keeps me from floating off to join all the other people living
on big multicolored clouds.

Last
night, I had a dream in which an editor from Random House visited me
in Kansas City to tell me that Random House had published a book in
my Skeet Bannion series written by someone else, the first of many,
and had sold it for a television series, leaving me protesting that
they couldn’t do that since Random House is not my publisher and
crying to my agent and my actual editor at my actual publisher, “What
can we do? They’re stealing my books!”

I’m
a writer, so you’d think some of these dreams would spark stories
or books. I have had the germs of stories and books come to me in my
dreams before, but not in medicated dreams like these. I know from
sad experience that none of these will offer me anything more than a
moment’s entertainment and wonder. I suppose that, if I wrote
literary short fiction in the surreal school of writing, I might find
them useful, but for someone who writes mystery novels and thrillers
that must make sense to the average reader, these dreams are a waste
of my unconscious’s creative skills.

What
they do for me as a writer, however, is remind me that I have at my
disposal an incredibly creative partner in that very unconscious. I
simply have to find ways to guide its creativity and to ground it in
the details of reality. That inventive part of my mind works
constantly coming up with all kinds of stories, good, bad, bizarre,
and humdrum. It’s up to me to harness and channel all that
imaginative energy. Still, it would be nice if it could just toss up
a nice, usable, Academy-Award-worthy story now and then.

Now,
if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my nightly excursion into the
world of flying cars and dogs and Nazi storm troopers chasing me at a
writers conference and other exciting adventures.

Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, is based on her popular workshop.  Her newest anthology, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, co-edited with Diane Glancy, was published in February 2017. Her
fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion,
is due in 2019. Her three earlier novels—Every Hidden Fear,
Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received awards, such as St. Martin’s Press/Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, 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 the anthology, Kansas
City Noir, has been optioned for film. Woven Voices: 3
Generations of Puertorriqueña
Poets Look at Their American Lives, a poetry anthology she
edited, received an International Latino Book Award.
Rodriguez is past
chair of the AWP Indigenous/Aboriginal American Writer’s Caucus, a
founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers
Place, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers
and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community.