Category Archives: Blog

For a writer, identity is everything.

We explore it. We question it. We challenge it.

And when we are faced with it, truly faced with it, it are confused by it. Sometimes even haunted by who are.

If you’re me, you spend a life time struggling with it, accepting it, and working to balance it against the mainstream.

I am, for the new readers of this blog, Afro Latina. My dad was Cuban. My mother is Guatemalan. I speak Spanish but have dark skin and curly hair. And when I watch my favorite novelas on Univision, I don’t see myself.

I am not what the mainstream or even some of my friends think of what a Latina looks like. The kinky in my hair and the fullness of my lips says African but the roll of the  “r” off my tongue, my customs and culture are Latino.

So what am I? I’m both.

As a writer, that search for identity creeps into my work. My thesis-so-to-be-novel has an Afro Latina protagonist. She deals with identity. She tries to balance it against the backdrop of her reality. Yes, you write what you know and I know about being, well, me.

But I’ve always felt, even as I continue my art, that identity for me is more than a search for balance. Perhaps its acceptance I seek. Acceptance, but not in the way that makes it okay to exist. I strive for acceptance in a way that requires no explanation.

I want the world to know what a real Latina looks like! We do not all come from Mexico. We do not all have olive skin and dark hair. We are not all walking sex. I want acceptance of the true form of being Latina.

And so, it is with pride that I announce that I will soon start a new tab on this blog. On the top, under the banner, will be a new tab called About AfroLatinos. It will become a resipicle of videos and links to articles and people on Twitter that promote and inform the public about AfroLatinos/Black Hispanics.

This, my friends, I hope begins a new dialogue. In addition to this, I propose that in a few short weeks, just when  Black History Month is about to begin, from Jan 30 – Feb. 3, we honor Afro Latinos. I call on other bloggers to highlight Latinos of African decent on their blogs so that the public can learn about them. Only this way can we strive for the acceptance that doesn’t require explanation.

Who’s with me?

On this day, 121 years ago, Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama. She would go on to create some of the most memorable, incandescent, truthful prose any American writer has ever set on paper. She would inspire and teach, through her art, generations of writers. She is the example of how to write the bare truth on the page without apologies.
I learned of her birthday today, shamefully, on Facebook and I couldn’t let this day pass without writing something on my blog about her. She is one of the voices that helped me with my thesis and I owe her a great deal of gratitude.

So how did Ms. Hurston help? With the second paragraph of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

The dream is the truth. The dream is the truth. These five words rocked my world. Let me explain.
I read Hurston at the beginning of my MFA program. In fact, she was in the first pile of required reading. When I started the program, I was lost. I sought the voice that went away when my dad passed away. I know now that part of that journey to find my voice was to find the truth, face it, embrace it, and soak it in.

The dream is the truth.

My dream at the time was to be okay, to find some calm in the middle of the storm I had gotten myself into. I had lived myself into a corner because I did everything I was suppose to do. I wasn’t happy. I lost a large piece of who I was and what was left was rapidly decaying. I wanted a peace that I only found on the page, in worlds created by my pen where no one could tell me what to do.

My dream, my truth, lives in the written word. Hurston gave me permission to believe it, face it, embrace it, and soak it in.

That was how this part of my journey started and she was there with me, along with Clarice Lispector. Eventually we picked up others— Cristina Garcia, Isabel Allende, Gabo, Chandler, Mosley, Green, Danticat, and so many others. These writers encouraged and taught and, above all, gave me permission to be just who I was. They were my breaths in an airless tank. I survived and I am because they were.
Hurston was the first burst of fresh air.

So, on this 121st birthday, I say thank you, but not to Hurston, an African American writer or woman writer. To Hurston, the writer. Gracias.

For Libraries and Publishers, an E-Book Tug of War – NYTimes.com:

‘via Blog this’

Ryan Boudinot

Confession: When I first started the MFA program at Goddard College, the guy in the picture intimidated me. Word on the playground was that he made his advisees read really thick books and had a due date that was a week earlier than the rest of the advisors. With a full time schedule at work, I thought adding that to my plate was going to kill me. (I was so naive when I started.)

But naivete (yes, I know there are accents in this word) aside, I still learned from Ryan Boudinot. Before he was the second reader to my thesis, a surprisingly limited role, his workshops were helpful. Uber helpful.

If you don’t know who he is, here’s his bio from Amazon:

Ryan Boudinot is the author of BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE (Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 2012); MISCONCEPTION (Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 2009), a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award; and THE LITTLEST HITLER (Counterpoint, 2006), a Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com Best Book of 2006. His work has appeared in MCSWEENEY’S, THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING, NERVE, BLACK BOOK, and other anthologies and journals. He teaches creative writing at Goddard College’s MFA program in Port Townsend, Washington, and blogs about film at therumpus.net. He lives in Seattle.

And just like his workshops, his notes as a second reader got down to the nitty gritty of writing. Here are two of the many tips I found useful.

“Blueprints of the Afterlife” comes out Jan. 3.  Click the picture to pre-order.

1) Overly physical language. I come from the world of telling. As a reporter, I tell everything — the color of the shirt, the temperature of the day, the wind, the sun, the rain. So switching from tell to show is easier said than done. This is one way to do it. How does this happen? Readers want to be inside the character, they want to be inside their skin. Something like “my heart beat faster” or “my eyes welled with tears” now takes the reader outside of the character’s skin. And by the way, those phrases tend to be cliche. We all know why we use cliches — they are easy to use, they tend to be true and well, we’re lazy sometimes.

Now, I won’t admit that I used overly physical language in my writing but…what do I do for a living?

2) Avoid instances of “could”when you can. “Could” is like the word “that”, most of the time you can do without it. I particularly love this piece of writing advice because it promotes clear writing.  So for example:

“I could talk as fast as a madwoman.”

Taking out “could” and going straight to the verb “talk” makes the sentence more direct.

“I talked as fast as a madwoman.”

Not bad, right? Now that “could” is out of the way, I’m sure the writers in the crowd can see how to further revise this sentence. I’ll leave you to think about the various draft of this sentence and if you want to share, hit the comment button.

There are other writing tidbits he’s shared but let’s just focus on these two for now. These two pieces of advice may seem small and to some a rehash of a lesson learned earlier but, just by using them, the prose pops. That nearly instant fix is enough to unstuck the stuck writer and/or to jump start a lengthy revision process.

As writing advice goes, this ranks up with there with White Collar creator Jeff Eastin and Diahann Carroll offerings.

Ryan’s latest comes out Jan. 3. Pre-order it here.

My work desk

With the completion of my thesis, I have been in overdrive at work. My work desk shows it. Here’s how it looks today. Yes, a hurricane hit my desk. It shall be clean soon.