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Last Chicago Events of 2011
Next week is the last Palabra Pura of the year, featuring Luis Humberto Valadez and Tim Z. Herna'ndez in a poetry face-off. (Fortunately they're old friends, so any blood-letting will be in good fun.) If you haven't heard Luis or Tim live, it's one of the most unique experiences you'll have with poetry. For example, check out Luis in action.
Palabra Pura: Luis Humberto Valadez & Tim Z. Herna'ndez
Wed., Nov. 16, 2011, 7:30pm
at La Bruquena restaurant (upstairs), 2726 W. Division, Chicago
Then the next night in Hyde Park, we're presenting the contemplative fiction and non-fiction of Sergio Troncoso. He'll be reading from his new books From This Wicked Patch of Dust (University of Arizona Press) -- a novel about the Martinez family, who struggles to stay together despite cultural clashes, different religions, and contemporary politics across the U.S.-Mexico border -- and Crossing Borders: Personal Essays. Learn more about Troncoso here.
Reading with Sergio Troncoso
Thurs. Nov. 17, 2011, 7:00pm
University of Chicago's International House
1414 East 59th Street
{From La Bloga: Also check out Daniel Olivas's interview with Sergio Troncoso this past Monday here.}
Finally, in Donation Watch: thanks to generous gifts from people like you--or maybe the person next to you--we are half-way to our $400 matching gift goal for December 1st, and one step closer to our overall fundraising goal for the year-- huzzah! Please help us keep up the momentum!
If you know someone else who might be interested in these articles, events and audio clips, please forward this information. Better yet, bring them along to the next Guild show!
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By: Contributing Bloguistas:,
on 11/12/2011
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Chicago, Palabra Pura, literary events, sergio troncoso, The Guild Literary Complex, Add a tag
By: Manuel Ramos,
on 9/22/2011
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Juliana Aragón Fatula, Red Hen Poetry Prize, Thelma Reyna, Crossing Borders, Su teatro, Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, sergio troncoso, Add a tag
Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
Sergio Troncoso
Arte Público Press - September, 2011
Although the noted sportswriter Red Smith got it wrong about Muhammad Ali, he was right on when he said that writing is easy: "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Ernest Hemingway put it this way: "I have to write to be happy, whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease to a vice."
Sergio Troncoso, author of the acclaimed The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (winner of the Premio Aztlán), The Nature of Truth, and his most recent novel, This Wicked Patch of Dust, embodies both Smith's and Hemingway's brutal yet romantic views of the writer. Want proof? Pick up a copy of Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, Troncoso's latest.
We live in a complex time. Troncoso is a complicated man trying to understand a complicated world. In his quest for understanding, he eloquently shares lessons learned in sixteen provocative essays.
Troncoso delivers on the promise of the title of his book. These very personal essays cross several borders: cultural, historical, and self-imposed.
For example, he contemplates writer's block in A Day Without Ideas and compares it to a death-like existence where nothing matters and he will "simply be there."
In a painful letter to his sons detailing their mother's struggle with breast cancer, Troncoso the writer reveals his true identity as Troncoso the frightened, caring, and strong father.
He takes on the 9/11 attackers (Terror and Humanity) not with hatred or revenge but with a plea for basic humanity. "To be human is to engage with, to care about. To be human is to love another. To be human is to communicate with someone, even if you are only shouting at them. The most human of all is discourse. With nature. With other human beings."
He writes, with some anxiety and plenty of honesty (Fresh Challah), about major contradictions he has embraced – he is a Chicano from El Paso, educated at Harvard, attracted to Judaism, and now living the intellectual life in New York. The careful reader picks up on Troncoso
By: Lisa Alvarado,
on 7/9/2009
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: writing, poems, working-class aesthetics, sergio troncoso, Add a tag
Sergio Troncoso
Why I Write Simply
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By: Contributing Bloguistas:,
on 11/12/2011
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Chicago, Palabra Pura, literary events, sergio troncoso, The Guild Literary Complex, Add a tag
0 Comments on Palabra Pura & Sergio Troncoso – Chicago as of 1/1/1900
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By: Manuel Ramos,
on 9/22/2011
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Juliana Aragón Fatula, Red Hen Poetry Prize, Thelma Reyna, Crossing Borders, Su teatro, Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, sergio troncoso, Add a tag
Crossing Borders
Book Review by Manuel RamosCrossing Borders: Personal Essays
Sergio Troncoso
Arte Público Press - September, 2011
Although the noted sportswriter Red Smith got it wrong about Muhammad Ali, he was right on when he said that writing is easy: "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Ernest Hemingway put it this way: "I have to write to be happy, whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease to a vice."
Sergio Troncoso, author of the acclaimed The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (winner of the Premio Aztlán), The Nature of Truth, and his most recent novel, This Wicked Patch of Dust, embodies both Smith's and Hemingway's brutal yet romantic views of the writer. Want proof? Pick up a copy of Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, Troncoso's latest.
We live in a complex time. Troncoso is a complicated man trying to understand a complicated world. In his quest for understanding, he eloquently shares lessons learned in sixteen provocative essays.
Troncoso delivers on the promise of the title of his book. These very personal essays cross several borders: cultural, historical, and self-imposed.
For example, he contemplates writer's block in A Day Without Ideas and compares it to a death-like existence where nothing matters and he will "simply be there."
In a painful letter to his sons detailing their mother's struggle with breast cancer, Troncoso the writer reveals his true identity as Troncoso the frightened, caring, and strong father.
He takes on the 9/11 attackers (Terror and Humanity) not with hatred or revenge but with a plea for basic humanity. "To be human is to engage with, to care about. To be human is to love another. To be human is to communicate with someone, even if you are only shouting at them. The most human of all is discourse. With nature. With other human beings."
He writes, with some anxiety and plenty of honesty (Fresh Challah), about major contradictions he has embraced – he is a Chicano from El Paso, educated at Harvard, attracted to Judaism, and now living the intellectual life in New York. The careful reader picks up on Troncoso
0 Comments on Review - Crossing Borders: Personal Essays / Events & Literary Prizes as of 1/1/1900
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By: Lisa Alvarado,
on 7/9/2009
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: writing, poems, working-class aesthetics, sergio troncoso, Add a tag
Sergio TroncosoSergio Troncoso and I met at this year's AWP (that's the Association of Writing Programs) at the annual Cont Tinta event. He was kind enough to introduce himself and we talked about being Anusim and working and writing. This is an open letter from his blog: Chico Lingo.
My two cents follow.
Why I Write Simply
My prose tends to be simple and direct. I don’t use words like ‘ideation,’ ‘deconstructing dynamics of power and authority,’ and ‘synthesizing structure.’ Perhaps when I was at Yale as a graduate student in philosophy, I may have written like that, but I made it a point of eschewing such language forever. I still however use words like ‘eschewing.’ I can’t help it. Why?
When I started writing fiction, which was late in life for a writer, as a grad student, I wanted to get away from the meaningless abstractions of philosophical seminars. This linguistic pretension removed me from my community, from my father and mother, from my abuelita. The first story I wrote, “The Abuelita,” was specifically for readers to remember who my abuelita had been, and to criticize my study of Heidegger and Nietzsche at Yale, for its isolation, for its anti-humanity.
For in classrooms within the Gothic fortress of Yale’s Old Campus (and I suspect at many of the seminars in academies across the country), a human being is a mind, first and foremost. But in Ysleta, my home less than a mile from the Mexican-American border, the human being was, and is, feet. Feet in pain. Callused hands. Adobe houses built by those hands and feet. La gente humilde of Ysleta.
At Yale I was reacting against the elitism of the academy, an elitism that is hard to overcome when you can immerse yourself in books and forget the workers who make that world possible. I was also reacting against myself. I loved reading German and Greek philosophers. They did provide unique, unconventional insights into the human being. I had become an Ivy Leaguer in many ways. I was torn, between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.
I also noticed that many of the practitioners of academic fancy language, as I’ll call it, were individuals who treated people poorly. Their education and facility with argument and power encouraged lying, deception, and manipulation. The nature of truth, the pursuit of abstraction in universities, was a passive aggressive violence.
Eliminate your opponent, not by killing him, but by warping arguments to win at any cost, by murdering his mind. The nature of truth was hate. When you view human beings as abstractions, then it is easy to abuse those abstractions without guilt. Judging a person as a category is the root of racism; it is the root of cruelty. Moreover, writing about the world of people is an exercise in abstraction, and explains my deep ambivalence about being a writer.
Too often my writer friends forget themselves in their world of words. So I took a different tack with my fiction. I wanted to write so my father and mother could understand me. I was writing for them, and to give voice to those from Ysleta. I wrote simply. I also wrote prose obsessed with details, personal stories, to give meat to those understanding my community outside the mainstream. I used myself as an example to provide a meaningful character struggling with complex issues, within the murk between right and wrong.
Yet I also wanted to explore the ideas from Yale, and beyond, which I thought were worthwhile, so I wrote philosophical stories questioning the basis of morality. I wrote stories that asked whether murder was always wrong, or belief in god always holy, or success the root of moral failure. Most importantly, I believed the people of Ysleta had a lot to teach the people at Yale about being good human beings. I still believe that.
But this effort to be clear and direct about difficult questions has sometimes condemned me in academic circles or among those who prize the beauty of language above all. I am also condemned by those who never think beyond the obvious and popular, because I write philosophical stories. You will never find my fiction at Costco. I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It’s a borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.
When I started writing fiction, which was late in life for a writer, as a grad student, I wanted to get away from the meaningless abstractions of philosophical seminars. This linguistic pretension removed me from my community, from my father and mother, from my abuelita. The first story I wrote, “The Abuelita,” was specifically for readers to remember who my abuelita had been, and to criticize my study of Heidegger and Nietzsche at Yale, for its isolation, for its anti-humanity.
For in classrooms within the Gothic fortress of Yale’s Old Campus (and I suspect at many of the seminars in academies across the country), a human being is a mind, first and foremost. But in Ysleta, my home less than a mile from the Mexican-American border, the human being was, and is, feet. Feet in pain. Callused hands. Adobe houses built by those hands and feet. La gente humilde of Ysleta.
At Yale I was reacting against the elitism of the academy, an elitism that is hard to overcome when you can immerse yourself in books and forget the workers who make that world possible. I was also reacting against myself. I loved reading German and Greek philosophers. They did provide unique, unconventional insights into the human being. I had become an Ivy Leaguer in many ways. I was torn, between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.
I also noticed that many of the practitioners of academic fancy language, as I’ll call it, were individuals who treated people poorly. Their education and facility with argument and power encouraged lying, deception, and manipulation. The nature of truth, the pursuit of abstraction in universities, was a passive aggressive violence.
Eliminate your opponent, not by killing him, but by warping arguments to win at any cost, by murdering his mind. The nature of truth was hate. When you view human beings as abstractions, then it is easy to abuse those abstractions without guilt. Judging a person as a category is the root of racism; it is the root of cruelty. Moreover, writing about the world of people is an exercise in abstraction, and explains my deep ambivalence about being a writer.
Too often my writer friends forget themselves in their world of words. So I took a different tack with my fiction. I wanted to write so my father and mother could understand me. I was writing for them, and to give voice to those from Ysleta. I wrote simply. I also wrote prose obsessed with details, personal stories, to give meat to those understanding my community outside the mainstream. I used myself as an example to provide a meaningful character struggling with complex issues, within the murk between right and wrong.
Yet I also wanted to explore the ideas from Yale, and beyond, which I thought were worthwhile, so I wrote philosophical stories questioning the basis of morality. I wrote stories that asked whether murder was always wrong, or belief in god always holy, or success the root of moral failure. Most importantly, I believed the people of Ysleta had a lot to teach the people at Yale about being good human beings. I still believe that.
But this effort to be clear and direct about difficult questions has sometimes condemned me in academic circles or among those who prize the beauty of language above all. I am also condemned by those who never think beyond the obvious and popular, because I write philosophical stories. You will never find my fiction at Costco. I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It’s a borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.
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Dear Sergio:
Initially, I would say: "Oh, you're not alone, compay..." But the truth be told, I have had those bad days, many more than I would like. We do swim upstream most of our days as worker/writers, writer/workers, some of us hoping to land in the academy as well as on the bookshelves.
We embrace "popular" writing when the academics and the intelligensia clamor for something else -- a style, themes and messages set in canon stone by the rich, by mostly white men. This makes us the infinitely facsinating, unemployable, exotic "other" -- desireable as a passing instructional fling, questionable as to "who exactly are we are" as undergrads and even more rare, as grad students. We sometimes appear, almost as a hiccup, or better perhaps, a conflicted apology to the past when we are hired as faculty.
When I was a grad student in my 40's at an East Coast art school, I confounded my teachers and fellow students when when pressed about what "school" was I a part. I categorized myself as a "naive/outsider" writer/artist. It was the only category available that held simple, clean, direct work that fed my soul. Mind you, their eyes glazed over when I said I was only borrowing those terms for their convenience --- that everyday people making art was hardly naive, just unpretentious. "Outside" presumes an "inside" born on the backs of working people and people of color. It was a "inside" where I was never invited, could not see myself. My writing too, is plain, plain and simple, plain for all to see, I am plainly some one who want to be read by as many people who want to meet me in that way.
As to who you honor in writing, I remember many years ago, before a fundraiser for a project, I was sitting in a bar, waiting for the event venue to open. The waitress was a woman, like women I had known my whole life -- Mejicana, India, working hard and still happy to talk with this customer with a lapful of books to sell. While I was waiting for my friends, I gave her a copy The Housekeeper's Diary, full of poems about my work as a maid. Later, as I was leaving , she tapped me on the shoulder and gave me a neatly folded napkin. On it was written: "Gracias, por las poemas y la historia de mi vida."
I'll be buried with that napkin.
Un abrazo, Lisa Alvarado
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