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Miguel Marmol Prize winner coming out

Toni Margarita Plummer's first book, The Bolero of Andi Rowe, winner of the Miguel Marmol Prize, comes out in June from the new Curbstone imprint at Northwestern University Press.

From the publisher:

"Largely set in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley, this prize-winning collection of interlinked stories centers on the Rowe family. Olivia Real, originally from Mexico, marries Charles Rowe in the 1970s. They have two daughters: Andi takes after her mother, Maura is blonde, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned. Olivia and Charles get divorced a few years later, but Olivia, whose parents died when she was a child, continues to have a special relationship with her Irish-born mother-in-law.

"Plummer’s characters share a keen sense of the loss that comes from distance both figurative and literal. In “Happy Hour,” Olivia grapples with her mother-in-law’s death, and in “To Visit the Cemetery,” she visits her parents’ grave in Mexico City, where she seeks reconciliation with her sister, who has remained in their native land. Andi, an architecture student in New York, struggles to connect to the friends and neighbors she’s left behind, including her best friend, a Filipina bent on finding love in the club scene, and Andi’s almost-sweetheart, a musician doctor-to-be torn between affections.

"When distances are closed between characters, the emotion and passion is explosive and honest. Plummer has written an evocative, sometimes surprisingly sexy collection that, when taken as a whole, shows an incredibly rich picture of a place and a way of life. The Bolero of Andi Rowe marks the arrival of a truly original voice in Latina fiction."

Here's Sandra Cisneros's blurb on this debut short story collection: "Heartfelt stories of girls who ache to live in any other world than the one given them and who disastrously believe falling in love is the only way to get there. American tales for the new millenium."<

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On May 21, Rudy Ch. Garcia and I hosted a reading and signing event for Latinos In Lotusland at the Colfax Avenue version of the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. The bookstore people, as always, were gracious and accommodating; the audience was attentive and eager to hear about this amazing collection of short stories that features more than thirty writers; and the night turned into one of those where everything fell into place and a great time was had by all. Camaraderie and affection filled the air as old friends greeted one another with enthusiastic hugs, while strangers shook hands and introduced themselves. Everyone was primed for a literary evening, and no one left disappointed.

A great crowd showed up for the event.



I opened the evening with some comments about Daniel Olivas's original call for "provocative stories ... from social realism to cuentos de fantasma and anything in between" as long as Los Angeles played an integral role. I pointed out that one of Daniel's goals was to bring together some of the "best contemporary Latino fiction" about Los Angeles. And then Rudy and I set out to demonstrate to the audience how well Daniel had succeeded in reaching his goal.


Rudy continued, in his inimitable style, with more short pieces. He opened with a page from Luis Alberto Urrea's The White Girl, quickly moved to several paragraphs from Frederick Luis Aldama (A Long Story Cut Short); came on strong with choice words from Kathleen de Azevedo's The True Story; and finished with his own LAX Confidential. We both wished we had more time to read more selections, but the ones we did manage to fit in were applauded enthusiastically by the audience. Later, several attendees told us that they appreciated the way we presented the stories, whetting their appetites, leaving them with the desire to hear more and, thus, to buy and read the book.

We answered questions: were there any pachuco stories in the collection (check out Kid Zopilote by Mario Suárez); why is profanity necessary in some stories and not in others (Rudy handled that); would we rather write short stories or novels (we like shorts, we like novels, we just want to write); is there a bias in the publishing world against writers from mid-America (h-m-m-m).


We finished by signing books for those who wanted autographs. We mingled a bit, took a few photos, then several of us ended up at the nearby Neighborhood Flix Café bar, where old and sometimes classic movies show continuously on the walls, and you can take your beverage of choice into the theater to watch movies like The Favor, Anamorph and 21. We toasted the book, toasted one another, and speculated about another short story collection, maybe something like Latinos in the Rocky Mountains. What a night.






Rudy surrounded by his proud family at his first reading for a published story.









NEW FROM NEW MEXICO PRESS
The following is from the UNM Press Fall 2008 catalog:



The Song of Jonah
Gene Guerin
In this modern retelling of the Book of Jonah, Fr. Jon, like his biblical counterpart, rejects the call from God to his own “Nineveh.” In an ironic echoing of Jonah’s fate, the priest is swallowed up by a metaphorical whale and deposited on the very shores of the place he was determined to avoid. Nueve Niños, with its long-standing reputation for mistreating its pastors, is an alien world that will prove his ultimate testing ground. Through his slow, often reluctant immersion into the lives of the villagers, Fr. Jon eventually gains insight into himself and his ultimate calling.

Gene Guerin’s novel Cottonwood Saints (UNM Press) won the Mountains and Plains 2007 Regional Book Award for Adult Fiction and the 2006 Premio Aztlán for first-time Hispanic writers. Born and raised in New Mexico, he presently lives in Denver.

ChupaCabra and the Roswell UFO
Rudolfo Anaya
In this second ChupaCabra mystery, Professor Rosa Medina has just arrived in Santa Fe where she meets Nadine, a mysterious sixteen-year-old who insists that the two of them travel to Roswell, New Mexico. Nadine is convinced that C-Force, a secret government agency, has decoded the DNA of ChupaCabra and an extraterrestrial. If the two genomes are combined, a new and horrific life form will be created.

In this fast-paced mystery, Anaya expands the ChupaCabra folklore into a metaphor that deals with the new powers inherent in science. Is ChupaCabra a beast in Latino folktales, used to frighten children, or a lost species being manipulated by C-Force? Rosa’s life hangs in the balance as she and her young accomplice try to find a way to stop C-Force before its mad scientists create a monster.

Rudolfo Anaya has received numerous awards, including the Premio Quinto Sol, the national Chicano literary award, the National Medal of Arts for literature, the PEN Center West Award for Fiction, the American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation, the Mexican Medal of Friendship from the Mexican Consulate, and the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award.


Juan the Bear and the Water of Life La Acequia de Juan del Oso
Retold and Translated by Enrique R. Lamadrid and Juan Estevan Arellano; Illustrated by Amy Córdova
La Acequia del Rito y la Sierra in the Mora Valley is the highest and most famous traditional irrigation system in New Mexico. It carries water up and over a mountain ridge and across a sub-continental divide, from the tributaries of the Río Grande to the immense watershed of the Mora, Canadian, Arkansas, and Mississippi Rivers. The names and stories of those who created this acequia to sustain their communities have mostly been lost and replaced by myths and legends. Now, when children ask, some parents attribute the task of moving mountains and changing the course of rivers to Juan del Oso, the stouthearted man whose father was
a bear.

From the mountains of northern Spain to the Andes in South America, Spanish-speaking people have told ancient legends of Juan del Oso and his friends. In this children’s tale, agriculturalist Juan Estevan Arellano and folklorist Enrique Lamadrid share a unique version of a celebrated story that has been told in northern New Mexico for centuries.

Enrique R. Lamadrid, professor of Spanish folklore and literature at the University of New Mexico, was awarded the Americo Paredes Prize in recognition of his work as a cultural activist. Juan Estevan Arellano, a native of Embudo, New Mexico, is a poet, artist, writer, and agronomist. He is an expert in traditional Spanish/Moorish agriculture and the sustaining of traditional crops originally brought to New Mexico from Europe and Central Mexico. Amy Córdova lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she is co-owner of Enger-Córdova Fine Art. She is also an educator and has illustrated many children’s books.

Later.

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Sorry about that -- I got so irritated with trying to blog by email that I stopped. Now all is well technically, and I thought the world deserved a proper blog entry, albeit a short one.

The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.

Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.

(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)


I am, as I said, really enjoying it.

Having said that, there are a bunch of introductions to things I agreed to write with end of January deadlines (as I was certain that I'd be done the The Graveyard Book by then) that are a bit of a distraction.

The Writer's Strike continues. I was delighted that the Weinstein Company has just made a deal with the WGA, agreeing to all the terms, as that means I can now go back to work on the Neverwhere movie. (A short history -- I wrote about eight drafts of Neverwhere-the-movie between 1997 and 2000, and then retired. Other people came in and wrote scripts, some of which were hated and some of which weren't, but it died. Last year my agents sent someone who asked about it the version of the script they had, which was the last draft script I did in 2000, and people read it, got excited and suddenly it came back to life, with the Hensons producing and doing it with the Weinstein Company. It needs to find a director, but at least I can work on it now.)

...

One very frequently asked question here is Can I Recommend a Book For A Young Reader? And the answer really is, no, I can't, not without knowing the Young Reader in question. Different people like different books, and age isn't much of a guide to that. But what I can now do is point anyone at this rather wonderful Daily Telegraph list of 100 booksevery child should read, broken into three sections (young, middle and older readers). It's a terrific list, and I say that as someone who's read to myself, or read aloud, many of the books they suggest, and not just because they've got Coraline on there.

...

There's an article on Stephin Merritt in the New York Times.

...

People have asked if I want to get one of the new lightweight Macs. And I shall, I expect, but I'll wait for them to have been around for a generation before I do. (It always seems the wisest course of action not to nip out and buy Mac stuff when they first release it. The travails of Holly's first generation MacBook is the most recent example in my family of ignoring that rule.)

Also, I'd like it to be a bit lighter still. I wish my new Panasonic W7 was lighter, and it's about 8 ounces less than the new Macs.

...

Neil, on 27 December, you said, There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn't decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family. Howcome you don't talk about that side of your family?

Normally because it's not something I think about, nor something I'm comfortable with, and it rarely works its way into conversation.

I remember the first time I really became aware of what happened in World War Two was when, aged about 11, I had to do a family tree as a school project. This was only twenty five years after the end of the war -- not a long time, not really, although to me it was an age, and WW2 was ancient history. I discovered as I drew the family tree and talked to relatives that, for the most part, my family, in Poland and Germany and all over Eastern Europe, went into concentration camps and didn't come out. On my paternal grandfather's side alone, a huge extended family was mostly reduced to my great-grandfather and his children, who had come to England, and three sisters from Radomsko in Poland, who survived by fortune and their wits.

One of those sisters was my cousin, the remarkable Dr Helen Fagin, [she was my grandfather's first cousin -- my great-grandfather was her uncle], and has been honoured by New College of Florida in Sarasota for her work in Holocaust Education.

Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.

"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."

The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.

"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.

"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."

And she's right -- although as I said in American Gods, the worst part, for me, is that some, perhaps many of the people who killed my family and six million others had, I have no doubt, convinced themselves that they were good people doing the right thing.

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Several hundred people wrote to let me know about Terry Pratchett being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers.

Yes, it's very upsetting and no, it's not a good thing. Also, and most importantly, as Terry points out, twice now, he's not dead yet (although you mightn't know it from the reaction on the web), and he has a few more books in him besides.

It's not time for wakes, or for mourning, or for "Terry Pratchett -- An Appreciation and Remembrance" or any of that stuff, not now and probably not for a long time. He's still here, he's still writing. He's not done yet.

Right.

And if you're still upset, well, it's a good time to remind people that there are charitable organisations that can be supported, and things that can be bought the profits of which go to completely different charities (Good Omens scents for example).

...

The sore throat thing seems to have subsided to the point where I finally have a more or less functioning head back. (A good thing, as I can start writing again, rather more successfully.) On the down side I think someone crept in during the night and filled up my lungs with thick glue. (A bad thing.)

Sometimes making stuff up feels a lot like Coyote* running across the empty space between one rocky pinnacle and the next, and as long as you keep moving you're fine. When you stop and look down, it's suddenly all too apparent that there's absolutely nothing underneath and that you're keeping in the air by a peculiar effort of will.

And then a good day comes, and you start running through the air once again, and, if you're smart, you resolutely don't look down.

...

It's nice to see the Stardust film turning up on end of the year Best Of lists.

It's out in the US on DVD in a few days, and has been quietly doing really well around the world for the last several months (it's now made nearly as much in the UK as it did in the US, which I guess says something about the difference in marketing in each country).

...

I've had a few people ask how they should support the striking writers. I'm glad I can now point them somewhere which offers suggestions -- http://www.fans4writers.com/participate.shtml.

And Jason and Maui's engagement has made Boing Boing.



* Wile E, or the American Indian one who created the world.

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.....

Mark Buckingham just sent me his illustrations for Odd. Here's the one for Chapter Three...

(Someone wrote in wondering how we make a profit or a royalty or anything on a ten penny -- or even one pound -- book. And the answer is, we don't. World Book Day is a good cause, and we did it for nothing.)

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And finally, a Writers' Strike video with a message for all of us. Especially adorable animals.

(If you're on an RSS feed where you can't see it, click on the link to the actual blog entry.)

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...

And here are the videos:



and here's another,

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