A Year-Long Correspondence between Wendy C Ortiz & Sheila Maldonado
SM: Wendy and I met at a book festival in Brownsville, Texas, in 2017, on the border with Mexico and not too far from the Gulf Coast. We stayed in a motel behind a strip mall. We went to eat in some buffet place the first night we met, which was the first night we got there, and we kept yapping the whole weekend, I certainly did. It was an odd, magical time in the border town, a great place to meet. I haven't seen her IRL since. I don’t know when I will see her again but I was happy to share 2019 with her in these back-and-forths. She wrote one month, I wrote another. It was awesome having a penpal. Thank you, Wendy, for asking me to write you. I hope we keep yapping.
WCO: Okay, we officially met for a book festival, but we really met at the airport, after taking a small plane where I noticed Sheila and wondered if we were heading to the same place. Odd and magical are the right words, yes. We also had archives opened for each of us and our fellow visiting writers at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I asked Sheila to correspond with me over the course of 2019, per my usual constraint: I write to her in January, she responds in February, I reply in March, and so on. This correspondence will also live on paper in our respective archives.
WCO: New year, new correspondence!
I’m reflecting right now on how it feels (and has always felt) like I’ve known you for ages, yet we met in March 2017 (yes?). I’ve learned that one can feel incredibly close to those they meet and engage with regularly on social media, and that closeness is composed of parts reality and parts fantasy. You and I spent a few days in close proximity to one another and then diverged to our separate coasts but remained friendly and warm via sporadic texts and social media. How do you account for “social media relationships” vs. (?) “irl relationships”, how do you “do” them?
SM: I’m not doing them very well lately. Either one of em, irl and social media. I have pulled back a bit on the social media since I went to a residency that was pretty much anti-cell phone. I was very shook by their policy at the beginning but it did start to sink in pretty quickly. I got good at being immersed in the beautiful wooded world I was in, it helped that it was such a beautiful world. I did not want to return to reality, and cell phones. I was angry at my phone. We are both old enough to remember what it was like without it. Actually I’m starting to not remember.
Since returning to the real world, I have learned about muting people on Instagram and snoozing them on Facebook. I am losing my eyesight more and more, always inside this damn phone. I do tire of the feeling of comparison and envy that social media creates. But I am intensely alone and easily addicted to things. I am phonely. I return to the gadget and the TV of my friends too easily.
I am glad it is helped me catch up with you and say, people in Honduras, where my family is from, people I have tremendous distances from, who I never see. I think it gets more complicated with the ones I get to see in person. I don’t know what that is. I need distance? I want admiration? Validation? Exposure? Not to be forgotten? And yet like I say I was very happy lost in the woods. I miss the woods. Also the lake. There was a lake. They were all gods more powerful than a phone. I think about what the woods are doing. When are they going to text me. If they are going to post #tbt pix of when we were together.
It does feel like we have known each other a long time but our friendship is a baby. Almost two years since we met. I don’t quite know why we clicked so. Cuz we’re about the same age? Cuz you had a comfy couch in your room at the strip mall motel we were staying in? Cuz of our general air of don’t-give-a-fuckness? I do get from your pix that you do give fucks and are quite disciplined between your daily hiking up mountains and journal writing. I have my spurts of discipline but feel messy most days. Is there ever a moment it falls apart? What is that like?
WCO: Okay, reading that you’re losing your eyesight more resonated with me because someone I follow recently said they were convinced they’ll end up fucking up big time on social media probably because of their increasingly failing eyesight...and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since because my eyesight, too, is getting worse. I am the older woman peering at her phone with her progressive lenses perched on her head.
I had not heard of “phonely”, did you come up with that??
I agree that we share a general air of don’t-give-a-fuckness, at least I remember that we both gave off that air when we first encountered each other on the small airplane to Brownsville, Texas. And yes, there are some things, a few things, I do give some fucks about in the end. Let me first say that everyone who follows me on social media thinks of my hikes as “daily hikes”--but in actuality, they are maybe once or twice a week, if I’m lucky. They used to be more often but that ended about a year ago when I took on a bunch more work. I’m trying to get back to twice a week, but once is good. My brain kind of requires it. My body does, too, but my brain, more. The hiking and yes, daily journal writing, feel less like discipline and more like, If I don’t do this, things will feel a lot more unstable to me, and I can’t go more unstable than I already feel. This particular place, “midlife” as it’s popularly known, is some weird-ass, unstable territory for me. The body is doing its own thing, and any “control” I thought I had over it is slipping further away...my brain is not what it once was...and self-doubts loom larger than they ever have.
The moments that it falls apart are not pictured. On occasion I try to write them but even that feels threatening to whatever does feel stable. I recently quit a couple of long-time vices and that has “awakened” me to A LOT that I have been...very asleep about in the past few years. I credit grief for this long hiccup. February and March always suck now, since 2014, because I think of them as the months when I last saw my father, and when my father died. I lost a lot more than my father in the past five years and it’s only been recently that I feel like I have really lifted my head, looked around, and thought, Oh no. I missed a lot. On purpose and by accident. Grief just fucking turned me inward even when I appeared to be facing outward.
I actually love imagining the trees texting you. If they did, I imagine they’d only send like one a year. Really keep you hanging.
Why the focus on “discipline”? Aside from what we learn about it. Sometimes it’s not what people require to do the work they’re here to do. SOMETIMES. Lol. What’s your best idea of “discipline” and what it looks like and what it offers you? And also, how does “messiness” look and what does it offer?
SM: Happy fools and poets month! That exclamation point is more energetic than I am. Spring is coming in cold and I am drained. You ask what messiness is and this might be a messy writing. This morning I was feeling a little like I had it together. I woke up early for me and took a good long shower. I drank my green tea. I was all kinds of awake and making decisions. I felt like I was getting things done. I have just a few moments of that. I taught in the afternoon and had a big burger to reward myself. That might have slowed me down a bit. I have no discipline when it comes to food. Not lately especially. Was working out for a while but then got to thinking it doesn’t really matter. It does for energy perhaps but not for general attraction purposes. I think I have given up on the idea of being with someone. Midlife gets me that way.
I did come up with the word “phonely.” Thank you. I pat myself on the back for that one.
I worry about discipline because I still have some of my father in my head. He was inspirational and a little tyrannical. Really was tough on me about doing well in school and all and I did do well back when. I was my father’s daughter. Now I teach and I think I might be a bit laid back there in reaction to the overachiever I was as a kid. That and I’m an adjunct who barely makes a living wage.
My father has been gone for over 10 years now. I remember how mind-altering the grief was the first year especially. I almost don’t remember that first year. I remembering feeling like I was on some permanent trip. I was 34 when he passed. He was 64. He wanted so much from life and was the-life-of-the-party kind of person. But he also had a deep sense of failure. I remain his daughter. My mama and I get on just great and I know she sees him in me so much. Both my parents lost their parents very early in life, my mother at 9 and my father at 18. They both became parents to their siblings because of that so I used to feel I was raised by grandparents. Death can be a kind of failure, at least I feel I inherited that sense of it from them. Not a renewal or the transference of energy as people like to say but the end. I felt much more secure growing up than they did and they held on so tight, it was like a death grip. I resented it young but have given into it a bit as an adult. I was glad I was there for my father in his last years and happy to be there for my mom now but it is also odd sometimes because I did not make a family of my own. I don’t want to cling but she is who is there for me and vice versa.
How did I get here? I told you I was going to be messy today. End of a Monday, still have homework and papers to look over. I forget how talking to you I feel kind of on the couch. Because of what you do for a living and how you write. And because of the couch in your room in the motel in Brownsville and all our therapy sessions there. I have been thinking of going back to therapy. I’m not in an especially intense place but might be a good idea for that reason. I hear it is popular nowadays. I had a super intense weekend where a couple of friends had breakdowns or near breakdowns and I was taking care of my niece and mama, making sure they got from point A to B, and was also taking kids on a trip, all kinds of outside of myself work. Midterm. It was super exhausting. There was a meme of a dog laid out on a couch. Something about empaths after a day of people. I posted it. It is that time of year where I post that catatonic destroyed by the world image. Last year toward the end of the school year I think I put one up of this Latinx artist who laid her naked body on a rock somewhere, Laura Aguilar. She passed away. I’m sure you know. West coast. Anyways, that is all to say I need some renewal. By the end of the school year I am most beat down. I live for summer even if I’m broke which I often am. Still have to figure out that hustle. At least the sun and the water are generally free.
I’m trying to think of what to ask you but all I can think is I’m bummed I missed you at AWP. I didn’t go at all. I get all freaked out by those conferences truly and only go when they’re nearby and I can sneak in. I can’t with all the unbridled ambition. I should have thought though I will see all the west coast people if I go. That would have been awesome to see you. Also Portland everyone was calling Poetland but I was thinking Potland. I would have gone to half of one panel and then disappeared in a cloud. How did you handle it? How do you handle all the people you deal with? The writers, the patients? How do you have the patience?
WCO: I’m hung up on the line “feeling like I was on some permanent trip” after the passing of your father. I say “passing” for other people, but when I refer to my father’s death I say “death.” I feel like I too was on a permanent trip and I just got off the train last year so it ended up being a temporary trip. But if I keep on with this metaphor I will say that grief always seems to hand me a ticket and push me onboard the train whenever the fuck it wants.
Are you making a plan to return to Brownsville? Have you sent anything to the archives opened for us at UTRGV? You know, AWP is in San Antonio next year… so let me tell you how I get through it. How I got through this last one was totally atypical for me. In previous years I rarely hit up panels. In the over 8 AWPs I’ve been to I cannot say I had been to even 8 panels, not counting the ones I’ve been on (maybe 6?). I started trying them on last year, when I wandered into one that was brilliant, with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Andrea Lawlor and Vi Khi Nao. It was completely unlike any panel I’d ever sat through, anywhere.
This year I had to take a radically different approach to AWP because I learned in the week or two before traveling that I have super low iron and it had been affecting me for months… only I was assuming that all my symptoms were just evidence of midlife. Well, some probably are, it’s hard to parse out, but mainly, my brain felt like it was not working at capacity, and I was more tired than usual. Because I wasn’t feeling myself I took extra good care during AWP. I saw panels as places where I could hang out and sit and just absorb, and walk out if I wanted (which I did, pretty often). I did not drink every night. I got away from the convention center and saw friends that had nothing to do with AWP. I had a long luxurious brunch with a poet friend who lives in Portland. There was a food place on my walk to and from the hotel that offered bowls of rice, beans, veggies, and protein and I ate one every fucking day in my hotel room by 6pm and then I crashed and enjoyed the silence. I did my panels and had coffee with people I love. I also had an opportunity to undo some stories I had told myself about various writers in the wider lit community. Ha! It was the best AWP I’ve had, because I did it completely differently than previous years which were mainly a mess of drinking and staying up too late and somehow ending up talking to random dudes who bought me a drink. Hmmm.
How do I handle all the people I deal with? Hahaha. Well, I try to take as much alone time as I can which is a struggle with a family that is not as introverted as I am, or is like pretty extroverted, if I’m honest. I love my clients. I genuinely love my work and the people I work with which is not something I could ever say about any workplace I’ve been in previously. The swarm of people at AWP is tough. I took some weed tincture and just walked around and smiled and laughed and when it was too overwhelming I’d either find a spot to be alone, or hang out with one person I genuinely love (this trip it was Wendy Chin-Tanner, Emily Kendal Frey, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Cari Luna), or walk the fuck away from that conference. But also? I’m not an academic, I don’t have to be on panels if I don’t want to, and I see the whole thing as an expensive opportunity to see a bunch of people from all over the country I only get to see once a year. Can I interest you in going to San Antonio next year? ;)
Let’s talk about that archive. I was surprised to be honored in that way. I have sent some things. What is your sense of being “archived”? How do you approach it?
SM: So I am hella late getting to this because I have been in endless AWP-like situations for the past few weeks since school ended. I would not have planned it this way if I could help it but here it is, back to back conference-like things. I was in Spain when I was supposed to be writing you and wanted to do it from there but Spain was calling me out to play. I had left a poetry festival I had been invited to there. I had spent almost a week at it. It was a new thing called Unamuno Author Festival and it was the first Anglophone poetry festival in Madrid which is an odd distinction. I didn’t question it so much because I was invited and it was an excuse to return there. I went to Spain twelve years ago for a residency and promised I would return because it was so broken and bizarre and familiar in this way I wanted to know more about and the food is awesome. I never thought it would take so long but poetry life has been tougher than I imagined I guess. I don’t know what I imagined really. I never thought that far ahead with all this writing stuff. Just always knew I would be writing, have written, am writing.
I really like what you said about untelling yourself the things you told yourself about certain writers that you might bump into at these conference-like things. That sounds like maturity and I think I had some of that this time at this festival. There were some people that I was concerned about dealing with but it was all better than I imagined. Maybe being away in this land that was totally out of context in some way helped. It changed the dynamic a lot. I was ultimately there for the place and was with the place and myself and kept centered that way.
I was actually sick throughout most of the trip. I am calling it perimenopausal hayfever. It was all this sinus shit that can go haywire on me in these ways that destroy my sleep and make me a small walking wreck. And I think this time in life where the body does all kinds of shit to a woman has to do with it. I had to really hide to get myself together for the reading I had to do, for the panel I had to sit on and the others I watched. It was full-on self-care and was tough to do in a place with no heavy duty over-the-counter drugs like the US. I also forgot my neti pot. I did what I could with what I brought.
I am at another conference now, the Creative Capital retreat at Bard in upstate New York. It is a grant I got a few years ago with a group of writers, a novelist, a journalist and me, the poet, and we are here together about to meet all the other artists who have gotten the same. I just left a weekend of poets at the CantoMundo workshop at Columbia in New York. It has been dizzying. As a Pisces empath disguised as a city rat, it has been hard to be around all these sensitive ass people. But again all the stuff you imagine about all these people changes once you’re there and you have to remember it is only you in this body moving you around. I have felt decentered at times in all of this but not so bad as I thought I might be. I have wanted to travel and get past school and all the dreariness of being an adjunct. Basically I wanted all these trips, I wanted to decenter myself a little, break my routine in the city, figure out who I am in the world. I fear I am just an old teacher, kind of beaten down by institution and students. But I also do have some sense of myself that isn’t so childish, although I do still always feel like some kind of kid. I just move way slower. And I can. All this stuff is pretty much illusory. A creation like writing. I am finally getting that I can shape into something that works for me. That often means taking my time, reclaiming it like Maxine Waters.
It does help to get some decent sleep and not drink alcohol so much, yes. The occasional edible has helped, not too much of it. So glad we are in this era of understanding all of that as medication and knowing your dosage. New York is still not legal but it might as well be. You are from the future over there in California. You guys probably have amazing weed tampons and shit. We just barely got them to stop arresting us for it over here. CBD is doing some good things everywhere though, the powers that be can’t stop that medication from doing its work.
I have gone totally off-track and ignored your question at the end about the archiving and also going to AWP in San Antonio. I can be real slow and cheap about AWP but between you asking and this poet I met in Spain asking who happens to be the poet laureate of San Antonio currently, I figure I should go. I don’t think I can turn both of you down. I have been to Texas five million times, it stays calling me back. It is Latino/a/x (I can’t get this right still) writer hub though. That is just how that is. That is why we met. And it has just been way too long. I don’t want seeing you to be another Spain thing, some shit that has gone on too long. It has already gone on too long. Maybe I will bother Christopher Carmona and ask if we can meet there and I can give him stuff for the archive in Brownsville. I was meaning to send things. I forgot to bring journals I’ve been in, all these student anthologies I’ve done for teaching artist gigs, some broadsides, stuff like that. I really didn’t understand or perhaps take serious what the archive meant until we were there in that ceremony for it. It was pretty damn cool. Thank you for reminding me to take advantage of it. I live for play in the writing and in my life but it is time to get serious about documenting what I do. I’ve gone so long not really giving that the real attention it deserves. I am here at this Creative Capital thinking about that. How do I get serious about making a sustainable place for the work, something that will support me and give me energy to keep going.
At CantoMundo I was graduating as they call it when you have done all the time you are supposed to do with the organization, attend three workshops in five years like the other groups for poets of color, Cave Canem and Kundiman. I think even though my body was a little broken down and kept me from making it to everything that was happening there, I still had this idea happening about what direction I wanted to go, what I have to do, like finish a book or two at least real damn soon and maybe live a bit lean in order to do that, don’t teach so much, use the summer to work, don’t just float away as I love to do. Also deal with the stuff I’ve been avoiding, some writing about what I’m from that I have to face already in a way that works for me. I felt glad to be older and a bit detached but aware of what people were feeling. I wasn’t as decentered as I thought I would be. Withdrawing a bit did help. Made me feel ready to dig in deeper when I was there and be more open and not feel too vulnerable or unsafe. That actually was the point of that space and I was glad for it. Oh shit, I think I might have grown up.
What has made you feel grown up? Do you fear losing your childlikeness? Does having a kid affect all that? I don’t have one so could not measure that way. I might have measured from losing my father a few years ago. Or maybe from the years of teaching kids. Now my body is making me re-see myself as grown. When I was at the poetry festival in Spain, they talked about Miguel de Unamuno and how he was from an older generation but had a great influence on Lorca and other younger writers of Lorca’s generation, how he was perceived as youthful in some way that the younger writers paid attention to and thought relevant. I have been thinking about that a bit. What is it to figure out some way to maintain a youthful sense and still be grown. How does that work for you?
WCO: Now it’s my turn to run a little late (today is July 7th). I’ve been home for a little over 24 hours after being gone for most of the last 12 days. I read this and laugh, thinking about weed tampons. And how great it will be to see you in San Antonio next year! Yeah!
I am calling most everything that’s been happening to me lately “maybe perimenopausal” and there is something freeing in that even though I can’t say for sure what’s happening beyond “aging.”
Your travels have been very enjoyable through my eyes on your instagram. It’s even better to get a little narrative behind the images. You’ve been busy! And yes, let’s get more serious about documenting. I think I have been documenting pretty steadily in different ways my entire life--whether through the journals I write in, the amount of photos I’ve made since I was a teenager, the pieces of paper I have collected (and that I’ve also purged from, so the collection changes over time)... but having that space in a university library is a whole other thing to consider. We are artists and if I don’t document my own work, who will? (Of course climate change doesn’t give a fuck about my archive, but…)
Just yesterday my kid said to no one in particular (she’s like that, a running monologue of unreliable narrator-ness), Mommy is so much like a mommy! And I felt weirdly seen. As in, ohhhh, she sees how I am not completely like a mommy. Which feels true to me. Like, not completely an adult that embodies and goes by “Mommy.”
In all honesty I feel like I lost my childlikeness a long, long time ago. Having my kid has reintroduced me to what it means to be a child, or childlike, especially as she is in the beginning of the funky “tween” phase. I’ve been enjoying, for the first time maybe since I was a kid, movies for kids! I resisted going to them until recently and then I REALLY enjoyed a few and now I’m trying to convince my kid to go to them with me! In part because I enjoy them but also because I realize this time really is going to come to a close soon. She will not be interested in these movies anymore. And this may be the only time in my life when I go out to see these movies. I could apply this to a number of activities, not just kids movies.
But when I think about what you have said about Miguel de Unamuno… this sounds like a quality he maybe carried? The ability to maintain connection to youth, or to people younger than himself? I mean, I grapple with this, like one can when one is 46 and on social media talking to a number of people, the majority of whom are younger and in some cases much younger than me. I have a new friend who is 24. I think back to when I was her age (!!!) and remember that one of my best friends at the time was a 39-year-old woman. I used to hang out with her often and feel special, like, hey, this very cool older person wants to hang out with me! But now I’m the older person, hopefully cool I guess, but now I get it--I mean, there are just some exchanges I’ll have with a 24-year-old that are different than with people my own age. And I appreciate that.
I am grown, yeah, but still sometimes find that when I am walking around a supermarket pushing a cart I feel like I am going to be found out for the impostor adult that I sometimes feel like (most especially when I’m at the grocery store).
What ways can you/do you break your routine in the city? I get the sense from your insta that you’ve found ways to do that but I am hearing you say here that the trips were a way to do that--so it made me curious about how you do that during the academic year, if you do--
SM: I am making notes for myself as to what to address in your last missive. I am fully in the grip of green tea in the AC in my bedroom at a makeshift standing desk which is really putting my laptop on a locker next to my desk.
Notes:
Breaking routine
Imposter adulthood
Hanging with younger people
Kids movies
Weed tampons
Other shit
OK. This whole summer has been a huge routine break. I have basically not worked but have arted or thought about arting or plotted about future arting (yes, that looks like farting). I have also laid there and stressed about no money and gotten out of bed to do whatever it is to not panic like look up jobs I don’t apply to but somehow feel comforted by the fact that they are out there waiting for me to hate them. So breaking routine for me is basically not working a job but that is hard and a crazy luxury and almost drives me mad. But all the jobs fell apart for me this summer and I just can’t teach. I teach for 9 months of the year. That is enough, even too much. During that time, yes it is hard. I do immediately imagine my depression when I think of it. My functioning NY depression, the feeling of my entire life. September is still summer as far as I am concerned. I still go to the beach on the weekends. I still bike. I do more of it even. There are all these Jewish holidays in September/October and it is crazy cuz the school year is just starting but then we are off a bunch so that drags out the summer some. I often think of the Jewish New Year as a joyous last hurrah before the October grayness and rain, the fall into fall. Truthfully I do love the gray rain weather too. It is less pressure than the sun. It is hiding and thinking weather. By November and December my friend Ndlela and I are seriously scheming on getting to the castle of spa in Queens, the grimy legend that many shun but many are fools. Have I spoken of it before? I’m sure I have. I also do Bikram through the winter when I can. I realize I am more addressing the idea of how I deal with my winter/school depression rather than I do break routine. Maybe those are the same things. Even SpaCastle and Bikram have become something of a routine or traditions but they’re good ones. Going out dancing especially in the cold is a big routine breaker but I have not done it nearly as much as I used to. All the parties are in Brooklyn often which are super far for me. I also have come to hate Brooklyn a great deal as it spit my family out. I do need new things in my life, like more winter travel. I would say I need some actual physical love in my life too. I will say that. I want more of that. The 40 + era has been a difficult time that way for me. No one told me it would be like entering a convent.
That was a long ass paragraph. I will keep it briefer. I am listening to NPR or WNYC that is always on in my house and they are saying the cop who killed Eric Garner was just fired. One of his family members was just on and was like great but also he should be in jail. She was awesome. I think often about his daughter, Erica, a 27-year-old who died of a heart attack basically a few years after her father was killed. She was protesting all the time after he passed and I think she was just spent. I think about things like that when I think about breaking routine. I think the world is horrifying and I want to survive it. I wish I could have taken her to SpaCastle or Bikram. Not to be flip at all but I sincerely wish shit had been different for her, that she could have escaped some of that pain.
I am supposed to go to a protest today for Puerto Rico. I don’t know if I’ll make it but it is a great one, perreo protest. How does one translate perreo? It is like doggy style, I guess, dancing. Twerking basically sort of. Bad Bunny, the unofficial president of Puerto Rico, has a song called “Cuando Perriabas.” I always think about translating that like, “When You Used to Twerk” or “When You Used to Bend Your Ass Towards Me and Shake it on Me.” I love the nostalgia of that grimy thing. There are some things in Spanish that are really untranslatable. I have really gone off the rails here. But it has been that kind of summer, unpredictable. All the protest has been inspiring. I wish there were some more for the detention camps up here in NY. It is so hidden a thing here. We are not the border but there are borders here in all kinds of ways.
I will try to get back to the notes and say protesting keeps me young. I will always believe in that. I believed in it as a teenager and it is still real for me now. I don’t do it all the time but I do it plenty. I think my niece wants to do it more too. We went to the pride parade at the end of June and that was just awesome for her. She is the main young person I want to communicate with. I am not as good as I wish I could be but I think we talk well. She is dark and funny and more analytical now. She is definitely my blood. She is wearing dresses I gave her, ones I had from high school or college. “Vintage,” she calls it, Jesus. I can offer fucking vintage clothing to the youth. That is why they care to know me.
As for kids’ movies, man I watch those shits all the time. I don’t and won’t have a child. Finding Nemo and the one about all the moods and Up, so many of those are so damn good. They will catch you in your feelings and they will tell you all about yourself. It is too much really. OMG Moana. Wow. That one makes me think of Whale Rider a lot another all time favorite, indie kid movie. Awesome.
I feel like an imposter adult in the supermarket too. Also on the streets of this neighborhood often. I’m in Washington Heights aka el alto Manhattan aka Cibao, República Dominicana. I get called Doña so much. Viejas in the post office always ask me to fill shit out for them. They see the dutiful daughter before them. My glasses, my gray hair. My angry, stink, yet studious look. Aware, I should say, far too aware. Literate. Far too literate. I do all I can to erase that.
About a month after we talked about weed tampons, one text thread I’m on sent me a link to CBD suppositories. The idea was in the air and now real. Those shits are $70 though. I guess they shouldn’t be cheap. But dammit only the elite can have those or people who really prioritize themselves I guess and budget for this. Eating or drug plug. Hmmm.
What is my question for you today. What gets you mad? What gets you twerking in the streets? I was only a day late this time yay.
WCO: Ahahaha, what doesn’t get me mad? In the last few years riding those grief waves I’ve been the most angry I think I’ve ever been in my entire life. Noticing this--usually in the form of road rage or easy outbursts at home I decided to try meditation, and by now I’m on my 390th session or so. I just started meditating for 20 minutes instead of 10 this week. I’ve bought books about “calming your angry mind” and I’ve developed a heart issue. I do believe that my anger and the stress of life in general have contributed to this heart thing. I was wearing a heart monitor recently and it fell off after 10 days and hopefully it was working the whole time because what a nuisance. All in service to figure out what to do next with this heart. I’m also tired of talking and thinking about my heart, which has taken up a lot of psychic energy since January when it began. I’m mad about quitting smoking and then developing a heart issue. I’m mad about this country. Another mass shooting in Texas yesterday. I have murderous thoughts about the administration of this country. I don’t own a gun. My father used to have a couple of guns and though they were not locked up when I was a child they were hidden and I never thought much about them. As an adult I have to think about guns in other people’s houses, places my kid visits. I’m nauseated by the thought of guns now. I’m nauseated by this country.
Because of the book I’m trying to write (just finished and turned in the first draft book proposal to my agent this week after a year of resistance, depression, and working too much) I’ve thought some on my past as a person who protested in the streets regularly (late 1990s, early 2000s) and how things changed when I moved to L.A. Without a cohesive group to identify with, plot with and plan with, I stopped going to actions and demos and watched from afar. And with the arrival of my kid and the way protests have changed--feeling more unpredictable, for one--I have really changed my approach to protest. I have less interest in being in the streets. In fact, I fear what could happen and the anxiety about my kid being near what could happen is too much. We recently went to an annual carnival we’ve been going to since she was young enough to ride the small ponies they always had in the shade. This year there were no ponies and I found myself noting pretty constantly where the exits were because new fencing had been put in to sort of route the crowds. Starting with self-defense classes in my 20s I’ve always noted when I walk into strange rooms or buildings where are the exits? What could I use here as a weapon if needed? But now it’s more like a grave, depressing necessity--an extra layer of vigilance. I fucking hate it.
Also, with this heart condition, I’ve never been more acutely aware of how related my thoughts and feelings are to my body. My heart sometimes responds to the stresses in my life, beating arythmically and/or pounding in a way that causes anxiety even if I hadn’t quite been feeling anxious before the pounding. I’m compelled to really, literally decrease stresses in my life as much as I can! Because having atrial fibrillation in response to stress, eating too much, exercising too hard, having too much caffeine or alcohol is ridic, and I can manage those things. I have to. Things reaaaaaaaaaally shifted since I turned 45 and now 46. I mean, fuck.
We went to see the Dora movie yesterday and it was AWESOME. After having had to watch Dora when my kid was little, it was a treat to see Dora as a teenager, as well as how they treated Dora in the city. Great casting, and an emphasis on exploring vs. treasure hunting. Anyway, I am gonna keep enjoying these kids movies for a while. It’s a good counterbalance to my tv watching, which has lately been heavy on Mindhunter and the last season of True Detective…
I’m glad to hear you had time off from teaching, that summer was a routine break. I also hope you get what you want, including the physical love you mention. I just read (oh god here we go) the book Three Women, and it is purportedly a book about “women’s desire” but jfc it was brutal and to me not actually about women’s desire but about misogyny and patriarchy and how women survive it. I only bring this up because it made me consider how I walk around in the world as a woman 40+, how there are different expectations of me, and/or how I become invisible to a large part of the population. There are positives and negatives about this. I also just read Flash Count Diary, a sort of memoir about menopause that has had me thinking about aging though when am I not thinking about aging these days, as my body is doing things I can’t really control anymore...
What books or writers these days are getting you through life? Who or what are your life preservers out in the enormous oceans of uncertainty? (I think of you dancing come fall and winter…)
SM: This week I got my first round of papers to read from students, first a batch of 40 and in a couple of days about 20 more. That means my leisure reading time is pretty much done. I don’t get through books much ever though. I skim books all the time, read first chapters or hop around and read a few poems. I read articles online all the time. But a full book, that is hard to get to. I finally have the past few summers. The last full book I read was Tracing the Horse by Diana Marie Delgado. Beautiful poetry book, also economic as hell, which I love not just cuz I don’t have time for long books once the semester starts but because I really do believe in economy in poetry. Haiku is a major root for me and the shapes of Diana’s poems are brief like that, spare, imagistic, bizarre, strong. She is a friend and a great writer and her book made me feel like I could keep making small shapes of my odd thoughts. I think you would love it too. Another many generations deep California ruca. She is from the SGV. She is in her 40s and this is her first major collection of poems. She had a chapbook too. It is awesome shit. I highly recommend.
I also read the first of the Elena Ferrante book series finally, My Brilliant Friend. I was calling it My Brilliant Frienemy cuz I really wasn’t sure they were friends. I wasn’t sure I could hold on to the narrator cuz she can be pretty unlikable I think but she was honest and then it just felt like she was telling on herself and I read gossip fast. Also I read all this stuff about the whole anonymous author controversy of it and how it might even be two people, a couple of big Italian writers and that spurred my reading to think of the ramifications of that. Then I thought do you go anonymous so you can be mean? That’s an idea.
Also I reread Sula, Toni Morrison. I read it originally in my late 20s and wasn’t sure what to make of it and now it is clear as hell and makes all the sense and is amazing and made for my old forever feeling outside of society self. The 1939 chapter especially was all of the things all the truths, so very right now for me. It was grown ass lady writing. Her passing was so giant and she is so mythical and to face her writing is to remember the foundation of what I thought writing was. It is still that. I don’t really write at all in that way but it is the real standard for me. I wish I had more time to reread all her stuff. She and Gabriel García Márquez were the big giants I loved to attach my idea of writing to when I was young but I was actually reading her in her native language. I read García Márquez in translation. I tried to him read him in Spanish some time ago and could not handle it. Was way too dense. Holy shit. I don’t speak Spanish like that, not that baroque stuff that he was writing. It was beautiful but I just did not have that grasp at the time. I need major immersion for that and hell of dictionaries. Morrison’s English is the real English to me.
I grew up with Spanish at home. Spanish was my first language technically until I was like three. I grew up getting mocked for my Spanish at home. I made fun of my parents’ English. But my father was the one who got me the books with cassettes that got me reading in English and that was very early on. I left them and that world of Spanish fast. I’m not tragic like Richard Rodriguez but I understood his shame and his pain about that all. I think my experience was a lot funnier and in 70s New York among a lot of Caribbean Latinos who are a whole other experience so different from what my Central American family was from, mainly Caribbean people are way less stoic. How did I get here? Oh, Márquez and Morrison and Spanish and English.
Also I am thinking about what it is to be in this country many generations in and how it comes out in the language. My brother used to say that I might have skipped a few generations because of my education especially. Maybe I am thinking about this all cuz it is the sanctioned month of us thinking about this all, Hispanix/Latinx/Spix History Month. Maybe I am thinking about it all cuz I am getting old and am trying to remember how I got involved with words in the first place. Language doesn’t really always save me but it has been a fascinating thing to have. I’m getting a little abstract here though. That saves me sometimes, helps me hide.
What other life preservers do I have? Rest, running away on my bike, to the beach, laying on my couch. My friend Ndlela saves me pretty much every day just by being in touch, just a text or two. I talk to so few people daily. I talk to my mama. She is away in Honduras right now actually so I call her like every other day. I need to get a practice like meditation going. I have had some moments in my life with yoga. I really need to get back to it. Once the school year really starts to kick my ass as it is about to, I will seek it out desperately.
I looked up some of those books you mentioned. I need some peri/menopausal info, advice, accounts something. I am between gyns and need to deal with myself physically. So tired today from a long bike ride 2 days ago. My body just can’t handle it anymore.
Please take care of yourself and your heart. I know you are but just saying. I am hearing from my friends about too many heart conditions, all kinds of conditions really. I want us to all be OK.
I’ve written myself into a little corner. Will ask you some abstract thing, how does being many generations in this country come out in your language, in your life? That might not mean anything but if it does, go for it, answer away. If not, just tell me about your November 1st day. Holy shit. Our year is almost done. Time is stupid. I’m on time for once this time. Woo hoo.
WCO: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Spanish in my life--the other day I told my kid she would have to take a Spanish summer class or something, some accelerated shit, because it’s horrifying to me that she knows so little. Meanwhile, I’m losing my grasp on any of the Spanish I once knew. My parents didn’t teach me and didn’t talk about not teaching me--my mother’s Spanish is East Los and my father’s was better than hers and got much better after he remarried a woman from Mexico. But they made fun of the Spanish I brought home from school. At least I got Spanish in school! Grades preschool through high school, but never going beyond subjunctive tense which I never mastered. This means I have a ton of vocab, problems conjugating much beyond present tense, and a lot of shitty feelings about not knowing Spanish beyond this. And now with this kid who doesn’t get foreign language at all in her school unless we pay extra for it. And I’m gonna pay extra for it as soon as next year because I can’t have this.
I’m not many generations in this country--my father’s parents were from Mexico and my mother’s grandparents were from Mexico. It’s hard to find out much more information because people are dying and their stories are going with them, and my mother, who is the only one I have left of immediate family, is an unreliable narrator and always has been.
I love how you’re like “I’m not tragic like Richard Rodriguez.” HA! I, on occasion, will still use his book as an example of how one complicated person writes about race and class. He has pissed me off a lot in the past but I still have his tragic book. Lol. I will definitely check out Diana Marie Delgado. Thank you for the recommendation. I’m reading a lot less this year than in previous years. I just hit my 52 books challenge for 2019 but I imagine there are still about 5-8 books I may still get through by year end. I just picked up another Ferrante book--The Lost Daughter. I love whomever is writing these books. A writer I love came into town recently and at dinner started telling me about who really writes these books and I could not hear it, I just shut off, I don’t want to accept that it’s “just” a dude or two or whatever. I want to live in the Ferrante fantasy!
Your photos on ig, especially your stories, make me think you’ve got some good life preservers going on there. From the observer’s end of things it looks like you have a lot of adventure in your everyday life. May it continue.
My November 1st is starting out very slow and lazy. I had planned to hike but this week I’ve been struggling against my own laziness, or mild fatigue, or something. I plan to see my mother today. Tomorrow my family is going to a big Día de los Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever cemetery. I have my own altar at home that features a photo of my niece who passed earlier this year, my father (2014), my grandmother (2011).
Yeah, our year is almost done! What did you think of this project? I think I’ll print it all out once it’s done and send a copy to the archive. The archive we both have at the same location!
SM: OMG, this is the end. Time continues to be dumb. A fucking year. It has been awesome to be in touch this way. To go about our lives and then remember and be in touch and be human to each other. Thank you so much for asking me to do this. Maybe we should keep texting at least on the first of the month for like ever, even when they have installed chips in our brain instead of the phones.
I want to go back to some of what you said in your last post. I was really sorry to hear about your niece. I didn’t realize. My niece is the closest thing in my life to children that I might have so that is a lot to hear. She is applying for colleges and is drafting an essay about Halloween as her identity. It has been interesting to see her on the page. She is a good writer. I’m thrilled she paid attention to me at some point, or got analytical in some way. I disagree with some of what she wrote, especially her identity stuff but it is still interesting to see her perception of herself. It’s more than she has opened up ever I think. This is related to your Day of the Dead mention earlier in some way. She is so Americanized she doesn’t even realize how steeped in death culture she already is. She thinks Celtics and Tim Burton gave her all those ideas of death. And they did in part, she is American, born in Honduras but a citizen before she even came here cuz her father, my brother works in immigration law and knew to file for her as a born abroad citizen, like the way U.S. military can when they have kids outside of the U.S. I thought she might say oh Halloween is my identity not just cuz I was born in October but because I am born in a gruesome ass place as Honduras is known to be and we have Day of the Dead and such. But she really doesn’t remember a lot from there. I’m hoping I don’t push her away with my insistence that she is more dark and Latin than she thinks. I was pretty pissed at my ancestry at that age and can be still. Was glad to find my way back in some way even though it remains a tense, fraught thing. It is the stuff of writing and frustration. I’m sure I’ve talked about it before here somewhere.
I just scanned some of what we wrote the past year looking to see what I did say. I regret nothing. I love this archive of us over a year. I think it is brilliant of you to think to send it to the archive at the border school where we met. Thanks to Chris Carmona for that. We were with Rossy Lima too. She was awesome. I am bummed I haven’t seen her either since. Just on the social medias.
I have to say I am gonna suck now but I might not go to San Antonio AWP. My adjunct lifestyle is kind of killing me and my credit cards. It depends on school funding too, which is super iffy because I am an adjunct. Saying this here reminds me to try again for it but it is not looking good. I suck and I am sorry if I can’t see you there but I will make it to L.A. within the next year I hope and state it here to make it real. I turned in edits for my 2nd poetry book and there are still some final steps but we are talking about next fall for the release. I am crossing all my digits and I really hope to read out there, maybe with you? I can’t believe I’ve never been there at all. There is a lot about it I feel I know or feel connected to, mainly cuz I loved someone from there for a long time. We talked about it when we first met in Brownsville. Your couch of our book festival. The mall we lived behind.
It is a very dark winter day in NY. It is not even officially winter. It is snowy and sleety and makes the apartments feel like dark holes or caves. Makes us bears, groundhogs, winter animals, curled up and hibernating. If we are awake, the whole world feels like a brooding brain, the thoughts are deep and dark. It’s super literary. It’s what I’m used to. I love the sun and would love L.A. for that but sometimes the sun is a lot of pressure. It wants you out and sunny like it. I can’t manage it all the time. I started the day deep in some great longing but could go slow cuz it’s a Sunday and just kind of lived in it, worked through it, got up and went back to bed, got up again. My body wants some attention, it is clear. I’m gonna get my ass to hot yoga, Bikram, even though I know that dude is problematic. All the gurus are. But my body is used to that warmth in the dark winter. It like craves it. I do it for my body, not for some guru. I am running a little late so I’m going to leave it here.
Was gonna say that might be a weird way to end but this is not an end. Was really happy to have a friendship here. It is so tough to keep them in your 40s. Been bummed about that lately. So please let this not be any kind of end. Let us keep talking and writing and finding a way to see each other. Love to you and your family.
Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja. In 2016 Bustle named her one of “9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, and FENCE, among other places. Wendy is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collection one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press, 2011). Her 2nd publication, that's what you get, is forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective.
