AWP’s 2020 Annual Conference & Bookfair Keynote Address

Helena María Viramontes | September 2020

This essay was adapted from the keynote address at the 2020 AWP Conference & Bookfair in San Antonio, Texas.

1.

It is an honor but also a challenge to distill all that I want to share with you as a writer of fiction, an elder and teacher, and Chicana feminist, while attempting to hold a train of thought towards a coherent destination. It is not an easy thing to stand before you in the public spotlight and offer you intimacy without revealing some form of insight into, regrettably, my own limitations and blind spots, into my own imperfect way of being in the constant eruptions of what we call life. As comprehensive as I might want to be today, given this incredible but infrequent opportunity, given these perilous times of great global and local humanitarian failures, cruel objectives cemented by morally repugnant mindsets and given the history of violence which has proven all too predictable, I know my words may appear hugely insufficient in protecting the most vulnerable, may prove to be never enough to diminish the sorrow and suffering of others. And yet as a writer, I continue to write. Audre Lorde knew that not writing was more painful because like many of us who seek a liberatory existence, she felt that writing was breathing. Lest we forget the pleading voice of Eric Garner, the real-time incarceration of illiteracy, the respiratory, pervasive inhumanity of the deportation camps—Frantz Fanon’s assertion immediately comes to mind, “We revolt simply because…. we can no longer breathe.” And so, my first visceral mandate against suffocating and dying, literally, allegorically, and morally is to inhale deeply the particles that make up oxygen, and then exhale to disburse a “me-ness” to use Lorde ’s term, into air streams and into a unity that touches the plants and animals, the sky and water.

In configuring ways to explain how I have managed to transform the inhumane travesties that burn and rage within me into a synergy of successful composition, I hope to provide a few sweeping and intersectional meditations by speaking first about literacy and illiteracy, then moving to writing, perspective, politics, and readership, coming to and discussing sacredness, and finally some concluding remarks.

My underlying concern: how can one create an effective space for aligning corporeal activism with the spiritual invocations of writing and reading? How do I continue to write this essay if I don’t hold a respectful and awed recognition of language’s power, if I don’t maintain a daily practiced faith in the force of words?

2.

Illiteracy was one of conquest’s triumphs and still persists today. According to Leslie Marmon Silko, “in 1540, the great libraries of the Americas were burned by European invaders… because they wished to foster the notion that the New World was populated by savages. Savages could be slaughtered and enslaved; savages were no better than wild beasts and thus had no property rights.” She goes on to explain how the invaders attempted to erase any linguistic, cultural, historical, oral, and traditional texts and objects in order to substantiate their logic that they had rights to land and ownership of bodies. Nonetheless, the Mayan Popol Vuh was saved from the book burning bonfires and transported to safety; the Aztec Florentine Codex existed because of a collaboration between a conscience-stricken friar and a number of indigenous contributors who worked feverishly to record stories, histories, and ways of life before succumbing to the great pox epidemic and the real possibility of extinction. Can you picture yourself like the writers of the Florentine Codex, knowing the responsibility and discipline of chronicling and witnessing their world forever changing right before them, working sometimes feverishly day after night to record all that was important in cultural myths and medicines, all that which distinguished civilizations from savagery?

In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass recalled, as a nine-year old, hearing Hugh Auld tell his wife why it was forbidden to teach the enslaved child to read: “There would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Hearing this ignited in Douglas his “first decidedly antislavery lecture… once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” To be literate in the Americas was not only a source of freedom and antithesis to the maintenance of brutal enslavement, but had also another effect on indigenous nations that fought to keep their literacy.

Illiteracy is a dehumanizing mechanism to keep people from being “free.” Playwright and Yale Drama Series Award-winner Virginia Grise, who was born and raised in San Antonio, indicated in her “Read-In and Mitote at AWP” invitation, that one in four residents of San Antonio are considered illiterate. Writer Bárbara Renaud-González confirms the same in her open letter to AWP and addressed to me and published on the Gemini Ink website. When over sixty percent of the city’s populace is Mex and Latinx, one has to ask who benefits most from keeping residents illiterate?

3.

Which leads me to ask—can we admit, all of us who write, that there are always intrinsic moral and political implications in creativity’s ecosystem regardless of whether a writer is conscious of them or not? In who we are, what we choose as material to write about, and what we choose not to write about, all contribute reflections of our particular perceptions and ultimately a shadowed meditation of our lived experiences. A writer’s perception then, becomes a set of observations influenced by religion, gender, race, economic status, mobility, and sexual orientation. It is useful to consider novelist Christopher Castellani’s clear mediation on perspective:

Narration is perspective in action. It is the delivering of perspective to the reader or listener. That delivery system bears the unique stamp of the narrator’s sensibility and his motley set of biases and agendas at the moment of telling. This makes every story, at its core, an assertion of perspective with the narrator as the story’s prime mover. (My italics)

Let us agree on this as well, that perspective comes from individual judgment influenced by certain moral and political settings, hierarchies of privileges and identities, and here I include “white” as an identity as well. The writer’s pair of observing eyes belong to a face embodied in the sensual, lived physicality of the world, a body at once in relationship with and connected to flora and fauna, interactive in work and recreation, in hunger and nourishment, in war and peace, in colonialized or decolonialized processes, redemptive in the magic of love and loss. All are layered into the constant-contestable imaginary of the writer, and come into mysterious play in the labor of writing. What personal lens we choose lends itself to what we see. I use the word “see” as a metaphor, a clairvoyance beyond the physical world, and not at all to discount blindness as the inability to “see,” but rather to join in the continuum of a long tradition of poets and writers who were perceived as seers capable of channeling vision. “We only see what we look at,” John Berger asserts, “To look is an act of choice.” Choosing what is observed becomes a political act for someone like myself; choosing not to see becomes a power only the privileged can afford.

Subjugated to colonization and its systemic exploitation, I willfully chose to study gender like an anthropologist, excavate the imperial compressions of historical sediments like an archeologist, scrutinize maps like a cartographer invested in understanding the trauma of conquest while developing an evolving aesthetic and an increasing respect for the capability and malleability of language. Other than this arduous process, I have no other way of explaining the long pauses in between the publications of my books. My projects are never quite chosen, but are revealed to me in ways both mysterious and foundational to my opposition of historical amnesia and erasure. A sense of curiosity, certainly, but what I see becomes complimentary to what I choose not to ignore and this makes my writing practice my moral imperative.

Surrounded by cemeteries growing up in East Los Angeles, I taught myself how to read gravestone engravings like history, exhume buried lives and undo hidden legacies and genealogies in order to make the imaginative leap and fill in the ghostly gaps between the dates and names etched. Cemeteries are powerful sacred lands that also become spaces of contestation precisely because of this. As one example, the Alamo’s recent renovation revealed human remains from burial grounds where more than 1,300 mostly indigenous people were interred. The General Land Office and the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan nation are in conflict about what to do with these ancestral remains, but clearly the conflict indicates that much more is at stake.

I carry these thoughts into my current work in progress, The Cemetery Boys. I am attempting to examine a time when various neighborhoods in Los Angeles and their differing ethnic and racial populations co-existed in often interdependent ways. The novel is also a war novel, spanning the turn of the century up to the Iraq War peopled with survivors of that and other wars in other countries who crisscross internationally. I take on epic sweeps of California history, histories not only rooted in national and cultural intersections but in transnational migrations to California. Consequently, the novel takes me from Punjab to Haiti, from Germany to the Philippine island of Luzon, to characters laboring in the fields of California or in the city streets that make up ethnic Los Angeles. I sometimes refer to my discarded drafts as bold failures.

Those drafts remind me of Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners. I can’t help but think she is speaking directly to me when she warns of writers who “seek to describe problems, not people, questions and issues, not the texture of existence, of case histories and everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” The “sociological smack” can be easily attributed to material that is outside the parameters of what was once considered “American,” outside of the dominant culture conceptual framework of what fiction should be. Certainly, O’Connor argued that absolute storytelling through character, “the texture of experience” must overwhelm the sociological, but she spoke from a Southern literary tradition well established by writers like Faulkner and Welty. The region’s white writers had grounded a concrete familiarity. Yet, she remained highly aware of the cultural and regional differences in audiences and noted its effect on how one wrote. Her words:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

In my mid-twenties, I understood immediately that as a working class Chicana I would not be able to “relax a little.” Back in 1979, in my initiation into an MFA program—an experience I have written about in several essays and won’t repeat here at length, though admittedly this would have been the perfect place to share it—I was greatly pained by a meeting with my advisor when he informed me that my subject material was not transcending into “universality.” Incredulous, he had asked me pointed questions not necessarily having to do with craft such as “Are they (in reference to my characters) really that poor?” The exchange revealed a cultural and linguistic gap, a “universal” in which he claimed full ownership, and as a result his commentaries contained implicit hostilities, placing me on the defensive by having to justify my characters’ poverty, or rather, my own lived experiences. In self-reflection and self-doubt, I was plagued by two things: did I fail in craft and form as a writer, or was it a failure of empathic experience by this particular reader? Surely writer and reader work in tandem; surely it is a symbiotic relationship, a given reciprocity, and nowhere else but in literature is there a more intimate act of the “dancing mind,” to use Toni Morrison’s expression. Yet, I understand the contradiction—at some point early in my career, it was dangerous not to consider audience. However, it was not in any way pandering to publishing establishments, for there remains little room in any true writer’s mind to think of publication when one is too preoccupied with one word and the next. What I desired was for readers to engage in my work by becoming a part of it, a full participatory yielding to the power of language in order to provoke something more than just empathy.

Although “The Moths” is my most frequently anthologized short story, I consider “The Cariboo Café” my most personal one. During the Ronald Reagan years, thousands of US tax dollars funded the violent right wing militias in Central America. Like other Chicana/o/x and Latinx activists and writers, I held an international perspective, a global interconnectedness, and I felt like I needed to write of this experience as an ethical matter of urgency. This was before the publication of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, published by Tia Chucha Press, before a generation of writers like poet Javier Zamora came to light. In brief summary, “The Cariboo Café” deals with a washerwoman whose child is murdered in an unnamed Central American country. Traumatized and economically strapped, her country in violent chaos, she travels to the US, only to kidnap an undocumented Mexican boy who she thinks is her son; a series of events involving a white cook and owner of the cafe begin to escalate, ending with her murder by the LAPD.

 

I had a strong desire to involve readers of all colors as participants in the story, awaken in them a sense of accountability for the violence perpetuated in their tax dollar name. Only at the climax of the story, did I become aware that readers were passive voyeurs watching the confrontation between the washerwoman and the police, as they pressed

their faces against the window glass to get a good view as she begins screaming all over again, screaming so that the walls shake, screaming enough for all the women of murdered children, screaming, pleading for help from the people outside, and she pushes an open hand against an officer’s nose because no one will stop them and he pushes the gun barrel to her face.

In the final paragraph there is a dramatic point of view shift from third to first person that I made without an awareness of it. Because of intervention, the reader is no longer outside the café looking in, but now residing in the washerwoman’s thoughts, thereby becoming one with her. Within that same paragraph, she directly addresses the police in the first two sentences, after which she speaks to herself (and the reader):

I will fight you for my son until I have no hands left to hold a knife. I will fight you all because you’re farted out of the Devil’s ass, and you’ll not take us with you. I am laughing, howling at their stupidity. Because they should know by now that I will never let my son go and then I hear something crunching like broken glass against my forehead and I am blinded by the liquid darkness. But I hold onto his hand. That I can feel, you see, I’ll never let go. Because we are going home. My son and I.

In both stories, I had hoped to move towards some kind of redirection of a reader’s gaze, away from the pages into a dynamic witnessing of other people’s suffering, a felt empathy bridging two experiences that was participatory, not passive. Some writers and scholars may think of fiction as artifice and indeed the subject is debated in some circles of the academy—but for me, I was desperately trying to humanize the people believed not to be human, and it never occurred to me that fiction was artificial but instead had an incarnation of human experience as tactile as a healing scab, as audible as any woman’s mournful wailing for her children.

4.

There is a narrow winding road that leads up to a group of buildings nestled on top of the beautiful Los Feliz hills of Hollywood, California. Before the buildings became the American Film Institute, it belonged to Immaculate Heart College, a small four-year Catholic liberal arts college that I was fortunate to have attended. It was established by a group of nuns who had challenged the Archbishop of Los Angeles by proposing radical reforms in their religious practices, including more self-governance. This was the 1960s in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, and other vocalizations of resistance had resonated everywhere. The Cardinal, given over to majestic drama, presented the nuns with an ultimatum; either conform and continue their servitude as is expected, or dispense from their vows altogether—in “Love it or Leave it” posturing, a well-worn chant against anti-war demonstrators.

In a courageous act of conscience, ninety percent of the nuns, a few of whom were Mexican American and Filipina, chose to dispense from their vows. My read on this is: this remarkable story of rebellion, not against their profound faith, but against the patriarchal structure of the church, and its misogynist and misguided denial in engaging with the poverty and suffering and hurt of the modern world. As a form of self-validation, they continued to call themselves “sisters” and reorganized their community into a nonprofit Immaculate Heart Community. Without the archdiocese to dictate their practices, these nuns provided a different feminist lens, quite distinct from what Linda Martin Alcoff calls “imperial feminism.” This group created an alternative space by which students like me could study structural systems of oppression: “Capital couldn’t do much of what it does,” activist and anti-racist feminist writer Zillah Eisenstein notes “if it didn’t use patriarchy and its deep roots/routes of modernized settler colonialism and chattel slavery to garner its profits.” The sisters drew on readings from liberation theologians in Latin America who perceived the practices of the Catholic Church in Latin America as different by “asserting that industrialized nations enriched themselves at the expense of developing countries.”

I was seventeen years old when I was first introduced to the prison writings of Daniel Berrigan, George Jackson, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer or debated subjects like reproductive rights even before the landmark decision Roe v Wade. I became woke to the fact that I was a colonialized and gendered subject and as such was challenged to find ways not only to understand, but resist, not only to resist but maintain hope, not only to hope, but to believe I could create another more just world. Such igniting consciousness had an empowering effect on me to engage as a “citizen of the world,” as my teachers were apt to tell us, and helped to reorient another understanding and another vocabulary to articulate my bitter distain for the private pursuit of profits over people and place. Finally, the knowledge empowered me to envision something not currently in existence, to create around the question, What if?

Though I was an apostate of Catholicism before I enrolled at IHC, and have continued my apostasy since, I have learned well from the sisters’ example that one can have faith without necessarily a religious institution, one can practice ritual without literal decrees coming from above. Latina theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz began to study everyday forms of resistance in communities besieged by the enclosure of poverty and policing brutality. In her pivotal work Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the 21st Century, she reconsiders the daily habits and aspirations of people subjugated to dehumanizing practices as part of a seeking of the sacred. “For us,” writes Isasi-Díaz, “the sacred is an integral part of our daily lives.” She points out that the sacred is founded on all of the practices we deem necessary to resist invisibility, degradation, and invalidation. By giving profound value—and here we acknowledge an empowered sense of “self-authority” and “self-validation” to provide value—everything we do, every practice we take up, can be considered acts against erasure, and hence sacred, a sacredness that heightens our state of being and answers to our instinctive urge to transcend. With this as practicum, Isasi-Diaz argues, our kitchens, gardens, special oak trees, porches or patios, workshops, and sidewalk views becomes a “relocation,” or reclaim of sacred space where we recognize our existences, own our ways of being, and where we can allow interdependencies and celebratory kinships and clans to transpire. It remains for us, she continues, to empower ourselves by choice and to grant value to re-consecrate sacredness. In doing so, we can and will experience a transformative and transcendent life of resistance.

The world is so much more complicated than we can understand, and our lives are so much more complex than we care to realize, what if I make a call for a courageous act of conscience beginning with myself? What if I make a demand of myself, to seek a different way of living, take fearless leaps of imagination and find grace where there seemingly is none, no visibility at first sighting? What if I ask myself to reside in one image, time, face, voice, long enough until something happens, some force of imagination yields an opening to a mystery, a connection, a recognition of humanity, an acknowledgement of mutual hurt, all becoming moments of grace, what if?

We all seek the divine because we are a “meaning seeking” species, as Karen Armstrong reminds us, and now it’s time to acknowledge a respectful holiness in everything we choose to touch. Whether hiking in Ithaca or walking the streets of East Los Angeles, or whenever I choose to look upon the vapors of the clouds that hover above the high mountainous terrains and think about how vapors turn into rain into icy snow which melts into water that runs into a shifting narrative shoreline of ancestral sights, I remember how important it is to raise our eyes from instruments of distractions before it’s too late, before our rage ravages and we dare not find the fortitude to name the faces of flowers; once we hear the hoarse voices of the treetops then describe them, once we see the way the ecosystem allows permission for us to exist, then be grateful, once it asks us to let go our ego, then do it. Know that which a Navajo grandmother once taught me on the occasion of her eightieth holiday celebration, years and years ago—we become divine in the presence of holiness.

And we can see this point in Toni Morrison’s observation:

I am fascinated by the fact that no bestial treatment of human beings ever produces beasts. White marauders can force Native American Indians to walk from one part of the country to another and watch them drop like flies and cattle, but they did not end up as cattle; Jewish people could be thrown into ovens like living carcasses but Jews were not bestialized by it; black people could be enslaved for generation after generation and recorded in statistics along with a list of rice, tar, and turpentine cargo but they did not turn out to be cargo. Each of those groups civilized the very horror that oppressed them.

How did that come to be then, that “no bestial treatment of human beings ever produced beasts?” While categorially rejecting malfeasant, dangerous practices like the continued rape of the ecosystem by insatiable profiteers, like the dismemberment of people because of their race, sexual orientation, gender, and economic class, like the disgusting old practice of torturing children by separating them from their families no matter where it takes place, at the border or in Indian Schools, we do not become beasts because we do not take for granted the sacrality in all life forms. This is not to say we should not continue to dismantle structural systems one word at a time, one policy, or participate in peaceful revolutions. But we writers need to provide another world, need to keep asking—What if? To write then is to withstand the continued violence forced upon the vulnerable on a daily basis by holding firm to sacredness.

If we are losing the ability to find the sacred in nature, in ourselves, in each other, losing a reciprocity that opens to the imaginable, it is probably because we are also losing our faith in What if, losing our trust in the power of stories. However, AWP would not exist, nor would you be in attendance if this were true.

5.

I began this presentation with a question on how to transform the fire raging in my body and ravaging my spirit into a synergy that creates and does not destroy. The inquiry is a mystery as much as it is obvious, technique and practice as much as intuition and luck:

1. Humble yourself. That is the only way to keep your heart, soul and mind open. But assert yourself in combatting illiteracy.
2. Recognize your positionality. This will be helpful in making you aware of your limitations and will help direct you towards the work you need to do to deepen your understanding and break out of those limitations.
3. 3. You’ll make constant mistakes. Admit to them and learn. Be prepared to forgive and then fearlessly try again.
4. 4. Read widely in fiction and poetry, but also in genres—histories, memoirs, biographies, scholarly works etc. Read by the light of your public library. Smile at librarians.
5. 5. Commit to finding the sacred in everyday life. Build around those moments of grace. Believe in writing as Scripture in its power to complicate, to create empathy, to direct us towards meaning.
6. 6. Understand the systems that hold us in bondage to cultural and economic capital. Battling against these conditions is how character is made—in you and in your work.
7. Commitment to your writing is a commitment to dismantling these systems one word at a time. Therefore, make all the words in your sentences muscular and ready to work. Resistance makes muscles.
8. Make corporeal activism a ritual essential to your well-being as a writer. This is community building. Finding the silences between your heartbeat to write is solitary work and you need to go outside and get some fresh air.
9. Reconnect with power of stories like creation stories, myths, chismes, prayers, fables, fears, oral histories. Everyone and everything has story, so pay attention with ganas.
10. The face of the other is yours and imagine your face as the other especially in the revision stage of your work. Audre Lorde’s words ring loudly “I am who I am, doing what I came to do…..to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”
11. And for all practical purposes, don’t quit your day job.

Please excuse my broad strokes but from the vantage point of age, from over forty years of experience in the writing world, I can say that the diversity of authors of color and audiences and readers responding to that work were not always visible or taught/read as they are currently—though so much still has to be done. Allow me to honor the artists, activists, and teachers too numerous to name who in all their intersectionality and transformative beliefs, worked, wrote, sacrificed, and sometimes died so that African American, Indigenous, Asian American, Ethnic, and Chicana/Latinx studies would exist; women, gender, and LGBT studies would emerge in the first wave of scholars and writers sprouted from Affirmative Action, and usher in robustly the second wave of scholars and writers taught by the first wave, and so on and so forth.

Along with Woolf, Eliot, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, I studied Mitsuye Yamada and Maxine Hong Kingston, devoured Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and the magnificent Toni Morrison; N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko guided me, and both Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein cracked open another dimension of being. In my generational group of the 1970s, when computers were emerging and social media as we know it didn’t exist and reproductive accessibility was just beginning, we sought solidarity and strategies against illiteracy; poet Lorna Dee Cervantes began Mango Press from her garage, writer Sandra Cisneros began Macondo at her kitchen table, playwright Denise Chávez began her bookstore and book fair, essayist, playwright and poet Cherríe Moraga began working with Kitchen Table Press, and I began working with ChismeArte Magazine. We waited for no one and demanded visibility and space for our communal voices, and were mostly calmed by the fact that we knew each of us existed out there. In a world that did little to respect us, we supported one another with a revolutionary kind of love.

In the last forty years, I have learned to breathe in order to conjure my community into existence, in order to depict a “texture of existence” with the necessary force of imagination. I had to figure out ways of returning the flesh back to the dismembered, reinsert a human face in all its particularity to defy stereotypes. I held my breath to plunge in with the freight of my fears, create aesthetics in which both mystery and terror resided in all its fucked up and beautiful concoctions. When I began writing over forty years ago it began intuitively, this inescapable politic to write out my insurgent heart with an urgency that hasn’t released me of the obligation since.

I wish you all a well-earned, honest night’s sleep.

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Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel. Her second novel is Their Dogs Came with Them. In the 1980s, Viramontes became co-coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association and literary editor of ChismeArte Magazine. Later, Viramontes helped found Southern California Latino Writers and Filmmakers. In collaboration with feminist scholar Maria Herrera Sobek, Viramontes organized three major conferences at UC-Irvine, resulting in two anthologies: Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature and Chicana Writes: On Word and Film. Named a USA Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus, and a 2017 Bellagio Center Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2015, California State University at Long Beach inaugurated the Helena María Viramontes Lecture. Viramontes is Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a new novel.

Notes

1. The introduction to “My Insurgent Heart” began with this paragraph. However, after the inspirational land statements by The River Singers and then Margo Tamez, I decided not to read it. History, like geopolitical space, like a human being, is a palimpsest, and I would not be the multiplicity of who I hope I am if I did not acknowledge that I am currently standing on indigenous occupied land. Roxanne Dunbar Oritz reminds us that “the first Spanish town in Texas San Antonio was established in 1718, and Franciscan missionaries founded the mission San Antonio de Valero.” This indispensable historian also provides an abbreviated list of indigenous nations who lived in these regions way before the conquest and annexation: Lupin Apaches, Jumanos, Coahuiltecans,Tonkawas, Karankawas and Caddos to name only a few. For those who are unfamiliar with this area, the state’s name is derived from a Caddo word “friend”, and for those who are generationally rooted in Texas, this history is part of them, like my husband Eloy Rodriguez whose grandmother Celestina Garcia Calvillo is buried near his great-grandfather Eugenio Calvillo in El Desierto cemetery of the borderlands.
2. My history of the Immaculate Heart College nuns is with the help of Wikipedia. My heartfelt apologies to my teachers if I explained their history through this lens, but also through the lens of my memory and political retrospection. What I hoped to convey was their great and moral influence on me and others through their political intelligence, compassion and courage.
3. News of Covid-19 caused over half of the registered AWP to cancel or were forced into cancellation by their institutions. However, several of us weathered our wits and came to San Antonio. The risk and stress of the pandemic made me doubly appreciative of audience attendance.
4. In the case of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, I am reminded that writers as human beings have immense flaws