PINTURA : PALABRA: the next phase: prose.

“The following book is a collection of ekphrastic short stories, many very very brief, and written by a writer from the Philippines. Several will be used for the workshop.”

—Fred Arroyo

November 28, 2015

Thus wrote the facilitator of the next PINTURA:PALABRA workshop, giving us a sense of some of the materials he'll be sharing with our workshop participants. What follows is what I'll call an informational interview in which Fred offers some thoughts on the gathering he'll be leading in Salt Lake City, UT--this time for writers who will be exploring ekphrastic prose. 

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LLB: Letras Latinas Blog

FA:   Fred Arroyo

LLB:

You recently spent a few days in Sacramento, CA, visiting the Crocker Art Museum for three consecutive days, for several hours each day. Will you share with our readers why?

FA:

The weekend of March 28-29, 2015, I  will be leading a creative writing workshop, “Creative Dialogues: A Workshop in Brief Ekphrastic Prose,” at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah. The workshop is taking place in conjunction with the exhibit Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Drawn from the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibit highlights Latino artists and the rich, beautiful, and important contributions they’ve made to American art and culture from the mid-20^th century to the present, and will travel across the United States until the Spring of 2017. Letras Latinas has set in motion “PINTURA : PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis,” a multi-year national initiative that seeks to enkindle new creative writing inspired by Latino art, and, thus far, poetry workshops have taken place in Washington, DC, Miami, and Sacramento. The next installment in the project will be the workshop in brief ekphrastic prose in Salt Lake City.

Currently the exhibit is in Sacramento, at the Crocker Museum, and I traveled there to engage with the exhibit, have a sense of how the works are curated within a museum space, and to view, read, imagine, and write from the exhibit as a form of practice, process, and preparation for the workshop. I composed between 12 – 16 creative works (very brief fictions, prose poems, and essays) during my three days, and these are works that I’m eager to return to and continue revising and refining. I have to say that attending the exhibit was one of the more enriching and productive experiences of creativity that I’ve experienced in some time. The exhibit helped to affirm and provoke intuitions that have shaped the stories I write. You feel a great sense of pride and gratitude giving yourself to the exhibit, following the peoples, places, artistic choices and forms as they begin to offer stories, connections, and differences that Latino artists in the exhibit work with. You begin to see a shared history emerging in a variety of forms and mediums, a new language connected and different to Latino literary expression, and as you contend with these elements of expression you begin to hear and see new images and locations of culture and identity, and you begin to see and hear silences. And in those silences you begin to imagine new forms of expression and representation that are needed within our collective history, our literature and arts, and the communities we want to inhabit. 

LLB:

What has been the extent of your experience with ekphrastic writing up until now, and how do you think this experience will help you as move forward in designing and developing “Creative Dialogues: A Workshop in Brief Ekphrastic Prose”?

FA:

Photographs, paintings, and objects have always sparked my writing; they help me to begin inventing, clustering, and collaging together various strands of a story. Often when I write, I have a painting or photo that exists as in the background. The landscape itself in my writing comes to life through a kind of ekphrastic moment. From my limited study of the Greeks, ekphrasis—a description of some place, artwork, or object—has been a natural part of my writing process for some time.

The exhibit (and the preparation for the workshop) is helping to extend and change how I envision the ekphrastic. I’m very intrigued by the materiality or spirit of an artwork as it is brought to life in literary writing. How to experience and create a real presence? In viewing the exhibit Our America, I started to welcome more voices into the ekphrastic, more versions of self and other, a more multilingual, multigenerational, multicolored, or multi-lensed approach, where richer possibilities of creativity and expression can arise in engaging with a work of art. And I think this may be because the works in the exhibit have greater power in relation to each other, rather than in their singularity, or isolation. This isn’t to suggest that I would deny the power of a single work. Instead, the artworks in Our America collectively—in pairings, in groupings, in creative dialogues—begin to register and offer nuances and particulars that make for such a compelling presence of art, and the silences that art makes us to listen to as well. This is shaping the ekphrastic literary works we'll read before the workshop, and as well as how we might approach the exhibit beyond the categories or themes found in the exhibit, so workshop participants might envision how different works—outside their categories—offer creative  connections and dialogues.

LLB:

Will the workshop participants be asked to carry out any tasks before the workshop?

FA:

There will be an anthology of readings participants will need to read. They will include many different forms of ekphrastic writing, as well as more craft or process-orientated writings focused on writing brief prose. In addition, I want to offer readings that return back to an original sense of the ekphrastic: a literary description of a place, a work of art, or an object. In contemplating brief forms of writing that emerge from the ekphrasis of a place or object, my sense is that the ekphrastic dialogue with a work of art will be more particular and imaginative. In the end, we’ll have specific texts to discuss, along with accompanying artworks projected on a screen, have some craft or process language that helps shape our discussions and our writings, and then have these readings and discussions inform our workshops focused on our original creative writings.

Each participant will also need to explore the online exhibit, http://www.americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/our_america/online_exhibition.cfm, and then write three brief ekphrastic prose works (650 words or less) before the workshop. Ideally, it would be great to distribute the works a few days before our first workshop.

Each day will be divided between discussion of works from the anthology, workshops of the participants’ writings, and a good space of time to interact with the actual exhibit. Saturday’s workshops will be of writings created before arriving in Salt Lake City, and Sunday’s workshop will allow for writers to present both a revision and a new work. This will allow for each writer to feel more confident and creative given how the workshop unfolds, the more time they have with the actual exhibit, and as they accumulate ideas, suggestions, and possibilities they want to bring to their writing. Saturday will also be dedicated to focusing on heuristics—inventive prompts, guides, or possibilities—for engaging and discovering the ekphrastic. Sunday evening, after the workshop, we hope to have a celebratory reading where workshop participants can share their writing. 

LLB:

What will the post-workshop phase of the Salt Lake City edition of PINTURA : PALABRA look like, both in terms of writing, and publication(s).

FA:

I am very excited by the two-day workshop at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the new brief ekphrastic prose that will emerge from the workshop participants, and the future work of curating these works for publication. The plan for now is to edit a portfolio of brief nonfictions for the on-line journal Brevity. In addition, I would like to also edit a portfolio of brief fictions and prose poems for another literary journal, which is still in the works. Before publication, though, I’d like to create an online post-workshop, where workshop participants will have a chance to go home, consider there writing within a larger space of contemplation and creativity, and revise or create new works to share with the group. This on-line workshop can then provide more insights and possibilities into new revision and accomplishment, so participants can send their work in for possible publication in the portfolios. I see the space and time after the Salt lake City workshop as a place to invent, revise, and refine, for each participant to imagine more poetically what the ekphrastic can mean and offer to Latino/a literary expression, and why that expression can become a vibrant part of our communities.

Prose writers supporting Andrés Montoya

When this Initiative was conceived, the plan was to enlist the support, above all, of fellow literary artists. Thus far, most of these have been poets since the principle beneficiary of this gesture is Latino poetry's first book prize. But I wanted to take a moment and single out for a special expression of appreciation those prose writers (novelists, short story writers, and memoirists) who have stepped to the plate. My hope is that their numbers will gradually increase as we move forward toward our goal of selling out "Untitled" by Malaquias Montoya---inspired by the poetry of his son, Andrés. My heartfelt thanks to:

Michael Nava

Benjamin Alire Saenz

Helena Maria Viramontes

Sergio Troncoso

Daniel Chacón

Lorraine Lopez

Fred Arroyo

John Phillip Santos

Sandra Cisneros

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The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative

Join us.

Photo Gallery: M and F at LOC

Aerial view of, among other things,

 the Library of Congress

Among the most meaningful partnerships that Letras Latinas has established in recent years is the one with the Library of Congress' Poetry and Literature Center (Rob Casper) and Hispanic Division (Georgette Dorn). What follows is a partial photo gallery of Fred Arroyo's and Maria Melendez's appearance at the LOC.

partial view of the kiosk outside 

the LOC's Madison Building

Georgette Dorn, Maria Melendez and Fred Arroyo

shortly before their audio recordings for

the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape

on April 11, 2013 (10 am - 12 noon)

Maria Melendez reads selections from her work

Fred Arroyo reads selections from this work

After the recordings, we were taken on a tour

of the Library of Congress' Poetry Room---

the office of the U.S. Poet Laureate

Rob Casper, head of LOC's Poetry and Literature Center

points out the spectacular view 

of the Capitol from the Poetry Room

to Maria Melendez

Standing:

Georgette Dorn, Rob Casper, Catalina Gomez

Sitting:

Fred Arroyo, Francisco Aragón, Maria Melendez

Note: Maria and Fred read from their work in the Madison Building that evening, but no photographs were taken. But a video recording of the full reading and colloquium will be available on the LOC website, soon.

Letras Latinas Presents:

Review Roundup: November 25, 2012

Laurie Ann Guerrero reviews Carmen Tafolla’s Rebozos

Fifth-edition Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner, Laurie Ann Guerrero reviews San Antonio Poet Laureate and CantoMundo co-founder, Carmen Tafolla’s Rebozos.

Rebozos is a collaborative book of sixteen poems by Carmen Tafolla and sixteen paintings by Catalina Gárate García. As the title of the collection implies and as Laurie Ann Guerrero astutely remarks, this is a collection the uses the rebozo’s intricately woven patterns, to “weave together” the “sometimes-undocumented” stories of women. Stories written in poems that have volition of their own, following their own linguistic logic and playfulness:

“These are not translations, Tafolla notes in her acknowledgements, but individual poems composed of their own volition: "I wrote each poem authentically in its own language, and insisted … that each poem should have its freedom to be unique, even from its counterpart in the other language." Once again, Tafolla has created a space where many can exist — as she does in both the community and on the page. She uses the rebozo as a metaphor for that which weaves us together. "The rebozo itself carries our history and our sometimes-undocumented stories," Tafolla said. "And so many of the people whose stories it carries were illiterate or had no access to make their stories known. So there is a special responsibility to let those many, many generations of human voices speak out."

            [Continue reading.]

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New Pages reviews Fred Arroyo’s Western Avenue and Other Fictions

During my time here at Notre Dame one of the most memorable Letras Latinas-sponsored events has been for me the visit and reading by Fred Arroyo this past month of October; when he read from his collection of stories Western Avenue.

One of the things I admire about Fred Arroyo, both as a person and as a writer, is his insistence that while he is writing and in turn creating fictitious characters, he is also writing about the lives and stories of real people. These are real stories of real people that in life labored and loved and were at best ignored by the communities they served and often were in death forgotten by history:

“Don’t let the title of Fred Arroyo’s latest collection of short stories, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, fool you. “Fiction” is hardly the right word for what Arroyo has done here. If these insightful, living, breathing stories are fiction, I’d be hard pressed to imagine what reality must look like.

As a Midwest native and Chicago transplant, I can attest firsthand to just how lifelike Arroyo’s descriptions of North Clark Street and the factories along Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana are. The snapshots of poetry peppered throughout the collection paint a portrait of urban immigrant life even more vividly than a photograph could. “

            [Continue reading.]

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Todd Thorpe reviews Roberto Tejada’s Mirrors for Gold

Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet Roberto Tejada (who along with Carmen Giménez Smith and J. Michael Martinez , is slated to kick-off the penultimate installment of the multi-year national reading series in April of 2013 at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center) is currently featured in edition two of Latino Poetry Review, in an older but still very much relevant book review of Tejada’s Mirrors for Gold.

Mirrors for Gold is a fascinating social critique of the “nexus where “history, sexuality, and and language collide.” Rendered through the phrase “mirrors for gold,” the title of the collection references the unequal exchange of European trinkets for the mineral wealth of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a moment which marks the beginnings of a history of expropriation and cultural destruction:

“Though mirrors are themselves simple, they have a complicated literary and mythical history. They might be calm pools of water, polished metal or stone surfaces, a sheet of clear glass capturing a spectral image, or a piece of glass backed with a silver tain in which a discrete image may be seen. The mirrors referred to in the book's title are of the last type; European baubles exchanged for New World wealth. The unevenness of the exchange is masked by the verisimilitude of the mirror's reflection. At last, the New World's indigenous inhabitants could hold the mirror up to nature and see their true reflections, such a gift! As with true reflections, so with true religion, conquest brought instruction on the nature of the soul and path to salvation. Gold is the tain of the truth brought by the godly conquistadors from Spain, and when Tejada holds his mirror up it is not nature that he finds but history with its irrational drives, its passionate adventures, its endless negotiations. Clearly, Tejada has read Lacan. Tejada's poems carefully query the conditions of possibility of historical reflection.”

            [Continue reading.]

 

Fred Arroyo @ Notre Dame

Sponsored by Letras Latinas, the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the José E. Fernández Hispanic Studies Caribbean Initiative, and the Creative Writing Program, “Western Avenue: Fred Arroyo reads from his fiction,” was—with standing-room only—nothing short than a success. According to Gilberto Cárdenas—the founding director of the Institute for Latino Studies—this event by Fred Arroyo was the best attended reading he has seen at McKenna Hall.

Fred Arroyo’s first visit to Notre Dame back in 2009 had previously coincided with a cafecito charla at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS). Where ILS staff were giving the opportunity to read Fred’s debut novel The Region of Lost Names (2008) and participate in a discussion with the author. And finally, Fred participated in Letras Latinas’ Oral History Project where he was interviewed. A moving re-cap of that conversation can be found here.

                     

In this, his latest visit, Fred was able to meet and dine with poets and fiction writers from Notre Dame’s MFA program. Prior to the reading itself, Fred Arroyo also met with undergraduate students in Professor Marisel Moreno’s “Migrant Voices” class where Western Avenue and Other Fictions (2012) was being read and of course gave a succinct and lyric reading of his newly released collection of short stories Western Avenue and Other Fictions (2012).

Speaking of the mano de obra, the unknown laborer whose hands helped to build the brilliance of our world, the Argentine poet Juan Gelman once wrote: “Studying history, dates, battles, letters written in stone… I see only dark, metallurgical, mining, sewing…slaves’ hands…they died and their fingernails still grew.” If history is that which is written to commemorate the deeds of the powerful, than memory is the fingernail by which the oppressed etch their own history.

“Memory,” Fred Arroyo’s work seems to drench the air with this word whenever he speaks or reads about the working-class characters and immigrants that inhabit the cities—the “avenues”—they helped build but which often negate their existence.

In Western Avenue, Fred Arroyo serves as the bringer of good news. As memory’s postman, Fred Arroyo, resurrects the unknown laborers’ hands and delivers letters written across time and space, the places where those hands “will not meet” but where they shall write each others’ lives again.

The following is a photo gallery of the event:

Fred Arroyo with MFA students Lynda Letona, Meg Brandl and Jenica Moore

Professor Marisel Moreno interviewing Fred Arroyo

Professor Marisel Moreno and Fred Arroyo

Fred Arroyo in the undergraduate class "Migrant Voices"

The gathering crowd.

Still gathering....

Fred Arroyo

Standing at the podium.

Fred Arroyo signs a few books.