Linda Rodriguez interviews Lucha
Corpi
Lucha Corpi is the author of two
collections of poetry and six novels, four of which feature Chicana detective
Gloria Damasco: Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Cactus Blood, Black Widow’s
Wardrobe, and Death at Solstice. In addition to writing poetry and mystery
novels, Corpi is also the author of two bilingual children’s books and has been
distinguished with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, an
Oakland Cultural Arts fellowship in fiction, the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles
Award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Literary Award for fiction.
She is currently featured in an
interview with novelist Linda Rodriguez in her blog “Linda Rodriguez Writes,”
in which the character of Gloria Damasco is foregrounded as a central and
defining figure in Lucha Corpi’s work: Both for her role as being considered,
among scholars and critics, as the “first Chicana private detective in American
literature… [and as]the first fictional woman detective to be deeply rooted in
Chicana-o/Mexican culture in the U.S.” but also for the special place this
character holds in the imagination of the author:
“That same year, my father underwent
a cornea transplant and had trouble reading the newspaper. He asked me to read
to him from any page in the newspaper except La página roja—the crime page. I
was seven years old, so my father went to great lengths to remove the red page
and hide it from me. But he didn’t destroy it right away, so I usually found it
and read it. La página described knifings, fights in the sugar cane fields,
other brawls and bloody accidents, in all their gory details. I soon tired of
reading those repetitive news reports. But my curiosity grew the first time I
read about and followed the case of a woman who had unsuccessfully tried to
poison her husband. I fell in love with the kind of story, in which it was
evident that there was someone’s “intelligence” behind the crime, and someone
else’s matching “wits” to bring the criminal to justice—aka the detective
story. But it wasn’t until 1989 that I undertook the research for my first
mystery novel, months before I met Gloria Damasco, the detective who would need
access to all that knowledge at a moment’s notice to do her job.”
*
Rigoberto González interviews Natalie
Diaz
Natalie Diaz is the author of When
My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and is currently
featured over at “Critical Mass” in an interview by Latino/a Poetry Now
featured poet, Rigoberto González and which profiles Diaz’s debut collection of
poems.
Grounded in the experiences of
growing up in the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California,
Natalie Diaz’s debut collection burrows from native folklore, Greek mythology,
Mexican pop culture, and the speaker’s brother and his troubled addiction to methamphetamine
to build a series of poems that is both narrative and surreal but always
engaged with reveling what Natalie Diaz calls the “truest truth:” Testimonies
that are to be found not in “history” but in the “myths” found in tribal
stories:
“I was
raised to hold many truths in my hand, all at the same time, and to never have
to drop one in order to have faith the other. This is the beauty of growing up
in a multicultural family. Our capacity for identity is large. I am many. Even
though most people use the word “myth” to speak of our tribal stories, we see
them as truth. So, for me, myth has always been the truest truth. The word
“history” on the other hand, we question. Since I first began reading, I was
drawn to any stories that were labeled myth—Viking, Roman, Greek, etc.—because
I had learned those were the real stories. My grandparents are from the north
of Spain, Asturias and Oviedo. We grew up hearing them speak Spanish, and I
ended up playing basketball and living in Spain, where I learned to appreciate
the language more. Though my grandparents are Spanish, we have many Mexican
relatives. My mother is native, from two tribes, but our language was a dying
language, and so not spoken at home. It wasn’t until I began to work with my
Elders that I began to learn the Mojave language. There are only a few poems in
the book that use Mojave, and this is very intentional. The English language
silenced Mojave for a very long time, worked hard to crush it completely. I
don’t ever want to force my Mojave language to speak in English—what I mean by
this is that in my writing, I use Mojave to say Mojave things, things that the
English language is too young or not strong enough or deep enough to hold.
Truly Mojave things. If I have something to say in English, well, there is
plenty of the English language to say it with.”
*
Emma Trelles @ Boxcar
Poetry Review
Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and the winner of the 2010 Andrés
Montoya Poetry Prize and is currently featured in a conversation with
Justin Petropoulos, author of Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011),
over at “Boxcar Poetry Review.”
In this conversation both poets
express the convergence, in their two texts (Tropicalia and Eminent
Domain), of poetry as an agent of preservation where language serves both
to document and record the voice(s) of communities previously displaced; where
language acts as the agent that cures and preserves these voices like the
“canning of fruit for the coming winter:”
“I
find it interesting that although our books are utterly disparate in tone,
there is still a fundamental unity present that involves the document—a thing
that serves to record, preserve, or, in some cases, give voice to communities
which, as you put so precisely, are "relegated to silence" by the
very language that is used to mask their existence. This idea of language as a
form of preservation is also of great interest to me, although my own book's
approach is rooted more in the truths and artifices of the image, how it is
subject to manipulation through a desire to document.”
*
One
of Letras Latinas’ most little known initiative is the Oral History Project. A
series of taped interviews, this initiative is intended to provide a resource
on the web for students, scholars, and the general reader alike. To date this
collection includes over twenty interviews, including those with poets Valerie
Martinez and Brenda Cárdenas and prose writers Daniel Alarcón and John Phillip
Santos, to name a few.
Latino/a
Poetry Now featured poet, Maria Melendez is the author of How Long She'll
Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006), for which she
received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was
named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards. University
of Arizona Press published Flexible Bones, her most recent collection of
poetry, in 2010.
In
this Oral History Project interview, Maria Melendez speaks of her own poetics
and its relationship to the environment; where poetry has the power to mourn
the loss of biodiversity, the loss of whole communities of plants and other
living beings—as well as the ability to remember places that are lost and which
where once inhabited by human and non-human life alike. And of her fascinating
and artistic childhood and household where she was first encouraged to write
poetry in exchange for ice cream: “poetry does pay” Maria jokes laughingly.
