Rigoberto González on the 20th Anniversary of Arturo Islas' Migrant Souls

MIGRANT SOULS
Arturo Islas
Avon Books, 1991

Pluma Fronteriza celebrates the 20th anniversary of Arturo Islas' Migrant Souls with a guest post by Rigoberto González:

Arturo Islas: An Appreciation on the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Migrant Souls

Arturo Islas died one day after Valentine’s Day in 1991, almost a year after the release of his second novel Migrant Souls. News of his death was a particularly disappointing moment for me because I had resolved to attend Stanford University’s graduate program just to work with him. I was only a junior at the University of California, Riverside, but I already had aspirations to become a writer. I had been reading Chicano literature voraciously, and one of the books that had moved me had been The Rain God (1984). The sequel to the Angel family saga, had just been released to wide acclaim and I spent the next twelve months fantasizing about telling Islas all about me. You see, the other thing I knew about him was that he was gay. A gay Chicano writer. Who knew there were two of us?

Complete guest post at Pluma Fronteriza.

Interview: J. Michael Martinez speaks with Pluma Fronteriza

J. Michael Martinez reads from Heredities
Originally uploaded by OBermeo

Profile and interview with recent Whitman Prize winner J. Michael Martinez is live at the Pluma Fronteriza blog. Here's an excerpt:

Pluma Fronteriza: Can you summarize your Heredities for readers who are not familiar with your work?

When I write, oftentimes, the work knows more of what it wants than me. It’s a consciousness more conscious than my own. I’ve learned to relinquish my intentions for the poetry to the poem.

As in meditation, where one empties the mind to move into a greater space of silence, so poetry moves my life to myself, speaking an unspoken world into language. In surrendering control, I learn from what has been written.

That said, I’m not sure if I can summarize Heredities.

I can say, when writing the poems that now comprise Heredities, I was in my mid to late twenties and coming to terms with what it meant for me to be Chicano in the US, responding to cliché conceptions and articulations of Latinidad.

Complete interview is here.