A Text from Sydney

I got a text message this morning from a friend of mine named Sydney.  I haven't talked to her in a while, so it was a nice surprise.  We talked about our busy lives for a bit before she said, "Hey so I hate to like randomly talk to you after forever and then ask a favor... but I'm doing a story on the gay marriage debate for one of my journalism classes and I would love to interview you and Brian."  I wasn't expecting that sort of favor to be asked, but I couldn't say no.  I mean, for a lot of people Brian and I are the only gay couple they know... let alone a married gay couple.  So even though I'm completely swamped in schoolwork this weekend, we agreed to the interview.  She's coming over to film us tomorrow.

That's right, film us.  When I initially agreed to help out I thought it would be for a written article.  But no, she wants to show Brian and I cooking in the kitchen and acting all cute and coupley.  Then we'll sit down for a filmed interview session with her. It's a little nerve-wracking, and I have to remind myself that nobody's going to see it other than her professor and a smattering of classmates at Brigham Young University.

Speaking of BYU, I know that their men's chorus sang at one of the sessions of LDS General Conference today.  I have a couple of gay friends, Michael and Andrew, who sing in that choir.  They were pretty excited to be a part of it all.  Also, while I'm on the topic of gays and BYU students, I know a guy named Nathan Cunliffe who co-created a comic strip for BYU's Understanding Same-Gender Attraction (USGA) organization.  The strip is called Bronicorns and it's about two brothers, one gay and one straight, who attend BYU.  It's pretty cute, so you should check them out!

My Chapbook Came In! Yay!

My sister Renee sent me a photo much like the one here, holding my little chapbook.  "Wow," I texted. "You got yours before I got mine!"  "I must be important," she replied.  But a few hours later, while at work, I got a text from Brian.  Guess what it was.  Yep, another photo of a hand holding my chapbook, this time the hand belonged to Brian.  "Your book came in!" he said.  I was pretty excited to hear it.  And when I got home, I was finally able to get my own hands on my little book.  I can't believe so many people got to see it before I did!  It looks great though.  Blurb did a good job with the printing.

"But then you smiled with fruit juice dripping from the corner of your apple lips, your mouth a yawning hollow where I could see our bleak future."

Light at the End?

There's a light at the end of the tunnel, but nobody said there was an obstacle course to get to it. Sure the semester ends in just a couple of weeks, but in those weeks there are a myriad of hoops for me to jump through, Herculean tasks to prove myself a hero. In class today my professor congratulated me for a paper being published in Essais. "Are you presenting it at Popomology?" she asked. "Um, no, I haven't heard..." "Oh," she said. "I'm the faculty advisor for the journal. Someone should have contacted you. Consider yourself invited." So now I'm giving a 10-minute presentation with visuals and participating in a Q&A session. Next Thursday. For reals.

I also have a poem to memorize and recite, some finals to prepare for, a smattering of papers to write, a group presentation to give, more reading and countless other assignments that have fallen under my radar. Please, God of Academia, hear my plea and deliver me from this evil! Thank you. Amen.

Workshop with Melanie Rae Thon: Part Two

Here are more writing prompts from yesterday's writing workshop with author Melanie Rae Thon.

Have you ever been accused of a crime you didn't commit?

I've been accused of being condescending or inattentive or even fake.  I've been accused of being too trusting, a blabber-mouth, too selfless, too selfish and even passive aggressive.  I suppose at times they are all true.  Nobody's perfect.  I used to be accused of being gay, but these days I'll admit it.  Recently I was accused of plagiarizing a poem, because my iambic pentameter was too spot on.  The professor's google search came up with just one hit, a link to my personal blog.  She apologized.  What I hate most of all is being accused of crimes that I did commit.  Oftentimes, this new picture of me is so frightening and so unlike my own self-perception that I immediately deny it.  "No, that's not true.  I would never do such a thing!"  And because our world is composed of language, those words construct a new reality that I buy into.  And it's like I never did anything wrong.  My world is right-side-up again.

What are the circumstances of your birth?

My mother didn't say she was pregnant with me for a long while, or so I hear.  Reason being her sister, my aunt, was already pregnant.  My mother didn't want to steal her thunder.  Eventually I became obvious, protruding from her stomach larger and larger with each passing day until I was born, screaming and squirming on a hot day in August.  My father had been feeding ice cubes to my mother, to distract her from the pain, and his hands were cold and wet when he held me for the first time.  My mother held me too, smiling and exhausted, but somewhere far away my aunt secretly wept the loss of my cousin that would never be.  Thunder was stolen after all.

Workshop with Melanie Rae Thon: Part One

Today I attended a reading, dinner and workshop with a Salt Lake City author named Melanie Rae Thon.  I have only recently become acquainted with her work, but she's fantastic.  She blurs the genre line between poetry and prose, and her novel The Voice of the River, is simply fantastic.  I'm only halfway through, but I'm loving her writing style.  So lyrical and profound.  Very nice.  I recommend it.  At her workshop, she gave us some writing prompts and had us just free-write for 5 minutes or so.  What I wrote is pretty rough and nonsensical, but I'm really trying to blog every day in the month of April, so yeah...

Have you ever been close to death?

I'm not afraid of death necessarily, but I am afraid of pain.  This fear keeps me from doing anything adventurous or anything out of the ordinary hamster wheel that is my life.  So death, it seems, has never been near me.  I keep it as away from me as possible.  Except of course that time I awoke in the night with my heart determined to stab me, unable to breathe and scared out of my mind.  Probably just acid reflux or something else nonthreatening, but it felt like death at the time.  I've been on shaky airplanes where I realize how small and high up I am or in cars with reckless drivers who cause me to continually push my foot against the ground as if I can hit the brakes from the passenger side.  I sideswiped a van once and almost hit a deer, so I guess that makes me a bad driver as well.  I remember once, riding in the car with my stepfather, and seeing a herd of cattle crushed into bits before my eyes by a semi-truck in the night.  Headlights steadily illuminating the unwitting targets.  I heard their panicked mooing stop with an explosion of red and death seemed real to me.  Death was disturbing; not peaceful like the last time I saw my grandmother's sweet face and I whispered, "Grandma's sleeping" as my mother led me away from the coffin.

More mindless ramblings tomorrow...

Prose Poem for English 3440

Burritos and Coca-Cola

Jack Garcia

His arm pressed against my arm, Zeek says, I’m just about as white as you, although he’s a true Mexican. He plays fútbol and wears cleats and isn’t even a citizen, although he’s lived here all his life. Speaks Spanish fluently, not the gringo Spanglish I utter. My father, brown as a Reese’s peanut butter cup, folds my potato burrito a certain way and I follow in his footsteps. Hispanic women have a chip on their shoulder, he told me once, while sipping Coca-Cola from red- and yellow-striped straws. Perhaps that’s why all his wives have been red-headed and fair-skinned, including my mother who once attended a cooking class for Hispanic women with my Aunt Rachel—I call her Tía Loca and she calls me J.J. or sometimes Joaquín. My mom felt out of place in that class, garnering glares like wasp stings from the coffee-colored mujeres until my tía told them all to fuck off. She’s my sister-in-law, she said. She belongs. I remember once in high school, being called at an assembly to receive an award for academic excellence. A white kid named Brody jokingly said, I bet you’re the first Garcia to ever win an award, and I laughed. Mia Medina, overhearing, did not laugh. Her beautiful brown eyes turned black and her eyebrows furrowed so close together she looked like the Mexican artist Frida. That’s racist, she said, don’t ever let me hear you say something like that again. On stage I accepted the award, but instead of pride I felt shame.

Yawning Hollow

For my English 3440 Class (Intermediate Poetry) we were asked by our professor Dr. Laura Hamblin to create a chapbook. What's a chapbook?  Well, I had no idea either so don't feel too stupid.  Basically, back in the old days in England a chapman was a bookseller, and a chapbook was a small, inexpensive book of poetry, ballads, stories, etc.  At least that's what the Internet Machine tells me.  So basically my chapbook is a small 20-page book of 12 poems and photos from our trip to New York City.  It's kind of cool.  I ordered two of them (one for my professor and one for me) and they should arrive on April 8th.

A quick story about the title.  One of my poems contained the phrase "gaping hole" which everyone in my workshop considered to be too cliche.  So in the revision process it eventually became "yawning hollow" which is more unique and has a really nice sound with the assonance.  In fact, I liked the two words together so much that I made it the title of the collection.  Runner-ups included A Burnt Out Match and Gin-Soaked, also phrases from the included poems, but in the end I just fell in love with Yawning Hollow.  So yay for workshops and harsh criticisms!

Anyway, the book is just $8.99, and while I originally wasn't planning on selling it, some extra cash doesn't hurt anybody, right? Ha ha.  So buy one if you love me.  Or you can read it for free right here in the preview...

Yawning Hollow by Jack Garcia | Make Your Own Book