Javier O. Huerta (Arte Publico Press) presents on the panel, Engaging YAs with Latino Short Fiction and Poetry on Wednesday from 12-12:50.
1. Have you attended TLA before? If so, what advice do you have for
new authors?
No, I have not attended TLA before. But I have seen *Party Girl* and have read *The Giant's House* by Elizabeth McCracken.
2. What is your preferred method of writing and why -- laptop,
longhand, typewriter?
For my first creative writing workshop at the University of Houston, I handwrote my first poem because we didn't have a computer at home and I didn't yet know how to use the resources in the community (libraries) or on campus (computer labs). My classmates laughed at me. The professor shook his head. One classmate thought I was making an aesthetic statement and told me she loved it.
I then procured a used typewriter. Charles Olson celebrates the typewriter--"the machine," he calls it--as a promising tool for his "projective verse." Of course that was in 1950, and I was writing at the end of the 20th century. Poets had moved on, but there I was writing retrojective verse. Using a typewriter became too expensive; I spent too much money on white-out.
Eventually I learned to use the 24-hour computer labs at the U of H. I have never purchased my own laptop. To write this, I'm using my second hand-me down. But now I'm thinking maybe there was/is something poetic to handwriting poems.
3. Favorite books of the past year
Last year I read for my PhD Qualifying Exams, so my favorites will come mostly from the 19th Century:
The Monk, by Matthew Lewis
Don Juan, by Lord Byron
Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
4. Favorite books from your YA years
As a young adult I thought I was too cool for school; therefore, I did not do much reading. These are two books that I have come to love and that I wish I would have experienced for the first time as a young adult:
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
5. Finish this sentence. The perfect vacation is...
una biblioteca.
6. MySpace or Facebook?
Facebook. I've only been on there for a week, and I already have more than a hundred friends. When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. Things haven't changed much, but at least Facebook has befriended me.
7. BBQ or Tex-Mex?
Both. I'm interpreting this question as an invitation.
8. Finish this sentence. Libraries are...
"bibliotecas" in Spanish; "librerías" are bookstores; I still get these confused.
Libraries are liberries. I still mispronounce this. What would a liberry taste like?
9. Do you have a blog, website, or other online presence that you
would like to share with us?
My page over on *Harriet*, the blog of the Poetry Foundation:
