Año 3/Vol. 4 LA TOLTECA Summer Solstice 2013 Issue

Interview With Navajo Poet Laureate LUCI TAPAHONSO

La Tolteca’s Fabulous

Best Photo Contest Winners Remembering Chinua Achebe Poetry from Rachel Jamison Webster

Our Lost Border Review Eco-Fashion with Marisa Pawelko Essays Workshopistas’ Palette What’s Next?

Publisher & Editor in Chief Ana Castillo Los Toltecas

Marcelo Castillo Paul au McLennan Laura Manningg Lau J Janine b Stubbs

Cont ibuto Contributors

Ignatius Valentine Valent Aloysius Adriana Herrera Amparán Adrian mparán Samadhi Mett Metta tta Bexar B ar

On the Cover

La Tolteca’s Best Photo Ph Contest 1st place photo, Hazy Memory by Claudia Hernández © 2012 USA

About the Photo

“Hazy Memory was taken at Descanso Gardens in the city of La Canada Flintridge, in 2012. charming beauty with zen gardens, oak forests, and ponds come across a bridge and instead of taking photographs of the sakuras in bloom, the pond and the decaying leaves drowning in the water, caught with an aperture of f22, low iso (100) and fast shutter speed; I don’t use a tripod.”

- Claudia D. Hernandez

TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITOR’S PAGE Ana Castillo CRAFTS 5 Crazy Cool Duct Tape Projects by Marisa Pawelko IN MEMORIAM 5 Miss Sheila - Rancho La Fina mascot 6 Chinua Achebe POETRY

INTERVIEWS 11 La Tolteca’s Best Photo Contest Winners: Claudia Hernández & Hugo Claudin Marcelo Castillo WORDS 18 Yes, It was My Grandmother: An Online Interview with Navajo Poet Laureate Luci Tapahonso Ama Billi Free 22 Yes, It Was My Grandmother 23 Birthday Poem 25 Blue Horses Rush In Luci Tapahonso

REVIEWS

27 Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence (ed.

Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso) Samadhi Metta Bexar, Ph.D. SUMMER READS 28 Beach, Bed and Bar: Summer Reading Anywhere WORKSHOPISTAS’ PALETTE 30 Frozen Branches Ignatius Valentine Aloysius 31 Take My Heart Adriana Herrera Amparán ANNOUNCEMENTS All Photos This Page: Marisa Pawelko © 2013 USA

LA TOLTECA

EDITOR’S PAGE

Ana Castillo

New Mexico, USA Planet Earth

C

Sheila the goose, mascot at Rancho La Fina, Ana Castillo Writing Workshops in Taos, New Mexico for 13 years and whose daily eggs were quite spectacular. She was abducted, most likely by a predator bird. She will be greatly missed.

B

Patricia Quintana Š 2013 NM, USA

marisa@modernsurrealist.com www.modernsurrealist.com Photos: Marisa Pawelko Š 2013 USA

IN MEMORIAM: Chinua Achebe Nov 1930-Mar 2013

In the Words of the Poet:

Rachel Jamison Webster on Rachel Jamison Webster When I was still an undergraduate in Portland, Oregon, I began designing and teaching writing workshops to at-risk teens, and through that work—and a thesis on Adrienne Rich—I developed a conviction in poetry’s ability to make us more peaceful, conscious agents of our lives. I carried these ideas with me when I moved to Chicago and was able to begin working with then-First Lady Maggie Daley and her arts artist programs to thousands of city teens. I wrote for her as Public Relations Coordinator and then helped to develop and teach “Words 37,” which brought creative writing programs to dozens of high schools across the city. I also worked with a co-teacher and a group of talented teens in the art of editing, and we published two anthologies of writing by Chicago youth, "Alchemy" and "Paper

writing really does change lives. amid conformity and despotism, and to read their work is to be reminded of the power of words and the endurance of the human spirit.

While Richard was alive, we hosted monthly readings and a yearly “Festival of Free Expression” and developed a relationship with Chicago Public Radio, to help widen the audience for humanizing poetry. materializing in the form of a Public Radio Series on poetry that I am co-producing with a former I grew up in a rural, working class town in Ohio, in a smart and loving family—a lucky childhood for a reading the New York Times or quoting poetry.

And probably because of this, I always feel a need to be widening poetry’s audience, or trying to relate poetry to any reader.

“All over the world, people risk their lives to write and publish poems!”

When I met my late partner Richard Fammeree, he had just started UniVerse , dedicated to “peace through poetry” and an online anthology designed to publish poets from every nation in the world, regardless of territory, which includes poets writing in endangered languages and poets who have been robbed of their homelands.

Richard immediately asked me to be UniVerse’s editor, and although he had more international experience than me, having spent 20 years of his life traveling, we shared a deep conviction in poetry’s relevance—its power to heal, transform and invite readers into fuller relationships with themselves, with other people and with the earth. All over the world, people risk their lives to write and publish poems!

My teaching is an extension of this idea. I want to create literary contexts and cultures and not just presume to inherit them. I learn from every person, and I love the symbiosis that teaching provides—a place to discuss the techniques and impulses that ultimately, for the writer, must be developed in solitude. I feel very privileged to teach at Northwestern, where the students are so impassioned and hardworking, and to meet others who want to have this conversation. Teaching provides the perfect balance to writing, for me, and challenges me to be more sensitive and intelligent all the time. although I wrote four collections beforehand, all of

awards or seriously considered for publication by Reference Links: reputable presses. So the patience this has taken has been staggering! But I think we all have to develop a kind of faith in our own calling to be writers, our own http://www.wbez.org/episode-segments/universefree-expression-celebration-international-poetry way of seeing and "saying" the world, regardless of external notice or reward. Some of the poems in September are ten years old, but most were written over a relatively short period of time for poetry—two http://www.universeofpoetry.org while hot, heeding my own inner music and cutting a lot out, and this clarity would not have been possible if I had not written those earlier books.

“I want to create literary contexts and cultures and not just presume to inherit them.”

I do like a book to have a unity of tone and pacing.

September, that feeling of the last bloom before the chill within a kind of guiding ecstasy. And the story years, I had a child and then nursed her through babyhood, and then her father became terminally ill was enough backstory for one book to handle, and each of the poems in "September" had to move quickly."

http://www.racheljamisonwebster.com

You shawl me like smoke.

My hands shake, I go down out the door hoping no one will talk to me ask me something like my name. I can feel your hunger your question a bell plundered of its tongue. can walk with me down the street to buy the Times.

I imagine you in parts and snag on trash because this other this with rain—well, I have trouble walking and counting out change.

You are still so present, I know we share a passion for this autumn, this light unburdened life.

Since you went the light is so clear it has become everything.

Faces peel from the bricks.

And outside the impoverished city hospital someone has planted an Easter lily.

Its trumpet erupts from green tongues.

White throat that is your life.

Rachel Jamison Webster © 2013 USA Photo: Marisa Pawelko © 2013 USA Photo: Marisa Pawelko © 2013 USA

How Did We Come to Be the Ones Whose Feet Are Being Washed?

from September Rachel Jamison Webster © 2013 USA

from September Rachel Jamison Webster © 2013 USA Illustration: Marisa Pawelko © 2013 USA

Illustration: Marisa Pawelko © 2013 USA

Best Photo Contest 1st & 3rd Place Winner

‘S

Claudia D. Hernández

Claudia Hernández © 2013 USA

“I have a Cannon Rebel T2i and most of the time I use the auto mode when I don’t have time to play with the exposure settings.”

LT: Do your pictures come from your experiences in your personal life?

CH: As a poet, I see every photograph as a poem. Each image tells a song with its own rhythm.

3rd Place

Photo: Descascarándome Claudia Hernández ©2011 USA

About the photo: I took Descascarándome in Tijuana Baja California, in 2011. Borders have always been an important theme in my life and in my art. This is a literal border that divides Tijuana and San Diego, California.

The fence caught my eye because it’s rusting away, yet it still stands, diving us. At the age of ten, I also had to cross a border, illegally. How I wish I had a camera back then to capture all the borders I had to cross. This photo was taken with an aperture of f8, 400 iso, and fast shutter speed. - Claudia Hernandez

LT: You are currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing for Young Adults. Are there any projects in the works?

CH: I’m on my second semester at Antioch and I absolutely love it. I’m currently working on a memoir composed of short stories.

It will be divided into three parts describing: my childhood in my motherland, Guatemala, my journey to this country, and how I adapted (or not) to this new culture/country. https://www.facebook.com/TodaysRevolutio naryWomenOfColor?ref=ts&fref=ts

Right: La Tolteca’s 1st place photo, Hazy Memory.

1st Place Claudia Hernández © 2013 USA

‘S

Best Photo Contest 2nd Place Winner

Hugo Claudin

Hugo Claudin © 2013 USA Hugo Claudin © 2013 USA

“Currently, I am consumed with collaborations in theater, music and painting.”

Hugo Claudin/Motley Cat Studio © 2013 USA

Hugo Claudin Š 2013 USA

About Hugo’s award winning photo (full page, previous page): 2nd Place

“I got started in photography out of necessity.” continued from page 14

LT: What & Who inspires your work?

HC: I grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico and I saw the work of Jose Clemente Orozco when I was little. Later I was taken in with skateboard culture and in school I was fascinated with Leon Golub, Sue Coe, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, and Ida Applebroog.

One day when I worked at a bookstore I landed a copy of New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century by Guillermo Gómez Peña. Currently, I am consumed with collaborations in theater, music and painting.

Hugo Claudin © 2013 USA

‘S

Best Photo Contest

La Tolteca would like to thank the judges of La Tolteca’s 1st Best Photo Contest, owners and curators Arica Hilton and Sven Asmus of HILTON | ASMUS CONTEMPORARY Gallery located at: 716 N. Wells Chicago, IL 60654 arica@hilton-asmus.com 312.852.8200 www.hiltonasmus.com

Yes, It Was My Grandmother Yes, it was my grandmother who trained wild horses for pleasure and play.

People knew of her, saying:

She knows how to handle them.

Horses obey that woman.

She worked, skirts flying, hair tied securely in the wind and dust.

She rode those animals hard and was thrown, time and time again.

She worked until they were meek and wanting to please.

She came home at dusk,

tired and dusty,

smelling of sweat and horses.

She couldn’t cook, my father said smiling, your grandmother hated to cook.

Oh Grandmother,

who freed me from cooking.

Grandmother, you must have made sure

I met a man who would not share the kitchen.

I am small like you and do not protect my careless hair from wind or rain - it tangles often, Grandma, and it is wild and untrained. from A Breeze Swept Through by Luci Tapahonso Š 2013 USA

A Birthday Poem This morning, the sunrise is a brilliant song cradling tiny birds and brittle leaves. The world responds, stretching, humming. The sunlight is Diyin, sacred beams as the Holy Ones arrive with prayers.

They bring gifts in the cold dawn. Again, as a Diné woman, I face east on the porch and pray for Hózhó one more time. For today, allow me to share Hózhó, the beauty of all things being right and proper as in songs the Holy Ones gave us. They created the world, instilling stories and lessons so we would know Diyin surrounds us. Our lives were set by precise prayers and stories to ensure balance. Grant me the humor Diné elders relish so. No matter what, let the Diné love of jokes, stories, and laughter create some Hózhó.

Some days, even after great coffee, I need to hear a song to reassure me that the distance from Dinétah is not a world away. I know the soft hills, plains, and wind are Diyin also. Yet I plan the next trip when we will say prayers in the dim driveway. As we drive, Kansas darkens. Prayers and memories protect us. In the tradition of Diné travel, we eat, laugh, refuel, sing. Twice in Texas, Hózhó arose in clear air above the flatness. The full moon was a song

we watched all night. We marveled at how quietly the world is blessed. After midnight, Lori asks about the Diyin Diné’é who dance in the Night Way ceremony. The sacred Diyin Diné’é come after the first frost glistens. Their prayers and long rhythmic songs help us live. This is a Diné way of communion and cleansing. At the Night Way, Hózhó awaits as we come to listen and absorb the songs until they live within. It is true that the world is restored by the Holy Ones who return to the Fourth World to take part in the Night Way. They want to know that the Diyin still exists amongst their children. Their stories and prayers guide us now. At times the Holy Ones feared the Diné would succumb to foreign ways. For them, it is truly Hózhó to see us at the Night Way gathered in the smoky cold. Songs rise with fire smoke. I tell Lori we Diné are made of prayers.

At times, the world may overwhelm us, yet because of the Diyin, each morning we pray to restore Hózhó, Hózhó, Hózhó. from Blue Horses Rush In by Luci Tapahonso © 2013 USA

Blue Horses Rush In

For Chamisa Bah Edmo, Shisóí ,aląąjį, naaghíí

Before the birth, she moved and pushed inside her mother.

Her heart pounded quickly and we recognized the sound of horses running:

the thundering of hooves on the desert floor.

Her mother clenches her fists and gasps.

She moans ageless pain and pushes: This is it!

Chamisa slips out, glistening wet, and takes her first breath.

The wind outside swirls small leaves

and branches in the dark.

Her father’s eyes are wet with gratitude.

He prays and watches both mother and baby—stunned.

This baby arrived amid a herd of horses,

horses of different colors.

White horses ride in on the breath of the wind.

White horses from the east where plants of gold chamisa simmer in the moonlight.

She arrived amid a herd of horses.

Blue horses enter from the south bringing the scent of prairie grasses from the small hills outside.

She arrived amid a herd of horses.

Yellow horses rush in, snorting from the desert in the south.

It is possible to see across the entire valley to Niist’áá from Tó.

Bah, from here your grandmothers went to war long ago.

She arrived amid a herd of horses.

Black horses came from the north.

They are the lush summers of Montana and the still white winters of Idaho.

Chamisa, Chamisa Bah. It is all this that you are.

You will grow: laughing, crying, and we will celebrate each change you live.

You will grow strong like the horses of your past.

You will grow strong like the horses of your birth. from Blue Horses Rush In by Luci Tapahonso © 2013 USA

REVIEW Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso 280 pages paperback; $15.40 Arte PĂşblico Press; 2013

Beach, Bed and Bar:

Frozen Branches

My words come, sparse and gradual with the same developing momentum of winter’s appetite. We’re upon May, and yet winter carries on. I surrender, give up. I give in to the season’s persistent wetness and pale beauty, but long to escape its bone-chilling thrall even before it descends at the end of each autumn. There’s the car, the getaway.

There’s the car. I can disappear for a little while, but what am I really running from?

It’s the sun I am after. It’s the god-sun I miss more urgently, light that my body echoes at its core and from behind clear brown eyes not ready to lay off just yet.

Connections with others languish, delicate and aimless like frozen branches held back before the thaw. Impeccable patterns of reclusion and distance, crystalline silence, proclaiming their own angles of persuasion for me to follow. As if that’s the constant virtue of the world. As if I alone am on a tether, barking for a master stroke, for wellearned wages, for understanding, and for the robin’s good evening song that seems to say, They’re Here, They’re Here. So open the doors and let them in. Unbolt the sunroof, crack it wide beyond a slit. Turn up the volume and face that bass. Smack the dash, laughing. Yes, I can laugh when there’s gumption and a whale of spirit. Laughing I can do especially in the warm bosom of the car. But it’s you I miss. It’s you I really miss.

We’ve gone a fine distance, you and I, kept mobile and fed our souls at the pump. At times the price was too high, but the drive so useful to help take the edge off. I have made myself unavailable. I am not here, not for me and not for us.

Not present, and yet I am about in person.

What might my homeland say, those depending on me who pull through there?

Not present. They wait, palms turned up, wanting and questioning.

And I say in return: I have remained eternally at your side. Were you ever with me and for me? Are you with me still? I’ve heard it said, distance makes the heart grow fonder. This I want to believe, but visible through the glass shield between us is a moratorium of something—call it the interchange, or duty if you want. Winter’s grip etched in watertight grids.

Photo: Ignatius Valentine Aloysius © 2013 USA

The season humbles and rectifies what lies in strain: thoughts dismantled from reality, times clenched in excess. That must be so. I’ll have my foot on the pedal. I am ready, reminded that winter will soon take back its force and slip into history again, its arms thrown open to a new dash.◆ Ignatius Valentine Aloysius (Workshopista, Chicago, 2013) is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. He is a fiction reader for TriQuarterly.

Oaxaca Take My Heart

Take my heart if only a petal from a rose cut in half as edges darken, my drying blood. Paint white tablecloths with my dye. Smudge me. Use me as crimson ink, distort my memory, split me into the past where I know within these lines something true a dual nature of my own where trees shall feel like me.

I, like them.

Not any tree.

Existing free yet captive un árbol de amor in Oaxaca embracing my pillar out from roots a crown of palms above my cup where my heart beats from my stem hip’s bloom

Photo: Marisa Pawelko © 2013 USA

xochitl runpon bey calle de alegria somewhere, Baja 0005671

Adrianna Herrera Amparán © 2013 USA (Workshopista, Española, NM 2011)

Announcements •Must be original and unpublished; any theme.

•English or Spanish (No translations) •No multiple submissions. (No poems that are being submitted for consideration for publication ) •Deadline: February 14, 2014 •Entry Reading Fee: $20 USD per entry. Up to three sonnets per entry (Paypal: ac@anacastillo.com) •Grand Prize: $100.00 USD, publication and feature in LT Spring Equinox Issue 2014 •Second Place: $50.00 USD, publication in LT Spring Equinox Issue 2014 •Submissions and queries: tolteca@anacastillo.com

Become La Tolteca’s Sonneteer!

What Is A Sonnet?

A sonnet is a lyric poem of fourteen lines.

English sonnet rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. (iambic pentameter) Italian sonnet rhyme scheme is abbabba cdecde First quatrain: An exposition of the main theme and main metaphor.

Second quatrain given. ninth line).

Couplet: Summarizes and leaves the reader with a new, concluding image.

Famous Sonnet Excerpts How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace…

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: --Shakespeare

(And when love fades… )

Only until this cigarette is ended, A little moment at the end of all, Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended, I will permit my memory to recall And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.

Yours is a face of which I can forget But in your day this moment is the sun --Edna St. Vincent Millay

Gibrán Papaloyaotl Güido

Categories: For queries regarding Writer’s Residence: anacastilloworkshops@gmail.com

Ana Castillo Memoir Writing Workshop (+ lunch con vino) Where: Rancho La Fina - Taos, NM When: August 3, 2013 10am-4pm

Southwest Festival of the Written Word Where: Silver City, NM When: September 28, 2013 2-4:30pm

MA/MFA Program Introductory Memoir Writing Workshop Where: English Dept. - Northwestern University - Chicago, IL When: Fall Semester - Tuesday evenings For more information, email anacastilloworkshops@gmail.com Please be sure to visit www.anacastillo.com and subscribe to the newsletter for upcoming workshops in 2014.