A Wish, An Excerpt, and Some Music

Today is my grandmom's birthday. Here's a link to a poem I wrote about her. It's called Dizzy.

I learned what Halloween as the same time I learned what Mischief Night was. My parents left all the lights on downstairs that night, and they closed all the blinds. I smiled to myself. It was like our private family hideout. Why didn’t home always feel like that? But their mouths were grim. In the morning, broken eggs streaked the windows of the houses on our block. The tree on the corner was mummified in toilet paper. I had nothing but my mind to connect the dots between last night and that morning. Halloween for me wasn’t about ghosts and candy; it was about the shadowy strangers who liked to threaten you from the shadows finally stepping out of the shadows.

Best Reason for a Border Crossing

The cast and crew of 1/20, the movie I wrote, were invited to speak at New York Law School last week. I wasn't there, but Ayako Ibaraki and Kayla Dempsey were. Gerardo, the director, was Skyping in, which is why he looks like a talking head from Futurama.

Also, if you're in Mexico City, 1/20 is showing at La Casa Del Cine this Monday, August 24. Admission is free, so if you really want to see it, you can buy a plane ticket and count that as your admission. (Plus, bonus, Mexico!)

C MALO PRODUCCIONES Presenta la cinta: “1/20” El documental “1/20” muestra la perspectiva de México desde unapunk inmigrante japonesa orgullosa de los Estados Unidos.  No hay subtítulos, porque la sutileza de las demandas de actuación se centra en la audiencia.  La presentación es suave e infantil como una nueva forma de rebelión contra las convenciones cinematográficas.   La generación de “1/20” ha rechazado todas las reglas, mientras que secretamente busca el sentido en una cortina del nihilismo. La presentación de “1/20” se realizará en Lacasadelcine.mx el miércoles 24 de Agosto a las 9 PM. ¡LA ENTRADA ES LIBRE! ¡NO FALTEN!

Meanwhile, I'm still pretty lost in my new memoir. (In a good way, I think.) (Uh, mostly.) With fiction, you're creating a story, and every part of it--characters, plot, setting, accidents--goes toward building the story. When you write nonfiction, you're dealing with stuff that already happened, and trying to magically change those things into a story. Even if you already know what the story is, you don't necessarily know what needs to be there for the story to happen. So you can -- hypothetically -- write a chapter that's 15,000 words long, and then realize that it doesn't belong in there at all. And then you just hit DELETE, or tuck it into your back pocket and think it might be good for another story someday, and then you just carry on.

Hypothetically, I mean.