Pleiades Interview with Sergio Troncoso

"There are many hidden philosophical questions and issues in the book. How do you develop character? How do you morph from idealism to realism as you move into adulthood? The book addresses racism, as well. Along the way some people are welcoming to Turi and Arnulfo, but others are racist and xenophobic. They don’t want Mexican Americans or Mexicans living in this country. How do you keep that racist poison from infecting your soul as you are faced with this kind of hate? Turi has to fight for his place in this country rather than to assume he belongs. He has to survive here, and he’s not turning back. Connecticut is where he’ll make his stand. Nobody’s Pilgrims is a thriller."

Thank you to Pleiades Magazine, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, and Rey Rodriguez for this interview.

https://pleiadesmag.com/an-interview-with-sergio-troncoso/

Inklette Magazine's Conversation With Sergio Troncoso

A very in-depth interview (perhaps my most revealing in many years) with Devanshi Khetarpal of Inklette Magazine. Thank you, Devanshi, for the conversation.

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“A deep freedom of consciousness,” Sergio says, “is what writing is about.” “Damn even yourself,” he says and advises writers not to fall for their own proclivities, judgements and tendencies. He wants to ask the toughest questions of himself, as much as he asks them of others around them and that’s why he loves writing. He said, “Let me be blunt. I don’t even think I know myself.” It’s a huge admission to come from a writer, and it is difficult to do what Sergio wants writers to do: to turn the lens onto our own selves as we do towards others.
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https://inklettemagazine.com/2022/07/19/a-conversation-with-sergio-troncoso/

American Book Review Interview with Sergio Troncoso

Frederick Luis Aldama interviews Sergio Troncoso in American Book Review:

“You are your own best experiment. If you’re digging honestly into yourself, you’re also looking at the problems and issues that that make up the human condition. So I think my ideal reader begins with someone on the border who loves to read. But I also think of readers beyond the border, those who have left and those who have come back, because many do precisely that.”

(Volume 42, Number 4, May/June 2021, pp. 14-28.)

https://sergiotroncoso.com/news/americanbookreview/Sergio-Troncoso-American-Book-Review.pdf

Sergio Troncoso with Brad King, Downtown Writers Jam Podcast

Please take a listen to my wonderful conversation with Brad King of The Downtown Writers Jam Podcast from Pittsburgh, PA. I loved our easy, free-flowing talk. We connected with each other as we dove deep into my history in Ysleta, Texas on the United States-Mexico border, how I became a writer, and how my working class upbringing has informed my writing as an outsider. Thank you, Brad King.

https://thewritersjam.com/episode-138-sergio-troncoso/

Rumpus Interview: Nepantla and Radical Empathy with Sergio Troncoso

“For me, nepantla is about radical empathy.... [R]eading is about that, how when you read, you’re entering somebody’s world, fictionalized or not and that person should open up your mind to some new possibility of existence, to some new way of looking at the world.”

https://therumpus.net/2021/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-sergio-troncoso/

Contra Viento Journal Intervews Sergio Troncoso

My interview in Contra Viento Journal was published today. Thank you Gabriel Dozal and Sean McCoy.

"I also think growing up dirt poor on the border had a profound effect on me. My neighborhood in Ysleta hasn’t changed too much: it’s become working-class, when it was actually poorer in the ’60s and ’70s. Not even working class. I believe, and have always believed, in los de abajo, the very poor, and what they have to contribute, the ideas they explore, the importance of their lives, even if so many others just ignore them. If that’s empathy, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. But even that word, ‘empathy,’ seems studied somehow: these are just the people I knew, the people I grew up with, my people."

https://contravientojournal.org/radiant-perspectives-on-the-border-conversation-sergio-troncoso-peculiar-kind-of-immigrants-son/

October Readings and Events

I'll be in New Jersey, Oregon, Maryland, Texas, and California in October.  I am exhausted just thinking about it!  I hope to see you at one of these readings or events.  That is what makes these trips so worthwhile to me, when I connect with readers face-to-face. My complete schedule of readings and appearances is at: www.sergiotroncoso.com/readings/index.htm.

October 5, 2011, 5 PM---Weiss Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, with other authors of You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens, Jersey City, NJ.

October 8, 2011, 6 PM---National Endowment for the Arts Stage, Wordstock Book and Literary Festival, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR.

October 16, 2011, 2 PM---The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD.

October 18, 2011, 6:30-8:30 PM---Collegiate School, Collegiate Book Festival’s Opening Reception, 260 West 78th Street, New York, NY.

October 21, 2011, 5-7 PM---The Twig Book Shop, 200 E. Grayson, Suite 124, San Antonio, TX.

October 22-23, 2011---Texas Book Festival (Saturday: 11:30-12:30 PM, “Stories from El Paso,” and Sunday: 1:30-2:30 PM, “Latino Mystery Stories,” and 3:00-4:00, “The Art of Personal Reflection”), Texas State Capitol, Austin, TX.

October 24, 2011, 4:30 PM---San Francisco Public Library, The International Center, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA.

October 25, 2011---Reedley College, 995 North Reed Avenue, Reedley, CA.

Also, I recently posted a YouTube video of a reading and discussion of my novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust. I hope you enjoy it: http://youtu.be/m4pwgIuGUOM.

I received a nice review of my new book of essays, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, from the El Paso Times: "Troncoso is a complicated man trying to understand a complicated world. In his quest for understanding, he eloquently shares lessons learned in 16 provocative essays. These very personal essays cross several borders: cultural, historical, and self-imposed. For example, he contemplates writer's block in 'A Day Without Ideas,' comparing it to a deathlike existence where nothing matters and he will ‘simply be there.’ In a painful letter to his sons detailing their mother's struggle with breast cancer, Troncoso the writer reveals his true identity as Troncoso the frightened, caring, and strong father. He takes on the 9/11 attackers, in a piece called 'Terror and Humanity,' not with hatred or revenge, but with a plea for basic humanity....the collection remains timely. We owe it to ourselves to read, savor and read them again."

Finally, I am working on several projects at the same time, while reading across the country for both books, correcting one son's essay for English, reviewing Spanish grammar for a test the other son will have today, feeding my beloved cat Ocistar, buying milk, and well, you get the picture.  I am not that complicated; I am just exhausted.  It has been a busy time, but so far I have not dropped anything I am juggling.

I love to hear from readers. That lifts me up like nothing else.  Every time readers write to me about how they enjoyed one of my stories, or identified with one of my characters, or thought about their lives differently after reading my work, that day my bones do not ache and I feel as powerful as the Housatonic River. Thank you.

Work@Character

Yesterday Laura and I had our last face-to-face teacher conference of the academic year for our younger son Isaac. Next year he will join his older brother at one of the best high schools in New York City, and this conference was bittersweet for us.

Both our children attended the Bank Street School for Children starting as three-year-olds. Aaron graduated two years ago, and I’m on the parents’ committee for Isaac’s graduation in two months. Bank Street has been a remarkable school for both our children, and it will be hard to leave it.

But what struck me was how Laura and I reached this point, with two similar, yet also different kids, both who work hard and possess unique abilities, but who also needed to overcome specific challenges. My kids are excellent students at their schools; they have scored at the highest levels in standardized tests to reach their goals. Both are avid readers of very different books, yet Aaron and Isaac share a sense of humor that is light years beyond mine. Do I even have a sense of humor? I am their strict, mercurial father.

What is obscured by this bit of bragging about my kids —who are not kids anymore but young adults— is the years of hard work of parenting to help Aaron and Isaac become the best version of themselves. I believe in learning by doing, Bank Street’s philosophy, but also Aristotle’s. I never did my children’s homework. On the contrary, in recent years, I have hardly seen what they have worked on after coming home from school. But when they have a question or a problem, I teach them how to find the answer for themselves. When they are stuck, I prompt them with questions to guide them to their own revelations.

We provide the space and time to focus quietly on their schoolwork. Friends who are wild or rude, I tell my kids, are not welcomed in our home. When Aaron and Isaac start wavering on the good habits we have encouraged, when they watch too much TV, or have not chosen the next book to read in bed, then yes, I am the heavy. I draw the bright line too many parents fail to draw: to turn off the TV, or to make finding a new book a priority, or to rewrite what they thought was ‘good enough.’ Real pride in your work is when you learn to do it yourself —not when somebody else does it for you— and when you know the work you accomplished was excellent. But often children have to be guided to get there.

Case in point. A few weeks ago, Isaac had brought home two short papers in which the teachers had given him only average marks. Isaac knew it wasn’t very good work, and he showed me the papers with what seemed a mix of fear and shame in his eyes. I read the papers, and yes, they were lightly researched, and his arguments were unsupported and often unclear. I remembered when he had worked on these papers, and I knew he had not given them the time they required, or the focus. Isaac is a bright kid and a good writer, but perhaps that week he had worried too much about succeeding at Oblivion on the Xbox, and too little about the failures of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

We talked about it, and we decided he would ask his teachers if he could rewrite both papers over the following two weeks of Spring Break. I told him it didn’t matter if his teachers didn’t give him different grades, but what did matter was that he should do his best work. And this wasn’t his best work, was it? No, he said, it wasn’t. Yes, I was a bit the heavy. I also told Isaac he wouldn’t play the Xbox over Spring Break, nor watch any TV, until those papers were rewritten, and well.

Isaac asked his teachers about rewriting the essays on the Friday before Spring Break, and they agreed. The teachers also decided to extend that offer to all the kids in the class: if anybody else wanted to rewrite their papers, they could. But, as far as I know, only Isaac would rewrite his papers during this vacation.

Now let me tell you about what happened over Spring Break. Isaac worked from morning until afternoon, for five days straight, rereading and expanding his source material, outlining his arguments, and reconstructing his essays. Sometimes he would ask questions. Occasionally he showed me what he had written, and I gave him my honest opinion. He rewrote page after page.

Whether he was motivated by his desire to get to Oblivion before his vacation ended, to please his mean old father, to show the teachers what he could do, or a combination of these, I don’t know. But Isaac worked independently, and ferociously. I was in awe, and prouder than any father could be.

Weeks later, at the conference, Isaac’s teachers noted how remarkably better the second go-around of his Civil War papers had been. They had given Isaac the highest marks for his rewrites. That was the work they had been accustomed to seeing from Isaac. Moreover, the teachers happily noted that on an in-class essay after Spring Break Isaac had again written a beautifully coherent essay on the Civil Rights movement.

Perhaps the teachers suspected that I, the writer-father, had ‘helped’ him on the rewrites during Spring Break, but the in-class essay confirmed it was Isaac who had done the work on the rewrites. And indeed it was. I just set the bar high. I did not allow him to lower it because I knew he could reach it. I gave my son advice to prompt him to think for himself when he needed it. Isaac learned by doing it, the hard way, the only way. The way toward good character.

Packinghouse Poet

I have spent the last week delightfully immersed in the poetry of David Dominguez, who wrote The Ghost of César Chávez and Work Done Right.  David is also co-founder and poetry editor of The Packinghouse Review from California’s San Joaquin Valley.  You should read this poet.

His narrative poetry struck multiple chords with me.  His images were evocative, from working at Galdini Sausage grinding pork, to driving his red pickup across the California desert, to setting the tile floor for his new house.  These images reminded me of growing up in Ysleta and working on Texas farms as a child. I hated the poverty of this existence, yet it also defined who I was.  There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure.  You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.

Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses.  We idolize Warren Buffett and the culture of wealth.  However, we don’t realize the meaning of the most radical recommendations for profitable companies and the ideal business climate: monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing power and predatory practices against hapless, powerless consumers.

What is best is a balance, between making money for entrepreneurs and their companies, and providing beneficial products and services for consumers, with protections against abuses.  I think we have lost that balance in this country.  The richest of the rich have dramatically increased their share of the nation’s income, while the bottom sixty percent of this country —yes the majority of the people— have seen their share of income shrink in the past thirty years.  Worse yet, multitudes have been convinced we need even less protection from the abuses of Wall Street, that we need to give more tax breaks to businesses and the super-wealthy, and that somehow these policies will rain money on the plebes below and return the United States to an idealized past glory.  Good luck with that.

But I digress, yet only slightly.  David Dominguez’s poetry brings us back to a focus on the working man, the pride and heartache of work, and the heritage of our families, Chicano and Mexicano.  This is what I think good literature should be: expertly crafted lines, unique images that spur thinking, and…and…a focus against the grain and against what society stupidly values, a view that unsettles our comfortable perspectives.  This kind of good literature fights against our über-focus on ‘material success equals what is worthy.’ This pernicious focus infected the literary world long ago, and transformed ‘what is good’ in books into only ‘what is entertaining,’ escapism for the masses.

What I believe propels David Dominguez’s poetry even a step further is his introspection. He wrestles with how his success as a writer and teacher has left him in an ambiguous place beyond obreros, beyond his father and grandfather, yet not quite an Americano:

At the register, the cashier glanced at my blazer.

“This it?” she asked, not “Hola, señor.”

Once, after weeding and hoeing my flower beds all day,

I came here to buy insecticide and Roundup,

and the same cashier asked me, “Cómo le va, señor?”

Like many, I prefer Macy’s over the swap meet

and would rather play a round of golf

alongside the wet eucalyptus clinging to the riverbank

than rise every morning to mow lawns

or gather with others on street corners,

praying for the chance to hop into trucks as underpaid

construction workers building housing tracts.

I’m spoken to informally in English if I’m clean

but in Spanish if I’m sweaty and dirty.

It happens all the time; I could bet on it:

the odds are as reliable as rope.

This strange, in-between existence has certainly been central to my life.  To succeed in the American literary world, you must write in English, perfectly and singularly.  You must appeal to what most literary buyers want to read (or at least a significant number of readers). This 'market appeal' often has nothing to do with obreros, or Chicanos, or issues that criticize the mainstream.  You must appeal to the lowest common denominator in this culture, and that is ‘entertainment that transports you somewhere, without making you think too much, without being too complex.’  As you, the writer, push forward into American culture (should you?), are you leaving more of yourself behind?  Who were you anyway?  Who should you be?  These questions have no easy answers.

Marie Ponsot

I returned from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Annual Conference in Chicago this weekend inspired by the most unlikeliest of writers: Marie Ponsot, a poet. I do not write poetry, but I do care about the role of the writer in the world and the craft of writing. I worry that my sense of how and why I write is antiquated, to help others into explorations of ideas often unmarketable and unusual. As a contrarian, a loner, and an Aristotlean, is there still a place for me?

In the panel, “The Duty of a Writer,” Marie Ponsot said simply, “The duty of a poet is to write poetry.” The work of writing defines a poet, she said. The struggle to write a poem. The action of writing a poem. Not the thought, nor the hope of writing poetry. “The mastery of skill is the mastery of oneself.” This mastery is internal; it is inexpensive; it is ongoing. Above all, this is a practical mastery. To listen is one of the most important skills a writer must cultivate; to listen in a world full of noises and phenomena is difficult. The act of work sharpens and deepens the writer’s listening skills. I am paraphrasing Ponsot’s words, leaving out so much, and perhaps distorting her at once complicated and simple message.

To improve as a writer, I have tried to slow down my thoughts, and my fingers, to ponder words and sentences before they become entities on the page. Every writer, I believe, must work against his or her weaknesses. Mine are that I write too fast and too colloquially. I can create a story (plot plot plot!), yet I often find the care missing from my words. I do often ‘see’ beyond what others see: I read as much philosophy as literature and I do not care for the crowd. But often that ‘sight’ is not translated into the words that reveal a new world on the page. I am trying to improve.

In a recent essay, “Trapped,” I wrote about how my body and its “loin energy” at once give me an advantage and a disadvantage. I love to work; the more I work, the more I can work. Yet this nervousness, or incessant thinking and doing and wanting to do, hampers my listening. To write better, I need to quiet myself. Reading poetry and studying the mechanics of poetry and listening to poets have helped me to counter my weaknesses as a prose writer.

I returned from Chicago, and discovered that I already knew Marie Ponsot’s work. Scott Hightower, another poet-teacher, had long ago recommended Beat Not the Poor Desk, by Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen. This is the best book on teaching writing I have ever read, and I had forgotten the authors but remembered the impact this book had on my work years ago. Without friends like Scott and teachers like Marie Ponsot, where would I be? These good writers are good people who care to teach.

Incidentally, I attended another panel, “Big House/Small House,” with LeAnne Howe, Rilla Askew, Tracy Daugherty, Molly Giles, and Allen Wier. This was also, in my opinion, another excellent panel at the AWP. In particular, Tracy Daugherty’s thoughtful reflections on the right expectations of literary writers for their careers, their relationship with an editor, and ‘what should be enough for the good writer’ brought me back again to how and why good words on the page matter most of all. I will be in Denver next year, again to listen and improve.