It’s already March! This year is going by so quickly. Luz and I had our un-anniversary this week. 21 years. That’s crazy!

We have been watching season 3 of Jane the Virgin and I have been feeling more and more like I should be writing a novel instead of…everything else.

I’m not writing at all these days, and that’s not good for my brain or my soul.

I taught “Woman Hollering Creek” for the first time this week. And so, it was not that smooth. BUT, I realized that what I like about that story is that it’s the answer to Emma Pérez’s sexuality and discourse. That is, it’s about a community of women, stepping in and changing the tragedy. changing the telenovela story line. Cracking it open and offering new alternative endings. That’s what Felice and Graciela do.

That’s what nobody does for Delgadina.

In Song of the Hummingbird, Graciela Limón writes a new ending for La Llorona, where she kills not her children, but the engineer of her misery, Baltazar, who takes her children away from her. But she is still a woman alone, acting alone. Her relationships are with men: Zintle, Tetla, Baltazar. She is mother to her children: the wings of a bird, Baltazar (II), Paloma (little this and little that).

She has no helpers in the story. She has one nameless helper, who lures Baltazar to the underground passages with stories of hidden gold. But this character has no name and Huitzitzílin has no relationship with them. What would it mean if that person was her lover, her business partner, her comadre?

So then—back to me writing a novel—I was thinking, I should re-write The Order of Santa Rita modeling Cisneros’s writing of Woman Hollering Creek. In terms of narrative voice, structure, time.

SIDE NOTE: “Woman Hollering Creek” should go with “La Historia de Una Marimacha” in the anthology of stories that structure my understanding of the divine. What Night Brings. Luna’s California Poppies. Santora. The God Box. So Far from God. Bless Me Ultima. Portrait of Doña Elena. Wild Steps of Heaven.

 

That’s what I want to write, by the way. I feel like my ultimate goal is teach Portrait of Doña Elena. and Ludlow: Grito de los Mineros.

No, I mean that’s what I want to write. I want to write the abuela’s diary.

I can meditate on that story and then write in that way. And then I can choose another story and use that as a model. That is, I can move my fiction writing out of where it is—stuck!—into another space. and I can follow readers I admire. And I don’t have to wait till I find a creative writing teacher. Orale, I’m nearly 52 years old—“'Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.” Quit looking for someone to be my bridge. To be my teacher.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Fuck that! When the student is ready, she can figure out how to be her own teacher.

[I posted this update on FB and then had to explain the whole concept to Luz and they thought that’s a BRILLIANT idea, because Woman Hollering Creek that is such a perfect story! And it means you have to withhold information from the reader. And it means you have to play with timing, to move beyond “this happened and then that happened” that beginning writers stay stuck in.]

Something like that. Hey, someone in Washington wants to invite me up to give a talk about theology. I should be writing “Towards a Tzlingona Theology.”