Hello, pretty little doves!
Moving right into things—DOUBLE PRIDE PANIC! is coming up on Wednesday, June 24th, 8PM sharp. This event is free and 21+. NOWHERE is located at 322 E 14th St (btwn 1st/2nd) and we’re hoping you can join us for a wonderful evening that will feature six queer writers of color. Come join Vince Bernard, Rosalind Lloyd, Ian Rafael Titus, Taylor Siluwé, Claudia Narvaez-Meza and Brandon Lacy Campos, for what surely will be a fierce reading of poetry and prose. I’m thrilled to be hosting.
I interviewed one of the aforementioned presenters, Taylor Siluwé, for the June 15th issue of Ambiente, regarding his new book and what gets him “Dancing with the Devil”, which is the name of his fresh, new fiction collection. You can read that here www.ambiente.us. Ambiente also posted a book review I wrote for the hair-raising Tales of the City of Mexico (Lethe 2002). Both of these books are terrific!
On the radical news front: The Radical Homosexual Agenda contacted me recently, notifying me of their third-annual PARADE WITHOUT A PERMIT, which they’re holding at Washington Square Park, on Friday, June 19th, 9PM. If this sounds interesting to you, check them out here:
Latina lesbian comedienne Marga Gomez is performing in NYC from Thursday, June 18th through Sunday the 21st at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater on W 47th Street and 8th Avenue. Her new show Long Island Iced Latina chronicles her Long Island childhood and is sure to be a bellyacher. Don’t miss her if you can help it—we’re going on Saturday night. Check Marga Gomez out here: http://www.margagomez.com/
Queer Latino Musings on Literature is proud to be participating in the first-ever “Latino Virtual Book Tour”, which is debuting on the blogosphere with the very talented Puerto Rican-American writer Estevan Vega. Estevan will be available for questions, etc, right here on this blog page via the Comments section, on June 25th, all day. So if you have things you’d like to ask him, fire away! Here is his artist statement and an excerpt from his latest book, The Sacred Sin.
Hello, world,
My name is Estevan Vega. I’m a writer. That’s usually all I like to tell people. That and that I’m not crazy about speaking in front of people, or really attractive girls. Scratch that…any girl. Some of you might have heard of me, but most of you probably haven’t. Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. But, if you care to know, I write fiction, and have a tendency to be very transparent. So, here it goes.
As a kid, I would have told you that reading books was the farthest thing from entertainment. I never really appreciated the written word and absolutely hated books…until the fifth grade, when I realized I might actually have to like them if I were going to start contributing to the collection. From small short stories and fictional essays for school, I began to take a liking to darker, supernatural elements, and have since enjoyed incorporating them into each story. As the second of four sons, sometimes I felt like the “monkey in the middle.” I liked to write when my brothers couldn’t stand to read. Rock music constantly poured out of my speakers, while they took a liking to rap and hip-hop. Oh, did I mention I was chubby? Needless to say, I felt somewhat out of place at times, even in my own house. But, I can’t say I’m fully bitter, because it gave me some good writing material, personal experience, and pent-up aggression, which occasionally breathes out of the more cynical characters I create, like Jude Foster in The Sacred Sin.
Publishing a book is no easy feat. I learned that firsthand as a sophomore in high school, when I published Servant of the Realm. My first literary venture was a sci-fi thriller about a teen who steals a corrupting serum which allows him to see the deaths of those closest to him. He spends much of the novel trying to change their fates and gets addicted to these horrible circumstances. The Sacred Sin, my second novel, was released when I was 18, and deals with a deeper subject: the darkness within all of us. It’s about struggling with the demons surrounding us—literal and figurative—as well as warring against the inner demons urging us to do the darkest things.
I have lived in Connecticut all my life, moving to and from various cities, but never fully escaping. I now reside in a small town called Portland, but have spent the last year up by Boston at Gordon College.
And now, here’s a taste of The Sacred Sin.
It felt so real again, like he was living it over, only this time he could rewind it, fast-forward it, freeze it. Each time it grew more painful, truer. Engle Baker, the miserable soul whom the rest of the outside world knew as Morgan’s daddy, was still whispering that name to him now, so many years later. It was real, not just memory.
Morgan walked into the bathroom and shut the door. It was dark, the way things usually were in the Baker house. A fracture of light fought its way in through the bottom slit in the door, but the darkness was too great. He shuddered. Something was nudging up against his foot. At first, he became startled, but it was just the body of his father, the remains at least. At this point in time, the fleshy parts were completely unidentifiable, a gash where the throat used to be now decayed and bony so as to appear as though there never was one at all. The holes where each eyeball once was were hollow and black; Morgan hated it when people stared at him, most of all Engle. But he didn’t even mind the stench anymore. Incensed and afraid again, Morgan took out a blade and put it into his hand, feeling the blood drain from his body. But no matter how hard he squeezed, no matter how deep the wound, it kept closing up. He hated not being able to hurt himself, not able to kill the pain. He kept the blade tucked into the flesh of his palm for nearly five minutes. Tears swelled in his eyes, irate painful tears. Real tears. Morgan hadn’t cried in twenty years, but tonight—for a few moments—he remembered what it was like to be human.
Look for me in the coming weeks on my first ever Virtual Blog Tour, and visit www.estevanvega.com for ordering info, my personal blog, and up-to-date news on the development of my latest novel Arson, releasing later this year.
Thanks Estevan!
And thank you to all my wonderful readers!!!
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xoxo Charlie Vázquez
I’ll be checking throughout the afternoon/day…welcome! For a while I noticed it was mostly female authors writing about their family histories. Where is it going these days though?