Alicia Gaspar De Alba's Blog, page 2

Reading & Book Signing on Dec. 9

To celebrate the paperback release of Calligraphy of the Witch I will be doing a reading & book signing at ChimMaya Art Gallery (5283 E. Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90022) on December 9 from 2-4pm. One of the things I most like about the paperback (other than my darling wife's cover, of course) is the way Marina, Gabi, and Nick at Arte Publico Press made the influence of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the book and on the main character's life, front and center. The story could be described as Sor Juana meets the Salem witch trials, although it's her assistant Concepción who embodies the poetry and philosophy of la décima Musa in New England. This is the flyer that Alma created for the event. Note the nifty code box that can be scanned by a phone or Ipad and it will take you directly to my website. So cool.

Calligraphy of the Witch Book Trailer

After four years of Calligraphy of the Witch being out of print, the paperback edition has just been released by Arte Público Press. I'm so happy the book is available again. When the hardback first edition was released by St. Martin's Press in the Fall of 2007, I had just started Chairing the César Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Administrative work completely absorbed all of my time and energy for three years, and I wasn't able to do the book justice, unlike the success I had with Desert Blood, which I was able to promote widely. Now, Arte Público Press has released the paperback edition of Calligraphy of the Witch, sporting a brand new cover designed by my darling wife, Alma Lopez. Alma is also responsible for this gorgeous book trailer. You can order the book through my website: www.aliciagaspardealba.net, or wherever books are sold. The new cover features performer/musician Lysa Flores as the main character, Concepción Benavídez. Special thanks to Adelina Anthony for performing the part of Concepción's daughter, Hanna Jeremiah, in the book trailer.

Pooling thoughts at the end of my spring sabbatical

Im sitting in my mom's kitchen in El Paso this Friday morning looking out at the contrast between dry desert and the blue pool in the backyard, abandoned most of the time but still glittering the same bright clear blue as the west Texas sky. I'm remembering all the different parties we've had in this backyard, most memorably my 40th piñata party over a decade ago, and even further back, my goodbye party as I prepared to leave El Paso after 27 years and two lifetimes here, to embark on the adventure of PhD school at the U of Iowa (where I only last 9 months). At the time all I had in terms of publishing credits were a few poems and short prose pieces, and the dream of one day being a published author of novels and other booksg gleamed as bright and pristine as this backyard pool. Today I have ten published books, and I sit here contemplating how to balance the completion of two more: my next academic book and the YA novel I've been working on since I finished NaNoWriMo in 2010. It is the end of my spring quarter sabbatical at UCLA which means I have only three months of writing time left before I have to find my Profe hat and start preparing for the new academic year and our first cohort of PhD students in the Chavez Department. I could never have imagined this busy and productive life back in 1985, even with my BA and MA in hand. My life then was like that pool, clear and wide open.

11/11/11

Sold my first book on PayPal! Thank you Allison in Louisiana for purchasing a hardback first edition copy of Sor Juana's Second Dream from my website. I think this bodes well for a triple 11 day. I'm also selling first editions of the totally out of print and hard to find Calligraphy of the Witch. Click here to read the great review AnneMarie Perez posted on Aztlan Reads: http://www.aztlanreads.com/2011/08/27...
Be sure to click on the link at the bottom of the review to see the trailer that my darling Alma made.

No NaNoWriMo this year

I can't believe it's more than a year since I've updated my blog and that's after a year of not teaching. I did finish NaNoWriMo last year for the first time and produced my first YA novel that I'm actually pretty proud of. This year instead of launching into a brand new story I'm going to rerevise Drag King Debutante even though I am teaching a huge intro course of nearly 400 students and writing two new research essays. But did promise my agent she'd get the book in January. So that's what I'll be working on for the next 2.5 months. and learning to play on my iPad.

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo 2010

Over twenty years ago, when I lived in Boston, committed to living the writer's life, though stuck in a 9-5 job at a braille press (yes, I learned to read braille, but with my eyes rather than my fingers), I learned the most valuable lesson of my working life: that time is a non-renewable commodity. That I might be able to make up money, but I would never be able to make up time. Thus began my very conscious effort to use whatever time I had to write in the most productive way possible. I think this has been the secret to my productivity, that I no longer take time for granted, that I know each passing day is a day I will never get back, each hour an hour I could have moved forward on my writing. For three years, between 2007-2010, I wasn't able to move forward in my writing very much because I was serving as Chair of the Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Not that I wasn't productive, and I took advantage of the time I did have to write three new research articles and edit two new anthologies, and I did actually manage to eke out a brand new short story for an anthology on YA mystery fiction. But there were all these ideas for a new novel swirling around in the back of my brain, haunting and taunting me on a daily basis, that I did not have time to sit down and flesh out in my journal. Usually, they would needle under my eyelids while I was undergoing an acupuncture treatment, although occasionally, they also danced on my dashboard while I sat in L.A. traffic on the 405. It was these brilliant (I thought) but amorphous ideas that I attempted to channel into a NaNoWriMo novel in 2008 and again in 2009. But I never got very far, not even halfway through the 50K challenge, and still, I was content to have been able to write anything at all. This year, I have a sabbatical and that means I finally have time to sit down and really listen to and voyeurize those story-ideas that have been haunting me for three years. Of course, October is a great month to be haunted, and November, with its cooler weather, its occasional gray skies, its gothic possibilities, lends itself well to daily summoning at the computer. And so, I have resolved that this year, 2010, I will finish the 50K challenge, and out of it will emerge a very raw, very rough draft of a YA novel that is at this very moment sitting in lotus at the top of my head.

Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera

It seems eerily appropriate that my edited book on the murdered women of Juárez is going to be published in November 2010, the centennial anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. How did Juárez go from being a seedbed of revolutionary thinking in 1910 to a killing field of women and girls and a cesspool of narco slaughter one hundred years later? Maybe Porfirio Díaz was right: poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. But it's more than the crimes of proximity that have affected my hometown (because the El Paso/Juárez border, el Chamizal, to be exact, is literally the place where I was born). It's all of the ways in which this portal to the promised land has been poisoned, exploited, and coerced into losing its soul to Big Business and Big Brother. The deaths--particularly the femicides, which Making a Killing is all about--are the detritus of all this spoilage. The greed at the root of this spoilage is nothing new; it marbled the heart of Porfirio Díaz as much as it worms through the guts of any current-day politician, north or south of the border, whose only interest is to profit at anyone's expense, that is, to "make a killing." Unlike my previous mystery novel on the subject (Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders), this book is a collection of 13 scholarly essays and testimonios that focus exclusively on analyzing this continuous heinous crime wave of gendered violence on the El Paso/Juárez border, and the different forms of activism that have arisen over the last 17 years. Click on the thumbnail picture to see the book's table of contents and introductory essay.

The Sabbatical Begins

And now, finally, after a month of house renovations, family visits, and a Vegas birthday vacation filled with bowling and blackjack, my sabbatical after a three-year term as department chair officially begins. As a "broche de oro" to close my chairship, I got the news that UC Systemwide had officially approved our department's M.A./Ph.D. proposal, and this was a fantabulous way to step down, although I know we all have our work cut out for us to get the graduate program off the ground. Still, as Elena our department's long-time administrative specialist said, I helped launch the new future of our department and I feel damn good about it. As to what my sabbatical brings, here's what I'm hoping for: much-needed rest and perhaps even the end of my stress-induced fibromyalgia; more exercise and walks on the beach; completion of a new academic book manuscript; beginning a new novel, and I'm playing with the idea of a YA book; and lots of bowling. Got a personalized bowling ball for my birthday, some spiffy bowling shoes, and a very professional-looking bowling bag to carry it all in (and with my Vegas blackjack winnings, I got Alma the same, and she helped upgrade our bags to rollers with her roulette winnings) and we are looking into lesbian bowling in Los Angeles. I think we found something at Lucky Strike Lanes in Hollywood. And we continue to look to the stars for signs of one named Azul.

Sex y Corazon Symposium @ UCLA

On Friday, February 12, 2010 the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Chair Alicia Gaspar de Alba will be hosting a one-day symposium that looks back over the last fifteen years of Chicana/o Studies and examines how Chicana/o queer and feminist scholars have changed the field.

This historical symposium will gather over twenty-five Chicana and Chicano scholars and practitioners whose work intersects race, class, gender and sexuality paradigms within both traditional and interdisciplinary fields. Speakers will also speak to how their scholarship and activism utilizes love as a political strategy for social change.

The symposium is free and open to the public.

Online registration required at http://sites.google.com/site/sexycorazon2010/.

Seating is limited so register today.

"Love has no gender..."

It makes me very proud to have had two of our wedding pictures selected for this Courage Campaign "igualdad" advertisement. The pictures, especially the one showing "the kiss" part of our ceremony, always puts a little knot in my throat as I remember what an incredibly beautiful day that was, and how perfect everything was from the passion roses to the clear color of the Pacific Ocean, to the way Captain Chuck's white uniform and Alma's Veracruzana dress and the black embroidery of the Virgen de Guadalupe on my white guayabera all stood out against the colorful Mexican dresses of our flower girls, ring bearers, and madrinas. It's almost our one-year anniversary and I can still relive every moment of that perfect day in which our families and closest friends came together to celebrate and honor our love and union. It's a bittersweet memory, however, when just a few months later the retrograde people of this State overturned the right to marry for gays and lesbians. What I love about these Courage Campaign ads, in English and Spanish, is that they put that right into the context of other civil rights struggles which have been won through the unity of open hearts and minds. As Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz once said, "love has no gender, love is our very soul."