Artist Interviews: Jay Rodriguez, musician/composer

 

I met Jay Rodriguez at a rehearsal for a performance at Symphony Space with Arturo O'Farrill and the AfroLatin Jazz Orchestra, Tato Laviera, Bill Ware and a gaggle of very talented poets and performers.

 1. What was the first musical instrument you wanted to play and why?

The recorder..because everyone else had one in Kindergarten and my parents did not want to get me one.We had just immigrated from Barranquilla. I guess it was not so important in their respective minds at the time.I always did love singing and dancing.We had parties many a weekend and dancing was obligatory.

2. What gig convinced you of your viability as an artist?

I had been studying under Tito D Rivera...and after a lesson.. Paquito D Rivera took me with him to sit in at Mikell's back in the day.I was 14 .Slide Hampton hung with me and drove me home after the hit.I played, MOMENTS NOTICE, a blues ?, and EL DIA QUE ME QUIERAS.I was never going to be the same..I also remember getting to playing Lead alto with Victor Venegas,Candido and Marco Rizo for a big band..around that time.and in 8 th grade I remember scoring the gig with Vicente Pacheco (singer with Wilfredo Vargas ).I was on call with Milly Jocelyn and the merengue scene..i would go from gigs to my performing Arts on 46th many a night..ha...

3. . What has been the most surprising aspect of your trajectory as a musician?

I must say.a few... co founding the Groove Collective back in the early 90's (growing up within that ensemble as musicians and as people )-we were in our early 20's,working with ,Gil Evans,Prince/briefly-Miles ,playing and 

recording with Ray Barretto.

4. Who would be in your dream band? (Musicians dead and alive)

Dream band... Kenny Kirkland,Elvin Jones,Jimmy Garrison,Jaco,George Duke,Trane and Miles,Lester Young,Coleman Hawkins..Bird...and some mo..( Bruce Lee, Batman,the Dali Lama..ha.. ) just incase .all of us just playing one big fat universal note ..

The truth is I feel sometimes that I am already living a dream..so I don't usually dream much..I am constantly inspired though...

 5. What country would you like to live in for one year and why?

Either India- Because i love the music..and have studied Bansuri..and Indian theory ...and Harmony within the line...exquisite...!

or Colombia - because i am from there ,yet I did not grow up there.and could perhaps make a difference within myself.....I figure it would help me understand those things and tendencies within myself...I have been feeling that way every since my fathers passing 3 years ago..I brought his ashes to la Laguna de Luruaco in Barranquilla..where he played as a child..very moving...in my minds eye ..i heard drums in the distance..as I held my little boy Nile in my arms...and spread his ashes onto the lagoon.

6. What is your favorite music to nap to?

I can't sleep to music...it makes me think too much...when i was younger I fell asleep to Alejandro Duran, La Cumbia Soledena,the Fania All Stars, The Ramones,Bob Marley,Stravinsky.. Bach...The Beatles,Stevie Wonder,Marvin Gaye..Ascension,Giant Steps, Billy Holiday, Bird..WBGO...ha..

 I guess If i have to choose it must be BACH..! Nothing is clearer and all encompassing....Bach....sleep Bach....it brings order all....in my mind and heart..

 Now I need..what I like to call Sound Space...not because I don't want to hear music or anything..but because I have enough sounds and things in my mind's ear.... Silence within is truly Golden...

I see Gringos everywhere! Where are the Latinos? Odilia Rivera-Santos

Latinos are workers, tax payers, and consumers of many things, including culture and media.
We are guilty of not making enough noise when it comes to our representation in the media on American television. 
We are guilty of not making enough noise when it comes to the blatant racism in Spanish-language television. On Spanish-language television, Latinos know you have to be of European descent to represent. In the real world, the majority of Latinos are not White with blue eyes and blond hair. 
Where are the Latinas who look like me?
Where are the Latinos who look like my (Hershey's Dark Chocolate-colored) AfroPuerto Rican relatives?
Where are the Latinos of Asian descent?

Where are the Latinos ...period.

The African-American Community has done a brilliant job in the area of gaining visibility in film, television shows, etc. 
As Latinos, we have a lot to learn from our African American peeps.

I started https://www.facebook.com/WeWantLatinoActorsAndWritersOnAmericanTelevision to encourage Latinos and those who ADORE us to focus on our political and economic power in regards to our visibility in the media.

VISIBILITY, VISIBILITY, VISIBILITY!

If you are an actor, writer,production crew member who is unemployed or underemployed, take daily steps to get back on track.
1. Call two people a day and tell them you're available to work on their project and tell them to give your number to someone else who might be in need of your services.
2. Promote your work online for two hours per day.
3. Pray for God to send you the right people and present you with the best opportunities to use your skills.
4. Write down other work you enjoy and would be willing to do to earn money.
5. Your 'B' job is the parent and your vision is your baby.
The parent has to provide whatever the baby needs and some babies are high-maintenance.
If your vision requires studio time, taking classes, buying equipment, you need to earn a higher salary. 

Be willing to take small steps each day toward achieving your goals.
It's not hard; it's challenging. And our minds need a challenge in order to work to the best of their potential

In other words, ¡pa'lante! #OdiliaRiveraSantos, your AfroPuerto Rican CEO 
www.fashionloveandneuroscience.blogspot.com 
www.nycpoorbutcool.blogspot.com
www.peopleforpuertorico.blogspot.com
www.howardsendennuevayork.blogspot.com

blip journal; the progress of a NYC writer - Odilia Rivera-Santos

It is early in the morning, and I am on the job, down at the very bottom of an abyss of words, phrases, and neatly folded plans and tasks. My work day begins early with a shower and walk to a comfortable spot at a coffee shop. It's good to have someone prepare my coffee while I sit wondering. Wondering is meaningful enough to take my attention away from a coffee maker, allowing it to bubble wildly out of control, spit up all over the stove and leave the environs with the sweet burnt smell of overcooked grounds.
Grounds ground into the ground.
It is a good thing to show up and let magic take its turn to handle things. At the spur of the moment, Arturo O' Farrill invited me to sing some backup on Trashed Out, a show about the housing crisis, he was working on and I went with no expectations and full of Jamaican green, my favorite drink from Ms. Lily's. Our rehearsal was at City College and the halls smelled of damp clarinet reeds and I was brought back to the time I attempted to take piano there and decided it was frivolous.
Now, I realize the only frivolous thing in life is doing anything that doesn't bring me joy. Joyful is my natural state and anything that diminishes joy is irrelevant.

We were there -- a group of musicians, having fun. And then, we performed at The Stone to a packed little house. The music was free, avant-garde, morose and humorous. We, the 'we' being Brad Jones, Bill Ware, E.J. Rodriguez, Sam Bardfeld, Roy Nathanson, Arturo O'Farrill, Zack O'Farrill, Josh Roseman, Lloyd Miller, Sandra Lilia Velasquez, were crammed together on a stage, tangled in each others' instrument and microphone cords, sweating profusely and it was perfect.

On Monday, I got the chance to meet Danny Glover, an actor I greatly admire for his devotion to political causes as well as his acting ability and re-connected with Charles Knox Lasister, a fascinating Harlem character and owner of Knox Gallery

And I get a message via Facebook from Julio Ricardo Varela, the founder of the Latino Rebels, saying, we were mentioned in a Forbes Magazine online article. Harmonic convergence, magical realism, and my head reels with nerdish excitement. http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2012/10/01/rebel-with-a-latino-cause/2/

My life feels like a beautifully-written and sometimes, badly-acted film and I am merely a character actress waiting for her lines.


Trashed Out.
Songs-in-progress, script excerpts, photos, and more from this work-in-progress can be found here: http://roynathanson.tumblr.com/


Haiku Empire

Work, Life, Writerly Life, and New Year's Resolutions

by Odilia Rivera Santos

Years ago, I picked up a book entitled The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It was a book for creatives to help make us more productive and Cameron included various exercises and one strange suggestion for writers: stop reading.
Instead of stopping reading altogether, I stopped reading The Artist's Way. The suggestion of morning pages was a good one -- the author suggests writing three pages every morning. I could easily write 50 every morning, so limiting a freewrite to 3 was intriguing. The images were more vibrant and events dramatic in the condensed version, which felt like having bouillon cubes in the cupboard. I could always return to my literary bouillon, drop one in a pot of dilution material -- dialogue, setting, pauses, esoteric phrases, etc.
I published quite a few poems, nonfiction and some fiction from my morning pages. The not reading part always seemed daunting. I have always read novels, nutrition, philosophy, psychology, and poetry as if my life depended on it.
A friend today mentioned that sometimes a lonely act such as writing can use company, specifically the company of other writers.
Writing is always a liberating experience for me and it is the one constant. Regardless of my gypsy-like existence in which I appear to always be comfortable with the thought of immigrating to a foreign land or borough, writing is a nourishing constant. Without writing, I am at a loss for words and range of emotion in civilian life. My maturity and confidence in the creative realm leaves other realms in the dust.
I am most alive, relaxed, excited, happy, at ease, and happy with myself when I have made adequate room to write and get ideas out into the world.

One of my new year's resolutions is to start my new year's resolutions early.
Resolution #1: I will read only on Fridays. Ouch!
Resolution #2: I will work collaboratively with other writers.

http://artistswayatwork.com/aw.html

November 6, 2011. Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC Writer.

Odilia Rivera Santos

I was talking to some writer friends the other day and found most of them are waiting for someone somewhere to do something. Waiting is not something I do well. The sense of autonomy you feel as an independent artist sitting glumly or cheerily at your favorite wifi-enhanced coffee shop is lost when the waiting time comes. The trick is to not let that sense of accomplishment diminish in the waiting process. You have to breathe, and laugh, and continue writing, and take bubble baths, and make hot dinners while you wait. I am waiting too because, as they say, the universe is abundant and full of miracles. But I noticed yesterday I had slipped into my old habit of denying myself pleasure as if being emotionally frozen or deprived of sensuality would accelerate decisions and make decision-makers rule in my favor. I realized this while eating a low-fat mozzarella cheese stick that tasted of cardboard - yeah, it's nutritious, but who wants to eat paper?
I resigned from my last teaching job in January. The bathroom was freezing cold, the toilet overflowed often, there was no place to eat lunch in the neighborhood, classes were cancelled when it snowed - which meant not getting paid on those days, and I realized the sense of deprivation in this place was getting to me, and although I cared for the students, the job was siphoning out too much of my qi.
I walked away and into the dangerous precarious world of freelance writing, editing, translating, thinking if teaching was something I was meant to do, it would materialize in a less hazardous and depressing setting.
One of my favorite books on writing is On Writing by Stephen King; it is an autobiography through the prism of writing as a working-class art. He held some truly frightening jobs through his process of becoming a successful writer -- the worst being one in which he scrapped blood and gore off of hospital sheets while working in a laundry. All the bizarre experiences of his childhood, growing up with a mentally-ill mother were great ingredients for an artist in the making. As a guy with a real working-class mindset I admire, King would probably never call himself an artist. He is a dedicated worker with a clear idea of his skill set.
While perusing through the writer want ads, I often come across the mantra: no pay, but great exposure. These days, it's quite simple to promote one's writing online without anyone's help.
Every job has its risks and annoyances. I am often amazed at how people become completely consumed by their work and how salary dictates how they feel about themselves.
Happiness becomes tethered to titles, material possessions and zeros on that paycheck.

I am thinking about work and writing about work for my next e-book: Work Chronicles, which I will published on Smashwords in November. In the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
http://twitter.com/#!/UrbanBrainiac
http://twitter.com/#!/bezotes
http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

10.21.11 Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC Writer, writing by hand, by android, by the light of an all-night diner

Odilia Rivera Santos

Last night, I watched part I of Ken Burns's Prohibition and part of a PBS mystery with an actor whose name escapes me but he is incredibly talented. It was a mystery that remains a mystery, because I fell asleep before the end to wonder who the killer was. It was early when I awoke, too early for anything but undocumented workers headed for construction sites, restaurant kitchens, hotels and illegal factories.
Despite this earlyness, I had my cup of coffee and began my visualization exercises accompanied by Samba Triste performed by Baden Powell and slipped into the train station at 5:45 a.m. to watch NYC from another angle. We have trees and silence and people who greet you with smiles not wanting or lacking anything.
I discovered another all-night diner; the Mexican busboy wears a crisply ironed white shirt and burgundy apron, his slicked back hair makes him look like a country boy who's making first trip to the big city and I expect him to start dancing and singing of the virtues of his village in Mexico and his love for our gritty little cityworld. I am sitting in a big booth by myself, but it doesn't matter because it's too early for booth people -- it's counter people time. Everyone is congregated around the counter with the TV blaring some morning news and tips on how to become more utilitarian.
The coffee tastes like instant with ground up cardboard. I am writing some new poems for reading on October 29th with Charlie Vázquez and sending out writing to different journals. Writing and editing and submitting and overusing the gerund.

I am working on a collection of essays about work entitled Work Chronicles to be published as an e-book on Smashwords in November; in the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
http://twitter.com/#!/UrbanBrainiac
http://twitter.com/#!/bezotes
http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

Hispanic Heritage Month: Latinos and Education, instilling intellectual curiosity in a child.

Odilia Rivera Santos

You can provide an elite private school education for your children without spending any money. It does require that parents take a long at themselves and invest time and energy in working one-on-one with their children.

1. Attitude - the adults are the prototype for what a child envisions as his or her future adult self. Your language is extremely important. Focus on solutions and not problems when you speak. If you constantly talk about problems, a child will feel that life is difficult and he or she will feel easily defeated. If you state the problem simply and go on to talk about how the problem may be addressed, the child learns critical thinking skills and gains an optimistic outlook. Teach that every problem has a solution.

2. Self-advocacy - young children have to be taught to be activists. They need tools for setting boundaries between themselves and other kids, adults, etc. They must understand that they have rights everywhere they go and that no one has the right to be verbally abusive or to touch them without permission.
Teaching children history with an emphasis on their particular racial or ethnic group as "victims" will create a sense of hopelessness and a person who feels hopeless is less likely to stand up for him or herself.
Make sure to expose children to the history of brilliant leaders and to focus on those who triumphed despite adversity.

3. Goals - the best way to teach children to set goals is to have some goals yourself and to speak to your child about the process. If you are a parent working on getting a G.E.D., do not speak about the experience with regret or in a way that connotes that you feel like a failure; instead, focus on talking about what you are learning and the interesting people you're meeting in the process.
Don't do the "Don't do what I did" speech because it is fear-based, boring and not effective.
Consider presenting yourself to your kids as if you were an employee.
The truth is that your kids are evaluating your parenting skills; your assessment as a parent will come in the way of your child's positive or negative behavior.
Be a dynamic employee/parent who the child will admire. Children listen to people they respect, admire or find interesting. This does not mean that you become their friend and abandon providing structure for children's lives; it means that you must be a person a child would like to emulate.
You are in charge but in order to be an effective parent, you must be humble enough to admit when your parenting approach is not working.
The goal is to have a happy interdependent relationship with your children in which they can make informed decisions when you are not around to offer guidance. If the parenting methods you are currently employing are not getting the results you'd like, change.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result." - Einstein.

4. Standards - there are certain skills that a child is expected to learn before going on to the next grade. You can find a lot of useful lesson plans to do at home on PBS Kids and Starfall is a great website for phonics help.
http://www.pbs.org/parents/goingtoschool/what_1.html
http://www.starfall.com/

5. Language - teach your child Spanish by putting time aside to speak only in Spanish. You can choose to speak Spanish on the weekend or at night, but make sure you do not respond to your child if he or she speaks English. If you ask a question in Spanish and the child answers in English, keep asking in Spanish until you get an answer in Spanish. The most natural way to learn language is through employing it in everyday life: watch films, read books, listen to music and have conversations in the target language -- Spanish.
If your Spanish skills need some brushing up, Directo al grano is a great grammar book that provides a comparison of Spanish and English grammar. MIT offers free online courses -- take a Spanish class. Lo que no mata engorda.
http://www.amazon.com/Directo-grano-Complete-Reference-Spanish/dp/0130848018
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/foreign-languages-and-literatures/

6. Recreation as work and work as recreation - you can teach reading comprehension, research skills and critical thinking through doing research on subjects that the child enjoys. You can read the same books and articles and talk about them.
Choose one day per week to go to the library and always keep the appointment.
It is a good idea to read books on library reading lists, as they represent books used in schools. Reading books at home before the child reads them at school will give them a sense of accomplishment and insure they are better prepared.
http://kids.nypl.org/reading/recommended.cfm
http://kids.nypl.org/reading/recommended.cfm

7. Oral communication skills - boys tend to give one-word answers to questions while girls only need one simple question to talk for two hours. Make sure every question you ask is open-ended. Open-ended questions force the child to think.
Did you have fun at school today? - this is a yes/no question
How was school today? - this is an open-ended question, which allows a child to produce language, review syntax, use of prepositions, etc.

Give the child your undivided attention without staring at them. Some kids feel scrutinized and as if they are being interrogated if you ask questions and make intense eye-contact. Be casual but listen closely. You can try having a conversation as you prepare a snack together or do some other quiet activity.
Do not interrupt a child who speaks slowly; he or she might process information slowly and interruptions will make the child feel uncomfortable about speaking.

Make sure the television is not always on.
Attention deficit disorder begins at home with too much stimulation: cellphones, television, radio, music, a group of people talking at once.

8.Make time for important stuff. Reading and talking with your children is vital. Throw your television out the window, but make sure no one is standing below first. Limit television viewing because there are very few jobs for people that require them to sit still, stare blankly and overeat.

A bad education is hard to undo but a great education is something that no one can ever take away from you. The best inheritance you can leave your children is intellectual curiosity.


Check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
http://twitter.com/#!/UrbanBrainiac
http://twitter.com/#!/bezotes
http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

Hispanic Heritage Month and the 'Superpeople'

Odilia Rivera Santos

During Hispanic Heritage Month, the media bombards Americans with images of Latino 'superpeople,' a term used in a NY Times article recently on overachievers who speak three or more languages and hold advanced degrees in subject areas requiring both sides of the brain.
For persons from a humble background who didn't have access to the kinds of mentorship,education and/or familial support necessary to reach superpeople status, Latino superpeople can be both a source of pride and discomfort. Regardless of how damaging it may be, people tend to compare themselves to those in the spotlight. And it is often the case that those with the least educational opportunities also lack an understanding of what such high achievement necessitates. There are incremental steps one must take before becoming a CEO at a respectable socially-conscious corporation - they exist.
Being disconnected from the reality of how many people are involved in the achievements of one person sometimes causes Latinos to have unrealistic goals, which inevitably leads to failure. The Latino superpeople didn't pop up in a vacuum.

Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates mainly those who have had tremendous triumphs on the world stage, but we should also celebrate the Latinos offstage in the back of the theater or those in the standing room area.
Today is a good day to celebrate the everyday superpeople, the Latinos who have made an art of survival, who love and nurture their families, who accept failure as part of the rhythm of life and continue to strive for a better life while appreciating the life they have.

I am working on a collection of essays about work entitled Work Chronicles to be published as an e-book on Smashwords in November; in the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
http://twitter.com/#!/UrbanBrainiac
http://twitter.com/#!/bezotes
http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

Hispanic Heritage Month: Latinos and Education

Odilia Rivera Santos

It is Hispanic Heritage Month and we will ignore its actual start date and focus on the most important issue in the life of Latinos: Education.
According to U.S. News and World Report, the high school graduation rate among Latinos has improved. However, a graduation rate of 57 percent among Hispanic students is nothing to be proud of.
Parents in the U.S. are often overwhelmed by having to deal with work, and maintaining a home and a marriage intact; for low-income families, the challenges in raising a family are exacerbated by a limited income and less leisure time.
Oftentimes, children do not associate a formal education with everyday life. Lectures about how school is important and how you wish you had gone to college or taken school seriously don't work because it is negative reinforcement. Children don't respond well to being told of the horrors that await them should they decide to drop out of high school, trade school or college.
Positive reinforcement is a much more successful tool and because kids disengage from lectures -- you remember Charlie Brown and his teacher. Wah wah wah -- your best option as a parent is to incorporate learning into everyday life.

Living life one day at a time while thinking about the future

Cooking with your children and eating meals as a family are a great way for a parent to initiate conversations with children in a nonthreatening non-confrontational way. While you cook, you can ask open-ended questions instead of yes or no questions.
What did you do in math class today?
What do you think about the new English teacher?
You can teach a kid math, measurements and nutrition while you get them to discuss how they feel about their educational experience at home in a comfortable setting, not at the parent/teacher conference.

These interactions with a child will make him or her more comfortable speaking up about problems in school before they become a major issue. It is the one-day-at-a-time approach in which you reinforce the importance of what a child is doing at his or her "job," which is school.
The small talk and activities often lead to a discussion of a kid's bigger dreams and an understanding of how their actions in the present are cumulative and will lead to the future he or she wants.

Conversations about music, television and books

Kids often arrive in school not knowing how to learn. Parents can teach their kids how to learn by speaking with them about what they have read, listened to or seen throughout the day. It is always a good idea for parents to create a balance regarding how their kids receive information without judging what they like.
Some children learn more easily through reading than watching films or television or vice versa. In the learning process, the most important thing is that a child not take in information without engaging with it in some way. A parent can help a child learn to be a critical thinker and to become a person who analyzes information.
The aforementioned process is necessary in learning any subject in school.
You can watch PBS or Discovery Channel shows online on different subjects and talk about what you've just seen, but make sure you let the child do most of the talking.

Letting your child be smarter than you

One of the best ways to assess your child's understanding of a subject is to let him or her explain something to you. Choose something about which you know little or nothing because you won't be tempted to fill in the gaps. This is an activity to teach children to be authoritative and use language.
If the parent is always the teacher and always the expert, a child will be less prone to speak or ask questions. When a child can teach an adult something, he or she gains a lot of confidence.

Doing homework is hard
On top of all the other jobs a parent has, no one expects you to relearn math! However, doing homework with a child every night allows you to see how he or she is doing in a subject. Homework help is available in many communities and you can contact your child's school to find assistance.
Find out what kind of standardized exams a child will have in each grade by visiting the school's website or conferring with your child's teacher. Schools also provide materials for children to prepare for each exam at home.

Teach your children through modeling behavior you expect from them

Devote yourself to learning something new. While you keep your mind sharp by reading or watching history programs, you are teaching your child the importance of education without boring lectures.

Why is it important to focus on education?
It is important to focus on education because while we cannot control every aspect of our lives, we can certainly control the trajectory of our work life. During this difficult economic time in which many people have been laid off, persons who know how to learn will fare better, as they will find it easier to train for a new profession. A formal education provides more opportunities and this may be vocational or scholarly. The important thing is to choose what makes you happy as far as a course of study and career is concerned.
Education is work and work is an education, because we have to remain open to new ideas, keep learning and continue to hone skills.


I am writing a collection of essays about work entitled Work Chronicles to be published as an e-book on Smashwords in November; in the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
http://twitter.com/#!/UrbanBrainiac
http://twitter.com/#!/bezotes
http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

october . . .1, 2011 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

Sometimes, I make straight, rigid immutable plans and almost always, God laughs. There is a sort of unity, balance and return to the beginning in a poem or good story, and what is life but a poem or a good story?
I am in the thick of my life-poem, life-story with eyes open and a meditative calm heart.
We play the trust game as children knowingly and as adults, we play the trust game unknowingly.
In both, we close our eyes and let part or our selves go lax.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about how in the ghetto there are two kinds of people: those who run toward the guy who's just pulled out a gun in the middle of a crowd and those who run away from the gun.
One time, while at an underground club in the South Bronx where I had gone to see Kurtis Blow and met Run DMC, a guy pulled out a gun. I didn't wait to see the object of all the excitement. I ran out into the cool of the night, sky blacker than I'd ever seen, a glow cast across burned down buildings by streetlights, no yellow cab to be found, my shoes borrowed from a friend and too high for my taste, red lipstick still on cause I hadn't kissed anyone, black velvet dress clinging to me from sweating while dancing half the night away, friends scattered to wherever they were going, hair exploded into a curly afro, and I said . . . if only I'd brought my camera.
Will the South Bronx ever be this dark, this cold, this still again?

I am sitting in a remote outpost, playing the trust game with the universe while listening to Ali Farka Touré and wondering where they all are -- the people populating that night.

9.27.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

Riding the train from one end of the 2 line to another, you see a little bit of everything: Haitian church goers, Hassidum, Wall Street executives and protesters following their footsteps, young families headed to the lesser known nooks and crannies of Bronx neighborhoods and me.

As I sit peacefully thinking about what best to do with the hundreds of pages of writing I've accumulated, I glance to my left and notice a woman immersed in a book. I think of how many bits of information her brain must ignore to accomplish the task of following a plot.
I return to the New York Times to read an article about drug cartels and their control of a town and extortion plots and I imagine many must consider legalization of drugs to be the best option.
There would be a transition period while drug dealers get used to wearing suits and not carrying a gun while they visit hospitals, buying hospital staff monthly lunches to insure when a sluggish patient needs a crack sample, the grateful workers will reach for their brand of crack.

I fold the paper neatly to peruse later. And wait for the show.
On the train, there's always a show.
A Chinese woman walks into the car, pushing a cart. She plops herself down between between reader and writer.
We look up and make eye-contact, above the head of the Chinese lady, like synchronized swimmers.
The Chinese woman fidgets and lunges at the map and sits down again all the while exuding a diversity of funk heretofore unknown to man.
But you can't make assumptions.
She might be completely sane and have no sense of smell or she may have ingested some herbal medicines, which can make one smell like a donkey for a couple of hours or she might have some physical malady.

We, reader and writer, stand, again synchronized, and bemoan our seatless state during a non-rush hour rush hour.
The Chinese woman, her mission accomplished, unpacks some things from her cart and luxuriates, having inherited a whole subway bench to herself -- a rare event in a city where size 24 often crams into size 6 slots.

https://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor
https://twitter.com/#!/urbanbrainiac
https://twitter.com/#!/bezotes

Edwidge Danticat booksigning, immigration, time travel and the umbilical cord

Odilia Rivera Santos


It’s always interesting to see how an artist presents his or her work and how it is received. Living in NYC makes it easy to meander over to a performance, reading, or art gallery on the spur of the moment, alone with a notebook.
If I’m not taking notes, I’m taking notes.
I went to see Edwidge Danticat read excerpts of Brother, I’m Dying and answer questions. An audience is always a loose cannon and how an author handles the inappropriate or downright offensive question reveals his or her level of insularity.
Ms. Danticat is a writer I admire, partly because I can identify with her experience as an immigrant, having to learn a new language and deal with the acculturation process. Like many immigrants, Ms. Danticat took full advantage of what this country has to offer: a great education and an opportunity to abandon limitations set by one’s country of origin.
I have seen her speak before and find her presence is always constrained as if she were holding on tightly to the practiced stoicism of those who’ve experienced great losses and seen tragedy up close. She spoke as gently about the infuriating policies restricting Haitians’ entry into the American immigration maze as one would of going to the supermarket to get milk, However, I’m certain she has strong feelings regarding the inequities and racism in the immigration process. Considering the problems in Haiti, she must keep calm and practice compassionate detachment, as it must be a burden to be a public figure with its requisite unrealistic expectations. Persons from colonies/third-world countries who succeed in the U.S. are expected to do a lot for their countries of origin.
For many, Ms. Danticat provided a first glimpse into Haiti and its myriad wonders.
What I find most moving is the simple scene of Danticat giving birth in the U.S. As a woman living a privileged existence, she was able to choose natural childbirth as opposed to women in impoverished third-world countries who would never use the term ‘natural childbirth’ because there is no other kind. In a third-world country, women just hope to survive childbirth; labor pain is not as frightening as death or permanent injuries.
Her natural childbirth sounds like a ceremony to welcome and celebrate a new life with little to no fear of the mother’s life being endangered. Danticat reads of being surrounded by flowers and caring people and how this is probably what her mother would have liked as, Edwidge, her own child was born.
My mother had seven children with a midwife in her small cement house in Puerto Rico and the last two children were born in a hospital. Ironically enough, the complications during birth occurred in the hospital surrounded by the latest modern equipment, not with the elderly Black midwife who my father said chewed tobacco.
He also joked the midwife was an old lady when he was a little boy.
Danticat spoke of sacrifices immigrants make to bring their children to another country in order to live a better life or merely survive. To me, we leave our countries through a one-way door bolted from the native-country side. We can go back, but we might do so as anthropologists, sociologists or some other -ist prepared to survey the scene. Equipped with American educations, where we learned the history of our countries of origin, we balk at classifications we would have accepted had we never left. Leaving your country of origin gives you some new reference points.

Danticat’s uncle died in an USCIS prison; she used a Haitian proverb -- Running from the rain to jump into the fire -- to describe his flight from the privations of his country to the privations of an immigration holding cell where he died in the same way as a pauper with no connections. The immigrants with whom I’ve worked suffered from severing ties with their origins, but truly rejoiced at seeing their children succeed, and, in some cases, become the first literate members of a family.
To a loving parent, any sacrifice is fine as long as the child makes it to shore.

She really does speak of the experience of traveling not from one country to another, but from one century to another. Our consciousness shifts as we land in a new place in which electricity and hot water are freely available, libraries offer a free education, hospitals do not require the infirm to find transportation to get to the hospital and notions of race, gender, class and happiness become notions to be examined and compared with one’s original reference point. I imagine in her life, as in mine, thinking about childhood as a poor kid in a colony and moving to a city with every conceivable comfort is akin to being very elderly with a lucid mind. We try to explain what this travel from there has been, but unless the listeners have also traveled from there to here, it is an abstract fairytale.






I am writing about work for my next e-book: Work Chronicles, which I will published on Smashwords in November. In the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
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http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor
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9.18.11 Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC Writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

I stood in front of the classroom full of adults -- some newly-homeless and others stuck in the cyclical experience of being well enough to manage for a while with the call of the wild leading them back to danger and homelessness. Stripped of belongings and any pretense, they stared at me.
I had no lesson because it was a surprise -- I was asked to sub for a runaway teacher. Several students had plastic bags with their belongings and miniature toiletries. Some looked as if they had slept in their clothes, matted hair stuck to the sides of their heads. I thought of how self-neglect is an act with its roots in childhood that keeps people anchored to poverty.
I chose to riff on self-love. The visual of lowering a rope down a deep well popped into my mind, so I could let go of grandiose philosophical abstract plans for the day. Before people can learn to love life, they first have to stop thinking of suicides and mistakes and losses and false starts.
Rituals, I said, in my hyperactive Mr. Rogers voice, are important, necessary and calming.
You get up,shower,brush your teeth,put on deodorant.
At this point, a woman, in the front row,reached into her plastic bag, pulled out deodorant and she attempted to discreetly apply it. I pretended to not notice.
Privacy ceases to matter once people have done so many things in public: writing your manifesto against the government for sterilization via drugs in your Koolaid, cat naps on trains and bird baths at Starbucks and meeting your life partner on line at the methadone clinic. A person you trust to not judge you for your transgressions but never trust to be trustworthy.
I wondered as I watched couplings when being around peers was beneficial and when it was a detriment to be in the same boat. The boat might be too small or you as a couple with the trail of baggage might be too heavy. The boat might be full of holes from the start and not as new as it seemed from the hazy angle from which you first scoped it out.
Are there life rafts?
I never judged people for their troubles.
My main concern was they remain childless until they learned about self-love and taking that boat in for a second opinion before they climbed in.
My simple words streamed out as the philosophical spiders built intricate webs.
And then, a student says, Are you an actress?
Yeah, I'm an actress, researching a role I said with a smile.

9.16.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a nyc writer,

Odilia Rivera Santos

I slip into living in a monastery of my own making with rules designed to turn me into an enlightened ascetic or at least a great scientist of words, thought and emotion. My distance from noise is real while I imagine all the great possibilities of life on a different kind of edge without the normal trappings of normal life. There are no bears or wild boar in my new desolate life made simple by keeping all necessary goods close and abandoning those things, material and immaterial, making flight inelegant and unappealing.
New York City fuels my creativity, nest-building to create new characters, and a structured abandonment of expected structures. Life requires we reach out as we swim inward without any worry of losing those things left anchored at a faraway shore.
Today, I asked questions in a blunt manner to avoid circuitous talk and pretense; I fed the question, and watched as it was ingested and an answer came quick and gentle.
I am reading about the mysteries of how the brain functions and misfires and fills with nuances to be collated or abandoned as we struggle with or grapple or just balance the mundane, profane, insane and the just plain aspects of living.

8.29.11 Blip journal: the progress of a NYC writer

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

Odilia Rivera Santos is a writer, performer, editor, creative writing teacher and translator.

I have never fancied myself as any kind of therapist or counselor -- just an observer of human interactions and motivation. Observation, interaction, meditation, solitude and reflection are all necessary in my experience as a writer. In order to write well, you have to pay attention to details, but you have to know what to do with the details you've collected.
One of the most interesting kind of humans to observe is the chaos maker; everyone knows one and my advice is be careful who you let in your life. Facebook provides a good opportunity to meditate on this idea: some people should be on the fan page, not the friend page if you get my drift.

I wrote an essay entitled Chaos Makers, for my e-book Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I ,about people who lack clarity and fear being alone. Chaos makers create drama from the simplest incident, and in paranoiac conversations, they obsess about how others view them.
They tend to lack focus and ramble on at a rapid pace, mainly about trivial things.
I've observed that the chaos maker doesn't edit or filter and sees their perceptions as fact even if he/she has no evidence to bolster said perception. Chaos makers spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing other people's behavior or their interactions with other people instead of just asking a question. They often say I think she thinks. Instead of asking a person what he or she thinks, the chaos maker will spend days speculating about a sentence someone uttered.
And if you ask How was your day?, you will get a list of everything the cm did: I got up at 6, drank coffee, talked to my uncle about his liver surgery, took a shower with this new strawberry bodywash I got at the 99 cent store -- it's really good though!, I walked from Brooklyn to the East Village, I. . .
The chaos maker pays attention to details but becomes completely lost in the details, unable to use them toward a coherent purpose. I recently dealt with a chaos maker who considered himself a kind of Sherlock Holmes; he did compile details but lacked the logic necessary to come to a reasonable conclusion. His impressive collection of details led to a paranoiac conclusion.

A little disorder in life or work in the manufacturing of disorder

While every one of us has a area of life in which there is a little disorder, the chaos maker is a disorder and disorganization factory, creating complications from the simplest elements.
I think CMs are popular at parties and get-togethers because they can flit from one group to another, dropping a strange amusing anecdote, and in small doses, they are entertaining. Trying to have in-depth conversations is impossible because they lack focus; their speech is more a series of bullet points.

Goodbye to all that

I made a conscious decision to distance myself from CMs because their shenanigans take time from my peaceful reading and writing time. If we read about our favorite authors' lives, we find dysfunctional tumultuous periods, but they were still able to produce magnificent work worthy of discussion due to a sharpened clear focus, and the wonderful thing is their work sits quietly on a bookshelf -- slivers of brilliance, perhaps garnered through horrific desperate experiences, without burdening the reader with a phone call at 3am.
I spent many years as the person people called in an emergency, and one day, I was on the phone with a friend who was repeating her problem over and over again, and I found myself rolling my eyes. This was a person who never asked me how I was or if everything was okay with me.
I realized on that day I no longer gleaned anything from this kind of exchange. A friend of mine said it is the difference between having someone in your life who is a 'client' and someone who is an 'equal.'
This particular friend was not an equal; she was a client who wasn't paying me, nor did she even offer to treat me to dinner after six years of my being her go-to person for every issue in her life. When I called her and needed her support, she was unavailable. I stopped talking to her, realizing in her mind, it was akin to her psychologist calling her to state a problem. A breach of professionalism. Client.

Traditional-Puerto-Rican-Woman Training

Being a caretaker was part of my training as a Puerto Rican girl growing up in a very traditional Puerto Rican family from Puerto Rico, which is very different from the hipsters born and raised on the mainland. A good Puerto Rican woman was one who took care of others and made herself invisible and continued to excise her dreams and desires from her own life to prove her fealty to the 'correct' model of womanhood.
I finally decided to refer troubled souls to 'professionals.'
It was a liberating decision.
I liberated myself from the last remnant of Puerto Rican Woman training.
I can tell people I don't have time to listen to the same problem ten times, because it isn't a good use of my time, I'm not getting paid to do this, and focusing on problems instead of solutions is a waste of time.
People raised to be caretakers often need to be reminded to take care of themselves.
http://peopleforpuertorico.blogspot.com/2011/04/caretakersactivists-love-thyself.html

Work and Life

When I worked with victims of domestic violence and homeless people, I noticed they had a thousand details for each story. As they told their stories, I could see the pain and anxiety rise and realized it was not only unhealthy to focus so much on one's problems, without reflection, but dangerous. Many had suffered multiple breakdowns and the clients kept bringing themselves to the edge by retelling their story to as many people as possible.
I taught the clients at the agency to state the problem in one sentence without providing a life history. I then had them write their autobiographies in seven year intervals as well as everything that was bothering them on a piece of paper, and I would ask which details they needed to share and with whom. Their lives had been full of tragedy and I asked them to reflect on each with one question in mind: What did you learn from this experience at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one?
I noticed their anxiety level went down and they became more rational in their exchanges with me and others. I enjoyed my work and when it was time to move on from that line of work, I did. Now, it's time for me to be very careful with the persons I allow into my life.

Self-destructive people want to take you with them
Self-destructive people make for great theater, but in life, they are very time-consuming and emotionally exhausting. They threaten to destroy your sanctuary and rob you of the little bit of sanity you have left. I have dated chaos makers and had them as 'friends,' so I have dedicated enough time to chaos makers in my life; now, I decide how and when to interact with CMs.
If you know how to be well and you choose to do things to make yourself sick, I don't need you in my life.

Writing is my homeboy

I am happiest when working at my own pace, which leads me back to the wonderful solitary activity of writing. I don't need to go to meetings or confer with anyone or wait until someone else resolves fifty problems before they can meet a deadline. I write regardless of my circumstances, with or without a computer, with or without tranquil surroundings, and make no excuses. If I don't do something within a particular timeframe for myself, it affects only me.
Today is a perfect day. I am reading, writing, listening to the news and minding my own business and leaving others to theirs.

If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.
Dalai Lama

The orgiastic pleasures of writing . . . yeah, it's awesome

Odilia Rivera Santos

I am so content to sit in my bed propped up by pillows with my Mac on my lap I forget to eat and sometimes go hours with only water and coffee. I know this is not physically healthy, so I force myself to get up and prepare good snacks, which don't require my full focus. It is a great feeling to listen to the news or interviews with writers or artists. Today, I got up early, posted on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and prepared a runner's breakfast of one slice of bread with crunchy peanut butter and coffee with milk. I headed out for a run and took a long leisurely walk by the river. I felt a bit restless but fought the temptation to get a book at the library to read under a tree. Life is about balance after all. I wanted to use other senses and go on an intellectual fast or put my intellectual mind on a modified fast at least. I thought, perhaps, the intuition suffers if one keeps intellectual parts of the brain too overworked.
I walked around Harlem and saw the door to The Cotton Club was ajar, so I stuck my head in and asked if I could look around. The well-dressed man behind a desk waved me in and I entered, knowing I had been there before but not quite remembering the particulars. Glistening red chairs and small tables point to the fact that the place is for performance and you can imagine an elegant Black audience sipping drinks in semi-darkness as light reflects from sparkling contented eyes - the stuff mundane life aspires to. There's magic in this small space and you can feel it. The man who welcomed me in is the owner, John Beatty and he spoke to me about his Columbia University experience. CU is trying to turn Harlem into an extension of its campus: predominately white and privileged. Mr. Beatty held his ground and CU backed off. Black History takes precedence over corporate greed for once. Mr Beatty said Monday night is the night to drop by.
I had an epiphany about time -- yes, another one. It is ok to change your deadlines if you feel it is best and not everything must be accomplished at a maddening breakneck speed.
I am sitting by the river in the bright sunshine, sunning myself while a beautiful exotic yellow and blue birds screeches from the bridge. It may be someone's very expensive pet and, for a moment, I consider calling 311. But then, I changed my mind because exotic birds should be free. Perched unceremoniously on the bridge, she seems content and does she not have the right to be free?

. . . you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
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http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

Rituals for Writing a New Novel

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

I have been toying with the idea of writing the definitive codependent relationship novel for a couple of years, and finally, the time seems perfect to dive into the abyss. The main characters will chase crazy down a crazy rabbit hole and undergo a transmogrification to put Mary Shelly to shame. I am writing the character dossiers tonight and unpacking their brains in the morning: the neurosis of past events, childhoods, relationships and betrayals will be lain across a cloth on a table like the remains of a crime scene. The tone for this novel will be very conversational, unlike the novel I completed in June of 2011 -- which was very formal and contained an epistolary section. This novel will be imagery punctuated with the words of two people who are seeking salvation in the wrong place, in the wrong ways, and with the wrong person. Their conversations will delve into what I call the suffering olympics. The suffering olympics is a special competition in which people don't listen to each because they are too busy telling their story over and over again. It is a comedy, even though it sounds a little heavy duty. I think there is comedy in the search for a love approximating one's first love, which I believe romance really is all about. How do you, as an adult, recreate the feeling of being safe, fed, protected and wearing a dry diaper?
I enjoy creating deadlines for myself and hope you will keep me company during the writing of this novel. The novel will be completed on July 31st, and I will do a public reading. Please stay tuned and feel free to ask questions about where my characters are and what they're doing.
My rituals for writing a new novel include lots of bottles of water in the fridge, long walks or runs to sort out the thousands of details flooding in, meditation, a daily word count goal, and lots of dancing. I need music and movement as a balance to sitting still for hours per day.

I will keep you posted on what happens with the two novels currently floating in the ether.

Using SociaL Media and Getting Your Art Done

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

In January, I resigned from a teaching position, at a community center, with the clear goal of finishing two novels, my collection of poetry on the subject of love, and organizing poetry readings for my company, Haiku Empire. In addition to those goals, I decided to learn as much about online marketing as possible. The foci of an artist these days -- making art and promoting it. After much deliberation, I decided to send my novels and poetry to a traditional publisher and to self-publish nonfiction, in the form of e-books, for the rest of the year. I gave myself the luxury of completing the aforementioned projects within a year, but I was pleasantly surprised: I finished within six months. I have my parents to thank for my work ethic.
I attempted to live without a cellphone for a year, but kept receiving concerned emails from friends, so the phone is back on. When I'm writing, the Internet is never a distraction, but circuitous conversations really bore me. I really think people need to read more, so they can stop talking about their feelings all day -- it's like the Oprah couch universalized.
I have also been a person who feels very content spending time alone and this makes some people uncomfortable. I go to concerts, the movies, the gym, and even dancing alone. Sometimes, it's easier to be alone because there are no schedules to coordinate. In NYC, coordinating schedules with other people is complicated; we are all busy.
I did not have a clear vision of how my adventure into a full-time artist life would look; thus far, the experience has been magnificent. I am single and have no children, which is helpful because I don't have to discuss my plans with anyone. After talking to a lot of artists about romantic relationships, I see how it takes an extremely confident person to date someone who feels self-actualized. My friend Nelson Cabán, the Puerto Rican artist, and I talked about romance and making art some months back and agreed on how difficult it can be for the artist's lover to deal with our obsession with making art. I sometimes get up at five in the morning to write, connect myself via headphones to my Mac and disconnect from everything else. During this wonderful process of leaving work that no longer suited me, I have had the luxury of moving toward a closer approximation of my ideal life. There were weeks in which I got up, drank coffee, exercised, and wrote without speaking to anyone for days. After years as an advocate for homeless people, victims of domestic violence and immigrants, it was cathartic and wonderful to not speak.
I also connected with some great musicians, Tato Torres of Yerbabuena, Maurice Brown, Arturo O’ Farrill and Wynton Marsalis, who were kind enough to sit for interviews, allowed me to attend rehearsals and I will be posting those interviews on Leisurefications
The Wynton Marsalis interview was strange; I was sitting down waiting to order breakfast at a coffee shop. Marsalis comes in and looks at me like he knew me and I waved. When he sat down, I yelled out 'let me interview you!" He asked me to join him at his table and I asked him to join me at mine. He acquiesced and we sat for two hours talking about Jazz, Hip Hop and his fourteen-year-old son joined us. He was very gracious and fun to talk to.
I firmly believe when we let go of things and people who no longer serve any purpose in our lives, the right people and situations materialize.
Another big change is that I have decided to perform more -- people have asked me to act in their plays and movies for years, but I was never interested. Somehow, the idea of becoming a writer/performer makes sense now. I am speaking to someone this week about television work, some poetry readings and perhaps, becoming the creative director on someone else's very successful project.
My brother used to say a lot of people fear success more than failure, and I can see this is true. I chose to put myself in situations completely inappropriate to who I am and allowed people who are chaos-makers to enter my life. And excising toxic people from my life feels like clearing cobwebs along a path.
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Blogging -- Subject Matters

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

When I ventured to blog, there was the clear idea of having an audience. Instead of keeping a journal with story sketches or the happenings of my day, I could now obsessively post in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia or instead of running down the subway stairs to go hobnob with other nerdy artsy types. This is not to say blogging replaces socializing with humans, because I love the humans, but it is nice to have a medium through which people can see what I do. I am a writer, and this fact shapes my approach to most things in life. Thoughts of fame and fortune are never far behind in American culture, but for me, fame is irrelevant -- just the fortune will do. We write because we love writing, and I suspect most of us, bloggers, consider the possibility of hitting the blogger lottery: getting paid to blog. The new American dream for those of us comfortable with the idea of a screen in front of our faces all day is the ability to earn a living in a strange outfit while sitting in a French coffee shop, eating croissants and drinking a capuchino.
Before I began this blogging journey in 2008, I thought about topics that might gain a following, so I surfed the net with an eye on numbers; it seemed sites devoted to porn and beauty tips were very popular. This was just what I gleaned from a cursory glance. I wasn't particularly qualified to write on either subject. I did, however, start to wonder what the two subjects might have in common. Lip gloss and coitus infinitus were inextricably bound. I wondered if the attraction to these sites could be a need for self-improvement, a need to cover all the bases as dating becomes a permanent fixture in people's lives; if one could both apply makeup and learn all the latest techniques for having sex, ...
An advertisement popped up the other day for a dating site for older people. The people in the pictures looked to be in their early eighties, and I wondered what people were hoping to find in this dating from junior high school to grave culture. It is okay to settle down with one person and watch him or her lose the sparkling appeal and then, perhaps, the ability to think rationally. There should be phases of a relationship in which two people are partners and then, one needs more help than the other. I wondered if people let go of each other too easily in a relationship. Of course, I am not speaking of cases in which there is possessive, jealous or otherwise unacceptable behavior. But I did wonder about the kind of baggage people drag around from one relationship to another.
It is still odd for me to hear of someone's parents being divorced. My parents got married and their marriage was dissolved as they'd promised it would be: through death. My father died after he and my mother had been together for over sixty years. They settled in and settled for that on which they'd agreed. Their agreement including sickness, as my father became ill at a relatively young age and never quite recovered. It is an old-fashioned idea to be with one person and allow him or her to annoy without even considering walking away. The love is decided and the love question is never again brought up. It just is.

Thinking about porn and makeup, I came to the conclusion -- no pun intended, that people just don't know how to settle anymore or settle down. And perhaps, there are areas in life in which being complacent would be a good thing or at least preferable to the alternative. I have settled down with writing and we are definitely staying together through sickness, health, rich, poor and all the other issues that may come up. I will write and observe, feeling a sense of satisfied complacence. Yes, I have settled and have no problem with it.



Writing on Writing
My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

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Writing Tips and Tips for Tips for the Artist Life

©2011 by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Many of us have been tortured souls and have created great art through and from a source rife with pain. The problem with setting up these connections, of creation and pain, is that the nervous system will eventually tire out. We wear out our myelin sheaths with the constant banging against our nervous system walls. Our bodies have a memory, so when we create from pain, it stands to reason that at the start of a writing, painting or film-making project, our bodies might go into that depressive state in which negative emotional chemicals begin to flow.
In the slaughter of animals in order for the meat to be Kosher, the animals cannot see other animals slaughtered because fear unleashes unhealthy hormones. The fight or flight response negatively affects the parasympathetic system, and causes the release of the hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
Fear and pain cannot be the source of creativity but we can use creativity to climb out of the darkness of suffering. The first rule of being an artist is to be satisfied with your work; this is not to say you should not think there's room for improvement. All artists are looking to continue their artistic evolution. But you should be happy to make art -- you, all alone without awards or a friend at a major publishing house and maybe three people who care about what you have to say.
The suffering artist bit has been done to death both literally and figuratively. If you are suffering, as so many artists I know seem to be, make an attempt to get to the root of suffering and deal with it head on. Perspective is usually the culprit; examining past experiences requires a healthy perspective in order to retrieve worthwhile lessons and leave the nastiness behind. Sometimes, people don't suffer from depression but have been taught to think like a depressive -- fearful, overanalyzing each experience and full of apprehension.

Keep your day job and hustle or hustle and hustle
There are two options when you decide to be an artist: be a full-time artist or keep a day job and be a part-time artist. If you are a natural born gambler who doesn't blink at the prospect of skipping a few meals and living with thirteen people in a studio apartment, be a full-time artist. You have to really hustle and create a rigid schedule for yourself -- far more rigid than any created by an employer.
If you're the nervous type or a natural born lollygagger who does not have the hustler gene, keep your day job. The important thing is to know yourself and to avoid whining.
Whining isn't an efficient use of time. The best kind of job for an artist is one that helps him/her cultivate a personality trait he/she would like to have. Some artists suffer so much in the attempt at normalcy that they are better suited to doing everything possible to avoid the 9 to 5 existence. Henry Miller was one of those artists who was crushed by the idea of going to work and coming home to eat dinner with his wife and child; for him, writing and a regular life were incompatible to say the least. He speaks very eloquently about his misery in the normal world and the tremendous sense of freedom once he decided, at the insistence of his wife, to pursue writing full-time: Henry Miller

Whatever work you do, outside your art, must strengthen your resolve and make you a better artist. For example, if you are losing your sense of play and joy and becoming humorless, working with children on art projects would help. When we become closed off to some aspect of life, emotion or segment of the population, our creativity suffers.
Do your art everyday. I have spoken to artists who say they need a new computer to write or a writing workshop, painters need a studio, etc., but that's bullshit. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison awaiting execution. If you want to do it, you will do it. If you resist doing your art, maybe you are a masochist or not really an artist.
If you are a writer, take pictures. If you are a visual artist, write. If you are a spoken word artist, be quiet and make a sculpture. Variety inspires us.
Learn from others but don't compare yourself to anyone. You can learn a lot from other artists but instead of trying to imitate or compare yourself to them, think about the essence of the individual's creation. I love Nabokov and Kurt Weill and realize it is their independence of spirit and belief in their work I find thrilling. They turned their art into a world, so moving from one country to another was not fraught with suffering. Wherever they traveled, they were home. They were at home in Art, which is where I live.


Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love