5/13/02: Click here for an updated timeline.This page sparked to life on a damp Saturday afternoon. Here you'll find some of my short fiction, and shards of prose from pieces that have been -- or are about to be -- submitted to periodicals. Rejection letters are forthcoming.
I've been writing and publishing non-fiction for six years. But we might as well start at the beginning and work our way to the present, our heads turned in the general direction of the past, our shoulders bare to the future. It'll be brief. This won't hurt a bit.
I was conceived in the Dutch island of Curacao in 1974, and whisked away a month before my birth to Bucaramanga, Colombia, then shipped, four months later, to Caracas, Venezuela, where my father worked as a quality control engineer for three years. Things have been considerably more hectic since then.
A map of the Americas might come in handy right now. I've lived in Guri, Venezuela; Barranquilla, Colombia; Akron, Ohio; Bucaramanga, Colombia; Orlando, Florida; and Bogota, Colombia.
The order is chronological, with the bulk on the tiny pinpoint of Guri, a worker's camp where my family spent six years (the longest I've continuously lived anywhere), and where I tossed dirt-clots at other children in glorious wars, surrounded by gigantic pipes, dwarfed by the wheels of titanic Caterpillar trucks. I left in 1982, when Guri's dam, then the second largest in the world, was still a few years away from completion. The house where we lived is now part of the shallow bottom of the dam's retention lake. I've been told that, on sunny days, you can see the roofs of my old neighborhood's duplexes. Memories are like that.
My first published piece was a film review for The Orlando Sentinel, a newspaper associated with The Chicago Tribune. I was sixteen. The Sentinel published my reviews every two weeks in their Calendar section for a full year -- I was one of four Teen Movie Critics. The gig ended in 1993, as did high school. I was accepted into the University of Central Florida, where I intended to major in Film. I wrote features on alligator-meat, rollerblading, coffee-ho uses and jazz for the college newspaper, The Central Florida Future.
What my future had in store was a four-year foray in my mother country. I dropped out of U.C.F. and into Colombia. There, I wrote, edited, proofed, and diagrammed for an English-language weekly called The Colombian Post. There is no better experience for a budding writer than a newspaper, particularly if it is small and understaffed. You learn to write in tidy paragraphs. The only muse you need is a deadline. You learn how to wheedle, whine, and threaten your boss for your paycheck, and you find out about the mechanics of printing, the intricacies of the publishing industry, the aesthetic logic of setting columns and photographs in their proper place. You get a glimpse of what writing is -- how to make it sturdy, how to make it sing. And you get invited to cocktail parties.
I am in Orlando now, and back in college. I may graduate before the year 2000. My days of living precariously as a newspaper hack, poeticaster, and criticule are receding.
There is an interesting story about my birth, a bit too magical to be put into the tidy confines of fiction -- interesting because it points to a pattern, a cognizant, ordered sequence of events, in life.
Curacao, January 1974. My mother would go to a fortune-teller every Saturday morning, my father, a skeptic, tailing along. That morning, the gypsy told my mother she was going to have a baby. My father scoffed. They were young and had not planned on having a kid, not yet. The gypsy told them that they would see a sign that afternoon. At around three o'clock,as they were walking on the beach, the fortune-teller forgotten, a yellow baby-bootie washed up ashore by their feet. They still have it. Months later, well after science had confirmed the augury, a sonogram revealed the baby but not the baby's sex, and my parents decided that it would be a bad idea to buy pink or blue clothes for the newborn. They bought everything in yellow.
There is a pattern linking us to others, to our world , to sand and sky, to clouds, to fallen leaves and abandoned skyscrapers, though all that we glimpse is odd coincidences, flashes of intuition as pure and raw as love, and just as strange.