When students ask author René Saldaña, Jr. how one becomes a writer, he says, “It’s complicated.” In this memoir written in verse for young adults, the author remembers his boyhood and the path that led to his becoming a reader, writer and scholar. He begins with “The Detes: My Parents as Kids,” and recounts “’Apá was born a long time ago / ‘Amá a few years after him.” His father finished elementary school in Mier, Tamaulipas, and then went to Nuevo Laredo to study machines. His parents married in Chihuahua, Texas: “It’s got one street / called Charco, or mud-puddle.” René’s childhood along the Texas-Mexico border was filled with lots of family—cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents; his abuelo told countless stories that helped define the boy. He read magazines at the grocery store, watched his mother read Selecciones, the Spanish-language version of Reader’s Digest, and realized writing poetry was the way to get a girlfriend. But he remembers junior high school as “those blasted years” and the teachers “who made me fall / out of love with reading a book.” Later he found a book in the library in which he saw himself for the first time; there were kids that spoke Spanish, had brown skin and names like his. This touching portrait depicts the development of a writer and the impact his rural, Mexican-American community had on his growth into a published author and university scholar. Written in an accessible style and available in a bilingual format, this moving and often humorous memoir in narrative verse will appeal to all teens. Young people of color and reluctant male readers will find it of particular interest.
- Cover
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Prologue: On School Visits, Invariably, a Student Will Ask
- The Deets: My Parents as Kid
- Fast-Forward: Now She Sees Him
- Coming into This World on the Chea
- In ’68 98 Dollars Could’a Got Us
- Strumming My Guitar That Was a Broom
- No tengo ni un solo recuerdo
- Shakity-Shakes: You Don’t Gotta Tell Us Twice
- Today, Through My Fingers, the World Is Gray
- When to Eat pan dulce
- Learning to Write
- My First Kiss
- This Aine Nothing Like Reading
- Rosita Alvírez Murió: Ha corrido
- 2 Things I’ll Always Remember About 1 Grade: Neither of Which Has to Do with My Reading or Writing Life st (Or Do They?)
- Learning to Ride
- Learning to Write, or the Genesis of a Writer Who Got His Start by Reading
- Mrs. Peña, Who Introduced Me to Wet Albert
- No Clue, None at All
- My Very First Car Worth Mentioning Was an Orange ’57 Chevy
- Summertime Magic
- Today, Through My Nose, the World Is Yellow
- In the Magic Tree
- Visiting Polito, My Cousin, Always...A Good Time: A Self-Plagiarism
- Ant Juice
- Guerrilleros
- La Migra
- Then Came Junior Hig
- My Father, the Man (1)
- A Card for My Mother
- He Would’a If He Could’a
- My Father’s Hands (1)
- My Father’s Hands (2)
- A Lion Sleeps in the Heart of Every Man
- El Canalito: In Those Day
- Leal’s Grocery Store
- Today, Through My Eyes, the World Is Green
- Two Things that Wake Me Up Too Early on Saturday Morning—No, Three
- Something to Music
- But Man, That Boy Can Play
- What Goes Around . . .
- El Espejo
- Can’t Be Scared of Someone Who’s Loved
- Our Last Kiss
- In This Book: Me, Myself & I
- Pero ¿qué de mí?
- My Open Wound
- My Librarian
- A Librarian Just Knows
- Texas, in That Sense, Was Like a Story. And a Boring One at That: A Self-Plagiarism
- All of These Made Up Our Texas: A Mish-Mash Self-Plagiarism
- It Was Poetry
- Lost
- Sweet Conversion
- My Father, the Man (2)
- Tío Who Cursed My Dad Was Still My Tío, Whom I Loved
- A Word So Much More Beautiful
- El sueño americano
- You Got Papers?
- I Wrote, But I Wasn’t No Writer (If that Makes Sense)
- Music All Around
- In-Betweenness
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #1
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #2
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #3
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #4
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #5
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #6
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #7
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #8
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #9
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #10
- Waiting Our Turn at the Border Patrol Checkpoint, Falfurrias, TX #11
- A Book, an Escape
- Writing, What a Bore
- Mirrors / Windows / Sliding Glass Doors: Reading Edition
- Mirrors / Windows / Sliding Glass Doors: TV Show Edition
- I Got My Own Typing Skills: 60 wpm: Soy mecanógrafo como Apá
- A Hole in My Pocket, I Write (Though Sometimes Writing Doesn’t Look It)
- Afternoons, My Mother Reads: How I Became a Writer
- Under the Shade: How I Became a Writer
- El cuentista: How I Became a Writer
- Not a Single, Solitary Thing: A Writer-in-theMaking in Line at the US Post Office Dropping Off a Letter to His Long-Distance Girlfriend at the Counter Instead of In the Box: Bettering the Odds
- Reading Is Not Writing . . . Or Is It? How I Became a Writer
- Epilogue: Eventually, Inevitably
- Coda. Writers Do What?
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