Thank you Andy Peters for bringing me into The Next Big Thing!
The Rules: Answer the ten questions about your current book or work-in-progress and tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.
So here are the questions/answers for my latest poetry collaboration Hustler Rave XXX: Poetry of the Eternal Survivor, written with David Caleb Acevedo and published by Lethe Press on March 1, 2013.
What is the working title of your book?
Hustler Rave XXX: Poetry of the Eternal Survivor is the full title. David came up with Hustler Rave, and I added the XXX and the rest of it as a kind of nod to sleazy old Times Square movie theaters and such. I miss places like that. Without realizing it this book wound up becoming things other than just a collection of erotic poems—in David’s case a riveting testimonial based on his days as a sex worker working to pay for college, and for me an exposé of the gay sex underground I discovered as a young man and continued to explore for another fifteen or so years.
Despite the fact that we now have institutions like “gay marriage” and greater “acceptance” in New York, honest and visceral discussions of gay sex and pornography still disturb lots of people in the mainstream, yet LGBT folks are bombarded daily, by the hour, by heterosexual sexual expression. People are still much more conservative than they want to admit. As a working-class New Yorker it was time to put something out there that captured the grit that once made New York so exciting and fertile for the arts. Our city has turned into a destination for rich zombies, and they are the least interested—or interesting.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I thought it would be fun to collaborate and David came up with the theme. This was last summer and much has happened since, so I hope I didn’t get this wrong. Regardless, David and I both write in English and Spanish, so the book started as a bilingual collection. But David decided that the English pieces had a better flow, so we dropped the few Spanish pieces we had at the time. As he used to actually hustle, I gave him a lot of freedom to sequence the pieces, etc.
As for me, I used to know lots of hustlers and junkies and had a knack for hanging out in sleazy places, gay bars, punk joints, strip clubs. I’ve always had a fondness for dubious places, because the people who generally inhabit them are honest about why they are there. I know that the concept for this book made some people shudder, but I’ve always admired honesty no matter how disturbing. Shoot me: I was raised in the Bronx in the 1970s/1980s. I like grit.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry. Noir. Hot. Sleazy poetry, pretty poetry—tragic, sordid, ecstatic. Erotic poetry.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Well, it would be a large cast as there are nearly 50 poems that take place all over the world and feature a myriad of characters from various nationalities, races, etc. Being that I’m almost 42, I’d want James Franco to play me when I was a bolder 25-year-old with a knack for being naked—a lot.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
An intimate and poetic investigation of the young men of night and the men who pay them for their beauty.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The wonderful Lethe Press published it. Back in 2011 the amazing Charles Rice-González brought me on board to co-edit the anthology From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction, so this is, in many ways, a continuation of that relationship. David also had a story in that book…small world, eh?
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
David and I started piecing it together back in August of 2012, that is, while working around other projects. He was finishing his sex memoir (Diario de una puta humilde) and I was starting my first stage play and was studying and reading a lot. I decided to take a short break from fiction, to recharge after trying to resurrect my hopeless first novel, so this little detour was the perfect opportunity to invent new dramas. I would say we kept developing the poems for a solid six months or so. Adding, axing, cutting, disintegrating, rearranging.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I’m not sure. Though while I was working on the book it was hard not to think about people like Jean Genet, David Wojnarowicz, Reinaldo Arenas, John Rechy, etc. I make references in the author introductions to My Own Private Idaho and the book Queer Latino Testimonio: Keith Haring and Juanito Xtravaganza by the Puerto Rican scholar Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, which if you haven’t read is terrific. Some people might find parallels to Emanuel Xavier’s earlier work, which I’ve always loved. But something David and I strove for was to populate the pages with multiple voices. We even break from the hustlers on occasion to give a few of the “johns” voices. Some of the poems are written in lacy, worldly language, and others bark in street slang. We wanted to cover a range of colors and language.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
David and I had been proofing and translating one another’s work and it just seemed like a fun idea. Perhaps his mentioning the title of his sex memoir sparked a fire—for him I think it was to get certain memories off his chest and to focus on writing in English. For me it was about revisiting old ghosts and dressing them in new clothes, so to speak. I work for the dead.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Aside from the juicy subject matter—that is, as we revisit yet another Age of Conservatism—I would say the use of language and voice and locations. Hustler Rave XXX tells the stories of Latino rough trade Castro Street boys to struggling San Juan college students to runaway white boy junkies in Seattle. Even if we’ve fictionalized them, someone needs to give them a human voice. Hustlers often come from very troubled backgrounds to begin with. They’re people, too—no matter how we might feel about their ways of surviving. I can assure you that some of their worst critics might be guilty of much more heinous things.
Hustler Rave XXX is available at the following Barnes and Noble URL:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hustler-rave-xxx-david-caleb-acevedo/1114638446
Who I’m tagging:
David Caleb Acevedo: writer and translator in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Luis Negrón, writer in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Emanuel Xavier, poet and writer in Brooklyn, New York
Bonafide Rojas, poet in the Bronx, New York
Peggy Robles-Alvarado, poet and writer in the Bronx, New York
I met the San Juan-based writer and translator David Caleb Acevedo in 2011, while I was in Puerto Rico. I was working on my Meditations/Meditaciones: Bronx/Salsa poems at the time and later contacted him about proofing my Spanish and hopefully translating some longer pieces in exchange for similar gestures, which I was happy to fulfill for him as well. As he was writing and finishing his sex memoir (Diario de una puta humilde) and as I began to piece together my first stage play, we began writing and sharing–what was at first just for fun–bilingual poetry that focused on the theme of “hustlers”. I was itching to work on something that would make just the right people squirm, yet fiction would’ve been a timelier investment. Once David came up with the title Hustler Rave and I added the XXX: Poetry of the Eternal Survivor (as a nod to vintage Times Square), everything else fell right into place. And while David had personal experience to draw from on these matters, I had to take a different approach. Surely I had tales to retell from the golden years when I more often had my clothes off than on, but I also wanted to explore the johns’ points-of-view. In other words, it was a lot of fun to invent characters and scenarios based on sex workers and other creatures of the night I once knew.
From past life greased-up Greek boys of antiquity to the contemporary streets and dark rooms of New York, San Juan, Hartford, CT, Tijuana, Portland, OR, San Francisco and beyond, Hustler Rave XXX: Poetry of the Eternal Survivor grew into a collection of seamy snapshots, oftentimes sordid and tragic, but never lacking freedom of the sexual soul. I really enjoyed this collaboration for many reasons, one of them being that I never thought I’d write about some of the characters I’d crossed paths with in the nearly two decades I spent in the gay underground clubs and bars of the Pacific Northwest, California, Baja Mexico, and New York City during the 1990s/2000s–during a post-AIDS boom that introduced new HIV/AIDS therapies and medications that began adding years of life to many who thought they’d be dead before their next birthday. Those days were a pre-9/11 sexual Twilight Zone fueled by a plush economy, limitless intoxicants and cheap air travel–but everything comes to an end. So it’s with great joy that Lethe Press liked the material and decided to publish it, while also giving David and I much artistic control.
Most importantly, it was an electrifying experience to give voice to those who often find themselves without one…
Hustler Rave XXX: Poetry of the Eternal Survivor is now available. Video readings coming soon!
Click here to order the ebook (choose Checkout with Amazon).
Click here to order from Powell’s Books.
Sketchbooks/Notebooks
Like a lot of writers and others who put pen to paper or type out their thoughts and ideas, I began writing before I even realized I was doing it. During my late teens, in 1988, I moved out of the Bronx and to the West Coast—to Portland, Oregon—where my mother’s family was living at the time. And once I graduated high school (I moved there right before my senior year) I was out and on my own in the world.
I was hired as a busboy at a café/restaurant emporium called the Metro on Broadway, where as my family often said, “those” people hung out, which meant queers, musicians, artists and other miscellaneous riff-raff—everything I was attracted to, much to their horror. There was an art supply store nearby where locals bought their creative tools such as pens, paints, brushes, and sketchbooks/notebooks.
My preferred sketchbook/notebook had a solid 5”x7” black cover (black, of course) and blank white pages. These were typically used by visual artists for sketching in, but I started using them to experiment with “word assemblages” that today make me cringe, but it was the beginning of something nonetheless. This habit developed into something lifelong and the notebooks have never gone away. Anything that can be written on, when needed, can function as a temporary fix.
As I made the transition to fiction from experimental poetry they became even more valuable—as I (back in the mid-1990s) first tried my hand and fleshing out lengthy plot developments and character profiles for the first time. I had a computer at home in those days but my imagination felt its limits within my dark and tiny apartment. Inspiration often struck while I was walking down the street or having a beer with a friend, and those flashes—which often only strike once—needed to be captured.
Now I live what I call a “tri-borough” existence, meaning Brooklyn is home, Manhattan is where I work, and my family lives in the Bronx where I grew up—I ride the subway a lot and far. I don’t have an iPad or mobile computer at the moment, so when I’m reading on the train or revising something on my Android smart-phone, anything that “comes to me” goes right into my notebook. And from there I later transfer it to where it belongs.
These days I use 8.5”x11” coil-bound “subject” notebooks. The effect of using paper and a writing tool—the way I originally learned to compose language—lends a different angle to the imagination than does typing. There’s no “deleting” text, for example. You can cross things out and build on ideas, but in the end it’s all still there. And I still use pens when writing down anything—changes to dialogue, new scene ideas, and action developments.
Writing is an art, and just as the painter uses a sketchbook to develop his or her ideas, so can a writer. This was a solid piece of advice that an elder scribe shared with me in my younger days and one that has yet to let me down.
I bought my (former) author website domain back in 2005 and maintained a consistent web-world for another six years or so. The initial page templates were constructed by my friend, musician Kirk Wagner, and I was able to, over the next few years, both modify and update his simple layout and erase it all and start from scratch thanks to Dreamweaver software. I never went as far as the Flash route, nor did I want to. All I wanted was a straightforward information channel.
I posted what most writers do on their websites—upcoming readings (I curated a series from 2008-2011), publication news, where books could be purchased, a biography page, etc., and when I started a blog in 2009 I linked that up to the website as well. Being an on-and-off blogger working around demanding book projects, it didn’t strike me right away that they were becoming the same thing—in my case anyway.
(Photo by Robert Cohen: with writers Sofia Quintero, Linda Nieves-Powell, and Orlando Ferrand, Hostos College, Bronx, NY 2012)
The cost and maintenance of a proper website was what made me decide to ditch it—I was working on the blog more often as it was (it was easier for me) and with time, blogging sites such as WordPress, became more sophisticated and I’m now able to do everything I used to do on my website on my most recent blog incarnation. I stopped paying mind to what industry heads kept claiming—what works best for you in connecting with people works best, period.
A website going to ruin (as mine was during its last seasons) that 5-10 people stumble upon daily throughout the world is less useful to a writer than a blog that 30-50 people a day (or more) choose to read. No matter how flashy or impressive its design may be. This is what has worked for me since I started announcing book publications, editorial services, calls-for-submissions, reading series dates, special traveling engagements/appearances, ad nauseum.
For some, the standard website, hardwired to what’s most valuable in these scenarios—a great [email] mailing list—can also pump marketing and production muscle. But blog designers took this into consideration years ago and now readers can enter their email addresses into a subscription box and—voilà—they’ll receive, straight to their email accounts, everything you post until they unsubscribe.
This has become the more streamlined approach for me, until the next thing happens.
What about you? Please feel free to comment!!
¡Happy Almost New Year!
Charlie
Taking advantage of the track repairs being made to the 2/5 elevated train line in the Bronx (starting last summer and into the fall), I captured this footage of the Bronx’s nightscape in a surreal and harried manner on my Android phone, taking it all in as empty station platforms zipped by the speeding trains on which I found myself on. I grafted together the best footage into a seamless one-way journey starting at around E 180th Street or Tremont/West Farms Square as the train flew forward toward the foreboding tunnel entrance that takes it underground and into Manhattan between Jackson Avenue and 149th St/3rd Avenue. After watching the footage at home once I treated it in iMovie, I realized it needed something else–conceptually/visually speaking.
As the train cruised underneath Gotham and toward Brooklyn one day, I took notice of all the colorful lights that flash in the tunnels. Things we New Yorkers generally ignore. Third rail sparks often flash a whitish-blue and tunnel lights can vary from white to amber. I collected more footage of the tunnel lights over the course of a few days, trying not to look like a suspicious lunatic, and edited together the most kinetic sequences to give the netherworld (as far as the video is concerned) a texture of its own. When I completed a 7-minute reel or so I began to write loose verse to accompany it, completing the text body during Hurricane Sandy. Once that was all done, I contacted the very talented Afro-Caribbean percussionist LS Bell and we booked an afternoon at D.O.P.E. Studios in Brooklyn to complete the project.
While I’m certainly no filmmaker, I was pleased with the results!
Experimentation can be medicine for the artist’s soul.
Happy Holidays…
Charlie
THURSDAY – OCTOBER 11
Americas Society/Queen Sofia Spanish Institute
680-684 Park Avenue
(Subway 6 to 68th Street)
——
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center/NYU
53 Washington Square S
(Subway R to 8th Street/NYU)
——
Lehman College
250 Bedford Park Blvd W
Subway 4 or D to Bedford Park Blvd)
——
Fordham University
113 w 60th Street
(Subway 1, A, B, C D to Columbus Circle)
——
McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince Street
(Subway R to Prince Street)
——
10:00am−3:00pm
Lehman College
A Visit with Writers, Academics and Students
With Awilda Cáez, Rosa Beltrán, Mayra Santos-Febres, Julio Ricardo Varela, José Manuel Fajardo and Hilda García
——
12pm-2pm
Fordham University/Lincoln Center
Debate: “Three Islands, Three Ways to Live and Write the Caribbean”
With Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Pedro Antonio Valdéz, and Luis Negrón
——
3:30pm-4:30pm
El Barco de Papel Bookstore
A Visit with the Writer Mayra Santos-Febres
——
5:00pm−5:30pm
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center/NYU
Photography Projection Presentation: “Últimas noticias del sur”
With Daniel Mordzinski
——
5:30pm−6:30pm
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center/NYU
Discussion – “The Voices That Nobody Listens To”
With Álvaro Enrigue, Valeria Luiselli, Jan Martínez, Daniel Maximin, and Alfredo Pita
——
5:30pm−6:00pm
McNally-Jackson Bookstore
Manhattan Readings III – Poetry
A Reading by Ángel Antonio Ruiz Laboy, winner of the 2012 Nuevas Voces Award
——
7:00pm−8:00pm
Queen Sofía Spanish Institute ($10.00/non-members)
Discussion – “Adjusting the Narrative: Familiar Demons in New Latin American Literature”
With: Pedro Antonio Valdéz, Awilda Cáez, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and Ángel Antonio Ruiz Laboy. Moderated by Darío Henao.
——
8:00pm-9:00pm
McNally-Jackson Bookstore
Closing Celebration Reading for Festival de la Palabra 2012
With Jan Martínez, Daniel Maximin, Urayoán Noel, Diamela Eltit, José Manuel Fajardo, Valeria Luiselli, and Mayra Santos-Febres.
WEDNESDAY – OCTOBER 10
At :
Instituto Cervantes de Nueva York
211 E 49th Street
(Subway 6 to 51st Street)
——
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center/NYU
53 Washington Square S
(Subway R to 8th Street/NYU)
4:00pm
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
Discussion – “A Question of Rhythm: The Communicating Vessels Between Literature, Scenes, and Music In Latin America”
With Charlie Vázquez, Nancy Mercado, Juan Moreno-Velázquez and Orlando Ferrand
——
5:00pm
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center/NYU
Manhattan Readings II. – Poetry and Brief Narrative
With Awilda Cáez, Luis Negrón, Rosa Beltrán, Alfredo Pita, Jorge Volpi and Charlie Vázquez
——
5:30pm
Instituto Cervantes de Nueva York
Discussion – “Spain and Latin America: A Literary Voyage of Going and Returning”
With Manuel Rivas, Mayra Santos-Febres, Pedro Antonio Valdéz, and José Ovejero
Moderated by José Manuel Fajardo
——
7:30pm
Instituto Cervantes de Nueva York
A Dialogue Between Juan Villoro (Mexico) and Juan Cruz (Spain)
