by Natalia Treviño
I wake up each day and begin assessing. Did I get enough sleep? I do math, guessing at total hours without waking up fully. It is the first thing that comes to mind. I want to live. Sleep, I have learned, will help me do that. I tell myself a lot of things in order to calm down the monsters that are always at me, always wanting me to give up, stop trying hard, and hide under a rock for the rest of my life. I reason away the monsters as best I can by way of dreams, concoctions, stories, alternate realities, television, statistics, oppositional thinking, lectures, readings, creativity. Community. Comunidad is the one brain, heart, and soul medicine that sticks, that works, that helps create something out of all the muck and beauty that I see. I grew up with a lot of fear, as a Mexican girl told by her father not to make waves, to always stay under the radar, and eke out a living if possible. He also trained me to understand that death was around every corner, that predators surround every public space, and the goal is not to get fired or divorced again. I had to make this work for me, make my fear be the catalyst for living despite it. Writing is my act of hope against fear, and hope is what my writing mentors have given me over the years, but the unstoppable hope I have now I can only attribute to Macondo Magic.
The story about how Sandra Cisneros began Macondo at her kitchen table is famous in San Antonio and among Macondistas. When she has talked about the formation of Macondo, she explains that she had attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and hated it for many reasons. While it gave her access to peers like Joy Harjo and her long term editor, it also created a sense of isolation she could not shake, isolation which can be translated as writers’ malnutrition. It can deepen depression, angst, and our sense of futility as we aim to give humanity a hand at itself, to re-think itself on a local and global scale. This is a big job. It is hard, comparable to the punishment of Sisyphus.
Sandra began her career teaching writing at universities and also found a gap there between what she wanted to give her students as writers and how they received her valuable instruction. Once hired as the Literature Director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and relocating to Texas, she wanted to create a safe ground for herself and for other writers she met, a homeland for writers that was infused with the culture of San Antonio, the motherly, attentive, hospitable, and loving Mexican-American culture. She wanted a workshop for dedicated writers that not only helped them improve their craft with tough, honest, critical feedback, like a good madre, but also enriched them by attending to the whole human being, the whole writer, the total package.
My entrance to Macondo, about eleven years after its formation, was a fluke. I had won the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award from Sandra’s Foundation named for her father, a very generous man who was an artist in his work as an upholsterer. I met her in person months after she called me on the phone to tell me the good news. When I met her, I asked about coming to Macondo and she said, “Sorry, you have to get nominated by a member. Someone has to write a nomination letter for you.” Shoot, I thought. I only knew one person who had attended, and I was too shy to ask her for a letter.
Magically, I got another call from Sandra less than a year later. Some writers dropped out of her class at the last minute. She contacted me and a few other locals and offered for us to volunteer, help, drive, participate, audit, or do anything we wanted, so that we felt comfortable. She just knew what she was offering. I decided to get my huevos in order to take a spot, to participate fully in her workshop, even though I was working full time that summer, and would not be able to attend every day of workshop. The terror level, the fear of failure and rejection was high.
I walked into the welcome dinner early and sat next to a man who was also early and who I imagined was like me, afraid, but when I turned to look at him, it was Luis Rodriguez. I gasped and began to gush to him that I teach his work in my classes, that my students love him, that I saw him as the keynote speaker at a conference in Chicago, and nearly crying with disbelief, that he had changed my teaching methods forever because of what he said. My body sort of burst into a magical being that day. As I had dinner with Luis Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros gave me a cup of ice water, checking on me. It was unreal. How could this be my world? It was Macondo Magic.
That summer, I met a group of writers who are now my friends, allies, and who are kickass writers, leaders in their fields today. I did not know about Macondo’s structure and that in order to be in Sandra’s class, you had to “graduate” to it by taking other workshops first. One peer reluctantly told me about this rule a few days in. He explained that I had broken this rule, and I gulped with anxiety. How did that look? And rather than treat me with needles, envy, and barbs, they handled me with grace and love. They told me where my story worked and where it didn’t. They shared their concerns about the story’s trajectory, and they shared their own vulnerability about how it made them feel. They told me where I had also missed the mark. The sharing was like no other workshop I had attended because of the key ingredients Sandra reminded me of when I tried to thank her for this opportunity. “We leave our egos at the door. I want us to be generous with one another. You will see. This is a familia you will have that will live all over the country.”
That story I took that day helped me win the San Antonio Arts Foundation Award for Literature years later, a story that still haunts me about the deaths of migrant workers in the back of a trailer. I had taken the point of view of the least likable person in the story, the driver.
Over the years, I have witnessed the generosity of Sandra and this organization in ways that keep surprising me, in ways that resemble that cup of water Sandra offered me that first day, or the fruit licuado she made for me and Levi Romero before we taught the Poesia de la Calle workshop to writers who had literally met Sandra in the street. The height of her vision for us to be a familia, a community for one another is professional, spiritual, and personal. She gives of her whole self. With Macondo, she tapped into an energy source that seems to be unlimited in its scope and that has no boundaries. Animals receive, writers receive, nurses, waitresses, and the shoe shiner who came to our Poesia de la Calle workshop all receive her energy. But it is with an aim at excellence, by kicking our flabby writers butts into gear, as she has said to me.
At AWP in Chicago, I was working the Macondo table, and a writer said to me cynically, “Well, I heard Sandra is leaving Macondo. She won’t be much a part of it anymore” I became a little enraged. I had to ask myself why this felt so far from the truth. Sure, Sandra would stop ordering all the fruit cups and setting the programming for months in advance, and stressing out and paying for accommodation for up to eighty writers, for fees and speakers and hotels for our teachers, but that is not Macondo. My response was, “Sandra is as much a part of Macondo as the oxygen in your blood.” She cannot be removed from Macondo because she created Macondo Magic, and those of us who serve on the Ad Hoc Advisory Board know that.
We honor it. We want to give new writers that same cup of refreshing ice-cold water that will refresh the spirit, life, and desire in the writer, and yes, we will tell you your line breaks are not working, and that your narrative distance is not gelling with the structure of the story, but we are about something bigger, serving the human story in all of its diverse forms, telling hidden stories that are not part of mainstream literature, and doing it well, so that those people, our predecessors, our often ignored points of light can shine and become part of American literature.
Last year, a small group of us reclaimed Macondo so that it belongs to the members, as it always has, and did our best to bring back what we have received from Macondo and give to writers who need and deserve: community, validation, guidance, sustenance, and un cachito de Macondo Magic.
Sandra was so pleased with what we had done that she offered what she had been unable to do in years as the head madrina to our organization: to teach again, to help writers with their work in a room that simply has chairs, an hourglass to keep time, and a table.
Today, individuals can apply for the Macondo Writers Workshop through the website, and applications are juried by new and veteran Macondistas. To find out more on Macondo, follow them on Facebook and Twitter, where they will be announcing their 2019 summer faculty very soon!
Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviñolearned English from Bert and Ernie while growing up in South Texas and is the author of Lavando La Dirty Laundry, which was a national and international awards finalist. Other awards include the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the Menada Literary Award at the Ditet E Naimit Poetry Festival in Macedonia. Her work has been translated and published in Albanian, and is being translated this fall to Italian and Macedonian. Natalia’s poems appear in Bordersenses, Borderlands, burnt district, Sugar House Review, the Southern Poetry Anthology, The Western Humanities Review, the Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, and other journals and anthologies. Of Natalia’s new book, VirginX, a finalist for Finishing Line Press’s Open Chapbook contest, author Veronica Golos says, “the voice of Aztec and of San Antonio; of the Madonna and the goddess with a necklace of hands.”