An Interview with Poet, Octavio Quintanilla, author of "The Book of Wounded Sparrows," by Rey M. Rodríguez

Octavio Quintanilla’s poetry collection, “The Book of Wounded Sparrows,” (Texas Review Press 2024) recently received the distinction of being long-listed for poetry by the National Book Review. He is also the author of the book, “If I Go Missing” (Slough Press, 2014), and served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. 

His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere.

His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published in Poetry Northwest, Gold Wake Live, Newfound, Chachalaca Review, Chair Poetry Evenings, Red Wedge, The Museum of Americana, About Place Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, The Windward Review, Tapestry, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, & The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas.   

Octavio’s visual work has been exhibited at the Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Equinox Gallery, UTRGV-Brownsville, the Weslaco Museum, Aanna Reyes Gallery in San Antonio, TX, Our Lady of the Lake University, AllState Almaguer art space in Mission, El Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, The Walker’s Gallery in San Marcos, TX, and in the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, TX. 

He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review and poetry editor for The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism & for Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Literature & Arts Magazine.  

Octavio teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.  

The Storyteller’s Blog discussed his recent poetry book, the craft of writing, what poetry means to him, grief, and the power of art to heal. It was an extraordinary opportunity to discuss all of these topics and more, through his poetry.

Octavio Quintanilla. Welcome to the Storytellers Blog of Chapter House, the Literary Journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Thank you for offering me the space to be interviewed and to discuss literature, poetry, and my work.

It's our pleasure and privilege, especially after reading your latest book and all your great work. The first question is, how did you get into writing?

I've always been creative, even as a boy. I've always had this sense of daydreaming. It's a characteristic of people like me who want to turn the world into something else. Eventually, we find the means to transform it and make it art. Even though I was born here in Texas. I lived the first 9 years of my life in Mexico. I would read a lot of graphic novels. In my early twenties, and late teens, I tried music, sculpture, and painting, but I always returned to language, writing reading, and I never gave up painting. 

Where in Mexico did you grow up?

I lived in a small town called Magueyes, Tamaulipas, which is at the border with Nuevo Leon, Maybe two and a half hours south of Monterrey, just to give you a location. It is at the foot of the Sierra Madre Mountains in Tamaulipas. I went to school there until I was 9, and then I came with my little brother to the States. We got sent here to live with my grandmother in Texas. My siblings and parents stayed behind. And I'm giving you this context because just by telling you this, you get a sense of what the book is about. 

But going back to your question about writing, I've always been a writer, which might just be a consequence of my daydreaming. I find stories everywhere, even on the markings of stained walls. As I grew up I knew, I had to find a way or method to tell them, so I started experimenting with different ways to tell a story. I kept returning to language because I love to read. Language became important to me as a form of expression since I carried with me all of the complexities of having Spanish as my first language and then after coming to the States having English slowly suppress my Spanish. 

Maybe this is why I love words. It sometimes takes me a week to read a book, because I want to flip through it. I just want to look at the words until I finally start reading, which I think is a way of reading.

I became a writer because I love to read and tell stories to myself. Even now I'm always telling myself stories, imagining situations. As a boy, even though I had friends, I was also very comfortable in my solitude, which means that I started talking to myself. I start imagining things. It was all part of the natural process of becoming a writer and storyteller. 

In high school, I wanted to write novels because I loved writers such as Albert Camus and Kafka. Kafka is one of my favorite writers. Dostoyevsky, Carlos Fuentes and García Márquez, too. So after high school, I wanted to be a novelist and somehow, along the way, I found poetry. But I think poetry was always with me. 

I just interviewed Jennifer Maritza Mccauley, and I asked her this question, and she astonished me with her answer. And so, I must ask you what is poetry?

What is poetry? It's that thing that when you read a poem is not necessarily found in the poem.

I can tell you some characteristics that could make up a poem, such as that it can be made of 14 lines, or that it has iambic pentameter, or that it utilizes metaphor. Or that it is made up of intentional diction. Those could be some particularities of a poem.  But for me, the poetry of the poem happens as I read it and then what happens after. How that poem makes me feel. How it made me feel. That's the poetry, the emotion that can’t be articulated because there are no words for it, even though the poem is made of them. Defining poetry is like trying to define God.

I love that. You are a poet and visual artist. Could you describe the framework for how you write poetry and your back story? 

I’ve tried all sorts of forms of expression. Music, for instance. In my early twenties or late teens, I knew I was not going to get anywhere with music. But that experience helped me be the writer that I am. It was good to know a little bit about music, rhythm, chord progression, and melody. Another love of mine is painting and in my early twenties, I wanted to paint. But the material was so expensive. So, I would buy a notebook for 50 cents and write in it. I felt fulfilled by doing this creative act. When I started writing in the notebooks, for a moment I felt like I was abandoning painting and music, but I realized I was just becoming more focused on writing. 

I’ve always enjoyed to mark-make and handwrite, which is why, in the book, you see visual poems that I call “Frontextos.” I’ve always been attracted to the artistic process. I like to see painters set up their paints and throw their first splashes of paint on canvas, or watch illustrators begin their first sketches. And it’s inspiring to see writers write longhand and see their handwriting. I think it's beautiful and enigmatic, and it's so visceral for me. It appeals to my senses and so that's why, since 2018, I've been writing all my poems in notebooks. So that's part of my thinking and writing process. 

And for me, writing in notebooks is beneficial in that I don't spend hours sitting down in front of a computer trying to write a poem anymore. I write on the go. Whenever inspiration strikes. And writing longhand helps with this. The notebooks. I write a phrase, or a metaphor, or a description that could be useful later when I sit to focus. Which is to say, I enjoy the messiness of what process can be. The disjunction that it is often made of. 

Are you slowing time because you're noticing and being more present? You're incorporating the moment into your art.

Yes, I think everything about art has to do with time. Which is another way to say that for me everything in the world has the potential to be a metaphor and symbol. Making connections between the self and things in the world is a way of being present. If I walk past a tree, I like to touch its bark. Or if I encounter an interesting leaf on the ground as I walk, I usually pick it up and observe the writing in it.  This is the type of relationship I'm building with the world, which helps me with the sort of poetry I want to write.  

I understand. Now tell me about your parents.

My father passed away in 2015. My mother lives in the Rio Grande Valley, four hours South of San Antonio. I don't know if you're familiar with McAllen, Texas, or Harlingen, Texas.

I was born in El Paso. I grew up in Durango, Colorado, so I know a little bit about Texas, but I don't know enough about the Rio Grande Valley.

Well, it's four counties. My parents came to live here in 1992, when I graduated high school. My father farmed in Mexico and when he came here, he worked in construction. He worked all kinds of labor-type jobs, plumbing, roofing, sheet rock. You name it. My mom still has the house in Mexico where we grew up.  My late father’s farmlands are still there, overgrown with brush.

So let's get into the book. We keep touching on it, and there's a lot to discuss. It is a gorgeous book, and it has so many layers to it. Clearly, more people need to read it. They need to spend more time with it, so I love this format because there's enough time to have a good conversation. But it is a book that you want to spend a lot of time with the poems and the art. 

There are many layers to it. Yes.

So let's start with the title, “The Book of Wounded Sparrows,” and then “Wounded Sparrows,” has a line through it.

Right.

Tell me a little bit about the title and the strikethrough.

Well, the cover art I did myself. Let's start with that. I resisted doing the cover at first. Felt there would be too much of me in the book.  But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense for me to do it. I mean, it’s my book, after all. And it was nice for Texas Review Press to give me the opportunity to paint the cover. I painted seventeen abstracts paintings before landing on the one. 

Without the art, it would be a completely different book. The art is poetry.

Thank you for that. I feel the same way. I feel now that it's more intimate. Figuratively speaking, once you hold the book, you're holding a wounded sparrow. 

That statement is beautiful.

The book has been curated in such a way that it's supposed to take the reader on a journey. 

It's handcrafted. It's like a gift.

Exactly.

A handcrafted gift that you would give somebody.

Yes. And then the title with the strike-through was a key element since the book has to do with memory and its unintentional erasure. The visual element of the title evokes this. 

Oh, that's awesome!

It went well with the theme of memory, and how there comes a time in our life when we start losing memory. We don't remember things as they were. We start mythologizing the self. And then, at the beginning of the book, I included two letters I wrote to my parents when I was a boy. 

They're beautiful letters. 

And if you notice, those two letters have erasures of text, too. 

Okay, so I have to discuss the poem, “Postscript,” because the line that stunned me was, “You don't know yet that a contraction is a visual form of separation: m  amá.

That was because you would write your mother's name, “amá.” You left out the “m” in “mamá.”

Yes, yes.

It echoes the Spanish word, “Amar,” too.

Yes.

Well, let’s discuss the poem, “Postscript.” 

It’s probably the most significant poem in the collection because it gives the reader context about the emotional tensions in the book. That is to say, the themes that play out: familial, geographic, and emotional separation of all kinds; uprooting of all kinds. 

It was only a key because you're in a whole different world at this point of the book.

Yes. This poem is a sort of key to the reading of the book. However, there is more than one way to read this book. It’s not just about familial separation. It is also about language, about transformation, about art. So, if you were to choose a different poem to discuss, that poem would also be a key to give the book a different reading. 

The Frontextos are as powerful or even more powerful than just words. And being a bilingual reader also helps to understand them more.

Yes.

If you're monolingual it will mean one thing, because, you translated what you wrote in Spanish on the Frontextos. I have a whole series of other questions about your choices there.

Yes.  Frontextos divide the book into three sections. Overall, there are twenty-five of them, and I conceptualized these sections as a stand-alone book of visual poetry. So, in essence, The Book of Wounded Sparrows is composed of a book within a book. Because the text in most of these Frontextos is Spanish, I decided to translate them and then used all the text in the Frontextos to create a poem. A type of textual stitching. 

It's not just Spanish and English, it's like you were saying, it's music. It's mathematics. It's all of these different ways that we express ourselves. It's like your father working on a farm. That's a certain expression, another language, right?

Yes.

Why would we try to restrain people from speaking a second language? 

Right.

Spanish is so beautiful.

Yes.

It is a gift.

You are touching on some of the reasons why I included the Frontextos in Spanish. Even though at the end I do give an approximation of a translation. I wanted to make sure that there was Spanish in this book. I felt that the Spanish would serve the book and the poetics better if it was placed with the art.

Wow! I love that. The only thing I questioned is that you translated the Frontextos into English. I wish you had kept it in Spanish, so the people had to figure it out.

I went through all those emotions. If you were to see the first, second, and third versions of the manuscript that I sent my editor, you’d see that none of Frontextos were translated.  But then I made a compromise with myself, and I compromised in such a way that I don't feel bad about including the translation because as I said, the translations are English approximations to the Spanish text.  

Correct. And then there's a different notion of death in Spanish and English, culturally. Don't recite poems at the hour of my death. Amen!

It's a different thing. Yeah, I mean think about “amen” and “ámen.” Think about the different emotional responses we feel.

It's different.

It's a different emotional response, and then you have it in English, which has a different emotional response.

It's very, very different.

You are going to have a different emotional response to the Spanish if your first language is Spanish.

Moving to “The Self-Portrait With My Father's Eyes.” It's hard for me to read it without crying. But I have to talk to you about it, and then “Migrations.”

“Self-portrait” is one of the few prose poems that I wrote late in the writing of the manuscript. I actually painted a portrait of my father a couple of years after he died.  It hangs in my house by the staircase.  Impossible not to see it every day.  It’s a portrait made of lines, highly abstract, but and once you see the eyes, you recognize who it is. In order to see the face, you need to stand a few feet away from it.  Painting this is my way to fight forgetfulness. After a while, you start forgetting the faces of your dead. 

Let's talk about “Gregor, Samsa's Sister.” I'm not quite sure what the story is behind it.

Gregor is the main character in Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Now, I get it.

In “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor wakes up one day looking or feeling like a cockroach and his sister takes care of him. She’d take him food. Days go by and Gregor realizes that she is becoming afraid of him. There is a type of complexity in the relationship. In the poem, I am addressing Gregor and how his sister must’ve felt about the whole thing. Of course, the poem is about that, but also about other things. Like loneliness. And the duty we often feel to our loved ones. 

I love that. All right, let’s discuss “Where Do We Go From Here?” I think that's a good place to tie up the interview.

This one is another prose poem that I wrote towards the end of finalizing the manuscript. And it's also one of those poems where I'm thinking about our journey as immigrants. I am first generation and so I wanted to explore what that means. And what that means to our family and to our children, and about how we can't forget about those who truly struggled for us to be here. 

Yes, I thought it tied up a lot of the narrative together in a powerful way. The place I wanted to push you on was if you read Luis Rodríguez, he's basically saying, we didn't cross the border. The border crossed us. It's interesting how a line gets internalized in us. It's an artificial line, right?

Right. It is. But it also feels so real. I mean, everything that happens in the Border is evidence that the line is real. It is just hard to see it as a “line.” 

At some point, there was no line.

There are always invisible lines. This is how we live our lives. 

And so I mean, this question of belonging almost seems kind of imposed on us because of systemic racism.

Racism and other social constructs. Almost every aspect of our human experience has to do with belonging and not belonging. Even when I visit Mexico, I feel I don’t belong. Even in our small communities, we might feel this. 

The thing is that we internalize it. And we almost spend our whole life trying to belong. You are less likely to feel that way right unless we have books like yours.

Yes. I am done trying to “belong.”  It is what it is. 

We don't see ourselves, or if we see ourselves, it's in a very negative light. At the moment, we have a Presidential candidate articulating hate and there is no counternarrative to protect us.

There are counternarratives. They are just being drowned in the noise. 

There is so much ignorance about who we are. And so I was hoping that when you write another poem it'll express the idea that, of course, we belong. We always belonged. It was you who said that we didn't. When I was growing up there were very few Latino books.

This poem in particular is ironic. The question in the title is self-reflexive and the intent is to say that once we learn our history of who we are and where we come from there is no way to ever feel less than anyone. 

You'd have to read books written by Black writers to at least hear about another narrative, or what I'm finding out now by being a student at the Institute for American Indian Arts is that there are all of these Indigenous writers that we weren't exposed to, that we should have been exposed to. That would have educated us even more.

Yes. Well, now we know. And it is up to us to do the work that maybe was not done before. 

History, who we are, and how we got here are much more complicated stories than what we're fed, and that we have accepted because it was imposed on us. And that's why I'm so grateful for your book. Because your book speaks to so many different layers and so many different emotions that add complexity to our story.

Yes. The good thing is that now we are in a position to do more. And I think this is precisely why The Book of Wounded Sparrow is important. I hope schools have the good sense to include it in their curriculum. 

I like that. I mean what a gift! Thank you so much and congratulations on being long-listed for the National Book Award. So well-deserved.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall his poetry will be published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, IAIA's literary journal, Pleiades Magazine, and Los Angeles Review.

A Frontexto by Octavio Quintanilla