I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.

Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads

the world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.

The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.

An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.