A new story is up on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale.
Richard Gatica, serving three life prison terms, writes of the day he offered to make a burrito for a friend on a tier above him, and how he got it up there.
Check out Wanna Burrito? a prison tale up now.
It’s an amazing story, of the kind I love to post on the site. Small, poignant moment. Great stuff!
If you have a story that you think might work, let me know. Write it and send it in. I don’t pay but I do edit.
Sam
Filed under Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius probably wasn’t thinking about writing when he said this:
Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the
various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? For thou wilt be ashamed to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this.
But I’ve always found a sentiment like this to be enormously helpful in writing. Breaking down a task into little bits, 
isolating them, then doing that one task, and not thinking about all you have to do to finish your project. Even if they’re not done in what would seem obvious chronological order, it’s better to focus on small, doable writing tasks.
When I’m on a larger writing project — as I am now, with a book I’m putting together on heroin and prescription painkillers, I usually spend a lot of time writing what I call “chunks.” Could be anecdotes, or stories shaped around a quote, or just observations or descriptions of a place or person — things that might well make it into the final draft of what I’m writing.
I was talking to a prison inmate the other day who wants to write a book about his life. I said, don’t set out to write a book. It’s like climbing a mountain. Try crossing the street — write a story from your childhood. Just one. then write another, maybe from adulthood. Next day, another. Never think you’re heading toward assembling a book. Pretty soon you’ll have a selection of pieces and can gather energy and encouragement from that.
Here’s what an author at The Atlantic had to say about Marcus Aurelius’s quote.
Filed under Books, Storytelling, Writing
Up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website, is a piece by Kansas writer Rachel Kimbrough.
Check out “How I Know” – a story about doubt, faith, a child and a mother.
Rachel’s a great writer. This is her fourth TYTT story.
Remember, I’m eager to look at all submissions. I don’t pay, but I do edit.
So get writin’.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
My homeboy from years in Mexico, Joel Millman, at the Wall Street Journal, has written a fantastic story of kidnapping of Eritreans, who are then traded by networks of kidnapping gangs, sometimes several times and across several borders.
The Eritreans are migrants/refugees fleeing their country and looking for work in nearby countries and are kidnapped by Bedouins.
The kidnapping gangs have blossomed in the vacuum of political supervision in Egypt’s Sinai desert as Egypt has been dealing with its many other issues in the last year.
Remarkable story about the global economy and the vast lagoons of impunity that exist due to political borders and agencies that have faltered or have not changed with the same velocity as economics — which might be exactly the prescription for what spawns criminal gangs and mafias.
Check out the video of Joel talking with one kidnapping victim, and explaining the genesis of his story.
By the way, Joel’s been doing these kinds of stories about migrants and the borderless world for many years now and he’s one of the best around.
His book, The Other Americans, is a great series of vignettes about folks from around the world changing our country. His chapter on the Patel motel clan is worth the price of the book.
Photo: Sinai Desert; Photo Credit: Wall Street Journal
Map: Middle East; Credit: Google Maps
Filed under Books, Global Economy, Migrants, Storytelling
One of the great storytellers in English and true independent spirits was born on this date.
Dr. Seuss, who taught kids the importance of being yourself, trying new things (Green Eggs and Ham), not being afraid of going out on your own, was born today in 1902.
The great Doctor (Theodore Geisel) did all that in perfectly rhymed (he knew how to count syllables) sentences, with whacky characters and drawings, exploding forever the “See Spot Run” children-book model.
The Cat in the Hat contained 236 different words. It’s been published in 12 languages, including Latin.
To think he wrote it in 1954, the year the Army-McCarthy hearings took place, the stifled and conformist 1950s, makes him one of the radicals of that decade, if you ask me.
“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” Sounds like the motto for the 1960s. (Maybe the mid-1950s was when the 1960s really began.)
As a wanna-be writer of children’s books — with two unpublished manuscripts, including one rhymed — I have particular appreciation for his rhyme and rhythm schemes, and his close attention to syllable count in each line.
Here’s some great Dr Seuss quotes.
Happy Birthday, Doc!
Yertle the Turtle is one of my favorites, along with Green Eggs and Ham, as all my life people have occasionally called me Sam I Am.
What’s your favorite Dr. Seuss book?
Filed under Books, Storytelling
I’ve posted two new stories at Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website.
David Chittenden chimes in with “Billy Joe, Where Are You?”
Monah Li gives us a story from her battles with bulimia in “Beauty and the Lonely Feast.”
These are the second stories for both authors to appear on the ether of TYTT.
As with most TYTT stories, these are not to be missed!
And as always, I’m eager to look at more submissions, so send em on in. You know you want to!
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
My story is today’s paper is about how the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain helped create a Oaxacan kitchen workforce that is now essential to upscale dining in Los Angeles.
I found this out as I began interviewing Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca, Mexico about why there were so many of them in the kitchens of Los Angeles’ best restaurants. I ran into many who told me they started at El Hamlet.
One thing led to another and I discovered that one guy, Asael Gonzalez (pictured above with his wife, Emma, who also worked at El Hamlet), was responsible for grabbing a beachhead there in 1968 and over the next 30 years hiring hundreds upon hundreds of men from Oaxaca’s Sierra Juarez mountains who got their first jobs washing dishes or busing tables at Hamburger Hamlet.
One thing that didn’t make it into the story is that Gonzalez converted to evangelical Christianity in the mid-1970s. When he did this, he changed the religious life of many Zapotecs in L.A. Many converted as well. In the 1970s and 1980s, at least a dozen churches were formed, in Pico-Union and Mid-City, with congregations of Zapotecs who worked at Hamburger Hamlet.
These churches acted as reception centers for arriving immigrants for Oaxaca, where they knew they could find kind words, help finding work, maybe some food and coffee and possible lodging.
All of which makes Gonzalez an enormously influential figure in LA during this time for the way he transformed his own community and parts of the city. I interviewed him and his wife, but family illness kept me from pursuing his story with sufficient depth.
So the story focuses on Marcelino Martinez, who was hired by Gonzalez in 1970 and later became supervisor of kitchens as the chain expanded, training in the kitchens the hundreds of men Gonzalez hired.
When they were amnestied in 1986, they left the Hamlet and spread out to other restaurants, some leaving food preparation entirely.
As the story says, Martinez is still at it, 43 years later. Amazing….
Today, in LA, there are so many Oaxacans with so much skill and experience that they keep restaurant costs low by allowing owners to dig into the vast Zapotec labor pool to quickly replace workers who are leaving, and with almost no training costs.
Zapotec Indians, from a peasant culture where only women prepared food, now make up some of the best chefs and kitchen workers in Los Angeles.
It’s all in the panorama of today’s L.A.
Photos: Emma and Asael Gonzalez
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California, Storytelling
Hey all — Up this week on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale, is a story in a poem by Alexis Rhone Fancher, an LA writer and
poetry editor of culturalweekly.com.
Check out “Subterranean Lovesick Clues” — a great poem about an early sexual encounter.
Please share it with friends, but above all, write a story of your own and send it in. No time like the present to tell those tales.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
For those in the L.A. area, I’m exhibiting a selection of photos at Kaldi, a cafe in South Pasadena, through mid-December.
The photos are from stories I’ve done in Mexico, Los Angeles, as well as a brief trip to Bogota I took at the behest of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, to do a story on the girl soldiers in the guerrilla militias.
Above are four of the shots: from a story on the emergence of tubas as the region’s emblematic musical instrument; a group of Mennonite kids at a school in northern Mexico, where I went to do a story on Mennonites’ involvement in drug trafficking.
There’s also Grace, a legendary drag queen in the 1980s who is now homeless, and another of a Oaxacan farmworker in the agricultural valley of San Quintin, which is south of Ensenada, Baja California.
Many more are up at Kaldi — hope you like them….They make great Christmas gifts!….:)
Filed under Global Economy, Los Angeles, Mexico, Photography, Southern California, Storytelling
Two new stories up this week on Tell Your True Tale. Both grew from a writing workshop I did with students this month at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA — a town where I was once a crime reporter for several years.
The stories were terrific and I’ll be posting several of them in coming weeks.
Perhaps reflecting some of the town’s grit, the tales themselves are rough, but really great, reads — confirming my faith in community colleges as story goldmines.
These are the first two:
–Christian Lockwood, a former cop, writes of the final day of his drunken homelessness, in The Last Day.
Check them out. Please share them on social media. I’m always interested in looking at new submissions, so take computer in hand and get writing.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
I’ll be talking about storytelling and writing.
I’ll be telling some stories that I love and discussing students’ stories from their own lives — a little bit of my Tell Your True Tale workshops.
Hope to see you all there…
Thanks Library Club of Cerritos College!
A new story up this week on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale, is by convicted bank robber Jeffrey Scott Hunter.
Check out Wasn’t About the Money — Jeff’s story of the time he knew his bank robbing was getting out of hand.
Happy to read any story you might want to submit.
And please share it on any social media you might use….
Many thanks,
Sam
Filed under Culture, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
Last week, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Stockton, California, one of my favorite towns.
I was the crime reporter there for the Stockton Record from 1988-92.
This time, I met with students at San Joaquin Delta College, the area community college, in a class taught by poet/instructor Pedro Ramirez. We were talking about writing and how they could tell their own stories — part of my Tell Your True writing workshops.
I’ll be posting some of them soon on my TYTT storytelling page.
The town has taken a lot of hits, entering bankruptcy in the wake of the housing collapse — which seemed reflected in the tales the students wrote, most of which were pretty grim.
Cops have left for departments elsewhere — Oceanside is one, I understand — when they lose their houses due to their salaries being reduced. Crime is again on a track to break records. I did notice a lot of the parolee/addict/hooker kind of folks downtown.
One of Stockton’s problems is that, by design or not, it is within a hundred miles of something like half the prisons in the state: this includes Folsom, San Quentin, Deuel, and the new prisons down by Corcoran/Delano, as well as a women’s prison and a youth-authority prison. That’s a lot.
But there’s a backbone to the town that I always liked, and a down-to-earth quality to folks that I did not feel, for example, when I moved to Seattle for my next job. (Civil folks, those Seattlites, but not at all friendly. And then there’s the rain, or should I say the constant drizzle.)
In Stockton, I note still a lack of graffiti, which is good. When I was there, it was the graffiti that most seemed to drag down the town and give it a defeated/defeatist feel.
These photos suggest the town’s stiff upper lip remains.
Filed under California, Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
A great and touching piece is up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling page.
Check out “Emri’s Chest” by Rachel Kimbrough, a great young writer from Kansas, about the death of her toddler son.
http://www.samquinones.com/category/true-tales/
Please share it on FB, Twitter, etc….
Above all, write one of your own and send it in……Sam
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
I was covering the dramatic bank robbery at the BofA in East L.A. this morning. Appears a couple guys kidnapped the manager last night, apparently as she was on her way home, then brought her to the bank this morning with a bomb strapped to her body.
She went in and told employees that she had the device on her and the kidnappers were telling her to take money out, which she did, then put the cash in a bag and threw it out to them, waiting in a car. They made their getaway.
She was unhurt, though shaken, and a Sheriff’s bomb squad disarmed the device.
Stories like this can involve a lot of waiting around, talking with bystanders who might have seen something. One of them was Octavio Medrano, a salesman at a used car lot, who’s been in the area “like all my life,” he says, selling used SUVs and Nissans and the like. He’s from Chihuahua.
He arrived at work too late for the commotion. But as we talked he began telling me about his other line of work.
In his part time, he writes about eternity. Just finished his second book, as it turns out — Viajero Eterno (Eternal Traveler). His card urges people to read the books if they are want to learn”the secrets of the seven doors of knowledge” or “the secret of reincarnation” or “the road to internal peace” or “our relation with the moon and planets,” and more.
All in all, that’s a lot more than I’ expect to learn at any used car lot.
Btw, you can pick up Mr. Medrano’s book at Amazon.com or www.palibrio.com.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Storytelling
