Buy: The Book of Wounded Sparrows | Texas Review Press (TRP: The University Press of SHSU) | September 1, 2024
Note: Frontextos are woven throughout the interview.
What are some key themes present in your book?
Key themes in the collection explore emotional and geographic dislocation, and throughout the book you’ll find the theme of family separation, this last being the thread holding the whole book together. Of course, as with any work of art, it’s hard to put everything this book is about in a couple of sentences. For instance, the book is also a hybrid, containing 25 Frontextos (visual work) that complement and amplify the narratives and lyricism. It’s essentially a book within a book. And the hybridity of the text, in many ways, underscores the theme of hybrid experience, such as living in more than one culture, or speaking or writing in more than one language.
How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?
The earliest memory I have of myself is one in which my mother takes me to a school to sit in a classroom with older kids because I wanted to learn how to read. Many years later, after I learned how to read, it was the daydreaming that made me a writer, which is to say, half of my need to write was born in reading. I read lots of Mexican graphic novels as a boy. I just fell in love with words. How they looked on the page. The sounds they made in my head. Words by themselves and words strung together. It is still fascinating to me to look at words on a page. How worlds are contained between the covers of books. Sometimes I spend days just flipping the pages of a book, and look at words, anticipate what awaits me. Which is a sort of reading and feeling before the actual reading.
Can you talk about your use of form and theory?
I like process and I like to listen to intuition. I like to live with what I write till I form a relationship with it, till I memorize the thing, a poem, for instance. Shape its form by saying it over and over again till the words in it sound as natural as my breathing.
Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? This could be the room, the desk, the city, an MFA program, a fellowship, or any other environmental factor (you only wrote when it rained, you always wrote with fresh flowers in the room, etc.).
The environments kept changing. I’ve been handwriting my poems in notebooks for a few years now, so often they come as fragments, lines, phrases, metaphors. That is to say, the poems for this book often came in pieces. They were like puzzles I had to put together. The notes I wrote often became springboards for more a complex exploration of emotion. Because I write in notebooks, the settings for writing change—coffee houses, restaurants, bars, libraries, my couch, etc.
How did writing this book transform you?
Writing this book has been transformative in that it has helped me learn a lot about myself as a writer. I’ve learned that a book might take years to write and, in the end, it might not even get published, or read. And I am okay with that. I’ve learned that I write not because I want publication, but because I have to write. Writing is a way of being in the world for me. So in a sense, I’ve learned to be patient. Writing this book also transformed my trauma into power.
Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it?
In addition to The Book of Wounded Sparrows, I also have a book of poetry coming out from University of Arizona Press in the spring of 2025, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, which won the Ambroggio Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets. With these two books complete, I have started working on short essays about writing, creative process, borderlands, masculinity, and poetics.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize given by the Academy of American Poets. Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.
IG: @writeroctavioquintanilla
Twitter: @OctQuintanilla