Tag literature

Ruin & Want interview excerpt, pt. 1

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

In the next few days I’ll be sharing excerpts from an interview I did with Sundress Publications. Izzy Astuto asked me some insightful questions. Hope my answers make sense, haha.

I am placing the visual slides I created below as well as the text of the interview excerpt below that.

And please pre-order my new book, it would mean a great deal to me–you can do so on the Sundress Publications site!

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Izzy Astuto: How did you decide to first introduce L through the eyes of the narrator’s at the time girlfriend?

José: This decision came via feedback from poet and dear friend Rivka Clifton who noted that the project needed an entry point into what was at stake. Seeing it now that the project is completed, it was a great suggestion. I see it as a moment of crisis similar to the sense of crisis in the rest of the project, a moment where different roles and kinds of masking I performed in my relationships clashed. In this moment of friction, all I had was questions I couldn’t take the time to answer because of the damage control I had to play, with my at the time girlfriend, with the image I had of myself that I fought to maintain.

More tomorrow!

José

Ruin & Want available for pre-order!

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Book cover for Ruin & Want, cover art by Ani Araguz
Book cover for Ruin & Want, cover art by Ani Araguz

Just a quick note to share that my lyric memoir, Ruin & Want, is available for pre-order from Sundress Publications! Pre-orders help a lot in getting a book out into the world. It’d mean so much to me to have the support. The pre-order price for my book is also at a discount.

One of the dynamic, community-oriented things that Sundress Publications does for its authors is donate 10% of pre-orders to a nonprofit of their choice. For my book, I chose The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies (The Partnership), “the only U.S. disability-led organization with a focused mission of equity for people with disabilities and people with access and functional needs throughout all planning, programs, services and procedures before, during and after disasters and emergencies.”

If money is an issue, you can also support by suggesting your local library preorder the book and requesting it for checkout as soon as it becomes available. This achieves the same end—a copy of the book is still preordered and purchased—and also helps place the book in your library for readers in your community.

Here’s the description of the project:

Is selfhood constructed? And if so, by whom? Exploring queerness, race, body image, and family, Ruin & Want is a masterful meditation on otherness and identity. In a series of gripping, episodic prose pieces centered on an illicit relationship between a student and his high school English teacher, Araguz peels back the layers of his marginalized identity. By reflecting on his childhood into adulthood, Araguz grapples with finding a sense of self when early, predatory experiences have deeply affected his coming-of-age. In quixotic, deeply eviscerating lyric prose, Araguz delivers a troubling but bold memoir that handles this topic with courage while grieving what it costs survivors to reckon with harm’s aftermath. Yet in the midst of this struggle, we find many bittersweet and lingering gifts such as, “For the first time I saw myself as someone worth seeing,” that make this work necessary and unforgettable.

I’ll be sharing updates on events and related matters throughout the month of November. The official publication date is November 28, 2023.

I am also working on landing here more regularly. Stay tuned!

Abrazos,

José