Martin Boyd

The following is an excerpt from my short story “Culture”, originally published in 2008 in the Canadian literary journal Other Voices. The story has recently been re-published in an excellent Spanish translation by award-winning Mexican-Canadian author and translator Martha Bátiz, for the new anthology Desde el norte: narrativa canadiense contemporánea, published by Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico. Many thanks to Martha for giving this story new life in the Spanish language.

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Pablo Salinas was born in Lima, Peru in 1973. He has published a diverse range of stories and poems in print and online journals, as well as in the anthologies Retrato de una nube (2008, published in English as Cloudburst by University of Ottawa Press in 2013), Las imposturas de Eros (2009) and Voces con vida (2012). His short stories “El camino de regreso” and “Padre José”, which received honorable mentions in the nuestra palabra contest in 2008, appear in the collection of nuestra palabra award winners titled Cuentos de nuestra palabra en Canadá: Primera hornada (2009). He completed a doctorate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Ottawa and is currently visiting professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio.

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Humberto Benjamín Clavería

Manuel Urrutia couldn’t get to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he thought of the damaged skull with a gold tooth that he had hidden away inside his backpack. He seemed to sense the dead thing emerging from the bag, covered in soft tissue, crowned with a mop of fresh flowing hair. His skin stood on end merely imagining that the bodiless head might suddenly come to life, approach him and begin to talk to him, to tell him who he was, to share his past with him. Or perhaps he would weep or laugh. And the gold tooth would shine in the light of his bedside lamp.

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Mexican writer Joan Francisco Matamoros was born in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, and at the age of 12 he moved with his mother to Toronto, where he completed much of his secondary education. At sixteen he returned to Chihuahua to live with his father, and then decided to return to Toronto to settle and study here. He began writing stories in earnest at the age of sixteen during his return to Mexico, when he reconnected with the Spanish language.

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Gélico began his first publications as a cartoonist at age 17 in the humorous weekly magazine Melaíto. Since then, his work has been published in hundreds of magazines and newspapers in Cuba, Canada, and many other countries. During his career he has won more than twenty awards and participated in more than thirty collective exhibitions. He currently resides in Toronto, where he is the director of Gélico Gallery.

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Yoel Isaac Díaz León

Once again, I’ve been a few blocks from my friends’ house, near the street Calzada de Infanta. Once again, I have not gone to see them. One of them is now 65 years old; the other 68. Every December when I go back to Havana, I feel the impulse to go by and say “hello” to them, but at the last moment I stop short at the bus stop. There I stay while my gaze wanders down the street to San Miguel, right, left, then right again. I stop at the building and look up. I go up the stairs and knock on the door.

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Gregorio López y Fuentes

The house – the only one in the whole valley – was up on one of those flattened hills which, like rudimentary pyramids, had been left by a few tribes as they continued on their pilgrimages… amid the cornstalks, the beans with their purple flowers, an unmistakable presage of a good harvest.

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Ballad of my name

In commemoration of International Women’s Day, this week’s post is a poem by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957). Born in Vicuña, Chile, of indigenous and Basque descent, Mistral went on to become one of her nation’s most outstanding ambassadors and the first Latin American (and, to date, the only Latin American woman) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1945. A true Latin American icon, Mistral will be remembered as a great educator, a tireless advocate of children’s rights and, above all, the author of some of the most moving poems ever written.

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