Essay

Words The Family Used When No One Was Listening

My work grows out of family, place, and the lived history of Southern Colorado. I write toward memory, inheritance, labor, and the ways private lives are shaped by community history, oral storytelling, and the emotional weight families carry across generations.

Across fiction, essays, and dramatic work, I return to the textures of working-class life, bilingual memory, family myth, and the unstable border between what can be documented and what can only be felt, remembered, or imagined.

What matters most to me is not simply preserving the past, but recreating on the page the language, feeling, and pressure of lived experience. My writing tries to hold onto what is slipping away while admitting that memory is partial, unstable, and often shaped as much by loss and imagination as by fact.

“Writing is the only way I know to connect the people who raised me to the person I’ve become.”

— John Paul Jaramillo

Essay

Words The Family Used When No One Was Listening

One semester back in 1998—back when there was still a University of Southern Colorado—the poet David Keplinger asked me, “Who do you imagine you are writing to?” I think his lesson was about intimacy—about how imagined audience shapes voice—and I have been obsessed with that question, and its answers, ever since. I told him I imagined I was writing for and from my family and my Southern Colorado community. Stories the family usually kept secret or hidden. Stories lost to me.

He said, “Oh. I imagine I’m writing to my ex-girlfriend.”

Since 1999, I’ve been writing short stories drawn from my family and my community. My first book, The House of Order, is a collection of stories about growing up in Southern Colorado and about the traumatic experiences I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand. My second book, Little Mocos, explores my father’s side of the family—his upbringing in and around the Bessemer neighborhood near the steel mill once called Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I). My most recent book, Carlos Montoya, imagines my mother’s upbringing and the life of her father in the San Luis Valley, a man I never had the chance to meet.

From sitting there early in the morning as compadres barged in for breakfast, and later in the day as family came by to talk and play cards, I learned how stories lived. The old folks talked for hours—always about the past, always intimately about their lives and experiences, always in a mix of Spanish and English. With my grandfather, the stories were about the worksites of CF&I Steel and the pool halls around Huérfano County. With my grandmother, it was her drunkard father and the way he treated women. These stories were animated, raw, unfiltered. Over time, I came to treasure those kitchen talks and family myths. I sought them out, wrote them down, and hoped they might someday become a book.

What I know now is that the work has always lived in the tension between fact, memory, and the way family stories are actually told. In “Rabbit Story,” the warning comes early: “You can’t tell a man’s story unless you are for sure about the facts, Manito.” But in that same story-world, history is made of fragments, omissions, and pressure, of lies and stories half-told and then forgotten unless pressed and pushed. That contradiction—between what is factual and what is carried in rumor, grief, and repetition—is where I write from.

And the language matters. The voices matter. The old neighborhood spoke with tenderness, insult, swagger, shame, prayer, and profanity all mixed together. In “Cabrón,” Spruce Street is remembered as “one nest full of cabrónes,” which is not exaggeration for effect so much as a record of how people named themselves and each other. In “Family Album,” memory itself becomes unstable: “1815 Spruce Street never exists in those old photos,” and later the old albums become unbearable because “all they do is remind me of what I can’t seem to remember.” That is the territory I keep returning to as a writer—the place where the story is both testimony and invention, both recovery and loss.

Years later, I know the central objective of my work has been to recreate—in fiction—the families and neighborhoods of my youth in Southern Colorado. Stories from my particular part of the world. Stories about family ghosts and old haunts. In one of the stories, memory itself becomes the problem and the task: “the only thing left is to recreate in their stories.” That line feels, to me, less like a sentence from a story than a statement of method.

I want to represent the old folks I’ve lost—their Spanish, their language—as well as my life now, as a community college professor and writer. I think often of the voice that insists, “You have to learn your family’s language. Tu sabes?” Writing is the only way I know to connect the people who raised me to the person I’ve become.

To remember Bessemer alive and as it was. To gather the old photos and the old stories, and let them come together in my notes and thoughts and finally on the page. To honor the people who are gone, even when memory is fractured, denied, or incomplete. Maybe that is why I keep writing toward what can’t quite be recovered—because all they do is remind me of what I can’t seem to remember. And yet that, for me, is where the work begins.