John Paul Jaramillo is the author of The House of Order, Little Mocos, and Carlos Montoya, books that explore family, memory, labor, and cultural inheritance in Southern Colorado and the greater Southwest. His work has received recognition from the Latino Book Awards and has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Acentos Review, Palabra, and riverSedge: A Journal of Art and Literature, among others.
A longtime professor of English and creative writing at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, Jaramillo plays a central role in the English and Creative Writing Program, where he teaches literature, composition, and creative writing courses that emphasize critical thinking, cultural awareness, and the ethical responsibilities of writers working in public-facing spaces. Drawing extensively from family oral histories, regional archives, and working-class narratives, he shapes fiction grounded in place. His writing blends gritty realism with lyricism and myth, often examining how private lives are shaped by history, labor, and displacement. He is currently at work on a novel and a memoir rooted in the lives and legacies of his grandparents’ generation.
Blending archival research, oral history, and a lyric narrative sensibility, Jaramillo’s work locates beauty and meaning in the overlooked lives of the Southwest, where memory, labor, and imagination intersect to remake the past. As Mary Jean Porter writes, “Jaramillo is writing about working in Southern Colorado farm fields, driving and drinking beer and smoking pot; visiting family members in the state penitentiary; about tattooed pregnant girls, dirty kids in laundromats and their desperate mothers—and the pain-filled list goes on, back through several decades. What saves these stories is the grace in which they are written.”
(draft) artist statement—Words The Family Used When No One Was Listening
One semester back in 1998, back when there still was 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.
Years later, I was standing in line at the post office when a woman from the old neighborhood leaned toward me. Her hair was peppered gray and black, her eyes half-open the whole time. One hand held a stack of envelopes; the other clutched a blue leather handbag as large as the state of Colorado. Behind her, an unending line of patrons waited.
She wore purple stretch pants and white Keds. Her round arms jiggled as she pointed at me and said, “Hey, John Paul!”
I froze. Her arms, still full of letters and greeting cards for her grandkids, hovered between us.
“I have to tell you,” she said, “the profanity from your people shocked me.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” She stepped back and told me she had been my second-grade teacher. She said she was proud of me. She said she had read my book. She said she knew my people and knew they didn’t speak that way. Not the way she remembered them, anyway. And she didn’t believe anyone in the neighborhood was that violent.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The curse words,” she said. “Your grandmother and your grandfather. They never spoke like that.”
I told her I knew my family well, and that was exactly how they spoke. I added, almost defensively, that the book was fiction anyway.
What I didn’t say—but what I knew—was that The House of Order came partly from my Oregon State MFA program and partly from a failed novel, but mostly from my dead grandmother’s kitchen and the old man who wasn’t my real grandfather. 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. 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 Huerfano 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.
When my old teacher finally stepped aside and let me pass, I was left thinking about those stories and what they’re for.
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.
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. 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. The old photos and old stories coming together in my notes and thoughts, and then finally on the page, feels like the best way—the only way left—to honor them.
CV
contact
Menard Building Room 2281 / Lincoln Land Community College / 5250 Shepherd Road Box 19256 / Springfield, Illinois 62794-9256 / John.Jaramillo@llcc.edu / Office: (217) 786-2897