John Paul Jaramillo is the author of The House of Order, Little Mocos, and Carlos Montoya, award-winning books that explore family, memory, and cultural inheritance in Southern Colorado and the greater Southwest. His work has been recognized by the Latino Book Awards and featured in literary journals such as The Acentos Review, Palabra, and riverSedge–a journal of art and literature. A longtime professor of English and creative writing at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, Jaramillo draws from his family’s oral histories and regional archives to shape fiction that blends gritty realism with lyricism and myth. He is currently at work on a novel and a memoir rooted in the stories of his grandparents’ generation.
artist statement (draft)
One semester back in 1998 at the University of Southern Colorado, the poet David Keplinger asked me, “Who do you imagine you are writing to?” I believe his lesson was on the importance of intimacy in my work, and I have been obsessed with this question and the answers ever since. I told him I believed I imagine I am writing for and from my family and Southern Colorado community. Stories that the family usually kept secret or hidden. Stories lost to me.
He told me, Oh, I imagine I’m writing to my ex-girlfriend.
Since 1999 I’ve been writing short stories and recounting these stories from my family and my community. My first book the House of Order is a collection of short stories on my growing up in Southern Colorado and on traumatic experiences I’ve spent my life trying to understand. My second book, Little Mocos, explores my father’s side of my family, it is a book about my father’s upbringing in and around the Bessemer neighborhood surrounding the steel mill that was once named Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I). My latest book, Carlos Montoya, envisions my mother’s upbringing and my mother’s father from the San Luis Valley, a man I never had the pleasure of meeting.
Another time, at the post office, the lady from the old neighborhood who read my book leans forward, her hair pepper gray and black. Her eyes really only half open the entire time. Her one hand holds a stack of envelopes and the other a blue and leather handbag as large as you think of the state of Colorado as large. Behind her an unending line of patrons waiting in line at the post office.
She has a round stomach, she’s wearing purple stretch pants and white Keds. Her round arms jiggle with fat as she points towards me and speaks. There, in line, the woman begins with, “Hey, John Paul!”
And I stop. Her arms filled with letters and greeting cards for her grandkids still in between us.
“I have to tell you,” the woman tells me, “the profanity from your people shocked me.”
I say, “Excuse me?”
She says, “You don’t remember me do you?” And with that the woman steps back and tells me she was my 2nd grade teacher. Wonders if I remember. Then says she’s proud of me and tells me she read my book and knew my people and just knows they didn’t speak that way. Not the way she knew them anyway. And she certainly didn’t;t believe anyone in the neighborhood was that violent.
I ask her what she means?
“The curse words,” she explains. “Your Grandmother and your Grandfather. They never spoke like that.”
I say, I know my family real well and that was how they spoke. I say, The book is all fiction anyway.
I go on to tell her my book The House of Order came from my Oregon State MFA program and also from a failed novel. Mostly it came from my dead Grandmother’s kitchen and the old man who wasn’t my true Grandfather. Sitting there early in the morning as Compadres barged in for breakfast and then later in the day the family who came over to talk and play cards. The old folks would talk and talk for hours. Always on the past and always intimately about their lives and experiences. Always in a mix of Spanish and English. With the Grandfather it was the worksites of CF&I Steel and the pool halls around Huerfano County in Southern Colorado. With the Grandmother it was always her drunkard father and his experiences—the way he treated women. Again these stories were always intimate and animated. As time went on I reveled in these kitchen talks and family myths. I sought them out for my notebook and hoped to include them in a book someday.
And as my old teacher let me be, I’m left with my thoughts on those stories and their uses.
Years later I know that the central objective of my work has been to recreate in fiction the family and neighborhoods from my youth and life in Southern Colorado, stories from my particular part of the world. Stories about family ghosts and old family haunts.
I guess I can say I want to represent the old folks lost to me—their Spanish and their language—as well as my current life as a community college professor and writer. The only way to connect to the old folks who raised me to myself as an adult. To remember the old neighborhood of Bessemer alive and as it was. The old photos and the old stories coming together in my notes and thoughts and then down onto the blank page seemed like the best way—the only way now—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