R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

14
1
God, with or without a name, won’t help me; a good night’s sleep will. I need to
help myself. I need to have more character, and more talent, and everything my
writer friends have --the savagery and the time and the ruthless focus on work and
the immediate focus on the dramatic self-- to get more work done, to believe I exist.
I need to be mean. I need to love harder. I need to think I am getting really old,
and what my legacy will be, and why I haven’t written more books than I have.
Maybe I even need to start thinking about Heidegger again, and all his beingtowards-death
shit, and have my death inexorably in front of me, to spur me out of
my trap. But that is motivation by hate. How long can that last?
Yes, I know I am my trap, perhaps I am inside several traps, and I am
rattling the bars from inside these cages, and occasionally I stick my arm out and
whack a passerby, who turns to stare at me and see what or who the hell just
smacked him in the face. Yes, I am trapped, and yet every once in a while I, or my
arm, or my spit, or my lips, or my imagination, escape.
Sergio Troncoso graduated from Harvard College, and studied international relations
and philosophy at Yale University. He won a Fulbright scholarship to Mexico and
was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Alumni Hall of Fame. He is a
member of PEN, and teaches at Yale University.
Troncoso's stories are featured in many anthologies, including The Norton Anthology
of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton & Company), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U. S.
Latino Literature (Pearson/Longman Publishing), Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of
Texas-Mexican Literature (University of New Mexico Press), and New World: Young
Latino Writers (Dell Publishing). His stories and essays, to name a few, have
appeared in Encyclopedia Latina, Newsday, The El Paso Times, Other Voices,
Pembroke Magazine. He runs the weekly blog, Chico Lingo: Writing, Reading, Money,
Argument.