Wattpad brings you a guest post from Erasmo Guerra, whose memoir “Once More to the River” is currently featured on Wattpad.
Here, he talks about how his life experiences combined with his imagination to produce his unique writing style today:
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“I spent most of my childhood living in books that hardly reflected my arid reality…”
Hunting the wooded area just beyond the ramshackle neighborhood where I grew up, I turned over rocks and poked sticks into the dirt, looking for the red and yellow salamanders I read about in books. I never did find the critters. And it was just as well. When I showed the photos to my mom, she shuddered and claimed salamanders squirmed into your body at night and laid eggs in your belly.
Whatever. My mom just didn’t want me keeping animals in the house.
We lived in the wrong part of the country anyway. Or, at least, the climate was all wrong. In the desert and subtropical region of South Texas, all I came across were geckos—colorless house lizards that crawled up the walls at night and whose tails broke off and jumped around with a life of their own. There were also prehistoric-looking horned toads that skittered across the dusty roads, though my mom always warned that if you picked them up, you’d get a wart.
After reading yet another field guide on keeping wild animals as pets, I lay awake at night and listened hard for the sound of flying squirrels gliding among the treetops. Or I listened for the hiss of raccoons and the howl of hunting dogs like the pair that trotted through the pages of the novel “Where the Red Fern Grows.” But the only thing I heard outside my bedroom window were buzzing cicadas the size of fists and the slow work of red ants chewing the tree bare in the front yard.
I spent most of my childhood living in books that hardly reflected my arid reality. At some point the disappointment must’ve evaporated with the heat. Or it was distilled into determination. I began to observe my world, stocking my imagination with the native things I would come to sketch in my own stories, ultimately learning that where a red fern doesn’t grow, a cactus flower blooms.
So, like a reporter, now I take notes of everything around me. In my stories you won’t see backdrops of shady elms and maples, but of mesquite and huizache and spiny paddle cactus. I write stories I wish I had growing up, with the added hope that they offer a kind of map to readers navigating emotional landscapes in which they also find themselves dealing with disappointment and loss.
Read Erasmo Guerra’s non-fiction memoir, “Once More to the River” on Wattpad.
“Like the howl of an accordion—half sorrow and half joy, wondrous and exquisite—these stories squeezed my heart.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of “The House on Mango Street”
In “Once More to the River,” Erasmo Guerra writes a moving account of his boyhood on the Texas-Mexico border.
An award-winning novelist and journalist, Guerra explores present-day political and cultural realities, and recounts the shattering loss his family suffered when his teenage sister was murdered.
Told with lyrical prose and a reporter’s ear for the “Tex-Mex” language of the region, these stories capture the voices of South Texas. By turns humorous and haunting, powerful and tender, this collection is an intensely personal chronicle of tragedy and the triumph of survival.