images and stories about parenting, healing from long term illness, transforming trauma, community, aging, being chicana, growing up multicultural, being queer, traveling the planet, radical unschooling, death and all the art that is living life
morning prayer on voice i open my root and allow my voice to rise from deep in mamiearth i open my heart and allow my voice to sing into all the silences that have kept me safe and alive i open my mouth and i allow my voice to fill …
I just released Children’s Books as a Radical Act on Indiegogo to support my first 6 independently published children’s books. What makes these books radical? Why is it noteworthy that they’re independently published? Why children’s books of all things? Radical? Any time we center ourselves as POC, indigenous or queer …
We are born to it. It doesn’t begin as a movement, as a march to equal rights. For most of us it begins as children, but it can begin later in life too. It is a knowing within one’s self. Sometimes that knowing takes time to develop in a world …
Not last night but the night before I was woken up by something that has never happened before. Apparently I had spontaneously vomited in my sleep, just a little, but enough to start me gagging and choking. I woke up disoriented and a little shock-y because I couldn’t breathe and …
What if the children’s book industry changed tomorrow? And the number of books that actually reflect our communities was equitable with those of straight Euro Americans? What if I began getting calls that offered real advances and publicity for books with larger publishing houses? What if for some reason, after …
1/17/16 Francisco X. Alarcón let go of his body January 15. His passing is moving me very much. I am finishing drawings on our latest book together. A book of days. I look at spending the next few months very intimately sitting with Francisco as the arte unfolds. I am …
Ahhh the holidays! My mother stopped talking to me on Christmas day, the rest of my family followed suit. Later, I was actually disowned! I don’t know if my name still appears on any of the papers that connect me to my family of origin. Jajaja! I laugh my queer …
Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of spirit in my life. In Just Like Me: An Anthology by 14 Artists, I wrote about a vision I had in the middle of the night when I was 5 years old. I saw a light so bright that it woke …
It can be difficult to talk about death. Or pain or sickness; or loss or grief. When I first healed from heavy metal poisoning in 2006, I wanted to run and run and run and live. I wanted to live like mad. I didn’t want to remember 10 years of …
Saturday I am speaking at the Bay area SCBWI Oktoberfest. One of my talks is titled, Get Radical! Why Radical Thinkers Are Needed in the Children’s Book World. Apparently my reputation precedes me because I didn’t come up with the title. I simply and happily slid into place upon arrival. …
