I Hunt for Stars Alone: A Novel by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I felt close to the characters in this story and like any great book, I’ll miss a few of them. They felt real to me like I could give them a call and pick up where the book left off. This is the skill of a gifted writer and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo does not let down in his first novel, I Hunt For Stars Alone.
Aside from the wonderful character dynamics between our protagonist and all the people who color his world, the book is beautifully written and thoughtfully layered with real emotions. Each piece of verse, which constitutes a chapter, packs a punch. Every word paints the inner world of our hero in his youth and as an adult narrator.
The story centers on a teenage boy from Mexico and his immigration to the U.S. The narrator (the protagonist as an adult) illustrates our hero navigating his new world in the Midwest America in the early 2000s. As the story progresses, he must figure out how to deal with bigotry, a new stepfather, and a dissolving relationship with his brother. To overcome these challenges, he turns to music, books, movies, and a few good friends. Still, he’s faced with obstacle after obstacle, wins and loses, tiny victories and big mistakes.
For someone such as myself, who has considered himself a lifelong artist and social outsider, I felt a sense of validation. Our hero is just not like everyone else who wants to score touchdowns, and party hard. He just wants to figure out his world while trying to figure out himself. And although my demographic background does not completely match our protagonist’s background, I felt what any one of my favorite authors have made me feel–like I’m not alone in this world and in this universe, and the stars still burn bright no matter how much our lives have let us down. It’s up to us to keep looking. I highly recommend I Hunt For Stars Alone by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo.
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Our Sacred Underground, published.
My story, Our Sacred Underground, has been published on North Meridian Review.
Here’s the link:
https://thenorthmeridianreview.org/blog
Untitled Night Club Poem
by Marc Alexander Valle
The multicolored lights. Bodies grinding and a few fist fights. Anything but actual dancing on the dance floor.
Groups of girls huddled in corners. I see young men walk over. They’re dressed in the style of ‘loose and baggy’ or ‘bad boy I don’t care what any thinks’.
The endless beat and bass. I vibe to the music just in case. They might see that I’m not like them.
The problem with the nightclub was that it was just like my head. Stimulation, movement, nonstop noise and chatter.
The problem was that I believed that these people were somehow more advanced than me. They could socialize and talk better than me.
The problem was with Beethoven. When we were in high school, these people were moving through the bases of dating. When we were in high school, I listened to the 9th for the 9th time, wondering if I would ever create something so sublime in my lifetime.
The problem was with movies. The problem was with filmmaking. The problem was with following your dreams. Which means the problem was with me.
If I could find a time machine and talk to a younger me I’d tell myself, “You have no interest in making art that slow and working as a team. Find another medium.”
The problem is that the world is incentivized to see reality in black and white, and as much as I tried to fight I could only see reality as an explosion of light.
So after one more visit to the nightclub, I decided that time would be more well spent behind a word processor. Written words always had a habit of flowing my way even when they came in cluttered.
Clubbing was no way to find myself. Clubbing was no way to find my niche. Trying to find your place with everyone in a place where everyone is trying to forget is the perfect way to lose your mind and maybe even your convictions.
Beethoven wrote that. Right after he wrote the 9th.
Happy 2nd Birthday, Emile!
It’s been a week since your second birthday, and I still have yet to write my birthday letter to you. Things are just as hectic as everyone said they would be. Some days I accept it. Some days I rage against it like King Lear and the thunderstorm. But every day I’m grateful for what you and your siblings have taught me about what’s important. I was so set on this idea of “making it” and “getting noticed” that I forgot why I started to write to begin with. I wrote and created art to feel normal and well inside. It became my medication, protecting me from a mediocre world with mediocre ideas and even more shallow emotions.
Now there is no time to let those demons have their way. I have to make the time to write when I can find the time and when I’m bold enough to take artistic risks. Hollywood, the publishing world, and any industry under the sun wouldn’t have known what to make of me anyway. Not to mention, stardom sounds about as interesting as cyanide these days.
For the first time, I fear death more than anything. It might not be saying much to the average person, but it’s a revolutionary idea to me. For the first time, I don’t need the Shangri-la promise of celebrity-induced admiration to get me through my days. I only need the admiration of the people under one roof. My roof. And that roof is bigger than the world, and big enough to fill my love for you, and my love for everyone in it. But today I reaffirm my love for you, Emile. Because you are 2-years-old today. And you will be 2-years-old forever in my heart, a heart once filled with the wrong things. False things. With bad feelings and dumb ideas. The struggle is real and the struggle is to be as honest and good as possible in every corner of your life. The struggle is the embodiment of suffering, but it’s the only struggle that counts.
I don’t claim to have won that battle, but I know that I am winning. And I can give you no birthday gift to compensate for that.
I love you, Emile. How did I ever make it without you and your siblings? God only knows.
Happy birthday.
The Olive Tree
I had a roommate in college that couldn’t get used to it. Frank would walk in and say, “How come you’re always just looking at the wall when I come in?” I wanted to tell him that I was actually staring at the corner between the ceiling and the wall, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. I was socially inept back then, but I wasn’t that helpless.
But I would just lay there and think, feeling an immense sense of sadness about my life. I wanted to get away from who I was without losing my heart, my mind, and my beliefs. Daydreaming provided a drug-free buffer from a world that didn’t get me but still couldn’t get rid of me.
It really seemed to bother Frank though. It was the way he’d say it. Not with malice, but not jokingly either. Like he’d caught someone smelling their own underwear. In time, whenever I heard him approaching the door, I’d sit up and find something to do in order to look occupied. It was like working a minimum-wage job and hearing the boss’s keys jangling around the corner.
I still do it today when I hear Yvonne walking upstairs yet she’s one of the few people who’s ever understood me. It’s another little complex of mine that I’ve picked up like a common cold, and I don’t see it leaving my body anytime soon.
It takes love and it takes guts to undo what’s been done by an idiot. But we only have less than a lifetime to undo it. And there’s no shortage of idiots.
Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc by Marc Alexander Valle
One of my earliest memories of your grandmother is learning how to spell words. She would draw a picture and write the word beneath it. I asked her multiple times to run this lesson for me, and every time she did do it for me, she’d place a cup of juice with Vienna Fingers on the kitchen table by my side.
There was something about a visual representation of an idea that blew my mind. I’d ask her to draw different words to see what they look like. By then, I’d seen every one of those objects in artistic depictions, but there was something magical about your grandmother doing it before my eyes. She knew the world in a way that I couldn’t yet process, and the drawings solidified her power in my mind.
Sometimes I swear I can feel abstract ideas as tangibly as I can feel the keys on this computer. I can perceive their texture and their weight. Sometimes I can see the cost of manifesting them into the world, and sometimes I can see their consequences. This phenomenon has fueled my art and maybe my humanity.
I’m sure there’s an earlier memory of your grandmother somewhere in my unconscious. I’ll keep it there until it needs to be replaced, and I’ll keep the memory from you until something more pressing needs to be said. I’ve learned that it’s better to see loved ones at their greatest moment if you can help it. For everything else, there’s Vienna Fingers and juice.
by Marc Alexander Valle
It’s Always in the Corners (Latest Draft)
I let him hit me. Not punch me and not “I let him” as in “Sure! Go ahead and hit me” but I let him hit me. He’d push my head with an open hand. I told him to stop, but he didn’t. He’d hit me more than I’d like to admit, and sometimes I even told myself we were really friends.
Some time ago, I started to believe that it began in Algebra class, and that I was Tourette’s-and-facial-tic-free until I sat in front of Axel Sidezski that sophomore year of high school. I don’t remember having or feeling the tics before then, and for years I felt shame for knowing that I let him do that. It took many more years to begin to understand why I did.
I googled searched Axel the other day, asking two questions: Is he still the same? And is he doing better than I am? I searched for 10 minutes, and I only found white-page profiles of other Axels. Nowhere could I find that parted, reddish-blondish hair. Nowhere could I find that smirk.
I made a promise to myself long ago. I told myself that I would write things and create things of immense beauty. I told myself that if the Axels of the world ever came back, I could do one thing better than they could, one thing no person can take away.
Is he still the same and is he doing better than I am?
I don’t even think he’d remember my name.
My Drawings from an Unfinished Illustrated Short Story
The Dream Ebbs and Flows
I remember asking the Ritter Elementary School librarian for a book on Spielberg in the 1988-1989 school year. I waited two weeks for it. Every other day, I’d bother her about the book, but the date of arrival never changed.
At age 8, I wanted to be Steven Spielberg. He made daydreams come to life. He turned regular people into giants. A rainbow always shined in the end, and evil always lost. My world was my family, my home, and a movie theater, and I could see no other calling.
At age 42, I just want to live well and write well and maybe have a wider audience. I try and sometimes succeed at the first one every day. I feel better about the second. Maybe I’ll have the third eventually, but I think I’ll be okay if it never happens. Until then, I finally own that Spielberg book.
Happy 548 Birthday!
One-and-a-half trips around The Sun today, Emile. There will be no party, but I celebrate all the same.
You are here. You are healthy and strong and absorbing new words faster than I ever could. You were meant to be here and will inherit the world in ways that I could not.
There was a time when my head was a carnival of light, my son. Thoughts, ideas, and emotions all intertwined in a kaleidoscopic feast, and I believed that if I just put it out there, put it on paper or film or on stage, people would understand me. I was convinced I was here to save the world and show them things hidden under the blanket of their fixed views and idealogy.
But no one seemed to care, and I engaged in a protracted and misanthropic self-conversation that robbed me of joy and gratification with even the most delectable of occasions.
It doesn’t matter what they think of me anymore, at least not like it used to. I see the psychedelic-Kodachrome cavalcade in your smile and I am reborn. It makes its way down the abandoned roads of my soul, and some days I think I can see barren fields filled with life again. I ask myself, “How could I ever have allowed others such power over me? How could anyone torture themselves as I did?”
I will be your audience, my son. I will be your witness. I know that if I can do anything it will be to see you in your most noble and extraordinary wardrobe, a tapestry of confidence and sweetness patched together with no visible seams. I will be your champion. The world doesn’t know what they’re in for like I do.
Happy 18 months old, Emile. We’ve come so far in such a short time, and we have miles and miles to go. Sometimes I wonder what I would do for a few miles more.
Stuck
When something doesn’t go Emile’s way, he says that it’s stuck. When he can’t open a door, it’s stuck. When a ball or toy is lodged under something, it’s stuck. When he can’t push his carriage across the sidewalk, it’s stuck. When an object is too heavy to lift and throw outside of his playpen, it’s stuck. Stuck no longer means stuck to him. Anything that serves as a source of frustration and forces him to solve a problem, anything that he can’t control and must learn to overcome, anything that he can’t manipulate and must learn to leave alone, all of it is stuck. With that said, I have a possible name for my future book of stories and essays that I’m writing for Emile. The World Is Stuck.
A Twilight-Hour Note (from a first-time father to his newborn son) by Marc Alexander Valle
Your Daddy writes to be heard. Your Daddy writes to let the world know that he’s here. Your Daddy writes because he feels that he has something to say, a message that needs to be delivered and pulled out of his gut like some-type of science fiction movie. Your Daddy writes to not be interrupted when he speaks. Your Daddy writes to be loved. Your Daddy hopes to be understood, but at this point feels that most people will never understand him. Your Daddy writes because he cannot say what he means on the top of his head without the other person giving him time to think or respond. If Daddy were to try to verbally express what you’re reading now, he would sound like the under-educated, working class kid that he was. Your Daddy writes because he’s an artist. Your Daddy is an artist, someone that sees things so…
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Devin Maguire Can Bite My Dust
Devin Maguire Can Bite My Dust
by Marc Alexander Valle
10-year old Devin Maguire held onto his BMX handlebars and stared at my new bike. “Your dad got that bike from a thrift store.”
“No, he didn’t!” I said.
“Yes, he did. I can tell.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Yeah, cause there’s marks on it.”
I looked down at the bike. There were scuff marks on the handlebars, but that was it.
“He got it from K-Mart,” I said.
“Okay, which one?”
“The one down the street.”
“I know all the bikes at K-Mart. I didn’t see that one there.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, that’s where he got it from.”
“Did he tell you he got it from there?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
Devin stared right into my eyes. He had a blank expression, but I swore I could see a smirk. It was the same smirk he always had, the same one he had whenever he beat a kid in a race.
“So?” Devin said. “How do you know?”
Devin kept staring. He looked as though he had all the time in the world and the absolute certainty that he was right. I knew that I had only a beat or two before I looked like a fool. I had to answer.
“Cuz,” I said, “My parents don’t shop at thrift stores!”
Devin continued to look into my eyes. I felt like he was searching for something, and I needed to keep my composure. Didn’t he see my brother with a new bike last year? Didn’t he know it was my turn?
I tightened my lips and gripped my handlebars. Devin scrunched his eyebrows. I quickly glanced down at his bike.
“Alright,” he said, letting out a snicker. Then he rode off towards his apartment building.
When my dad came back from work, he told me that he bought the bike from a thrift store. The same store we’d been to several times that year. ©2022
Music: The Letters to My Son Series
Nearly a century and a half of music recordings and centuries more of musical compositions are at your disposal. Use it. Find it. Let it talk to you. It can help you at any time. Never expect it to solve the problem, but music can expose the underlying issues of your life that make the problem seem real.
I was sad in my early 20s. Very sad. Everything was tragic, and everything I tried to do seemed to end in failure. I felt as though I couldn’t even get a hello from people and from the world. I wanted it all to end sometimes. Music was that hello.
It talked to me directly, and it made me believe that there are and have been others just like me. They think like me, and they feel like me. Music was the code between us, and the message was, “I am an artist.” Music told me that my role was to reevaluate norms. I was never to be satisfied with what we assumed to be true, but I was never to change my core beliefs. There was nothing wrong with me. I was normal. It was the conversation between the individual and the world that was distorted.
There’s a link between youth and music and the way it shapes our views. How will you allow it to shape yours?
Mavthewriter 