Deceleration inherited this event a couple years back from a fellow ecowriter here in SATX (the fabulous Mobi Warren if you wanna know!). Usually it’s an outdoor reading held in high spring at a former sludge lagoon turned wildlife refuge and birding site, but last year COVID forced us to reimagine it as a zine. This year we’re doing an online reading, which allows us to open up the event to readers and viewers outside of San Antonio. One of my priorities for W4B has been to link it more deeply to local and global movements for environmental justice, and I’m really excited that this year’s call for readers has brought in so many new voices.

Okay, here’s the basic info…more detailed info on readers and how to tune in can be found HERE.

On Friday, March 5 at 6pm CST, join FlowerSong Press in celebrating the official release of Luz at Midnight! As y’all know, Luz tells a climate change story unique to South Texas—belly of the beast for boom-and-bust extraction—challenging regional histories of environmental injustice while weaving a universal story of love and longing. Arts writer Nicholas Frank recently wrote in The San Antonio Report that the novel has proved “eerily prescient” in its depiction of the rolling blackouts that have recently rocked the state.

The launch event will tell the story of Luz via selected readings from the novel as well as conversation with/readings from four comadres (Kamala Platt, Mobi Warren, Davíd Zamora Casas, and Viktoria Valenzuela) who helped give the book its final shape and bring it into the world.

Launch will happen online via Zoom: click HERE to attend.

ALSO! RAFFLE ALERT! Cuz it’s fun: between February 20 and the end of the reading, if you purchase a copy of Luz from FlowerSong, we’ll enter your name into a drawing for a chance to win prizes! Books can be purchased HERE. To learn more about the book and view the trailer, visit https://mcortez.net/luz/

Here are the deets in superconcentrated visual form, with thanks to Jo Reyes-Boitel and the FlowerSong familia:

In the past week, a couple of the environmental subplots in my book (Luz at Midnight) have leaped from page to real life here in South Texas. And I’ve been stuck inside, even more deeply inside than I have been for the past year’s pandemic–the four of us confined not just to the house but to one room of the house to maximize the power of three space heaters—with nothing else to do than to reflect on the weirdness of it all. It’s kinda freaky, until I remember that I crafted those subplots based on what I imagined to be the most plausible scenarios for climate disruption in this part of the planet, based on historical patterns to date. So it makes sense. But then it quickly goes back to being freaky.

The first and most obvious, of course, is the polar vortex that has dipped down into Texas to knock us flat on our unaccustomed asses for a week, tripping rolling blackouts across the state. Here’s a passage from one of the early chapters of the book, when I’m setting up the widest stakes of the climate change subplot:

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For more info on the book, see HERE

One of the givens of small press publication is that most of the book marketing stuff you do yourself (and, from what I’ve observed of the press side, production is largely a DIY hustle as well). Once I got past several months of extreme overwhelm, I’ve actually found this kind of fun, in the way most DIY stuff is. Years spent working at various nonprofits have taught me a number of skills I never knew I was acquiring at the time (graphic design, press releases, website maintenance, social media stuff, and more recently media production), all of which have come in handy.

Like, for instance, did you know that YouTube has a function where you can set an uploaded video to premiere at a certain day/time? I did not. I’ve had a YT account for like 15 yrs and have pretty much used it only for making wacky playlists (“Music to Poop To“) and writing short stories in response to Bette Midler videos. Only the other day did it occur to me that it’s a sort of an artistic medium in its own right, or at least a medium for sharing artistic stuff. But then, the idea that you might actually want other people to look at artistic stuff you did occurred to me only very recently as well.

So. Here is the book trailer I produced with Greg, who has a natural knack for the audio/visual. You can’t watch it now–it premieres Sunday, January 3 at 4pm CST. YouTube says to tell you that you can click on the little bell icon to get a reminder just before it airs.

This morning my 13-year-old woke up at 6am to make me a pot of tea, because for weeks we’ve been obsessed with The Crown and drooling especially over all those silver Victorian tea sets, their tall shining kettles with swan neck spouts flanked by stiff-lipped creamers and stout sugar bowls. Just imagine the delicious tea that must be inside! I waaaaaaaaant it, we wail.

I’d already spent all night fighting panic because the toddler promptly puked the bed last night just after he went down–most likely the result of spicy homemade ginger ale followed by the overstimulation of chaotic Christmas Eve family Zoom, everyone talking at once–and I have a lifelong phobia of vomiting. So I stayed up half the night in a state of hypervigilance, fighting sleep by watching The Crown in the toddler’s bed, a little crib mattress tucked into the corner of the room. Finally, around 1, I let go and let Xanax, only to wake at 6am to the sound of the teenager banging and rumbling around in the kitchen.

Despite my medicated stupor, I got up and stumbled into the kitchen. What’re you doing?

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This Saturday, November 14, I’ll be reading in support of Davíd Zamora Casas’s exuberant, beautiful, heartbreaking Dia de los Muertos exhibit (click here to take the 3-D tour). I’ll be reading from Luz but also from cat stories, pandemic poetry (everybody’s got some), and election incantations. Would love to see you there. Click below on the image to RSVP and access the Zoom link: