-
Ray Gonzalez
- TCU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
512 Ray Gonzalez Ray Gonzalez was born and raised in El Paso. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including five from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals, a 1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award; Cabato Sentora, a 2000 Minnesota book Award Finalist; The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, a 2003 winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry; Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems; and the forthcoming Cool Auditor. Turtle Pictures, a mixed-genre text, received the 2001 Minnesota book Award for Poetry. The Religion of Hands, the second volume of the Turtle Pictures trilogy, was published in 2005. He is also the author of three collections of essays: Memory Fever; Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays; and The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape, the recipient of the 2003 Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, named one of the best non-fiction books of the year by the Rocky Mountain News and one of ten best southwest books of the year by the Arizona Humanities Commission. Gonzalez has written two collections of short stories: the Ghost of John Wayne, winner of a 2002 Western Heritage Award for best short story and a 2002 Latino Heritage Award in Literature, and Circling theTortilla Dragon. His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of The Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000. He is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets. Poetry editor of the Bloomsbury Review for twenty-two years, he also founded the poetry journal Luna in 1998. Currently, Gonzalez is full professor in the M.F.A. creative writing program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and also teaches in the Solstice M.F.A. program at Pine Manor College in Boston. From Memory Fever: White Sands It was like playing on the moon as we rolled down the white sand dunes when we were kids. By the time we came to a stop at the bottom, we were covered in white dirt, looking like ghost children. 513 The memory of family picnics at the White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the fifties is blurred now, but I still cling to a few vivid images of miles and miles of a white world where I had fun playing in the dunes, building white sand castles without knowing we were only a few miles from the government test site where Trinity, the first atomic bomb, was detonated on July 16, 1945. Until I studied World War II in high school, I did not know the white desert playground of the park distracted visitors from the fact that they were near the historic site. After seeing what I was reading, my mother casually told me that she and my father, along with thousands of El Pasoans, had seen a bright flash in the sky on July 16. My parents were high school students at El Paso Technical when the test bomb went off one hundred miles to the north. No one knew what the flash was until years later, but she told me that day felt very unusual. The sudden light made many people nervous because the war was still on. My parents had witnessed a turning point in history by seeing that bright light in the sky. As a child, I spent many weekends playing in the white sands of the future, just another kid amazed at the endless horizon of white hills and dunes, the light falling from the desert sun to wither everything in 95-degree heat, making us play harder as the light intensified. I can’t forget the first day we walked through the park museum. Besides the usual geological charts and raised maps, I saw displays of mounted white mice, white rabbits, and white coyotes—even white tarantulas. These creatures had adjusted to this white world so that they could survive in the heat and desolation of the bleached landscape. Each species evolved to take advantage of an endless camouflage. When I learned about Trinity, I wondered how many of the animals had been affected by the radiation of history. Had they truly changed color to blend into the white sand for protection and survival against predators, or was this ivory land, and its creatures, a mutation from the first blast? Concerns over nuclear fallout were not hot topics for high school students...