Felix Valentino Salmoran
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
Felix Valentino Salmoran: I live and create among a beautiful, extensive, mostly chosen family full of prolific artists and writers, both alive in the flesh and no longer, to whom I write my poems as love letters. A large part of my work since 2021 has been written for and after my dear late friend, the poet Bennett Nieberg. Knowing Bennett and their writing entirely recomposed my knowledge of what poetry can do, and what I can do as a poet. Another contemporary of mine is the artist and writer Arden Shostak, my husband and one of my most-trusted editors. Our collaborations include our small press, Last Plum Press, through which we sell zines made by us and our friends. I'm also a musician, learning endlessly from my bandmates, past and present, about the dynamics and synergy of verse through song. I find myself speaking to my ancestors constantly in my poems, and inviting them to speak through me. Mi abuelo, Miguel Salmorán Marín, was a historian, archivist, and editor who spent his life preserving our people's stories through compiling and publishing anthologies of poetry and books like Hijos Distinguidos de Acatlán, Puebla (Distinguished Children of Acatlán, Puebla, a collection of histories passed down through oral tradition of Mixtec people dating as far back as the 1500s). In conversation with his life's work, I see my voice as a poet formed in his image, taking on his devotion to researching and remembering, and extending it to the lineage of other communities I'm part of. When I write about my transness, I invoke the presence of my transcestors, as if I am making an ofrenda.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
FVS: I learned English and Spanish concurrently. Legend has it my preschool teachers advised my parents against this -- said it would slow me down and "confuse" me -- but within a few years, I was reading earlier and at a higher level than most of my peers. Regardless, just having the knowledge that we spoke Spanish at home was enough to make the public school system pull me out of class once a year until high school to test out of ESOL classes. Eventually, though I remain fluent in Spanish, my access to the English language outpaced my practice of reading and writing in Spanish throughout my undergraduate years. It's been only in the past six or so years that I've been taking myself seriously as a bilingual writer, sometimes writing poems entirely in Spanish, and other times (like in one of my poems in this issue, "HISTORIA CONTINUADA"), finding that the most precise way I can say what I mean is in Spanglish. This year, I've even started learning Mixtec, though it will be a while before I'm writing poetry in Mixtec.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
FVS: My most formative high school teacher -- the person who introduced me to the language of poetic devices and creative writing workshop spaces -- shared with us many insights that I've internalized, one of which was her take on the "Rule of Three" in design. She said that when it comes to art and writing, if something comes up once, that is an accident; if something comes up twice, that is a coincidence; and if something comes up three times, THAT is design. I think about this all the time in my writing and when I'm giving feedback, and in my photography, printmaking, graphic design, even my fashion sense. It is some of the most useful advice I've been given, and I've passed it on to many other writers and artists. My best advice for other writers specifically is regarding the use of epigraphs. Don’t get me wrong, I love an epigraph, but I also believe it is meant to do at least one of the two following things, and if it isn’t doing either, maybe you don’t need the epigraph. Firstly, an epigraph serves to invoke a larger conversation to which a poem is contributing – its dialectic lineage. Secondly, an epigraph provides a place to include information or perspective that is necessary for your readers to know to be in the poem with you, and it must be something that you cannot include in the body of the poem without significant losses and distractions, and that they cannot easily figure out themselves using publicly-available sources. If it is information that gives necessary context, but you’re not sure how accessible that information is without being told explicitly, consider a footnote.
ORP: What do you hope readers (or your audience) will take away from your creative work?
FVS: I hope readers take away from my work that there is poetry in every interaction, conversation, relationship, reflection, and you can tap into it whether you consider yourself a poet or not. Poetry is about noticing, remembering, evoking, and often, confronting -- these are things anyone can do.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
FVS: I always joke with people that my Virgo Mercury and Cancer Moon placements are what propel my affinity for writing as a medium. Poetry is, for me, an inherently political tool in an artist’s toolbox; it provides a way to not only work through and present our understandings of this world and being alive in it, but also a means by which to use the written word to imagine better worlds. In this process, we can unite individuals and mobilize communities, moving us to participate in the co-creation of a world where revolution lives, and liberation is. The confessions being made in my work, dreams recalled, questions asked, its hunger and its meat, always come down to how we make an archive of our aliveness that outlives us, how we relate to one another as we navigate the vicissitudes of any present political moment, and what it means to call each other to action in our struggle to change our conditions and honor those whose revolutionary work we build on as we move towards our collective liberation.
