Yes, cinco de mayo has been co-opted as another drinking holiday here in the United States. It’s actually only a regional holiday in Pueblo, Mexico, held in commemoration of the Mexican army’s unlikely victory over French forces. Still, when Tania DeLuzuriaga throws a cinco de mayo party, replete with sangria and the promise of tacos, you go.

Tania is my Harvard co-worker, friend, and wunderkind behind the food blog, The Musing Bouche. She likes food (and Mexico) as much as I do, but is way more hardcore about actually going out and getting it. She fishes, she hunts. She has skulls in her office. In essence, she is my hero.

Tania lured me with tacos — not just any tacos: braised pork belly tacos. If bacon is the perfect food, tacos may be a close second.

And enchiladas. And pastel de tres leches. And sangria. Tania knocked it out of the park. Here are some photos from my cinco de mayo, Tania style:

I love discovering new poems. Even better, when these poems talk about Cozumel, Mexico. How cynical to think I was the only one? From PANK, by Mike Dockins:

Jamie, once again I’m strumming the low
latitudes, plucking dark lines
like harp strings—oblivion’s
tropical melody. All morning I’ve been drinking
the wide blue sky: cliché heaped upon cliché—
each atom complicit, each molecule a temple
of triteness, a dull world.
But this green sea is a global original,
an inimitable canvas. And beyond the epic
reef that stretches like a marine spine
toward Belize: the zillion
hotels of Cozumel—a zillion fangs
in the jaw of the horizon, the horizon
speckled with cruise ships fatter
and no doubt more festive than my hometown. …

Read the rest here!

Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

That’s Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham, y’all. She was the big focus in my first, and likely only, cover story for the Harvard Gazette. You can read it here.

She was gracious and frantic, like most creative types, myself included. I was scared as hell to meet her, I must admit; our email exchanges were a bit flighty, and she was skeptical about having me sit-in on some of her student rehearsals for a big poetry recitation she’s set up for April 29. Then we met, and she said I had a strong psychic presence, and I swooned. She’s amazing.

I also met and interviewed the inimitable poetry critic Helen Vendler, who regaled me with many fun stories I couldn’t fit into the piece. When I sent the finished product to her for clearing, she had edited the whole thing (even though I told her the article’s next stop was the Gazette’s in-house editor). “Wunderkinds,” she wrote to me, “is not the plural of wunderkind.” I’ll never forget that.

The year is winding down. So much is happening. I’ve been interviewing for a job that could land me in Mexico indefinitely. Cross your fingers. Anything could happen in 44 days!

This has been one of the busiest times of my life, with no sign of slowing down. Not only have I been devouring travel memoirs like crazy, I’ve started working on my memoir that I hope — cross fingers! — to complete while in Cozumel. If being consumed with a book project wasn’t enough, I’ve also been doing minor freelance jobs on the side, taking a Spanish class, figuring out how to move out of my apartment, and making arrangements about where to store my stuff. But it’s my fulltime job that’s kept me the most busiest, as every other day it seems I’m interviewing another faculty member in preparation of my first Gazette cover story — on poetry at Harvard. It’s very exciting and a great opportunity for me.

Luckily, last week I had the great fortune to do a reading at Newtonville Books on the first stop of the Madonna & Me book tour. My essay, “Mother Madonna,” graces this anthology’s amazing pages, which seemed to take forever to get published! Maybe it was just that I’m incredibly impatient, but it’s finally OUT. Buy yourself a copy — you won’t regret it.

I read with read with three other wonderful contributors: Erin Trahan, Kelly Keenan Trumpbour, and Christine Bachman. Laura Barcella, the talented editor behind the project, was on-site to introduce us.

I read last, which I didn’t mind. But the sun set, and I could feel the crowd slinking away. Luckily for me, my piece is relatively short and contains flourishes of soft-core porn. The crowd was warm and immediately livened up; one girl was even bowling over with laughter, but I’m pretty sure the lady in the front row had her jaw hanging open through my whole reading. It’s a pretty risque piece.

I’m continually surprised by the bits of humor people pick up in my essays. Even when I’m meaning to be serious, subconsciously I just can’t take myself — or life — too seriously. Humor always pokes in, and so even as I felt a bit disconnected from the essay — I’d written it more than two years ago — the volume of insanity and upheaval depicted in the essay helped reconnect me with not only the story, but this period in my life.

The book has been garnering a lot of attention, and to top off I got a mention in this Atlantic article!