Do the labels that we assign people give more power to those creating the categories or those we attempt to categorize? California authors Myriam Gurba and Héctor Tobar kick off Alta Live’s inaugural Writers on Writers series with a sharp and intellectual conversation on their two newly released works of nonfiction. Gurba’s Creep looks at society’s villainous characters, cultures, and institutions through deft cultural criticism, never losing her signature voice. Our Migrant Souls, Tobar’s new book, is a wide-spanning analysis of the term Latino and the meaning it holds, both ethnographic and personal. Sure to come up: being Latinx in today’s world, how to create solidarity in marginalized communities, and much more. Join us as we kick off Alta Journal’s Issue 25, The Writer’s Issue with this exciting series.
About the guests
Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true-crime memoir Mean, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. O, The Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, Time, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. She lives in Pasadena, California.
Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Tobar is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He’s written for the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.
About their books
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster CREEP: ACCUSATIONS AND CONFESSIONS, BY MYRIAM GURBA
Creep: A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.
A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.
Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.
With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.
MCD OUR MIGRANT SOULS: A MEDITATION ON RACE AND THE MEANINGS AND MYTHS OF “LATINO”, BY HÉCTOR TOBAR
Our Migrant Souls: In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now.
Latino is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as Latino, Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity.
Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of Latino as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States and gives voice to the anger and the hopes of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes and who have faced insult and division—a story as old as this country itself.
Tobar translates his experience as not only a journalist and novelist but also a mentor, a leader, and an educator. He interweaves his own story, and that of his parents’ migration to the United States from Guatemala, into his account of his journey across the country to uncover something expansive, inspiring, true, and alive about the meaning of Latino in the 21st century.
About Alta’s Writers on Writers series
Celebrating writers and their work is one of the core missions of Alta Journal, and we’re proud to work with some of the West Coast’s best. But how do writers like C Pam Zhang, Forrest Gander, and Lydia Kiesling make the magic that results in our inevitable need to read one more chapter, turn one more page, and devour one more poem? Alta’s Issue 25, The Writer’s Issue not only examines the practice and art of writing but also includes a special pull-out guide to 126 books written by Alta contributors over the past two years. Alta Live, our Wednesday Zoom interview series, takes this focus on authors one step further with our Writers on Writers series that will feature noted authors and Alta contributors in conversation with one another. Throughout the month of October, Alta Live will exclusively offer intimate, eye-opening, and hopefully extremely fun discussions between two writers working in the same genre.•
