ARYA'S WRITING & READING BLOG

It's not often that kindness is associated with art. More often than not, the artist is historically a fickle being riddled by angst, sometimes mad, quirky at best, cruel at worst. The artist is to be forgiven. She or he is after all toeing the line of super-humanity, stretching her or his limits for the sake of art. In a pivotal scene in Maestro , the stunning recent film by Bradley Cooper in which he plays Leonard Bernstein, and Carey Mulligan, his wife Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein's wife imparts one word to her children, her most important legacy, as she lays dying of cancer. "Kindness, kindness, kindness," she repeats, as if that is all that matters in life and death. It is a deeply touching and telling moment. Maestro is about the complicated relationship between Bernstein, who was bisexual if not homosexual, and the conflicts this generated in his marriage to Montealegre, a Costa Rican actress who performed on Broadway, bore Bernstein three children, and endu

Reverie Magazine, an international magazine run by students at Boston College, has offered me a lovely platform for several poems to date, the most recent, bilingual, and inspired by my childhood in Talara, Peru.  "Caracol, Caracol," and "Me Voy" came to me first in Spanish, which was my Colombian mother's language and the language of my childhood. The language of these poems is simple and fairly easy to translate to English. I'm deeply grateful to have a literary platform for this experiment. Thanks to Alexis and all the editors at Reverie. https://www.magazinereverie.com/post/caracol-caracol-y-me-voy