Office Hours with Gary Soto

This short essay appeared originally in frequent contributor Gabriel San Román's excellent Slingshot newsletter. It's a smart, affectionate, wise appreciation of the legendary teacher, writer, and poet whose example has meant so much to so many. Gary Soto's latest collection is Downtime: Poems from the Couch out from Gunpowder Press. Oh, and not to brag, but Soto's 2003 novel Amnesia in a Republican County was dedicated to Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich.

Before stepping into my first (and only) creative writing class in college, I stopped my professor in the hallway. Gary Soto, an author and poet from Fresno, stood wearing an oversized button-up shirt, a tuft of curly salt-and-pepper hair atop his head and wiry glasses. I introduced myself by name-dropping my educator brother for whom Soto's young adult fiction and children's books, like Chato and the Party Animals, served as a culturally responsive treasure trove. 

Chato was the coolest cat in el barrio, after all. 

When I learned that Soto taught creative writing at UC Riverside through a thick catalog of classes, I knew it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. My hermano agreed. For the next ten weeks, I apprenticed under the Central Valley sage. Soto hopped on flights from his Berkeley home to teach us the art of essay writing twice a week. Essays, he said, were considered low on literature's totem pole, but didn't have to be. 

I had interesting classmates, including a student who was smitten with Tom Wolfe and literally bracketed flashbacks in his essays with [memory frame]. Jessie, an Inland Empire vato with slicked-back hair, stood out as the best writer in the class. Soto thought so, too. He had an organic lyricism that drew his readers into scenes and the emotions swirling around them. 

Me? I didn't have all the tools to artfully express my early activist passion or bravely examine my vulnerable young life outside of it. I did show some seedlings of style: humor and a little bit of Spanglish. 

Soto graded one of my essays with a chuckle in ink as I deadpanned myself as a high school poet who crafted verses in English that couldn't even impress the girls in ESL classes. Another time I wrote about my car breaking down on the way to protest the DNC in Los Angeles in 2000. Most of the class looked perplexed when the word "desmadre" was read out loud until Soto offered a quick translation. 

We learned to critique each other's work in classroom discussions. I found one classmate's refrain that he was that "somebody" who had to buy oranges from the Mexican selling them by freeway offramps a tad patronizing. Soto agreed. But the lesson that stayed with me most for those ten weeks happened outside of class. 

I caught Soto on the elevator going down one day and mustered up the courage to ask him to look at my poetry.

"Sure," he said. "Meet me during office hours." 

Later that day, I pulled a folder out of my backpack with a bunch of poems I churned out of my bleeding activist heart. Soto thumbed through them, including a cheap imitation of Pablo Neruda's "Canto General," as I fashioned myself a budding Latin American historian.

"Don't tell me about poverty in Latin America," Soto told me, unimpressed. "Show me the mother who is hungry." That was my first encounter with "show, don't tell."

Soto left me with more words of wisdom. He told me that to be a good writer, "read, read, read!" His class didn't give me the confidence that I could write. I can't remember what grade I got, anyway. Maybe a B? 

Historian Sterling Stuckey's farewell Reconstruction class at UC Riverside did that when he complimented my writing as "splendidly toned," which made me feel like my pen could glide with grace. 

Soto's office hours punctured my ego--something I sorely needed. He gave me the gift of criticism and the advice that would later help me grow into a writer.

Since then, I haven't spoken with Soto save for the time I ran into him on campus after I was his student. I heard that one of his books was being worked into a movie project and congratulated him. 

But every so often, I return to the pages of A Natural Man, my favorite collection of his poetry, for some lessons. There's a poem from the book entitled "Oranges" about a boy who walks with a girl for the first time. He has an orange in his pocket that he peels at the end of the stroll. 

Soto writes: "Someone might have thought I was making a fire in my hands." 

Show, don't tell! 

Gabriel San Román is an Orange County writer for the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked at OC Weekly – as a reporter, podcast producer and columnist – until the newspaper’s closing in late 2019. San Román just may be the tallest Mexican in O.C.