By Cecilia Martinez-Gil

Él
todo el tiempo
me arrebata los fuegos
las ganas
y quiero creerte
pero de nuevo guardo silencio
de nuevo
todo el tiempo
las nubes

What are your thoughts on the importance of the arts and humanities and The Creative Process?
My poetry seeks to remind us that our bodies are made of Earth’s elements—somos Naturaleza—and emphasizes our interconnectedness. The video merges past footage with recent photographs of the untouched Atlantic coast in eastern Uruguay, where my family has vacationed for generations, a region free from corporate exploitation. My daughter, Magaluna, was born in Los Angeles but conceived in this wild region, and she was named after a Shaman chief from the Indigenous Charrúas, my ancestors, who, before the Spanish colonization, freely roamed these lands. These clouds symbolize a decolonized world where nature thrives, and people appreciate its fleeting beauty. This work combines original music by my husband, Federico Ramos, (Coco and Encanto) and photography by my cousin, Gabriela Gil, (a psychologist, a flamenco dancer, and an art couch focused on psychosomatic healing) with my early new adult poetry filled with simplicity. Together, they enrich our imagination and experience. 

Creative endeavors can challenge traditional views and transform the human spirit, but true magic happens through collaboration, connecting writers, musicians, photographers, and viewers. Any creative endeavor translates and transports experience, challenging the Darwinian theory of evolution and transforming the human spirit while finding sustenance in creativity, artistic endeavors, and the imagination. But it’s in collaboration that the true magic of creative expression is enhanced. It connects the writer and the reader, the composer and the listener, the photographer, and the viewer. 

I have worked multiple times in collaboration with artists from different backgrounds and with unique and distinctive artistic expressions. I call this intersectionality and interdisciplinary collaborative work creative cross-pollination.

What was the inspiration for your creative work?: Watching the sky at sunsets, at sunrises, and randomly, during daylight and nighttime continues to surprise me and awe me, besides giving me a few minutes of solace and a break from the oppressive and anxious time we live in when most people stare down at a rectangular light promising a spur of dopamine in the compulsive scrolling of social media screens.

Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
In this poem, the clouds are anthropomorphized in the figure of a lover as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of desire, pleasure, and ethereal peace as the clouds move onward on the sky stewarded by winds, though they are always omnipresent. I have always been obsessed with cloud formation and have painstakingly observed them and their patterns in either the Southern hemisphere of my native land, the northern hemisphere of my chosen land, and across my traveling experience as a backpacking migrant always in search of my roots across the dozen countries I have visited and inhabited in keenly aware of the skylight and ceilings, wild or urban, sheltering me. I am always looking up, trying to tap into its weather signs, which are quirky in recent decades with unpredictable chances for rain with the sun, storms, temperature extremes, and natural disasters across Earth, though human-induced problems exacerbating climate change.

Photo credit: Photography included in the video Las Nubes - by Gabriela Gil from Valizas - Rocha - República Oriental del Uruguay- Video Produced and Edited by Cecilia Martinez-Gil

Originally from Uruguay, I am a Latine writer, translator, and multi-award-winner author of the full-length collections “Psaltery and Serpentines” and “A Fix of Ink.” I’m writing a memoir about my experiences living in fifty homes in two dozen countries spanning three decades, including my father’s exile, the trauma of living under a dictatorship, and my search for mi lugar en el mundo as a backpacking migrant in a desperate search to root and belong. My work has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Levure Litteraire, The Anthology of Latin American Writers, Iowa’s Exchanges, and elsewhere. I hold three MA’s in Luso-Hispanic and Anglo-American Literature, Urban Sustainability, and an MFA in Creative Writing. I’m an Associate Professor at Santa Monica College, where I teach English. As a literary citizen, I am a frequent panelist at AWP, participating in readings and workshops. I live in Santa Monica, on the unceded Tongva land, with my husband, musician Federico Ramos, and our daughter, Luna, a singer/ songwriter.