Image Rooted in Memory with Frontexto Artist and Poet, Octavio Quintanilla

In this episode, we explore imagery rooted in memory with Frontexto artist, poet, publisher, and instructor, Octavio Quintanilla. 

Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press, 2025).  

Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. 

Website: https://www.octavioquintanilla.com/

IG: @writeroctavioquintanilla  Twitter: @OctQuintanilla  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the HeartPath Podcast. I'm your host, Yvonne Millis. The HeartPath Podcast spotlights authors, change makers, nature lovers, and creators of all kinds. Each of our podcasts aims to share interviews and stories of beauty, resilience, and inspiration for all.

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Not my close friends, not acquaintances, not my co-workers, not the friendly strangers in public spaces who wave at me expecting small talk. I don't want to tell anyone. I wish I could keep it all to myself. Keep her to myself. Even that day I saw her cry brokenheartedly for her wayward sons, including me, who at 15 drove a stolen car towards a dark future no one else saw but me. But back then, how could I have known that my writing would become so embedded in my waking hours that it would be hard to differentiate between the art I am making and the life I am living? My mother died on Christmas Day, and we buried her on New Year's Eve. In the country where she was born, throughout the week, death is celebrated with heavy drinking by the men who come to tend the late night fires. There wasn't much drinking at my mother's wake. Not even at the burial. She hated it when her son strank themselves stupid. Late at night, my brothers who still love guns headed out to an open field where the stars could be made out with a naked eye and fired their grief into the ground.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Wow. Holy moly, thank you so much for sharing this.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

This is brand new. I'm working on a hybrid collection of poetry, memoir, visual poetry, and different kinds of media. And I'm also including photography and possibly some transcribe to music that I've been writing. So I'm having a lot of fun with it. And this is a poem that I decided to read to you because reading your work for me is a way for me to go back and take it all in, to go back and revise. So I'm kind of using your program to revise my poems.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Perfect. Ah, wonderful. And I totally understood the lines where you were talking about how writing is life and how it's so hard to get away from who we are as humans in writing. So thank you for sharing that. I would love to talk a little bit about visual poetry and when you started visual poetry.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

Since I was a little boy in school, I would always be drawing, sketching. My teachers, I don't know if they hated me, or some of them just decided to accept the way I was because every time they would give us an assignment to write on a test or whatever, I would always doodle. I would always be drawing. I would always be doing something on the paper. And I don't know if I was bored or I just wanted to draw, or I was trying to be clever, or I don't know, but I've always been drawing, sketching, and I'm not a great illustrator, to be honest with you, but I love painting. I love art, visual art. And the only formal class that I have is a high school class. However, I've always painted. And as a teenager, I realized that art material is very expensive. So I would paint on drywall that my father would bring back home from work, which is, you know, it breaks easily. But I would still paint on it and practice, right? For me, it was all about practicing. And I was doing a lot of sacred art, a lot of bloody Christ and Sexy Marys and stuff like that. And my friends loved them. And now that I think back, having my friends see the work that I was doing was probably the best thing that came out of that because my friends began to see me as an artist. In 2018, I committed myself to write every day. I would always be making excuses. I don't have time to write, you know, everybody has a second book except me, blah, blah, blah. And so I bought a bunch of notebooks, and of course, I would write, but I would also be sketching and doodling, and then I started uploading them, posting them on social media, and then I post something every day since 2018.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

So I have um containers full of artwork, which you know, they're a lot easier to store than canvases. Now I paint on canvas also, and I paint something that I love, and I'm going through this process of painting over paintings, right? I don't have the room to store them. And um, I paint every day, basically. Since the Book of Wounded Sparrows came out, I haven't been writing until recently, and that's why I read that poem. It's more like a prose poem, it's almost like an essay. I think right now I'm between writing poetry and writing memoir, you know, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I think eventually I'll know what I'm doing. So I've always been interested in visual poetry and combining text and image. And I love looking at things. I love not necessarily understanding what I'm looking at, but there's something that I'm looking at that gives me pleasure in some way. And for me, you have a visual poem that's abstract or more evocative than concrete. I love that, you know, combination of color and text. And so once I started drawing and writing in my notebook, I I realized that hey, uh I like this. I want this to be visual poetry, I want this to be part of my creative process. And for my creative process to be the artifacts that my audience uh looks at. I want my artistic process to be the art itself and not wait until I do a work of quote-unquote genius to show it off to the world. I want the world to see my process. If along the way I do something great that people like, well, great. If not, screw it, you keep exploring. That's my philosophy in writing and in art. And so since 2018, I've been posting frontextos, I don't want to call them visual poems. So I decided to combine two words, frontera and textil. Frontera means border, and texto means text, frontexto, which is for me, it's a way to honor where I come from. You know, I come from the Texas borderland, South Texas. And now, in the same way, 35 years ago or more, that I got validated by my friends for painting crap on drywalls. Now, one of the happiest moments was when journals started calling my work from textos when they got published. So it's like, wow, this is cool. So that's that's my history with visual art. I've always loved it, and I'm always gonna paint. As a matter of fact, for me, painting is like writing, and writing is like painting because I'm a visual poet in the sense that even in text, I write with images, I write with metaphor.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Wow. Were there any other artists in your family? Or are you the one that just was like, I'm painting, I'm doing this?

SPEAKER_02 8:51

Well, that's kind of interesting because I was just writing uh another little prose piece about this, because as a writer, as someone who makes art or thinks artistically, I've always wondered where she comes from, you know. Am I the only dude that does this? But no, my mom used to write poetry, even though she kept it to herself. Unfortunately, she told us about it when we were teenagers and we made fun of her.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Uh-uh.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

My mom used to write little verses in Spanish, and in her later years, she also sang, and she became a preacher at her church and would give sermons or lectures about the Bible, and she would sing. And it's interesting because she's finding this out that she has that need and that desire to express herself in front of the public artistically in her later years. Maybe she always had it, but the life that she was leading did not accommodate her desires. It was a hard life. She comes from Mexico, from the ranchos, from the ranches, raising kids. You don't think about art, right? Yeah. Well, you might think about it, but you don't have the luxury to do it, the time or whatever. So my mom has that, and then one of my uncles in Mexico, he lives in Monterrey, he's a songwriter. He writes songs for her bands. And I think the greatest artist in my family was my father. He was a farmer. He farmed and worked the land like an artist, like a freaking artist. So I think my way of making art obviously is very different from what he did. But you learn from someone like that how to take care of something, how to tend it, how to watch it grow, how to harvest it, how to keep trying when the rains don't come. He was the artist, you know. He was a brilliant man, even though he had a second, third grade education. So it's like, wow, you know, I can see why I desire this. He would work with wood, he would make all kinds of furniture. If you don't call that art, I don't know what the hell you call art, you know. So yeah, I come from a family that has always appreciated education, reading, the arts, to whatever extent they were understood by them. They always appreciated that. And that's why I'm here because they appreciated this life so much that they gave me the opportunity, the time, the space to be myself, to do crazy shit like being in a rock band in the 90s and waking them up at 2 in the morning, playing guitar and with a band. Uh, gave me the time to stay home and read. I was supposed to go dig bitches for plumbers. So I think that's also part of the artist's life that often we don't talk about. You're not made from one day to the next. In my case, there's a lot of people that have allowed me to be here, maybe not because they were necessarily making quote unquote art as I'm trying to make, but because they appreciate it. And I think there's something good to say about that. When you do something like this, you kind of have to have guts, right? To just throw yourself out there and say, this is what I'm gonna do, and I don't know what I'm doing, but hopefully I find what I'm doing or something of what I'm doing in the process. And when my first book came out in 2014, I was like, okay, dude, I already went through the system. I, you know, I got a PhD in creative writing and literature, I already did all this crap. I'm still not happy. I want to do my thing. And I did, right? I'm like, you know what? Screw all that. Let me do this, right? Let me do what I feel is poetic, that I feel feels something in me. Uh this excitement, you know, like when you see something, you get excited, even though it might not be complete, even though it might not be perfect. It's kind of like when I see abstract works, when I'm like, whoa, you know, like abstract work makes me emotional. Not all of it, but if I see something, I want to do something like that, you know. And honestly, I was just kind of bored with the limitations of what I thought I could do with poetry and words and images, and so you start doing stuff, you know, you start combining stuff. For me, obviously, I'm realizing that writing is not enough, you know. I have to paint, and also I do a little bit of music, so I think all of them are kind of in dialogue and similar and also different ways. And I don't know, I mean, to me, it's all about process, it's all about exploration. And you start exploring. And I remember being kind of scared at the beginning. You know, people are gonna think it sucks, and people, but then I realized, well, no, I'm documenting my process as a human being, you know, and that's been since 2018. And you go to my social media, you're gonna see from 2018 all the way here, you're gonna see an image and how it's growing, you know, and doing that kind of thing has been probably the smartest thing I've ever done in my life because doing that has opened so many doors for me.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

Exhibits, collaborations with other artists, residencies. Uh it's like, yeah, you know, just do what your heart feels like doing. You only live once. It's the one thing that I'm so glad I realized earlier in life. You gotta do what makes you happy, no matter what. Oh, I could maybe have more money, maybe have a swimming pool. But I'm happy, you know. I love where I work. I teach at Orlando University, and some people tell me, Man, you could probably teach at a better school and get paid more. And I'm like, Yeah, dude, but I'm happy waking up and driving to work and being in a space that welcomes me and I know what I'm doing. And and if I go somewhere else, sure, you know, it might be different and I might have a different experience, but I don't know what it means to be happy in that space because I'm happy in this space, you know what I'm saying? So I don't feel like I'm losing anything, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, you know. So I always tell my students, do what you love because life is long when you're freaking miserable, you know. Life is long when you're miserable, but when you're happy, life just passes you by like nothing.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

You're on the path, you're doing what you love. You have a lot of events coming up on the 22nd of April. You have a Moody Professorship lecture at University of Incarnate Word at 5 p.m.

SPEAKER_02 16:19

It's gonna be on visual poetry, the making of it, contemporary practitioners of visual poetry, and also hybrid text, not just visual poetry, but that poem that I read is part of this little project that I'm working on. It's like a little hybrid chat book for now, and that's gonna be part of my presentation. I'm gonna be showing the audience how I'm putting this thing together, right? I'm hoping that it will become my next book. But like I said, everything for me is processed. So I'm not waiting to finish the book to start talking about it because that's how I revise, that's how I go back and think about what I'm doing and what's working and what's not working. But yeah, it's gonna be about hybrid text and all aspects of visual poetry. So a faculty professor from the University of Incarnate Word comes to the lake, they do their lecture, and then I go to their university and I do my lecture, and then we both do it in our own respective universities. So it's a really cool scholarly collaboration between two universities.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

So yeah. And then you have another event happening June 24th through the 28th in Arizona. What's that event called?

SPEAKER_02 17:38

Uh, I'm gonna be a faculty for Cantomundo. Cantomundo is an organization that supports uh Latinx poets, you know, and it's uh been around uh for more than a decade. And I'm a Cantomundo fellow. I attended the conference three summers. And in this case, I'm returning as faculty, so it should be fun.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Are you gonna teach visual poetry there or something else?

SPEAKER_02 18:05

I think I am. That's what I hear participants want. So I would probably be walking them through exercises, giving them more context. But I'm gonna try and guide it for us to reflect about what it means to tell your own story, but also the different ways you can tell your story, including lyric poetry, prose poetry, visual poetry, object poetry, uh, video poetics, different ways to experiment with your story.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

So that sounds great. Yes, and then you are going to be the keynote speaker at the Texas Association of Creative Writers on October 2nd. Is that open for anyone that wants to join?

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Or it's an association, so I think there's fees if you're from Texas.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 19:01

Uh so yeah, I think you have to be a member to attend. But from what I understand, they often have grad students come and present their papers. It's a conference, and I'm just gonna do the keynote. I have no idea what I'll be talking about, but I'll probably mix it with remarks on the literary life and reading poetry.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Yes, yes. And then you have an event in Florence, South Carolina at the PD Festival at Francis Marion University. And when is that going to be?

SPEAKER_02 19:38

It's going to be November 5th and 6th.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Woo-hoo.

SPEAKER_02 19:44

Yeah, it's might be my first time in South Carolina, so I'm excited to visit. I love to visit new places. So when I get an opportunity to go read somewhere outside of Texas, I jump on it.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

I love going to AWP for that reason because I can go to places I wouldn't normally go to and hang out with a bunch of writers, and that makes me very happy. I would love to hear one more poem if you'd be willing to share.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

And it goes like this movies. I've been watching movies in which older folk innocent have sex. Men and women in their late 60s or early 70s. Hard to tell the age on screen, since I know for sure I'm not there yet. But I will eventually. Wonder where she is. Wonder if she finally left the warehouse where we both worked, where we first kissed behind the stack of printing paper. Where after kissing we kept our eyes closed till we heard the boss calling out someone's name. Her sons must be close to the age she was when she pressed her body against mine in the back of her old station wagon. They were kids then, the oldest, not much younger than I was. How could I ever be a father, their father at their age? She never asked me to. Across her mind as she does with me now. And I watch a movie in which a man and a woman kiss and grope their aged bodies. And I see their wrinkly faces and their dry big veined hands. And it's like seeing the future. There I am, reaching hard again for what I've been practicing my whole life. Anyway, that's the poem.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Wow. Heck yeah, you've got some good stuff in there. Thank you for sharing.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

Yeah, it's a new poem and it's a little different, but so far I've been kind of exploring uh family, death, getting older, just things like that. I guess most poets reflect on.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Well, I love what you're creating. Thank you so much for sharing today. Thank you for continuing to create every day and sharing your work with all.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Appreciate that.