By Dalia Hajir
My watch strikes 6:00 p.m. as I sit at my table waiting anxiously for Lawrence Welsh to arrive. Soon, he steps into the quaint Mexican restaurant Riviera, saunters over to our table, and eloquently introduces himself with a suave, confident voice. Outgoing and totally at ease, almost as if about to engage in a poetry reading, he is dressed in a red sweater, his spirited blue eyes outlined by the squarish frames of his glasses. Upon sitting down, we immediately begin talking about school, literature and family. After we order our food, he shows me a copy of his newest poetry collection, American Skull, signs it on the spot, and gifts it to me, a treasure I will read and cherish forever. The dinner, casual yet appetizing, is the vehicle for a mind-blowing conversation about his roots and life as a writer. As I learn more about him, mesmerized by his life and writing experiences, the words keep popping into my head, Wow! What a sensational life he’s had!
Welsh, a gifted desert poet, carries his leather sketchbook to his wanderings through the deserts of El Paso, finds the most unworthy aspects of the environment and writes them down with brisk cursive handwriting. The ordinary trash, the flesh-eaten bones, the uncanny flowers pop vividly in his poems without remorse. He doesn’t sacrifice the authentic for the beautiful. He finds beauty in the raw, the rough, the broken – what strengthens our bodies and polishes our minds.
A former award-winning journalist who has taught at several universities across the country, Welsh is a highly sought-out English professor at El Paso Community College. His students say he captivates and inspires them with his lectures, which he spices up with his experience in the field. I’m sure they are as engrossed with his lectures as I am now with his experiences. He readily admits that he doesn’t freely give grades, that he grades students’ essays for merit and improvement; a caring professor he is, concerned that his students pick up a thing or two about writing. His aura alone compels them to do better, write more, and not hold back.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh
Welsh’s father, a veteran of D-Day, having fought valiantly along the beaches of Normandy, and his mother, an Irish immigrant from Nenagh, County Tipperary, make him a first-generation Irish American, born in 1959 in South Central Los Angeles, a place where the hate of the Black Power Movement of the ‘60s and the Watts Riots of 1965 became an eventual theme in many of his poems. “I came of age in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time,” he recalls in an interview with the Lummox Journal. “I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. I think you can figure it out: getting stabbed, dodging gangs, learning to fight, living in fear. The Crips were formed down the street. The Bloods started just east of Normandie Avenue. I’d often hear gang members scream on the street, ‘There’s a white boy. Let’s kill him.’” At the age of 12, inducing fear while still in his childhood, Welsh got jumped out on the street and stabbed in the face, an experience Daniel Madrid records in his essay Desert Mad from the L.A. Streets: “I pulled myself off the sidewalk and thought I was dead. And I promised myself that no one would ever mess with me again.”
Though the streets were constantly raging, at his home prevailed the love and support of his parents, who raised him with the values of his Irish-Catholic roots. Knowing no shortcuts or advantages in life, his blue-collar family taught him to work hard to earn an honest living. Admittedly, he tells the Lummox Journal he wouldn’t change a thing. One could say his rough beginnings in South Central Los Angeles shaped his deep sense of empathy for people who haven’t had it easy in life.
In 1979, now 20 years old, young Welsh’s life would get hit by another powerful twist – the punk scene. During that year, he moved to Los Angeles’ Westside and formed his own punk band, The Alcoholics. In Notes from a Punk Survivor, an autobiographical work, he states that every day he’d write “two or three songs” with which the band would practice all night. They’d gig with many other vital participants of L.A.’s early punk rock community, constantly performing, partying and polishing their music.
The Alcoholics broke up in 1982, but Welsh remains a punk at heart. In the Lummox Journal, when asked if music impacts his writing, Welsh replies, “All kinds of music continually impact and inspire my writing: jazz, country, punk, folk, Irish, bluegrass, ambient/space, and blues. Sometimes I riff on a song title. Sometimes it’s the rhythms that get the pen moving. Sometimes it’s thinking about a musician’s life. I’ve written poems about a wide range of musicians, including Billy Joe Shaver, Butch Hancock, Ralph Stanley, members of ZZ Top, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Phil Lynott, Darby Crash, Joe Strummer, Nick Cave, Willy DeVille, Lester Young, Chet Baker and Art Pepper, to name a few.” To name a few, he says. It would be enlightening to see the depth of the entire list. An apparent avid listener of various music genres, Welsh has not only written about a magnanimous group of musicians, but they have also inspired him to write. After all, poetry is an art form, lyrical in many respects, and the intertwining of music and writing only seems evident. But from Welsh, it is more than evident, it is an homage to the musical greats who have lifted his spirit, propelled his pen onto paper, and awakened the word sorcerer inside of him.
While jamming away in The Alcoholics, Welsh worked as a supermarket grocery clerk at Safeway, a day job of sorts. “Many punks knew me as ‘Larry Safeway,’ a nickname christened by some punk chick from England,” he tells the Lummox Journal as a curious detail. After four years at the job, he suffered a back injury while working as part of a Safeway graveyard stocking crew, forcing him to figure out a way of living that didn’t require heavy lifting. He became a grocery checker at Safeway and would remain there for another five years. Unsure of what he wanted to do, at 22 he enrolled in El Camino College in Torrance, California. During his third semester, he fell in love with a journalism class and realized that while his injury prevented him from doing manual labor, it did not prevent him from using his mind and making a living with words and through words.
Five years passed, and after working for two college newspapers, Welsh graduated with distinction from California State University with a B.A. in both Journalism and Political Science. One could say this was a reencounter with journalism because he first became very curious about it during his childhood. “His father would bring home stacks of newspapers, such as The Los Angeles Times, Herald-Examiner, and Daily Breeze, which he would collect on the bus. Welsh frequently read the newspapers. He said he was fond of them and intrigued by their contents,” says Stephanie Bustamante, writer for the Tejano Tribune. Across the years, Welsh traversed from journalism to fiction writing, and finally, the same drive, energy, and creativity that had gone into his music – boom, boom, bam – shifted into poetry.
His career took a significant leap when Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009 was published by the University of New Mexico Press, a major publishing house in the Southwest. Before then, smaller presses had published his work. Begging for Vultures “speaks to the bitter part of people, massaging their anger into ambition, their sadness into survival,” states Ashlie Rodriguez, a What’s Up magazine writer. “It’s a recommended read for ugly, desert ducklings who have no desire to become swans and are quite content to dig through the dirt for their own destiny.” This extraordinary review speaks to the poet’s collection, which won Welsh a 2012
New Mexico Arizona Book Award and the Southwest Notable Book of the Year Award.
While his writing has appeared in over 300 publications, Welsh published his 13th and most recent collection of poetry, American Skull, in 2021. But as with every writer, his work faces rejection all the time. Since his first work was sent to publishers, he has gotten up to 1,200 rejections, which he considers a natural part of the job. “Don’t worry about rejection; it will find you, as it has me, constantly,” he tells Rodriguez, though it applies to every writer, painter, musician, or dancer, to everyone who wants to do anything. In the end, even if rejection may have found Welsh, his persistence has allowed him to learn from it, brush it aside, and barrel through to success.
Lawrence Welsh, a pillar in the El Paso writing community, an upstanding citizen, a loving father, and a loyal husband, stands as a great role model for aspiring writers and poets and anyone with a dream who looks for its realization. Compared to the tremendous challenges and successes he has experienced, ours is a small conversation but an encouraging one that made me feel like going into the desert and writing poetry of my own. I genuinely believe that, as you read through the interview, through the words that he shares with me during our dinner, where the food is only the appetizer to his candid telling of his life, you’ll feel the same way.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh signing Begging for Voltures. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
What strikes me most is not only the importance of resilience, of not giving up, but also the need to pause, reflect, and let ourselves heal old wounds, to reconnect with our past so that we can enjoy the present and look into the future without fear or regret. After all, just like with music and poetry, the beats of life come in different rhythms: boom, boom, bam.
Can you talk a bit about your childhood and young adult years? What was that like?
I’m from South Central Los Angeles, and I grew up in a very loving home with my mother and father, my mother being an Irish immigrant and my father being an Irish American bus driver. I went to Catholic school.
There was a lot of love at home, but, also, I went through the Watts Riots. I went through the death of JFK. My sister and father worked the streets for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 for his presidential campaign. Growing up, the neighborhood changed, and in the ‘60s, the neighborhood became very violent and very intense. It was one of the most intense ghettos in America. We became one of the only white families left in South Central Los Angeles.
There was a lot of hatred. There was a lot of pain on the streets. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that many of us were trapped down there, not only the Chicanos that I ran with, but the Blacks, too, and what few Anglos there were. When on the streets, the streets were hell. It was hell.
As a young boy, I got jumped a lot. I had to fight a lot. I was almost stabbed to death at the age of 12. All those things would end up forming a part of my life and who I was and how I was going to continue.
But the flip side was that there was a lot of love in my home. I think because of my mother and father, that’s why I’m here today. I don’t think I would have ever survived if I didn’t have that strong support system at home. Like any family, there were dynamics between being Irish and being Catholic. It wasn’t perfect, but to make it simple, I was blessed that, in their own way, my mother and father loved me deeply, and during challenging times they were there. Because of them, there was a lot of support at home.
It’s good that you got out of that situation.
Yes. I left South Central Los Angeles when I was 20. You leave the neighborhood, but you never really leave the neighborhood.
And the neighborhood never leaves you.
Yes. I learned a lot of things down there. I learned how to survive, I learned how to navigate, I learned how to fight, and I made a pact with myself down there that I was going to survive it, and no one was ever going to kill me. I felt that I had become tough. And then I did.
Those things, in later years, wouldn’t always serve me well, and I had to do some healing from many of those things. But they helped me survive.
It was a very rough situation. It made you stronger; however, you needed to take time to process, to heal. Is that what you mean?
Yes. I went to live in Ireland the summer I was 16. I went back. That was another significant change in my life because Ireland is really important to me. My mom always told us, “You are Irish, you got to be tough.”
Our people have been through Cromwell trying to kill all the Irish in the 1600s and the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s, 1850s. One out of every three Irish died from the Great Potato Famine.
I started drinking at 16 and soon found out, at 16, 17, 18 – this is just part of my story – that I was probably an alcoholic. I was lucky enough to realize that this could be a real problem. I process alcohol like a Native American, so when I started drinking, I wouldn’t stop until I was very messed up as a young man. But I was smart enough to realize that it was a problem.
I did graduate from high school. I became a musician, a harmonica player. I started playing in blues bands and stuff like that. What was a galvanizing force for me when I moved out at 20 was that I became a punk rocker. I bought a guitar and started writing my own songs for this band that would become The Alcoholics in Los Angeles.
And at 20, I found that punk was like it. A lot of the rage I had from the streets where I grew up could be fueled into this time of Los Angeles punk. Los Angeles punk was, some people say, the most intense and hardcore scene in the world with punk rockers, and that was my world. This is all before I started college at the age of 22.
Yes, I was a reformed alcoholic in a punk rock band in ‘79. I have no illusions about where we are in the realm of Los Angeles punk rock history and culture, but the bottom line is we were there, and we did it, and we did the gigs, and we played with a lot of bands.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh with Mike Tapia, author of Gangs of the El Paso-Juarez Borderland, in Socorro, Texas, 2021. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
In some ways, I kind of still see myself as a punk because it was so creative and so intense and so wild. The time came when I had to leave that, too, because that was also a very dark scene. A lot of people died, and a lot of people got very hooked on hard drugs. It was intense. At the same time, from an art point of view, there were artists and writers, and it was intense, it was wild, and it was creative. The L.A. punk scene was very big to me.
Then, a couple of years later, I found my way to college. That’s when this whole new wave started. I had a girlfriend who gave me the Selected Poems of the French poet Paul Verlaine. We were young lovers, and we were 22. I started falling deeply in love with poetry and fiction. She wanted to be a writer; I wanted to be a writer. One time we were at a party, and I didn’t know who Karl Marx was, and she got really pissed and said, “Larry, I’m not going to date an uneducated man.”
I started community college and fell in love with it. I thought all my professors were a trip. They were these interesting people I had never met. I just started throwing myself into school.
When you were in the punk band, it was a very dark place. Would you say that from an artistic point of view it was a very powerful way of releasing emotions?
Absolutely. Yes. And it was fun, too, but it was very intense, very much a way to relieve emotions. I found a lot of the intensity of South Central Los Angeles and some of the anger and rage I was feeling for how I grew up. And where I grew up was perfect for punk rock because punk was intense.
I got myself a guitar, and much like with the poetry, I could write songs like this, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. I would write songs, bring them to practice, and say, “Hey, guys, I got another song.” Bam, bam, boom, same sort of thing. It was wonderful.
But at the same time, people were dying of heroin overdoses and alcoholism; people were dropping too much acid. I don’t know if it’s because I’m Irish, but my whole life I have been hotwired a bit towards dark things. It all fueled into that.
That was an incredible time. It was an incredible time to be creative. There was a time when I felt I had to leave it because I wanted to move on 
to this next world. That started happening when I was 22.
It was like you navigated through that, but then you said, “Okay. It’s time to move on to something else because this environment is not right.”
Yes. I mean, it was always right. I still see myself today as a punk. That was an ethos for me. But no. There just came a time when I wanted more. The only reason I went to college is I spent ten years as a grocery clerk at Safeway, a supermarket, and I hurt my back when I was 22, so I couldn’t stock shelves anymore, and I was at a point in my life where I knew I had to get some more training.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh, right, with The Alcoholics at Joey Kills in Los Angeles, 1980. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
I remember the night it came to me, Well, maybe I’ll try school. The light went on. Maybe I’ll go back to school and try and see if I like it. I went back to school, and I liked it.
What made you want to choose El Paso as the place to live?
When I was 30, I had already worked as a newspaper reporter. I went to college and got degrees in newspaper journalism and political science. I worked in two college newspapers as a reporter and a writer. Then I worked for five years for a daily newspaper, the Daily Breeze, in L.A. as a reporter, writing, writing, writing, writing.
Then I started doing some publishing. By this time, I’m around 27. I graduated college when I was 27 and started messing around with fiction and poetry. I worked a couple of rough jobs after the newspaper business, where I was an editor and worked PR, and these things I didn’t like.
At 30 I decided I was going to hitchhike across America by myself. I had read a book called Vagabonding in the USA. I had a friend leave me off on the interstate by myself with a backpack, and I put out my thumb, so at 30 I hitchhiked across America. That was a new chapter in my life. That journey completely changed my life because I hitchhiked into El Paso and knew no one. I knew nothing about El Paso. I stayed here for a while around the Placita, hitchhiked to Houston, became a waiter in a TexMex restaurant, and lived there writing. I felt I was a writer and I wanted to write.
Then I made it to Florida and then spent some time in San Antonio. I was out on the road for three months. When I came back to L.A., I knew then, at the age of 30, that I wanted to leave Los Angeles one day for good.
Something happened to me in Albuquerque, where I had a spiritual experience. When I got to Albuquerque, this was in 1989, I was walking the streets. It was the fall, and people were roasting chiles. I felt that I had been there in another lifetime. It was like an out-of-world experience. I felt this deep connection to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Years later, I would find out that my aunt was a nun in New Mexico. My uncle, Father Bartholomew Welsh, was a Franciscan priest for 40 years in the desert of Arizona. So, I didn’t quantify it, but I felt this incredible connection. When I returned to L.A., I started doing new editing work and got a very good job as an editor with the County of Los Angeles, making some really good money. I was like 31, 32.
And I knew that I wanted to leave Los Angeles, and I knew I wanted to go to the Southwest. I initially thought about the University of New Mexico, but they didn’t have the degree I wanted. At that time, I published one short story in a magazine in San Francisco, fiction, and then I decided to go to graduate school.
I started looking for graduate schools because I wanted to go to Texas or New Mexico. I came out to UTEP on July 4, 1994, to El Paso, and they accepted me into graduate school, and that’s where I’ve been since, here.
How does El Paso fit into the poetry or subject matter you write about?
It’s everything. The desert kind of took hold of me 27 years ago. I try not to analyze things intensely. I just write. If I’m in the desert hiking – which I do a lot – and walking, I’m writing, because what will happen is phrases will be dictated to me, and they will just come into my head.
I love it. It’s so hard. It becomes so political sometimes about who you are, what you are. I know El Paso is not for everyone, but it got into my soul and blood, and I love it here. I grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by the Mexican American culture from when I was a kid. My dad would always take me to the fairs in the Catholic churches, and we had family friends – everybody spoke Spanish. I ran the streets with Mexican American guys and Black dudes in L.A., so when I came to El Paso, it felt like home. It’s like a different aspect of culture.
I found it a very good place to write. I don’t want to quantify it. I have just stayed here, and I’ve been here a long time now, and there’s nowhere else I want to go but here. I’m very content and happy here, and I did a lot of healing. So, I’m here.
That is very interesting, how El Paso is a very calm place to be, right?
Yes.
Compared to a lot of the chaos that may be in other places. Sure. Indeed, it may not be for everybody. I know that. People kind of either like it here or hate it here. It’s worked for me. I met my wife, and she grew up here, so she is a woman of the desert. I believe that people from the area, the Frontera, Juárez, and El Paso – I see it in my students, whether they want it or not, it’s in their soul, in their blood, and they are children of the desert. I married the woman that she is. She is an El Pasoan, and that doesn’t need to be quantified either. It just is.
I know that you spent years as a journalist. At least from my perspective, journalism can be a dry writing form.
Yes.
How do you contrast that with your beautiful poetry and fiction? What made you leave journalism for a more creative writing form?
I think a lot of the great American writers started as journalists. Hemingway was a newspaperman, and William Kennedy. So many writers started as reporters and journalists, and I wanted to be in that vein.
Journalism is incredible for paring things down and making the language simple and concrete. All that I learned in journali
sm directly influenced my poetry. Then in my fiction writing, even though I haven’t published a lot, I try to get things as tight as possible.
Like my New and Selected Poems from the University of New Mexico Press, Begging for Vultures, critics say that I squeeze everything almost down, so the language is very tight. The images are very tight, almost like sometimes I’m finding my bones in the desert.
That’s an awesome description of that.
Yes. Almost trying to strangulate things so they are sometimes just like images there.
But, yes, I love journalism. That time I spent as a newspaper reporter is some of the greatest stuff I have written in my life. I think sometimes, yes, maybe my poetry is a little bit dry, but it’s always about editing, editing, editing, editing, and trying to keep things tight.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh in Las Cruces. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
It’s like taking images down to the base, like removing all the meat and getting to the bones.
Base, yes. But, once again, it’s nothing that I analyze. I just do it organically. That doesn’t mean I don’t spend much time editing things, but I’ll get things down and then edit them. Yes, it’s kind of organic. Some critics have said this, too, for a lot of my stuff: There’s not a lot of flesh on the bone. It’s the bone, with not a whole lot of ornamentation. There’s undoubtedly been a precedence for that because many of my heroes dealt with aspects of that.
How so?
Well, hundreds and hundreds of poets are very important to me. Two significant early influences were William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley. I continued from page 15 Lawrence Welsh continued on page 17 17 could talk for hours and hours and hours about poetic influences, but all that would do is put everyone to sleep. Spanish poets, African American poets. Irish poets are very important to me. A lot of really heavy American poets. Indeed, there’s been outlaw poets and underground poets who are very important to me.
In some ways that’s what we do. We take everything in and the journey is to be ourselves.
Yes. So, which one of the poets that you described is your work most like?
I don’t know. No, I don’t know. I have a lot of influences. I’m not trying to be like anyone. There are just a lot of heavy people who have influenced me.
French poets are very important to me: Molière, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine. These are just the French. Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet, is very important. There are a lot of women poets: Wanda Coleman, a Black poet from Los Angeles, a huge influence. Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Olson. In Ireland: Yeats, Michael Hartnett, James Liddy, Jean Valentine, Eileen Myles. They are all hugely important to me. But, once again, it’s very organic. I’m not analyzing every move they make. I read them and I study them, and I dig them.
Then Todd Moore was this underground, avant-garde outlaw poet I became friends with while living in Albuquerque. He is huge to me. V.B. Price, the Albuquerque journalist and poet, is important. V.B. Price is the one who acquired my New and Selected Poems for the University of New Mexico Press.
Yes, it is very important to learn from others and follow the process you like.
Yes. You learn from others and then leave others. We leave them but maybe we never leave them.
And there was another Native American poet who I discovered years ago who recently died. His name was Adrian C. Louis. I corresponded with him. He was from the Lovelock Paiute tribe. There are a lot of Native American poets. Simon Ortiz, who is from the Acoma Pueblo, is important.
Right. Regarding what you said about writing organically, how many hours do you spend writing? Or is there a special ritual that you follow during the process?
I write every day. I have written daily, seven days a week, for 35 years. I don’t make a big deal about it. Who is the great Chicago poet – Carl Sandburg. They asked him, What do you try to do as a poet? He said, I try and write a poem a day, one poem a day, and not make a big deal out of it. I have done that for decades and decades and decades, one poem a day. But then, if I’m working on another book – I have a bunch of books that are not published, like a memoir that took ten years to write. I’m still sending it out. It’s a nonfiction book, and it took ten years to write. Even when I’m working on a piece of nonfiction or fiction, I try and do something every day.
It just comes naturally to you.
Yes, I guess. I’ll be honest with you, I struggled a lot. At home I have a minimum of 1,200 rejections and maybe 300 acceptances.
People are always and have always told me no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, still to this day. But along the way, I’ve had some yeses. I have no illusion of where I am in the literary world or anything. I know where I am. I still face “no” all the time, but I feel blessed for the yeses. I am grateful for where I am. I feel grateful when I win awards or when a new manuscript comes out. Soy un veterano. If I’m anything, I’m a veterano.
It’s a huge part of being an artist and writer, that you have to face the no, no, no, no, no, but then you get the yes.
Yes. Some people haven’t had it as rough as me, and some have had it rougher. I always read about other writers’ journeys, and artists, too, and what they go through in their lives.
Sometimes you will meet someone who is a young woman, like you. They send something out to an editor, and an editor in New York loves them, and instantly they become this huge sensation. I think, Wow, that’s incredible. That’s not my story. Even navigating fame, like immense fame, there’s always some price to pay, for everything.
I’ve known that before. It’s like when I put out a book, like this latest one, from a very small press, in some ways it kind of makes me happy because it’s a smaller press, and then, for me, there are smaller expectations. But when the books come out from the University of New Mexico Press, there are more expectations of me getting out there and hustling readings, gigs and reviews.
Many describe your poetry as minimalistic. Would you consider yourself a minimalist in other areas?
Yes. In some ways I get minimalism. I dig a lot of things. I don’t think it’s all minimalistic, but I think overall, yes, it is. Minimalism almost kind of comes in with the editing of journalism. Minimalism was kind of ingrained in me through punk. Bam, bam, bam. Bam, bam, bam. Bam, bam, boom.
It has a rhythm, right?
Yes, and fast. Fast and intense. Yes. There’s a lot of minimalistic stuff in my work. I still don’t know what I’m trying to do. You mentioned the word “base.” I like to get things down to essence.
Yes, essence.
One time another professor asked me to read some of my work in her class. She looked up and said to the class, “Well, what did you think of that?” And she then said, “All I could see – the images that went through my mind were of trash.” But that’s okay.
I laughed, and I was like, yes, because trash is important to me. In a way of refuse, my poems, broken beer bottles, broken cans, bones in the desert, stones, mesquite, rocks, litter, it’s, yes, trash. I kind of laughed and said, “Well, yes, that poem is kind of about trash.” And for me, that’s good enough.
It’s like a painting. Sometimes, when someone paints, there are so many different aspects of the canvas, of painting, that sometimes someone may look at something and say, “Well, that’s kind of very minimalistic,” or maybe it evokes this.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh. Courtesy of Borderzine
Is that the most interesting interpretation somebody gave to one of your poems?
No. There’s been a lot of interpretations. There’s been quite a lot of people who have written reviews of my work. It’s on the internet. As a writer, that is not my job, to put it in any state of vanities.
I’ll give you an example. I had a professor fall in love with my book Rusted Steel and Bordertown Starts. It came out in 1999. It’s a hardback book all about the border. I love that book. And he fell in love with it. He was a journalist from Chicago. He bought 20 copies of it and sent it to all his friends. My next book that came out, he stopped me in the hall one day and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “That new book of yours, I have no idea what’s going on. I have no idea what you are writing about.”
I stood there kind of shocked. I couldn’t write Rusted Steel and Bordertown Starts again. Those were early desert, border, Juárez/El Paso poems. But the time he had read this next book, I was millions of miles away from that. It’s just like American Skull, some critics have already read it and said it is millions of miles away from anything else I have ever done.
So, that’s my journey. I’m trying to do my best, but I think things will change with still a core of the essence of who I am. I’m not out to please anybody. I’m trying to do the best work I can, but the main person I have to please is myself.
And then if other people can find some worth in it, good for them. But my next book that he could find no worth in, it’s where I was. Then there was a next book and a next book and a next book. Hopefully, that journey will continue till the day I die.
You don’t have a specific way in which you would like your poetry to be perceived?
No, no. That’s not up to me. That’s up for however people perceive it. Because how can I? I had a guy come up with some of these poems, and he said, “Every poem in that book, American Skull, Larry, is like a ghost or a specter.” He said, “It’s so chiseled down.”
And then I wrote my book Skull Highway, and one time a critic said that it was like bones or stones in the desert. Everything had been burned away, and there was just like a pile of ashes, and those ashes were my poems, I guess.
I love the way that you describe your poetry. Even the description of your poetry has a lot of imagination in it.
Yes, yes. I’m so deep into it that all that counts is the continuance. I’m open. I’ve been writing and everything, so I never know where I’m going. I just go.
It’s about the process instead of just thinking.
It’s more of a process. In graduate school we had a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. It changed my life. It’s one of the great Zen philosophical books on writing. I met Natalie Goldberg in Taos years later, and I told her I took all the principles of her book and I used them. Her philosophy is that it’s just about the doing.
The power of meditation is what? Even though meditation is a struggle – or it is still for me – you do it because you are trying to be in the moment. Right? So, when I write and come out of meditation, I’m in the moment. It’s like a painter.
I was very good friends with a painter here, who painted every day for 60 years, named Bill Rakocy. I would go to his art gallery. He had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of paintings. He is one of the great masters of the Southwest. I would almost shake when I would go into his studios because here was a man who painted every day for 60 years: oils, watercolors, charcoals, pencils. When I had money, I would bring money, and I would say, “Dude, I want to buy one of these paintings. Sell them to me.” We did a small book together many years ago. He was a painter, and he painted in the now, in the moment.
If somebody had told me decades ago that I would end up being 62 years old in El Paso, Texas, as a professor, writing every day and publishing 13 books of poetry – I never wanted to be a poet. Never. I never wanted to be a poet. It just came to me. It happened organically. I practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. I found out on some level that I had some aptitude for it. I think part of that possibly comes from being Irish.
In Irish society, for hundreds and hundreds of years, the number one person in all Irish society, above the kings, were the poets. That’s kind of a blunt thing. In some ways it’s almost like a curse because they kicked the poets out, and they told them to go dig a ditch. “F- you and your poetry. What you need to do is manual labor.” There are all these different levels. I never wanted to be one, but I became one.
Do you feel it is necessary to have had a sensational life or to have had sensational life experiences to write creatively, or do you think one can sit in a room, having had a subtle life experience, and be imaginative?
Absolutely. I think both are absolutely right. Yes. There are certainly people who never leave their rooms, be in that one room their whole lives and be incredible writers. For me, it was important to get out there. In some ways it could be, yes, a full life.
Because as a journalist, I certainly have no illusions about how bright I am or how good of a writer I am. None of that enters my consciousness. I think I’m pretty good at paying attention to everything. Pay attention to what’s going on out there, but also pay attention to what’s going on inside you on that other journey.
Like meditation and prayer, you close your eyes, you are going inward, and that’s a whole world to itself, like many worlds you access with your eyes shut. It doesn’t mean you are better than anyone. When I write, I can tap into a full life of memories. But then, another writer can do that again by never even leaving their room. Emily Dickason spent her whole life in her room.
If you have a lot of struggles, you are navigating through something very meaningful.
You are right. But I’ll tell you what, I’ve had struggles, but then one struggles. I’m very fortunate in many ways because people in Mexico have nothing. I used to read stories of people who would get on that train, esta la bestia, the beast, and they would ride the trains and try and go to towns just to get something to eat. I’ve had my struggles, but I haven’t had struggles like that.
My mom came to America because they were poor in Ireland. I’m an immigrant’s son. My story is the story of America as I’m a first-generation American. I’m an immigrant’s son, like many of my students from Mexico are first generation. We’re all immigrants.
You have that connection with them.
Yes. We are all immigrants in America. I am. The Irish came over here because they were dying in Ireland. They were starving to death. In waves, they came on what they called the coffin ships. My ancestors came to America for want of a better life. What did my mom want for me? She had a tough life.
My mom struggled. She is an immigrant. But she loved America, and she wanted things for her children. My mom wanted me to be rich. “I want you to go to college. I want you to be a businessman, and you are going to be rich, rich, rich,” she told me, “like the Kennedys, you will be rich.” I said, “Mom, I’m not going to be a businessman.”
The beautiful thing is before she died, she understood the path I was on, and she was happy for me. I never became rich, rich, rich. I mean, rich in spirit, but I’m not driving around in a Rolls Royce or a Bentley or a brand-new Range Rover. But she was happy that I had found my way.
It’s very sweet that in the end she understood that you wanted to be a poet.
She knew it. Because like I said, once again, in Ireland, it’s so in the blood and so in the people, that when she found I was going in that direction, she didn’t even have to talk about it. She knew it was okay because it’s there, the Irish writer, Irish poet. Even if you are a bad one, there’s room in the society for it, and it’s important.
Teaching is a noble profession. What made you want to become an English professor?
I needed a job. That’s my own thing: I needed to make money, and I’ve always needed to make money. I thought when I was in college, at my community college, Wow, maybe someday I would like to have the opportunity to try and teach at either the high school or college level. I started teaching at UTEP as a teaching assistant, getting my master’s degree, and I liked it. I liked the interaction with the students, and I enjoyed helping them. I have found over the years that hopefully I can help students, but I also find that students help me.
I’ve always engaged with students when I can. They write about their lives, so I learn that way. They write about their struggles. When I grade essays, I remember what it’s like to be young. They share their culture with me, and they share their language with me, the Spanish language, the English language.
Since I like to pay attention in life, I’ve learned a lot from my students. I don’t get super involved in their lives, but there are many students over the decades whom I love because they are genuine, so many of them, and they are trying to improve.
The main thing is estudiante, in español. The biggest student of all is me. I’m the professor, but more so than that, I’m the student because I’m still reading. I’m still writing. I’m still trying to improve my life. I’m still trying to come up in the world as a writer. They are students and I’m a student.
Image caption: Lawrence Welsh reading at UTEP. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
I also think at El Paso Community College we change lives just like I was changed. Professors changed my life at El Camino, my community college. They opened that doorway. I like doing the same, even though I have pretty high standards. I don’t give grades. I actually teach, and I grade students’ essays. I take a lot of time, and I take it very seriously. That’s where I am as a professor.
What’s the best thing that you have learned from your students?
About life. I’ve learned that they struggle, and I remember that I struggled. Some of their struggles are easier than mine, and some are harder than mine. I have learned culture from them. I have learned the language from them. I have learned a lot about life from them. I have learned what it is to be young again because sometimes I forget.
How much do you infuse poetry into your classes?
Not a lot. I teach it if I’m teaching that, but generally I teach a lot of comp classes, so I keep it pretty standard. It’s all poetry in some ways. I never read any of my work. I never have any of it. I’ll turn students on to it. I teach a lot of basic composition classes.
And when I teach literature, we will do the poetry thing. If we do the poetry thing in my lit classes, I certainly can talk about that world, and I certainly can analyze poetry on many, many, many, many, many levels, and not always the most traditional levels. In some ways it’s all poetry. It’s all language.
I’m certainly no scholar of the Bible, but I think of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.” And you are like, “Whoa. What was the word, God or –”
What was before?
Yes, right. In some of my poems, there’s always this longing for touch or going into the darkness and trying to find a stone, a feather, a mesquite plant, a skull, a rosary, a crucifix, all those things, like a lot of iconography of Mexico, like the retablos.
All that stuff is important to me, the santeros, the carvers of the Santos. Much of that stuff from New México is also important to me, like Los Penitentes. Those are, in Mexico, the artwork of the Catholic Church, very important to me.
Another obsession is – the term is like Los Penitentes de la Luz, the penitence of the light, like in Holy Week, the crucifixion and the resurrection, the Dia De Las Cruces, the whipping, the blood, sangria.
And then for me, too, as a man who has struggled a lot, and me going in my own way to faith and hope, that’s another thing. El Paso is a pretty Catholic town and so is México. I am nowhere near the world’s best Catholic, but that stuff has been in my blood since I was a kid.
That’s why I always say Irish and Mexicans get along. I have Irish relatives in Los Angeles who married Mexican Americans. It’s all kind of like everything is in the mix. It’s like a painter.
Is there any writing advice you hear that you dislike, and how would you turn it around?
Yes. The only thing I like to hear about writing is this: A writer writes. That’s it. That’s it. No matter who the writer is, my student or me. When I give advice to students, the main person I’m giving the advice to is myself. The only advice a writer needs is that a writer, in my humble opinion, should write. Hopefully, along the way, they will read, open themselves up to everything, and then find out what works for them in fiction, literature, poetry, essays and journalism.
And then the advice is to do it. You don’t need to go to school to do it. It can help. I’ll give you a story. I was in graduate school at UTEP with a famous fiction writer, Rick DeMarinis, and he liked me. I think he liked my poetry more than my fiction, and he was a fiction teacher. He pulled me aside at a party in El Paso, and he said, “Come here, Larry.” He knew that I was already 34, 35 and that I had already been a journalist.
He said, “I’m going to tell you something tonight, Larry, that I think you already know, or maybe not.” And I said, “What, Rick? What?” He said, “Larry, you know I really can’t teach you anything.” He said, “You are at a place where you know what you are going to have to do.” And I was kind of like, What? He said, “Lock your ass away in a room for decades and you write. That’s what is going to teach you: dedicating your life to writing, because you are at a place right now, or maybe never, where I can’t teach you. You know, you have learned enough. Now it’s going to be up to you to write alone.”
The thing for me is always to see, Do I have what it takes to stay with it in the good times and the bad times, in the 1,200 rejections. That’s it. Writers write.
If there was a single phrase that you would like your students to remember by heart, which one would it be?
I would say, Be good to yourself and continue striving to be the best you can be in this world.
In that, I try and help students with being kind and good to yourself because many of my students don’t always have the highest self-esteem. I want them to be kind to themselves and keep trying to actualize their triumphs. Even if they fail my class, when I talk to students for the first time, I say, “Don’t let anything ever take you out of the game because you need to continue to develop your skills, like I am. Be good to yourself, and don’t let anybody ever stop you. Don’t let anybody ever stop you, including yourself, on whatever journey you are going to self-fulfillment, journey into the light, journey to becoming completely your own self.”
Can you speak to the importance of knowledge in education and intellectualism? Do you think it is falling by the wayside, or is it as strong as ever?
Well, I don’t know a lot about that. I believe that, as I said, I’m a student, first and foremost. When I got very, very serious about learning in college, it never ended. I don’t know about where people are today or anything, but I believe that the road of education and learning and intellectualism is endless.
Once again, it’s not something that I quantify. I have never thought of myself as a very bright person, but, man, I love learning and I love reading and I love soaking everything up. So, I continue as a student and as a student of life, a student of literature, a student of poetry, a student of music, a student of politics, a student of art, a student of history, a student of street culture, a student of punk.
I always tell students, “You will meet professors who know everything. I’m Mr. Welsh, who knows nothing,” in some ways. It’s kind of like an oxymoron because I can help them, and I can impart what I know.
I know you are a family man, a husband and a father. How does your family, especially your children, feel about you being a poet? Do you think that they are following in your footsteps?
I don’t know. My family is really important to me. My wife, Lisa McNiel, is a professor. That means so much to me. Both of my children mean so much. My daughter wrote an essay that got her into UT Austin that was an incredible piece of writing. It was beautiful. After she wrote that and I read it, I was like, It was so heartfelt and so beautiful. I know I’m her father, but I’m also a writer and editor.
And she said, “Daddy, I don’t know if I ever want to be a writer because it takes so much work.” I said, “Megan, I don’t care how much work that took; that was a beautiful essay you wrote.” Good writing does take time.
I think it is in my son’s blood. A few years ago, we found a poem that he had written when he was younger, and it was mature and quite intense, like he was touched by the gods. I don’t know what he is going to be. I don’t know what road he is going to take in life. He is a basketball player. And I think it may be in his blood, and maybe my daughter, too, but it’s going to be up to them. The path of a poet is kind of the path of pain. There’s no money in it.
Somebody told me poetry is as important as dropping a feather into the Grand Canyon. It means nothing. It’s like nothing, but then it is. It’s like nothing and everything at the same time. It’s useless. It doesn’t make money.
So, yes, like any father, I want the best for them. What they do and how they find their way in life, I don’t know. But I love them, and I am a family man and try to be the best that I can. I have written poems about them, a few about my son, and a couple about my wife and daughter. What I want for them is just what I told you I want for them, the best. They are going to have to go through the labyrinth, the man in the maze, the labyrinth with the woman in the maze. We get here, we get stuck, we go this way, we get stuck, we find another opening, we go that way. I guess that’s life, being in the maze.
I’m sure that they hugely appreciate what you do for them.
I’m trying. I’m just basically trying to do what my parents did for me. Many of my students at EPCC will write about things like alcoholism in their families. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why, too, I like El Paso, because I can relate to that world.
They will come to my office and say, “Mr. Welsh, I’ve got this uncle who died of a heroin overdose” or “My dad is drinking too much,” and they want to talk about it. I know that world, so I can sometimes share some hope and strength.
How do you feel when your students talk to you about their struggles? How do you respond to them?
I will always talk to them. It was hard during the pandemic and COVID because of all the online, but when we do face-to-face, many students would always come to my office and feel they can open up to me. If a student opens up to me, I’m going to open up to them. I’ll be honest.
One time a student in Juarez said, “Mr. Welsh, I’m dying from doing too much cocaine, la coca. I’m drinking every night, I’m doing cocaine. I’m partying in Juarez.” I told him what I know. The main thing is you don’t have to die for it. You don’t have to die for it. You can get well. You can turn a corner.
I know that world. I know that world myself, and you don’t have to die for it. I offer words of encouragement and sometimes tell them where rehab centers are and things of hope. We all need hope. We need hope, and we need grace, and I need it, too.
