Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Guillermo Santos. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Guillermo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Getting to reflect on not only my father’s death, but the larger cultural circumstances of my youth and the discrepancies between my peers and I, in a large well renown news publication almost exclusively read by those peer’s parents was such a profound delight. Having the proper means to really reflect on my father and those childhood memories in a largescale way and be able to retell the stories and observations I’d been parroting to anyone who’d listen to for years to the largest scale audience of my career at that point felt like the most perfect full circle moment.
When a child is forced to preserver through a horrible childhood, they are told (or at least I was) that’d be good fodder for their memoirs one day. It felt like the greatest gift I could have ever given that poor kid I once was. Especially since it helped me see that he is who I still am.
Guillermo, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
James Baldwin once said that all he wanted was to be a good writer and a honest man. and he was one of the greatest writers to ever live. That mentality has been a guiding light for me since long before I heard it. As much as I want to hone my craft and highlight my dedication to and for my work, I also want to be a honest man. So I want my work to be filled with that honesty and truth as well. The best work to me is that which not only comments on the world around it, to show how it may improve, but also shows some of that world’s beauty that you may have never truly acknowledged without having engaged with it. I’ve been writing my whole life, penning scripts and novels as soon as I knew how to pick up a pencil, and I like to believe this is what I have always tried to accomplish.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The community I’ve been able to foster and create around me because of my work. From every discipline! Musicians, filmmakers, painters. What a blessing it is to be surrounded by so many truly caring, lovely, and beautiful souls just for having expressed myself. Outside of writing my own work I also do a lot to put on events to showcase others, and watching those grow over the years and seeing the people it attracts is a profound delight every single time.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I have always been forced to prove that my existence is not only worthwhile, but important. The constant and consistent oppression I’ve faced throughout my life regarding my race, my class, and my physical abilities are not only something I highlight in my work, but are sadly such a way of life for me that to say they solely influence my writing would be a profound understatement. Being cast aside due to my heritage or being poor or disabled is something I had to take on the chin a lot as a child, and yet I never let suppress me the way people intended. I continued to write. I continued to live. I don’t want to say that all made me work harder since that can imply there was a positive to that kind of treatment I’ve endured. I had to always explain why this wasn’t fair. I always had to listen to the arguments about why I was less than with open ears as to not give them more reason to hate me. I always had to be who I was and still am in spite of their attacks. Creating art was a respite from that. And also a perfect way to express everything I’d ever wanted to say. So no matter what happened in my life, I never put down the pen.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://guillermoasantos.com
- Instagram: @guillermoasantos
