Julián’s CaSSaDaGa

THiRD PeRSoN PoeTiC Bio:

Julián Esteban Torres López was born at a young age and lived to tell about it.

Julián has lived in five countries, three continents, is fluent in two languages, and in the past ten years alone has had exactly sixty-eight different roommates of all ages, complexions, ethnicities, sexual and gender orientations, professions, levels of education, cultures, political partialities, religious affiliations, and linguistic abilities. (Though only one recognized at first meeting that he had three front teeth.)

He has shared homes with a house full of San Francisco circus performers and one French photographer who concentrated on taking intricately passionate photos of blue jeans, immigrant poets in search of a home, foosball playing rock climbers, and a brilliant German physicist who danced the Tango like an Argentine and liked to read Harry Potter during his spare time in the hot tub as Cleopatra the hen chased Marc Anthony the rooster in the backyard. The list goes on. The amalgamation of such experiences influenced the multiple cores of his writings.

Along with his academic training – in Philosophy BA, Communication BA, Justice Studies MA, and Political Science/Latin American Studies PhD (candidacy) – his exhausting experience as an unbound yet homeward traveler has led him to express his thoughts and perspectives by means of many literary genres, such as poetry, short and flash fiction, novel, essay, academic articles, university lectures, journalistic columns, and spoken word performances. You may even find his work written on paper napkins left on wobbly café chairs and rusting bar stools or engraved in park benches made of oak.

However, when others try to encapsulate him into one particular genre he just responds with, “Simply put, I’m a storyteller. Yo cuento cuentos.” When pushed to elaborate he often proceeds to quote Wayson Choy, “I’m a writer of a certain kind, and I write for the reader who understands how moments, not plots, compose our lives.”

Living in British Columbia, Canada, he’s currently a columnist for Colombia Reports (Colombia’s main English news source), working on his first novel, and finishing his PhD dissertation at the University of British Columbia Okanagan on the Colombian armed conflict, which he will turn into a book upon completion.

Julián was born at a young age. This is true. We verified with the Colombia authorities. Further, according to his closest friends and family members (wishing to remain nameless), Julián is also vegan, an agnostic atheist, and is painstakingly working on the autobiography of his pseudonym. Julián does not have an imaginary friend but does travel with a ‘stuffed animal’ named Penguino for whom he cares more than he does most humans. Julián has never been pushed off a bridge, has never won a gold medal in any of the seven Summer Olympics he has lived through, and has never, to his knowledge, picked his nose with the fingers of his left hand.

La CaSSaDaGa is Julián’s collection of his work as a writer.

FiRST PeRSoN PoeTiC Bio:

JULIán’S CaSSaDaGa is birth and those steps that have led me astray from this home.  It is Medellín.  It is the Aburrá Valley.  It is my earliest memories and those that have left me a trail of bread crumbs so I don’t forget how to pronounce the double RRs of my suRRname.  It is where I go to remember.  Where I go to forget.

It is my identity – a hybrid cluster of my own experiences.

Friedrich Nietzsche may have said it best when he wrote, in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,” the following:

“I am a wanderer and mountain climber,
he said to his heart,
I do not love the plains,
and it seems I cannot sit still for long.
And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience –
it will be a wandering and a mountain climbing;
in the end one experiences only oneself.”

JULIán’S CaSSaDaGa is where my false childhood memories and true childhood memories play hop-scotch and where the chubby-cheeked neighbourhood bully steals the broken piece of red brick I once used to write the numbers inside the boxes.

It is where you and I shake hands with a glance.  Where you blink, and my grip lingers

According to Bright Eyes, it is where you’re going to find the centre of energy if you just plan ahead, pack the things that you think you’re gonna need, and then just go.  CaSSaDaGa might just be the premonition of a place you’re about to visit.

JULIán’S CaSSaDaGa acts as the essential vortex of videos, audio clips, photography, articles, and creative fiction that express my perspectives on life, love, culture, politics, ethics, current events, and the arts.

JULIán’S CaSSaDaGa is the vault of my fragmented memories.  Memories that walk with a limp and grow hungry and thin like an Autumn trail.  Where the brittle-bones of my cursive thoughts run through the tall grass of my pseudonym’s poetry in a jealous rage.

In the final analysis, my CaSSaDaGa is a co-constructional-relational realty within that makes shadow puppets with my confusion.  It wanders through cracks of voices while braiding the hair extensions of my very own experiences.  Is is a re-introduction – a renaissance of sorts – where arthritic fingers flip through old photo albums.

JULIán’S CaSSaDaGa is an island, floating on the pond of night, soaking its feet at the dock’s end.

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Photography by Daniela De Los Reyes-Lopez Myerston