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What is the best way of making money? HELIUM ONLINE MAGAZINE

Nov 12, 2008

12 November What is the best way of making money? HELIUM ONLINE MAGAZINE by David Gittlin Chaz Mena is a man of passion. Whether it is creating roles for the stage and screen or spending time with family and friends, […]

12 November

What is the best way of making money? HELIUM ONLINE MAGAZINE

by David Gittlin

Chaz Mena is a man of passion. Whether it is creating roles for the stage and screen or spending time with family and friends, there is nothing this forty-one year old, Cuban-American actor does half way.

Chaz was born and raised in Miami, Florida where his earliest memories included scenes of his parents and grandparents telling each other stories of daily life in their long lost homeland of Cuba. Today, the population of South Florida is predominantly Spanish speaking. A large segment of the Hispanic population is Cuban-American. This is the exact opposite of the situation in the early Sixties. At the time, the first waves of Cuban exiles were literally lost in America. Chaz remembers “coming alive” when listening to the colorful stories his family members acted out on the front porch of their two story home in “Little Havana.” In hindsight, Mena realizes that telling these stories in a theatrical style enabled his family members to reconnect with their history and culture. These childhood experiences and an innate drive to tell a story that creates a shared experience have made Chaz Mena the man he is today.

After completing an MFA in Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, Mena arrived back in Miami with eighty thousand dollars in debts from his undergraduate and graduate studies. Even worse, he didn’t have a single lead or personal contact that might lead to gainful employment. It took a full week of sleeping in bed and the encouragement of wife Ileana before Mena was able to face the situation. He had been brought up to be a man of action rather than words. This led him to bravely pursue his childhood dream of becoming an actor without worrying about the consequences. Now, the first of many gut-wrenching reality checks Chaz Mena would have to learn to deal with waited unannounced on his doorstep.

By working odd jobs, Mena scraped together a nest egg of three thousand dollars. He set sail for New York City to establish himself as a legitimate, working actor. Chaz leased an apartment and began searching for an agent and acting roles. A few months later, Mena was penniless. All he had to show for his earnest efforts was a case of walking pneumonia. Then, serendipity or something akin to Divine Intervention changed Mena’s fortunes. While auditioning for a stage role, Chaz met the manager of the Spanish Repertoire Theater. The manager, whose name was Gilberto, recognized Mena’s family name. It turned out Gilberto had gone to college with Chaz’s father. He liked the father and enjoyed having his son, who bore a striking resemblance to Gilberto’s old college mate, around. “It made him feel young again,” Mena explains. So Chaz became a regular member of the theater company, which gave him the opportunity to play as many as six roles at a time in classical and contemporary Spanish speaking plays written by Spanish playwrights. The Spanish Repertoire Theater was the vehicle that launched Mena’s career. He began landing roles on TV and in Independent films. Mena was now living his dream as a respected and well-reviewed New York actor. Yet something was still missing.

Mena says he felt like “a fisherman constantly casting his line for roles with no real anchor. ” It isn’t hard to understand this statement since most actors live from role to role in their working life. One night, as Chaz was lamenting about the situation to his best friend Juan Carlos, something amazing happened. Instead of commiserating with Mena, Juan Carlos came up with an inspired idea. He knew Chaz had been, from early boyhood, a fan and avid reader of the work of Jose Marti, a 19th century Cuban Poet, Humanist, and Revolutionary. Juan Carlos suggested that Chaz write a one man play about Marti and act the role of the man whose ideas were instrumental in helping Cuba win independence from Spanish colonization. Chaz’s response to his friend’s idea might have been, “Are you kidding?” if not for the fact that Juan Carlos was a member of the Board of Directors of the Florida Humanities Council. All Chaz needed was his resume, some head shots, and of course, the play, Juan Carlos explained. He chose to ignore the fact that Chaz had never written anything for the stage or screen before in his life. Nevertheless, the next morning, Mena woke up with the first sentence of the play in his head: “Jose is still with us.”

Nowadays, between stage and screen roles, Mena travels to colleges and universities to enact the one man show with the sponsorship of the Florida Humanities council. As part of the presentation, audience members can ask questions and hear a carefully researched answer from the actor who has brought a great historical figure and his ideas to life. Getting into character, Mena expresses a “Martiano” idea: “That which is beautiful is moral. That which is moral is beautiful.

By Chaz Mena 21 May, 2021
Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence," Oil on Canvas, 12' X 18'
By Chaz Mena 15 Mar, 2021
Interviewed by Chaz Mena 15 March, 2021 Celia, you've been a poet for a while, published in many literary journals around the country. You're a mother of two beautiful little girls, the editor of Prospectus: A Literary Offering. You’re keeping house with your husband, Rafael Montes , a renowned professor at St. Thomas University. HOW DO YOU DO IT? I don’t! I haven’t done the laundry in over a month! It seems like I do because I’m very good at assessing and prioritizing. I figure out what the most important thing that needs to get done now is, and I do it until it’s done. The bad part of that attitude is that I let things that are not priority no. 1 fall away, like the laundry, for example. But often it’s more serious things, like my writing and my constant battle with mommy guilt. But I’m a workaholic. It’s what I’m best at. Is Multiverses your first book-length collection? How did Finishing Line Press come across your manuscript? Was yours an unsolicited submission, or had they contacted you? Tell us. Yes, I had two chapbooks before Multiverses , my first full-length collection. I was looking for places to send it to when I came across the fact that Finishing Line was now publishing full-length collections. That was not the case when The Stones came out. Of course I sent it to them, and they accepted it right away. The genesis of Multiverses is clear to your reader. Would you feel comfortable describing to us that moment when you decided - if it was a conscious choice at all! - to have it become book-length? Were you planning an arc or a structure from the beginning? I knew I had a lot to say, and that it had a narrative arc, but I wasn’t thinking about length as I wrote. I wrote until I finished saying what I wanted to say, and then I looked at the page count and realized I had gone beyond chapbook length. At that point I was surprised because it’s very hard for me to write things that go well together, which is what you look for when you’re trying to write a full-length collection. My writing is all over the place, so it’s hard for me to publish more than individual poems in journals. I'm struck by the many epic conventions implemented: beginning in the middle, a tribute to ancestors, a type of arming for battle as you and Rafael prepare for the infant's arrival, the inciting loss as the gods turned their backs to you, the subsequent katabasis (descent into the Underworld) wherein long-passed relatives file in, rehearsing family memories helping you in your trials, etc. Think of it as a mini-epic. The events were epic to me, and I wrote them so. I still don’t believe it’s possible to capture in words the loss of a child. The gut-wrenching, universe-shaking, time-bending nature of seeing such a tiny, innocent creature suffer so much only to die in such a horrific way as my son did. It can’t be spoken of, only remembered. That’s the epicenter of the book, and from there sprout other losses and memories so that it seems like there’s a sort of temporal journey taking place. The past is haunted by the present—the glossy photographs and memories of parents and grandparents when they were young and full of vigor that you know now went nowhere. Our parents’ immigrant generation was epic. I still remember when they used to talk about getting back to their Ithaca, Cuba. They never made it. What was to be a temporary home became their last resting place. If there is no pathos in that, I don’t know where there is. Thinking about it makes me cringe. When I lost my son, I became unhinged. I had to remake someone new from scratch. The materials I had at hand were memory and desire. The memories grounded me while the desire to erase that one event in my life and make everything okay again sent me flying apart. Multiverses comprises pieces that don’t fit. They are shards of a broken mirror that can’t be glued back together no matter how hard you try. Pieces are lost, shattered irretrievably . From there comes the sense of an epic quest at hand, a quest to rebuild my psyche, perhaps. But it’s a failed quest that’s resolved only in fantasy. Let's talk about the verse. The meter is dactyl in the beginning, fitting for a lament, as it begins with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed: a sudden lashing out, followed by a limping recovery. The narrator's voice is tripped up as if wounded, hobbling. It's very evocative and draws great sympathy from your reader. Later, the voice changes and more disparate tones (meters) play out. You also change lengths - even using alexandrines! Was this planned? Yes and no. I was very interested in preserving the breath of the words, of writing as if I were speaking directly. When I noticed there was a certain pattern or the possibility for a certain pattern—the dactyl and the alexandrine, as you point out, the trochee, too—I chose to follow that pattern as long as it didn’t result in violating my idea of the breath. I didn’t feel that this subject fit with too much structure; the whole point of the book is that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” That doesn’t jive well with neat little patterns, so I let anarchy reign when it should. There is one sonnet, but it’s a nonce sonnet. The word and/or concept of "illusion" in English and its translation into Spanish crop up. Illusion connotes a mirage or a quixotic striving for something not there, misinterpreted. But in Spanish, ' ilusión’ evokes hoping for a hidden desire, cherished and kept secret - a furtive wish for something beyond your means, perhaps. Is this a thread worth examining in this work? Definitely. In the English sense, illusion has somewhat of a negative connotation, a foolish belief that often occludes the truth. In that sense, all the narratives that take place in parallel universes, with the last poem especially, are illusions, frustrations of the mind that cannot accept the truth. You and a few other readers have mentioned that I give equal weight to the parallel universes as I do to the one we really inhabit. I meant to do that. I wanted the stories of the parallel universes to seem just as truthful as the truth. It was very satisfying emotionally, which is where the Spanish notion of ilusión comes in. I had ilusiones for my family that were broken. In the Spanish sense, there are a lot more pathos involved. I tried not to give in to that pathos (though I’m sure I failed a couple of times) because it would break the illusion in the English sense. The emotional charge of the real narrative would set it apart from the parallel narratives, and I did not want this to be a memoir plus fantasies (though I have used that word to describe the parallel narratives). I wanted to give credence to the multiverse theory by keeping the reader in a constant state of flux. OK, 'multiverses': one of the most satisfying aspects of this work is how you play out its conceit of alternate existence (s) with such detail. You give integrity and specificity to every life played out in alternate universes. Nothing is derivative, and all possibilities are legitimate. May you speak to that? This question is connected to your previous one. Had I made any of the parallel narratives anything less than hyper-realistic, the project would have fallen apart. It would have become a regular narrative, musing on different fantastical possibilities. So I tried very hard to keep to that notion that a butterfly flaps its wings halfway around the world and it can change everything. I think I achieved this mostly in the sequence of poems after they discharge my father from the hospital “healthy.” I have often berated myself for not having reacted to that situation differently—to have demanded a diagnosis for his collapse, to have been able to take him to a cardiologist or even to a witch doctor if necessary instead of having waited a month to watch him die. Could his death have been avoided by calling the social worker at the hospital and demanding he not be discharged so abruptly? By a phone call? I allowed myself to explore these possibilities in poems that are near identical, yet wholly different. The only poem in which I let the curtain part to reveal the wizard is the last poem which is so obviously a fantasy of closure impossible to achieve in the actual memoir. You've begun reading parts of the poem to audiences (online, for now); what has been the response so far? Mixed. Some people have commented that the poems moved them. My favorite comment I have received is from a woman who said she felt “met.” She is a caretaker and could relate to the poems where my father loses his mind. No one has accused me of being aloof, but the implication of some comments (such as “you are very brave to be able to write about these things so unflinchingly”) is that I perhaps don’t feel the weight of the emotions that’s because of the events I narrate. I think it might be difficult for some readers to realize the almost clinical detachment I had to create in order to write about this. I wanted the truth to be spoken, recorded, not glossed over in any way. To think of it cinematically, I wanted the camera to pan in and focus on the hardest events. Why I wanted that is difficult to explain. I think it has something to do with the way we grieve in this culture, how we are expected to show our strength by moving past disaster as quickly as possible. Like the old Nike slogan, “Acknowledge, move on.” That can be very helpful in minor situations, but I think catastrophic events are more suited to the mourning we used to do—covering mirrors, stopping clocks, wearing black for a full year. It was an acknowledgement that something horrible had happened. In Multiverses I don’t hesitate in including even the most gruesome details, because they happened, and I wanted them to be acknowledged. The narrator is so Miamian - Cuban. You bring in place names and ethnic food, contextualizing the poem so specifically. How did that help you tell this story (ies)? Multiverses was the first time I didn’t write with a white American audience in mind. I was writing these poems for myself, so I didn’t feel the need to explain baffling details such as my parents living with us, or to smatter the poems with Spanish words and then translate them. I did that only once, I think, when I called my father ‘un vividor’ and I couldn’t find the right word in English to express the same idea. Otherwise, I just wrote in English words that were spoken in Spanish. When my father, for example, confuses the words plane and bird, he is confusing avión and pájaro. But what would have been the point of emphasizing that? I wasn’t writing about being Cuban, I was writing about being human. So the references of my life just worked themselves into the book. I felt the Cuban influence more strongly when writing about my granduncle Arturito, who to the day he died loved tangos and reminisced about being young, which meant being in Cuba. Incorporating those details helped me pin him down as an individual, and not just some generic grandfather figure. What's next Celia, what are you working on between making meals, going through scores of submissions for Prospectus , and being interviewed? Has quarantining hindered or helped your writing? I hate to say it, but the pandemic has really helped my writing! I wrote the entirety of Multiverses at the beginning of the pandemic. I also started sending some older poems out again, and so far have found eight of them new homes. Now what I’m doing is assessing. I took a long hiatus from writing (four years) while I was teaching high school, so I’m reacquainting myself with my work and trying to see what’s there that has potential. I have a bunch of really good pop-culture poems, but that has so been done already (and by better poets than I) that I don’t know whether pursuing that theme is worth the time. I think I might just want to write all new poems, like I did with Multiverses . It was very liberating, not having to write to a “theme.” The problem is running Prospectus , which is time-consuming. I might just have to concentrate on being an editor for a little while. PREORDER SHIPS MAY 7, 2021 Multiverses by Celia Lisset Alvarez $19.99, Full-length, paper RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY Celia Lisset Alvarez , born in Spain to Cuban parents fleeing Fidel Castro’s regime, immigrated to Miami in 1974, where she has been living since. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, and proceeded to publish two chapbooks of poetry, Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006) and The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Multiverses (Finishing Line Press, 2021) is her first full-length collection. She is currently the editor of Prospectus: A Literary Offering , and lives with her husband Rafael, daughters Lucy and Sara, and her mother, Sonia.
By Chaz Mena 30 Mar, 2020
All that made me split hairs in argument in debates over which end of the egg should be cracked, are muted by days which run out of purpose, blanketed over by a mimed virus. A dumb show. 'Scrambled or fried?' to my daughter who plays with a doll that has an eye missing. Another is armless for which we compensate. We hug her over and over. We join hands behind each other’s backs and keep at bay the dusk of reason and the dawn's caprice. I know that we have been here before, plagued by suspicion held close to our bosoms, cards kept close to our wheezing chests, a two-card draw where bets are sheared and yawned. We are at a littoral standstill, bereft of people whom would wade in slow moving tides - the marsh behind, the dunes' rise. ‘Taking your shawl?’ I ask my wife and she submits for once, itself an event. Whips it over her shoulders, evoked Iberian mothers who at Finisterre looked out at anarchy, an unkind ocean and waited for their lost men, though foretold of their deaths. Augured. Sure. We pack lunches and eat on marmalade porches, pour olive oil over salted bread. We eat in silence. We keep to ourselves in temps de peste , a virus which sends word ahead but comes and waits on the landing. We hide inside and not answer the door. Seclude. Have I forgot our deca millennium-old marches? Exoduses up a levant that skirted untread beaches sylvan sands where predecessors drew in deep breaths, filled their neolithic lungs with trekked salt spray our short-lived friends risked all as if called forward, as if summoned up from richer game and recorded sandprints that veered into being 'forever-ago.' I'll listen to them. They will call me and I'll answer.
By Chaz Mena 02 Dec, 2019
Tartarus Press has printed a limited edition of Robert Aickman‘s complete works in ten volumes. I have been reading this author–known as “Britain’s best-kept secret” in short story literature–for close to a month. His prose is among the best that […]
By Chaz Mena 10 Oct, 2019
…an impulse after all these years.
By Chaz Mena 09 Sep, 2019
El cannabis medicinal y las vivencias en Puerto Rico luego de los estragos del huracán María en 2017, sirvieron de base para la nueva película del director boricua Bruno Irizarry, titulada Yerba Buena y protagonizada por Karla Monroig. El filme, […]
By Chaz Mena 18 Aug, 2019
Diccionario Del Pensamiento Martiano by Ramiro Gallaraga, (Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 2002). Out of Print, alas. Galarraga’s seminal work (in Spanish) is an indispensable reference for all Martí readers and the result of thousands of hours of painstaking work, combing through […]
By Chaz Mena 12 Jul, 2019
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN: In this bonus episode there’s a chance to hear Franklin D Roosevelt’s speech after Pearl Harbour as performed by American actor Chaz Mena. Legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow and World at War narrator Laurence Olivier also get […]
By Chaz Mena 12 Jul, 2019
On a bicycle—and they rarely lie—down Martin Drove End it seemed as if the Wiltshire Hills winked as I rode past. Cradled w/in grassland waves the lambs bleated me into Blake’s epigraph: “Dost thou know who made thee …?” etc. […]
By Chaz Mena 29 Apr, 2019
A drawer you left open invited dead parents to visit demanding that you tidy up. Or it may be a promise unfulfilled or maybe the clue to a crime, or a prompt to mend your ways and reform. Suddenly, you […]
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