Help Teo get to Tin House Summer Workshop

"in an evening field endangered we entered its space: impressionable you foster shame as necessity, I was a youth, I was an adult I was learning all the ways in which I

bruise. we dusk every lesson shine tempered light on inflamed skin if you do not allow a push you can never say it was a fight a war, a warring, you never opened a door, never said ‘pass’. Now I Now we hold hands up lay bodies down purse our lips to kiss say: this is what I allow, this is all I allow."

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My name is Mateo Perez Lara. I go by Teo.

I am nonbinary, queer, Latinx. Over the course of my existence, I have been lucky to learn under many amazing writers and mentors despite any obstacles put before me.

I am 30. I have an okay job, I help take care of my grandma. I have 3 cats.

I was lucky enough to be offered a spot in the Tin House Summer Workshop 2024, with Paul Tran, which is huge for me because poets from Bakersfield, California, or from the San Joaquin Valley, don't always get these opportunities.

It's mostly because I've seen my mother and my grandmother struggle to pay bills, to live comfortably, and I don't want to add on to that stress. Since my grandpa passed away in 2017, finances have always been tight, constricting, and necessary to exist in this capitalist Covid landscape.

Especially under genocide, under brutal forced control. We need ways to bring ourselves together, toward the fight, toward the future, toward something meaningful.

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I've been better at saving as I get older, but bills, loans, life get in the way, whether it's fixing a windshield or a tire, or getting my cats better. It's not always easy to save for extra self-care journeys like Tin House. I want to nurture my writing and bring all my knowledge and tools to my family and to my community with workshops and poetry readings.

Some of these things I do are not just for me. I want to create a space for who I love and who needs a space.

I've been 7 months sober. I've been working on myself and how I am to others. I've been going to therapy and really putting myself to the test on healing, growing, and maintaining relationships with people.

Tin House would really be the dream for me to learn and expand my writing. I want to exist in a space where I can share the jagged journey of my healing, my love of horror movies, how I fluctuate thinking about my family, but most importantly how it is to want to live despite everything going on in the world around us.

This is all to say, thank you for listening if you got this far. Thank you for being tender if you understand. Thank you for the grace and the kindness toward community and bringing someone in yours a chance, a light.

I am confident I can come up with half of what the whole residency amounts to.

Which is $2400 with tuition and room/board.

$1600 for tuition

$800 for room/board.

I will be taking the train to Reed College.

I can definitely come up with $600 maybe more, with help from my own work and jobs, plus my grandmother, who I adore and helps me exist. She said she would match me in any capacity.

The rest, I am asking the community to help with, if they can.

The goal is to have it all by July 1st when it is due.

I am humbly asking, sending out queer magic and spells, to help push me toward this chance.

I write toward growth and magic.

I hope you want to share in that with me.

With love,

Thank you!

Do everything with love.

"honey too sweet lightly drizzled on my lip, I’m undeserving of any, I shiver, you remind me, we draw boundaries, we eat here, we wallow there, we embrace here – I mark on my map, draw my lines, stake my wooden figurines, make the circle, I want to be close, but price in that when you're too close it becomes a danger, we need almost, not-quite, I fashion the home, string up the tokens from when we lived here, when we moved there, when someone died, when someone left, when truth was out, then we rearrange, so we don’t become unfocused in the futility and mundanity of this ritual. I still expect you there, you are not there, I still expect to feel a feeling that has disappeared, I’m holding onto quick, dissolving, but deeply penetrating things and I can’t, no matter how much I close the distance, name them all. "

None of us are free until all of us are free.

What is Tin House Summer Workshop?

The Tin House Summer Workshop is a weeklong intensive that consists of curated workshops with limited participants (eight to ten per class), one-on-one meetings with faculty and agents, craft lectures, author conversations, generative exercises, affinity group meetings, and student/faculty readings. There will be plenty of opportunities for mingling, happy hours, and, of course, karaoke.

Participants will be expected to read up to nine other manuscripts and provide response letters to each before arriving on campus.

The Workshop will take place at Reed College, located on 100 acres of rolling lawns, winding lanes, and magnificent old trees in southeast Portland, Oregon, just minutes from downtown and twelve miles from the airport.