Richie David Marrufo and the Tumblewords Project–writing and reading and music and reading and publishing and reading

Last winter, after moping to everyone I knew that I hadn’t written anything all year worth typing up, I found a small notebook under a stack of old bills and flipped through the pages.  It held the almost illegible scrawl of a poem I had written last year in April in a Tumblewords Project workshop led by Richie David Marrufo, the poet, musician, and professor who is an integral player in the spoken word, music, and literary performance culture of these borderlands.  Richie’s workshop title captures the individual threads that come together to create the skein of his interests: Bebop Impressionism: Breathing Between the Lines.

I took this from the event description Tumblewords Project posted for the April 2019 workshop:

“…Marrufo is a native El Pasoan and teaches English at El Paso Community College. He is the current Project Director of The Barbed Wire Open Mic Series…, and a writer for the film/production studio Power at the Pass. Richie has traveled and competed in the Southwest United States as a member of El Paso’s most recent slam poetry team and has conducted various writing workshops within the city to people of all ages. He is a huge advocate for the voice of the community and the support of local artistic endeavors…, [f]rom playing music on street corners and mountaintops to speaking in front of classrooms….”

Marrufo’s workshops,  like the performance events he makes happen,  create a safe space for the fun of writing and reading poetry. Here is a poem I wrote in that workshop he led last year, with thanks to Richie and the publisher of VEXT Magazine, Lori Gómez, for the creation of another publication credit.  Maybe you’ll hear it at the August 29th Twenty-fifth anniversary reading for the Tumblewords Project. Y’all come.

“Crystal spheres blown through emptiness” by Donna Snyder