Local Author Parlays Hardscrabble Childhood into Arresting First Memoir, Earns PNW Book Award

By Karen W. Carlin

Local Gorge resident Tina Ontiveros, one-time buyer at Klindt’s Bookstore in The Dalles, author and teacher, recently had her first memoir rough house, published by Oregon State University Press, to an inspiring reception. I had an opportunity to ‘Zoom chat’ with her recently about her haunting yet moving memoir.

Tina Ontiveros, long-time resident of the Gorge, daughter, wife, mother, sister, author, writing teacher and advocate for the disenfranchised living in poverty—she wears many hats. However, the one adjective she does not ascribe to herself is ‘victim.’ And from the outside looking into her life, most people reading her first memoir would tell her unequivocally that she has every right to feel like one.

Ontiveros’s freshman memoir is a tale of abject poverty, abuse, addiction and the generational molestation and degradation of the women in the family; all punctuated by a nomadic upbringing that saw her and her brother Jesse moving from one working-class timber town to another in Oregon and Washington. It was a life no child should ever have to endure, and yet it is a story as old as time.

Author Tina Ontinveros

At the core of her tale is her father Loyd and peripherally, her mother, who struggled to raise three children ‘on the poor side of town.’ Loyd was a true dichotomy; doting, devoted father, charming and fun-loving when not beset by the addiction to drugs and alcohol that would torment him through the end of his life; mercurial, violent and indefensibly cruel when he was. Ontiveros’s mother often held down two or more jobs just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Often absent from the home due to her work schedule, the children were routinely required to fend for themselves.

“There were benefits to our way of life. We had freedom to create educational mischief. We were pretty good at fixing broken stuff and maintaining our own bikes. We could get around town on our own and break into the house when we locked ourselves out…we mostly stayed in line. We gave each other wounds; we patched each other up.” 

Pain—it either breaks us, or it provides a mechanism by which we cleanse ourselves of the past. And utilize the mechanism is exactly what Ontiveros did.

The impetus behind her decision to write this memoir isn’t easy for her to define. 

“I think I’ve been writing it my whole life. I think that before I physically started writing it, it was writing me,”she said. 

She went on to explain that a lot of people who ‘grow up poor’ spend considerable time trying to assimilate into the middle class. “I spent most of my young adulthood trying to run away from that, and in that sense, I think I was letting it write me.”

Having grown up not always feeling ‘welcome in certain academic circles’ she recognized that one of the ways out of poverty was education, and for her that meant Columbia Gorge Community College. She had the idea early on that she one day wanted to teach at CGCC and specifically in that capacity reach out to and impact students who faced the types of barriers she had. She obtained her bachelor’s degree and was encouraged by several teachers to go for her Masters.

“This was really hard because my entire college education was obtained while I was raising my kids and working,” Ontiveros said. “I had one teacher specifically who told me I needed to get an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Writing. Who could afford to get an MFA? Those are for people who are going to publish books. The poor person in me was like ‘that’s silly.’ My mom always told me, if I didn’t want to be poor, I needed to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she said laughing. “Bad enough that I am majoring in English!” 

She realized if she could get into the MFA program, there were a lot of very good, intense low-residency programs that would allow her to work and study around her life. She decided to forge ahead, but discovered one of the requisites was that she had to write a book. 

A second important factor for Ontiveros’s decision to pen her memoir was her younger sister, who has been unable to make it across the federal poverty line. She struggles much in the same way Ontiveros and her brother did in terms of growing up poor. Ontiveros recognized in her sister’s young daughters the same pattern of compensation by the children for an absentee parent, an absence once again necessitated by the reality of a mother struggling to feed her children. She saw the weight of the burden her oldest niece carried on her shoulders as she went to school that most of the other kids did not bear.

“It really made me think about the position of privilege I was in compared to my sister; living in comfort, being educated and not being poor anymore gave me the freedom to talk about that life and that experience,” she explained. 

Her hope was to show her nieces and her students at CGCC—one-third of whom she notes are in a similar position—that if they can set down the shame earlier than she did, the road ahead becomes easier. “I’ll be honest with you,” Ontiveros said emphatically. “A big part of realizing I didn’t need to be ashamed came from the realization the shame didn’t come from my family. It came from the outside world and the way the outside world treats poor people.”

Many in Ontiveros’s ‘orbit’ growing up in The Dalles and then later when she was an adult, have been friends with or worked with her mother, her or both of them for many years. Small communities, by the very nature of their existence, do not lend themselves to privacy. Most people in their circle were aware on some level that the marital situation for her mother and Loyd as well as her childhood and that of her siblings had been far from easy. However, the extent of those struggles came as a shock to most as Ontiveros’s unwrapped their reality. 

“I was writing the book no matter what,” she said. She was keenly aware of the initial trepidation her mother was feeling about the book being published. Ontiveros had formed many literary relationships in Oregon during and after her college days and in the course of forming those relationships, she shared the germ of the book with many, so there was an expectation of the book eventually being published. At one point, Ontiveros told her mother they had to make a decision about whether to move forward or not. It was never worth it for her to publish anything that would be hurtful to anyone. 

She gave a copy of the book to her mother and her brother and asked them to read it. Her mother read it twice and told her ‘It’s hard, but I love it so much. It’s beautiful. I think that it needs to be in the world.’ Ontiveros noted that the hardest thing for her mother was that she does not like to bring attention to herself. 

“She didn’t think we noticed as much as we did,” she explained. “She thought she had shielded us from a lot of those things. It was hard for her to realize she hadn’t.” Ultimately, it was freeing in a way for her mother, as she realized there was much to be proud of and nothing to feel shame for. It also enabled her to retain a sense of justification for the decisions she was forced to make, such as staying in or chronically returning to the domestic violence and abuse that was the mainstay of her marriage. Ontiveros’s dad could ‘be very loveable,’ and it was easy for her to see why her mother had such a difficult time leaving him. For Ontiveros, the memoir, while proving catharsis, did not evoke emotional turmoil within her.

“It was good work for me,” she said. “I really tried hard to use the tools of fiction and of poetry to make it a beautiful thing, not just the telling of a life. It’s so crafted…most of it is not hugely emotional for me anymore. I have enough distance from it.”

In spite of the delicate balancing act Ontiveros and her brother endured during their childhood, she recognized that life with Loyd and all the schizophrenic reality that came along with it, afforded her some insight into the woman she evolved into.

“I would be dishonest if I didn’t say that Loyd, in the way that he loved and took care of us, and in the moment he loved and took care of us, in many ways, he gave me the tools to survive him,” she noted.  “I really believe that he, for all his faults, his careful attention and how he loved us without condition… he instilled in my brother and me a sense of worth that served us when it came to standing up to him and surviving him, so I have to give him that credit,’ she finished.

Ontiveros views her mother as her hero.

“She’s the hero of that book and she’s the hero of more books,” she said. “I’ve been working on a book about the same years only in The Dalles with my mom. I think that one would be a lot harder for her because a lot of those people are still in our lives,” she pointed out. “Nobody’s perfect, and we all make mistakes, and they have greater consequences when you don’t have money or social capital. So, when my mom would stumble, we suffered the consequences, and she still feels some shame for that, even though she was an excellent, amazing single mom. She’s the hero of that book; she’s my hero, and she’s still doing hero’s work today.”

Ontiveros and her husband Ronnie have been married for 22 years, or, as she joked, ‘forever!’ Ronnie, with whom she was friends in high school, came with a baby boy, Sol. According to Ontiveros, Sol was also instrumental in helping to change the trajectory of her life. “When Ronnie and I started dating, I think I still had quite a bit of Loyd’s volatility at the time. And there were definitely times I wanted to bolt. But as soon as I bonded to that child, it was just so inevitable. The drive to take care of him and the drive to take care of both of our kids, (the couple also have a daughter, Lillian) was definitely the primary drive of my life while they were growing up.”

Writing and publishing her book has impacted Ontiveros in a number of ways. 

“Personally, I would say that publishing the book opened up new ways of communicating between me and my mom and me and my brother. It’s been really good for us. Professionally, it’s been… a process of discovery. I thought at first, oh, people who have crappy childhoods write memoirs!” she jokingly stated. A devotee of literary fiction for most of her reading life, she began to explore the stories of other writers to establish a baseline of sorts.

“I read somewhere between 45 and 60 memoirs while I was writing the book. I took a very small stack of the ones I loved. I thought, what components do I like about these books? I had curiosity about the motivations of other people, which I think we forget to do a lot of the time. I think a lot of the polarization we see right now in our country is because we forget to think about the motivation of other people. Why they do what they do, and what have they been ‘hurt’ into?”

That curiosity and the underlying motivations of others led Ontiveros to question the ways society forces people to assimilate into certain classes.

“People think America is without caste,” she noted. “Our society is so stratified, and there are markers that show what class you’re in. And we all know that, and we all abide by them, and we all perpetuate them,” she said. 

From Ontiveros perspective, the middle and upper classes do not suffer the same public shaming that those living in poverty do when they make the same bad choices. 

“Yes, Loyd was doing bad things. Yes, every adult in my upbringing could be blamed for making a bad choice here or there. Now that I’m comfortably in the middle class, and I’ve raised children here, I see people who are drug addicts here; I see people beat their wives here; I see people who are extremely neglectful of their children. But they don’t suffer the same consequences because they have social capital and they have money,” said Ontiveros. 

Citing Bryan Stevenson, author of the memoir Just Mercy, she paraphrases a section of the book in which the author says ‘It’s not that people who are wealthier don’t do bad things that poor people do. It’s just that if you do them when you are poor, you become known as the worst thing you’ve ever done. Coming to that realization has really changed my professional life especially as a teacher.”

Drawing by Alexis Montavon

Not surprisingly then, this theme of looking at those living in poverty differently than the way society customarily dictates we do, has become something of a battle cry for Ontiveros, particularly with children and young adults. Writing the book helped her to reach that mindset. She recounted being made to ‘feel like crap all the time’ by people as a child. “I get it — there are some frustrating things about people’s behavior sometimes, but what is the value in that?” she asked. “When you tell a child her parents are trash, you’re telling that child that she is trash. We don’t know what people are carrying, and we make a lot of snap judgements. As a writer, I want to do little else than look at this whole issue of how we treat poor people and how those of us outside the situation are making it worse on the children. It’s something I hope people will think about.”

Ontiveros’s takeaway for her readers is not what most people might expect; it almost seems imperative for many authors who recall a childhood filled with trauma in a memoir to delineate their catharsis with common themes such as healing, forgiveness, letting go and resilience. And yes, all of those descriptors apply to Ontiveros’s experience. But her desire for her readers is that they take an even more intimate look into their own lives to learn to forgive themselves. She received an e-mail recently (her favorite) from a woman who tells Ontiveros that the memoir ‘gave her permission to love those broken parents, but even more, it gave her rest from hating the broken parts of herself.’ That idea is exactly what Ontiveros is trying to convey. Children raised in trauma tend to grow up believing that because ‘I come from all of this dark and terrible stuff, then there is something wrong with me too,’ she explained. “That e-mail really embodies what I hope people will take away from it (the memoir).”

Ontiveros, now a teacher of writing at CGCC, is working on her second memoir and is busier than ever. Her memoir rough house can be a rough read. As a child, when you have a parent or other adult in your life who sends mixed messages of love, support, adoration and care interspersed with abuse, neglect, self-imposed poverty and routine cruelty, all fueled by inexorable demons, whether they be drugs, alcohol or mental illness, the odds are more often than not stacked against them having any kind of functioning future.

Ontiveros and her brother, thanks to the loving perseverance of their mother and other adult mentors, were able to re-define their lives and give to their children what they themselves were unable to have growing up.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive Loyd for everything,” she stated. “I think that life is never black or white. Life is always somewhere in the gray area. I think that I can love him and still have to figure out how I feel about some of that. I want all men to be accountable for that kind of behavior. I don’t want to be seen in any way as justifying Loyd’s behavior. But as an individual, the only thing I can do is choose how I react.”

Loyd had a saying, one of Ontiveros’s favorites: ‘Ain’t nothin’ for it but time sweetheart’, which he frequently repeated to them.

“It’s like poetry. I think there is beauty and value in that. That was the number one thing he taught me over and over again, is that sometimes you just have to wait it out. He always believed in starting over and that this time, he might actually make it,” she recalled. In spite of all of his faults, addictions and internal demons, Ontiveros knows each time he ‘started over’ he was doing it for his children.

rough house was one of 6 books (out of over 400 nominees!) to receive a Pacific Northwest Book Award- there is a live zoom award celebration on Feb 10 that is free and Ms. Ontiveros will be there. People can register here

Ontiveros’s memoir can be found at Klindt’s Bookstore in The Dalles, Waucoma Bookstore in Hood River or you can order from the many independent bookstores listed on her website at: https://www.tinaontiveros.com