SOURCE: “The Childhood Worries, Or Why I Became a Writer,” in The Iowa Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1995, pp. 105-15.

In the following essay, Soto reminisces about childhood events later utilized in his verse.

As a boy growing up in Fresno I knew that disease lurked just beneath the skin, that it was possible to wake in the morning unable to move your legs or arms or even your head, that stone on a pillow. Your eyeballs might still swim in their own liquids as they searched the ceiling, or beyond, toward heaven and whatever savage god did this to you. Frail and whimpering, you could lie in your rickety bed. You could hear the siren blast at the Sun-Maid Raisin plant, and answer that blast with your own chirp-like cry. But that was it for you, a boy now reduced to the dull activity of blinking. In the...