Guillermo Bowie - Issue 36

Guillermo Bowie is a Portland, Oregon based writer. In 2025 he was published in Maryland Literary Review, Maryland’s Academy Of The Heart And Mind, New Brunswick, Canada’s Version 9, Australia’s The Font: A Literary Journal For Language Teachers, United Kingdom’s The Unseen Threads: Let’s Bind Them Together, Anemone, forthcoming in New Brunswick, Canada’s Nashwaak Review, Germany’s Sein und Werden, India’s INNSAEI Journal…

He has a B.A. from Lewis and Clark College, studied Spanish completing a M.A. at Columbia University, a second M.A. in Spanish from New York University, studied doctoral Spanish at Harvard University and did ½ of a Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Oregon. Guillermo Bowie is also a Chilean trained poet as he began writing under the direction of Chilean poet Enrique A. Giordano during his first M.A. degree, studied with Chilean poet Nicanor Parra during his second M.A. degree, and following Spanish studies at Harvard, studied with Harvard graduate Chilean poetry anthologizer Juan A. Epple. Guillermo Bowie is a former Spanish teacher at the University of Oregon and Curry College, a former Spanish tutor at Columbia University and Boston School Of Modern Languages, a former bilingual second grade teacher at Manhattan’s P.S. 152, second grade teacher in the Bronx, and former day care teacher at Union Theological Seminary Day Care Center.

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My Great Grandfather’s Great Grandfather

And the beat goes on

Six generations after the fall of the Alamo

The nature or nurture theorists

Debate on whether or not our behavior is socially determined

Or was it passed on from one generation to the next

That is are we products of the events and limitations around us

And shaped by these circumstances surrounding each of us as individuals

Or did we inherit our outlooks, were our choices inherited through our biological genetic  

        makeup

Whereas Sociologists theorize concerning our being products of the environment

Where our outcome is largely from the institution (family, work, school) that determined it

What does it mean to discover after a B.A. degree in Sociology from an elite college, two 

        master’s degrees, and getting to know five Latin American republics

That my choices had come out the same as those six generations before me

And that life on the Bowie Hill in Bullard, Texas had been a place

Generation after generation of a little more than shared physical characteristics

On the Bowie Hill in Bullard, Texas where aunts and uncles

Left their impressions on nieces and nephews for generation after generation

On the Bowie Hill where looking like a Bowie

Carried on through the lineage where the oldest son of the oldest son carried on 

        transcribing this

Well into work on a third master’s degree

Did I finally stop stumbling over my name

Something that others had always responded to but left for me as an eventual surprise

And were it not for Widener Library at Harvard University where I was doing the third 

        master’s degree

Today I would still not know

As all of the libraries around me (for all of their good intentions as institutions and for all of 

        the time that 

I spend in them) have nothing on the subject

And after carefully looking at my great grandfather’s great grandfather 

It left me and my sociological background with several answered questions

The choices and outcomes of a Bowie from the Bowie Hill

Where as a seven year old I ran and rolled and played in the sand as all of those had before    

        me

But the Widener Library experience is one of those things in the category

You have to go through it to get to it

No one can tell you in language what Widener Library in experience 

        can do to you

There are those things that you have to experience to expound on

You have to know Widener Library to have all of your well grounded assumptions 

        challenged

Now you might be left with questions but you haven’t gone through all of the Mexican 

       borderland experiences that I’ve gone through to know what forty one years and called it 

       quits on the borderlands was

It will leave you seeing the effects of nature and what is passed on …