Baltazar Castillo Author Reading

Writer and Visual Artist Baltazar Castillo will read from his book, That Time Before You, a fictional account of a young man’s plan to repair a hole in the sky.

Synopsis of the story:
It's 1972. Ozone crisis flyers are everywhere. Smart phones and social media are nowhere, and Sunny Boy has a plan to fix the hole in the sky. Fast forward to 1980: Sunny Boy, now known as Young Dude is in Cali during the Lettuce Strike protesting with migrant workers between semesters. It’s 2022 and Middle-aged Dude etc. etc—with the exception of the Covid 19, absolutely no etcetera there—has a new Smart Phone but no one to tweet. At last it’s 2043: the planet, with GrandDaddyDude and 9,338,661,314 untethered-from-all-social-media-others, on it, is in full climate crisis. Is long past sustainability. Is in fact, not only in “countdown lockdown extinction,” but feeding on the populaces’ frenetic energy, thus adding an unpredictable orbit of a twist to the story’s end, unless— well, you won’t believe what GDD’s plan is now.

That Time Before You is a fictional account that shows what can happen when warning signs go unheeded, are misinterpreted due to human deficiencies or to suit agendas. The novel is about a young man's search for remedies in an artificial culture. His spiritual malaise, contrasted with corporate demands for more than their share of the earth’s energy, illustrates a constant battle for renewable energy within an exhausted individual’s or group’s psyche.

Author bio:
Baltazar Castillo is a writer, a visual artist, and a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Presently he is working on—and querying to agents—his collection of short stories and a novel based on his unique experiences as a Latino youth growing up in predominantly white middle-class Chicago neighborhoods during the 1970s and 80s. A long-time resident of Chicago, Baltazar now resides in Crete.