Every desert has its poets, coyotes who see things through a different lens and have a compulsion with written words, and storytellers who survive under the most straining conditions. They are artists and culture pushers who continuously battle ignorance and sometimes an indifferent audience.

Our city has many scribes, some hidden and reluctant to spill their guts to strangers, others are pretty comfortable smothering your face in them.

One of those scribes is Myrlin James Gonzalez Hepworth, a Phoenikero with the most non-Mexican-Mexican name. He is the kind of dude you want producing shit in La Phoenikera, and whatever your opinion may be about his motives and skills as a poet/musician/performer, this mofo has guts, and that’s what it takes to be a culture producer in our piece of “brown wasteland,” as some dipshit writer once called it.

Myrlindo is in the set for his “Just This” music video later this year. Photo: Alisa Avila.

Myrlin grew up listening to coyote stories about the world’s creation and humanity, about the trickster-wise character that often appears in Indigenous narrations of the Southwest. He never anticipated that he would become the coyote of his own story.

His dad told him these fables, and his mom taught him to love the melanin populating his skin and the legacy of his ancestors.

He was raised between northern Idaho and New Mexico and spent most of his life in Lewiston, Idaho, near the site of the most important Aryan Nations compound in the world. He was a few shades too brown to be entirely white.

He’s loved hip-hop since ’94, when he heard “Crooklyn” by the Crooklyn Dodgers while his mom was playing the Spike Lee joint of the same title. He then moved to listen to the greats like Biggie, Pac, Outkast, J Dilla, and others like Common, Mos Def, and The Roots. He remembers that was it; it had him, it owned him, and it was something made for him.

At the same time, his mom played tons of other music in their home. “She played Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon; some Mariachi music, José Alfredo Jiménez, Chente, Pedro Infante, and Lola Beltrán. Then there was also Sly and The Family Stone, The Temptations, Etta James, Nina Simone, Hector Lavoe,” he recounts.

Myrlin is plotting the next move. Photo: Alisa Avila.

His mother’s side of the family has lived in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico since the state was part of Mexico during colonialism. His roots are of Spanish and indigenous descent, and his genome includes Pueblo and possibly Comanche.

Myrlin explains that his mom’s teachings on resistance and accepting his brownness were crucial in his upbringing. Also valuable was his father’s insight into the history of Indigenous people in America, which he learned while living on a reservation because his grandfather taught there and coached basketball.

As a result, Myrlin developed a sense of pride in who he is, which helped him face constant targeting because of the pigment of his skin; brown was scarce at Lewiston High School.

That targeting wasn’t exclusive to the white spaces he occupied, though. It also worked the other way around. “In New Mexico, some of my cousins were like, ‘Ah, your dad is white, you’re like a pocho, you’re one of those,’” he recalls. That made him insecure, mostly because he wanted people of color to accept him.

A Coyotito is born

When Myrlin reached High School, he discovered he had a knack for storytelling, and his teacher, “Miss Mac,” encouraged his talents. He thinks it has a lot to do with his family being incredible storytellers, which was something he could absorb.

Writing is the medium that speaks to him the most. Writing poetry was his survival mechanism, and he started in 9th grade.

Fresh out of high school, Myrlin decided to come to Arizona after he didn’t take the SATs. He came here because a friend’s sister was here, and he planned to go to a community college. That was around 2005.

After hopscotching through the East Valley, he settled in Tempe. One day, he saw a call for poets at a poetry slam venue on Mill Ave.; he felt compelled to participate.

“I was super scared, and I wrote some shit and finally did it. Within a year, I rose in the Arizona poetry scene and was on my way to the finals for a national poetry slam. Subsequently, I was able to make a career out of it,” Myrlindo explains.

At the time, he was on his own, going to school and working as a teacher’s assistant. He learned to work with kids by participating in the AmeriCorps Learn and Serve America program, which provided opportunities for students nationwide to participate in service-learning projects and gain valuable experience while helping communities.

When he started attending ASU, he learned how literature is taught in an institution, and he became aware of performing styles, poetry movements, and writing styles.

“It gave me an advantage over my peers because I was learning all these things. I also became aware of how professors would say which poetry should be studied or which writers should be revered. So I was receiving training in technical writing, but I was also learning about the shit that comes from the block, not just the ivory tower,” he says. “That made it easier for me to be mobile in a lot of different spaces because, at that time, the perception of slam poetry or poets who perform was pretty negative, one because poets that didn’t come from academia were deemed as trash, and two because academic poets were inaccessible.”

Myrlin quit his day job as a preschool teacher while attending ASU, found a niche, and began teaching poetry to middle and high school students.

He founded Phonetic Spit with other local writers. They started it because they needed to create a youth culture in La Phoenikera since there was none concerning poetry. The organization is now led by Ashley Hare and Tomás Stanton.

That is what Myrlin predominantly does now. He travels around the country, teaching youth to tell their stories through narrative.

He gives talks where there’s a dialog about race, politics, art, and hip-hop; he talks about his own story; he goes into English or writing classes and creates a safe space where students can speak freely about any topic or about who they are, instead of adhering to standards.

“I tell them that they are the standard and all they need. I encourage them to be brave, unapologetic, and honest .”

By sharing their experiences, participants become empowered by their stories and share them with the class, displaying everyday issues that affect their lives, like drug abuse, imprisonment of family members, violence, and rape, things that they are being asked about for the first time in their academic journey.

“This process humanizes the students by letting their classmates and teachers know that there is a story behind all of them, and in a way that changes the culture and dynamics of the classroom.”

One of the many things poetry has given to Myrlin is the ability to walk into rooms that he wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, you know, without a mic.

Working with kids at Roaring Fork High School in Colorado.

Myrlin, the hip-hop producer

For Myrlin, poet and musician are synonymous. Aside from working with youth through poetry, he’s also a music producer. He’s produced an album every two years since his debut with The Funky Autopsy mixtape in 2014. His second project was Eulogy in Blue, and his latest is Remember Why, which dropped about a month ago.

The musical references he acquired growing up and the mix of styles and genres he listens to perspire through the sounds of Remember Why.

As we listened to the record, we were surprised by its unpredictability and plurality of sound. The track list was narrowed down to 56 songs created in four years.

“My new album shows these influences, unconventional or unorthodox. It’s a hip-hop album, but there are congas and Afro-Cuban rhythms. It’s very diversified, but a cohesive expression and narrative is going from one song to the next.”

Myrlin writes mostly about what he’s going through at a specific moment. “I don’t set out to write a feminist piece or something racially charged or to make a statement necessarily, at least not so much in recent years,” he says. “I excavate sounds and words until I find myself in them and able to speak openly about what the song becomes.”

Remember Why Was recorded and produced by Myrlin except for two tracks, which were done by producer and MC Mike Maban.

“I sat down and pushed buttons and spent sleepless nights making the beats and creating something that doesn’t sound like anything else,” he says.

Myrlin works his way through samples and sounds made by his favorite instruments, or at least the ones he thinks would fit well in his song. Sometimes, he achieves the sound he’s aiming for, and in others, he doesn’t. You can’t win them all. Not every sound becomes a song.

He may like using techniques used by hitmakers he admires and uses instruments he loves, not just the ones that make something sound popular. He doesn’t try to fit into a sonic landscape of what’s easily recognizable or what sounds like “now.”

Myrlin James Gonzalez Hepworth in the recording studio. Photo: Alisa Avila.

What is Remember? Why about?
“It’s really about this on-and-off relationship of five years and really my choice to live a life on the road, travel often, be an entrepreneur, and what it comes with. So there’s a lot of drifting when I put these songs together. I talk about place and origin, race and politics, love, and things that are real to me. Years ago, I put out this song called Hometown. I realized that I was such an idealist, or had been for so long, that I felt like […] people love it in my hometown. Still, they don’t know what the fuck I’m saying, they don’t know that I’m talking about whiteness and racism […] they don’t care because I realized as time went on that people compartmentalize. You might not like Kanye’s whatever, but people are still going to listen to his shit. If you were a Kanye fan in 2005, you’d still be like, ‘fuck Kanye, but this song is dope.’ It has made me question the role of an artist in regards to influencing or changing culture, and it’s a tricky one; it’s tough for me to understand.

Remember Why was released about a month ago, check it!

In the new album, I have a song called The Message, and it’s about Phoenix; it doesn’t pull punches, and it’s about the Phoenix I know and love […] and yeah, I wish people that had grown up in Phoenix but lived in California when they were in second grade -but have been here over 20 years-, would stop telling people they grew up in California […] you grew up here, went to high school here, your kids were born here, stop saying you grew up in Cali. What’s up with your allegiance to L.A.? You can rep it, too, but this is where your life has been. And the folks that have pride in Phoenix, the pride we need, are people that aren’t allowed in many spaces. I wish there were more pride [….] when you go to a city like Chicago, the people there think that their city is the best at everything, they fucking think they invented water, they have a lot of pride there, for better or for worse ‘Chicago over everything.’ There is zero here; that is why it’s so hard to make it here because there is no pride.”

When you write, do you write poems or bars on a track?
“Mostly, it’s a process that goes hand in hand. I make the beat, write some lyrics, and then add them to it. I write some more, add them again […] So if it’s conceived as a song, then I structure it like that, but if it is a poem, it’s just me writing, and those never become songs, maybe concepts that I can transfer over because when I’m writing poems, I’m not trying to rhyme on beat, I’m not even trying to rhyme necessarily. I’m thinking about all the sounds and how they would sound in different languages, like Spanish with Dominican or Mexican accents or from wherever. So when I’m writing I know how my voice sounds, it’s Hip-Hop, it’s country, it’s folky and bluesy, so I know how I sound like, and I compose poems and music accordingly.”

Poetry and music allow Myrlin to walk into rooms that he wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

Have you found your style?
“Yeah, musically I have, I mean, I’m always evolving. The Funky Autopsy was made up of beats I found in old Outcast albums or a J Dilla song, but most were just mash-up tapes from this guy in Prague. The same in Euology in Blue. But yeah, I think I’m at a point where I have my style.”

You can find his work on his website.

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