Monday, October 24, 2016

On Seeing as an Artist or, Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühlung: Remarks For the Women Writing the West Panel on "Writing Across Borders and Cultures"

TRANSCRIPT (slightly expanded and now with a proper title) of C.M. Mayo’s talk for the panel “Writing Across Borders and Cultures”
Women Writing the West Annual Conference
Santa Fe, New Mexico, Saturday, October 15, 2016


ON SEEING AS AN ARTIST 
OR, 
FIVE TECHNIQUES FOR A JOURNEY TO EINFÜHLUNG

REMARKS BY C.M. MAYO

How many of you have been to Mexico? Well, viva Mexico! Here we are in New Mexico, Nuevo México. On this panel, with Dawn Wink and Kathryn Ferguson, it seems we are all about Mexico. I write both fiction and nonfiction, most of it about Mexico because that is where I have been living for most of my adult life— that is, the past 30 years— married to a Mexican and living in Mexico City. 

But in this talk I would like to put on my sombrero, as it were, as an historical novelist, and although my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is about Mexico, I don’t want to talk so much about Mexico as I do five simple, powerful techniques that have helped me, and that I hope will help you to see as an artist and write across borders and cultures.


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> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.




My Recollections of Maximilian by Marie de la Fere; Introduction by C.M. Mayo 
(A rare eyewitness English-language memoir published as an ebook 
by permission of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

(podcast and transcript)

See also my other blog, 
of the Tumultuous Period of Mexican History Known as 
the Second Empire or French Intervention
(Transcript of my talk for the panel on "Why Tramslate?"
American Literary Translators Conference, Milwaukee, 2015)