A Reading List for Writing Across Borders and Cultures

This was my handout for the panel "Writing Across Borders and Cultures" with Yours Truly, Dawn Wink and Kathryn Ferguson at the Women Writing the West Annual Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 15, 2016. 

UPDATE: Now posted, transcript of my remarks, "On Seeing as an Artist: Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühling"

RECOMMENDED READING 

FOR WRITING ACROSS BORDERS AND CULTURES

A LIST BY C.M. MAYO

C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

+ Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual
+ The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire
+ Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico
+ Sky Over El Nido: Stories
+ (as editor) Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion

MEGA BIG PICTURE


Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. 

Duffy, Patricia Lynne. Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their World. 

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 

Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. 

ON CRAFT

Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 

Ricco, Gabriele Lusser. Writing the Natural Way.

Smith, Pamela Jaye. Inner Drives: How to Write and Create Characters Using the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation. 

Zinsser, William, ed. They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing. 

ON PROCESS / PUSHING PAST RESISTANCE

Baum, Kenneth. The Mental Edge: Maximize Your Sports Potential with the Mind-Body Connection. 

Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art: Winning the Creative Battle.

P.S. Gigazoodles more recommended reading at my writing workshop page (on tips, on craft, process, editing, publishing, and more).



>> Stay tuned for the transcript of my talk for this panel.

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

Recommended Literary Travel Memoirs

Recommended Reading on Mexico

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises (UTEP Centennial Lecture)

From the transcript of  my lecture "Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises" University of Texas El Paso, Centennial Lecture, October 7, 2015. 

(Podcast coming soon).

My husband, who is Mexican, likes to joke that I missed being born Mexican by five miles. You might guess that means that I was born right here in El Paso—this "City of Surprises," as writer and editor Marcia Hatfield Daudistel calls it. My dad was an artillery officer stationed at Fort Bliss—and I understand that he took some engineering classes here at UT El Paso. So it is a very special honor for me, as a native El Pasoan, to have been invited to speak to you today.

I can't say it's like coming home, because my parents are from Chicago and New York, and when I was still a baby, my dad decided on a career in business, and he took the family out to California—to the part of the San Francisco Bay Area now known as Silicon Valley. Culturally speaking, I'm a Californian.

But back to El Paso—to quote Marcia Hatfield Daudistel again— this "dark-eyed stranger abducted into Texas by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848."

For me, to be here in El Paso is like coming home in another, deeply meaningful sense. This is a border city. I am a border person. Where others might be... let's say, a little nervous... we border people go back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico with ease, we are oftentimes bilingual, bicultural— or at least we don't blink at some of the more exotic juxtapositions, whether culinary or musical, and the mixed up lingo. I too, have been known to speak my gringa-chilanga version Spanglish—or, I might throw clumps of español—para que me entiendes bien— into my English.

I don't live on the border geographically, but culturally. I mean to say, when I got married 29 years ago, my husband and I moved to Mexico City—his home town, Chilangolandia—and now I have lived in Mexico City for more years than I have lived anywhere else, including California. And I should mention, I don't live in Mexico as a typical expat, coccooned among my fellow Americans and Canadian snowbirds. I am enconsed in a Mexican family, living in a Mexican neighborhood, and I have many very dear Mexican friends and colleagues.

Long story short, over the last three decades of my life, although I remain a U.S. citizen, Mexico has become my world. This is why my books are all about Mexico.

I hope my books might be both beautiful and useful—I write them with as much courtesy for the reader as I can muster. But the truth is, the reason I write them is because I want to delve in and explore the complexity around me, and then, having gained a new level of understanding, tell the story my way. Living in Mexico, very quickly, I learned to distrust the easy assumptions and much of the narrative about Mexico spooned out for us, whether on this side of the border or the other, whether in tourist guides, newspapers, television, paperback novels, movies. And sometimes... even in textbooks.

In Mexico, it is often said that nothing is as it seems. If you halt the show and question— sincerely and energetically question— read the bibliography, and read beyond the bibliography; take the time to interview people, really listen, with both an open mind and an open-heart; go to places and stand there and look around for yourself; roll up your sleeves and dig into the archives... it has consistently been my experience that you will uncover secrets and surprises.

Of course, that could be said about the whole world, from Azerbaijan to Zambia. And El Paso, Texas, itself. But Mexico is what my books are about. I won't stretch your patience to go on about all the books. I'm going to give you but three examples. [CONTINUE READING]



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

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

Francisco I. Madero as Medium: 

An Interview with Rev. Stephen A. Hermann, Author of Mediumship Mastery

Raymond Caballero on Mexican Revolutionary General Pascual Orozco and Far West Texas

My Dad's Book, Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam

Café San Martín: Reading Mexican Poet Agustín Cadena at the Café Passé in Tucson, Arizona

Sparkling sky and only a jeans jacket on the night before Halloween, University of Arizona students everywhere, in witches' hats and zombie makeup: that's how it was in Tucson when, as part of the American Literary Translators Conference "Café Latino" bilingual reading fiesta at Café Passé in Tucson, I read my translation, together with the Spanish original, of Mexican poet Agustín Cadena's poem "Café San Martín." That translation appears in poet Sarah Cortez's recent anthology, Goodbye Mexico (Texas Tech Press).

> Read Cadena's poem and about Goodbye Mexico here.

> Listen to the recording of my reading of Cadena's "Cafe San Martin" in the Café Passé as a podcast here.

Alas, Cadena could not be in Tucson because he lives in Hungary, where he teaches Latin American Literary in Debrecen. Follow his blog, El vino y la hiel.

Cadena's name and many works -- he is incredibly prolific and writes in almost every genre--were mentioned many times over the course of this year's ALTA conference. My dear amiga Patricia Dubrava, who also translates Cadena's poems and short fiction, shared a panel with me on the following day. 

> Read about that panel, and my talk for that panel, here.

It was an extra special honor to read Cadena's poem and my translation because not only is Cadena a treasure of a writer-- among the very finest Mexico has ever produced-- but he has translated many of my works, including the most recent Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution (as Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana). 


The audience was also especially distinguished, including Jeffrey C. Barnett, Mary Berg, Ellen Cassedy, Dick Cluster,  Pamela Carmel, Jill Gibian, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Suzanne Jill Levine, Angela McEwan, Barbara Paschke, Liliana Valenzuela, and so many other writers, poets and literary translators of note. 

And a very special thank you to Alexis Levitin, my favorite Portuguese translator (and, by the way, editor of Brazil: A Traveler's Literary Companion), who organized and MC'ed the reading.




P.S. I will be teaching the workshop "Podcasting for Writers" as part of the San Miguel Writers Conference this February 2016 in Mexico. More about that on my workshop schedule page and on the San Miguel Writers Conference page.

Five Quick Questions for Agustín Cadena

Q & A with Agustin Cadena

(Tameme)

Cadena's "Lady of the Seas" in Robert Giron's ArLiJo

La ofrenda debida by Agustín Cadena

Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion

listen to a podcast of the preface

plus read the short story by Agustin Cadena

Translating Across the Border

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:

Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

CLICK HERE.

Re: Ye Olde Website Tufte-esqued or, The Chocolate-Boxy Yum of Small Multiples

An eon ago I had the ginormous fortune to attend Edward Tufte's one day workshop on Presenting Data and Information. (Cost: 2 - 6 pairs of shoes, excellent value, jump-up-and-down recommended. And would that every government official in all the lands could attend!) 

One of the multitudinous things I learned on that day was what Tufte calls the power of small multiples. Finally, over the past weekend, I got around to applying it to some of the subpages on ye olde ever-morphing and mountainous website, www.cmmayo.com.

From Tufte's Envisioning Information, chapter 4, "Small Multiples": "Small multiples reveal, all at once, a scope of alternatives, a range of options." Um, yum, like a box of chocolates! 

Here are Tufte's books, displayed, yea verily, as small multiples:

I invite you to visit my website to view my books and other publications, now displayed as small multiples. If you've seen my website in the past, you will note an all-new look, which is thanks to fonts and glyphs from my latest unscheduled enthusiasm, The New Victorian Printshop by Walden Fonts. Whee, that was fun. 

Behold the new Tufte-esqued subpages with banners:

Books

Literary Travel Writing

Short Fiction

Yes, it would seem that I am procrastinating on writing my book about Far West Texas. Or am I? I like to think that a writer's website, whatever her visual and technical skills may or may not be, is an integral part of her work.

P.S. A shoutout for Jane Friedman, whose advice for my website headers and organization was most helpful. I also warmly recommend her free choc-full-of-helpful-nuggets newsletter.

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

For Mexicophiles

Adios FaceBook! The Six Reasons Why I Deactivated My Account

Getting Started with Websites and Blogs

Giant Golden Buddha and 364 More Free 5 Minute Writing Exercises

Waaaay back in 2006, as a kind of Ur-blog, for 365 consecutive days I posted a 5 minute writing exercise on my website both for my writing workshop students and for myself— for I was then in the midst of a multi-year marathon in writing my epic novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

Five minutes? Well, that was doable.

Anyway, "Giant Golden Buddha" and 364 more free 5 minute writing exercises are still there, right where they have always been, at this link. What prompts me to post about them today is that at the literary translators conference I attended recently a couple of people told me they loved the exercises but thought they were no longer on-line! I suspect that a few pathways got lost in the massive bramble in there when I redesigned the webpage last year. (Now the exercises are parked inside the new "For Creative Writers" pages).

I have reestablished a prominent link to "Giant Golden Buddha" from my website's homepage, and I hope that does the trick of making the 5 minute exercises easier-than-la-de-da to find. By the way, most but not all of the exercises are mine. To boogy things up, I asked several writer and poet friends to contribute an exercise, and many generously did (you will find their names and websites on the relevant pages). 

FOR THIS WEEK:

5 MINUTE WRITING EXERCISES FROM "GIANT GOLDEN BUDDHA" & 364 MORE FREE FIVE MINUTE WRITING EXERCISES BY C.M. MAYO

November 23 "Mpreg Story"
Today's exercise is courtesy of Liz Henry, a poet, writer, translator and blogger who lives in Redwood City, California.Pick a pop culture male character, someone you think of as quintessentially masculine, like Han Solo, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Aragorn, or Kermit the Frog. Write what he writes in his diary when he first realizes he's pregnant. How does he feel? What does he worry about? What does he do about it? Who will he tell? How will it affect his career? Is the (other) father his lover, his friend, or his worst enemy? Or, write a diary entry from a few months later, after the pregnancy starts to show and the baby or babies start to kick. Now you have the core of a strange mpreg story; mpreg, "male pregnancy" is a sub-genre of fan fiction. Whatever your own gender, this exercise will challenge your ideas about narration and gender normativity, and perhaps about canonical "ownership" of fictional characters.

November 24 "Moo-moo Stuffing"
In your novel, a character named Susie has concocted something for Thanksgiving which she calls "Moo-moo stuffing." What are the ingredients? (What are the ingredients according to Susie?) What does it taste like? Does anyone want to eat it? Does anyone eat it? What happens?

November 25 "Turkey Soup"
Apropos of Thanksgiving left-overs, here is an exercise in generating specific sensory detail and also in using interesting verbs: write in scene in which your character makes turkey soup.

November 26 "Interesting Red"
(Note: This is a variation on the exercise for October 10, "Interesting Pink".) There are are endless "browns", e.g., coffee, chocolate, rust-brown, tocacco-spit-brown, umber, amber, cumin, walnut, hazelnut, toast, fawn, cardboard-brown, ditchwater-brown, polluted-sky-brown, auburn, mahogany, liver, chestnut, roan, sepia, goat's-eye-brown, slime-brown, tawny, potato-brown, bronze, slug-brown, russet, caramel, rotting pumpkin, pot-roast, velvety-brown & etc.
So: make a list of reds. Whatever occurs to you. Really dig around in there. (Feel free to check the Thesaurus if you need a jump-start.)

November 27 "Dog"
Using detail that appeals to all your senses, describe one dog. Be sure to also describe the way it moves. And what can you say about its personality?

November 28 "Show Don't Tell: Crowded Shopping Mall"
Using specific, vivid detail that appeals to the senses, how might you show that the shopping mall is crowded? (Do not use the words "shopping mall" or "crowded.")

November 29 "Living Room"
Quickly, without a lot of thought, list at least 8 but no more than 12 pieces of furniture that might go into a fictional living room. Then choose five.
Now, assign each of the 5: a color; a texture: a size; one other attritubute (can be anything). Now, give each of these 5 pieces a position: for example, is the sofa facing the window? Is the coffee table on top of the bearskin rug? Or is the cabinet in the corner next to the potted palm? Bonus exercise (beyond the 5 minutes): in 3- 4 sentences, describe the owner coming into this living room.

November 30 "Funny Expressions"
Whenever it was time to go somewhere, my grandma used to say, "We're off, the captain shouted." I knew someone else who used to say, "it's all gone to hell in a handbasket." And lots of kids say, "Cool." The exercise is this: imagine an older character, and jot down 3 of his or her characteristic expressions. Do the same for a younger character, and then for a middle-aged character. Feel free to use expressions you've actually heard, or to make them up.

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

30 Deadly-Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, 

Drips & Gimungously Vast swaths of Time for Writing

10 Tools for Organizing a Novel in-Progress

Writing Loglines and the Concept of the "Eyespan"

More Resources for Writers

CLICK HERE.

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers: Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

[Yours Truly and Patricia Dubrava
with a chapbook of my translation of a short story
 by Agustín Cadena. We both translate Cadena.]

For the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference in Tucson late last month, apart from participating on Mark Weiss's excellent panel "Translating Across the Border," I proposed and chaired a panel that addressed a topic that, in truth, could have been considered for translating poets and writers in any of the populated continents:

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:  

Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

The panelists were Yours Truly (transcript of my talk follows), Jeffrey C. Barnett, Patricia Dubrava, and Clare Sullivan. In the audience: several very distinguished literary translators (lotus petals upon y'all). The Q & A was extra crunchy, and in true ALTA fashion, in the sweetest way. (Seriously, literary translators, and especially the crowd that regularly attends ALTA conferences, are angelically generous and encouraging. If any of you reading this have ever thought of trying literary translation and/or attending a literary translator's conference, my recommendation is, YES!) 

[LAS TRES AMIGAS: 

Yours Truly, Clare Sullivan, and Patricia Dubrava.]

[Jeffrey C. Barnett, C.M. Mayo, Patricia Dubrava]

Transcript of C.M. Mayo's Remarks 

for the panel on 

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers

ALTA, Tucson, Arizona, 

October 31, 2015

I started translating in Mexico City in the early 1990s. Mexico City is Mexico's capital, but it's not analogous to Washington DC or, say, Ottowa, Canada. The megalopolis, "the endless city," as Carlos Monsivaís calls Mexico City, is like Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, all piled into one. In other words, its the political capital, financial capital, publishing capital, cultural capital, and television and movie capital. Oh, and business capital, too. Yes, there are other important cities in Mexico, and they have become more important in many ways, and some of them have some excellent writers and poets. But Mexico City is MEXICO CITY.

Back in the early 1990s, the ruling party, the PRI or Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party was in power, about to enter the last decade of its more than 70— yes, 70—years in power. How did it last so long? There are many answers to that question but the main one relevant for our topic at hand is that the PRI attempted to bring everyone, whether farmers, campesinos, industrialists or intellectuals, and that would include poets and writers, under its own big tent. It had its ways. Stick and carrot— or bone, as Mexicans like to say.

You may be aware that after two consecutive presidential administrations under the PAN or the Partido Acción Nacional, over the past decade, Mexico's Presidency has since returned to the PRI. But it's not exactly a return to the past. Not exactly.

I'm not going to get all political on you, I simply want to underline the fact that back in early 1990s, the Mexican literary establishment, concentrated in Mexico City, was heavily influenced by and subsidized by the PRI government. Just to give you a notion of this: If you were to go into a library and look at some back issues of the leading Mexican literary and intellectual magazine of the time— of course that would be Octavio's Paz's Vuelta— you would see a large number of advertisements from government-owned entities and Televisa, the party-allied television conglomerate. There were literary gatekeepers, as there are everywhere in this world, but in Mexico City at that time, they were ginormously powerful. Octavio Paz was king.

Though Octavio Paz met his maker some years ago, in some ways things remain the same. Mexico City is where it's at. The government still plays an important, though lesser role. Letras Libres, successor to Vuelta, remains a leading magazine of influence, and in fact it does publish some of the best writing you'll find anywhere.

But since the early 1990s there have been political and economic sea-changes in Mexico. Power is more dispersed. Other political parties have become far more powerful. On the right and the left they rival the PRI and on many an occasion, beat the PRI at the ballot box.

And even more than the political and economic changes, the technological changes have been sea-changes. I'm talking about the rise of digital media, from blogging to YouTube, podcasting, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and publishing— and by the way, amazon is now in Mexico with www.amazon.com.mx.

To find a Mexican writer to translate, you no longer have to travel to Mexico City and get chummy with the powers that be who can make recommendations and, perhaps, invite the anointed to tea. Now, say, from Boston or Hong Kong or Cleveland, you can follow any given Mexican writer's blog, and comment thereupon. Or, say, send her a Tweet!

I would love to tell you the story of how, in the late 1990s, I started my bilingual magazine, Tameme, which published many Mexican writers, and my experiences with putting together the anthology, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion— no easy task, since the idea of the TLC series is to provide writing about the whole country— and that would include writing from and about Baja California, Yucatan, Chiapas, Chihuahua...

At present I am translating a batch of Mexican writers: Ignacio Solares, a novelist born in Ciudad Juárez, long based in Mexico City; Agustín Cadena, who was born in the state of Hidalgo and is living in Hungary; Araceli Ardón who was born in San Miguel de Allende and lives in Querétaro; and yet another, Rose Mary Salum, who is from Mexico City and now based in Houston, Texas.

But I don't want to take time from my fellow panelists and what I hope will be a rich question and answer session. The main thing I want to emphasize is that, as literary translators, we can play a powerful role in influencing who and who is not read in English. Who to translate? It's good to ask for advice from the powers that be of the literary establishment in, say, Mexico or Cuba or Chile, and maybe even choose to translate one of them. They might be blast-your-wig-to-the-asteroid-belt fabulous! But we also have to recognize that there are power structures in literary communities, some of them entangled with political structures, and we need to acknowledge and examine, in our own minds, and our own hearts, what part we play in that or choose not to play. And why.

#   #   #

We may have been visiting the southwest this year, but ni modo, after the panel we ambled over to Sinbad's for Iraqi tea and babaganoushe. 

Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Patricia Dubrava's blog post on ALTA

My review of Ilán Stavans Octavio Paz: A Meditation

My talk for ALTA 2014:

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

Translating Across the Border: 

Transcript of C.M. Mayo's remarks for the panel on 

"Translating the Other Side," ALTA, October 29, 2015.

Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance, edited by Sarah Cortez
(with my translation of a poem by Agustin Cadena)

Mexico City Melissa Garden 

(30 second video)

Cosecha del FIL: In Celebration of "Literal"

Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller

Just posted in the Washington Independent Review of Books:

NUT COUNTRY
Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy
by Edward H. Miller


Book Review by C.M. Mayo

In the early 1950s, for most Texas voters, the party of Abraham Lincoln had about as much appeal as Rhode Island barbecue. In the Civil War, Texas, a slave state, had fought for the Confederacy. Reconstruction brought Republican Party-rule, with its emphasis on establishing and protecting rights for freedmen. The backlash from largely ex-Confederate “redeemers” took only a few years to flush the Republicans from power. 

Attacking them as “the black man’s party,” these Democrats called for racial solidarity among whites and for rolling back the rights of African-Americans. For decades to come, Jim Crow Texas, like the rest of the South, was controlled by the so-called “yellow dog Democrats,” Democrats who would vote for their party’s candidate, even if he were a yellow dog. Yet by the 1960s, the Republican Party, now espousing conservatism, came roaring back in the Lone Star State.

What happened? [CONTINUE READING]

Since I'm working on a book about Far West Texas, 

most of my recent reviews are of books about Texas.

The Pecan: A History of America's Native Nut

by James McWilliams

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America

by Richard Parker

Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence 

edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso

My book review policy

(in case you were wondering)