Bay to Ocean Writers Conference, February 26, 2011 (Near Easton MD)

For the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference this February 26 I'll be offering a miniworkshop, "Top 10 Techniques of Creative Nonfiction and Fiction" from 1: 15 - 2:15 pm
Whether literary, mystery, spy, detective, romance, science or historical, fiction relies on specific techniques to invite the reader to form and maintain a "vivid dream" in his or her mind. The same is true for creative nonfiction, that is, literary travel writing, personal memoir and literary journalism. With examples of many different kinds of highly effective writing, award-winning travelwriter and novelist C.M. Mayo covers the ten most powerful of these techniques.


On Sunday February 27-- the following day-- I'll be offering a longer, three hour workshop, also on "Techniques of Fiction," at the Writer's Center in Bethesda MD. To read more and register on-line for this workshop, click here.

Lucky Dog Max!

My Mexico City amiga Cynthia Kaplan has started a business I am DELIGHTED to see: home cooked food for dogs. Oh, I have a lot to say on this subject, but read Max's story here.

Podcast Now Live: C.M. Mayo at "PEN Writers Aloud" in San Miguel de Allende

Here's the podcast from my recent reading and discussion of The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire as part of the PEN Writers Aloud Reading Series in San Miguel de Allende last week. The reading was co-sponsored by SOL Literary Magazine.


Relevant links:

---> PEN Writers Aloud Reading Series

---> SOL Literary Magazine

---> The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

---> El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano

---> Full archive of my podcasts

More anon.

Alissa Walker, aka "Gelato Baby" on Creative Mornings LA

2010/12 Alissa Walker | Gelatobaby from LosAngeles/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

"Gelato Baby's" talk for Creative Mornings LA
A sweet video, well worth watching. Charming indeed, and inspiring, like, um, yeah, really!

Ópera y vida cotidiana en la Puebla Imperial, a new book by Margarita López Cano

Professor of history and opera expert Margarita López Cano has just brought out a fascinating new book, Ópera y vida cotidiana en la Puebla Imperial ("Opera and Daily Life in Imperial Puebla"), co-published by CONACULTA and the Secretary of Culture of the State of Puebla, as part of the "Colección Bicentenario 2010."

Puebla is that Mexican city made famous by the Cinco de Mayo, the temporary but devastatingly defeat of the invading French Imperial Army in 1862. One of Mexico's most splendid Spanish colonial cities, Puebla is strategically situated on the route inland from Veracruz; no power could rule from Mexico City without first controlling Puebla. The French did retake Puebla a year later, however, and then Mexico City; thus, only a year later than planned, by the spring of 1864, having been crowned Emperor and Empress of Mexico in Trieste, Maximilian and Carlota were en route.

The Second Empire has rich and staggeringly diverse sound track . . . CONTINUE READING over at my other blog, Maximilian ~ Carlota: a blog for researchers, both armchair, and serious, of the Second Empire or "French Intervention."

Report from San Miguel de Allende

Think art colony + sunshine + pedestrian paradise (if you're wearing flat shoes, that is)... Oh, all the pink puffs of bougainvilleas against pure blue sky! I managed to reach escape velocity from Mexico City for a brief visit to San Miguel de Allende apropos of a reading of my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which took place in the gloriously pink and coral-red Salon Quetzal of the Biblioteca, sponsored by PEN San Miguel and SOL Literary Magazine.

+++
UPDATE:
PodCast is now live at podomatic.com
+++

Thank you, Eva Hunter, for the introduction, and Bill Pearlman, for all you do to organize this splendid reading series. Lucina Kathmann and Edward Swift, it was a delight to see you there. Edward-- everybody listen up! -- has a new novel about to come out, and it features Nezahualcoyotl's poems and stunning cover art by Kelly Vandiver. Edward's novel is one I am eagerly looking forward to reading, for I am a must-tell-EVERYBODY fan of his extraordinary memoir of growing up in the Big Thicket, My Grandfather's Finger. It was also a happy surprise to meet my fellow Unbridled Books author, George Rabasa, author of The Wonder Singer, whose new novel, Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb, is about to come out this spring. And Mariló Carral, Marisa Boullosa, and Lulu Torbet, wonderful artists, I send you besos.

P.S. I'll be back in San Miguel de Allende later in February for the San Miguel Writers Conference, for which I'll offering the mini-workshop on "Techniques of Fiction."

Also of note: My amiga writer Gina Hyams will be giving a workshop on blogging. Check out her bodacious blog! For anyone interested in starting or improving their blog, this is a terrific opportunity.


And here's the Q & A that didn't make in time for the announcement in San Miguel de Allende's local paper, Atención:

Three Questions for C.M. Mayo

Q: Why did you decide to write about this period of Mexican history?

A: I was so surprised to learn that the mother of the prince of the title– Agustin de Iturbide y Green (1863-1925) – was an American. I am also an American married to a Mexican, one very distantly related to her mother-in-law, so I was curious to learn more about her, how she came to Mexico and what made her agree, at first, to collaborate with Maximilian von Habsburg. When I started to delve into reading about the period and about her, however, I quickly found so many contradictions, mysterious distortions and vagueness, that I realized her story, and that of her son, had never been properly researched. I also felt it is an important story, for both Mexicans and Americans.

Q: As the author of nonfiction books, two on finance and a travel memoir of Baja California, how did you make the transition to writing fiction?


A: I made an effort to learn the craft of fiction through taking workshops, reading books on craft, and then re-reading novels, not as consumer wanting to be entertained, but as as a fellow craftsman, actively noting, for example, how does Chekhov describe the snow? Or Tolstoy, a dress? Lampedusa, a dance? Flaubert, a sense of joy or despair? How do they handle dialogue, transitions, building suspense? And so on. It was really as simple– and as difficult— as that.

Q: Which authors have most influenced your writing?


A: For this novel, the most influential was Guiseppi di Lampedusa's richly splendid novel, The Leopard, which covers a similar period in Sicily. For the flexible narrative voice and language I learned from Henry James’s Portrait of A Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and for structure, her tragic novel The House of Mirth. Contemporary influences include A. Manette Ansay, Kate Braverman, Bruce Chatwin, Ted Conover, Douglas Glover, V.S. Naipaul, and oh, so many others. Everyone in Mexico asks me if I’ve read Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio. The answer is, other than a very few pages which I translated for my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, no, and not because I am unaware that it is considered one of Mexico’s greatest novels. Del Paso covers the same period and many of the same characters, and I wanted to have a clear conscience that my novel is my own. So now I have to read it!

More anon.

Matías Romero's Visit to Springfield in 1861

Apropos of William Moss Wilson's excellent piece for the NYT's on-line "Opinionator," a new post on my other blog, Maximilian ~ Carlota.

More anon.

Top Ten Books Read 2010

1. Finding Iris Chang
by Paula Kamen
Iris Chang was the author of three books, including the blockbuster The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII. Kamen, also an accomplished journalist and author of four books, was first Iris's rival at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana and then, for many years, an admiring and close friend. Kamen's is a book by a writer about a writer, or rather, the biography of a rich and evolving writerly friendship with a violent end, for Iris Chang was found shot to death in a car by the side of the road near her home in northern California. Chang was then working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and as she had a small son, a happy marriage, and blazingly successly career, many people found it easy to believe she had been murdered, though, as Kamen explains at length, Chang's life was not what it appeared. Kamen's is a deeply moving book that should be read by anyone who is or would be a writer; it's a terrible lesson in the dangers of unbalanced ambition and, at the same time, ironically, the advantages of unbounded ambition. Beautifully written and researched, this is a work to be savored, both on the page, and in many meditations afterwards. I know I will be rereading this one.

2. The Big Short
By Michael Lewis
I relished Lewis's late 1980s memoir of working at Salmon Brothers, Liar's Poker, which I would describe as laugh-out-loud funny and grimly picaresque. The Big Short is equally entertaining, but, well, not funny. It is in fact horrifying. Unlike many books on financial shenanigans, this one is written by someone who actually worked in investment banking, who has an insider's understanding of the culture and the mentality of those, alas, not so few, who aim to "game the system." So what happened to the financial system in 2008? To begin to understand, start here.

2. When a Crocodile Ate the Sun
by Peter Godwin
It might seem an exotic horror story: Mugabe's Zimbabwe. But it's so much larger than that. What transpires when the government really, truly, breaks down? How do you find bread when your money inflates to near-nothing? What happens to the old people? To the animals? The crops? And the names of things? In other words, this is a story at once ancient and ever-new, a story that, for as long human nature and human societies endure, we will go on telling in its thousands of permutations. But this time, this book, wow.

4. Las tentaciones de la dicha
by Agustín Cadena
Who is Agustín Cadena? Think: Franz Kafka meets Juan Rulfo meets Raymond Carver or, the Mexican Chekhov. But that's not quite right: he's unique. I've just finished translating one of the stories, "The Vampire"--- hope to have news soon about a home for that. And some excellent, though to me, unexpected news: this book was named one of the top books of 2010 by Mexican critic Carlos Olivares Baró.

P.S. Read my translation of an earlier short story by Cadena, "Lady of the Seas," which appears in Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion.

4. The Bolter
by Frances Osborne
A superbly written biography of Idina Sackville, "the woman who scandalized 1920s Society and became White Mischief's infamous seductress," by her own great granddaughter. Every chapter is a surprise, and the last one more than any. (Oddly, this gave me a more nuanced appreciation for the decor in the Ralph Lauren shops.)

5. John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappriasal
by Thomas M. Settles
This new biography of a key 19th century military figure, best known as a controversial Confederate general who defended Virginia and Galveston,Texas in the U.S. Civil War, it is also crucial reading for anyone interested in the U.S.-Mexican War, the Civil War, and / or Mexico's Second Empire.

6. Black Robes in Paraguay
by William F. Jaenike
This magnificent, deeply and scrupulously researched book will always have a place of honor in my library. It should interest anyone who enjoys Latin American history -- and that includes the history of Mexico's Baja California, because of the parallel stories of their Jesuit missions.

7. Move Into Life: The Nine Essentials of Lifelong Vitality
by Anat Baniel
Protégée of Moishe Feldenkrais, the Israeli engineer and Judo expert who developed the renowned "Feldenkrais Method," Anat Baniel built her own "Anat Baniel Method" (ABM) on this foundation and three decades of helping thousands of people, from the tiniest babies to elders, move more easily and find freedom from pain. I have tried the ABM: gadzooks, it works! This book is a fine introduction to the method, and all-around inspiring. P.S. Her video beats a cup of coffee.

8. The Art of Intuition
by Sophy Burnham
A broad and knowledgable overview of issues related to and methods for accessing intuition, this is a most unusual book because it is written by a mystic and a literary artist: one and same person. Though Burnham is best known for her New York Times best-selling books on angels, some of her earlier books, especially The Art Crowd and The Landed Gentry, deserve far more recognition than they have yet received.

9. The Permit That Never Expires
by Philip Garrison
Anyone who wants to understand Mexican immigration should read this book -- and it's a gripping read, for Garrison is at once stylish, unusually perceptive, wryly humorous, and, above all, both compassionate and deeply knowledgeable. This is an astonishingly original and important work.

10. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
I don't know Clay Shirky but, from his description of his childhood, we could have been next door neighbors, for I too recall hours planted, zombie-like, in front of Batman and Gilligan's Island. So what happens to our culture as a whole when we move from passive to active-- even for the merest smidgen of time? As they used to say on Batman, "sha-zam!" (Only Clay Shirky could get me to sign up for LOL Cats. Oh, yes, it was a-meow-zing.)

---> Top 10 Books Read 2009
---> Top 10 Books Read 2008
---> Top 10 Books Read 2007
---> Top 10 Books Read 2006
More anon.

Blogs Noted: Laura Carmelita Bellmont, The World of Edgar Allan Poe, Julianne Douglas, Leslie Pietrzyk, Adriana Camarena, Bricolage, and More

Laura Carmelita Bellmont
Who will be teaching a 2 day pop-up paper engineering workshop at the Center for Book Arts in NYC, wow. (Yes, MSC, it would be grand to live on CPW. For more on NYC, click here.)

Artist and writer Jim Johnston's Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide: "Mom in Morocco"

Undine's The World of Edgar Allan Poe
See especially "The Reticent Mrs Shelton". So bizarre.

Julianne Douglas's Writing the Renaissance
A new year's resolution post EVERYONE should read.

Adriana Camarena in the Mission
A Mexico City lawyer's interviews in SF.

Via Bricolage, the Keats-Shelley house in Rome has such a beautiful new website it makes me sigh for Rome...

Novelist Leslie "Work-in-Progress" Pietrzyk talks points about her recent writers pow-wow.

Thx Thx Thx
Thx! Viva Thx!

Southern Cross Review
Rudolf Steiner meets 2011

Araceli Ardon: Kurt Wenner in Queretaro

Washington Musica Viva Links page
See especially artist Marilyn Banner's "Expanding Unconscious Sources: A Return to My Inner Self"

Getting the Royal Treatment
So, like, totally true.

And finally: my other blog, Maximilian ~ Carlota, for researchers of the Second Empire / French Intervention, will resume next Tuesday.

Next post: Monday.

Guestblogger Richard Goodman on 5 Favorite and Unexpected Literary Figures in NYC

Twin Towers image by Gaylord Schanilec is from New York Revisited, The Grolier Club, 2002

One of the things I find most fascinating about publishing now is the trend toward the ephemeral, on the one hand (e-books), and on the other, increasing material quality (collectors' books). So the very same book could appear as an e-book, and as a limited, autographed, letterpress edition with, say, handmade marbled paper. The first could cost only a few dollars, while the second could run into hundreds of dollars. (Where's the still big fat middle? Ye olde paperbacks shipped from amazon.com and packing the shelves in your local bookstore.)

Collectors' books, 19th century style, are often sold by subscription. This is the case with travel writer, essayist and writing teacher Richard Goodman's latest, or rather, forthcoming, The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker's Journey Through September 11th, which will feature original wood engravings by noted fine printer and wood engraver Gaylord Schanilec, to be published by Midnight Paper Sales. (Read the prospectus, a PDF, here.)

Apropos of this, I invited Richard to contribute a guest-blog post about literary New York. He's an expert on the city, having lived there for many years (check out his recent book, A New York Memoir.) Over to you, Richard.

MY FIVE FAVORITE (AND UNEXPECTED) LITERARY FIGURES WHO SPENT TIME IN NEW YORK CITY
by Richard Goodman

The list of literary figures who have visited or lived in New York is long and, sometimes, quite surprisingly delightful. Here are some of my favorites from that list. I’m always eager to hear about more, so if you know of any surprises, please post a comment.

Henry David Thoreau in Brooklyn
(The link is to a video in which a librarian at the Library of Congress discusses the day in Brooklyn Whitman and Thoreau exchanged books).
The famed naturalist and solitary dweller at Walden Pond did step foot in New York City—where, as we know, most of its citizens lead lives of quiet desperation. In 1850, he came to Fire Island—today, summer playground for young Manhttanites—to look for the effects of a drowned friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s. In 1856, he was in Brooklyn where he met, and walked two hours with, Walt Whitman. Whitman gave Thoreau a copy of Leaves of Grass, which, it turns out, Thoreau liked very much. “We ought to rejoice greatly in him,” Thoreau declared in reference to Walt.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Central Park South
(The link is to a New York Times article about a walking tour, "In the Footsteps of Saint-Exupéry")
The aviator-author of such lyrical classics as Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight lived briefly at 240 Central Park South in the early 1940s where he began his children’s classic, The Little Prince. He also lived on Beekman Place and in a rented mansion on the North Shore of Long Island before returning to France and a fateful rendezvous with a German fighter plane south of Toulon over the Mediterranean Sea.

Simone Weil on the Upper West Side
(The link is to Francine du Plessix Gray's biography, Simone Weil.)
In 1942, the wonderful, severe, brilliant and difficult French writer, Simone Weil, settled briefly with her family—including her equally brilliant brother—in an apartment at 594 Riverside Drive. The author of The Need for Roots eventually died in England, at age forty-four, later to become, in T.S. Eliot’s estimation, a saint.

Frederick Garcia Lorca in Harlem
(The link is to a New York Times article about his year in New York City.)
The celebrated Spanish poet, author of the plays, Yerma and Blood Wedding, spent 1929-30 in New York City where he attended, for a while, Columbia University’s School of General Studies — essentially, its school of continuing education. Out of this sojourn came his book, Poeta en Nueva York with its powerful poem, “El Rey de Harlem,” The King of Harlem.

Lorenzo da Ponte at Columbia University
(The link is to information about his grave in Queens)
The librettist for Mozart’s operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, da Ponte was born in 1749 near Venice. After a long and colorful career as a librettist working with Mozart and his nemesis, Salieri, da Ponte came to New York to escape his creditors. He became the first teacher of Italian at Columbia, opened a bookstore, and introduced the works of Rossini to America. He died in 1838, and is buried — where else? — in Queens.

--- Richard Goodman.

P.S. Read more of Richard Goodman's guest-blog posts:
Five Wondrous Works of New York Art
Five Favorite Books with Soul

--> Click here for the complete archive of guest-blogs posts at Madam Mayo.