Podcasting for Writers: Trailer for the iBook and Workshop at the Writer's Center

UPDATE: The ebook is available December 2012.

>>Visit the book's webpage

Meanwhile, I'm offering a 2 hour workshop at the Writer's Center in Bethesda MD (right outside Washington DC):

PODCASTING FOR WRITERS
May 5, 2012
Bethesda MD
The Writer's Center One day only. 10 am - 12 pm
Audio podcasts, on-line digital files, not only serve as an important promotional tool for writers, but they can be storytelling vehicles themselves, whether as stand-alone works or complements to text. This workshop provides an introduction and overview of podcasting for writers, from basic concepts to nuts-and-bolts tips. The goal is that by the end of the workshop, you will be able to go home and use your iPhone or digital recorder and computer to generate and then post a simple podcast on-line.
>>Listen to C.M. Mayo's podcasts here.
>>REGISTER ON-LINE

Marfa Mondays Podcast #4: Avram Dumitrescu, An Artist in Alpine

The monthly Marfa Mondays podcast is live: an interview with Avram Dumitrescu, an artist whose paintings have been featured in "Marfans: Art from the Plateau" at the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery in Odessa, and also showcased in Cenizo Journal. A native of the Channel Islands and raised in Belfast, Dumitrescu earned a bachelor's degree and Masters in Applied Arts from the University of Ulster at Belfast. He is married to journalist Megan Wilde. For more about Dumitrescu, and to view his portfolio, visit www.onlineavram.com.

Recorded in late January 2012. (About 36 minutes)

>>Click here to listen in.

Email Eureka

UPDATE: Email Ninjerie in the Theater of Space-Time





A total eureka moment! Mindfulness applied actually works.

In a notebook:

-->Time session begins.
-->Estimated time for session end

--> Session name (I know that sounds wacky, but it helps focus attention)

--> # emails downloaded (not counting spam, which is immediately deleted)
--> # emails dealt with (in reply to both current and backlog)
--> Net # emails dealt with (not counting new emails)
--> # new emails (that is, emails sent that are not replies to existing backlog)
--> Total number of emails sent (both in "dealt with" and new)

--> Time session actually ends
--> Note difference + or minus estimated time
--> Total time spent this session

--> Then, in a box at the bottom of the page, the running balance of emails dealt with (not counting the new emails)

End of day, total all sessions in box at bottom of page.

+ + + + + +

So now I clearly see the actual time I am spending on email and the progress I am making in plowing down the backlog. This seriously helps. Above all, this method has kept me from checking email at inopportune moments. When I sit down to look at my email now, by Jove, I sit down and deal with my email.

So far this week: +55. Time spent? Don't ask.

Why Don't We Chatter Away to the Dead, Too, While We're at It?

Ayy, less than sparkling conversationalists are these individuals who feel the need to incessantly check their email and thumb-away while at the table. (Did they not take their Xanax? Or, was their house just hit by an asteroid?) Well, like my grandpa used to say, your world is 500 people and you choose who's in it, so it looks like Yours Truly needs to do some rearranging of the guest list.

Seriously, I oftentimes feel as if people who have always been perfectly sane and civilized have been enchanted by some evil spell.

P.S. Here's a TED talk by Sherry Turkle, "Alone Together."

(Not that talking to the dead is ever and always a bad idea. Just not at the table, folks. Unless you plan on tipping. The table, I mean.)

The iBook: Podcasting for Writers & Other Creative Entrepreneurs

UPDATE: PODCASTING FOR WRITERS & OTHER CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS
December 2012





The iBook, PODCASTING FOR WRITERS AND OTHER CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS, will be published this summer by Dancing Chiva Literary Arts.

The website for the iBook is in progress; the trailer and a promotional podcast will be posted soon.

Want to be notified when this iBook is availble? Sign up for the (free) Dancing Chiva newsletter here.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a novel and a new travel memoir on West Texas. (You guessed it, I gave up on TV and I am massively, hopelessly behind on e-mail.)

Podcasting for Writers at the Writer's Center, Bethesda MD

I've had such fun learning to podcast, I am really looking forward to giving the new 2 hour workshop PODCASTING FOR WRITERS at the Writer's Center on May 5th. (More information about my other workshops, including HOW (AND HOW NOT) TO WRITE DIALOGUE here). I'll be talking about the technical stuff, of course, but also choosing from the among the astonishingly wide range of possible formats. Just for example, I've made podcasts out of

a panel discussion at a writer's conference

a book presentation

reading of an excerpt from a book

reading of a guest-blog post

some tips for my workshop students

an interview with another writer
an interview with a wilderness expert as part of an ongoing travel memoir

And there are many more formats to consider... it's a cornucopia.

So we'll start off with your intentions; an overview of the flourishing menu of options; looking at your time and money (and anxiety) budget; and with that in mind, figuring out what works best for you.

The goal is that you will be able to go home and make your own plain vanilla podcast.

>>MORE INFO AND REGISTER HERE.

UPDATE: PODCASTING FOR WRITERS & OTHER CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS is available from Dancing Chiva as an ebook December 2012
>>Click here to visit the website

Two New Workshops at the Writer's Center: Podcasting for Writers & Writing Dialogue

How to celebrate the 150th anniversary of 5 de mayo? I'm not too big on parades, but I love giving workshops on subjects that interest me, so I'll be giving two on the same day, both at the Writer's Center in Bethesda MD:

Podcasting for Writers
May 5, 2012
10 am - 12 pm
Audio podcasts, on-line digital files, not only serve as an important promotional tool for writers, but they can be storytelling vehicles themselves, whether as stand-alone works or complements to text. This workshop provides an introduction and overview of podcasting for writers, from basic concepts to nuts-and-bolts tips. The goal is that by the end of the workshop, you will be able to go home and use your iPhone or digital recorder and computer to generate and then post a simple podcast on-line.
>>REGISTER ON-LINE



How (and How Not) to Write Dialogue
May 5, 2012
1 - 5 pm
One of the most powerfully vivid ways to show character, relationship, conflict, and/or mood is through the use of dialogue. For both beginning and advanced fiction and nonfiction writers, this workshop focuses on the use and misuse of dialogue, with a series of mini-lectures interspersed with brief exercises. The goal is by the end of the workshop, your dialogue will be of notably higher quality.
>>REGISTER ON-LINE


For more about my workshops and many on-line resources for writers, including podcasts, recommended reading lists, 365 free five minute writing exercises, visit my workshop page.

A Conversation with Michael K. Schuessler, on Pita Amor, Elena Poniatowska, Sor Juana, and the rescue of Alma Reed's autobiography, Peregrina

As part of my series of occasional conversations with other writers:

Michael K. Schuessler, author of the biographies Guadalupe Amor: La undécisima musa (The Eleventh Muse) and Elena Poniatowska: An Intimate Portrait, and editor of journalist Alma Reed's long-lost autobiography, Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico. Recorded in Mexico City on March 8, 2012. (Approx 1 hour and 7 minutes)


>>Click here to listen now.

Marfa Mondays Podcast #3: Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

Just posted: the third podcast in the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project 2012-2013:

>> Click here to listen in


Yours Truly interviews Mary Bones, curator of the exhibit "The Lost Colony: Texas Regionalist Paintings," in the Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas.

The Lost Colony refers to the summer art colony at Sul Ross which began in 1932 and ended somewhat mysteriously in 1950. Alpine is 30 minutes northeast of Marfa-- right next door. Of the region, as Michael Duty writes in the introduction to the exhibit's catalog, "It... has long called to artists who have been captivated by its natural beauty, its history, and its people. In recent times, the area has also drawn the attention of writers and reporters who have written numerous articles touting the area's prominence as something of a center, albeit a far flung one, for contemporary art. Those articles focus primarily on Marfa and the influence that minimalist sculptor Donald Judd has had on the town..." Later, Duty adds, that Judd "was certainly not the first artist to be so captivated".

Mary Bones explains the inspiration for the exhibit, and shares the stories about and friendships of some of the painters, in particular Texan Julius Woeltz and his teacher Xavier González, a native of Spain, both of whom made trips to Mexico City to study the Mexican muralists, including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

Some of the other painters discussed are Mabel Vandiver, Anna Keener, Elizabeth Keefer, Coreen Mary Spellman, Harry Anthony De Young, Beatrice Cuming, Otis Dozier, William Lester, James Swann, Ethel Edwards, Alice Reynolds, and Juanita Montgomery. Several of these paintings can be seen in the article by Mary Bones, "The Lost Colony: Texas Regionalist Paintings - Rediscovering an Artistic Past," Cenizo Journal, 4th Quarter 2011.

>>Previous Marfa Mondays podcast: Charles Angell in the Big Bend.

>>For more Marfa Mondays podcasts, and to read about the project, please visit www.cmmayo.com/marfa

Guest-blogger Peter Behrens on 4 Canadian and 1 Irish Writers You Must Read

St Patrick's Day edition! My guest-blogger today is my Yaddo and VCCA amigo, Peter Behrens, whose most recent novel is The O'Briens (Pantheon, March 2012), which has been garnering glowing reviews as he takes it on a coast-to-coast tour. Behrens is also the author of the historical novel The Law of Dreams, and he blogs about trucks, cars, highways, aesthetics, and good writing at autoliterate. Where does he get his inspiration? Maybe it's from hanging out part of the year under the starry skies of Marfa, Texas. The New York Times recently profiled Behrens and his family in A Moth to Marfa's Flame: At Home with Peter Behrens by Penelope Green, along with a slide show, A Winter Home in the West Texas Desert. That said, the best novelists always draw inspiration from other novelists; here are five Behrens recommends.

Four Canadian and 1 Irish Writers You Must Read
By Peter Behrens

Alistair Macleod. His novel No Great Mischief won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1999. The novel is superb but the best of his short stories are transcendant. They were originally published in 2 collections: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. (The 2 volumes were collected and published in the United States as ISLAND in 2000. There are any number of Checkhov-calibre Macleod stories: two of my favorites are "Vision", and "The Closing Down of Summer". "The Tuning of Perfection" belongs right up there as well. Macleod was born in Saskatchewan, into a family of expatriate Nova Scotians. They soon returned to NS, and MacLeod grew up in Inverness County, on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. The culture he grew up within was shaped by Catholic Highlanders and Islandmen who emigrated from Scotland in the middle of the 19th century. It's a world much involved with the sea, and with fishing and coal mining; where Scottish Gaelic is still a common language (more common on Cape Breton than in Scotland, in fact.) The ancient world infuses Macleod's stories, but they are anything but quaint, sentimental, or bucolic. The stories operate like novels: they contain worlds; they are often open-ended. They resonate.


Joseph Boyden so far has published two remarkable novels, Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. Three Day Road is about Cree solidiers serving in the Canadian Army during WWI. Through Black Spruce which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2008. It's protagonst is a legendary bush pilot, son of one of the characters in the first novel. Boyden has Mètis heritage and his characters come out of that rich, impoverished, complex northern world of mixed race and mixed identity. Sometimes they choose between the northern world and the world "away"; sometimes the choice is made for them. They engage with the history of their time. This guy knows how to write. Beautiful sharp sentences.

Alice Munro. Why hasn't this writer won the Nobel Prize? Call me paranoid, but could it be because she's Canadian? Canada is too safe, white, and familiar to be exotic, but does not have the heft and presence on the international literary stage that say the US, Britain, and France do. There has been a spectacular "naissance" (as opposed to renaissance) of Canadian literature in English over the last twenty-five years, and I believe that the clear, weird, dangerous, beautifully constructed, and deceptively simple Munro stories that over the last four decades have been appearing in The New Yorker and in collections like Lives of Girls and Women, The Moons of Jupiter, and The Progress of Love are part of the reason why. The best Munro stories operate as very dense, very rich, compact novels. Nothing gets tied up neatly. Try her story "The Albanian Virgin", for example. Nobel judges please sit up and take notice: there are few writers who have created such a brilliant body of work over a long career. The title of her 2001 collection was Hateship Courtship Friendship Loveship Marriage but Munro's no miniaturist: her themes are the major ones.

Clark Blaise Blaise is finally getting (overdue) attention this year, thanks to the success of his recent story collection, The Meagre Tarmac. I'm happy to consider Blaise a Canadian writer even though he was born in North Dakota, attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop (during the illustrious Ray Carver era), and has lived and taught in the United States for most of his life. His parents were both Canadians, from opposite sides of the cultural divide (English/French; Western/Quebecois; middle class/not middle class). Blaise grew up mostly in the Deep South, and in the Midwest, where his French Canadian father, Leo Blais, recreated himself as Lee Blaise, furniture salesman extraordinaire. Clark Blaise lived and taught in Montreal for a ten-year period, and that era produced some of his most remarkable fictions: (the stories in Tribal Justice, for example) I think Blaise found the city a perfect setting for stories that sift through the complexities of identity, heritage, the immigration experience, and the power and style of family myth. I wrote an introduction to his collection Montreal Stories. Blaise is married to the American novelist Bharati Mukherjee and has long been familiar with Indian expatriate culture in North America: the world of middle class Indian professionals is the universe he explores with deftness and panache in The Meagre Tarmac.

John McGahern Okay here's the Irish corner of my post. For me, McGahern's novel Amongst Women is about as perfect as a novel gets. McGahern is mostly known as a short story writer, and the stories are brilliant, but Amongst Women seems to draw deeply from the well of family background, and it is perfectly constructed and intense. A slender volume, it makes a reader realize that other novelists--particularly contemporary American male novelists--ought to think about leaving a lot more out of their tomes. McGahern's Irish men and women, in the hinterlands of Counties Monaghan and Roscommon, usually in the 1950s, live with ghosts and echoes and silences. His portrait of the father in Amongst Women--a bitter old man, once a rebel and a gunman--is stinging and humane. I haven't read his memoir, All Will be Well, but I'm going to.

-- Peter Behrens

++++++++
UPDATE:
Peter Behren's St Patrick's Day op-ed for the New York Times, "It's About Immigrants, Not Irishness"
The O'Briens on National Public Radio
Marfa Public Radio: Talk at Ten interview with Peter Behrens


+ + + + + +
---> For the complete archive of Madam Mayo guest-blog posts, click here.
Recent posts include translator Harry Morales on Gregory Rabassa's 90th Birthday; Steve Sando on 5 Beans You're Not Eating; and novelist Andrew Dayton on 5 Books to Get Your Head Inside Iran. Last year's St Patrick's Day edition was Michael Hogan on the Irish soldiers of Mexico.