Roger Mansell (1935-2010) on Researching the History of the Mukden POW Camp

I miss my dad more than I can say. This week, had he not passed on to further adventures in 2010, he would have celebrated his 85th birthday. Recently my sister sent me the text of his presentation at a conference on POW history, which I had not seen before, and I am honored to post it here.

He was not a professional historian but a veteran (late 1950s in Korea) and a businessman. His retirement he dedicated to researching the POWs of the Japanese in World War II, which was made possible after many US government files were declassified, and by his ability to interview some of the survivors, then elderly (almost all have since passed on). He founded the Center for Research on Allied POWs Under the Japanese, which continues, its website, www.mansell.com, managed now by historian Wes Injerd. How my dad found the inspiration to do this work is something he talks about in his presentation, below.

His book, which he had finished just before his death, was edited by noted historian Linda Goetz Holmes and published in 2012 by Naval Institute Press as Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam. His papers, which include correspondence, and a multitude of documents and photographs given to him by POWs, are archived at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Since his passing I have maintained his memorial website, www.rogermansell.com.

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Researching the History of the Mukden POW Camp

Roger Mansell
Director, Center For Research, Allied POWS Under The Japanese

First, I want to make this very clear. I am NOT an expert of the Mukden POW Camp. Also, I am not an expert on the full story of ANY Japanese POW camp. 

Many years ago, I was pursuing and advanced degree in civil engineering… in the days before computers and digital calculators. I shall never forget telling one of my college professors about a particular engineer I had met. I said, rather naively, the “he was a real expert on steel re-enforced dome structures!”

He looked over his glasses and said, “Experts are fools who THINK they have all the answers.”

Some 15 years later, having changed careers a number of times, I had started a printing brokerage and a few other related companies. In one of these companies, I hired a young man, Ken Grimes, as my office manager who, it turned out, had been interned in Santo Tomas in Manila.

Often, we would talk about history. Eventually, he related his own horrific experiences of seeing his father beaten into unconsciousness, he mother frequently slapped and his own endless sense of hunger. It was Ken who said, “Someday Roger, when you retire, you should research what happened to all of us and write a book about it. Tell the whole story, not some officer’s point of view.”

That had to be in September of 1987. I note that my oldest POW files (in DOS) stem from that date. Since then, I have easily spent many thousands dollars and more than 10,000 hours researching and documenting the Allied POWS of the Japanese.

I realized rather rapidly that a number of the books, considered valuable, were actually full of glaring errors, gross exaggerations, and extraordinarily myopic. When I began one could count, on their one hand, the books that gave an overall picture of the POW experiences. Oddly, the best overall book was Joan and Clay Blair’s, Return From the River Kwai [Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979]. It is an outstanding narrative of the Australians return from the Death Railway and the tragedy of the December Hell Ships. A few others stand out, e.g., The Pacific War 1931-1945, by Ienaga, Saburō [Pantheon Books, New York, 1978 (Original- Taiheiyō Sensō-1968)].

However, the early 1990’s was a dynamic period in the development of book publishing programs augmented by the rapid development of low cost, computer driven printing processes. Adobe Corporations’ introduction of scalable type (Postscript) and the introduction of the first PC publishing software (PageMaker) revolutionized the book industry.

A number of individual memoirs and unit histories began to appear in the market. POW experiences in many areas of the Pacific were finally being written and published. My own library began to grow. By 1994, POW histories became an important part of current literature with the introduction of Gavin Daws’ Prisoners Of The Japanese [New York, William Morrow, 1994]. The Australian writer’s book became a best seller in the realm of history books. In my view, it is probably the best overall book written so far on treatment of POWS under the Japanese in World War II. It tended to center heavily on a few main characters but Daws did give a stunning and horrendous overview of maltreatment of the POWS.

For those in United States, Hampton Sides’ Ghost Soldiers [Doubleday Publishing, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2001] reinvigorated the interest of historians to learn more about the Americans captured by the Japanese. Few Americans today can comprehend the scale of the disaster in the Philippines. For the first time in America’s history, we lost an entire Army. The story of the rescue of Allied POWS at the Cabanatuan POW camp, 25 miles behind the Japanese battle lines, was one of the great stories of the war. A brilliant writer, Sides covered the entire war experience of the prisoners, from the Bataan Death March, the hell ships, the massacres and the amazing rescue by the US Rangers. It became a wildly successful best seller, multiple paperback editions, and inspired the movie, The Great Rescue, badly done in the usual Hollywood fashion.

For those of you in academia, you certainly know the dangers of historical research. Many years must pass before the emotional and physical passions of the present disappear from the “Ivy Covered Walls.” In the United States, a young historian could not write a book that negatively portrays President Franklin Roosevelt or President Kennedy. To this day, it would still be an exercise in academic suicide and a sure path to the denial of tenure. Perhaps in another 10 to 20 years.

Not being part of academia I had the freedom to pursue my own interests. I quickly realized that I would never be able to write a book to record the history of the POWs. Perhaps in a six or seven volume set but that was, again, beyond my interest. However, I did decide to focus on an overlooked group of men captured on Guam. I could use the men of Guam as a microcosm to explain the whole.

The introduction of NETSCAPE in 1994 changed the world and the direction of my research. I decided that I would convert my company website into a site to document all that I had learned and what I hoped to learn. My father, as a young man, owned a newspaper in Brooklyn New York and I suppose I acquired a reporter’s gene. I wanted the world to know the facts: who, what, why, where and when.

I started the Center as a non-profit organization and solicited volunteers from the local schools where 20 hours of “volunteer” service are required each year. So far, I have funded every cent of the operation. With but rare exception, I freely make copies of everything we have for any researcher, former POW or descendent anywhere in the world. I pray this attitude will spread amongst those who research how the Japanese exploited the POWS.

Some local educators were (and still are) hostile to anything that they think glorifies war. Some have refused to even mention our work. Still, we regularly greet new volunteers. I assure you, getting more than an hour of effective work from the 20 required is a challenge in itself. Teenagers are easily distracted but at least I know we expose them to “real” history that they will never forget.

I started the site to tell just a simple story of the Guam captives. However, these men were eventually scattered all over Japan and I began to explore every camp.

In 2004 the National Archives in Washington finally permitted the use of personal digital cameras with tripod mountings and my researching ability changed dramatically. In my previous five visits to NARA, I averaged around 200 Xerox copies and 5 to 10 written pages of notes each week. It was a slow and tedious process… noting the contents and location of every document that I planned to copy so we could validly cite, tabbing each page I wanted to copy, securing a NARA permission tab, standing in line for a copier… waiting… and doing it all over again for each box.

Now, I could setup a tripod, point my camera to the table, get one permission tab for 16 boxes at one time, and never hesitate to copy an entire file if I thought it may give valid information. Yes, I often seem to photograph duplicates of the same page but when I get home, we try to strip this out. In five subsequent visits, we now have over 8000 pages of rosters, reports, affidavits and diaries. I don’t think twice… if it looks interesting, I shoot the page!

By cooperating with other researchers around the world, e.g., Michael Hurst who has done a magnificent job documenting the camps on Taiwan, Rod Beattie & Neil MacPherson of Australia who are documenting the Burma-Thailand Railways, we have created a VIRTUAL POW RESEARCH CENTER. We freely exchange data bases and work together to assure accuracy of the camp records.

Other than the roster, we have NOT begun to photograph the Mukden files. I do know that  numerous affidavits, diaries and reports are at NARA that describe the experiences of Allied POWS here at the Mukden Prison. Probably a dozen or more books have been written by the survivors of Mukden.

Perhaps the most notable was Joseph A. Petak’s Never Plan Tomorrow.

We can be grateful to Corporal Petak, initially assigned to the 4th Chemical (Smoke Generators), for he created one of the most comprehensive stories about the men imprisoned at Mukden. As with any war history written by a participant, he writes glowingly of those who were his friends, ignores most of the others and relates the story from his point of view.

For the individual, war is “five yards.” He can only see and feel what is five yards in front, to the left, to the right, and to his rear. He can only hope that the enemy is not to his rear.

One is reminded of Sir Winston Churchill’s clear understanding of his historical importance when he stated he would be remembered well by history, “for I shall write the history.” As any reader of Churchill’s work can attest, he clearly placed himself in the middle of all decisions, cleverly evading the credit due to “Ultra,” the breaking of the German coding machine, “Enigma.”

Still, Churchill’s book has stood the test of time for it was sequentially accurate and offered insight into the conduct of the war. No student of the European War can begin to understand the full scope of the Allied efforts unless they read all five volumes.

So it is with Charles Petak. While his skill as a writer is not of literary merit, it is an excellent example of historic, non-fiction, literary narratives– a memoir using re-created conversations. The reader is projected into the milieu of prison life. We see and feel the daily struggle against hunger, the bitter cold of winter and the unrelenting brutality of the Japanese guards.

With over 150 hours of computer time, cross-checking each name against the National Archive list of American POWs, we have been able to correct every American name and all those who were deceased.

What Petak failed to include was a reasonably accurate time line of events. It is one of the most important details that must be known in order to investigate and document any camp or, if interested, the story of any individual man, hell-ship, unit or camp.

The second most important diary for this camp is that of Dr. (Captain) Mark Gardner Herbst. As a medical officer, the Japanese allowed him to have paper and pencils. In some camps, the possession of a pencil was a crime, punishable by a severe beating or even death. Many camp inmates knew that Herbst had carefully recorded the date, cause, and place of each known death. This diary, if found, would be a good time-line for numerous events.

Many researchers had heard of the diary but it could never be found in the National Archives.  Despite many individual searches, the diary remained elusive. Finally, in May 2005, I stumbled across a diary labeled “Diary, Capt MARK G. HERREST”. Flipping the cover open, I realized immediately it was the Herbst Diary– not just his original diary but an additional written summary that included POW numbers, date and cause of death plus, most important, the exact location of all known graves.

Whoever prepared the diary for the archive mis-read his name and the error was simply a permanent part of the archive ascension order. No computer search or visual search of the finding aids would point you to the diary. In over 50 days of careful searching through over 500 carefully selected boxes, and skimming through at least twice that many more, I can say without reservation that ninety percent of research success is pure luck.

At the Imperial War Museum in London, we also found a diary (IWM File 96/41/1) of the British Major R. Peaty. Unfortunately Major Peaty clearly demonstrated the immense gulf between officers and, as the British term their enlisted men, the “other ranks” or OR’s. Still, he did, rather carefully, note the deaths of each man but rarely bothered with a name unless it was an officer he knew personally. He did make a reasonable time line, recording significant events, e.g., one yank died; 2 Yanks died; 1 Yank died, etc. But, he did record the arrival of the influx of men from the Oryoku sequence and the high ranking officers from Taiwan. Now we had a confirmation of Herbst’s dates of death. (I extracted notes for this for at the time, digital cameras were still not allowed at the IWM).

Last April, I found the Mukden rosters (in RG 407 Box 122, dated 1 November 1944) and we were at last able to determine the arrival dates, prior POW numbers and current POW numbers for the full camp… at least those that remained. The only surprise was that it now appears the Americans arrived in two groups. The larger group arriving on 11 November 1942 and a smaller group on 18 December 1942. We do hope to get one of our volunteers to add this important information to our data set. As the Japanese normally assigned one’s POW number based upon the day they arrived, we should be then able to sort and verify the EXACT composition of the arriving groups of men.

It is this type of information that will enable us to establish a complete and accurate time line of events for the camp. Until we have these POW numbers and arrival dates added to our data set, we cannot even be certain that we have the complete list of men transferred back to Japan in May of 1944. We noted these men in the Nagoya POW branch camp at Kamioka but we have also seen notations of a second group that may have been sent to a camp in Fukuoka. These newly found rosters, with arrival dates, old POW numbers and Mukden Camp POW numbers will resolve some of the mysteries– at least for our Center.

In a cursory look, however, we suspect there may be some errors in the numbers that were assigned to some of those who arrived from Taiwan. Remember, these lists were prepared by ordinary military clerks and prepared mostly on Mimeograph machines, a process that died in the 1960’s when Xerox developed the office copier. Having typed my share of these mimeo masters, I know for certain there will ALWAYS be errors. I have NEVER found a NARA roster without an error.

We have contributed the final list of Americans in this camp. We were spurred to create this full roster a few years ago by AO Wang and Linda Goetz-Holmes. Last year, I donated my personal copy of Petak’s book to this museum. We will soon add a separate and more accurate listing, including unit designations, of the first 100 Mukden Commonwealth prisoners (16 Australian POWS already fully documented).

These specific 100 men were part of 1000 men in the first group of “white slaves” sent into slavery for the Japanese industrial corporations. These were the men of  Group “B” sent north from Singapore on the Fukkai Maru, arriving in Fusan (Pusan) Korea on 22 September 1942. Five hundred of the thousand captives remained on the ship and went sent to Moji in Japan.

The “A” Group were some 400 odd high ranking officers and aides sent to Formosa (Taiwan) and, as you all know, many of these “A” group men came to Mukden with the “Generals.”

Ridden with malaria, diarrhoea and dysentery, the 1000 men of “B” group were paraded for hours, marching through the streets of Pusan. Koreans lined the route as it was a national holiday and the Japanese fully intended to show the Koreans they were the master of the Pacific. The Japanese nationals were easy to spot as they were more colorfully clad and frequently tossed garbage, spittle and stones at the passing prisoners. The more harassment, the more the malnourished and malaria ridden troops stood up to the Japanese, finally marching in step, sounding off cadence and looking back at the Japanese with total disdain. The large number of Japanese photographers and film makers found little to use for their propaganda.

At best, the early Korean POW camps were poorly organized by the Japanese. The work loads were light, often non-existent. Compared to other POW camps, the food rations in Korea were actually equal to those of the Japanese soldiers. In general, their health improved over the next two months. But with the onset of winter, the sick rates climbed due to their weakened conditions.

In the first week of November, the most healthy 100 men were selected and sent by train on 9 November 1942 for their journey to Mukden. Their health, on average compared to the Americans who arrived at the same time, was markedly better. None of these men perished from illness or disease while at Mukden — not one — despite suffering the same privations. However, two men of the “B” Group died in the bombing of 10 December 1944.

The only other Commonwealth man to die at Mukden was an Australian Colonel Pigdon who died in July 1945 , having arrived from Taiwan in a severely malnourished condition. His death, incidently, was not recorded by Doctor Herbst nor his name noted by Major Peaty.

In researching the POWS, one also finds amazing little tidbits that open entirely new areas of interest. For example, in looking at other Korean files, I noted that a number of the “B” group men and some 100 Americans were eventually sent to a camp called KONAN in present day North Korea. The location of this camp is in a port city that some suspect was used by the Japanese in their efforts to process uranium. Hopefully, these files will all be declassified in my lifetime. Tucked into one of the of the Keijo (Seoul) files was a report on the balance of the “B” group who were taken directly to Japan on the same voyage as the Korean contingent.

This example is how we find we are able to tell the story of the POWs. One document leads to another and another mystery is solved. If you are new to the world of POW research, welcome! If you need help, ask! Don’t hoard information. Don’t make others waste time trying to find the same information. The facts of history should not to be hidden. Let others write their interpretations and tell their stories. As a researcher of the POWS, keep your opinions off the web sites unless you ARE the POW or relative thereof.

Now, I fully support this new Museum, here on the site of the Mukden POW Camp. I hope you will create a great web site to tell the story of the Japanese POWS, especially those men held here at Mukden. Let the men who were here write their stories on your web site. Tell the story of Unit 731. Tell the story of the civilian internment camps in China. Tell the story of ALL the Japanese camps in China. Let the world know what happened. Tell the facts. Show the pictures. Let the facts speak for themselves.

I hope that all of you, in this room, contribute your research freely so that the full story can be posted to a web site run by this museum. Make the site available in as many languages as possible. Make it the best POW site in the world and share the information freely.

Last, always remember that nothing in history is new. It is only information that YOU never knew.

Thank you.

—Roger Mansell (1935-2010)

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C.M. Mayo here: If you have any questions about POWs and this research I am not the one to ask. Please check out www.mansell.com and from there, you can always email the webmaster, Wes Injerd, whom I am sure will be very glad to hear from you.

Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico

Notes on Tom Lea and His Epic Masterpiece of a Western, The Wonderful Country

Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

How Are Some of the Most Accomplished Writers and Poets Coping with the Digital Revolution?

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

I am not the only one coming to the conclusion, after many years of enthusiastic embrace, that the digital revolution has been a Faustian deal. This month’s “Q & A” is not with one writer but a reprise of a question I have posed to many writers over the past few years, as part of this blog’s fourth Monday Q & A: How have you been coping with the digital revolution? Herewith a wide-ranging selection of their answers. May you find them as thought-provoking as I did.

KATHERINE DUNN: … I have an iPhone that I use mainly for photos…but I’m not attached to it like many people. I have learned to sit down, and state in my head what I need to do, i.e., “I need to get this canvas started and work on it for one hour.”

Simple tiny steps of work. I find I actually get a lot done in a shorter amount of time than when I was younger.

I also do not feel compelled to be in the studio all the time. I’m 62, maybe that is part of it–I have less enthusiasm for other people’s presence. 

I think if most people just tried [turning] off notifications on their iPhones it would help! I see some people unable to have a 5 minute conversation without getting interrupted.

I’ve learned to get on and off social media. I deleted 5000 “friends” on Facebook and kept 100 of people I really knew. I never post on it. I only maintain my Apifera Farm nonprofit page. I don’t comment hardly ever on anything of FB. I decided it was a drain and that I was basically entertaining the masses with free photos, stories and more, and was not seeing a return. The nonprofit still can bring in donations through FB. Instagram is eye candy, I use it as a marketing tool for my non profit, and post art when I have it to show.

But that’s it. I don’t interact on it, except to see a baby photo or something of real friends.
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From Q & A with Katherine Dunn on White Dog and Writing in the Digital Revolution, Madam Mayo blog, July 27, 2020

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JOANNA HERSHON: I imagine that, like most people, I’m more distracted with social media, texting and email but I still do feel like when I’m writing… I’m writing, just like I always did before the internet existed. Part of what I love and crave about writing fiction is that it’s a process that feels timeless and part of my essential self.
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From Q & A with Joanna Hershon on Her New Novel St. Ivo, Madam Mayo blog, March 23, 2020

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BARBARA CROOKER: …I resisted using social media for a long time once we got a high speed connection, fearing it would be a time suck (it is!). I do try to answer emails in a timely fashion, but I limit Facebook to half hour sessions, confess that I don’t see the use of Twitter, but do use it to post when poems are online or if I have an event, and haven’t figured out Instagram yet. . . .  The good part about all of this (the Digital Revolution) is that I can easily share work, especially work that has appeared in print-only journals, with larger audiences. I maintain my own website (www.barbaracrooker.com), posting a new poem every month, plus links to poems published online. The downside of it is that I’d need to be cloned to really be able to be a big presence on social media. But I feel my real job is just to write poems, so I’m working as hard as I can to keep the rest of the “stuff” to a minimum.  
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Q & A with Poet Barbara Crooker on the Magic of VCCA, Reading, and Some Glad Morning, Madam Mayo blog, December 23, 2019

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NANCY PEACOCK: My biggest experience with the digital revolution has been with Facebook. After much cajoling from an agent and the culture, I finally opened a Facebook account. That’s what we’re supposed to do, as writers, right? We’re supposed to promote our work every possible way. I was surprised to find things that mattered to me on Facebook, and then, as those things dwindled, I became addicted to searching for them. In the end, my mind became fractured, and I was unable to focus on what I needed to focus on: the writing. I deleted my FB account. I did not disable it. I deleted it, and I feel my mind healing. It was like coming off a drug…. For me it really came down to either being a writer or presenting as a writer. I chose the former.
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From Q & A: Nancy Peacock, Author of The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson, Madam Mayo blog, March 26, 2018

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BRUCE BERGER: I write the same way I did when I began, which is on a yellow legal pad in longhand with a Ticonderoga hardness of 3 pencil, which I transcribe to my laptop, then print for corrections. While I keep up with email and google for info, I don’t participate in social media or text. For the record, I identify as a retro analoggerhead Luddite retard from the Silent Generation.
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From Q & A with Bruce Berger on A Desert Harvest, Madam Mayo blog, November 25, 2019

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SERGIO TRONCOSO: I think you have to be relentless about getting the word out about your books and appearances on social media, you have to accept this ‘fast world’ as our world now, even though sometimes I hate it, and you have to do your best not to lose yourself in the posting and re-posting and stupid arguments that too often occur digitally. I do it, then I go back to my work. So I feel a bit schizophrenic sometimes, but I do relish the moment when I turn everything off and lose myself in my work or on a particularly thorny issue of craft. I think you almost have to have a ‘segmented mind,’ that is, learn to function in the realms of social media effectively. But then also learn to take all of this digital frenzy somewhat skeptically. The most basic way it’s affected my writing is that now I write about it, in dystopian stories about where I think our country might be headed, with people too quick to judge superficially, so enamored with images, so lost in our digital world that the real world becomes an aside. 
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From Q & A with Sergio Troncoso, Author of A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, October 28, 2019

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ERIC BARNES: My advice is to turn it all off when you write. Phone. Email. Everything. I write on a computer, but have to be sure all the alerts and notifications are off. Not just emails and the Web, but even alerts about software updates and battery life. Everything. Even the word processor I use, I have it set up so all the toolbars and menus and everything else is hidden. I just want a blank white page on which I can type. 

Otherwise, the distractions are deadly.
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From Q & A with Eric Barnes on Above the Ether and Turning It All Off, Madam Mayo blog, July 22, 2019

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JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I don’t have a writing routine, but when a poem does rear its Hyacinthine head, I become obsessive—preoccupied, distracted—and I pretty much stop answering emails. I have my blog set up so that my posts automatically flow through to a few social media sites, but I don’t generally visit those sites myself, even less so now that I’ve turned off notifications. Unfortunately, I follow numerous sites for political and poetical news, so that when a poem’s finished, I have to wade through days of unread articles. Overall, I’d say that I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.
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From Q & A: Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on The World As Is, April 22, 2019


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MARY MACKEY: I’ve been using computers since the early 80’s, so the Digital Revolution did not come as a surprise. It hasn’t affected my writing, but, like all writers these days, I have to spend time on social media that I would have otherwise spent writing, so I ration my online time carefully. To write poetry, to create anything, you need long periods of silence and intense concentration. You need to be able to hear your inner voice. You can’t do this if you are always checking your phone. My solution is rigorous compartmentalization. I set aside times to write and times to do social media.
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From Q & A: Mary Mackey on The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, Madam Mayo blog, November 18, 2018

What works and doesn’t work for you?

My own sense is that accomplishing anything in this midst of the digital revolution requires clarity of one’s intentions, as well as self-awareness and self-honesty when it comes to assessing one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and time constraints. Hence, everyone’s answer will differ. But we are all struggling with something tremendous.

Much more on this subject anon.

Synge’s The Aran Islands and Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus 

Q & A: Shelley Armitage on Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place 

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

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Poet, Writer, and Teacher Pat Schneider (1934-2020)

Poet, writer and teacher Pat Schneider has passed on. She left a remarkable body of work, and over many decades, as the visionary founder of Amherst Writers & Artists, she taught and helped and otherwise influenced uncounted writers and poets. Read her obituary here.

Pat Schneider. Screenshot of photo from Amherst Writers & Artists Founder’s bio.

Back when I was editing the bilingual journal Tameme, Noemí Escandell sent me her lovely translation of Pat’s poem, “How to Tell a Daughter.” It appeared in the third and final issue, “Reconquest/ Reconquista,” published in 2003. In tribute to Pat, here it is:

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My favorite book of Pat’s, and which I warmly recommend to my writing workshop students, is How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice.

Bon voyage, dear Pat. May your works shine on.

In Memorium: 
William C. Gruben and his “Animals in the Arts in Texas”

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

Translating Across the Border

“Duende” and the Importance of Questioning ELB

UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

DUENDE

Duende is a Spanish word that might be translated as “sprite” or “fairy.” But for poets and other artists, no one has evoked, if not quite explained this rare, magnetic quality in art, so well as Federico García Lorca in his poetry and in his essay, “The Theory and Play of the Duende.”

Who and what else has duende? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Tolstoy— and especially broad sections of War and Peace. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker— all of it. William Butler Yeats’ poetry. Charlie Chaplin’s silent movie “The Pilgrim”— especially the final scene at the US-Mexico border. In a time closer to our own, Flannery O’Connor’s fiction oozes duende.

Do you already have your own list? If not, I can recommend making one as a more than illuminating exercise.

ELB

Oftentimes writing with duende aims to épater les bourgeois, shock the middle class, as those poètes français d’autrefois so loved to do. The danger is that, alas, that épater stuff— I call it ELB for short— more often than not lacks duende. And ELB without duende is so old hat, you can vacuum it up along with the dust bunnies and dead flies.

In plain English, I label as ELB without duende those scenes, imagery, and lines of dialogue that don’t do squat, other than reveal the author’s rude jones to appear too cool for school. Entre nous, dear writerly reader, alas, more often than not, ELB might as well also stand for Easy Lazy Bullcrap.

Or, say, Egregiously Louche Buffalocrap.

“To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people – that is all!”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, 1893

It’s 2020. Scandalizing Grandma? She’s probably got three tattoos and you don’t want to guess what she’s watching on YouTube.

Green hair? Black fingernails? Chainsaw massacre? Yawn.

That said, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of the finest short stories yet written in the English language and it’s totally ELB, in the original sense. It is deeply weird, crisp, charming, punch-funny, and horrifying for, in the end– trigger warning!– Grandma gets offed by the mass murderer. It works. Why? Did I mention, it is deeply weird, crisp, charming, and punch-funny? O’Connor had so much duende, Dr. Jung would not have been surprised that her family’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she wrote so much of her fiction, was called Andalusia. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” appeared in 1953, and it still twirls the wig of just about everybody who reads it.

Religion is not my rodeo. However, I can recommend this fascinating interview with literary scholar Dr Jessica Hooten Wilson about how Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith informs her writing (the camera is a little shaky, so you might want to focus on just the sound):

More about duende and ELB anon.

P.S. You can find the archive of workshop posts here. Again, I offer a post for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing on the second Monday of every month.

The Book As Thoughtform, the Book As Object:
A Book Rescued, a Book Attacked, and Katherine Dunn’s
Beautiful Book White Dog Arrives

One Simple Yet Powerful Practice in Reading as a Writer 

Waaaay Out to the Big Bend of Far West Texas,
and a Note on El Paso’s Elroy Bode

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Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


Translation on the Menu, Plus from the Archives: “Café San Martín”– Reading Mexican Poet Agustín Cadena at the Café Passé in Tucson, Arizona

For me literary translation is a yoga, a labor of love, and a form of homage to both individual writers and poets and to Mexico, the country where I have lived for most of my life. For many years now, with one exception, and not counting the work of editing a magazine and an anthology, I’ve focussed on translating Mexican contemporary poems and short fiction that, with a bit of effort (and on occasion, by synchronistic magic) end up in literary magazines and small press anthologies. Payment usually: two copies of the publication. News flash: Not a way for anyone to make a living. But it is a wonderful thing to do, and I sincerely encourage writers and poets– most especially poets– to give translation a go. You don’t need to speak the original language fluently (though I do, in fact, speak Spanish fluently). The important things are firstly, getting permission (usually not a problem); secondly, a willingness to make the dedicated effort to understand the original (which may require a dictionary and the help of a native-speaker); and thirdly, an ability to render the work with equivalent art in one’s own language. This is why poets so often make the best literary translators, even when they cannot speak the original language.

Our world needs translation. It’s such fun to be able to share a discovery. Sometimes in undertaking a translation one makes a new friend–or deepens an already existing friendship. And from a purely selfish point of view, for the translator it can be a most stimulating and refreshing exercise in wrestling with the languages– the original language and one’s own. As an artist, translation shakes me up, it keeps my own writing and poetry fresh.

I’ve got a long list of translation projects… many to be aimed at literary magazines, and a few with more commercial possibilities…. right now, however, I’m still working on my Far West Texas book and, relatedly, the 22nd podcast for the Marfa Mondays series, which I hope to be able to post this month. But next month at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) virtual conference I will be back on Planet Translation, albeit briefly, to read an excerpt from a short story by Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum. Apropos of that upcoming powwow, here’s a post from the archives about my reading of a poem by Agustín Cadena at that same conference in 2015. I’m not Cadena’s only English language translator, by the way– my dear and esteemed amiga poet and essayist Pat Dubrava has also translated a large batch of Cadena’s short stories. They are brilliant. She’ll be reading some Cadena at this next ALTA.

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

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog December 14, 2015

Agustín Cadena

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. (NOTE: This link goes to the old blog on blogger.com. I’ll update the link as soon as this post is migrated.)

> 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– moreover, 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.

Q & A: Ellen Cassedy, 
Translator of On the Landing by Yenta Mash, 
Master Chronicler of Exile

Spotlight on Mexican Fiction: “The Apaches of Kiev” 
by Agustín Cadena in Tupelo Quarterly and Much More

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

Newsletter & Cyberflanerie (Way-out Artists & Ideas Edition)

This blog posts on Mondays. As of this year, whenever the month happens to have a fifth Monday, I offer my news plus cyberflanerie.

(You can subscribe to my blog by email on the signup form to the right or, if you’re on a smartphone or tablet, scroll on down, you’ll find the signup for at the bottom of the screen. For the very once-in-a-while emailed newsletter only, just send me an email, cmmayo (at) cmmayo (dot) com and I’ll add you to the list.)

Podcast

Marfa Mondays Podcast #22, an interview with Bill Smith in Sanderson, Cactus Capital of Texas, is alllllllllllmost ready. I’m working at a snail’s pace this summer, transcribing notes on my wanderings around the Permian Basin. Meanwhile, listen in anytime to the 21 other Marfa Mondays podcasts here.

Blog Posts

Selected Madam Mayo posts since the previous newsletter:

Q & A with Katherine Dunn on White Dog and Writing in the Digital Revolution

Doug Hill’s Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

The Book As Thoughtform, the Book As Object: A Book Rescued, a Book Attacked, and Katherine Dunn’s Beautiful Book White Dog Arrives

Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm

Workshop & Reading

Women Writing the West doing a Real World thing back in the time of BC (before corona)…. sigh… Note my book of poetry, Meteor, second row back from front, far left. Book PR…. WAHHHH

Originally to be held this October in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the annual Women Writing the West conference has gone virtual. As originally scheduled, but now via Zoom, I’ll be teaching a break-out workshop on powerful yet often overlooked poetic techniques for novelists and writers of creative nonfiction.

Saturday, October 17, 2020 
9:10-10:10
8:00 – 9:00 AM (Colorado time)
POETIC TECHNIQUES TO POWER UP
YOUR FICTION & NONFICTION
C.M. MAYO

For writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction (whether biography, nature writing, or memoir), award-winning poet and writer C.M. Mayo’s workshop gives you a toolkit of specific poetic techniques you can apply immediately to make your writing more vivid and engaging for your readers.

Using handouts, first we’ll cover specificity with reference to the senses, a technique, basic as it may be, that many writers tend to underutilize. Then, in supersonic fashion, we’ll zoom over alliteration; use of imagery; repetition; listing; diction drops and spikes; synesthesia; and crucially, how to work with rhythm and sound to reinforce meaning. 

The goal is for your writing to take an immediate step up.

P.S. You can find my book of poetry, Meteor, on amazon.com, et al.

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And at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference also this October, also gone virtual, I’ll be reading from my translation of one of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s haunting short stories, “The Aunt,” which appeared in the beautiful Catamaran Literary Reader in 2019.

For those of you writerly readers who happen to be translators, or who might fancy to dip a toe in such waters, there’s still time to register for the conference, if you feel so moved. I can tell you that I have always found the ALTA conferences well worthwhile– old friends, new friends, everyone is friendly and encouraging, there are magazine and book editors, scads of thought-provoking panels, and readings galore of translations from an untold number of languages. (My own thing is Spanish, always amply represented in ALTA.) The most fun of all is the traditional “Declamation,” at the end. Thanks to the covid, rather than meeting for a weekend in Tucson, Arizona, this will be ALTA’s first ever virtual conference, spread out over three weeks. You can view the conference schedule here.

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Cyberflanerie

B. Traven’s last novel, Aslan Norval, has been published in English in Kindle. Much more about this unusual novel and news anon.

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Susan Brind Morrow’s essay for Lapham’s Quarterly “The Turning Sky: Discovering the Pyramid Texts” — and about her astonishingly beautiful and important work, much more anon.

Mexico Cooks! blog offers a fascinating and detail-packed post about Mexican vanilla.

Rick Black on The Amichai Windows:

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Michael Minard’s 2 minute film Shiela Hale– Book Lover, Art Maker (hat tip to Deborah Batterman, who wrote about Hale’s work with her dictionary in this blog post, and supplies this link to an installation Hale did with a musician):

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William Zeitler plays the glass armonica:

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The Sociological Eye on the sociology of masks and social distancing.

Lady Evelyn Gray is just one of the many, many richly illustrated posts on the history of figure skating over at Ryan Stevens’ excellent Skate Blog. Tip of the sombrero to A. for this link.

“Viktor Schauberger: Comprehend and Copy Nature,” a documentary film.

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To my delighted surprise, in this video below, Rev. Steve Hermann, author of Mediumship Mastery, warmly recommends my book (and my translation of Madero’s book), Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. (You can read my Q & A with Hermann about the mediumship of Francisco I. Madero, one of the more interesting of the many interesting interviews I’ve posted here on Madam Mayo blog, at this link. )

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Life is wacky good. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Pilgrim,” a masterpiece of early silent cinema– set in Texas!–is now in the public domain.

Newsletter: Podcasts, Publications, Workshop,
Plus Cyberflanerie (Extra-Eclectic Edition!)

Using Imagery (The “Metaphor Stuff”) 

Biographers International Interview with C.M. Mayo:
Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution

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Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

From the Archives: On Francisco I. Madero as Medium: Q & A with Rev. Stephen A. Hermann, Author of “Mediumship Mastery”

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

Throughout this month of August I am on vacation, nonetheless posting each Monday– herewith, one of my favorites from this blog’s archives:

On Francisco I. Madero as Medium:
Q & A with Rev. Stephen A. Hermann,
Author of Mediumship Mastery

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog July 15, 2015

Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution,
President of Mexico 1911-1913, and author of Manual espírita (Spiritist Manual), 1911 — subject of my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution.

The astonishing thing about Francisco I. Madero’s Manual espírita of 1911 is that it lays out his philosophy so passionately and precisely, and yet, with counted exceptions (among them, Mexican historians Enrique Krauze, Yolia Tortolero, Manuel Guerra de Luna, and Alejandro Rosas), apart from cursory mentions, historians of the Mexican revolution have told us nearly nothing about this text, its origins, broader esoteric cultural context, and profound implications for understanding Madero’s actions as leader of the 1910 Revolution and as President of Mexico. My translation of Madero’s Manual espírita— the first into English and, as far as I have been able to ascertain, into any language— is included in my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.

>>Click here to view a one minute-long Mexican government video which gives a very basic idea of the official version of Madero’s importance in Mexico.<<

Madero was a medium in the Spiritist tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of France and Mexico. While Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution is a scholarly contribution, I write about Madero and his Spiritist Manual not as an academic historian, but as his translator and as a creative writer who has lived in and written about Mexico for many years. I presumed that most of my readers would encounter Madero’s ideas about communicating with the dead extremely peculiar, even disturbing. For the most part this has been the case. To give one of several (to me, amusing) examples, one prominent Mexico expert who shall remain unnamed felt moved to inform me that, though he very much enjoyed my book, he would not be reading Spiritist Manual.

That said, I am grateful to have been invited to speak about it at the Centro de Estudios de la Historia de México CARSO, Mexico City’s National Palace, Rice University, Stanford University, UCSD Center for US-Mexican Studies, and elsewhere, and to date, historians of Mexico and other scholars in these audiences have been both thoughtful and generous in their comments.

To my surprise, however, the Internet has brought my and Madero’s books another, very different audience, one that encounters the Spiritist Manual as, shall we say, a vintage text out of a well-known and warmly embraced tradition. 

Rev. Stephen A. Hermann, author of Mediumship Mastery
www.stevehermannmedium.com

In his review for the National Spiritualist, Rev. Stephen A. Hermann writes, “Anyone interested in the history of international Spiritualism as well as as mediumnistic unfoldment will find this manual invaluable.”

With the aim of providing further historical and philosophical context for Francisco I. Madero and his Spiritist Manual, I asked Rev. Hermann if, from the perspective of a practicing medium and teacher of mediumship— and author of the just-published Mediumship Mastery: The Mechanics of Receiving Spirit Communications— he would be so kind as to answer some of my questions about Madero as a medium and about his philosophy.

ON MADERO AS MEDIUM

C.M. MAYO: In your book, Mediumship Mastery, you distinguish between two broad types of mediumship, mental and physical. “Automatic writing” you categorize as both. Francisco I. Madero was a writing medium, that is, a medium who channeled messages from the spirit world through his hand and pen onto paper. Can you explain this? And, is this type of mediumship still common today?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Madero practiced automatic writing in which spirit personalities would control the movements of his arm and hand to write messages. It is common for many people, not knowing the difference, to confuse automatic writing with the phase of mediumship known as inspirational writing. With inspirational writing the medium’s conscious and unconscious mind are very much involved with the process. Genuine automatic writing occurs typically quite rapidly with the medium unable to control the movements taking place. The conscious mind of the medium is not involved in the process and the medium could even be engaged in a conversation with others while the writing is produced.

In the period that Madero developed his mediumship the practice of automatic writing, the use of planchette and table for spirit communication was quite common for many mediums. Madero was heavily influenced by the writings of the French Spiritualist Kardec, whose classic Medium’s Book was widely used by students of spirit communication as a standard for mediumistic unfoldment. 

As a phase of mediumship automatic writing is not commonly practiced the way it would have been a century ago. In most countries around the world most mediums practice mental phases of mediumship such as clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience (psychic seeing, hearing and sensing). There are also many mediums who practice controlled speaking or trance channeling.

C.M. MAYO: How how would you, as a medium, evaluate Madero’s mediumnistic notebooks? (These are preserved in his archive in Mexico’s Ministry of Finance; in my book, I quoted from some of them, communications in Madero’s handwriting signed by “Raúl,” “José” and “B.J.”).

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: I was impressed by Madero’s dedication to God, the spirit world and his mission to help Mexico. He certainly appears to have lived by higher spiritual principles. The communications that he received I feel were genuine and indicate the great effort of teachers in the spirit world to use him as a positive influence in the material world. I would love to see all his notebooks published and your book distributed even more as Madero’s work is an excellent example of a politician motivated selflessly out of love and duty.

[C.M. MAYO: The mediumnistic notebooks have been transcribed and published in volume VI. of Obras completas de Francisco Ignacio Madero, edited by Alejandro Rosas Robles, Editorial Clío, Mexico, 2000. For more about the work of Alejandro Rosas Robles and other Mexican historians on Madero and esoteric philosophy, see my post Lifting the (Very Heavy) Curtain on the Leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution].

C.M. MAYO: It seems that by the time Madero became president he was no longer channeling written messages but instead relied on “inspiration” or telepathic communication from spirits. My understanding is that Madero considered this an advance in his mediumnistic abilities. Would you agree?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: A student of mediumship is always progressing and as such the manner that his or her mediumship functions will evolve accordingly. I assume that Madero would have put considerable effort into growing as an individual as well as enhancing his own mediumistic skills. It is not that one phase of mediumship is better than another. All spiritual gifts are ways for the spirit personalities to bring love and healing to people in the material world. It is very common for mediums to develop new phases of mediumship as they gain experience and are ready. Madero was very progressive in all aspects of his life.

C.M. MAYO: One of the questions I invariably hear in any presentation or conference about Madero and his Spiritism is that, if he really were hearing from spirits, why did they not warn him about the coup d’etat of 1913, so that he could save himself? (Perhaps because as President coping with the challenges of governing, he no longer had the peace of mind to listen?) In Mediumship Mastery (p. 154-155) you write, “While warnings might be given in order to prevent a mishap, telling the recipient negative information such as he or she is going to die next week or be involved in a serious accident, generally would not come through with controlled regulated mediumship.” Can you explain and/or elaborate?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Madero would have been under great stress so it is very possible that his own mind would not have been receptive to warnings given by his guardians in the spirit world. On the other hand, we do not know the full picture in terms of his karma or lessons in this lifetime. Madero performed great works when he was physically present. I am sure that these great works would have continued in other realms after his physical death.

C.M. MAYO: In the introduction to your book, Mediumship Mastery, you mention that you trained as a hypnotherapist. From his personal library we know that Madero was intensely interested in hypnotism. Would this knowledge have enhanced his abilities as a medium and as a political leader? And if so, how?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Kardec and many of the pioneers of the Spiritualist movement studied Mesmerism and altered-states-of-consciousness. The awareness of inducing trance states is crucial for the development of mediumistic ability. For example, with clairvoyance the more the medium is able to place his or her mind into a receptive state and get the analytical mind out of the way, the easier it will be to receive as well as accurately interpret spirit messages given in this manner. Mediumship mastery requires considerable discipline on the part of the medium. Hypnosis is an effective tool for helping student mediums train their minds and open up as instruments for the spirit personalities to work through.

ON SPIRITISM, SPIRITUALISM, 
THE PHILIPPINES, AND PSYCHIC SURGERY

C.M. MAYO: Spiritism developed in France from the root of Anglo-American Spiritualism. As a medium who has practiced and taught in various countries from the U.S. to New Zealand and including in the Philippines, do you see important differences in these traditions, Spiritualism and Spiritism, today?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Spiritism and Spiritualism are branches of the same tree. A Spiritist is a Spiritualist who follows primarily the doctrine found within Kardec’s writings. Anglo-American Spiritualists do not limit themselves to Kardec’s writings and as a whole have not officially embraced the concept of reincarnation. The Spiritist approach generally places more emphasis on higher philosophy and less on phenomena or providing evidence of survival as the Spiritualist approach emphasizes. I think as a whole the Spiritist approach tends to be more progressive than what is found in many Spiritualist churches. However, Spiritists can be a bit dogmatic in adhering to Kardec’s writings.
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C.M. MAYO: In your chapter “Spiritiual Healing” you discuss psychic surgery in the Philippines. Though Madero does not discuss psychic surgery in the Spiritist Manual, in my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, I mention the Filipino and Brazilian psychic surgeons as well as some Mexicans including Niño Fidencio and Doña Pachita because they are well-known in Mexico and I felt they represented traditions that could claim at least some tangly bit of roots in the early 20th century Spiritism of Madero. Would you agree? Also, have you practiced and/or witnessed any psychic surgery yourself?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: There have always been mediums or healers in all cultures. The Philippines were a Spanish colony for almost three hundred years. Many of the leaders of the revolution against Spanish rule were involved in the practice of Spiritualism. Kardec’s writings were again a major influence in this part of the world.

I teach mediumship and healing worldwide and the Philippines is one of the countries I regularly visit. Over the years I have witnessed and experienced many remarkable physical and emotional healings with my own mediumship as well as the mediumship of others. With healing God is the healer and we are only vehicles for God’s unconditional love to work through. Yes, I practice psychic surgery with the help of spirit doctors. However, I do not pull blood and guts out of people and drop it in a tin can as many Filipino healers do.

C.M. MAYO: My understanding is that Spiritism arrived in the Philippines with Spanish translations of Kardec’s works. Presumably many of these came out Barcelona, an important center for esoteric publishing (and indeed, many of the books in Madero’s personal library were from Barcelona). When I discovered that Madero’s 1911 Manual espírita had been reprinted by Casa Editorial Maucci in Barcelona in 1924, I immediately wondered whether any copies had made their way to the Philippines and so played some role in the spread of Spiritism there. Do you know anything about this?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: I do not know anything about this. Don Juan Alvear in 1901 founded the first Spiritist center in San Fabrian, Pangasinan. I have worked at this center many times and the energy is amazing. Alvear was a great political leader, educator and prominent intellectual. Like Madero, Alvear authored a book on mediumship and was a hero of the revolution. His statue is outside the government building and across the street from the Spiritist center he founded.

[C.M. MAYO: See Hermann’s blog post about some history of Spiritism in the Philippines here. And for more about Spiritism in the Philippines, a subject on which I am admittedly very foggy, one place to start is Harvey Martin’s The Secret Teachings of the Espiritistas.]

ON THE BHAGAVAD-GITA AND REINCARNATION

C.M. MAYO: In many places in your book, Mediumship Mastery, you quote from the Bhagavad-Gita.This was a work that fascinated Madero; he not only mentions it in his Spiritist Manual, but under the pseudonym “Arjuna”— the name of the warrior in the Bhagavad-Gita— he wrote articles about it and was planning a book about its wisdom for the modern world. The Bhagavad-Gita also had an important influence on Gandhi, Emerson, the Theosophists, and many others. One of its many teachings is about reincarnation. In your book’s chapter “Past Life Readings,” you mention that you have recollections of some of your past lives and also have received communications from spirits about others’ past lives. Would you elaborate on reincarnation as explained in the Gita?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: The Bhagavad Gita is a conversation between the Supreme Personality and Arjuna. I try to read it as much as possible. Life is eternal as the personality continues into the world of spirit. The Bhagavad Gita explains the science of connecting with the Godhead and how to cultivate devotion or love of God. Every seven years pretty much all the molecules in our physical bodies change. So we are always changing physical bodies. Based on our consciousness at the end of this physical life we will end up having to take another physical birth. The Gita explains the process of transmigration and how we can ascend to higher levels.

C.M. MAYO: Like Madero in his Spiritist Manual, in your book, Mediumship Mastery, you advocate a vegetarian diet. Is this an idea that came to Spiritualism / Spiritism from Hindu philosophy?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Higher teachers on both the physical and spiritual worlds always advocate vegetarianism as it is very bad to hurt animals and cause suffering to others. A true follower of Jesus would not want to hurt others as would a true follower of Buddha. There is only one God and we are all God’s children. I am sure Madero was influenced by Vedic teachings which is why he loved the Bhagavad Gita.

MORE ABOUT MADERO’S SPIRITIST MANUAL

C.M. MAYO: What surprised you the most about Madero’s Spiritist Manual?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: I really loved reading the Spiritist Manual. It didn’t really surprise me as I am familiar with everything he wrote already. However, I especially loved reading the extra sections about your research and his notes, etc. I think you did a fantastic job.

C.M. MAYO: In terms of his understanding of mediumnistic unfoldment—or anything else—are there any points where you would disagree with Madero’s Spiritist Manual?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Madero approaches mediumship heavily influenced by Kardec’s Medium’s Book. Nothing wrong with that as Kardec’s work was way ahead of it’s time when it was published in 1861. However, the methods and approaches used by the spirit personalities to communicate, train and interact with mediums have greatly improved.

Back in the early years of Spiritualism there were no teachers of mediumship. Mediums learned through trial and error and with the assistance and input of teachers in the spirit world overtime created structured approaches to the unfoldment of the various phases of mediumship.

Madero was brilliant and had he not have been murdered his mediumship would have expanded even more. Love, harmony, enthusiasm, and higher purpose are the qualities needed to create the best conditions for successful mediumistic communications. Madero possessed all these qualities and more.

In the early years of Spiritualism there was much physical phenomena or manifestations of spirit power that could be directly experienced through the five physical senses. Nowadays, people are much more intellectually oriented and as such the mediumship practiced is mainly mental or telepathic in nature. It is not that one method is better but just better suited for the age. The methods for training mediums have greatly improved and expanded in the last 168 years.

C.M. MAYO: As you were reading Madero’s Spiritist Manual, or before or afterwards, did you ever sense that you were in communication with / sensing Madero’s spirit? Is there anything you would like to say about that?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: I would think that Madero most likely would have been around you a lot when you were researching and writing the book. I do not know if he was around me when I was reading the book, but I do feel that he and I would have a lot in common if we were to meet. I think we would get along pretty well as I can relate to where he was at in terms of his mediumship and his spirituality in general.

C.M. MAYO: In your book, Mediumship Mastery (p. 9) you introduce the subtle bodies that interpenetrate the physical body. As I read it, this is a somewhat different explanation from given by Madero where he, following Kardec, talks about the “perispirit.” Can you explain?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: The perispirit is the subtle or astral covering. Madero uses Kardec’s terminology. We have a physical body with subtle bodies interpenetrating it. After physical death the soul continues to function through the astral body and travels into the spirit world.

ON MEDIUMSHIP AND ENERGIES

C.M. MAYO: My experience has been that not all but most people either dismiss mediumship as impossible or, believing it possible, are frightened that, in calling on the spirit world, they might encounter negative entities. In particular, the Catholic and many other churches sternly warn against dabbling in conjuring spirits, especially with Ouija boards. In the introduction to your book, Mediumship Mastery, you write, “In all my years of working as a medium, I have never experienced anything negative or that made me feel uncomfortable. My experience of mediumship has always been genuinely positive, loving, and comfortable.” It would seem, from my reading of the Spiritist Manual, that Madero would have agreed. But has this been the case for others you know?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: Mediumship is all about love and healing. However, training is important as is proper motivation. Someone could have a bad experience with mediumship if they dabble in it or go about doing it in a superficial way. Spiritual mediumship is completely orchestrated by higher spirit personalities. Mediumship is not a board game for drunk teenagers to play at 2 AM. Like attracts like.

C.M. MAYO: In your book’s final chapter, “Dealing with Skeptics,” you write, “People who are closed off and negative for any reason, which would include hardcore skeptics, are exceptionally more difficult to work with as the energies are not as strong, the links to the spirit world weaker, and the connections more incomplete and vague.”

It seems to me that U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, who disdained Madero as mentally unbalanced and who, for his support for the coup d’etat that ended with Madero’s murder in 1913, has gone down as one of the archvillians of Mexican history, had much in common with the rigidmindedness of celebrity skeptics such as the Amazing Randi. Would you agree?

STEPHEN A. HERMANN: I don’t know Randi personally nor do I know the US Ambassador of that period. Who knows what motivates people on a deeper level? However, Randi does seem very closed off to higher consciousness and intuitive ability. I suspect that Ambassador Wilson was motivated completely by lower, selfish interests and as a result would have cut himself off from higher spiritual influences.

Skeptics are not necessarily immoral or callous individuals. They just do not often believe in the mystical and are highly suspect of claims that do not fit their rationalist view of the world. I appreciate skepticism as many people are completely gullible and easily misled. It is important to not throw out your intelligence when dealing with mediumship as there is a fine line with genuine psychic impressions and your own imagination.

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> Visit the webpage of Rev. Stephen A. Hermann, author of Mediumship Mastery

> Visit the web page for Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book 

> Visit the webpage for my book, together with a transcription of Madero’s Manual espírita, in Spanish, Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana.

> Visit the webpage for Resources for Researchers

> Find more Q & A’s here.

Q & A: W. Nick Hill on Sleight Work and Mucho Más

What Is Writing (Really)? 
Plus A New Video of Yours Truly Talking About 
Four Exceedingly Rare Books Essential 
for Scholars of the Mexican Revolution

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

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

From the Archives: “Reading Mexico: Recommendations for a Book Club of Extra-Curious & Adventurous English-Language Readers”

Hiding out! Chillin’! My writing assistants demonstrate the concepts.

I am hiding out this August Monday from the blog… and reading a most unusual novel, about which word soon. Meanwhile, herewith, an extra-crunchy post from the Madam Mayo blog archives:

Reading Mexico:
Recommendations for a Book Club
of Extra-Curious & Adventurous English-Language Readers


Originally published on Madam Mayo blog November 21, 2016

In recent days, I am delighted to report, more than one American has asked me for a list of recommended reading on Mexico for their book clubs. Before I present my correspondents, and you, dear reader, with my list, herewith a big fat flashing neon-lime caveat: 

This list is unlikely to coincide with most English language writers’ and readers’ ideas of what might be most appropriate. Nope, no Graham Greene. No D.H. Lawrence, no Malcolm Lowry, nor John Steinbeck. Most of the usual suspects have gone missing from my list. I packed the bunch of them off, as it were, to Puerto Vallarta for margaritas (a drink invented by a Texan, by the way) and a purgatory of reading juicy crime-novels. About crime novels, I am not your go-to gal.

For those of you new to this blog, let me introduce myself. I am a US citizen who has been living in Mexico City on and off for over three decades, and not in an expat community, but as a part of a Mexican family. Over these many years I have written several books about Mexico, most recently, the novel based on the true story of Mexico’s Second Empire, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, and Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I have also translated a long list of Mexican writers and poets, and am the editor of an anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, which is not a guidebook but a selection of 24 Mexican writers on Mexico, many in translation for the first time. All of which is to say that although I have not read each and every last thing ever published on Mexico (a feat for a bot!), I am indeed familiar with both the Spanish and the English language literature on Mexico, fiction and nonfiction. 

TWO CHALLENGES: SAD! VERY SAD!

But to make a list of recommendations for an English-language book club there are challenges. First, a number of Mexican works have been translated into English, but this amounts to only a tiny percentage of what has been published in Mexico over the centuries. To quote DJT completely out of context, “Sad!”

Second, also sadly, many of the best-known and easily available originally-in-English works on Mexico strike me as superb examples of a south-of-the-border species of what Edward W. Said termed “orientalism.” Translation: toe-curling. Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, to take but one example, while a deserved classic for its lyric beauty (count me a fan), will tell you little about Mexico, never mind the Baja California peninsula that stretches for nearly a thousand miles along the Sea of Cortez; much of what Steinbeck says about it is either flat wrong or rendered through a filter of commonplace prejudice and presumption.

Much of the best of contemporary English language literature on Mexico covers the border, mainly focusing on illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violence. There are several excellent works under that voluminous tent, but I’d like to get to those last. I submit that for a deeper sense of Mexico, one has to dig past the sorts of stories one can easily encounter in the mainstream news, television, and cinema, to go both deeper into the country and deeper into its past.

For a deeper sense of Mexico, one has to dig past the sorts of stories one can easily encounter in the mainstream news, television, and cinema, to go both deeper into the country and deeper into its past. 

Nope, that sad little shelf in the back room of your local big box bookstore is not the place to look. Unfortunately, and head-scratchingly—for the United States shares a nearly 2,000 mile border with Mexico, and all the cultural, economic, ecological, historical, and political intertwinings that would suggest— the selection of such works in English, enticing a “box of chocolates” as it may be, is limited. Moreover, whether because of their scarcity, high prices, length, and/or academic prose-style replete with reams of footnotes, few English language works on Mexico lend themselves to a felicitous selection for a book club.

A NOTE ON (MORE THAN) A FEW TITLES NOT ON MY LIST FOR BOOK CLUBS

Historian John Tutino’s Making a New World, for example, is a scholarly doorstopper of a tome, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a book club; however, I do believe it is one of the most important books yet published about Mexico. Read my review of Tutino’s Making a New World here and listen in anytime to my extra crunchy podcast interview with Tutino here.

Seriously, if you want to start getting an idea of Mexico beyond the clichés, stop reading this right now and listen to what Tutino has to say.

…  RESUME HERE

Also, I would have recommended the magnificent The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández, edited by Simon Varey, but (sigh),Stanford University Press has priced it at USD 72 a copy. You might ask your university or local public library to order a copy, if they do not already have one. 

Another wonder not on my list for book clubs— but do have a look at the digital edition free online— is Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, or General History of the Things of New Spain. The original 16th century manuscript, which contains 2,468 colorful illustrations and text in both Spanish and Nahuatl (the language spoken by the Aztecs phonetically transcribed using Latin), is also known as the Florentine Codex because it is in the Medicea Laurencziana Library in Florence, Italy. 

Then there is Daniela Rossell’s hilariously outré take on Mexico City’s, as the title says, Rich and Famous, but at over USD 100 for a used paperback copy, that title did not make it to my list, either. (But if you and your book club have wheelbarrows of cash to spare for no better purpose than to rain down upon amazon.com for some dozen copies of Rich and Famous, well, pourquoi pas? Read it while eating your cake, too!)

Numerous Mexican fabulosities, including Rich & Famous,  which cover is shown here, are not on my list.

My list, therefore, focuses on works in a variety of genres, from biography to history to poetry, that are not only illuminating but could be enjoyable reading for avid and thoughtful readers, and lend themselves to a spirited book club discussion. And, crucially for most book clubs, these are titles currently available at more-or-less-reasonable prices from major online booksellers and/or, as in the few instances when a work has lapsed into the public domain, as free downloads from www.archive.org. 

Toss a tomato if you like, but I also recommend my own works, else I would not have troubled to write them.

> For those looking for more complete and scholarly lists of recommended reading on Mexico, as well as several more fine anthologies, click here.

PREHISPANIC, CONQUEST, COLONY
(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)

Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate
A scrumptuously sweeping history of Mexico’s most delicious bean by a noted food historian and anthropologist. This one should be an especially popular pick for any book club.

Díaz, Bernal. The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
One of the greatest books every written about one of the greatest adventures of all time. And that is no exaggeration.
> Also available on archive.org

León-Portilla, Miguel, and Earl Shorris. In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present
León-Portilla is one of Mexico’s leading historians and intellectuals and this collection, the first to offer a comprehensive overview of this literature, is magnificent. 

Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith
Translated by the exceptional Margaret Sayers Peden. Catalog copy: “Mexico’s leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.”

UPDATE: See my blog post of March 20, 2017, “What the Muse Sent Me About the Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz”

Roberts, David. The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spanish Out of the Southwest
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 took place in what was then the Kingdom of New Mexico and is now within the United States; nevertheless, this is an crucial episode for understanding the history of the North American continent, including, of course, Mexico. 

NINETEENTH CENTURY 
(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)

Calderón de la Barca, Madame (Frances Erskine Inglis). Life in Mexico
This delightfully vivid memoir of 1842 by the Scottish-born wife of Spain’s first ambassador to Mexico should go at the top of the list for any Mexicophile. 
> Also available on archive.org
> Read my review for Tin House

Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico
A new and revisionist history of that tremendous and mercurial personality who dominated the first half of 19th century Mexico, the “Napoleon of the West.”
Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire
A mite heavy-going for a book club, but essential for understanding the historical relationship between the U.S. and Mexico and the US-Mexican War. 
> Read my review of this book.
> For a less rigorous but more entertaining and elegantly-written work on the Comanches, see S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon.

Hogan, Michael. Abraham Lincoln and Mexico: A History of Courage, Intrigue, and Unlikely Friendships
In this shining contribution to the literature on Abraham Lincoln and that of the US-Mexican War, Michael Hogan illuminates the stance of a young politician against that terrible war, telling a story that is both urgently necessary and well more than a century overdue.

Magoffin, Susan Shelby. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico
Now considered a classic of mid-19th century Americana, as a work of literature, this book has its limits and faults, for it was written as a private diary by a Missouri trader’s bride who was only 19 years old. I warmly recommend it for US book clubs because it is easy to find an inexpensive copy, and if it has faults, it also has many charms; and moreover, it provides an unforgettable glimpse of historical context for US-Mexico trade. Y’all, US-Mexico trade did not start with NAFTA. 
> See my blog post of notes about this book.

Mayo, C.M. The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire
A novel based on extensive archival research into the strange but true story of the half-American grandson of Agustin de Iturbide, Agustin de Iturbide y Green, in the court of Maximilian von Habsburg. A Library Journal Best Book of 2009.
> Visit this book’s website for excerpts, reviews, photos and more
> Related: From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion
A nonfiction novela about a fairytale: a visit to the Emperor of Mexico’s Italian castle. An award-winning long-form essay now available in Kindle.

McAllen, M.M. Maximilian and Carlota: Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico
A deeply researched book about a period of Mexican history that, while vital for understanding modern Mexico and its relations with the United States and Europe, is of perhaps unparalleled cultural, political, and military complexity for such a short period.
> Listen in anytime to my extra-extra crunchy conversation with M.M.McAllen about her splendid book, the first new major narrative history of this period in English in nearly forty years.

LATE 19th CENTURY, REVOLUTION, EARLY 20th CENTURY
(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)


Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs: A Novel of the Revolution
This is the first and classic Mexican novel of the Revolution, translated by Sergio Waisman and with a foreword by Carlos Fuentes. The original title in Spanish is Los de abajo. Not everyone’s slug of mescal, but a century on, it remains a cult fave, especially around the border.

Cooke, Catherine Nixon. The Thistle and the Rose: Romance, Railroads, and Big Oil in Revolutionary Mexico
This family history of Scotsman John George McNab and Oaxacan Guadalupe Fuentes Nivon McNab not only gives an overview of the transformation of the Mexican economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but some of Mexico’s ethnic, social, and regional diversity, both of which are far greater than U.S. media and Mexican tourist industry narratives would suggest.

Esquivel, Laura.Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies
The charming novel that was made into a major motion picture. 

Mayo, C.M. Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual
Knocks the huaraches off most people’s understanding of the 1910 Revolution, and its leader, Francisco I. Madero, who was elected President of Mexico in 1911 and served until his assassination in the coup d’etat of 1913. Someone described Metaphysical Odyssey as The Underdogs turned upside down, inside out, and with a cherry orchard on top. Anyway, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution is nonfiction and it includes the first and complete translation of Madero’s Spiritist Manual of 1911. 
> Visit this book’s website for excerpts, reviews, interviews, podcasts, and more.

Reed, Alma. Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico
Edited by Michael K. Schuessler with a foreword by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, who knew Alma Reed back in the 1960s. Reed was a journalist from San Francisco who came to Yucatan on assignment and ended up engaged to marry the governor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Just before the wedding Carrillo Puerto was assassinated.
> Listen in to my podcast interview with Michael K. Schuessler. 

Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
A leading scholar of Mexico takes on Mexico City from 1880 to 1940 in this beautifully written work. If you have ever visited or ever plan to visit Mexico City, this rich-as-a-truffle read is a must.

Traven, B. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Although it seems he may have been born in Germany, one must count the mysterious B. Traven, who escaped a death sentence in Germany in the 1920s, as a Mexican writer. Little is known about his early life. According to his Mexican stepdaughter, the “B.” stands not for Bruno as some biographers have asserted, but for “Plan B.” Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno recently closed its B. Traven show which featured clips from the movie “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, as well as clips from several other major movies inspired by Traven’s novels, and displays of his papers, photographs, guns, and typewriters. 

Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Hummingbird’s Daughter
The novel based on the true story of his great aunt, the folk saint and mediumnistic healer Teresita Urrea, la Santa de Cabora (Cabora is in Chihuahua). 

MID TO LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)

Biggers, Jeff. In the Sierra Madre
Adventure writing at its finest.

Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz
New translation by Alfred MacAdam. The famous novel by the famous author. Muy macho. Dark. Bitter. Ayyy a real jaw-cruncher.  

Herrera, Heyden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
The best introduction to Mexico’s most famous and uniquely flamboyant artist of the 20th century.

Hickman, Katie. A Trip to the Light Fantastic: Travels with a Mexican Circus
A spellbinding memoir by a noted British writer. 

Isaac, Claudio. Midday with Buñuel: Memories and Sketches, 1973 – 1983
Mexican filmmaker Claudio Isaac’s very personal and poetic recollection of his friendship with his mentor, the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, a major influence on Mexican (and world) cinema, who died in Mexico City in 1983. I do not have the original Spanish for a comparison, but the English is so vivid and smoothly elegant, I am sure that Brian T. Scoular’s must be a superb translation. 
Mastretta, Angeles. Women with Big Eyes
Short stories about “aunts” translated by Amy Schildhouse Greenberg. A best-seller in Mexico and widely read in Spanish in the United States as well. (A story from this book is in my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.)

Mayo, C.M. Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico
LA Times: “A luminous exploration of Baja California, from its southern tip at Los Cabos to its ‘lost city’ of Tijuana…. a work of nonfiction that elides into modern myth.” 
> Visit this book’s website for excerpts, photos, podcasts, and more
> More recommended reading on Baja California, including titles by Bruce Berger, Harry Crosby, and Graham Mackintosh.

Mayo, C.M., ed. Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
A portrait of Mexico in the work of 24 contemporary Mexican writers, many translated for the first time. Among them: Agustín Cadena, Rosario Castellanos, Fernando Del Paso, Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo, Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Mónica Lavín, Angeles Mastretta, Carlos Monsiváis, Juan Villoro.
> Visit this book’s website for excerpts, podcasts, and more.
> NPR interview about this book.

Monsiváis, Carlos. Mexican Postcards
Edited, Introduced and Translated by John Kraniauskas. A collection of essays by Mexico City’s most beloved social commentator. (His essay “Identity Hour or, What Photos Would You Take of the Endless City?” is included in my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.)

Novo, Salvador. Pillar of Salt: An Autobiography, with 19 Erotic Sonnets
Introduced by Carlos Monsiváis; Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. The memoir of a major and controversial figure in 20th century Mexican letters. Never a dull moment with Sr. Novo.

Poniatowska, Elena. The Skin of the Sky.
Poniatowska is one of Mexico’s most respected journalists and literary writers. Her better-known works include Massacre in Mexico, and Here’s to You, Jesusa. For a book club seeking a fresh and unexpected look at Mexico, however, I would recommend first reading The Skin of the Sky.

Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Paramo
The surrealist novel of the 1950s now translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. 

Schuessler, Michael K. Elena Poniatowska: An Intimate Biography
> Listen in to my interview with Michael K. Schuessler.

Sullivan, Rosemary, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseilles.
You might not guess it from the title, but Villa Air-Bel is essential reading for understanding modern art in post-WW-II Mexico. My article about the author and this book, “A Traveler in Mexico: A Rendezvous with Writer Rosemary Sullivan,” appeared in Inside Mexico, March 2009.

Tree, Isabella. Sliced Iguana: Travels in Mexico
One of my favorites for armchair traveling. Crisp, observant, original.
> Isabella Tree offers this guest-blog post on her five favorite books on Mexico. 

MEXICO POST-2000 & THE BORDER(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR)

Burton, Tony. Western Mexico: A Traveler’s Treasury
A unique guidebook by an English geographer that is chock full of surprises, plus illustrations and many maps. Yes, I am recommending a guidebook for a book club; it is that special. 

Call, Wendy. No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy
A passionate look at Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a little known and yet culturally, economically, historically, and politically vital part of Mexico. Winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction. 

Corchado, Alfredo. Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into Darkness
Like the title says. 

Ferguson, Kathryn. The Haunting of the Mexican Border
Ferociously personal reporting on both sides of the border.

Lida, David. First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century
A long-time resident of Mexico City and a prolific writer in both English and Spanish, Lida is one of the most knowledgable Americans writing about Mexico. 
>Visit Lida’s blog

Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
Dreamland should be read—and more than once— by anyone who would make or attempt to influence policy on the drug trade, whether legal or illegal. Moreover, Dreamland should be read by every citizen who would visit a doctor. > Read my review of this book in Literal Magazine.
> See also his beyond-outstanding collections of essays on Mexico: True Tales from Another Mexico and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.

Toledo, Natalia. The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems
Translated from Zapotec, a major indigenous language in Mexico, by Clare Sullivan.

Urrea, Luis Alberto. Into the Beautiful NorthYou can’t go wrong with Luis Alberto Urrea, pick any one or more of his titles.
> Visit his website.

PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! PLUS!
FIVE BOOKS ON MEXICO THAT I HAVE NOT YET READ,
BUT IF I WERE IN A BOOK CLUB I WOULD VOTE TO READ THEM

Boullosa, Carmen. Texas: The Great Theft 
Translated by Samantha Schnee. Why I would vote to read this book: Boullosa is one of Mexico’s best-known literary writers; Schnee is a respected literary translator, and the flip-side of the story of Texas is one Americans rarely if ever hear.

Gamboa, Federico. Santa
Translated and edited by John Charles Chasteen. Why I would vote to read this book: It was a racy best-seller of its day in Mexico and its author, Federico Gamboa, was a noted literary figure and politician.

Prieto, Carlos. Adventures of a Cello
It is a Stradivarius and Prieto is one of the best cellists in the world. From the catalog: “To make the story of his cello complete, Mr. Prieto also provides a brief history of violin making and a succinct review of cello music from Stradivari to the present. He highlights the work of composers from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, for whose music he has long been an advocate and principal performer.”

Valenzuela-Zapata, Ana G. and Gary Paul Nabhan. Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History
From the catalog: “Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata, the leading agronomist in Mexico’s tequila industry, and Gary Paul Nabhan, one of America’s most respected ethnobotanists, plumb the myth of tequila as they introduce the natural history, economics, and cultural significance of the plants cultivated for its production.”

Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt wrote about his research and explorations in Mexico; it would be difficult to overestimate his influence on how Mexican scientists saw their own country, and how Europeans saw Mexico in the 19th century. Friends have raved about Wulf’s book, so it would get my vote for a read. 


Q & A with Diana Anhalt on Her Poetry Collection Walking Backward

Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”

Translating Across the Border

#

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

From the Archives: Writing Loglines and the Concept of “the Eyespan”

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

This finds me away from the blog this week. Herewith a post from the archives:

Writing Loglines and the Concept of “the Eyespan“

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog February 22, 2012

I resisted writing loglines for a long time, for I was of the school of Flannery O’Connor’s famous saying (as I recall it), “if you want to know what the story is about, read the story.” In other words, I believed in the mysterious resonance of literary profundity– and, oh yeah, I still do– but I have come to appreciate the focusing power, both for the writer herself and for her sales team (agent, editor, marketing staff, booksellers, et al) of packing the whole enchilada into one super-yummy bite– because, otherwise, you and your readers will be left vaguely wondering, um, what might it be? “A good meal?” Err, that could anything from a chunk of cheese to a 5 star foie gras extravanganza.

Specificity entices.

It also repels. Dear writerly reader, as you know, there are readers you don’t want your book to attract. I don’t mean that in a necessarily snobby way. After all, someone who’s looking for a guidebook wouldn’t want to be served up a lyrical literary experiment in travel memoir– and vice versa.

I just wrapped up a few days of giving writing workshops in San Miguel de Allende, and on the last day, I evangelized about loglines which I would have done anyway but it so happened that I had just, the night before, finished reading Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! a both amusing and practical guide to writing screenplays which, by the way, offers a slew of examples of great loglines. I don’t write screenplays (yet) but the basic principles of storytelling are the same, whether for the screen or the stage, the page, or lo! ye olde campfire. Seriously, if you’re writing any kind of story, read Save the Cat!, have a chuckle or nine, and save yourself a heap of headaches. 

Snyder writes, “If you can’t tell me about it in one quick line, well, buddy, I’m on to something else.”

(Does this guy snazz around Malibu in a little red convertible, or what?)

Yours Truly defines the so-called logline as a one to two sentence description of the book that (a) tells the reader what to expect and (b) entices.

Here are some examples from various books that work for me– not all official, by the way, but plucked from longer descriptions on the book’s jacket; others are simply subtitles; others were cooked up not by the author but by the editor and/or marketing staff:

This ultimate insider’s guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who’s proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat.
Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder

From literary journalist Sara Mansfield Taber comes a deep and wondrous memoir of her exotic childhood as the daughter of a covert CIA operative.
Born Under an Assumed Name by Sara Mansfield Taber

How what we hear transforms our brains and our lives, from music to silence and everything in between
Healing at the Speed of Sound by Don Campbell and Alex Doman

An epic novel about a family torn apart in the struggle-to-the-death over the destiny of Mexico
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire by Yours Truly 

Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American journey that changed the way we see the world
Humboldt’s Cosmos by Gerard Helferich

Not long ago the Big Thicket of East Texas was still one of those places singular in its southernness, like the Mississippi Delta or the Carolina Low Country; now its old-timers and their ways are nearly gone. They will not be forgotten, though, for in My Grandfather’s Finger, Edward Swift recalls a Big Thicket populated by family and friends as gloriously vibrant and enigmatic as the land itself. 
My Grandfather’s Finger by Edward Swift

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. 
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

All of these fall into what I think of an an “eyespan”– an amount of text the reader’s eye can take in in a “gulp.” (I admit, the last example is long– but it is one sentence.) 

If you google around, you will find a multitude of webpages with advice, and schoolmarmy formulas, for writing log lines. Such rigidity might be apt for certain industries (TV pilots?) but for books, we have a scootch more wiggle room. But not past the eyespan.

What you might also notice is that in these examples– just pulled from the books I happened to have at hand– the (very few) adjectives and verbs have verve:

ADJECTIVES

ultimate
singular
gloriously
vibrant
enigmatic
deep 
wondrous
exotic
covert
illegitimate
beautiful

VERBS

reveals
dare
admit
prove
sell
save
hear
transform
to be (forgotten)
follows
fighting
yearning
leaves
fights (again!)
intrigues

So…. if you’re working on a log line, why not make a list of vervy verbs and such from the books you have at hand? Recycling a few of them (covertly fighting! deeply yearning! wondrously transforming!) can be a felicitous endeavor…

P.S. I offer several detailed reading lists for writers here.

For updates on upcoming workshops I invite you to sign up for my newsletter here.

On Seeing as an Artist or, Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühlung

Q & A: Amy Hale Auker, On Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs 

Daniel Chacón’s “Words on a Wire” Podcast Interview with Yours Truly About Francisco I. Madero’s Secret Book

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

From the Archives: “Another One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos: José N. Iturriaga (and Yours Truly) in Cuernavaca’s Historic Jardín Borda”

I’m away from the blog this Monday– my writing assistants illustrate the concept.

Another One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos:
José N. Iturriaga (and Yours Truly) in
Cuernavaca’s Historic Jardín Borda

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog July 4, 2016

The two volume anthology by José N. Iturriaga, a collection of writings by foreigners in Morelia, from the 16th to the 21st century. 

To see one’s own country through the scribbles of foreigners can be at once discomfiting and illuminating. Out of naiveté and presumption, foreigners get many things dead-wrong;  they also get many things confoundingly right. Like the child who asked why the emperor was wearing no clothes, oftentimes they point to things we have been blind to: beauty and wonders, silliness, perchance a cobwebby corner exuding one skanky stink. And of course, there are things for foreigners to point at in all countries, from Albania to Zambia.

As an American I have to admit it’s rare that we pay a whit of attention to writing on the United States by, say, Mexicans, Canadians, the Germans or the French. True, we have the shining example of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which every reasonably well-educated American may not have waded through but has at least heard of (and if you haven’t, dear reader, now you have.) But de Tocqueville’s tome is a musty-dusty 181 years old (the first of its four volumes was published in 1835, the last in 1840– get the whole croquembouche in paperback here.)

José N. Iturriaga, signing copies of his anthology, July 1, 2016, Centro Cultural Jardin Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.

This past Friday, July 1, 2016, I participated in the launch of novelist and historian José N. Iturriaga’s anthology Otros cien forasteros en Morelos [Another One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos], the companion volume to Cien forasteros en Morelos [One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos], from the 16th to the 21st century.

(For those rusty on their Mexican geography, Morelos is a large state in central Mexico that includes Cuernavaca, “the city of eternal springtime,” which it actually is, and Tepoztlán, a farm town surrounded by spectacular reddish bluffs that, despite an influx of tourists from Mexico City and abroad, still has a strong indigenous presence, and has been designated by Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism as a “pueblo mágico.” The most famous resident of the state of Morelos was Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.) 

The launch was held in the Centro Cultural Jardín Borda (Borda Gardens Cultural Center), an historic garden open to the public in downtown Cuernavaca– about an hour and a half’s drive from Mexico City. 

Jardín Borda, entrance patio, towards evening on an overcast day.

As Iturriaga said in his talk, for almost forty years he has been studying the writings of foreigners on Mexico, precisely for the fresh, if not always kind nor necessarily accurate, perspective they offer on his own country. 

I admire Iturriaga’s work, and his curiosity, open-mindedness, and open-heartedness more than I can say. It was a mammoth honor to have had an excerpt from my novel included in his anthology, and to have been invited to participate on the panel presenting his anthology. The other two panelists, whose work is also in the anthology, were poet, novelist and essayist Eliana Albala and journalist and poet María Gabriela Dumay, both of whom came to live in Cuernavaca in the early 1970s, political exiles from Pinochet’s Chile.

Mexican book presentations tend to be more formal affairs than those in US (the latter usually in a bookstore with, perhaps, a brief and informal introduction by the owner or a staff member. I have war stories.) In Mexico, in contrast, there is usually a felt-draped dais, always a microphone, and two to as many as five panelists who have prepared formal lectures about the book. The author speaks last, and briefly. Another difference is that the Mexican reporters, photographers, and oftentimes television cameras crowd the dais, lending the affair a glamor and gravitas rare for a US book presentation. Afterwards, there is a party with white-gloved waiters pouring “vino de honor”– in this case, for Iturriaga’s  Otro cien forasteros en Morelos, whoa, mezcal.

C.M. Mayo, Eliana Albala, María Gabriela Dumay, José N. Iturriaga, July 1, 2016, Centro Cultural Jardín Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

>> Where to buy Otros Cien Forasteros en Morelos? I hope to be able to provide a link shortly.

Here is my talk for the panel, translated into English.

Dear José Iturriaga; fellow panelists, Eliana Albala and María Gabriela Dumay; everyone in this beautiful Centro Cultural Jardín Borda who made this event possible; Ladies and Gentlemen:

First of all, heart-felt congratulations to José Iturriaga on this extraordinary anthology in two volumes, a magnificent and opportune cultural contribution that, no doubt, required endless hours of reading, not to mention the tremendous labor of love that went into selecting and then translating so many writers. 

Between the covers of this second volume, Otros cien forasteros en Morelos, I find my fellow Americans Jack London, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Steinbeck– among the most outstanding figures in US literature. There is also the great novelist who arrived, so mysteriously, from Germany: B. Traven; and artists such as Pedro Friedeberg; and distinguished historians such as John Womack, author of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, Michael K. Schuessler, biographer of the eccentric poetic genius Pita Amor; and the Austrian Konrad Ratz, whose meticulous research on Maximilian von Habsburg was essential, in fact a parting of the seas, in our understanding of the personality, education, and politics of the Archduke of Austria.

In three words, José Iturriaga’s anthology is eclectic, fascinating, and illuminating.

It is a great honor for me to participate in this presentation and an even greater honor that this second volume, Otros cien forasteros en Morelos, includes excerpts from my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. [In the anthology, excerpts are taken from the Spanish translation by Mexican novelist and poet Agustín Cadena, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano.]

My novel is about the grandson of Agustín de Iturbide,* Agustín de Iturbide y Green (1863-1925) whom Maximilian “adopted” in 1865, making this half-American two-year old, briefly, Heir Presumptive to the Mexican throne.

(*Agustin de Iturbide (1783-1824) led the final stage of Mexico’s war for independence from Spain, and supported by the Catholic Church, was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1822, deposed in 1823, and executed in 1824. )

In the winter of  1866, Maximilian brought his court here, to the Jardín Borda. And since we are within those very walls and surrounded by those very gardens, in celebration of José Iturriaga’s work, I would like to invoke those foreigners of the past, that is to say, I would like to read the few very brief excerpts from the novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, as they appear in this anthology. 

This bit from the novel is the imagined point of view of José Luis Blasio, a Mexican who served as Maximilian’s secretary:

Depend on it: Maximilian is shepherding Mexico into the modern world— so José Luis Blasio, His Majesty’s secretary, has told his family and tells himself. And this is no small task when His Majesty must grapple not only with our backwardness and ingratitude, but that thorn in his side, General Bazaine. The rumor is that, abetted by his Mexican wife’s family, Bazaine schemes to push aside Maximilian; they aim to have Louis Napoleon make Mexico a French Protectorate with himself in charge—  not that José Luis would give that a peso of credence. But José Luis does consider it an outrage, the latest of many, that he would wire a complaint that Maximilian has removed his court to Cuernavaca, rather than “attend to business in the capital.”

Yes, they are here in the Casa Borda amongst gardens and fountains, fruit trees, palm trees, parrots of every size and color—  a world away from Mexico City. But does not Louis Napoleon go to Plombières and Biarritz? Queen Victoria, who has sterner blood, travels as far as Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands. Dom Pedro II of Brazil retires to his villa in Petropolis. And did not the empress’s late father, Leopold, absent himself from Brussels in the Château Royal at Laeken? It is natural that for the winter, His Majesty should hold court in a healthier clime. 

But even here where he siestas in a hammock, drinks limeade from a coconut shell, and wears an ecru linen suit with an open-necked blouse, Maximilian’s work never ceases. It is a wide, rushing river that José Luis can only hope will not overspill its banks. In the past year, José Luis has come to appreciate the uncompromising necessity of working long hours; indeed, his eyesight, never strong, has deteriorated from so much reading in the dim of early mornings. Maximilian arises at four; his valet attends him, and though he might linger over breakfast, by no later than six, he is at “the bridge,” as he says, that is, his desk—  or, as here in Casa Borda, a folding table on the veranda. His Majesty’s dispatch box is heavy, and growing ever heavier… 

And now Pepa de Iturbide, daughter of the Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, godmother to Agustin de Iturbide y Green, and member of Maximilian’s court:

It is a holy miracle that she got a wink of sleep at all! So appalled she is by Maximilian’s whim to uproot the court to this hamlet two bone-jarring days travel up and down the sierra— good gracious, this is no time to abandon the capital, and go gallivanting about with butterfly nets and beetle jars! Matamoros is under siege; the whole state of Guerrero, from Acapulco to Iguala, is in thrall to guerrillas. And Pepa got it from Frau von Kuhacsevich, who got it from Lieutenant Weissbrunn, that whilst the empress was in Yucatan, Maximilian fancied a visit to Acapulco, but General Bazaine nixed it because it would have been impossible to maintain security for his person. That is the sum of things!

Oh, but in Mexico City Maximilian felt cramped, “an oyster in a bucket of ice,” he said. Over the past two months, the few times Pepa chanced to see Maximilian, he had spoken of the empress’s dispatches from Yucatan proudly but with— Pepa recognized it when she saw it— a glint of green. If Maximilian could not have his expedition to Yucatan, by Jove, he was going to go some place tropical! And Maximilian could not be outshone by his consort, oh no. A mere visit to Cuernavaca would not do; he had to serve himself  the whole enchilada with the big spoon: an Imperial Residence with landscaping, fountains, an ornamental pond stocked with exotic fish, and furnishings and flub dubs aplenty, comme ça and de rigueur. Whom did he imagine he was impressing with this caprice? Poor Charlotte, exhausted after Yucatan.  And as if the von Kuhacseviches were not already foundering in their attempts to manage the Imperial Household in Mexico City! As if the Mexican Imperial Army could offer its officers anything approaching a living wage! Or keep its depots stocked with gunpowder! It is a monumental waste of time, of effort, of money, and to boot, Casa Borda is a-crawl with cockroaches, beetles, earwigs, and moths—  a bonanza for Professor Bilimek!

And now the Austrian Frau von Kuhacsecvich, Mistress (chief administrador) of the Imperial Household: 

On the steps to the next patio, Frau von Kuhacsevich must pause to fan herself. Cuernavaca is not the Turkish bath of the hot lands, more, as Maximilian put it, an Italian May. Pleasant for the men, and Prince Agustín, perhaps, but a trial for those who must encase themselves in corsets and crinolines. Oh, poor Charlotte that her father has died, but Blessed Jesus, what would Frau von Kuhacsevich have done had she been obliged to wear mourning black! The thought simply wilts her. She is afraid her face has gone red as a beet. Her back feels sticky, and under her bonnet, she can feel her scalp sweating. Taking the bonnet off is out of the question: her roots have grown in nearly an inch— in all the rushing to and fro, there has not been a snatch of time to touch up the color.

An Italian May: in that spirit, for luncheon, Tüdos has concocted an amuse-gueule of olives, basil, and requeson, a cheese too strong to pass for mozzarella, but toothsome. In addition to coffee, he will be making a big pot of canarino: simply, the zest of lemons steeped as tea. Well, here it has to be made of limes, ni modo, no matter, as the Mexicans say.

Finally, Maximilian himself:

Here, this moment in Cuernavaca, one is happy: perfumes in the air, colors from the palette of Heaven, birds, flowering trees and vines and oranges, the music of the orchestra and of the fountains, this bone-warming sunshine…

Thank you.

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