Like many writers I nurture an oft-adjusted list of possible future writing projects (PFWP). I’ve been at this game for more years than I want to confess, so trust me when I say it’s surprisingly easy to get a sizzling-hot-slam-a-roni of an idea and then… have completely forgotten all about it anywhere from five minutes to five weeks later. But there they all are, captured in ink on my PFPW! (I keep mine in my Filofax. Other writers might prefer to keep theirs in a file on their computer or, perhaps, in a special notebook.)
Right now, February 2020, my PFWP list has four nonfiction books, three novels, a batch of stories, a couple of poems, a couple of translation projects, and an essay of creative nonfiction. Two of these possible future writing projects have been sitting on the list for over a decade. Oh, and just yesterday, I came up with a solidly good idea, if I do say so myself, for a scholarly paper about a cavalry officer’s adventures in the Guadalupe Mountains.
Will I ever get to them all? That is not the question.
My PFWP list is not so much a “to do” list as it is my very own rich and appealing menu. Whenever the time comes that I am ready to commit to a new writing project, I’m never left sitting there, spinning my wheels, wondering, ohmygosh, what can I write now? I simply whip out the PFWP and see which of those many projects feels right for me for a next-action.
All of them are appealing enough to me that were any one the only option I would gladly do it– or else I don’t add it to the list.
Meanwhile, one thing that helps keeps me going with my current writing project– the memoir of Far West Texas— is my NTDN list, that is, my list of the things Not To Do Now. These are things I feel pressured by others to do; or tempted against my better judgement to do; or expect / want to do at some point, but not now– “now” being the horizon for my current writing project.
TOP 5 ON MY NTDN LIST
(1) Download Whatsapp Nope, I have never downloaded Whatsapp. Bless you, my many friends and relatives who have asked me for my Whatsapp, because I love you! I do want to be in touch, I do want to see your photos! But it’s either my book gets written + I answer email or I do Whatsapp + I answer email. I have only 24 hours in the day. May I be blunt? Would you really wish for me to not write my book?
(2) Get a TV I gave away my TV an eon ago. I had a Netflix subscription once, but it so long ago I have forgotten when it was that I canceled it. Bless you all who can spend hours watching TV! But I don’t, I can’t, and that’s that!
(3) Participate on Social Media FaceBook deactivated in 2015. LinkedIn minimal. Instagram zip. Twitter I’ve been on since the get-go, but for a long while now I only tweet the link to the once-a-month Q & A on this blog, and on very rare occasion something similar, as a courtesy to that writer and anyone else mentioned on my blog. I consider Twitter so toxic that when I log on I use a timer to keep the whole interaction under 3 minutes. Why so toxic? Let me count the ways… but that would be another blog post. Twitter is just evil.
(4) Pilates class I recently gave up my weekly pilates, a wonderful class. I do think physical activity is important, but right now I don’t want to have to take time to get in my car and drive somewhere else and on a rigid schedule (um, the class doesn’t wait for me…). I’d prefer to take classes with a real person, but again, there are only 24 hours in the day, and to make time for writing I have to let some things go. I do take walks everyday, and weather permitting, I bike, and I also do yoga every day, both on my own, and with online yoga classes which, by their nature, commence, pause, and conclude in my own home at my own convenience.
(5) Teach a writing workshop This is terribly tempting because I love teaching writing workshops. I am always charmed, challenged, and inspired by my students! And I believe my own writing is much better for having taught various workshops over so many years. But right now I need the time and creative energy for my book. Therefore, barring a possible mini-conference workshop next fall, I am not teaching again until (maybe) later this year. In the meantime, I console myself with writing a once-a-month workshop post for this blog.
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My NTDN list is actually far longer, and it includes everything on my PFWP list, by definition. But you get the idea.
Of course, each writer’s PFWP and NTDN lists are going to be as unique as his or her fingerprints. My point is not that the items on my lists would be good for you or anyone else, but simply that, in my experience, too few writers trouble to make these lists in the first place—and then wonder why they feel at a loss about what to write, and then even when they do know what they want to write, they often find themselves spending their time and mental energies in ways that do not support their writing.
If you haven’t already made your PFWP list, simply muse: What writing projects sing (or whisper) to you as possibilities? Be sure to keep a notebook and pen with you at all times. Your best ideas just might come to you when you’re out and about. Or taking a shower. Or folding laundry.
And as for a NTDN list, what are some activities that might tempt you, or be warmly or even hotly encouraged by the people around you, but that, on reflection, you would consider a fatal drag on your time and mental energies for accomplishing your current writing project(s)? Or what are some things that you would be delighted to do, just not now?
This past Friday I had the honor and delight of being interviewed for the Words on a Wire podcast by Daniel Chacón, an award-winning creative writer and Chair of the University of Texas El Paso Creative Writing Program– and not about my latest book (Meteor, poetry) but about an older book of mine which, over the years since it came in 2014, surprisingly few people have dared to ask me about. Yep, it’s super spooky! Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I often refer to it as a chimera of a book, for it is not only my book about Madero’s book + my translation of Madero’s book, but my part of it is a work of scholarship that is at the same time intended to be a work of literary art in itself.
Just as soon as that link to the Words on a Wire podcast is live, I will post it here.
In the meantime, because I wish I’d thought to mention it in the interview, herewith a post from 2014 about a very rare but very important Mexican book, Una ventana al mundo invisible:
Una Ventana al Mundo Invisible (A Window onto the Invisible World): Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures
Una ventana al mundo invisible. Protocolos del IMIS Editorial Antorcha, Mexico City, 1960. [A Window to the Invisible world: Protocols of the IMIS]
I was a long ways into into the labyrinth of research and reading for my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, when I happened into Mexico City’s Librería Madero, expressing a vague interest in Francisco I. Madero and “lo que sea de lo esotérico.” When the owner, Don Enrique Fuentes Castilla, set this book upon the counter, I confess, the cover, which looks like a Halloween cartoon, with such childish fonts, did little to excite my interest. But oh, ho ho (in the voice of the Jolly Green Giant):
A Window to the Invisible World: Protocols of the Mexican Institute for Psychic Research Mexico City, 1960
This book, Una ventana al mundo invisible, is nothing less than the official, meticulously documented records of the dozens and dozens of research-séances of the Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Síquicas or IMIS (Mexican Institute of Psychic Research) from April 10, 1940 to April 12, 1952, members of which included– the book lists their names and their signatures— several medical doctors and National University (UNAM) professors; an ex-Rector of the UNAM, the medical doctor and historian Dr. Fernando Ocaranza; several generals; ambassadors; bankers; artists and writers, including José Juan Tablada; a supreme court justice; an ex-Minister of Foreign relations; an ex-director of Banco de México, Carlos Novoa; Ambassador Ramón Beteta, ex Minister of Finance; and… drumroll… both Miguel Alemán and Plutarco Elías Calles. *
Close up of the subtitle. Oy, the font. (Dude, what were you smoking?)
*I hate giving wikipedia links but as of this writing, the official webpage for the Mexican presidency doesn’t go back more than four administrations.
For those a little foggy on their Mexican history, Plutarco Elías Calles served as Mexico’s President from 1924-1928, and Miguel Alemán, 1946-1952. At the time of the séances documented in Una ventana al mundo invisible, Calles was in retirement, having returned from the exile imposed on him by President Cardenás in the 1930s.
President of Mexico, “El Jefe Máximo” Plutarco Elías Calles. In retirement he joined the IMIS and was a regular participant in the research-séances documented in Una ventana al mundo invisible
When Una ventana al mundo invisible was published in 1960, Alemán was long gone from power, and Calles had passed away.
I had heard, as has anyone who goes any ways into the subject, that Alemán and Calles and other Mexican “public figures” were secret Spiritists, but here, dear readers, in the Protocolos del IMIS, are the smoking signatures.
Yes, There are Other References to Una ventana al mundo invisible
Mexican historian Enrique Krauze was one of the first to cite Una ventana al mundo invisible in his chapter on Calles in Biography of Power, as does Jurgen Burchenau in his biography, Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution. But, as I write these lines, Una ventana al mundo invisible remains surprisingly obscure.
The Revolution as dolor de cabeza
Of course, I googled. A Mexican writer, Héctor de Mauleón, had discovered Una ventana al mundo invisible in a different Mexico City antiquarian bookstore and written up a summary for the October 2012 issue of Nexos. (But he complains of his copy’s missing the picture of the conjured spirit, “Master Amajur.” More about that in a moment.) And also recently, Grupo Espírita de la Palma, a Canary Islands Spiritist blog, which has posted several important bibliographic notes as well as a bibliography of Spanish works on Spiritism, posted this piece about the Jesuit Father Heredia’s involvement with the IMIS–thanks to his friend, none other than Calles–and about this book.
(A research project for whomever wants it: to delve into the Mexican hemerotecas of 1960-61 for any newspaper coverage, and 1979 and 1994 for anything about the Posadas and Planeta editions. My guess is, not much, for the press was largely under the thumb of the ruling party and this sort of information about Mexican Presidents would have been, to say the least, unwelcome. But that’s just my guess.)
So, Now, Delving into the Contents…
Rafael Alvarez y Alvarez (1857 – 1955), Mexican banker and founder of the Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Síquicas (IMIS)
The copy Don Enrique was offering, and for a very reasonable price, still had its dust jacket, small tears in places along the bottom and the top, but intact (the image on this blog post is a scan of my copy). The rest of it was pristine; the pages had not even been cut. Don Enrique slit open a few for me in the bookstore, and once home, I continued with my trusty steak knife (read about my other steak knife adventure here.)
I dove right in and learned that the founder of the IMIS, to whose memory the book is dedicated, was Rafael Alvarez y Alvarez (1887-1955), a distinguished Mexican banker, a president of the Monte de Piedad, and a congressman and senator. (Looking at his portrait with my novelist’s eye– that gaze! the bow tie!– yes, the intrepid maverick.)
The introduction is by Gutierre Tibón, an Italian-Mexican historian and anthropologist, professor in the National University’s prestigious faculty of Philosophy and Literature, and author of numerous noted works, including Iniciación al budismo and El jade de México.
A Brief Bit of Background on 19th Century Parapsychological Research
The goal of the IMIS was to progress in the tradition of pioneer American, English, and European parapsychological researchers. From my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, the first chapter, which provides 19th century background for Madero’s ideas about Spiritism, which he considered both a religion and a science:
“The exploits of mediums such as the Fox sisters, D.D. Home, the Eddy Brothers, and later in the nineteenth century, prim Leonora Piper (channel for the long-dead ‘Dr Phinuit’ and the mysterious ‘Imperator’), and wild Eusapia Palladino (whose séances featured billowing curtains, floating mandolins and, popping out of the dark, ectoplasmic hands), spurred the studies of investigators, journalists and a small group of elite scientists. Noted German, Italian, and French scientists, such as Nobel prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet undertook the examination of these anomalous phenomena, but the British Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, and the American Society for Psychical Research founded three years later, led the fray. Though their ranks included leading scientists such as chemist William Crookes, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, physicist Oliver Lodge, and William James (the Harvard University professor considered the father of psychology). Yet their researches almost invariably met not with celebration, nor curiosity on the part of their fellow academics, but ridicule, often to the point of personal slander.”
Medium Luís Martínez and “Spirit Guide” Dr. Enrique del Castillo
Luis Martínez, Mexican medium
As James et al had Leonora Piper, and Richet and Lombroso, Eusapia Palladino, the IMIS employed the medium Luis Martínez, who was able to evoke a broad spectrum of phenomena, from ringing bells to apports, ectoplasm, breezes, raps and knocks, levitation, and so on.
In séances with Martínez, the IMIS heard from its spirit guide on the “other side,” one Dr. Enrique del Castillo, a Mexican doctor of the 19th century. According to Dr Tibón in his introduction to Una ventana al mundo invisible (p. 20, my translation):
“The way he looked was perfectly well known because once he “aported” his photograph, which was later made into a larger size, framed and displayed the Institute’s workroom. Another aport of Dr. del Castillo were his spectacles, identical to those in the portrait. He brought them on October 24, 1944, at 10:30 pm, in a séance that was documented in Cuernavaca, and he said these words, directing them to Rafael Alvarez y Alvarez: ‘In leaving my spectacles to you, dear son, it is with the wish that you will see clearly the future road we must take. May these spectacles take you on the path where we will always be companions.’”
Enter “Master Amajur”
Of special note was the séance on the evening of September 24, 1941, when Plutarco Elías Calles invited Carlos de Heredia, S.J., author of a book debunking Spiritism– and Father Heredia, sufficiently awed (and according to Calles, converted) affixed his signature as witness to genuine phenomena. That séance is documented in its entirety in Una ventana al mundo invisible. From Dr. Tibón’s introduction (p.21, my translation):
“That memorable night there materialized another spirit guide for the circle: an oriental doctor named Master Amajur; and he did not only show himself completely to Father Heredia, he also spilled a glass of water, saturated it with magnetic fluid, and gave it to him to drink. Then there appeared the phantom of Sister María de Jesús and, before the astonished cleric, illuminated her face in a most unusual manner. Finally, Dr Enrique del Castillo appeared, surrounded by many tiny lights. These levitated the medium, chair and all– the equivalent of raising almost 100 kilos– and silently left him in the other end of the room. This phenomenon was verified for the first time. Later, I had the fortune to attend its repetition and I literally saw the medium fly two meters into the air.”
Master Amajur started showing up from the first documented séance of May 8, 1940 (p. 89, my translation of some of the highlights):
“Master Amajur [appeared] very clearly, he touched all of us and he wrote a message which says: Go forward and I will help you. When we asked him [for a message] he left a message for Colonel Villanueva that says: It would be good for you to attend a séance. [… ]The first materialization produced an electric spark above the lightbulb that was loose in its socket [… ] There was an aport: a small bottle of perfume and its essence sprinkled above us. The music box passed over our heads. The Master gave us his cloak to touch, which seemed to all of us a piece of gauze. One again he produced a fresh breeze: it smelled of ozone.
On June 12, 1940 (p.90, my translation):
[…] the Master came in. This manifestation appeared first as a human hand covered with a veil, imitating a human figure. Then it increased in size and luminosity until it came txo a height of about 1.5 meters. Only the head and bust could only be seen. It was covered in a bluish white veil which I touched with my face. It gave me the impression of being a cotton fabric… It gave me a large glass of water to drink… It put flowers in our hands, it gave us a perfumed air, and when luminous blobs passed near my face I perceived the smell of phosphorous.”
On June 22, 1941 (my translation, p. 92):
“In front of all of us, Amajur left on the wall an inscription that said: Go forward. Upon request, he gave fluid to a magnolia and then he began to cut the petals. One by one these were deposited in the mouths of the participants.”
And so on. Séance after séance after séance–96 in all–with sparks, music, levitations, ectoplasmic this & that, perfumes, flowers, and frequent appearances not only by Master Amajur and sundry others, but also a childlike spirit, “Botitas” (Little Boots), who would tug on the participants’ pant legs.
Photographing Master Amajur
Close up of “Master Amajur” From the cover of Una ventana al mundo invisible
Skipping ahead to the séance of June 17, 1943– which Plutarco Elías Calles attended– Master Amajur has agreed to pose for a photograph. At first this doesn’t work; the photographer only captures a hand and then, suddenly, falls into convulsions. But then, after some further bizarre phenomena and friendly intervention by the spirit Dr. del Castillo, the photograph is achieved (p. 194, my translation):
“According to Mrs. Padilla [wife of Ezequiel Padilla, ex Minister of Foreign Relations, also in attendance on this occasion], and in agreement with all the other participants, at the moment of the explosion or flash from the photographer’s lamp, in the shadow could be seen the complete figure of the master, as if a statue of about 2 meters covered in a cloak, from head to foot. It was also noted that Master Amajur received a powerful shock and on asking him if he would permit another photograph to be taken, he said no.”
According to the dust jacket flap text, this is the very photograph that adorns the cover of the book. But, um, it looks more like a drawing to me. (As, by the way, many purported “spirit photographs” do. Google, dear reader, and ye shall find. Lots on eBay, by the way.)
Madame Blavatsky. The monumental figure of modern esotericism. Author of The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled, etc. Founder, Theosophical Society
For historians of the metaphysical, it is interesting to note that Master Amajur claimed to be a member of the Great White Brotherhood, a term which came into use in the West with Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, in the 19th century. She claimed that her teachers, who often met with her on the astral plane, were the Great White Brothers or Mahatamas, the Ascended Masters Koot-hoomi (Kuthumi) and Morya. Later, her follower A. P. Sinnett expanded on this topic in a sensational book of its day, The Mahatma Letters (1923). Over the decades, other psychics claimed to receive channeled messages from various Ascended Masters, most notably “St. Germain” and Alice Bailey’s “Djwahl Khul” or “The Tibetan.” It would seem that “Master Amajur” falls into this rather blurry and ever-morphing category.*
*So are the terms Great White Brother, Mahatma, and Ascended Master one and the same? In this article in Quest, modern-day Theosophist Pablo B. Sender elucidates.
Interesting to note also that a google search brought up the tidbit that “Amajur” was the name of an astronomer of 10th century Baghdad– though I hasten to add, according to the IMIS reports in Una ventana al mundo invisible, “Master Amajur” spoke Mexican Spanish. And of further note: there are Spiritist groups that continue to channel messages from Master Amajur today.
Dear readers, conclude what you will, and whether this finds you embracing a gnosis that “resonates” with you, cackling like a hyena, or just numbly confused, surely we can agree that this is all very remarkable.
So What, Pray Tell, Does All This Have to Do with Don Francisco I. Madero?
Francisco I. Madero, President of Mexico 1911-1913; leader of the 1910 Revolution; and as “Bhima,” author of the 1911 Spiritist Manual
My book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, is about Madero as leader of the 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico, 1911-1913 and how his political career was launched as an integral part of his Spiritist beliefs. (The book includes my translation of his secret book of 1911, Spiritist Manual, which spells it all out– all the way to out-of-body travel and, yes, interplanetary reincarnation.)
Not all– Enrique Krauze, Yolia Tortolero Cervantes, Javier Garciadiego, Alejandro Rosas Robles, Manuel Guerra de Luna, among others, are important exceptions– but most historians of Mexico and its Revolution sidestep, belittle, or even ignore Madero’s Spiritist beliefs. In my book, I have quite a bit to say about why I think that is (key words: cognitive dissonance), but in sum, few have any context for Madero’s ideas which, for most educated people in the western world, fall into the category of absurd nonsense and “superstition.”
My aim in my book– and this blog post– is not to convince the reader of the truth or falsity of any religious beliefs (ha, neither do I poke tigers with sticks for the hell of it), but to provide a sense of the history and richness of the matrix of metaphysical traditions from which Madero’s beliefs emerged. And with this context, I believe, we can arrive at the conclusion that Madero was not mad, nor so naive and weak as many have painted him, but that, in fact, he was a political visionary of immense courage who found himself on a counterrevolutionary battlefield of such rage and chaos that, if it was fatal for him, would have been for almost anyone else as well.
Madero did not, like some mad alchemist, cook up his ideas by himself; they fit into what was then and is now a living tradition. Madero’s Spiritism was French, itself an off-shoot of American Spiritualism, and with roots in occult Masonry and hermeticism and mesmerism; in the early 20th century, Madero also adopted ideas from a wide range of difficult-to-categorize mystics, such as Edouard Schuré, and from the Hindu holy book so beloved of the Theosophists, Thoreau, and Mohandis Gandhi: the Baghavad-Gita.
After Madero, on the one hand, we see Spiritism melding with folkloric and shamanistic traditions, as with the mediumistic healers Niño Fidencio, Doña Pachita, and the “psychic surgeons” of Brazil and the Philippines. On the other hand, a very small and adventurous group of what was primarily members of the educated urban elite– as we see in Una ventana al mundo invisible– continued the international tradition of parapsychological research that, as we know from his Spiritist Manual and his personal library, Madero greatly admired.
Madam Mayo blog’s “madmimi” email sign-up is finally working, over there on the sidebar. Subscribe and each Monday you will receive the latest post (and nothing else– no spam). Mexico, poetry, rare books, Texas, translation, the typosphere, occasional pug-sightings– if these tickle your fancy this is the blog for you! Second Mondays are for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creating writing; fourth Mondays are for a Q & A with another writer.
It’s too long a story what happened to the Q & A for this month; however I offer you this fascinating Q & A from the Madam Mayo blog archives.
Q & A WITH ROGER GREENWALD, POET AND LITERARY TRANSLATOR OF GUNNAR HARDING
(Originally posted July 1, 2015 on Madam Mayo blog’s original blogger platform. Madam Mayo blog has since migrated to this new self-hosted WordPress site.)
ROGER GREENWALD, POET AND TRANSLATOR Photo by Alf Magne Heskja
Gunnar Harding, a jazz musician, painter, essayist and a translator himself, is one of Sweden’s leading poets. Surely Harding is one of Sweden’s most prolific as well; Greenwald has selected numerous poems from more than a dozen of his books. Strange, witty and jazzy, Harding’s poems wing from the moon’s Sea of Tranquility to nickels in a jukebox (“Rebel without a Cause”).
GUNNAR HARDING, Swedish literary legend
> Visit Greenwald’s webpage for the book, which includes some of the poems and a video of the launch, here.
> Read the review by Christine Roe for Words Without Borders. “Spanning a lifetime of poetry, Guarding the Air pays homage to tragically under-translated Swedish literary legend”
> Gunnar Harding on Swedish Wikipedia (Note: I’m not a fan of Wikipedia, but alas I could not find much else on Gunnar Harding. Caveat emptor.)
ROGER GREENWALD attended The City College of New York and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. His poetry has appeared in such journals as The World, Pequod, Pleiades, Poetry East, Prism International, The Spirit That Moves Us, The Texas Observer, Great River Review, and Leviathan Quarterly. He has won two Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Literary Awards (poetry and travel literature) and has published two books of poems: Connecting Flightfrom Williams-Wallace in Toronto and in April 2015, Slow Mountain Train, from Tiger Bark Press in Rochester, New York.
C.M. MAYO: In a sentence, why should readers pick up this book?
ROGER GREENWALD: This selection spans the whole career of a major poet whose work is accessible and appealing– and also strong in both idea and feeling.
C.M. MAYO: What were the challenges for you as a translator?
ROGER GREENWALD: First I had to understand each poem in depth, of course, and in this case that meant understanding not only the language and the “argument,” but a broad range of allusions to other literary works, paintings, recorded music, places, people, and so on. (I’ve put pointers to these in endnotes.)
The biggest challenge, as always, was to write in English poems that had something like the voice and the music of the source. People assume that it is easier to translate poems written in a colloquial voice than to translate work full of neologisms, broken syntax, word play, and other notoriously “tough” features. But the fact is that those features give a translator license to be creative and sometimes to sound “strange”; whereas to translate a whole book in a colloquial voice, getting the literal sense and the line units and the music right while never once sounding odd or “translated” is just as hard or harder.
C.M. MAYO: What advice would you offer others who might consider undertaking a poetry translation?
ROGER GREENWALD: Translate into your native language. If you’re not doing that, you need to collaborate with a poet whose native language is the target language. Try to live for at least a year in the country that your poet and his or her language come from. Read not just the major works from that country’s literature, but some of what children read in school years, like fairy tales. Get to know some of the art and music. Watch TV and listen to radio. And ask a lot of questions, especially about the language, its idioms, its peculiarities. When you start understanding friends’ jokes, stand-up comics, and locally made comedy films, you will know your cultural immersion has worked.
ROGER GREENWALD: The greatest benefits have come from sharing knowledge and experiences with other translators. Seeing and hearing their work and discussing how they approached certain texts gave me useful insights into practice. But it was also important to learn about how to navigate relationships with authors and their publishers, how to find suitable potential English-language publishers, how to present work to those, and how to avoid getting burned by unfair contracts. Simply hearing, in the Bilingual Reading series at ALTA conferences, a great range of usually unpublished work, some of it still in progress, has been an ongoing source of delight and inspiration.
And beyond that, it’s worth saying that literary translators have to be some of the most interesting people in the world, with extremely diverse backgrounds, experiences of foreign cultures, and knowledge of wonderful writers who are little known in English, even if their work has been translated and published. So it has been great to get to know my fascinating colleagues!
C.M. MAYO: Are there are other associations you would recommend?
ROGER GREENWALD: None that I belong to. But I have had it in mind for some time to look into the Authors Guild, because it is focused on advocating for fair treatment of authors and translators. And this seems to be an issue of growing concern as digital media undermine publishing revenue, and as companies like Amazon demand deep discounts and exert downward pressure on the sale price of both paper and electronic books.
C.M. MAYO: Where can readers find a copy of this book?
ROGER GREENWALD: I’m happy to say that the publisher of Guarding the Air has excellent worldwide distribution. So readers can buy it directly from the press at www.blackwidowpress.com (choose “Modern Poets” or use Search); they can order it through any independent bookseller they care to support; or they can buy it on line from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
It’s also worth remembering that readers can ask their public library or their college library to acquire the book.
“Oscar Wilde arrived here yesterday evening or rather, at our house at the Falls. I took a short walk with him before tea. He talks well but a little loud and with a little too much assertiveness…” — John Bigelow, Jr.
Early last month I made a supersonic visit to New York for two ultra-intensive days in the archives at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.* My object: to consult the diaries of Col. John Bigelow Jr., an officer in the Indian Wars and one of the personalities I am writing about in my book on Far West Texas. I’ve posted on this unjustly little-known officer and military intellectual elsewhere on this blog (here and here) and published a paper about him for the Journal of Big Bend Studies. One of the several things I was searching for in his archive were any mentions of his encounters with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde–for I knew that in between postings to remotest of Texas forts with the 10th Cavalry, Bigelow had returned to West Point to teach, and there, a short walk away, where his family had a country house at Highland Falls, his parents hosted Oscar Wilde. Yes, theOscar Wilde, international literary celebrity, who told U.S. customs on his arrival that he had “nothing to declare but his genius.” I found some choice quotes, not from Bigelow’s diaries, as I had expected, but in his letters to his fiancée, later wife, Mary Dallam. To wit:
West Point, November 21, 1881 …I hear that Oscar Wilde, having played himself out in England, is coming here to infatuate the American demoiselles. He will probably experience the disappointment of finding us on this side of the water in advance of England, rather than behind her, in recovery from the aesthete craze. There are not many symptoms of it now in New York. Yet one may once in a while see a girl on the street in a dress covered with gold colored patterns that make her look as if she were clothed in wall paper. February 10, 1882 ..I am especially sorry I could not be home Sunday as I missed seeing Oscar Wilde, who dined at our house that evening. I had seen him before at one of our receptions but had never had a good chance to hear him talk or to talk with him myself. From everything I learn about him I judge him to be a very companionable man. From the nature of your allusions to him I infer that he was not a social success in Baltimore. I think as little of his poetry as you do; nor do I much like his face. His mouth is not expressive of a delicate and refined instinct, and his hands are of the consistency of fresh bread. Nevertheless I am disgusted with the way in which he has been treated by a large part of our press and of our respectable population. There are young ladies in New York who talk about him as if he had come over here for the express purpose of captivating them and would have to regard his time and money wasted if he should not succeed in doing so! I believe Oscar Wilde is a man of rare talent and rare good taste. He believes in men dressing according to their individual taste and characteristics, not in knickerbockers unless that style of unmentionables especially becomes them. August 29, 1882 …Oscar Wilde arrived here yesterday evening or rather, at our house at the Falls. I took a short walk with him before tea. He talks well but a little loud and with a little too much assertiveness. The loudness is due partly to nature and partly to his speaking in public, the assertiveness is due to his public speaking and to his being lionized. There is more grace in his body than in his voice or features. He went to the ball with Anny and Jenny + my mother… His coat was a black velvet swallow-tail of the style of the last century, with ruffles in the place of cuffs and a white puffy frill-trimmed kerchief… He wore black knee-breeches, black silk stockings, buckled shoes and white kid gloves. When he went out to get into the carriage I saw him in his long easy cloak, his old-time high-crowned soft-felt hat, with its broad brim turned up one side, showing to advantage his long hair underneath; he looked like a typical cavalier. I know that if you had seen him you would have wished as I did that there were such costumes to be seen… August 31, 1882 Oscar Wilde left us today. He says he is to have a theater decorated to suit himself next winter in New York. He told us a good deal yesterday about Greece…
Sorry, no photos of that very photogenic snow-dusted campus at West Point. It was all I could do to work in the archives, then catch the shuttle to my hotel both days.
*It can be expensive indeed to travel to consult an archive, hence one must carefully guard one’s energies for long hours of laser-focus. My strategies include minimal socializing (I beg forgiveness of friends and family); no hither-and-thithering; eating only very lightly (preferably room service in the evening); sleeping as much as possible; showing up as close to when the archives open as possible, and staying glued to my seat, pencil in claw, until closing. I owe the warmest of thanks to the staff at the archives, most especially Susan Lintelman.
HONEY & WAX, ET AL
On this supersonic visit to New York I had but a mini-micro portion of a morning for shopping, and this being December, I had some to do. Since my dad’s family is from New York, the Rockefeller Center and the rest of tourist-clogged Fifth Avenue wasn’t anything novel for me, so I hopped over the river to peek into the Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, I’m a rare book aficionada– as both a collector (in the peewee leagues thereof) and a writer with a few things to say about it all (see my Dispatch from Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla, a longform essay on the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book). I also have a background as a (now armchair) economist, so I’ve had an eye on the rare book business from that angle, as well. Like the antiques business, and publishing, the rare book business has changed beyond recognition with the advent of Internet. Many of the changes frankly strike me as tragic losses. But there are some upsides. See for example these oral histories with members of the ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America): Garrett Scott; Henry Wessells; and Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers. The latter has been on my radar as one of the very few women in the trade and one of most dynamic of the new generation of rare book dealers. And here she is at the 2019 Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair!
Heather O’Donnell, proprietor of Honey & Wax Booksellers, member, Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America
The latest Honey & Wax Booksellers catalogue
Her Honey & Waxcatalogs are exemplars of elegance. And her inventory, whew! In the latest catalog: “Autumn Rain, Autumn Wind: Memorial for the Executed Revolutionary Qiu Jin,” 1907, USD 20,0000; a 1930s edition of the novels and some letters of Jane Austin, inscribed to E.M. Forster by Lytton Strachey, USD 9,500; and so on. Most of the Honey & Wax catalog items are a galaxy beyond my budget, but the offerings here in the Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair, if just as fancifully varied, and all in exquisite condition, were vastly more economical. For the price of pair of Keds, she sold me this sweet treasure, which I ended up keeping for myself:
Also from my Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair haul, this handsome first edition of The Saga of Texas Cookery from Lizzy Young Bookseller:
And for the price of a burger and fries (!!) I found this fine first edition from Enchanted Books:
Note my Texas Bibliothek bookmark. Yep, that’s where this handsome puppy goes. Dissanayake is also the author of the recently published Early Rock Art of the American West: The Geometric Enigma, which I look forward to reading.
Enchanted Books, antiquarian bookseller at the Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair
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This blog posts on Mondays. Next post will be the fourth Monday Q & A with another writer.
Pictured below, three birds with one stone, as it were, my writing assistant Uliberto Quetzalpugtl demonstrates Rattner’s science-based technique #25 “Sleep” and #26 “Nap” and #28 “Lie down or recline.”
#1 “Designate a creative space.” This winter 2020 my designated create space–I call it my office–is a room separated by a sliding door from the dining room. Plan B is my local coffee shop. In the past I have used a spare bedroom; a foyer (…that was challenging…); and a converted breakfast room. It is certainly possible to use a corner of the dining table; a breakfast table; a lap desk (taken to a sofa, chair, or bed); a table in a coffee shop; a carrel in a library… and so on. The point is, don’t be vague about where you’re going to do your writing. Designate it.
However, lovely as it may be for writer to have a large, totally private, and well-appointed office, it is by no means necessary. My advice would be, do your best to designate a creative space, whatever that best option may be for you at the moment, and then, get to the writing.
Yes, I find that does help, as Rattner says science confirms, to go to the same place each time you intend to write. But that isn’t necessary, either.
Here (below) my writing assistant models the big, sloppy Ikea sofa we use for lying down and, Rattner’s science-based technique #12 Choose curved over straight— the curved typing table; and #9 Be flexible–“Get the most creative bang for the buck by choosing furnishings and objects that move, change shape, or perform multiple functions”– note that the typing table has a drop-leaf, and note also, on the sofa under the plaid blanket, my lap desk. (Read more about the lap desk here.)
Yep, that’s a typewriter, a 1967 Hermes 3000. Read more about my typewriters here and here.
And my assistant also models #15 Get with your pet. “Studies indicate that having an animal friend nearby improves mood and mental dexterity.” (Uliberto Quetzalpugtl says, BARK BARK!)
“Studies indicate that having an animal friend nearby improves mood and mental dexterity.”
Here, below, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl models scientific technique #16 Make it beautiful. (Is my folded scarf used as the typewriter’s dust cover not beautiful?) And, simultaneously, #2 Look at something blue. Rattner writes: “Who would have thought that merely being exposed to certain colors could subliminally improve creative performance? Yet that’s precisely what researchers concluded after conducting several laboratory experiments measuring the impact of color on cognitive processing.”
The color blue improves creative performance! Whodathunk?
More of Rattner’s techniques for sparking creativity that were new for me included:
#24 Pick up the scent— I’ll try rosemary or anise tea. (What might work for you?)
#29 Make a fire. Or look at a picture of one. I googled “YouTube virtual fireplace” and this came up:
Très eco-eco (economical & ecological)– if you don’t take into account the server farm!
In sum, I found this a fun and thought-provoking book, and I expect I’ll be going through it many a time again.
BUT A CAVEAT
While there is a wealth of practical and easily affordable advice to glean from Rattner’s book, don’t let the slick photos of high-end design intimidate you into accepting another reason to procrastinate. (My creative space doesn’t look like that, so…) No creative space is ever perfectly perfect, and indeed, some of the most wonderful literature we have was produced in godawful conditions.
If you want to have written something, you just have to sit down (or stand) and do the work. Last I checked, the Muse may whisper an idea or three, but magic elves don’t get it done for you in the wee hours of the morning. I would suggest that improving your creative space best goes into the category not of writing time but quality leisure time, the importance of which I and some others have more to say here.
Madam Mayo blog’s “madmimi” email sign-up is finally working, over there on the sidebar. Subscribe and each Monday you will receive the latest post (and nothing else– no spam). Mexico, poetry, rare books, Texas, translation, the typosphere, occasional pug-sightings– if these tickle your fancy this is the blog for you! Second Mondays are for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creating writing; fourth Mondays are for a Q & A with another writer.
My holiday reading was Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, which I found at once disturbing and a revelation. A revelation because Smith’s writing is so poetic, and so engagingly and vividly evokes some of the raunchy subcultures of 1970s New York City; yet disturbing because I have always rejected, and upon reflection after having read Just Kids, the more so, this notion so many young and not-so-young artists have that being a True Artist excuses, or even calls for, wantonly destructive behavior towards oneself and others. (Count me as more Flaubert than Rimbaud.) Reading Patti Smith is definitely outside my comfort zone— which means I’ll be doing more of it in 2020.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, for an age I’ve been working on a book about Far West Texas. It’s impossible to consider Texas without taking into account so many Texans’ rock-solid belief in their state’s exceptionalism, which is not one and the same, but closely tied to the idea of American Exceptionalism. As one who was born in Texas, raised in California, and then spent some 30 years living outside the United States (and so immersed in a radically different cultural perspective), I can attest that this sense of exceptionalism is at once powerfully ingrained in American and Texan culture and well, kinda weird. I’ve been trying to get my mind around it for a while now.
In Global West, American Frontier : Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depressionhistorian David M. Wrobel brings this question of exceptionalism into focus by way of travel writing. He delves back to the 19th century when American and European artists and writers first began traveling through the West and writing about it as it was then, not yet “the frontier West as the heart and soul of America” (p.26) but “a global West.”
Wrobel’s focus here is on idea of the West in the works of such travel writers of originality and literary merit as Isabella Bird, Richard Francis Burton, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Ida Pfeiffer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Unlike so many post-WWII literary portraits of the West, in these, “travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many and considering the United States as a colonizing power.” (p.22) The French were then in Africa and Indochina, the British in India, Germans in Namibia, and so on. The American West was not yet, in our post- WWII sense, “a unique place, a place apart from the world, rather than a part of it.” (p.27).
“travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many”
(As a travel writer myself the higher qualities and role of travel writing is something that especially interests me. My own travel memoir is Miraculous Air, about Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, and the heart of it recounts my travels following the Jesuit conquest from the late 17th century until the expulsion in 1767. “Spanish padres,” these Jesuit missionaries are often called, but in fact, many were Italian, or German, or French. One was Honduran; another Scottish. And one key factor behind their authorized conquest of California– what we today call Baja California– was that the Spanish King, and therefore his viceroy in Mexico City, were concerned about British and French expansion in the Americas, and they most especially wanted to check Russian expansion– fueled by the fur trade with China– down the Pacific coast. How’s that for global context!)
When came the turn away from “a broader and largely deexceptionalized global context” towards “searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth”? (p.85) Wrobel argues that it came at the turn to twentieth century with writers such as Jack London and Theodore Roosevelt, both celebrity world travelers keen on seeking fresh frontiers of adventure. Then came the slew of automotive adventure memoirists battling flat tires and breakdowns while in search of “presumed regional authenticity” (p.135) — “a search for a distinctive American West, for last American frontiers” (p.135), for example, Mary Austin’s The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924); Hoffman Birney’s Roads to Roam (1928); Emily Post’s Motor to the Golden Gate (1916); Winifred Hawkridge’s Westward Hoboes: Ups and Downs of Frontier Motoring (1921); Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road (1925); C.K. Shepherd’s Across America by Motorcycle (1922); Hugo Taussig’s Retracing the Pioneers: From East to West in an Automobile (1910), and Frank Trego’s Boulevarded Old Trails in the Great Southwest (1929).
Also crucial in forging this conception of a unique American frontier– the West–were the New Deal state guidebooks, part of the Federal Writers Project (FWP). These state guidebooks included general background information (folkways, culture, history, economics, etc.); descriptions of cities and towns; and suggested tours by car. Writes Wrobel: across the West, “the guides generally emphasized the western frontier heritage and pioneering tradition. In that regard, they collectively amounted to a clear statement about where the West began and ended in the public consciousness and in the estimation of the guides’ writers in the 1930s.” (p.144). As for the Texas state guide, Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State (1940), that was “a veritable catalogue of Anglocentrism and Anglo-Saxonism, and of frontier-rooted state-level exceptionalism.” (p.151.) See for yourself in the copy now on archive.org.
In all, these memoirs and guides exemplified “how travel writing in the first four decades of the twentieth century constituted a movement inward, toward the national, and regional, and away from the global.” (p.180) So much may have been gained, yet so much lost. We became myopic.
For me, as both a reader and as a travel writer, Wrobel’s concluding chapter, “Enduring Roads,” was especially heartening. Yes, we live in this day of Tripadvisor.com and the heavily-marketed so-called “bucket lists,” nevertheless, I believe that good travel writing has and always will constitute a valuable contribution, both for individual readers (however dwindling their numbers) and the culture as a whole. Numbers of readers in the immediate aftermath of a book’s publication are not and have never necessarily been the best and only measure of its success. (More about the power of the book here.)
And I agree with Wrobel that the good and the true is not necessarily from some facile search for “authenticity.” Not that it’s often done, but it is possible to write brilliantly about a Disneyland ride or, for that matter, lazing in a hammock in one’s own backyard, surfing around Tripadvisor.
Writes Wrobel: “The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners… today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge… It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p. 187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.”
And a final note from Wrobel’s Global West, mainly for myself: What’s been done to death is the search for “authenticity.” Yes, Virginia, there is a Walmart there on the highway by the ranch, and the ranch has wifi– and drone roundups, too. The hand-tooled wallet in the gift shop is made in China and the boots, probably, in India. What more interesting things can be said? Can we not compare parts of the Transpecos to the Tarim Basin (a fascinating exercise, by the way)? Or, say find the interweavings with the Middle Eastern trade traditions (there is a Lebanese trader’s grave down by the Rio Grande at Presidio– he was killed by Comanches, as I recall.) Why is there so little compare-and-contrast of the rock art of Lower California with that of the Lower Pecos? And what of visionary artists, immigrants from the east, such as Donald Judd? Or for that matter visionary oral historians? Or the pre-Texas Revolution history of the Alamo?
P.S. Speaking of Germans in Namibia, it quite strikes me how much the Erongo Mountains look like the Big Bend of Far West Texas:
This blog posts on Mondays. As of 2019, the fifth Monday of the month, when there is one, rounds up my news plus some cyberflanerie.
Dear writerly readers, my writing assistants Uliberto Quetzalpugtl and Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl and I wish you a very happy, healthy, prosperous, and inspiring 2020!
RECENT PUBLICATIONS, PODCASTS & BLOG POSTS
(I finally got an email sign-up working– it’s there on the sidebar.)
New longform essay (soon to be a podcast):
Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson If I do say so myself, this is my best essay of creative nonfiction to date. Dear writerly readers, over the past two decades I have published essays of creative nonfiction in some mighty fine places: Creative Nonfiction, Letras Libres, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Southwest Review... But such was not to be the fate for “Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson.” It ended up being what it wanted to be– too short to stand as a book, yet too long for a literary journal or magazine (to cut it down would have ruined it), so forthwith, I posted it on my blog, and also read it aloud as the Marfa Mondays Podcast #21. The podcast is currently in production; I will update this post just as soon as the podcast is live.
New book:
Meteor. My book of poetry won the Gival Press Award. Read all about it on my webpage for the book here.
Scholarly article:
John Bigelow, Jr. (1854-1936), who served as an officer in the Indian Wars and went on to become a military intellectual of distinction, will be accompanying me in my memoir of Far West Texas, in a manner of speaking. I do not usually write scholarly articles all a-bristle with footnotes, but for him I did: John Bigelow, Jr.: Officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between the West and the Eastern Establishment, Journal of Big Bend Studies, 2018 (actually came out in 2019). This month, December 2019, I finally made it to the US Military Academy’s archive in West Point, NY to delve into his diaries. I’ll have something to say about some of those curiously fun pages in a later post.
From a Frederic Remington illustration in John Bigelow Jr.’s collected articles, On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo.
New short story:
“What Happened to the Dog?” was wicked fun to write, and to type! The idea was to write a story about a typewriter set in the far future, and then actually type it on a typewriter for Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds, edited by Richard Polt, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeeters.
Zip! This winter 2020 I’ll be working on my book about Far West Texas. (Stay tuned for more of the related “Marfa Mondays” podcasts, which you can listen into anytime for free here.) Nonetheless, I will continue offering a post for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing on the second Monday of every month throughout 2020.
P.S. Check out the substantial archive of workshop posts here.
Writers looking to get published, take special note: Allison Joseph’s long-time Creative Writers Opps listerserv is now a blog.
Madam Mayoin 2020
Madam Mayo blog posts on Mondays. As in 2019, in 2020 the second Monday of the month will be dedicated to my creative writing students and anyone else interested in creative writing, and the fourth Monday to a Q & A with a fellow writer. A fifth Monday, when there is one, will offer my newsletter and cyberflanerie. Bookmark this page or, better yet, sign up for new posts by email– right there on the sidebar.
“If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.” -Barbara Crooker
I do believe that a piece of heaven on earth is the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. That is where, one breezy evening by the grand piano, many years ago, I met Barbara Crooker and heard her read some of her beautiful poems. She goes to the VCCA more often than often, and whether there or elsewhere, she is prolific. Her latest book, Some Glad Morning, is just out from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, late NBA star Darryl Dawkins, and saltine crackers. While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.
Here’s her bio:
Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Les Fauves and The Book of Kells. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
C.M. MAYO:Of all the poems in this collection, which is your personal favorite? And why?
BARBARA CROOKER: Well, the book just came out (November 5th), so I don’t have any favorites yet. Plus, that question always feels like someone’s asking which is your favorite child (I have three, so all of them!). Here’s what Garrison Keillor has chosen to read on The Writer’s Almanac: “Tomorrow,” “BLT” (in which I quote Warren Zevon!), “Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen,” “The New Year,” and “Home Cooking.” I’m doing the first reading from the book this week; I’ll add to that “Regret,” “Big Love,” “Butter” (yes, I have an ode to butter), “Principles of Accounting,” “Drug Store” (based on a painting by Hopper), “Practicing Mindfulness,” and “Mid-November,” which got a lot of good comments when I posted it on my Facebook page. Oh, and I can’t leave out “Big Man,” an elegy to my Zumba buddy and NBA star, Darryl Dawkins. C.M. MAYO: Which is your favorite to read aloud?
BARBARA CROOKER: I’m hoping all of these read aloud well; sometimes, the lyric poems don’t, so when I perform, I tend to pick the narrative ones. I won’t come up with my favorites until I’ve done 5-10 readings—sometimes, the ones you think will read really well don’t, and vice-versa. If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read one poem on this collection, which would you recommend, and why?
PRINCIPLES OF ACCOUNTING by Barbara Crooker
Nearly summer, and the trees are banking on green, calculating their bonuses in numerators of leaves. Outside my window, the crows are ganging up on someone, thugs in their hoodies of night. I’m feeling the number of days begin to feel finite, no longer uncountable as blades of grass. So I’m rounding off clouds to the nearest decade; tabulating interest from the sweetness in the air. I’m going for broke, in the time remaining, like the mockingbird letting loose his vocals, a Fort Knox of sound. I’m going to spend it all. Not like our legislature, who can’t pass a budget, letting one year roll into the next, while schools and social services borrow to pay their providers, leaving even less in the diminishing pot for those who need it the most. Road repair, bridges, pre-K? Not sustainable, say the fat cats, lapping up their cream. For the rest of us, the dice are rigged, the loopholes big enough to drive a camel through. From this distance, the older I get, the closer I see the hand basket coming. So let me lean back in this red Adirondack chair as dusk makes us all equal, happy for the blend of herbs and gin, pure sapphire, the dividend of olive at the end. Here comes the night, nothing we can do to stop it, except tote up the stars on a ledger sheet, and put every last one of them in the plus column. . . .
BARBARA CROOKER: I’m going to pick this one because it hits a number of themes in this book: transience, impermanence, plus my own peculiar hybrid of lyric political poetry. I don’t think you can be a lyric poet in the era of the climate change crisis without letting politics seep into your poetry. C.M. MAYO:Can you talk about which poets have been the most important influences for you?
BARBARA CROOKER: Early on, I’d say Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin. But the one who made me fall in love with poetry, and set me on the writing path was Diane Wakoski. I came across a group of poems of hers plus an interview in a journal put out by Mansfield State Teachers’ College (as it was known then). I thought she was an undergraduate. (I knew nothing, like Jon Snow.) Had I known she was famous, I’d have been intimidated and never started, but I thought, “Hmm, if a college kid can write like that, maybe I can, too,” and dug in. That’s been my method; I was never in a position to get an MFA, so I went to what I call “the MFA of the 3000 books,” reading and studying on my own. Fast forward to recently, and Diane Wakoski put this note under a poem I’d posted on Facebook: “I wish I’d written that.” I couldn’t ask for anything more.
C.M. MAYO:Which poets and writers are you reading now?
BARBARA CROOKER: Christopher Buckley, David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Linda Pastan, Sharon Olds, Betsy Sholl, Ted Kooser, Wendy Barker, Marjorie Stelmach, Anya Silver, George Bilgere, Ellen Bass, Jeanne Murray Walker, Dorianne Laux, Robert Cording, Gray Jacobik. Plus I read every poem in every journal that I’m in, reading each journal (and each book of poetry) twice and taking notes. Which is why my reading pile is so high, and why I never reach the bottom. . . .
C.M. MAYO:It seems a very important part of your process is VCCA. What brings you back there time and again?
BARBARA CROOKER: I first went to VCCA in 1990, and have been back every 18 months since then (so 19 times). Besides not having an MFA, I’m an outlier in the larger writing world because I’m not an academic (although I have been an adjunct at eight different colleges). Rather, I’ve been a caregiver, taking care of my mother for many years and also my son, who has autism. So the first time I went to VCCA and realized what it was like to reclaim my life, at least for a short period of time (I started out going for 9 day stays; I’m now up to two week ones) would, not to exaggerate, save my life, and so I’ve returned. I’ve also had two residencies at VCCA in France (in Auvillar, near Toulouse) and two at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co. Monaghan, Ireland.
All of these places have been magical for me; I think it’s because when all you do for an entire day is write, read, talk about writing, take long walks and think about writing, you start drawing from a deeper well. Also, time becomes elastic—those nine days are worth nine months “in the real world.” It’s amazing how many hours there ARE in a day when you are not involved in food prep (planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning up, repeat three times a day). When my son was eight, I discovered that a gluten and dairy-free diet made a world of difference, so I started making parallel meals for him, which was, and is, very time-consuming. So colonies that provide meals are deeply appreciated. Also, when I’m away, I try to write outside as much as possible, let the world around me seep into my poems.
At VCCA, where there are also musicians, artists, other writers, I like to let myself be open to the influences of the other artists—it’s such a rich, fertile community, and everyone whose path has crossed mine has added to my work, perhaps not in obvious ways, but I see the connecting threads. And the grounds and physical location of VCCA is simply gorgeous.
Whenever I enter the gates of Mt. San Angelo, I feel like I’m coming home.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a prolific poet for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
BARBARA CROOKER: I’m not sure I am prolific, just old. I have a poem called “Twenty-Five Years of Rejection Slips” in my first book, and that pretty much describes my early years of writing but not getting published. So I had quite a backlog. This has also meant that I’ve never strayed much from my initial writing habits, which are/were to read, write, read, repeat. Initially, email was pretty clunky—remember dial-up? Those of us in the country used it for much, much longer than the rest of the country. So because it was time-consuming (and tied up our one phone line, I tried to limit my time online. Then 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.
C.M. MAYO:Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
BARBARA CROOKER: Um, I’m still working on paper! I do multiple drafts on paper, don’t turn to the computer until I feel ready to see how the lines look in type. (I use both my ear and my eye in casting lines.) For me, the connection between head and heart through the hand is important, and I like the physicality of the pen (roller ball, extra fine, .05) moving over the blue lines on the yellow pad. Now, since I have grandchildren, I know that cursive is no longer being taught in school, so I wonder how this will change writing in the future. I’m not saying it will be negative, just that it will be different. Also, I went through both undergraduate and graduate schools using a manual typewriter (only rich people and secretaries had electric ones, and they were big and cumbersome). Here’s a poem from Some Glad Morning about this:
PROMPT by Barbara Crooker after a poem by Alison Joseph
Write me a poem about the manual typewriter, the clip clop of fingers on keys, the sleigh bell that rang when you reached the end of the line. Tell me about the carbon that smudged your fingers when you untangled jangled keys. Remember life before Word Count, when a pencil mark reminded you to end the intro, start paragraph one. The other marks that kept you on the road, true to your outline. The finals streaks of graphite that said, Wrap it up, tie it together, lead it into the barn. Those days when cut and paste involved scissors and Elmer’s glue. When making a copy meant two sheets of paper with a leaf of inky black sandwiched between. No delete key, no white-out, no search and replace. So writing a paper or a novel involved manual labor, fingers dirty at the end of the day. Write me about how your back ached. Tell me about margins and tab sets. The silver levers, the roller bars. Remember how faithful it was, this coal black steed, the places it took you to, far, far into the thicket of words. And how it always brought you safely home again.
C.M. MAYO:What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another poet who is just starting out? And, if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty year-old self?
BARBARA CROOKER: Read. Read constantly. Read poets you like, and poets you don’t have a kinship with. When you read a poem that knocks your socks off, see if you can figure out why, and then try and do it in your own work. Buy books from that author. Go to readings. Go to museums. Read. And write. To my thirty year-old self, I’d say “Patience.” As I mentioned above, it took me a long time to get a first book, and although I was a finalist many times over (it’s like Chutes & Ladders, if you don’t win, you go back to the beginning), for a while, I was thinking it might be posthumous. Having nine full-length books (I also have twelve chapbooks) was never on my radar. Nor was being solicited for The Pitt Poetry Series (my new book, Some Glad Morning—I’m still pinching myself over that!). Or appearing fifty times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Or having people pay to fly me all over the country to read. (Am going to FL, OK, TX, WI, and CT this coming year). This writing life is full of a steady stream of rejection (I always say that while it might seem that I’m successful, that’s just the little tip on the surface, and the Giant Iceberg of Rejection is looming far beneath). One of my poems ends with “Something wonderful is just about to happen,” and I still need to remind myself of this on the days when the rejections are flying thicker than snowflakes. And really, my goal is not to earn prestige or win awards; it’s to write a poem that somebody else will want to read, to make that human connection. All the rest is background noise.
C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you?
BARBARA CROOKER: Oh, boy, THAT’S a good question! Up until this point, I’ve had completed manuscripts waiting for a publisher, or part of a project halfway done. But when Pitt came calling, they cleaned out my poetry cupboard, leaving it pretty bare. I’ve been looking at what’s left (and what I’ve done since), and have loosely gathered them in a binder, calling it (for now) Slow Wreckage (the body’s decline, what climate change is doing to the planet, the political situation—cheerful, right?) But I think (or hope) that the political poems will be dated by the time I’m ready to send it to a publisher, so I’m trying to be open to letting air in, changing it completely as new poems come. I’ve been working (slowly) on a series called “Late Painters” (Monet, Renoir, Matisse, so far), on how aging altered their work, and I’d like that to become a series or a section in a book. I’m hoping to apply to the American Academy in Rome, thinking that may bring some new poems, new directions. And I’m equally all right, if I don’t have seventy-five strong poems that hang together, to say that Some Glad Morning will be my last book. But I’m not ready to say never, so really, the answer is, I’m back to square one, where I was when I started, just writing poems.
Well, yeah, it is sort of ridiculously ridiculous to rate from 1 – 12 a batch of books published over a wide range of years and in genres as varied as stories in translation, poetry, history, historical fiction, travel writing, biography, and autobiography. But it works for me! I have been posting these always-eclectic annual top books read lists for Madam Mayo blog since 2006. Aside from serving as a reading diary for myself, it is my gift to you, dear writerly reader: If you are not familiar with any given book on this list, should it appeal to you to try it, may you find it as wondrously enriching a read as I did.
(1) The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams By Jove and by Jupiter, whyever did I not read this sooner?! Every chapter a chocolate truffle, The Education of Henry Adams is a fundamental text for comprehending the culture and overall development of the United States.
P.S. Michael Lindgrin has more to say about ye tome, “this strange and beautiful journey of a book,” over at The Millions.
Reading Cather is a joy. Both of these Cather novels are well-deserved American literary classics. Over the past couple of years I have been turtling my way through Cather’s oeuvre. So far: The Professor’s House (top books read list for 2017) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (top books read list for 2018).
“You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”
(4) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell I read this novel only because my book club picked it– lucky me. It’s wickedly funny, and, curiously, and most elegantly, written in crots. (I was unaware of Connell’s work when I wrote one of my own early short stories, also in crots, also published in the Paris Review. Well, howdy there, Mr. C! If you were still alive it sure would be fun to talk to you about crots!)
P.S. See Gerald Shapiro’s profile of Evan S. Connell in Ploughshares.
(5)Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton Yet another work I wish I had read years earlier. Culiano was the author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His life ended early, and not well, alas. I never met Culiano but I was at University of Chicago for several years just before he arrived, so I knew the super-charged intellectual ambiance well– and I think Anton captures it quite accurately. Recently occultist John Michael Greer has been making noises about Culiano’s understanding of cacomagic, and this the unnamed subject of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which is what prompted me to finally pick up this biography, which had been long languishing in my “to read” pile. (If you’re a metaphysics nerd and cacomagic is what you’re interested in specifically, however, Anton’s biography, otherwise excellent, will disappoint.)
(6) Tie:
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner Stegner is always a rare pleasure to read. I came away with immense admiration for John Wesley Powell’s many and visionary achievements. And the whole problem of water in the West thing!! Obvious as that may be, but I grew up in the West and it was not so obvious to me, nor to most people I knew at the time, and this book goes a long way towards explaining why. (Illuminating indeed to pair this work with a Cather novel… see above…)
A Desert Harvest by Bruce Berger This splendid anthology collects selected essays from Bruce Berger’s masterwork of a desert trilogy, The Telling Distance, Almost an Island, and There Was a River. P.S. Read my Q & A with Bruce Berger here.
The Western Paradox by Benard DeVoto Edited by David Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Crunchy! (I still have all my teeth, though!)
(7) Tie:
Lone Star Mind by Ty Cashion Professor Cashion articulates the kooky contradictions and tectonic shifts in both popular and academic versions of Texas history. A landmark work in Texas historiography.
Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham I will be writing about this work at some length in my book on Far West Texas. At first glance, for the splashy photos of the stars on its cover, it might appear to be the usual intellectually nutritious-as-a-Ding Dong film history book. But no! Graham knew Texas like almost no one else, and for Texas, Giant, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, was a film of profound cultural importance.
(13) The Chrysalids by John Wyndham I’m not a fan of sci-fi novels; I read this one about post-nuclear apocalypse Canada only because my book club chose it. I found it to be a page-turner with splendid prose throughout (although I did some eyerolling at the end when it did get a little “inner most cave-y” and “Deus-ex-Machine-y”). I can appreciate why it remains in print, and beloved by many, more than six decades after it was first published in 1955.
P.S. I can also warmly recommend the books by authors featured in my monthly Q & As.
We writers don’t just live in our heads, of course: we all have bodies. If we are uncomfortable physically in any way it is not impossible to write, but it doesn’t help! Count me a big fan of Annie Thoe’s YouTube channel “Sensing Vitalty,” which is chock full of her free, easy to follow, and highly effective Feldenkrais exercises. A recent one she offers is this simple exercise to relieve shoulder and neck pain––which we all get from sitting scrunched in front of a computer screen, no?
Like all Feldenkrais exercises I find this one a little strange, even counterintuitive, but nonetheless wonderfully effective. This one takes about 12 minutes and you can do it while sitting in your writing chair.
