Book reviews: I write them, for I consider reviewing certain books a vital exercise for finding clarity in my own thinking. However, I try not to read reviews of my own books because my book is already written, after all, and I wrote it the way I did because that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I thought I should do, and I did it the best way I knew how (and who the hell is that schmo anyway?) If some random reviewer doesn’t like it, TFB (tough frisbees). But of course… it’s too tempting… Yeah, I read them. The pay-off for this foolishness is that once in while there is a review that makes my whole month, and not so much because it tickles my ego (although it does) but because the reviewer so profoundly understood and appreciated what I was trying to do. And this one review somehow, truly, makes writing a book, and bringing it into the world, feel… sigh. Maybe a little less quixotic. Dear poetically-inclined reader, I point you to Greg Walkin’s review of Meteor.
> A recent Writers’ League of Texas Q & A with me about Meteor & etc. is here.
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These days I am not writing much poetry because I am working on my memoir / portrait of Far West Texas and related podcasts and essays. But the Muse has her whims and wiggly ways. This is what happened last week when, weirdly, I was thinking of Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo” as I read Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archäischer Torso Apollos.” Typed on a 1967 Hermes 3000. It’s a macaronic.
UPDATE: Joseph Hutchison has posted his elegant translation of Rilke’s poem plus some fascinating links to read more about it here.
Sergio Troncoso is a writer and literary activist whom I greatly admire. It so happens that we were born the same year in the same city: El Paso, Texas. And both of us lived our adult lives in cultural environments vastly different from El Paso: I went to Mexico City; Sergio to Harvard, Yale, and many years in New York City. Sergio’s works offer a wise, deeply considered, and highly original perspective on American culture. I’ve reviewed some of his work here and here; back in 2012 I interviewed him at length about his life and work for my occasional podcast series, Conversations With Other Writers, which you can listen in to anytime here. In the years since he has since published an impressive number of highly accomplished works, both fiction and nonfiction, his latest a collection of short stories, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son.
C.M. MAYO: What inspires you to write short fiction, as opposed to a novel or nonfiction?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: In this particular collection, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, I wanted to focus on short fiction because it allowed me to play with perspectivism and the fragmentation of characters in a way that a longer work (like a novel) would not. These thirteen stories on immigration and Mexican-American diaspora are linked together: a character appears in a group of stories, only to reappear in the next story from a different angle or perspective. The individual stories also build on each other to ask the reader to question herself as to how she brings certain biases and prejudices to certain characters, how the reader herself contributes to this perspectival and temporal truth, which philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche focused on and writers like Virgina Woolf also explored. So the book is this fragmented whole, in a way, in which the fragments are visible in the form of stories (and the whole is understood only by the reader).
C.M. MAYO: Of all the stories in this collection which is the one you feel most proud of? And why?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I conceived this book as a whole of stories, as a puzzle in thirteen pieces. So it’s difficult to single out one story. But I am fond of “Eternal Return,” the final story, because it stands alone to bring together many of the themes in the other stories, this playing with perspectivism and time, the presence of ancestors and geographies long gone, the shifting self trying to come together in many selves, all with the existential tick-tock of the clock that reminds us every day that our time on earth is limited. Even if time is always short, we must come together as a self, even if so many forces pull us apart.
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to only read one story, which would you recommend?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I would recommend the first story, “Rosary on the Border.” This story begins with a death (as does “Eternal Return,” but death in another form, so to speak), and it takes you into the realism of David Calderon’s life. He tries to makes sense of his father’s death, of his life in relation to the finality that David sees before him. So David sees and appreciates, in bittersweet moments, what his father and mother taught him, even as he has separated himself from them. So it’s an easily accessible (realistic) story that begins a journey for the reader that ends with the more magical-realist “Eternal Return” and another concept of ‘death’ and ‘ancestor.’
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to take away one sentence (or two or three) from this story, which would you suggest, and why?“
SERGIO TRONCOSO: “I believed in very little, but I kept going until I would get tired or defeated, and then I would take time to discover another wall to throw myself at. I was, and I am, and I will be, a peculiar kind of immigrant’s son. I got old, and that made everything better, including me.”These sentences from “Rosary on the Border” encapsulate David’s effort to search through his past to find out what belongs with him still, and to rid himself of ideas and superstitions that through experience lost their meaning, and yet to go back to who he was, an immigrant’s son, what’s left of this sense of self, to move forward in his life.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for you?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: Different writers have been influential at different times in my life. When I was a teenager, I loved S.E. Hinton, because her young-adult novels reflected much of my life in Ysleta, with gangs and poverty and being ‘outsiders.’ In college, I started reading the great Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Ruben Dario, Gabriela Mistral, and later I kept going with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. The list of Latin American writers I read is too long! It’s a treasure trove of great writing in Latin America. In the subway, for many years, I would read and reread Emily Dickinson’s collected works, because I loved her lines and the rhythms of her sentences, and because I was taken in by her unique, deeply curious perspective that had little to do with commercial publishing or becoming a celebrity. I love that kind of fiercely independent, insular writing into the soul.
C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I’ve read many of the works of Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican writer who is such an innovator with narrative form. I’m enjoying works by Francisco Cantu and Octavio Solis, as well as poetry by Sasha Pimentel and Megan Peak. I’m not a poet, but I love reading poetry. Also, I’m a fan of George Saunders: he is just a master of the short story, and his novel Lincoln in the Bardo introduced me to a new (or unusual) narrative form in a longer work.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a productive writer 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?
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.
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?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I still work on paper, after I edit on my computer. I always print any story or novel several times and edit it line-by-line on sheets of paper. I write notes in the white space in the back, as I edit, to add or subtract or plan ahead, as I discard, change, add. I like the going back and forth, between words on paper and words on a computer: this back and forth always gives me a new perspective on what I have on the page, and I need that as an editor.
C.M. MAYO: What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another writer who is just starting out? And, if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty year-old self?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: Read as if your life depended on it. Read critically in the area you are thinking of writing. Don’t be an idiot: seek out and appreciate the help of others who are trying to help you by pointing out your errors, your lapses in creating your literary aesthetic. Get a good night’s sleep: if you do, you’ll be ready to write new work the next day. And if you fail, you won’t destroy yourself because you did. You’ll be ready to sit in your chair the next day.
“Read as if your life depended on it. Read critically in the area you are thinking of writing.”
C.M. MAYO: In recent years you have been a very active member of the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL). Can you talk a little about your vision for and the value of this organization?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I’m the current vice president of the TIL. I’m also the webmaster. I’ve actually had a lot of roles in the TIL, official and unofficial. I’m just trying to help. I believe we can nurture a great community of writers in Texas that honors the independence and excellence of past members, while reaching out to communities within our state who are producing great writers but have often been ignored. Mexican-American writers, for example. So not only have we modernized the TIL by taking much of our work and ability to pay dues online, but we have also inducted more women and people of color. We have also held our annual meeting in places we’ve never been, like El Paso and McAllen, so that we represent the entire state of Texas, and not just the orbit around Austin. With our lifetime achievement award, we have honored more women than ever before (Sarah Bird, Pat Mora, Sandra Cisneros, Naomi Shihab Nye). And just a few days ago, we announced that John Rechy has won our 2020 Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award. So we are recognizing the excellence that was always there, while also being inclusive. As my grandmother often said, “Quien adelante no ve atras se queda.” One who doesn’t look forward is left behind.
“As my grandmother often said, ‘Quien adelante no ve atras se queda.’ One who doesn’t look forward is left behind.“
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I just signed a contract with Cinco Puntos Press for a new novel, tentatively entitled as Nobody’s Pilgrims, which I have already written. I’ll be working on editing it. Also, I’m the editor of a new anthology, Nepantla Familias: A Mexican-American Anthology of Literature on Families in between Worlds. What family values from Mexican-American heritage have helped the writer (or the protagonist or narrator) become who she is, and what family values did she discard or adapt or change to become who she wanted to be? This is the ‘in between moment’ that is the focus of this literary anthology. I am always busy, but that’s how I like it. The more I do, the more I can do.
BY C.M. MAYO — October 21, 2019 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
Just last week the 2018 issue (vol. 30) of the Journal of Big Bend Studies landed in my mailbox. I am proud to say that this is my second publication in this excellent US-Mexico borderlands scholarly journal published by Sul Ross State University in the Big Bend of Far West Texas. (My essay on Francisco I. Madero’s secret book was my first publication in the JBBS.) This is the paper I presented at the Center for Big Bend Studies Association conference in 2017: “John Bigelow, Jr.: Officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between the West and the Eastern Establishment.”
It’s in some fine company in this issue. Herewith the table of contents:
From a Frederic Remington illustration in John Bigelow Jr.’s collected articles, On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo.
Whew!! Pictured here is my writing assistant, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl. Remembering all that work we did made him…sigh… take a siesta.
Writing such a lengthy, seriously-serious article all abristle with endnotes and straight-jacketed diction is unusual for me; my focus is writing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Those of you who follow this blog well know that I have been at work on a memoir / portrait of Far West Texas– definitively creative nonfiction– for more than a little while now. It was because I had done a heap and a half of research on John Bigelow, Sr. in writing my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, that I knew there was much more to say about his son, John Bigelow, Jr., than I had come across in the literature on Texas and the Indian Wars and, well, I just felt I had to do it.
I find writing can be funny that way; for all one’s careful goal-setting and planning, sometimes a work seems to have a will of its own, to demand it be written, and in a certain way. This essay on John Bigelow, Jr. is one of those works. It truly surprised me. I hope it may prove of interest and useful to anyone looking at borderlands and military history, as well the genesis of ideas about the American West. Certainly, writing it has helped me further arrange the furniture, smooth out the rugs, and dust off the trophy heads in my thinking about Far West Texas.
As I stress in my creative writing workshops, it has been my consistent experience that to stay limber and working fluidly I need to regularly read outside my comfort zone. And I mean, read outside my comfort zone as a writer, pencil in-hand.
(Is this practice right for you as a creative writer? Well, I don’t know your innermost inner artist, nonetheless, I’d bet my three typewriters that he or she would find it bongo-drums + a B12 shot for creative energy. And I’d bet my laptop, too.)
Reading as a writer, as I detailed in this previous blog post, and this entire blog about War & Peace, is a fundamentally different endeavor than reading to pass the time, or, say, reading something just because all your friends and the people you presume to impress have read it, or reading because your book club picked it, or for some scholarly purpose, or whatever combination thereof.
Reading as a writer is reading to identify what precisely works here? What precisely is ineffective? And precisely why this effective, or that ineffective?
In short, there are rafts of techniques and I consider it essential to be able to identify them when they are used to effect– or could have been.
On other words, if a piece of writing sings to you, it is in no way helpful to you as a writer to get all awesomed out, saying things like, golly wow, no wonder he won the Nobel Prize, little ol’ me, why, I could never do that!
Well, ick. Stoppit. You can do this.
You need to ask, precisely why do I find this bit good? How, precisely, did the writer achieve this effect? What specifically can I learn here?
Ditto, if you find a piece of writing bad. Why is it bad? What specifically can I learn from this?
Reading as a writer, pencil in hand, I’ll read in my comfort zone– writers such as Willa Cather, Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, et al. But for creative inspiration I’ll also take a more than occasional jog outside my comfort zone: a spree on books about UFOs, gun mags, a guide to caring for your iguana (I do not have an iguana, I never had an iguana and I do not care to have an iguana, but anyway now I know a lot about iguanas), and (this comes with the territory of writing about Far West Texas) self-published cowboy memoirs.
Add to that ever-expanding list–this week only!–fashion blogs.
(What’s outside your comfort zone, dear writerly reader?)
OK, yes, a lot of the writing in these out-of-my-comfort-zone genres tends to be, shall we say, pedestrian. I cannot say anything in the how-to-care- for-iguanas genre, to take one example, would merit quoting for its lyrical qualities… but I may well have a character in my next novel who knows a heap about iguanas, and his green monster, Peps, who likes to hide his stash of flies under the sofa…
But sometimes I am surprised. I am always open to being surprised!
Fashion bloggers… There’s a heap to say about those fashion bloggers… but describing that colorful subculture and its effervescent personalities is not my purpose here. What I want to spotlight in this month’s workshop post is the vervy-good writing in Vancouver Canada-based artist Melanie Kobayashi’s fashion blog, Bag and a Beret.
To wit:
Sometimes I am giddy with the idea of throwing everything out, O-U-T, out! No more clutter, clenched sphincters, and squinty eyes. Instead, a confounding profound serenity. Like the scent of jeans fresh from the freezer. Clouds would be fluffier. Doritos would be healthier. I’d take up yoga, do downward dogs and sideways cows, and start saying all those namasty things. And drink green fluids with stringy bits. —Is That An Alien in My Closet? Melanie Kobayashi, Bag and a Beret, March 4, 2016
Because this is a workshop post, I’m going to get all workshoppy now and pick this apart. Which kills the fizz in it, I know, but the purpose here is to identify some of the poetic techniques Kobayashi uses that might well serve you for your writing.
Actually there is a whole bouquet of literary techniques in Kobayashi’s paragraph. To point out just four of the techniques:
(1) She varies her syntax– such delicious, jiggy energy! Note her short, punchy sentences: Clouds would be fluffier. Doritos would be healthier... And drink green fluids with stringy bits.
(2) Like the finest of poets Kobayashi gives us specific detail that appeals to the senses: Texture (fluffier clouds); temperatures (“jeans fresh from the freezer”); tastes (Doritos, “green fluids with stringy bits”)
Another example of vervy-good writing from Melanie Kobayashi’s blog:
Alert, another face pose! This aluminum-foilesque blazer is exactly my style. I adore the humongous acrylic buttons. Shelley grabbed it for a try-on on our way out. The way I farked this photo reminds me of a popular Canadian TV ad where a couple heats their home so hot that it melts cheese. In this case, I would be the potato. —Friends Galore and Imaginations Gone Wild, Melanie Kobayashi, Bag and a Beret, June 29, 2019
And:
Today I feature alluuuuring, not-quite-lurid, languid bedroom attire as corporate pyjama daywear, or, as I shall call it, Bed to Boardroom. “Oh James, bring me the latest numbers so I can calculate how bad I am at math. On second thought, skip the math and let’s go straight to drama, English literature. Bring me another martini and wheel in the divan.” —Corporate Pyjama Daywear, Leopard-Style Melanie Kobayashi, Bag and a Beret, October 21, 2017
There’s a lot of music in this quote:
(1) stretching and playing with words, e.g., “alluuuuring”
Yet another example from Kobayashi’s Bag and a Beret:
So I wore this vintage barkcloth maxi the other day. You may have seen it before – but not with my lovely lava pendant paired with that other one, looking very, dare I say, fly? And bracelets. I don’t wear them often because my wrists are small and the bangles clamp my hands when they dangle down. So here we have a Hawaiian-made dress with lava jewels and hiking boots (with fringe and platforms, an improvement on the standard fare). Do I sense a pattern here? Why, of course – I should be a vulcanologist! It’s so clear now. Open your mind. Let your clothes guide you!! —Let Your Clothes Choose Your Profession Melanie Kobayashi, Bag and a Beret, July 1, 2015
Just a few of many things I could note in this are her use of alliteration; questions; and splendid use of specific sensory detail (e.g., “And bracelets. I don’t wear them often because my wrists are small and the bangles clamp my hands when they dangle down.”)
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More!!
This is a project-ish project– paring down my clothing and focusing more on earrings and suchlike, meaning tights, hair thingies, face paint, maybe shoes. I am looking forward to the challenge but this is mainly an attempt to free up more space in my space-challenger home. In fact, I bought some Ziploc Space Bags (in tropical colours), which are vacuum-resealable bags capable of squishing a huge pile of clothing into one fruity brick. Spacey, baby, spacey. —Why Do Laundry When You Have Scissors? Melanie Kobayashi, Bag and a Beret, February 17, 2014
I wrote “Sky Over El Nido” about 500 years ago (um, that would be sometime in the early ’90s). What’s interesting to me about it now is that it has what I thought of then as a net-like narrative structure, but that I now think of as Sandboxing with Fractals. At the time I was reading a lot of Douglas Glover, Kate Braverman, Jorge Luis Borges, Marguerite Feitlowitz, and Flannery O’Connor. It was a wicked lark to write.
You can read more about Sky Over El Nido over on my webpage, www.cmmayo.com. (…In 2020 I aim to get that verily ancient website into WordPress…)
Notable: Whitney Fishburn, Washington DC-based journalist and critic, has just launched docu-mental. And she continues writing a monthly column for the Writer’s Center.
New book out: Eric D. Goodman writes, “This October, Loyola’s Apprentice House Press is publishing my novel, Setting the Family Tree... [I]t follows a private reserve of exotic animals as they are released into the community.”
I found out about Clifford Garstang’s latest, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, when I received his emailed newsletter. (A good writer’s newsletter– that will be the subject, along with a recounting of some of my own infelicitous adventures with mailchimp, of another post, perhaps in 2020.) Suffice to say, I was delighted to hear about Garstang’s new novel, just out from Braddock Avenue Books. I met Garstang some years ago when I was living in Washington DC. While the literary scene there is assuredly not what comes to mind for most people at the mention of the nation’s capital, in fact that scene is substantial, reaching into Virgnia, Maryland and Delaware; highly heterogeneous; attuned to the international; and thriving. Garstang, both as an author and as an editor, is an important part of it.
And by the way, many legions of writers all over the US and elsewhere who write in English also know Garstang for his annual Literary Magazine Rankings, which he publishes in his blog, Perpetual Folly.
C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write The Shaman of Turtle Valley?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: The book has multiple sources of inspiration. First, it’s something of an extension of the stories that appeared in my first collection, In an Uncharted Country, about people who are trying to find a place for themselves in a rural community. Shaman’s main character is a young war veteran who isn’t sure where he belongs, and that story was the original seed for the novel. But because I lived in Korea for a couple of years a long time ago, I have various Korean artifacts in my home, and one of those, a traditional Korean folk painting of a figure known as Sansin, or the Mountain God, got me to thinking of the similarities and differences between rural Korea and rural Virginia. What would happen, I wondered, if a Korean shaman—invariably a woman—encountered a traditional Appalachian healer in the mountains of Virginia? The two ideas came together, embraced each other, and grew.
C.M. MAYO:Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for you?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: I have had the great good fortune of studying with some amazing writers in graduate school and at writers’ conferences, and I would say they remain important influences because of what they had in common—a devotion to the sentence. Writers like Elizabeth Strout, Tim O’Brien, Christine Schutt, Peter Ho Davies, Russell Banks, and the late Grace Paley were all very generous with their attention and, I’d like to think, made me a better writer.
C.M. MAYO:Which writers are you reading now?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: I’m a terribly eclectic reader. I just finished Téa Obreht’s new novel, Inland, and next up would be Karen Russell’s Orange World, Tommy Orange’s There, There, and Richard Russo’s Chances Are. Also, because I just came home from a trip to Prague, I’m going to read Jiri Weil’s Mendelssohn is on the Roof, about the Nazi occupation of that city.
C.M. MAYO:You have been a productive writer 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?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: One of the reasons I often work in coffee shops, despite the inevitable distractions that come with being in a public place, is that it constrains me from goofing off. People see me, I’m supposed to be working, and so I mostly work. At home I’m far more easily distracted, but one thing that does seem to help is sticking to a work schedule every morning, turning off the Internet (or at least Social Media sites), and bringing my focus to bear on the task at hand. I don’t beat myself up if I slip—meditation training teaches us to “begin again”—and I also find it helps to listen to an album (instrumental). After the forty-five or sixty minutes of the music, I allow myself to take a peek at email, or whatever, and then get back to work.
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?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: Last year, as we were nearing the production phase of the book’s publication, I printed the manuscript out. (I confess that there were times much earlier when I thought the book was nearly done and I did the same thing, only to have the agent or publisher search stall.) I went off to a hideaway and I did my final, final edits on paper. I find this very useful at a late stage. It helps to see the words on the page differently, to spot problems that are more easily ignored when you glide by them on a screen. Then, too, working on paper is another way to focus, to shut out the Internet.
C.M. MAYO:What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another writer who is just starting out?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: I would advise patience. Don’t be in such a hurry to finish something or to publish it. Let it sit. Think about it. Revisit the work to see if it still feels right. And don’t let an agent’s or editor’s No deter you or push you into self-publishing prematurely. Keep improving the work and persevere until you find the right publishing opportunity and method for you and the work.
C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you as a writer?
CLIFFORD GARSTANG: I actually have two books “in the can” and set for publication. A new collection of short stories, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, will be published by Press 53 in May of 2020, and a novel, Oliver’s Travels, will be published by Regal House Publishing in Spring 2021. But my current writing project is another novel, this one set in Singapore, where I lived for many years. I’m excited about this book, but I have no idea when it will be done.
Catalog copy for The Shaman of Turtle Valley:
The author of the award-winning What the Zhang Boys Know ( …utterly beautiful and unforgettable Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang) now gives us a heart-rending first novel about love, displacement, and the powerful ghosts that haunt so many families. The Alexanders have farmed the land in Turtle Valley for generations, and their family and its history is tied to this mountainous region of Virginia in ways few others can claim. When Gulf War veteran Aiken Alexander brings home a young and pregnant South Korean bride, he hopes at long last to claim his own place in that complicated history coming out from behind the shadow of his tragically killed older brother and taking up a new place in his father’s affections. However, things do not go according to plan. While he loves his young son, his wife, Soon-hee, can’t or won’t adjust to life in America. Her behavior growing stranger and stranger to Aiken’s eyes every day until the marriage reaches a breaking point. When Soon-hee disappears with their son, Aiken’s life and dreams truly fall apart. He loses his job, is compelled to return to the family home, and falls prey to all his worst impulses. It is at this low point that Aiken’s story becomes interwoven with a dubious Alexander family history, one that pitted brother against brother and now cousin against cousin, in a perfect storm of violence and dysfunction. Drawing on Korean beliefs in spirits and shamanism, how Aiken solves these problems both corporeal and spiritual is at the center of this dynamic and beautifully written debut novel.
Ring-a-ling to Dr. Jung! I happened to get my hands on Turner’s memoir just before a trip to Paris in which, not having heard of his book, I had planned to visit St. Sulpice and so, by happenstance, on the very day I finished the book, which concludes in St. Sulpice, there I was, looking at the very same Eugène Delacroix murals. That was wiggy.
I regret that I do not have the time this week to give In the Land of the Temple Caves the thoughtful review it deserves. Suffice to say, it came out over a decade ago, and I am astonished that I had not heard of it earlier. It deserves to be considered a classic of American, and indeed English language, literary travel memoir.
This past spring I attended theAssociated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, where I read from Meteor, my book of poetry, as part of the Gival Press 20th anniversary celebration. AWP is not for the FOMO-ly challenged. In the crowd of 15,000+ conference-goers I missed many events and many friends, among them the poet, playwright and translator Zack Rogow. And it didn’t seem at all right to have missed Rogow for, the last time I was at AWP, it was to participate on his panel with Mark Doty and Charles Johnson, “Homesteading on the Digital Frontier: Writers’ Blogs,” one of the crunchiest conference panels ever. (You can read the transcript of my talk about blogs here.)
Should you try to attend AWP next spring 2020 in San Antonio? Of course only you know what’s right for you. But I can say this much: AWP can be overwhelming, an experience akin to a fun house ride and three times through the TSA line at the airport with liquids… while someone drones the William Carlos Williams white chickens poem… AWP can also prove Deader than Deadsville, if what you’re after is, say, an agent for your ready-for-Netflix thriller. The commercial publishing scene it ain’t.
On the bright side, however, Zack Rogow attends AWP. He is one of the most talented and generous poets and translators I know. Watch this brief documentary about his life and work and I think you’ll understand why I say this:
Rogow is also a teacher of creative writing, and for several years now he’s been blogging steadily with his “Advice for Writers.” It’s a terrific resource. I hope he’ll turn it into a book–the moment he does I’ll add it to the list of recommended books for my workshop.
Herewith a degustation of Rogow’s extra-crunchy posts:
I am delighted and honored to announce that my translation of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s short story “La tía” as “The Aunt” appears in the shiny new Fall 2019 issue of Catamaran Literary Reader– check it out here. “The Aunt” is from The Water That Rocks the Silence, Salum’s collection of linked stories set in Lebanon, two other stories of which have previously appeared in Catamaran. Originally published in Spanish as El agua que mece el silencio (Vaso Roto, 2015), it won the International Latino Book Award and the prestigious Panamerican Award Carlos Montemayor.
>>Continue reading this story online here and some of Salum’s other work in Catamaran here.
Based in Santa Cruz, California, Catamaran is a stand-out on the West Coast literary scene, and, indeed, it is one of the finest English language literary magazines alive in the United States today.
Rose Mary Salum is not only a superb writer and poet, but she is one of Mexico’s most visionary editors, editor of Delta de arenas (an anthology of Arab, Jewish writing from Latin America), and founding editor of the literary magazineLiteral: Latin American Voices, Voces latinoamericanas and of Literal Publishing which, among others, publishes the “Deslocados” series of writing in Spanish by Latin Americans who live in the United States.
Here is a screenshot of her bio (and mine) from the current issue:
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Back in 2013 I did a very fun in-depth interview with Rose Mary Salum about her work for my Conversations with Other Writers occasional series podcast. You can listen in anytime here and read the complete transcript of that interview here.
And the Houston Chronicle has a piece on Salum and her International Latino Book Award here.
