C.M. Mayo’s Book Notes + Convos – Page 2 – Texas, Mexico, rare books, literary travel memoir

Q & A with Rachel Fulton Brown About The Dragon Common Room and “Aurora Bearialis”

BY C.M. MAYO — July 25, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. The fourth Monday of every other month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

“Think fencing salle meets monastic scriptorium meets electric choir.” — Rachel Fulton Brown

A product of the on-the-edges cultural renaissance burbling up out of covid times, Aurora Bearialis is one of the most beautiful, original and charming books I have ever encountered. It is, by the way, a Christian children’s book modeled on medieval romance, brought into the world by a group of poets who meet online (group chat on Telegram), and by historian Rachel Fulton Brown. Visit her University of Chicago academic homepage; her “not-so-academic” blog; and her Dragon Common Room Books.

Aurora Bearialis
by The Dragon Common Room,
Illustrated by Handdrawnbear,
edited by Rachel Fulton Brown

C.M. MAYO: What is the Dragon Common Room, and what inspired you to write Aurora Bearialis?

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: The Dragon Common Room (DCR) is an online “digital classroom” which I started in May 2020 as a place for training in the art of Christian minstrelsy. Think fencing salle meets monastic scriptorium meets electric choir. In practical terms, DCR is a group chat on the social media platform Telegram, its members drawn from around the internet by their interest in Christianity, poetry, and imaginative mischief making. The core group of poets have been working together now for over two years, honing our ability to write in iambic pentameter.

Aurora Bearialis is our second book. Our first book, Centrism Games, is a biting satire on the modern lack of virtue in the pursuit of Fame. Having delved into the hypocrisies and horrors of our adult world in this first poem, we wanted to write something more hopeful for children, modeled on the grail quests and chivalric adventures of medieval romance. We wanted to give children something challenging but fun that would invite them into the world of Christian symbolism. We chose animals as our main characters to give the story a more “fairy tale” quality, but with grounding in our primary reality.

Perhaps the best description of Aurora Bearialisis “Dante for children”: a medieval-style comedy working on multiple levels—historical, allegorical, moral, and mystical—with bears, penguins, and an albatross, who go in search of the Light.

C.M. MAYO: How did you find Handrawnbear? Because, Wow!

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: Handdrawnbear found us! She had been working for several years making drawings and animations at unBearables Media (https://unbearablesmedia.com/hand-drawn-bear/). I was in touch with one of their other creators and asked if there were anyone interested in doing illustrations for our new bear poem. Being a “bear,” she jumped at the chance! She has written on her own blog about how working with us has inspired her to write more Christian poetry (https://handdrawnbear.com/blogs/handdrawn-journal/the-once-mute-bear-finds-her-voice).

I notice that in her version of the story, I found her. This is a taste of what it was like working on Aurora Bearialis: it often felt as if the poem were writing itself or that we were discovering it along with the penguins and bears. To this day, I have only a vague memory of who wrote what or even whether the words or pictures came first. More often than not, we would be writing, and Handdrawnbear would show us her sketches, and we would suddenly realize what came next thanks to her drawings. And yet, she remembers the process as finding the visuals to fit the words. Both are true!

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing and editing and assembling Aurora Bearialis, did you have in mind an ideal reader? If so, might you say more about that ideal reader?

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: Our ideal reader is a child aged 8-12, with younger and older siblings or friends. We had long discussions over the vocabulary for our poem. We wanted it to be challenging enough to send readers (or listeners) to the dictionary, but whimsical enough to make them laugh. The poem alternates high mysticism with physical comedy, so, for example, after Abner the albatross tells our hero, the polar bear Ulfilas, about the melting stars in the Southern sky, he has to taunt the bear to get off his butt and swim for it, whereupon the polar bear bites the albatross in the butt, claiming a feather.

We were also concerned to write a story for children with a strong moral, as well as a story that would point them to the beauties of the Christian liturgy. The characters in the story needed to grow in understanding over the course of their adventure and to face real threats to their courage. At the same time, we wanted the reader to feel caught up in the story, striving with the bears to answer the riddles that the penguins set. Conversely, we wanted the pictures to set puzzles that the text could not express, much as medieval manuscripts—or comic books—rely on both image and word. Thanks to Handdrawnbear’s experience with animation, it is possible to “read” the story simply by looking at the pictures, while the text points the reader to “Easter eggs” in the pictures only whales (or children dancing before the Ark) can find.

C.M. MAYO: What was the most challenging aspect of publishing this book?

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: Technically, the hardest part of publishing this book was the graphic design, for which we got help from one of Handdrawnbear’s friends, but the biggest challenge overall has been learning to work as a team. Telegram as a platform works amazingly well as a place for dynamic conversation. There, we are able not only to write, but also to share images, voice messages, and links, making it easy to compile references for both drawings and text. The difficulty comes as it does in any creative work with keeping to task while allowing inspiration to strike.

My solution: work and pray like medieval monks! The “drakes” meet as a group every weekday at 6pm CST, starting and (ideally) stopping after exactly an hour. My experience as a writer and teacher has obviously been helpful, but the drakes have given me energy and companionship that I have never experienced as an academic historian working primarily on single-author articles and monographs. It has been a challenge for me articulating my own creative process to a group—setting goals, writing outlines, keeping to the daily practice—but it has also been a joy being able to suggest an idea to the group and watch it blossom and fruit in ways I could never have envisioned on my own.

C.M. MAYO: What has most surprised you about its reception? (And what has been its reception among your academic colleagues?)

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: It has surprised me most being swarmed by the children at St. John Cantius Church when I did a reading for them one Sunday after Mass! (I think they liked it, especially the part where the Griffin grabs the Panda as he is eating the offerings on the altar.) I have also done presentations on the book for a conference on Christian literature, which we recorded as a lecture at Cantius for the parents (https://youtu.be/5AmMrBXFgUM), and I have presented on it to the Catholic Society at Hillsdale College.

When I talk about the book with my academic colleagues, they are, of course, dazzled by the pictures, but I can see them getting thoughtful about what it means to recover medieval Christian storytelling in a digital mode.

In the Dragon Common Room, we are using a digital medium (Telegram) to write metered poetry that reads like medieval exegesis of Scripture, on multiple levels simulatenously, with pictures and words working together to recover a multisensory awareness of metaphysical truth. Is academia with its visual focus on print ready for acoustically resonant Dantean poetry? The children at Cantius are!

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you as a creative writer, and also, specifically, when you were writing Aurora Bearialis?

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: I have been teaching a course at the University of Chicago on J.R.R. Tolkien for almost twenty years now, the final project for which is an invitation to “sub-create” within Tolkien’s legendarium in an artistic medium of the students’ choice. There is definitely something of Tolkien’s hobbits in our band of bears setting off on a quest that brings them to a mountain of fire, but there are doubtless layers that even I am not entirely conscious of, much as Tolkien described his own writing process.

We originally described the story as “The Hobbit (with bears) meets The Wizard of Oz (with penguins) meets Parzifal (with a griffin) meets The Voyage of St. Brendan (with the Leviathan), with a dash of Terry Pratchett’s Thud. Probably. Depending on what happens in the Ice City with the penguins. With gemstones inspired by Marbode of Rennes. I’m thinking there is something of The Silmarillion in the story soup as well. And probably some Pilgrim’s Progress.” I will be interested to hear what other influences readers discern, but one of my newer poets has for reasons unexplained started reading James Joyce, which I think is a clue.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you—and the Dragon Common Room?

RACHEL FULTON BROWN: Our next poem Draco Alchemicus is even more ambitious, with a new artist and a new stanza form. Think Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene meets Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, with pirates and insights from Marshall McLuhan on how “the medium is the message” and “the electric light is pure information.” We are launching a crowdfund this summer to help promote our work, but you can get a preview of the illustrations and opening stanzas on our website (https://www.dragoncommonroom.com).

Our new artist Zé Nuno Fraga is an experienced comic artist from Portugal, who specializes in truly terrifying Christian meditations, not to mention having an ethereal way with light. Our team has both shrunk and grown, as the poetry has gotten more demanding and we have expanded our technical range. We spent six months researching, brainstorming, and practicing Spenserian stanzas before starting to write this poem.

The best thing about the poetry for me is the way it gives shape to my academic reading and writing. I find myself researching things I would never have thought to consider in depth—pirates and the spice trade and alchemy and modern economics, not to mention media studies and horse racing—while becoming attentive to things I encounter both in real life and online as at once symbols and story.

A friend asked me recently about what the digital environment of social media and streaming means, as compared with the printed novel or electric film. I said, “You just said it. It’s streaming”—and then my newest poet started posting in our Telegram chat the opening pages of Finnegans Wake—“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay.” The opening scene of Draco Alchemicus is set in a casino by the bay where our newlywed couple is betting on the horses.

I’m thinking we’re going to need a bigger ark for the coming flood.

EXCERPT from Aurora Bearialis:

From Act III: The City
12
The Mayor of the Penguins ruffed his neck
and asked, “How come these strangers to our town?”
The guards replied, “We found them on their deck.
They climbed the Wall of Ice from base to crown!”
The Mayor turned with just a trace of geck:
“Do you denounce the seals as vicious clowns?”
“We seek the Light the albatross once spied.”
The Mayor squawked: “But how is that one pied?!”

13
“We rescued him from seals who called him fat.
They tortured him with fish he could not eat!”
“Why do you seek the Light?” the Mayor asked.
“To gaze upon its rhyme, celestial sweet.”
“The Light is not for unclean eyes of brats,
but only those whom riddles can’t defeat.”
Ulfilas grinned, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“No wizards nor their riddles match our wits!”

14
“You seek the Light, but it has come to you
upon the water where light meets the sky.
Tell me: can earth rejoice as angels do?
Can some birds swim like fish, or great fish fly?
The crystal door to heaven surrounds you.
The starry glass of Time is flowing by!”
His riddle fell to them as magic dice,
their destiny set down upon the ice.

15
The bears began to ruminate his words,
but crunches interrupted their deep thoughts.
“What tasty treats, such convivial birds!”
said Yuan with his mouth full. “Hits the spot!”
The Mayor and his courtiers gasped, perturbed.
The Magellanics cried, “What hast thou wrought?”
“How dare he!” “Seize him!” came great shouts of woe.
“We welcomed you as friends, but you are foe!”

16
The penguins gaped in horror as the bear
crawled up the altar, munching as he said,
“Who made these canapés? They’re yummy fare!”
The Mayor shook with anger, his wings spread,
but Panda did not even feel his stare
so hungry was his soul for their sea bread.
When—lo!—a beast with frightening, flaming jaws
swooped down and seized San Yuan in its claws!

—By permission of the editor, Rachel Fulton Brown.

*
To find your copy of Aurora Bearialis, visit Dragon Common Room Books.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Q & A with Christina Thompson on Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

From the Archives: A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire

Duende and the Importance of Questioning ELB

Writing Memoir: Taber’s “To Write the Past” and Conover’s “Immersion”

BY C.M. MAYO — July 11, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Second Mondays of every other month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!
> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

Please note: The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

Two new works for my list of recommended books on the craft of creative writing:

Sara Mansfield Taber’s superb To Write the Past: A Memoir Writer’s Companion (Musings on the Philosophical, Personal, and Artistic Questions Faced by the Autobiographical Writer) is an especially welcome addition to this list. Not only is Taber a seasoned writing teacher, but her memoirs, which I have long admired, have achieved wide acclaim, among them: Born Under an Assumed Name; Bread of Three Rivers, and Dusk on the Campo. Her latest is Black Water and Tulips— and apropos of that extraordinary memoir of her life with her also extraordinary mother, later this year I hope to get Taber’s As to some of my Qs for this blog.

“I say literary memoir-writing is not navel gazing, or conceit, or prostitution, but an offering of truth in a world gone hazy about it. I say we all have a right to our own stories, our own versions of the truth, and the more versions we have the richer we are.”

— Sara Mansfield Taber, To Write the Past

Ted Conover’s Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep is an invaluable guide for any writer who wants to go undercover (and don’t we all, at least a little bit, sometimes?) Conover is the author of several works of unsettlingly original anthropological literary reporting / memoirs of immersion, among them, Coyotes, Whiteout, and Newjack.

“A writer came up to me recently after I gave a talk and asked, ‘When you do these immersions, can you be yourself?’

“Yes, I said. Yes, because who can you be besides yourself?”

— Ted Conover, Immersion

“The best immersive researchers are probably those attentive to social cues, people who are reasonably social and reasonably self-aware. My operating philosophy is that many people are frightened of strangers, so the first thing you want to be is nonthreatening. You want to try to fit in. If you are young and have body piercings and tattoos and hope to sit in on a meeting of your great aunt’s chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, consider leaving studs and hoops at home and covering some of your skin.”
— Ted Conover, Immersion

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone (DFS),
Plus an App Evaluation Flowchart to Tailor-Make Your Own

Q & A with Biographer David O. Stewart
on the Stunning Fact of George Washington

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

The Most Extraordinary and Beautiful Translation I Have Ever Seen (And You Just Might Say the Same)

BY C.M. MAYO — June 20, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Because of some recent whatnot & etc. this finds me flailingly behind with my email. Slowly but surely I am catching up; however you will never find me complaining about email when among the missives are such beautiful gifts as this, from American poet Hiram Larew:

Dear Ms. Mayo—

I thought you might enjoy these two clips.

In a 2+-minute video, Eric Epstein offers his American Sign Language interpretation of Magic, a poem that first appeared in Orbis and then in my collection, Mud Ajar. Eric Epstein’s American Sign Language Interpretation of Larew’s Poem, “Magic” – YouTube

And, in a 4+ minute Behind the Scenes video, Mr. Epstein describes the process he used to translate the poem into ASL.

Behind the Scenes — Eric Epstein Discusses How He Translated “Magic” – YouTube

I thank Eric for his open, amazing spirit.

To the magic of ASL and poetry!

Hiram Larew

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Translating Across the Border

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

Q & A: Roger Greenwald on Translating
Tarjei Vesaas’s Through Naked Branches

Texas Books: From the Archives: A Review of Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso’s “Our Lost Border”

BY C.M. MAYO — June 6, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library.
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, a newsletter.

OUR LOST BORDER
Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
Arte Público Press, Houston, Texas
Trade paperback $19.95, March 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55885-752-0

Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal, 2013

Lurid television, newspaper stories, and cliché-ridden movies about Mexico abound in English; rare is any writing that plumbs to meaningful depths or attempts to explore its complexities. And so, out of a concatenation of ignorance, presumption and prejudice, those North Americans who read only English have been deprived of the stories that would help them see the Spanish-speaking peoples and cultures right next door, and even within the United States itself, and the tragedies daily unfolding because of or, at the very least kindled by, the voracious North American appetite for drugs. For this reason, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, a treasure trove of one dozen personal essays, deserves to be celebrated, read, and discussed in every community in North America.

Not a book about Mexico or narcotrafficking per se, Our Lost Border is meant, in the words of its editors, Chicano writers Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, “to bear witness,” to share what it has been like to live and travel in this region of Mexico’s many regions, and what has been lost.

Snaking from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the 2,000 mile-long U.S,-Mexico border is more than a fence or river or line on a map of arid wastelands; it is the home of a third culture or, rather, conglomeration of unique and hybrid cultures that are, in the words of the editors, “a living experience, at once both vital and energizing, sometimes full of thorny contradictions, sometimes replete with grace-filled opportunities.”

In “A World Between Two Worlds,” Troncoso asks, “what if in your lifetime you witness a culture and a way of life that has been lost?” And with finesse of the accomplished novelist that he is, Troncoso shows us how it was in his childhood, crossing easily from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez: family suppers at Ciros Taquería near the cathedral; visits to his godmother, Doña Romita, who had a stall in the mercado and who gave him an onyx chess set; getting his hair cut by “Nati” at Los Hermanos Mesa… Then, suddenly, came the carjackings, kidnappings, shootings, extorsions. For Troncoso, as for so many others fronterizos, the loss can be measured not only in numbers— homicides, restaurants closed, houses abandoned— but also in the painful pinching off of opportunities to segue from one culture and language with such ease, as when he was a child, for that had opened up his sense of possibility, creativity, and clear-sightedness, allowed him develop a practical fluidity, what he calls a “border mentality”— not to judge people, not to accept the presumptions of the hinterlands, whether of the U.S. or Mexico, but “to find out for yourself what would work and what would not.”

For many years along the border, and in some parts of the interior, drug violence was a long-festering problem. It began to veer out of control in the mid-1990s; by the mid-2000s it had become acute, metastasising beyond the drug trade itself into kidnapping, extorsion and other crimes. Short on money and training— in part a result of a series of fiscal crises beginning in the early 1970s— the Mexican police had proven ineffective, easily outgunned or bribed. Shortly after he took office in late 2006, President Felipe Calderón unleashed the armed forces in an all-out war against the cartels and that was when the violence along the border erupted as the narco gangs fought pitched battles not only against the army, marines, and federal and local police, but also and especially, and in grotesquely gory incidents, each other. Some of the worst fighting concentrated in the border state of Tamaulipas in its major city, Tampico, which is a several hours’ drive south of the border with Texas, but a major port for cocaine transhipments.

In the opening essay, “The Widest of Borders,” Mexican writer Liliana V. Blum provides a Who’s Who of the narco-gangs, from the Gulf Cartel, which got its start with liquor smuggling during Prohibition, to its off-shoot, the Zetas, which formed around a nucleus of Mexican Army special forces deserters in 1999, then joined the Beltrán Leyva Brothers, blood enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel. Fine a writer as she is, Blum’s experiences, which included having to drive her car through the sticky blood of a mass murder scene on the way home from her daughter’s school, make discouraging reading.

In “Selling Tita’s House,” Texas writer Mari Cristina Cigarroa recounts her family’s visits and Christmases to her grandparents’ elegant and beloved mansion in Nuevo Laredo. But then, with soldiers in fatigues patrolling the streets, Nuevo Laredo seemed “more like an occupied city during a war.” Chillingly, she writes, “I awoke to the reality that cartels controlled Nuevo Laredo the day I could no longer visit the family’s ranch on the outskirts of the city.”

The strongest and most shocking essay is journalist Diego Osorno’s “The Battle for Ciudad Mier,” about a town shattered in the war between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel for Tampaulipas.

I have hope for Mexico for, as as an American citizen who has lived in Mexico’s capital and traveled and written about its astonishingly varied history, literature, and varied regions for over two decades, I know its greatness, its achievements, its resilience, and creativity. But in his foreword, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith rightly chides, “The United States needs to wake up.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson

Edna Ferber’s Giant
& A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

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

Newsletter & Cyberflanerie

BY C.M. MAYO — May 30, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

It’s the fifth Monday of the month: time for the newsletter and a dollop of cyberflanerie.

POSTS AT MADAM MAYO BLOG
SINCE THE LAST NEWSLETTER

May 24, 2022 – Q & A:
From the Archives: Q & A with Poets Alenier, Anhalt, Crooker, Hill, Hutchison, and Mackay
May 9, 2022 – WORKSHOP:
Five Perhaps Apparently Silly But Ultra-Serious Reflections on Nurturing Creative Thought (Starting with Beethoven’s Ninth)

April 18, 2022
Thank you, Dear Readers: On the Occasion of Madam Mayo Blog’s 16th Anniversary
April 4, 2022 – TEXAS BOOKS:
Texas Books: The End of Night, West Texas Time Machine, How We See the Sky, and More Books About the Sky & Stars

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

March 28, 2022 – Q & A:
From the Archives: Q & A with Bruce Berger on A Desert Harvest
March 20, 2022
From the Archives: “The Essential Francisco Sosa or, Picadou’s Mexico City”
March 14, 2022 – WORKSHOP (SORT OF):
Readers Write: “Should I Move to Mexico?”
March 7, 2022 – TEXAS BOOKS:
From the Archives: A Review of Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West by Rubén Martínez

February 28, 2022 – Q & A:
Q & A with Michael Hogan About Guns, Grit and Glory: How the US and Mexico Came Together to Defeat the Last Empire in the Americas
February 21, 2022
From the Archives: Some Old Friends Spark Joy (Whilst Kondo-ing My Library)
February 14, 2022 – WORKSHOP:
From the Archives: Five Super Simple Tips for Better Book Design
February 7, 2022 – TEXAS BOOKS:
From the Archives: My Review of Heribert von Feilitzsch’s
In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908-1914

OTHER NEWS

Look for the Marfa Mondays podcasts to resume this summer.
By Jove & by Jimmy Dean, this will happen.

WORKSHOP NEWS

No news, other than that I am continuing to post for my workshop students every other second Monday throughout this year, 2022. You can find the archive of workshop posts, plus “‘Giant Golden Buddha’ & 364 More Free 5 Minute Writing Exercises” here.

CYBERFLANERIE

From one of my favorite poets, the sublimely talented Joe Hutchison: “I’ve started a little monthly poetry journal focused on poets associated with the Mountain West, called Bristlecone. (First two issues here and here.)

***

From my fellow translators, editors of Résonance: “We are thrilled to announce the publication of volume 4 of the open-access Franco-American online literary journal Résonance. With this issue, we’ve migrated the entire journal to a new website: www.resonance-journal.org. Volume 4 features a groundbreaking interview with the accomplished and influential poet Bill Tremblay that’s full of retrospective reflections. The interview is complemented by a generous selection of Tremblay’s new poems. The intriguing work of the Louisianian artist Chase Julien graces this issue, and his responses to the interview questions posed by our Arts Editor Erica Vermette provide insight into his sources of inspiration and his creative process. We invite you to explore the outstanding fiction, reviews, and poems we’ve gathered by such award-winning authors as Leslie Choquette, Ron Currie, Dorianne Laux, and Jeri Theriault. Please help us spread the word about our unique journal. We are now open for submissions to volume 5.”

***

Mexican writer Araceli Ardón on Mari Benedetti in 7 minutes, and Isabelle Allende in 7 minutes:

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The unique and magnificently prolific Violet Cabra on Novels vs. Television

***

The wisdom of Hafez:

***

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

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

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

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books, Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

From the Archives: Q & A with Poets Alenier, Anhalt, Crooker, Hill, Hutchison, and Mackay

*This is my “hats off” to poets hat. It moonlights as my “armchair baseball expert” hat.*

This fourth Monday of the odd-month, herewith, a bouquet of poets who have been so generous as to do a Q & A for this blog. My admiration, my thanks, and my hat off to all! May they inspire you to read more of their poetry— and perhaps also write some poems yourself.

Q & A with Karren Alenier on her New Book How We Hold On, the WordWorks, Paul Bowles & More (September 27, 2021)

“I have had numerous successful readings on Zoom… I like the platform and I have been making opportunities for other poets through Zoom. Yes, of course, there is a future in online readings. You get a bigger more geographically diverse audience. It’s exhilarating.”
— Karren Alenier

Q & A with Diana Anhalt on Her Poetry Collection Walking Backward (June 24, 2019)

“After Mauricio and I left Mexico and the home where we had lived for many years, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen or the bathroom only to discover my feet walking in the direction they would have taken in my Mexican home, not here in Atlanta. The title’s suggestion of walking and residing in the past was what I was aiming for.”
— Diana Anhalt

Q & A with Barbara Crooker on the Magic of VCCA, Reading, and Some Glad Morning (December 23, 2019)

“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

Q & A with W. Nick Hill on Sleight Work and Mucho Más (March 25, 2019)

“I don’t know how it is for others who teach about literature, but for me, after a time, when you’ve dealt with so many accomplished, brilliant writers and poets, it wasn’t so much that I was influenced by anyone in particular. It was more that I admired specific characteristics, or that the history of genres of writing became clearer because of the way Vallejo, for instance, who did have a serious part to play in what I wanted to do with poetry, the way he broke down previous measures of value to challenge language itself served as a path. Similarly with parts of Neruda, whose Odes touched a thread with simple language anybody could understand, like that of the ancient Chinese in English though because their poems were formally complex and were sung.”
— W. Nick Hill

Q & A with Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on The World As Is (April 22, 2019)

“I’ve always thought that the way poetry is taught often ruins it for young readers.”
—Joseph Hutchison

Q & A with Mary Mackey on The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, on Bearing Witness, and Women Writers’ Archives (November 18, 2018)

“I think it’s the duty of a poet to bear witness to her times, and that’s what I have done for over 40 years: bear witness.”
— Mary Mackay

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Archives: “The Essential Francisco Sosa or, Picadou’s Mexico City”

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

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

Five Perhaps Apparently Silly But Ultra-Serious Reflections on Nurturing Creative Thought (Starting with Beethoven’s Ninth)

BY C.M. MAYO — May 9, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

To me thoughts are things. They have shapes, colors, and movement, and they can morph, and even emit sounds and flavors in unique and sometimes quite fascinating ways. This is perhaps strange to say, but it is not original on my part. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater wrote about this in a little illustrated book, now over a century old, entitled Thought-forms. When I saw the illustrations of various thoughts as Besant and Leadbeater had perceived them on the astral plane, I recognized them instantly. Perhaps you will, too.

A helpful thought.
(Screenshot from the archive.org edition of Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms.)

Radiating affection.
(Screenshot from the archive.org edition of Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms)

Music by Mendelssohn
(Screenshot from the archive.org edition of Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms)

For me, as a literary artist (I write poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction), creativity is all about thoughts, corralling, arranging, refining them. And when thoughts appear in my mind that I would describe as shapeless, colorless, silent, still— or moving only in tight, repetitive fashion— the writing has about as much life as a robotic owl in quicksand. On the other hand, when my thoughts have a more fluid, dance-like quality, and shapes and colors that arrange themselves into some form of beauty, the writing is so much easier and fun. (Beauty, by the way, is not necessarily all sweetness, light, rainbows & Kumbaya; there can be intense beauty— and artistic power— in what the poet Federico García Lorca termed duende.)

How to nurture more beautiful and interesting thoughts in service of creative writing? A few reflections:

Firstly, music helps, for thoughts tend to entrain to and emerge from music. In my personal experience, there is no music more nurturing for creativity than Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D Minor.

Do yourself a favor, grab an hour and twenty minutes, and just listen:

Secondly, when it comes to what I read, I find it helpful, on occasion, to give my ego a metaphorical cookie break. My ego sees Yours Truly as the sort of highly cultured and discerning person who reads Willa Cather novels. Well, after having read My Ántonia, O Pioneers! The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and most recently, Shadows on the Rock, I pronounce Willa Cather one of the greatest literary artists who ever lived! Reading Cather’s novels has been a wondrous and luxurious experience, and invaluable inspiration for me as a writer. For my ego, a pat on the head and a chocolate cookie!

But hey now, how about that kooky Californian, P. K. Dick? Nobody I hang out with reads Dick. Sci-fi from the 60s?! my ego would have sneered, had it not been off nibbling its cookie. Just as soon as I finished Cather’s exquisite novel of old Quebec, Shadows on the Rock, I grabbed a copy of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and, zowie! quadruple-charged my batteries.

One of the greatest of all American novels.
Best consumed with a large box of hot tamale candies.

(And now I see Mr. Dick sprawled barefoot on the cabbage-roses sofa in Miss Cather’s New York living room, scribbling something mega-duende about a robotic owl in quicksand. “Edith,” she trills, “did you let this person in?”)

Thirdly, I find it useful to rethink the concept of “vacation.” Do I want a status-enhancing signaling opportunity with trophy-photos? Or do I actually want a change of scene / rest / adventure that recharges my creativity? These are not necessarily, nor even probably, same thing. In my experience, the vacations that best nurture my creativity tend to illicit confusion, even disdain, in other people. (Which is so interesting!)

Fourthly, I take long, meditative daily walks, leaving the smartphone at home. When I don’t take walks, I find that thoughts slow and take on a greyish tinge.

Fifthly, laughter, not the fake social stuff, but any genuine confetti burst of it, dislodges creative bottlenecks. There are many different types of humor, but people who lack a sense of one altogether or, infinitely worse, who straight-jacket the God-given one they do have, can be dangerous to themselves and others, including children, helpless elders, and pets.

This is easy to evaluate: check their Twitter. If they lack a Twitter, I assign them a flashing turquoise brownie point on the jumbotron in my mind, and in such case, this meme makes for an excellent litmus test:

More anon.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Donald M. Rattner’s My Creative Space

They Beat Their Horses with Rocks
(And Other Means of Energizing Transport in the Permian Basin of 1858)

Q & A with Biographer David O. Stewart
on the Stunning Fact of George Washington

Thank you, Dear Readers: On the Occasion of “Madam Mayo” Blog’s 16th Anniversary

BY C.M. MAYO — April, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

https://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html

Thank you for reading Madam Mayo blog. It’s a wonder to me that, as a writer of books, I am still embracing this not altogether embraceable genre called “blogging,” heading into year 17. It’s been a wiggy ride to have been blogging from the dawn of the genre, along with that of social media, then through the doldrums as social media overshadowed the blogosphere, and into the resurgence of blogging in this, the Present Rhinocerosness. Sometimes now, as with the Substackers, bloggers call their blog a “newsletter.” How to distinguish a “blog” from an emailed newsletter or, for that matter, from a video-blog (v-log) or a podcast? It gets fuzzy. Sometimes it’s all of the above.

Embracing the not altogether embraceable: My writing assistant demonstrates the concept.

From near-daily scattershot Twitter-like posts in 2006, gradually, over the years, I’ve come to settle on a schedule of posting on Mondays, focusing on subjects related to my books; my writing workshop; and whatever other writers and works catch my interest (and perhaps also yours?).

For those of you new to this blog: to date, most of my writing has had to do with Mexico; my current work-in-progress is on Far West Texas, which includes a hefty chunk of the US-Mexico borderlands— so you will find a cornucopia of posts about Mexico and Texas. I also occasionally post on literary translation and the typosphere.

My book writing needs to step up a notch, so from now through the end of 2022, look for a post every other first Monday of the month on Texas Books (apropos of that work in-progress); every other second Monday of the month a post for my workshop; every other third Monday a post related to my own work, past or in-progress (and more of the Marfa Mondays Podcasts); and every other fourth Monday, a Q & A with a fellow writer. When the month has a fifth Monday, I’ll post a newsletter. As ever, at year’s end I’ll post my top books read list.

For more about this blog, and blogging as a literary genre, I invite you read my post on the occasion of this blog’s eleventh anniversary in 2017.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Archives: Sam Quinones’
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Grokking Scansion: A Teensy (Albeit Painfully Tedious) Investment
for a Megamungous Payoff in the Power of Your Prose

From the Archives: The Solitario Dome

Texas Books: “The End of Night,” “West Texas Time Machine,” “How We See the Sky” and More Books About the Sky & Stars

BY C.M. MAYO — April 4, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Long before smartphone apps, before television, before electricity, yea verily, before mechanical clocks, our ancestors looked to the ever-present, ever-changing vault of the heavens. Because of light pollution however, in most towns and cities the night sky does not look the way it once did.

It so happens that the subject of my book in-progress, Far West Texas, is one of the darkest places in North America. In part this is simply because of its lack of water, and therefore low population, but it’s also thanks to “dark skies” policies and state legislation to protect it from light pollution (read more about the the whys, wherefores and history of these policies at at the website of the International Dark Skies Association). Not by happenstance, Far West Texas is also the home of one of the world’s most important astronomical observatories: the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis. In the most remote places in Far West Texas, if you find yourself outside on a clear night, you can not only see the Milky Way; it can seem the whole sky is a blanket of stars close enough to touch.

As one born in the second half of the 20th century, it took me a long while to appreciate how shockingly much of my culture’s relationship to the sky has atrophied. I’ll have a lot to say about this in my book; but for now, in this blog post, here are some of my go-to “stars and sky” books in my working library:

Paul Bogard’s The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light I would recommend to anyone and everyone. Bogard doesn’t say much about Far West Texas per se, but never mind, it’s a brilliant, joyous book, entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking throughout.

Telescopes gather light— and the technology behind some of them is astounding. An astronomical telescope is, in fact, a time machine, for it allows us to see light originating thousands, millions, and more years ago. West Texas Texas Machine is but one of an ongoing river of books on this subject, but it’s a good one, and the one I happened to have bought on my first visit to the MacDonald Observatory back in 1998.

Here is a batch of sky & stars books from my working library:

If you would like read more on the subject of our relationship with sky, and on seeing it not with gee-whiz technology, but with your own eyes, I would especially recommend astronomer Thomas Hockey’s How We See the Sky: A Naked-Eye Tour of Day and Night. After reading it, I had a whole new awareness of the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

Q & A with Christina Thompson on Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

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

From the Archives: Q & A with Bruce Berger on “A Desert Harvest”

BY C.M. MAYO — March 28, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

“When I write, I screen out where I am and focus on material and its expression. In Aspen I enjoy nearly complete silence, whereas in La Paz I sometimes spar with construction, loud music and dogs.”— Bruce Berger

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

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately twice a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

It’s been a year since my dear amigo, Bruce Berger, passed from this realm unto his next adventures. Bruce’s friendship and his books both made my world larger, stranger, funnier, and more beautiful. No one else wrote so well about the desert, any desert, but especially the Baja Californian and the American deserts. I miss him more than I can say.

> Read his obituary in the Aspen Daily News

If you are not familiar with Bruce Berger’s work, or if you are and would like to sample more of it, might I suggest his 2019 anthology A Desert Harvest is the perfect place to start. Apropos of that publication, back in 2019, Bruce did a Q & A for this blog, which I repost this Monday. His website www.bruceberger.net is no longer live, however, you can access a snapshot on the wayback machine.

Very late in the game, albeit well more than a decade ago, I learned of Bruce Berger’s work when I happened upon Almost an Island: Travels in Baja California in a California bookshop. I would have liked to, but I purposely did not read it then because I was writing my own memoir of Baja California and– I still think this wise– I did not want to be influenced as I was writing. Of course, the moment my book, Miraculous Air, was finished, I devoured Almost an Island, and I loved it. I went on to read Berger’s shimmering essays on the American desert in The Telling Distance and There was a River, and his poetry, and his quirkiest of memoirs of Spain, The End of the Sherry.

But to go back to Baja California. Imagine my delight soon after publishing Miraculous Air, to receive, out of the bluest of Baja California blues, an inscribed copy of his Sierra, Sea, and Desert: El Vizcaíno, welcoming me to this pequeño mundo of those who write about this most glorious and remote of Mexican peninsulas. And we have been amigos ever since. We even read together in 2006 in the Ida Victoria Gallery in San José del Cabo. (Carambas,that was a while ago!)

*Just a few of the many books by Bruce Berger in my library.*

Bruce Berger’s latest work, Desert Harvest, is a long overdue celebration, a compilation of essays selected from his sublime desert trilogy, Almost an Island, The Telling Distance, and There Was a River. Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Desert Harvest comes with blurbs galore from such as Terry Tempest Williams (“A Desert Harvest is a published patience, one I have been anticipating, having known and loved Bruce Berger’s voice. It is water in the desert”); Ted Conover (“a book that will stick to the reader like cholla… precious few are those who can write this well”); and Peter Mathiessen (“Fine, lucid essays”). Did I mention, Berger can be weirdly hilarious?

C.M. MAYO: What inspires you to write essays, as opposed to poetry?

BRUCE BERGER: I write poetry as well as prose, so there is no opposition, merely the choice of the moment.

C.M. MAYO: Of all the essays in this collection, which is your personal favorite? And why?

BRUCE BERGER: The essay I was most keen to see published is “Arrows of Time,” the last piece in the collection, about accompanying quark physicist Murray Gell-Mann to a physics conference in Spain in 1991. At the time I was writing for the airline magazine American Way, they paid for my flight with Murray, I wrote a long piece for them, they repied in all humility that they didn’t understand much of it and were much smarter than their readers, and they ran only an extract about dining while sitting between Murray and Stephen Hawking. Because they published a piece of the essay, no other periodical could run the piece in its entirety, and for nearly three decades it remained in limbo. Even though it has nothing to do with deserts, the editors at FSG chose it as the book’s finale and I cheered.

C.M. MAYO: For a reader who knows nothing of the desert, if he or she were to read only one essay on this collection, which would you recommend, and why?

BRUCE BERGER: Because it has apeared on three posters and a letterpress broadside, I suppose that one would be “How to Look at a Desert Sunset.”

>Visit The Paris Review blog to read Bruce Berger’s “How to Look at a Desert Sunset,” excerpted from A Desert Harvest

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for you?

BRUCE BERGER: As I was just starting to write about place, I was reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and, especially, his three books on Mediterranean islands. His way of capturing the essence of a location enthralled me. When I was on the last known river trip through Glen Canyon before the closing of the gates at the dam that created Lake Powell, I committed myself to writing about the experience as if I were Lawrence Durrell. No one has ever compared my writing to his, but I consider that an element in finding my literary voice.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?

BRUCE BERGER: I have just bought two books on Latin America: Silver, Sword and Stone, by Marie Arana, and On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux.

C.M. MAYO: You divide your time between two such beautiful places, Aspen, Colorado and La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico. How does that annual migration affect what and how you write?

BRUCE BERGER: When I write, I screen out where I am and focus on material and its expression. In Aspen I enjoy nearly complete silence, wheras in La Paz I sometimes spar with construction, loud music and dogs.

C.M. MAYO: 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?

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

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?

BRUCE BERGER: My advice to a beginning writer would be to read the best of the authors, contemporary and historical, of the genre you plan to write in, and internalize as much as possible. It worked for centuries before workshops, MFAs and the digital revolution, and still works today. In that regard, a half century later I am still my thirty year-old self.

“My advice to a beginning writer would be to read the best of the authors, contemporary and historical, of the genre you plan to write in, and internalize as much as possible. It worked for centuries before workshops, MFAs and the digital revolution, and still works today.”

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you?

BRUCE BERGER: My literary representative is working on an archive project for a university still to be selected.

> Visit Bruce Berger’s website at ~~https://bruceberger.net~~ .
UPDATE: 2022: You can access a snapshot of his website on the wayback machine.