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.

Bruce Berger

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 IslandTravels 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 IslandThe 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.

My writing assistant presents Bruce Berger’s latest, A Desert Harvest: New and Selected Essays.
C.M. Mayo, Bruce Berger, and Jaime Tolbert of Baja Books & Maps
Galeria de Ida Victoria, San Jose del Cabo, February 2006
Photo: (c) Alice J. Mansell
(scroll down to view photo of El Tule, Los Cabos, also by Alice J. Mansell)
El Tule, Los Cabos
Photo: (c) Copyright Alice J. Mansell

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

Q & A with Álvaro Santana-Acuña on Writing Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of SolitudeWas Written and Became a Global Classic

Q & A: Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on The World As Is

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

Newsletter & Cyberflanerie: Mexico Edition

BY C.M. MAYO — November 29, 2021
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This finds me working away on my Far West Texas book which, unavoidably, concerns Mexico. Meanwhile, it’s time for the fifth-Monday-of-the-month newsletter and cyberflanerie, Mexico edition.

Delightful Mexico-related items have been landing in my mailboxes— both email and snailmail! First of all, the pioneering consciousness explorer and interviewer Jeffrey Mishlove has won the Bigelow Prize of USD $500,000—you read that right, half a million dollars— for his essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.” The news relevant to Yours Truly and Mexico is that, in this essay, Mishlove mentions my work about Francisco I. Madero, the leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, who also happened to be a Spiritist medium. A few years ago in Las Vegas, I was also greatly honored when Mishlove interviewed me at length for his show, New Thinking Allowed.

You can read Mishlove’s award-winning essay “Beyond the Brain” in its mind-blowing entirety for free, and read more about the impressive panel of judges, and the also impressive runners-up for the Bigelow prize at this link.

*

Another delightful item to land in my mailbox in this drizzly-gray season was the pristine copy of Lloyd Kahn’s 1999 newspaper, El Correcaminos, Vol. 1. No. 1, Los Cabos, Baja California Sur. In the photo below, my writing assistant, Uli Quetzalpugtl, lends his presence to the wonderfulness! Gracias, Lloyd!

I’ve been a big fan of Lloyd Khan’s many endeavors (including this one) for some years now. Among other things, Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. Check out his website and blog.

For me, reading this first 1999 issue of El Correcaminos was like stepping into a very personal time machine, for that was the year that, having concluded several years of intensively traveling and interviewing in and researching about that Mexican peninsula, I started polishing my draft of the manuscript that would appear as Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (University of Utah Press, 2002).

Here’s a photo of El Correcaminos’ page of recommended books— ah ha! Anne Zwinger’s A Desert Country Near the Sea, Graham Mackintosh’s Into a Desert Place; Walt Peterson’s The Baja Adventure Book: These are some of the books I’d kept on my desk, and even carried with me on my travels. I’m smiling as I write this. How books can be like old friends! And sometimes their authors can become friends, too! (Hola, dear Graham!)

More Mexico news from Denver, Colorado: My amiga Pat Dubrava reads her translation of “The Magic Alphabet,” a short story by Mexican writer Agustín Cadena for Jill!

Dubrava and I both translate Cadena— he’s vastly under-appreciated in English, and we’re aiming to change that.

*

Mexican librarian and essayist Juan Manuel Herrera writes in Reforma about Mexico City’s esteemed rare book dealer, owner of the Librería Antigua Madero, Enrique Fuentes Castilla (March 30, 1940- March 8, 2021). I so admired and adored Don Enrique; I never considered my time in Mexico City well-spent without a visit to his Librería Madero. His passing is the passing of an era.

(Don Enrique was very helpful to me, and I wrote about him and Librería Madero a little bit in my long essay about the Mexican literary landscape, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla.”)

*

Another big part of the wonderfulness of Mexico City is its Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (CEHM) in the southern neighborhood of Chimalistac. Its director, historian Dr. Manuel Ramos Medina, reads a letter from the Empress Carlota to Señora Dolores de Almonte—this being one from the vast cornucopia of treasures in the CEHM’s archives. For those of you who speak Spanish and have an interest in Mexican history, check out the website for information of the innumerable free online lectures they offer.

My amigo Mexican writer Eduardo Zaráte has a fine new book of short stories: Cuentan las gentes (será cierto o no).

His wife, my amiga Araceli Ardón, a writer I have long admired and some of whose fiction I have translated, is offering a free series of outstandingly good lectures on Mexican literature and on her Ardón method of creative writing— in Spanish. Highly recommended.

*

How did I miss this fascinating 2014 article by Margaret Randall about Hassan Fathy??!! I came across Randall’s work back when I started editing the now-defunct Tameme literary magazine, and Fathy’s work, when I interviewed Simone Swan on the US-Mexico border in Presidio, Texas.

*

POSTS AT MADAM MAYO BLOG
SINCE THE LAST NEWSLETTER


TEXAS BOOKS
= First Monday of the Month=

They Beat Their Horses with Rocks
(And Other Means of Energizing Transport in the Permian Basin of 1858)
November 1, 2021 

Into the Guadalupe Mountains: Some Favorites from the Texas Bibliothek 
(Plus a Couple of Extra-Crunchy Videos)
October 4, 2021

From the Archives: My Review of Edward H. Miller’s 
Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy

September 6, 2021
*

WRITING WORKSHOP POSTS
= Second Monday of the Month =

Verbszzzzz… or Verbs!
November 8, 2021

Itty Bitty But Bold! From the Archives: “Revision: 
Take a Chainsaw to Those Little Darlings, 
Prune, Do No Harm, Be an Archaeologist, 
Move the Furniture Onto the Front Lawn, Flip the Gender”
October 11, 2021

Fearless Fabian / Plus From the Archives: 
“The Vivid Dreamer” Writing Workshop from

the Guadalupe Mountains National Park
September 13, 2021 
*

MISC & C.M. MAYO NEWS
= Third Monday of the Month =

How Wide is Your Overton Window?
Plus from the Archives: 
“On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises”

November 15, 2021

“Julius Knows” in Catamaran
October 18, 2021

Neil Postman’s 1997 Lecture
“The Surrender of Culture to Technology”
September 20, 2021
*

Q & A WITH OTHER WRITERS
= Fourth Monday of the month =

Q & A with Philosopher Richard Polt on The Typewriter Revolution
November 22, 2021 

How Are Some of the Most Accomplished Writers and Poets 
Coping with the Digital Revolution? / 
Plus: My Own Logbook and Stopwatch for Madam Mayo Blog
October 25, 2021

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

OTHER NEWS

Look for the Marfa Mondays podcasts to resume in early 2022.

*

Wingsuit Video of the Season: Mexican Wingsuit Camp.

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

Ignacio Solares’ “The Orders” in Gargoyle Magazine #72

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

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

Q & A: Bruce Berger on “A Desert Harvest”

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

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

My writing assistant presents Bruce Berger’s latest, A Desert Harvest: New and Selected Essays.

Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

Translating Across the Border

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

Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

Photo by C.M. Mayo. Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site in Far West Texas. Confession: After I snapped this photo with my iPhone I checked my email, just to see if I could! Alas, I could.

The aim of literary travel writing was– and remains– to bring the reader to deeply notice, that is, get out of her head and into the world of specific sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors, ideas, histories, geographies, geologies… In the words of Kenneth Smith, “You have to open space, and deepen place.” 

Start with escape velocity: from wherever you are, whoever you are in your known world, you rocket out, beyond the orbit of ordinary life. You float around out there– there being your own backyard or, for that matter, the island of Molokai– for a spell. Then, with a story to tell, you splash back to earth.

Next step: craft the narrative, rendering your experience in and understanding of that time and place as vividly, as lyrically, and engagingly as possible. I’ve had plenty to say about the craft of literary travel writing; what I want to touch on here are some of the steps in the process and how they have or have not changed with the lure of digital technologies and the tsunami of the Internet.

HEREWITH SOME NOTES, 
FIRSTLY, ON TAKING NOTES:

THEN: In olden times of yore, I mean in the 1990s, when traveling in Baja California for my travel memoir Miraculous Air, I carried around a pen and bulky notebook, and a camera with so many lenses and dials that if I were to pick it up today I wouldn’t remember how to operate it. To get every raw thing down that I would need for my book, I had to scribble-scribble-scribble, and during interviews and/or at the end of a day’s driving and hiking or whatever, boy howdy, I felt like a squeezed-out sponge and my hand like an arthritic claw. Once home, I spent hours upon hours typing up my field notes. And neither film nor film processing was cheap. Such was the first step of the process.

Charlie Angell, expert guide, in the Solitario, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Far West Texas. Listen in anytime to my podcast interview with Angell here.

NOW:These days, for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I carry a pen and a slim Moleskine to jot down this-and-that, but my main tool is my iPhone. Rather than scribble my field notes and interview notes, I simply turn on my iPhone’s dictation app and press “record” — when finished, I have a digital file. I also take loads of photos and videos. Oh yes, this is infinitely easier on me as I am traveling, and as far as the pictures and video go, the cost is zip. Once home, however, transcribing the audio field notes takes me hours upon hours, and it is exhausting.[*] 

[*]Yep, I have voice recognition software but it doesn’t work well enough– in the time it would take me to correct the gobbledygook I might as well transcribe from scratch. I expect this to change. For some of my podcasts I have used a transcription service, but field notes are another matter– too detailed, too personal. Furthermore, as tedious a job as it may be, transcribing my field notes helps me hyper-focus, recall more details, and gain further insight.

I am the first to admit, were I to do another literary travel memoir, while I would dictate my notes, I would need a better strategy for getting them transcribed. So I’m working on this mid-way. Ayyy.

ON UTILIZING / PROCESSING / PUBLISHING PHOTOS & VIDEO

THEN: Photos stayed in a box. A few ended up in the book. (Several years after the book on Baja California was published I uploaded a few to my website. You can view those here.)

NOW: Photos and videos can be amply shared on this blog, the website, Twitter, etc. A few will end up in the book, I expect.

Is this aspect of the process really that different because of the Internet? A few years ago I would have said so– I got very excited about the multimedia possibilities in ebooks. But I now believe that while our culture is increasingly oriented towards visual media, as far as books go, not much has changed, nor will it because what readers want is text. 

I’ll grant that some literary travel memoirs might offer a few more images and color images than might have been economically feasible before. I’ll grant that ebooks can include video or links to video. And I’ll grant that a few people may find out about and read my book because of a photo or video they Google up on my websites. A few. Most people surfing around the Internet don’t read books, never mind literary travel memoir. And there is nothing new about that.

ON FINDING BOOKS

THEN: To find books on Baja California, I scoured the shelves at John Cole’s in La Jolla, El Tecolote in Todos Santos, and a very few other bookstores and libraries, including the Bancroft at UC Berkeley. I thought the bibliography on Baja California was enormous, and I ended up owning a wall of books.

NOW: Amazon!!!! Although the other day I bought a rare book about the town of Toyah on www.abebooks.com. Over the past few years I have also bought a few books from bricks-and-mortar shops including the Marfa Book Company and Front Street Books in Alpine, and more from the bookstores in various state and national parks. And I go to the always fabulosa Librería Madero in Mexico City for out-of-print Spanish language books. I have consulted a few archives and collections… But I get most of my books from amazon.*

*I hasten to add that for research purposes I am mainly buying paperbacks and used reading-quality books, the kind I’ll take a highlighter to, not rare books. Buying rare books from amazon is not the best idea for many reasons, one of them being that the multitudinous sellers of used books  oftentimes describe a book as “new” when it is actually a stamped review copy, stained, or missing a dust jacket, and so on. For quality rare books from reputable sellers, I can recommend www.abebooks.com , www.abaa.com , and www.biblio.com

(Why am I buying so many books? Because I need to read and consult them and, alas, I do not live anywhere near a good English language library. And I admit, I do have a thing for rare books, especially on the Mexican Revolution, Baja California, Mexico’s Second Empire, or Far West Texana. Uh oh, that’s a lot.)

Bottom line: Not only is it easier to find books now, but the bibliography on Far West Texas and Texas makes that on Baja California look puny. Um, I think I’m going to need a new house.

Is this aspect of the process of writing a literary travel memoir really that different because of the Internet? It would seem so, but I’m contrasting an apple and a Durian, as it were. Baja California is a very different subject than Far West Texas. Many of the books I found useful on Baja California are not easy to find online, even today, while, so it seems to me now, if I sneeze someone hands me a book on the Great State of Lonestarlandia. 

I do miss ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstores. But I do not miss being unable to find what I was looking for. 

Anyway, not every travel memoir requires such intensive reading. 

And yet another consideration– and a topic for another blog post– is that it’s always easy to under- or over-research any given book.

ON THE INCONVENIENT LUXURY OF BEING INCOMMUNICADO 

THEN: Traveling in remote places on the peninsula I more often than not found myself incommunicado. (Back then, many small towns in Baja California did not yet have telephones.)

NOW: Few stretches of any highway, anywhere, including the most offbeat corners Far West Texas, are without cell phone reception. Many campgrounds and all hotels, properly so-called, have wifi. Digital distractions are legion. Or, another way to put it: the digital leash stays on– unless one is willing to confront friends, colleagues, and family. That takes energy. Or, another way to put it: that takes training. 

Deep Work by Cal Newport. Highly recommended.

While traveling, no, I do not text, no, I do not email (except when I fall into temptation!), and no, I do not answer my cell phone while I am driving or possibly fending off mountain lions! Sounds easy. Sounds curmudgeony. But for the kind of travel writing I do, trying to immerse my consciousness in an unfamiliar place, and come back with a vivid narrative, very necessary. 

Is it really that different? Not so much as it might appear. It has always taken a strategy plus herculean effort against formidable economic, physical, psychological, and social pressures to protect uninterrupted stretches of time for deep work. 

>> See Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Highly recommended.

ON FINDING (NONBOOK) RESEARCH MATERIALS

THEN: If it wasn’t in a book or a paper file, usually, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.

NOW: Whatever, Google.* And the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas is a fabulously rich– and free- resource. 

*Don’t get me started about the Maoist Muddle, aka Wikipedia. 

Is it really that different? Yes. 

To take but one example, it is radically different to be able to look at all the real estate on the Internet. I can be sitting in Mexico City and with my iPad and surf around, looking at all these places for sale in Far West Texas– whether a luxury ranch or a humble hunt box / trailer— I can see the kitchen, the bedrooms, ayyy, the bathrooms… I hasten to add I am not looking for anything in the Texas real estate market, but those listings, the descriptions and photos, constitute a window onto a people and place– in the not-so-distant past, this sort of at-hand detail was available only to licensed local real estate agents. 

ON ANONYMITY & KARMA

THEN: In the 90s in Baja California I talked to a lot of people who wouldn’t know me from a denizen of the fifth moon of Pluto and who would probably never learn about, never mind pick up and read my book. I found that very freeing.

Everyone will be famous for, like, 2 seconds, LOL

NOW: Still true in 2016 in Far West Texas, but almost everyone who feels moved to do so can whip out his or her smartphone and Google up my name for scads of links from my webpage to podcasts to this blog to academia.edu to LinkedIn, Twitter, blah blah blah, and all about my book on Baja California, my novel, my stories, and my book on the Mexican Revolution with the uber-crunchy title! I Google other people, too. I can follow the Twitter feed for the Food Shark in Marfa! I interview Lonn Taylor for my podcast! Lonn Taylor writes about me for the Big Bend Sentinel! Sometimes when I go out to Far West Texas I want to wear a wig and dark glasses a la Andy Warhol! But seriously, human nature hasn’t changed; most people respond very generously when asked sincere questions about their art, their business, their research, and/or their opinion, and I believe this will remain the case whether people know about my works and/or Google me or not. Moreover I expect that it will remain the case long into the future that the majority of Texans, and for that matter, denizens of the planet, will not be avidly reading literary travel memoir and couldn’t care a hula-whoop about the oeuvre of moi. (Oh well!)

Is it really that different because of the Internet? Having published several books, one thing I do appreciate, although my ego does not, is that books go out to a largely opaque response. You can talk about sales numbers, “big data,” reviews, and prizes, and it doesn’t change the fact that an author does not know when any given person is actually reading or talking about or feeling one way or the other about his or her book– and anyway, the readers of some books will be born long after their authors have passed to the Great Beyond. 

Still, I think it best to assume that there is karma with a capital “K” — opaque as it may be. In other words, you might not have to, but be prepared to live with the consequences of what you have written. Translation: truth is beauty but cruelty is stupid.

ON DISTRACTIONS

THEN: The main distractions were the television and the telephone.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. Strange, wonderful, and kinda creepy.

NOW: It’s the magnetic rabbit holes-o-rama of the Internet. In some ways this is more difficult for me as a writer because I use the same machine, the laptop, for writing as for research, for email, and for social media and surfing. (Oh, so that’s the problem! Well, at least I don’t watch television anymore.)

Is it really that different? Yes, because technology really is taking us somewhere very strange, and in some ways, for many people, smartphones are beginning to serve as an actual appendage. But no, because since the dawn of written history we have ample evidence that people have been tempted continually by hyper-palatable distractions of one kind or another and have been taken advantage of by those with the wherewithal to take advantage. Hmmmm…. religion…. slavery…. alcohol… opiates…. cigarettes…. casinos…. spectator sports…. mindless shopping…. television… or even, as they did even back in the days of the atl-atl, lolling around the campfire and indulging in idle & malicious gossip…

>> See also Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Winning the Creative Battle.

ON PUBLISHING EN ROUTE

THEN: As work progresses, I would publish an occasional article in a magazine or newspaper such as, say, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal— and I would actually get paid. I also published a number of longform essays in literary magazines. I got paid, a bit, and I treasure the beautiful copies.

NOW: Although I continue to publish in magazines, mainly I post digital media– articles on this blog, guest-blogs, and text, photos, videos and podcasts on my websites, plus I send out my emailed newsletter a few times a year. Downside: My short works make less money. Upside: publishing articles is quick, easy, and I retain control. Further upside: when people Google certain terms, they get me. For example, try “Sierra Madera Astrobleme.”

Is it really that different? Alas, yes. See Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget

I would tell any young writer getting started today that if you want the freedom to write things you will be proud of, first find a reliable alternative income source and from there, always living below your means, build and diversify your sources of income away from the labor market. (Getting an MFA so you can teach in a creative writing program? That might have made a smidge of sense two decades ago. Now you’d be better off starting a dog grooming business, and I am not joking.) Yes, if you are brilliant, hard-working and lucky, you might one day make a good living from your creative writing. But why squander your creative energy for your best work worrying about generating income from, specifically, writing? Quality and market response only occasionally coincide. Jaw-dropping mysteries abound. 

FURTHER NOTES: WHAT ELSE HASN’T CHANGED (MUCH)? 

The Call to Dive Below the Surface

One might imagine that with all the firehoses of information available to the average traveler, literary travel writing now needs to offer something get-out-the-scuba-gear profound. But this has been true for decades– long before the blogosphere and Tripadvisor.com & etc. thundered upon us. 

As V.S. Naipaul writes in A Turn in the South– waaay back in 1989:

“The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago… Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, ‘This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys…’ This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer.”

Organizational Challenges

Another thing that has not changed is the need to keep things organized– whether digital or paper. When I sit down to bang out a draft and then polish (and polish & polish & polish) a literary travel narrative, I need to constantly refer to my field notes, books, photos and videos, so it is vital that I have these resources where I can easily find them– and when done for the day, or with that section, that I have a place to easily put them back (and from where I can easily retrieve them as need be). This might sound trivial. It is not. 

Here’s what works for me: 

BOOKS: Shelve by category, e.g., Texas history, geology; regional; rock art, etc, using big, easy-to-read labels on the shelves; 

PAPERS: File in hanging folders in a cabinet, e.g., travels by date, editorial correspondence, other alphabetical correspondence, people (as subjects), places;

PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).

TRANSCRIBED FIELD NOTES AND INTERVIEWS: Store in three-ring binders; 

DIGITAL FILES: Save in folders on the laptop, e.g., audio by date and place, photos and video by date and place;

WEBSITES, PODCASTS, VIDEOS: For websites and etc, I often use posts on this very searchable blog as a way of filing notes that I can easily retrieve (here’s an example and here’s another and another and another and another);

Notes on Peyote, for example.

PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).

Sounds like I know what I’m doing! The truth is, no matter how often I declutter, books and papers tend to mushroom into unwieldy piles and ooze over any and all horizontal expanses. Piles make it easier to procrastinate. And procrastination is the Devil. I have been struggling mightily with getting my field notes transcribed. All that said, a book gets written as an elephant gets eaten– bit by bit. It’s happening. Stay tuned.

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

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber, on
Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the NIneteenth Century

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