BY C.M. MAYO — September 12, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
Well, gollygoobernation, it had seemed to me to have gotten a bit boring out there this summer with everyone everywhere all anxious about things, and everything else, too. But hark! I have found an exception! One self-described Swiss “sporty dude” whose name is Fabian, and who, a few days go, jumped clear off the Matterhorn in a wingsuit.
Dude! Danke sehr! Apropos of this week’s Madam Mayo blog writing workshop post, you have modeled the concept of precisely how it feels (among other things I could list but I won’t) to publish a book!
Be bold! Fearless Fabian models the concept.
This Monday finds me working on my Far West Texas book, so herewith, a post from the archives, which I hope might inspire you to prepare for your own eventual leap, metaphorically speaking, from your own personal Matterhorn. Stitch your wingsuit well.
NATURE & TRAVEL WRITING FOR THE VIVID DREAMER
A handout with examples & exercises from C.M. Mayo’s writing workshop given as Artist-in-Residence, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas, May 2017
We can think of the best writing about nature and travel, whether fiction or nonfiction, as instructions for the reader to form in his or her mind a “vivid dream,” an experience of the world. How do we, whether as readers, or as any human being (say, folding laundry or maybe digging for worms with a stick), experience anything? Of course, we experience the world through our bodies, that is to say, through our senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing-and I would add a “gut” or intuitive sense as well.
From Kenneth White’s Across the Territories: Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa:
“[Y]ou have to go out. You have to open space, and deepen place. Fill your eyes with the changing light.”
From a letter by Anton Chekov:
“In descriptions of nature one should seize upon minutiae, grouping them so that when, having read a passage, you close your eyes, a picture if formed. For example, you will evoke a moonlit night by writing that on the mill dam the glass fragments of a broken bottle flashed like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled along like a ball…”
From Bruce Berger’s The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert:
“Silence and slow time out of ancient seabeds, the sandstone heaved into red walls blackened with lichen and rain, stained with the guano of hawks and eagles.”
From Gary Paul Nabhan’s Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands:
“I rub a few leaves between my thumb and forefinger, and their fragrance suddenly pervades the dry air, as if I had just broken a bottle of perfume against one of the sharp basalt rocks at my feet.”
From Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (Los de abajo):
“Below, at the bottom of the canyon, through the veil of rain, could be seen straight, swaying palms, their angled tops rocking back and forth until a strong gust of wind blew their foliage open into green fans.”
From Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild:
“…day’s end pulls the buttery sunlight out of the canyon but does not lessen the furnace effect. High walls of stone hold a radiating heat that will last nearly until morning. I place my sleeping pad close to the river’s edge to make use of the swamp cooler effect. It is not usual to wake up, walk a few yards, and slip into the cool garment of night water.”
From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (from the chapter on Big Bend National Park):
“The desert is most alive at night… A flurry of moths becomes a white-winged blizzard; stalks of sotol glow like lit tapers on either side of the road. For eighty miles, we never pass a car.”
From Susan Shelby Magoffin’s diary of 1846-47, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico:
“Passed a great many buffalo, (some thousands) they crossed our road frequently within two or three hundred yards. They are very ugly, ill-shapen things with their long shaggy hair over their heads, and the great hump on their backs, and they look so droll running.”
THREE BRIEF EXERCISES TO REV UP YOUR WRITERLY PERCEPTIONS
Here I provide my own answers from when I was walking a few days ago on Pine Springs Trail late in the afternoon. About half way down the trail, I stopped, sat down on a handy bench, and did these three exercises in my notebook. You can do this right now—or, perhaps at some moment while you are on a hike today.
Note: This is not necessarily about writing some splendid polished bit, but rather, simply noticing detail and capturing it on paper. In other words, you’re generating raw material you might use later.
HUNT THE COLORS Pick an area that most people would decribe with one color, say, a yellow wall, or a green hillside. How many colors do you actually see?
Here’s what I got:
evergreen kelly green mint green straw green grey-green lavender-green khaki silvery green
TRIANGLE IN SPACE What two things do you notice in the distance? What two things do you notice very close to you? What two things do you notice behind you?
Here’s what I got:
In the distance: The hillside with bands of shadow
Nearby: Birdsong; shadow of the sumac tree
Behind: Sounds of cars and trucks on the highway; a cloud that looks like a squished frog
LIGHT & DARK Where is the light coming light? What effects does it cause?
The sun is low, almost 2/3 of the way from the top of the sky to the edge of the mountains; it is on my left, which is west.
Shadows: falling to my right. Sumac tree casts a shadow that alsmot seems to have polkadots, like lace. It is shivering. The ovals of light shine like coins. One side of the sumac is sunny, bright, the other looks gray and cold.
The sotol plant across the path—it’s shivering. It’s tips are silvered as if wet.
In this age of Instagram and Tripadvisor & etc. etc. etc. it would seem that increasingly fewer people have the interest, never mind the attentional focus, for literary travel memoir. But readers of this genre were always a tiny minority of the general population. I say, on this planet of billions of people, there will always be a good number of people who read, and read insatiably, seriously, broadly, and deeply. Ergo, we can be sure that someone somewhere will be writing something about someplace, and some number of these works, however small, will undoubtedly be read by some intelligent and thoughtful someone.
I write literary travel memoir and, on occasion, I teach a workshop on that genre, so when, as part of my reading for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I came across cultural historian David M. Wrobel’s superb Global West, American Frontier, apart from its helping me get my mind around “Texas,” I felt moved to make a few notes on what he has to say about this oft-undervalued literary genre. Dear writerly reader, may you may find these quotes as heartening as I did.
“The travel book remained a key genre throughout the twentieth century, and still is today. In the early twenty-first century, when it is possible to fly to nearly anywhere in the world within a day and to travel virtually anywhere via the Internet, a quaint, old-fashioned printed companion remains surprisingly popular. A distinctive hybrid of the fiction and nonfiction forms, of reflection and reportage, of anthropology, history, and literature, still serves as an essential accompaniment for actual travel or provides core background reading for a journey.” (pp. 5-6)
“The truly gifted and valuable travel writers are, I would venture, the ones who come to realize that they are not just traveling through other landscapes but through the landscapes of other people’s lives; they are visitors who care to learn what a place means to the people who live there.” (p.13)
“[T]he travel narrative form has remained an important guide to western America even as new technological developments have compressed space and rendered the most faraway places more readily accessible. For this reason, the travel book can be deemed an unlikely survivor in the digital age.” (p.17)
“The travel book lives on, oblivious to the assumption that its time should long since have passed.” (p.187)
“The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners. This is why the travel book has persisted for nearly two centuries since its death was first announced and for more than three-quarters of a century since its demise was dramatically reproclaimed, and why today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge. The ease of travel does not restrict the vision of the obervant travel writer in the postmodern age any more than the difficulty of travel guaranteed smart observation in the premodern or modern periods.” (p.187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p.187)
-David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier
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PS I would consider these among the best of the genre:
See also the Q & A’s here on Madam Mayo blog with the brilliant Shelley Armitage (Walking the Llano); Bruce Berger (A Desert Harvest, etc.); and Sara Mansfield Taber (Bread of Three Rivers, etc).
Madam Mayo blog’s “madmimi” email sign-up is finally working, over there on the sidebar. Subscribe and each Monday you will receive the latest post (and nothing else– no spam). Mexico, poetry, rare books, Texas, translation, the typosphere, occasional pug-sightings– if these tickle your fancy this is the blog for you! Second Mondays are for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creating writing; fourth Mondays are for a Q & A with another writer.
My holiday reading was Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, which I found at once disturbing and a revelation. A revelation because Smith’s writing is so poetic, and so engagingly and vividly evokes some of the raunchy subcultures of 1970s New York City; yet disturbing because I have always rejected, and upon reflection after having read Just Kids, the more so, this notion so many young and not-so-young artists have that being a True Artist excuses, or even calls for, wantonly destructive behavior towards oneself and others. (Count me as more Flaubert than Rimbaud.) Reading Patti Smith is definitely outside my comfort zone— which means I’ll be doing more of it in 2020.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, for an age I’ve been working on a book about Far West Texas. It’s impossible to consider Texas without taking into account so many Texans’ rock-solid belief in their state’s exceptionalism, which is not one and the same, but closely tied to the idea of American Exceptionalism. As one who was born in Texas, raised in California, and then spent some 30 years living outside the United States (and so immersed in a radically different cultural perspective), I can attest that this sense of exceptionalism is at once powerfully ingrained in American and Texan culture and well, kinda weird. I’ve been trying to get my mind around it for a while now.
In Global West, American Frontier : Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depressionhistorian David M. Wrobel brings this question of exceptionalism into focus by way of travel writing. He delves back to the 19th century when American and European artists and writers first began traveling through the West and writing about it as it was then, not yet “the frontier West as the heart and soul of America” (p.26) but “a global West.”
Wrobel’s focus here is on idea of the West in the works of such travel writers of originality and literary merit as Isabella Bird, Richard Francis Burton, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Ida Pfeiffer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Unlike so many post-WWII literary portraits of the West, in these, “travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many and considering the United States as a colonizing power.” (p.22) The French were then in Africa and Indochina, the British in India, Germans in Namibia, and so on. The American West was not yet, in our post- WWII sense, “a unique place, a place apart from the world, rather than a part of it.” (p.27).
“travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many”
(As a travel writer myself the higher qualities and role of travel writing is something that especially interests me. My own travel memoir is Miraculous Air, about Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, and the heart of it recounts my travels following the Jesuit conquest from the late 17th century until the expulsion in 1767. “Spanish padres,” these Jesuit missionaries are often called, but in fact, many were Italian, or German, or French. One was Honduran; another Scottish. And one key factor behind their authorized conquest of California– what we today call Baja California– was that the Spanish King, and therefore his viceroy in Mexico City, were concerned about British and French expansion in the Americas, and they most especially wanted to check Russian expansion– fueled by the fur trade with China– down the Pacific coast. How’s that for global context!)
When came the turn away from “a broader and largely deexceptionalized global context” towards “searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth”? (p.85) Wrobel argues that it came at the turn to twentieth century with writers such as Jack London and Theodore Roosevelt, both celebrity world travelers keen on seeking fresh frontiers of adventure. Then came the slew of automotive adventure memoirists battling flat tires and breakdowns while in search of “presumed regional authenticity” (p.135) — “a search for a distinctive American West, for last American frontiers” (p.135), for example, Mary Austin’s The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924); Hoffman Birney’s Roads to Roam (1928); Emily Post’s Motor to the Golden Gate (1916); Winifred Hawkridge’s Westward Hoboes: Ups and Downs of Frontier Motoring (1921); Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road (1925); C.K. Shepherd’s Across America by Motorcycle (1922); Hugo Taussig’s Retracing the Pioneers: From East to West in an Automobile (1910), and Frank Trego’s Boulevarded Old Trails in the Great Southwest (1929).
Also crucial in forging this conception of a unique American frontier– the West–were the New Deal state guidebooks, part of the Federal Writers Project (FWP). These state guidebooks included general background information (folkways, culture, history, economics, etc.); descriptions of cities and towns; and suggested tours by car. Writes Wrobel: across the West, “the guides generally emphasized the western frontier heritage and pioneering tradition. In that regard, they collectively amounted to a clear statement about where the West began and ended in the public consciousness and in the estimation of the guides’ writers in the 1930s.” (p.144). As for the Texas state guide, Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State (1940), that was “a veritable catalogue of Anglocentrism and Anglo-Saxonism, and of frontier-rooted state-level exceptionalism.” (p.151.) See for yourself in the copy now on archive.org.
In all, these memoirs and guides exemplified “how travel writing in the first four decades of the twentieth century constituted a movement inward, toward the national, and regional, and away from the global.” (p.180) So much may have been gained, yet so much lost. We became myopic.
For me, as both a reader and as a travel writer, Wrobel’s concluding chapter, “Enduring Roads,” was especially heartening. Yes, we live in this day of Tripadvisor.com and the heavily-marketed so-called “bucket lists,” nevertheless, I believe that good travel writing has and always will constitute a valuable contribution, both for individual readers (however dwindling their numbers) and the culture as a whole. Numbers of readers in the immediate aftermath of a book’s publication are not and have never necessarily been the best and only measure of its success. (More about the power of the book here.)
And I agree with Wrobel that the good and the true is not necessarily from some facile search for “authenticity.” Not that it’s often done, but it is possible to write brilliantly about a Disneyland ride or, for that matter, lazing in a hammock in one’s own backyard, surfing around Tripadvisor.
Writes Wrobel: “The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners… today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge… It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p. 187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.”
And a final note from Wrobel’s Global West, mainly for myself: What’s been done to death is the search for “authenticity.” Yes, Virginia, there is a Walmart there on the highway by the ranch, and the ranch has wifi– and drone roundups, too. The hand-tooled wallet in the gift shop is made in China and the boots, probably, in India. What more interesting things can be said? Can we not compare parts of the Transpecos to the Tarim Basin (a fascinating exercise, by the way)? Or, say find the interweavings with the Middle Eastern trade traditions (there is a Lebanese trader’s grave down by the Rio Grande at Presidio– he was killed by Comanches, as I recall.) Why is there so little compare-and-contrast of the rock art of Lower California with that of the Lower Pecos? And what of visionary artists, immigrants from the east, such as Donald Judd? Or for that matter visionary oral historians? Or the pre-Texas Revolution history of the Alamo?
P.S. Speaking of Germans in Namibia, it quite strikes me how much the Erongo Mountains look like the Big Bend of Far West Texas:
The study of English Literature has its pleasures and virtues, and much to do with learning the craft of creative writing; nonetheless, these are not one and the same endeavor. You can earn a PhD in race, class, gender, fill-in-the-blank in the novel, yet still not have the wherewithal to actually write one. That said, a novelist who has never read anything by Shakespeare or, say, Jane Austen, and learned to appreciate why such works are so celebrated, is working at a calamitous disadvantage.
Analogy: an art historian specializing in baroque cabinets is not the cabinet-maker who crafts them. While the art historian focuses on fact and figures and on what the baroque cabinet represents in all its broader context; the latter actually makes one. The former might yammer on for a book or two about the Hanseatic League or the Counter Reformation or the rise of the urban bourgeoisie, and so and and so forth; the latter, she’ll worry about the specifics of the grain of the wood; the type of joint; the choice of tool; a carved rose or a daisy for the keyhole?
Further analogy: any furniture maker who would manufacture a baroque-style cabinet would undoubtedly benefit from some familiarity with the finer examples that have survived.
DEFINITIONS
As a writer, I don’t noodle much about literary definitions of the sort a highschool English teacher would lay on a multiple choice exam, e.g., whether thus-and-such is a simile or a personificaction, metaphor, or allusion. I just think of “imagery” as my palette of “metaphor stuff.” I, the artist, can ignore it. Or I can make tiny dabs of this; squirts of that; wild oceanic splashes! In other words, as I write a novel or a story or a poem or an essay, I use imagery– I apply “metaphor stuff”–when and as I judge it apt.
(Of course, if we aim to find readers, then comes revision and editing, and further revision… More about that big bramble of a subject anon.)
For using imagery, there is no formula. Some marvelous writers relish using loads of it, others, equally marvelous, apply it sparingly.
In general, it serves to slow down, focus and brighten an idea, a character, act, place, thing– whatever it is you want the reader to more sharply “see.”
Yeah, but what about clutter?
In my experience, most people who come to a writing workshop for the first time do not have the easily fixable problem of cluttering up their writing with “metaphor stuff”; rather, for lack of it their writing is dull. And when they do use metaphor stuff, alas, it’s more often than not cliché– that is, somebody else’s metaphor stuff, warmed over 279 times. (More about cliché here.)
How to come up with your own original “metaphor stuff”?
1. Practice. The more often you practice, the easier it gets. Like riding a bike, it doesn’t require some otherwordly talent; most people find it challenging at first and then, quickly, something they can “just do.” For a trove of exercises, have a look at my workshop page’s “Giant Golden Buddha” & 364 More Five Minute Writing Exercises.
2. Learn to notice it as you read. You already have an immense treasure of metaphor stuff at-hand, right there in the books you have already read and loved. Go pluck one off your bookshelf, open it at random and chances are, you’ll find metaphor stuff aplenty. As you reread– and as you read any new book– keep your eyes sharp for the way the author uses it. (See my post on Reading as a Writer.) How well do they use it? If you love the book, chances are, the author uses it very well indeed.
For those feeling a little creaky with the creativity mojo, I’ve posted previously about emulation or permutation exercises. Basically, you jot down another writer’s line or two– anything you especially admire– and then vary the nouns and/or verbs, adjectives and/or adverbs (or however you want to do it). In short, in these exercises the idea is not to plagarize another writer; rather, you emulate; by means of play, you create your own lines.
Yes, sometimes, like a big fat cheesy enchilada, too much metaphor stuff in a manuscript can be too too… uhhff, pass the Alkaseltzer.
But again, there is no formula. Switching back to the furniture analogy, I mean, “metaphor stuff,” not everyone wants all the swirls and twirls and dainty dimpled cherubs and roses and whatnotty-whatnots of baroque furniture. But some people think baroque is the Dickens’ chickens.
For your reference, and the satisfaction of all English teachers, herewith some definitions:
ALLUSION An expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicity; in indirect or passing reference.
“Where’s the Plantation?” John Wesley asked. “Gone With the Wind,” said the Grandmother. “Ha ha.” —Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
ANALOGY A comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification; a correspondence or partial similarity.
A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it’s not open. —Frank Zappa
Minds are like ovens— if you leave them open all the time, everything comes out half-baked. —John Michael Greer
METAPHOR A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable; alternatvely, a thing representive or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.
She had heard any number of women talk of pregnancy as a slow ordeal to be endured, but now from month to month she felt only a peaceful ripening. —Richard Yates, “A Natural Girl”
PERSONIFICATION The attribution of a personal nature or personal characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form. (Throw animal forms in there, too, whydoncha.)
He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the sky —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
SIMILE A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.
…a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
When I teach this workshop I ask my students to each take a turn reading an example aloud. I would suggest that you do the same: Slow down, waaaaay down. Take a long, cool moment to read these examples aloud carefully, crisply, as if you were at the podium before a rapt audience.
We drove on, the morning
growing in the sky to our left.
—Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert
I wandered the village of rounded earthen houses, golden and white, decorated with stark geometric designs. They had a peculiar organic quality, as if they had bubbled up from the earth and dried there. Flattened dung cakes stuck on walls to dry looked like giant polka dots. —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Camel Like Only Camel,” in Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places
Inquisitiveness flutters this way and that, like a bird in a glass house. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
Given the single fossil bone, one fancifully builds up the whole diplodocus. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
A Hollywood millionaire is a strong, silent man, clean-shaven, with a face, either like a hatchet or an uncooked muffin. These, on the contrary, had tremendous beards, talked a great deal, were over-dressed and wore white gloves. They looked like a little party of Bluebeards. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
Most of the above examples are from a handout I’ve used over the years in my “Techniques of Fiction” and “Literary Travel Writing” workshops at the San Miguel Writers Conference and the Writer’s Center. In case you’ve already seen those, herewith, from recent reading, some fresh examples:
But his smile stung me like a nettle. So I barked, “Have you been to the post?” —Arthur Japin, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi
My playing is no more like hers, than a lamp is like sunshine. —Jane Austen, Emma
I have come out to lie on the rocks where I have the black edge of the north island in front of me, Galway Bay, too blue almost to look at, on my right, the Atlantic on my left, a perpendicular cliff under my ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other in a white cirrus of wings. —J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands
Again, a curagh with two light people in it floats on the water like a nutshell —J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands
He stuck with the tried and true—adding figures in his head. You could hear his lips whispering quick-quick-quick, like nuts rolling down a hill, and before you knew it he had the balance. —Yenta Mash, “The Irony of Fate,” in On the Landing (translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy)
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WALLACE STEGNER’S BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
In the past couple of weeks, apropos of my book in-progress on Far West Texas (trying to get my mind around the history of the American West in general and Reclamation in particular) I’ve had the rich pleasure of reading Wallace Stegner’sBeyond the Hundredth Meridan: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Stegner is a master of many things, including “the metaphor stuff.”
Some examples:
It is easy to skirt the region, hard to cross it, for from Bear Lake at its northern border to the Vermillion Cliffs along the south, Utah has a spine like a Stegasuarus. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 161
Powell saw the boat hang for a breath at the head of the rapid and then sweep into it. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 63
Suppose he and his family endured the sun and glare on their treeless prairie, and were not demolished by the cyclones that swept across the plains like great scythes. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 220
The inflexible fact of aridity lay like a fence along the 100th meridian. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 229
Characteristically, he took on more than he could finish. He was a Thor, always getting caught in an attempt to drink the ocean dry or uproot the Midgard serpent. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 279
His handling of the Commission was like a skilled muleskinner’s handling of a twenty-mule team. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 289
Three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon ringed them, the sky fitted the earth like a bell jar. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 297
The great men of Zion are on the map in Brigham City and Heber City and Knightsville, and beween and among these are scattered those dense but hollow names, smooth outside with use, packed with associations like internal crystals, that come from the Bible or the Book of Mormon—names that are like Lehi and Manti and Hebron, Nephi and Moroni and Moab. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 192
But here before him was the opportunity of his life, the massive and complex problem of planning for the West whose parts meshed in an intricate system. And here was he with twenty years of experience and knowledge, every bit of which could be applied to the problem as an engine’s power is applied to the axles. The action of Congress, stumilated by Stewart and Teller, had shifted him into gear, and he was not now going to be content with making a humming noise or moving pistons meaninglessly up and down. He was going to turn wheels. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 305
It was the West itself that beat him, the Big Bill Stewarts and Gideon Moodys, the land and cattle and water barons, the plain homesteaders, the locally patriotic, the ambitious, the venal, the acquisitive, the myth-bound West which insisted on running into the future like a streetcar on a gravel road. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 338
He was not merely an explorer, an opener, and an observer, he was a prophet. And yet by the law of motion (and hence of history) which he himself accepted, his motion as a particle in the jar and collision of American life was bound to be spiral. His reforms have taken effect, his plans have been adopted, but partially, belatedly, sidelong, as a yielding resultant of two nearly equal stresses. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 350
>> Find more workshop posts in the archive here; and many more resources at my workshop page on www.cmmayo.com here.
Warmest wishes to you, dear writerly readers, for a fabulously felicitous and swirlingly creative 2019.
With the new year two brilliant titles have just been added to my list of recommended literary travel memoirs: J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus. The former is a classic of the Irish Renaissance published in 1907; the latter, the memoir / meditation of an extraordinary Polish international journalist of covering India, China, Africa and more in the 1950s and ’60s. Both of these memoirs were written well before the advent of smartphones and social media and in many ways reading them–and on paper– felt like… profound relief. I’ll have more to say about smartphones, social media, and literary travel writing in next Monday’s post.
Speaking of writing, I can scarcely believe it but in 2019 “Madam Mayo,” this veritable Methusela of blogdom, will celebrate its 13th year. And it has been blinking & beeping on my “to do” list for nearly all of these many years to take my own advice and get off of the Google platform onto self-hosted WordPress.
In the last days of 2018, I finally did it– but not exactly. Various research surfaris yielded the intelligence that blogger-to-Wordpress migrations oftentimes work smoothly but, perchance generate headache-inducing snafus. Moreover, there is a huff-and-puff of a learning curve for any new digital endeavor. Hence I plan to keep that ginormous olde blog parked right where it’s always been at https://madammayo.blogspot.com, while offering new posts (and reposting selected posts of yore, bit by bit as I see fit) at this WordPress self-hosted site, www.madam-mayo.com.
If you subscribe by email, I hope you’ll consider resubscribing from the new WordPress blog instead. (I think that button works over there on the sidebar; if not, it will soon.)
What can you expect from “Madam Mayo” in 2019?
Front and center, I’ll be bringing back the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project, finishing up podcasts 21-24, as I continue to work on my book on Far West Texas.
My book Meteor, which won the Gival Poetry Prize for publication in 2018, will, after all, be published early this year, so look for some posts on poetry as well.
In addition, as in 2018, the second Monday of each month will be dedicated to topics for my writing workshop, and the fourth to a Q & A with a fellow writer. Next up is the intrepid David A. Taylor, author of Cork Wars.
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.
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 fabulosaLibrería 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.
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.
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…
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.
Apropos of my one day only workshop on Literary Travel Writing April 18, 2009 at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda MD:
FROM THE WORKSHOP: Literary Travel Writing by C.M. Mayo
“[Y]ou have to go out. You have to open space, and deepen place. Fill your eyes with the changing light.” — Kenneth White
“In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.” — John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
Literary travel writing is about first perceiving in wider and sharper focus than normal; then, in the act of composition, shaping and exploring these perceptions so that, as with fiction, it may evoke in a reader’s mind emotions, thoughts, and pictures. It’s not meant to be practical, to serve up, say, the top ten deals on rental cars, or a low-down on the newest “hot spas.” Literary travel writing, at its best, provides the reader the sense of actually traveling with the writer, so that she smells the tortillas heating on the comal, tastes the almond-laced hot chocolate, sees the lights in the distant houses brightening yellow in the twilight, and, after the put-put of a motorcycle, that sudden swirl of dust over the road.
Most beginning writers overemphasize the visual; because of our brains’ wiring, it’s a natural tendency. So we have to make a practiced effort to bring in the other senses— to note the slithery feel of the satin curtains, the round hum of a temple bell. Why is this so important? Think of a book you have already read that pulled you in so that nothing else mattered, not the laundry, not walking the dog, you only wanted to keep turning the pages. And it wasn’t just the cheap trick of suspense that enthralled you; it was the fullness of a whole world and the humanity, glorious and flawed, of the people in it. I promise you, if you were to pluck that book off your shelf and open it to any page, you would find that the writer makes ample use of specific sensory detail.
How to come up with that detail or, to put it another way, perceive with wider and sharper focus? In my one day workshop, we start with “right here, right now.” Yes, the classroom. (Last I checked, there is no White-Bearded Committee in the Sky that prescribes the distance one must travel for “travel” writing.) Indeed, as you’re reading this, mundane as your surroundings may seem to you, someone out there would consider them extraordinary. A kitchen counter in Rockville! A café off Dupont Circle! How to render them vividly? Well, what do you hear, right now? What do you smell? Where is the light coming from, and how would you characterize it? What’s on the floor by your left shoe? What is on the wall— or whatever— directly behind you? Look straight up, what do you see? Jot it all down. This exercise might seem trivial, even silly. But for literary writing— whether travel, fiction, or poetry— identifying specific detail that appeals to the senses is the first and most crucial skill to nurture.
We then delve deeper into detail, into the use of imagery, synesthesia, and a series of techniques for heightening vividness and showing movement through time and space. Then we consider the shaping and exploring— the act of composition. Is this bit about the visit to souk best dispatched in a few words or, slowed down, fleshed out into a full scene, with dialogue and lush description? How to identify clutter? How best to handle dialogue?
As for narrative structure, we begin with the beginning. What is the difference between an effective opening and a garden-variety dud? We look at pacing, turning points, climax and denouements, and explore different paradigms for thinking about structure. Finally, there are several crucial lessons from poetry. How to put energy and rhythm into the prose, so that the music reenforces meaning? How to slow it down, speed it up, make it jagged or slide-and-glide?
This is a lot to cover in a single afternoon, but we manage. Always with reference to examples from notable works of literary travel writing (as well as some fiction and poetry), there are several cycles of “mini-lecture” / questions and answers / and a brief writing exercise. In this way, these many techniques are illustrated and explored, and everyone has a chance to try them out in their own writing.
Whether your goal is write a memoir of your childhood in Pakistan or to keep a journal on your upcoming month on a trawler off Alaska, whether to write only for your grandchildren or to bring out a book with a major publisher, this workshop will not only give you an array of tools and an immediate improvement in the quality of your writing, but help you experience the world as more vivid and rich with complexity.
