Newsletter: C.M. Mayo’s Podcasts, Publications, and Workshops, Plus Cyberflanerie (Extra-Eclectic Edition!)

Welcome to this Monday’s post, dear writerly readers! As of this year, the fifth Monday of the month, when there is one, is for my newsletter, covering my publications, podcasts, selected posts from Madam Mayo, and upcoming workshops. Plus cyberflanerie.

Over the past few months, apart from waiting for the pears to ripen, I’ve mainly been working on my book on Far West Texas, and relatedly, the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

My writing assistants, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl and Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl, wondering when the pears will start to drop. So far nobody’s gotten plunked on the noggin.

PODCASTS

The Marfa Mondays Podcast 21: “Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson”

Check out the new website for the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project, where you can listen to in to 21 of the projected 24 podcasts anytime, and find the transcripts as well.

Next up in the series: An interview with Bill Smith about the cactus capital of Sanderson, Texas.

SELECTED MADAM MAYO POSTS

Writing Workshop Posts
(every second Monday of the month):

Frederick Turner’s In the Land of the Temple Caves Recommended, Plus From the Archives: Cal Newport’s Deep WorkStudy Hacks Blog; and on Quitting Social Media

Conjecture: The Powerful, Upfront, Fair and Square Technique to Blend Fiction into Your Nonfiction

From the Archives: Five 2 Word Exercises for Practicing Seeing as a Literary Artist in the Airport (or the Mall or the Train Station or the University Campus or the Car Wash, etc.)

Q & A s with a Fellow Writer
(every fourth Monday of the month):

Q & A with Ginger Eager on Her Debut Novel The Nature of Remains

Q & A with Art Taylor on The Boy Detective & The Summer of 74 and Other Tales of Suspense

Q & A with Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Writing Fiction and Her Latest Collection, Known by Heart

Other Selected Posts

From the Archives: A Visit to Las Pozas, Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, Mexico

In Memorium: William C. Gruben and his “Animals in the Arts in Texas”

WRITING WORKSHOP

In order to concentrate on writing my book I’ve taken a break from teaching this year, but I will be offering a one-hour workshop on poetic techniques for writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction at the Women Writing the West annual conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado this fall. If you’re anywhere in the area, and if your work focuses on anywhere / anything/ anyone in the US west of the Mississippi River, this might be a conference for you to consider. In particular, if you take your writing seriously, and if you’re looking to meet other writers, improve your writing skills, and to learn to pitch your work to agents, editors, and above all, help your book find its readers, I can warmly recommend this conference. I’ve participated twice now (you can read my edited transcript of a talk for the conference held in 2016 in Santa Fe here) and found it well worthwhile.

Saturday, October 17, 2020 
9:10-10:10 Poetic Techniques to Power Up– C.M. Mayo

For writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction (whether biography, nature writing, or memoir), award-winning poet and writer C.M. Mayo’s workshop gives you a toolkit of specific poetic techniques you can apply immediately to make your writing more vivid and engaging for your readers. Using handouts, first we’ll cover specificity with reference to the senses, a technique, basic as it may be, that many writers tend to underutilize. Then, in supersonic fashion, we’ll zoom over alliteration; use of imagery; repetition; listing; diction drops and spikes; synesthesia; and crucially, how to work with rhythm and sound to reinforce meaning. The goal is for your writing to take an immediate step up.

Meanwhile, for my students, and anyone else interested in creative writing, I will continue to post on some aspect of craft and/or creative process here at Madam Mayo blog on the second Monday of the month.

> You can always access the archive of Madam Mayo blog workshop posts here.

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CYBERFLANERIE
(INSPIRING, INTERESTING, AND/OR USEFUL GLEANINGS)

Robert Laughlin, Preserver of a Mayan Language, Dies at 85

Rudy Rucker High on Gnarl and Chaos

Richard Cytowic on reading to the rescue (short, important)

Adam Garfinkle on deep literacy (long, thought-provoking)

Paul Graham’s essay on useful essays

Artist Marilee Shapiro who survived five days in the hospital with the covid at age 107— and is still making art

The Zoom thing (oyy) and more on the Zoom thing

Some little-known yet fascinating US history: occultist and independent scholar John Michael Greer’s post from Ecosophia In the Footsteps of High John

An already-oldie but thought-provoking goodie: What was really going on with all that TP (!!)

Tyler Cowan interviews John McWhorter

Kevin Kelly offers a raft of advice, including: “Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.”

From Robert Giron at Gival Press (back in April, which was Poetry Month):

Take a few minutes away from the trauma of the day and read some poetry. Visit & read the Poetry Month 2020 Special Bilingual (Spanish/English) Edition in ArLiJo Issue No. 135 edited by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Featuring poets: Lucha Corpi, Raquel Salas Rivera, Naomi Ayala, Orlando Rossardi, Tina Escaja, Daisy Zamora, Isaac Goldemberg, and Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Visit: http://www.ArLiJo.com

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Stay safe!

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Primitive Skills guru on “never hurry, never worry”:

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Just ‘cuz it is so cool:

(Though certainly in English we underutilize clicks, we do use them. Notice how when an American is about to inform you about something, she says, tsk? It’s so quick, it’s easy to miss.)

P.S. I also, very occasionally, send out my newsletter to subscribers via email. If you would like to receive only the emailed newsletter, just zap me an email, I’ll be delighted to add you to my list. If in addition, or instead, you’d like to sign up for the Madam Mayo blog post alerts every Monday via email, just hie on over to the sidebar (or, if you’re on an iPhone, scroll down to the end of this post) for the signup. Welcome!

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Oscar Wilde in West Point, Honey & Wax in Brooklyn

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey

The StandStand: One Highly Recommended Way
to Keep on Writing While Standing

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Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

The Marfa Mondays Podcast is Back! No. 21: “Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson”

At long last the Marfa Mondays podcast #21 has been uploaded. It’s my reading of my longform essay, Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson. Listen in anytime here, and read the longform essay here. It’s a true and important story about a Texas schoolteacher who was also an oral historian. I think her story will profoundly change how you think about US history and the borderlands. Certainly it did for me.

UPDATE: The transcript of this podcast is now available here.

(For those interested in my sources, I’ll posting the version of essay with the footnotes and bibliography shortly.)

UPDATE: The PDF of the complete paper with footnotes, bibliography and acknowledgements is now available for download:

My warmest thanks to SISCA President Augusta (Gigi) Pines and Secretary Windy Goodloe for so generously receiving me in Brackettville, taking the time to show me around, and all through the museum, and to so patiently answer my many questions. They urged me to carefully read Jeff Guinn’s Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro, which I found to be most excellent advice, for it is not only deeply-researched but splendidly well-written, a genuine pleasure to read. My thanks to Rocío Gil for her welcome in Brackettville and copy of her paper. And thanks to Doug Sivad, who provided a copy of his book, with its wealth of personal recollections and photographs. I found J.B. Bird’s www.johnhorse.com an invaluable resource. Chris Hale generously went through my first draft of this essay with his eagle legal eye, catching many errors and making numerous suggestions for which I am especially grateful. (I am of course responsible for any errors that may remain.) Thanks to my readers Cecilia Autrique and Sara Mansfield Taber for their critique and encouragement, as well. And finally, my thanks to Bruce A. Glasrud, for the prompt I needed to find my way into telling this multi-faceted, transnational story that covers thousands of miles and no less than five wars.

Windy Goodloe, Augusta Pines, and Rocío Gil in Brackettville, Texas.

The Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project is a projected 24 podcasts apropos of my book in-process on Far West Texas. Most are interviews; a few are readings of my essays. Some of this material will appear in my book, some of it will not. We’ll see.

P.S. If you’d like to be alerted when the next Marfa Mondays podcast is live, just send me an email and I’ll add you to my mailing list.

John Bigelow, Jr. in the Journal of Big Bend Studies

A Review of Patrick Dearen’s 
Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River

Translating Across the Border

Newsletter: C.M. Mayo’s Podcasts, Publications, and Workshops, Plus Cyberflanerie (Corona Virus-Free Edition!)

My writing assistants Uliberto Quetzalpugtl and Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl snoofling at the mysteries.

For those interested in my publications, podcasts, and writing workshops, after a loooooong hiatus, I am resuming the newsletter, herewith commencing a new schedule of posting it on Madam Mayo blog every fifth Monday of the month (when there is a fifth Monday, that is to say, a few times a year).

I will also be sending out the newsletter to subscribers via email. If you would like to receive only the emailed newsletter, just zap me an email, I’ll be delighted to add you to my list. (If you’ve already signed up, stay tuned. I’ve had to switch my emailing service from Mailchimp to Mad Mimi, a bit of a process. Long story short, I give Mailchimp a black banana. Mashed in the noggin!)

If in addition or instead you’d like to sign up for the Madam Mayo blog post alerts every Monday via email, just hie on over to the sidebar (or, if you’re on an iphone, scroll down to the end of this post) for the signup. Welcome!

PODCASTS

“WORDS ON A WIRE”: Award-winning writer and Chair of the UTEP Creative Writing Department Daniel Chacón interviews me about my book Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual (which includes my translation of Madero’s 1911 book). This interview with Daniel Chacón was a special honor and delight for me because while my book is a work of scholarship, it is at the same time a work of creative nonfiction. It turned out to be a very fun interview, if I do say myself. >> Listen in anytime here.

Still in production, but allllllllmost ready: The MARFA MONDAYS Podcasting Project resumes with #21: a reading of my longform essay “Miss Charles Emily Wilson: Great Power in One.” Researching and writing this rearranged all the furniture in my mind about Texas, the US-Mexico border, Florida, the Indian Wars, and much more… Miss Charles is someone everyone should know about.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Majesty,” one of the stories from my collection Sky Over El Nido (U Georgia Press, 1996), appears in Down on the Sidewalk: Stories About Children and Childhood from the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, edited by Ethan Laughman.

My gosh, it’s unsettling to read a story I wrote so long ago (maybe 1993 or 1994?). And “Majesty” is a strange story, and stranger still to be rereading in this age of the iPhone. It’s set in an Arizona luxury golf resort / spa in the late 1980s / early 1990s–another world, so to say, and on multiple levels. I recall the fun I had playing with the Alice in Wonderland imagery– I had recently been introduced by Douglas Glover to the German novel The Quest for Christa T. and the idea of the story as a net, an important influence on my fiction writing ever since.

Get your copy from all the usual suspects, including amazon.com

GIVAL PRESS POETRY AWARD CONTEST
JUDGED BY YOURS TRULY

Back in January, as the winner of the most recent Gival Press Poetry Award (for Meteor), I selected the winner for this year from an excellent batch of anonymous manuscripts. Here’s the press release from Gival Press:

February 6, 2020
For Immediate Release
Contact: Robert L. Giron

(Arlington, VA) Gival Press is pleased to announce that Matthew Pennock has won the Gival Press Poetry Award for his collected titled The Miracle Machine. The collection was chosen by judge C.M. Mayo. The award has a cash prize of $1,000.00 and the collection will be published this fall. 

“With a craftsman’s deftest precision and a thunder-powered imagination on DaVinci wings, the author recreates a lost world within a lost world that yet—when we look—shimmers with life within our world. Elegant, wondrously strange, The Miracle Machine is at once an elegy and a celebration, tick-tock of the tao.”
—C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor

About the Author

Matthew Pennock is the author of Sudden Dog (Alice James Books, 2012), which won the Kinereth-Gensler Award. As per the terms of that award, he joined the board of Alice James Books in 2011, In 2014, he co-created AJB’s editorial board with executive editor Carey Salerno, and then became the board’s first chairperson, a position he held until 2020. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have been widely published in such journals as Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, New York Quarterly, LIT, and elsewhere. He currently owns and operates a learning center outside of Washington, D.C.

In case you missed it, here’s all the info about my poetry collection Meteor, which was published by Gival Press last spring, 2019.

SELECTED RECENT MADAM MAYO BLOG POSTS

Patti Smith’s Just Kids and David M. Wrobel’s Global West, American Frontier

Oscar Wilde in West Point, Honey & Wax in Brooklyn


Workshop Posts (every second Monday of the month):

Donald M. Rattner’s My Creative Space

This Writer’s PFWP and NTDN Lists: Two Tools for Resilience and Focus

A Refreshing Tweak: The Palomino Blackwing Pencil

Q & A

Q & A with Joanna Hershon on her New Novel St. Ivo

WORKSHOPS

I am working on a book so I have no workshops yet scheduled for 2020. For my students, and anyone else interested in creative writing, I will continue to post on some aspect of craft and/or creative process here at Madam Mayo blog on the second Monday of the month.

> View the archive of Madam Mayo workshop posts here.

Meanwhile, I’m putting together a new workshop on applying poetic techniques to fiction and creative nonfiction… More news about that in the next newsletter.

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CYBERFLANERIE
(INSPIRING, INTERESTING, AND/OR USEFUL GLEANINGS)

My typosphere guru, philosopher Richard Polt, has posted about the dance based on his “Typewriter Manifesto”!

How to smombify millions of otherwise healthy, active, and creative people or, electrical failure as last defense: Nicholas Carr on TikTok.

Let’s be frank, shall we? Leslie Pietrzyk offers tips on post-MFA etiquette at Work-in-Progress.

BRAAAAAAAVOOOOOOOOOO, Judith Boyd!!!! What to Wear in Honor of the Death of a Significant Friend is a highly unusual essay well worth reading thrice.

Patricia Dubrava on Little Women

Andrea Jones “On Not Riding”

Philosopher Jeremy Naydler on light and thought. Poets and literary writers may find this especially energizing. (Not for those who get cooties from any whiff of woowoo, however.)

Clifford Garstang, who did a Q & A for this blog in 2019, has posted his annual Literary Magazine rankings. Dear writerly readers looking to publish, while of course his, mine, yours, or anyone’s rankings of literary magazines are subject to debate, take this as a valuable and free resource!

Speaking of publishing, that usually involves a heaping helping of rejections. Well, I say, micro freaking deal! Rev that sense of humor! Need some assistance in that department? Here’s what Jia Jiang learned from 100 days of rejection:

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There’s more to Mexico than beaches & pyramids & Frida chunches… (Chunches: That’s Mexican for tchotchkes. Not to be confused with Ughyur raisin-drying facilities.) For anyone interested in the rich cultural heritage of Mexico, check out Richard Perry’s long-ongoing blog, Arts of Colonial Mexico. Richard writes: “For the New Year, we plan to highlight monuments and art works in Oaxaca and Yucatan as well as in Guanajuato, Puebla and Tlaxcala.”

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An email from Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, editor of Loch Raven Review:

Dear Fellow Translators,

I want to spread the word about Loch Raven Review’s role in showcasing poetry translated from a variety of languages, featuring as a rule one language per each issue’s bilingual section. Since 2011, when I accepted the responsibility of the Poetry Translations Editor, Loch Raven Review has featured 21 sections of poetry in translation. I’ve compiled a list of all the sections, starting with the Spanish language, followed by the expected and unexpected languages, such as Catalan, Mayan or Kurdish, at http://danutakk.wordpress.com/loch-raven-review/ 

I’ve made it a point to engage local area translators, starting with Yvette Neisser and Patricia Bejarano Fisher, then Nancy Naomi Carlson, Barbara Goldberg, Katherine E. Young, Nancy Arbuthnot, Zeina Azzam, and then Zackary Sholem Berger, Xuhua Lucia Liang, and Maritza Rivera in the most recent LRR Volume 15, No. 2, 2019.

Also, since 2018 we’ve been busy catching up with LRR print volumes. In 2019 we published Volumes 10-13! 
You may enjoy them at http://thelochravenreview.net/loch-raven-press-books/ and on our Facebook page.

Vol. 14 is going to press soon.

Starting in 2018 we have nominated four translations for the Pushcart Award.

I feel proud and happy to be able to bring together poets who write in such a variety of languages, and the translators who make the poems available to the English language readers.

Wishing you all a peaceful, creative, and joyful 2020, 

Danka

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

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Emma Lawton on “What Parkinson’s Taught Me”:

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There is nothing you cannot do! Says Tao Porchon-Lynch, the world’s oldest yoga teacher– who recently passed away at 101. She made 98 look like 18. Bless you, Tao.

Cyberflanerie: Bill Cunningham, Brattlecast,
Rudy Rucker, Sturmfrei & More

“The Typewriter Manifesto” by Richard Polt, 
Plus Cyberflanerie on Technology

Remembering Ann L. McLaughlin

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Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Happy New Year! Newsletter & Cyberflanerie

This blog posts on Mondays. As of 2019, the fifth Monday of the month, when there is one, rounds up my news plus some cyberflanerie.

Dear writerly readers, my writing assistants Uliberto Quetzalpugtl and Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl and I wish you a very happy, healthy, prosperous, and inspiring 2020!

RECENT PUBLICATIONS,
PODCASTS & BLOG POSTS

(I finally got an email sign-up working– it’s there on the sidebar.)

New longform essay (soon to be a podcast):

Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson
If I do say so myself, this is my best essay of creative nonfiction to date. Dear writerly readers, over the past two decades I have published essays of creative nonfiction in some mighty fine places: Creative Nonfiction, Letras Libres, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Southwest Review... But such was not to be the fate for “Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson.” It ended up being what it wanted to be– too short to stand as a book, yet too long for a literary journal or magazine (to cut it down would have ruined it), so forthwith, I posted it on my blog, and also read it aloud as the Marfa Mondays Podcast #21. The podcast is currently in production; I will update this post just as soon as the podcast is live.

New book:

Meteor. My book of poetry won the Gival Press Award. Read all about it on my webpage for the book here.

Scholarly article:

John Bigelow, Jr. (1854-1936), who served as an officer in the Indian Wars and went on to become a military intellectual of distinction, will be accompanying me in my memoir of Far West Texas, in a manner of speaking. I do not usually write scholarly articles all a-bristle with footnotes, but for him I did: John Bigelow, Jr.: Officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between the West and the Eastern Establishment, Journal of Big Bend Studies, 2018 (actually came out in 2019). This month, December 2019, I finally made it to the US Military Academy’s archive in West Point, NY to delve into his diaries. I’ll have something to say about some of those curiously fun pages in a later post.

From a Frederic Remington illustration in John Bigelow Jr.’s collected articles,
On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo.

New short story:

“What Happened to the Dog?” was wicked fun to write, and to type! The idea was to write a story about a typewriter set in the far future, and then actually type it on a typewriter for Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds, edited by Richard Polt, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeeters.


New translation:

My translation of “La tía,” as ,“The Aunt” by Mexican writer Rosemary Salum appeared in Catamaran Literary Review. To date several of my translations of Salum’s stories from her collection The Water that Rocks the Silence, all set in the Middle East, have appeared in Catamaran Literary Review and Origins.


Selected favorite Madam Mayo posts in 2019:

Lonn Taylor (1940-2019) and Don Graham (1940-2019),
Giants Among Texas Literati

Who Was B. Traven? Timothy Heyman on the Triumph of Traven

From the B. Traven Conferences in Berlin / Plus Cyberflanerie

Top 12+ Books Read 2019

Selected workshop posts
(workshop posts every second Monday of the month)

It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone 

Überly Fab Fashion Blogger Melanie Kobayashi’s “Bag and a Beret” (Further Notes on Reading as a Writer)

Using Imagery (The “Metaphor Stuff”)

A Working Library: Further Notes & Tips for Writers of Historical Fiction, Historians, Biographers & etc.

AWP 2019 (Think No One is Reading Books and Litmags Anymore?)

Q & As:

For an eon I’ve been posting occasional Q & As with fellow writers here at Madam Mayo, but in 2019 I started posting a Q & A every fourth Monday of the month. Among the Q & As for this year, poets: Diana Anhalt; Barbara Crooker; W. Nick Hill; Joseph Hutchison; an essayist, Bruce Berger (also a noted poet); novelists Eric Barnes; Clifford Garstang; Donna Baier Stein; Sergio Troncoso; historian David A. Taylor; and literary translator Ellen Cassedy. Each has fascinating things to say about their work, and also on maintaining and nurturing their creative process in the whirl of the Digital Revolution.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

Zip! This winter 2020 I’ll be working on my book about Far West Texas. (Stay tuned for more of the related “Marfa Mondays” podcasts, which you can listen into anytime for free here.) Nonetheless, I will continue offering a post for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing on the second Monday of every month throughout 2020.

P.S. Check out the substantial archive of workshop posts here.

CYBERFLANERIE

Listen in to Chris Alvarez’s “War Scholar” podcast interview with Mark Santiago about his excellent new book, A Bad Peace and a Good War.

A crunchy addition to the podcastosphere: Lisa Napoli’s podcast for Biographer’s International.

In case you might have been feeling a bit old fogeyx: David Bowles explains that “Latinx” thing (and how to pronounce it)

Lost chapter of world’s first novel found in Japanese storeroom

“Extraordinary” 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time

Most unusual! Zack Rogow on Michael Field: The Work and Lives of a Victorian Poet

Listen in to Cal Newport and James Clear getting nerdy about attentional awareness.

Listen in to William Reese’s lecture for Rare Books School

Mexico City-based writer Dorothy Walton’s essay “Funeral for a Tree”

Writers looking to get published, take special note: Allison Joseph’s long-time Creative Writers Opps listerserv is now a blog.

Madam Mayo in 2020

Madam Mayo blog posts on Mondays. As in 2019, in 2020 the second Monday of the month will be dedicated to my creative writing students and anyone else interested in creative writing, and the fourth Monday to a Q & A with a fellow writer. A fifth Monday, when there is one, will offer my newsletter and cyberflanerie. Bookmark this page or, better yet, sign up for new posts by email– right there on the sidebar.

More next Monday.

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Decluttering a Library

Peyote and the Perfect You

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson

This the longform essay I read for the Marfa Mondays podcast, which will be is now available for listening for free on both iTunes and Podomatic shortly. (For scholars and those wishing to examine sources, I will also be posting the version with extensive endnotes as a PDF.) In the meantime, you can listen in to the other 20 podcasts posted-to-date anytime via wwww.cmmayo.com/marfa.

LISTEN ON iTUNES
LISTEN ON PODOMATIC


UPDATE: Read the transcript

UPDATE: Listen in anytime to all the podcasts at the new “Marfa Mondays” home page.

A PDF of this essay with footnotes and the complete bibliography can be downloaded here:

Blood Over Salt in Borderlands Texas:
Q & A with Paul Cool About
Salt Warriors

Literary Travel Writing:
Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América in Mexico City

Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.

Copyright © C.M. Mayo 2019. All rights reserved.