Susan Brind Morrow – C.M. Mayo's Book Notes & Convos

This blog posts on Mondays. As of this year, whenever the month happens to have a fifth Monday, I offer my news plus cyberflanerie.

(You can subscribe to my blog by email on the signup form to the right or, if you’re on a smartphone or tablet, scroll on down, you’ll find the signup for at the bottom of the screen. For the very once-in-a-while emailed newsletter only, just send me an email, cmmayo (at) cmmayo (dot) com and I’ll add you to the list.)

Podcast

Marfa Mondays Podcast #22, an interview with Bill Smith in Sanderson, Cactus Capital of Texas, is alllllllllllmost ready. I’m working at a snail’s pace this summer, transcribing notes on my wanderings around the Permian Basin. Meanwhile, listen in anytime to the 21 other Marfa Mondays podcasts here.

Blog Posts

Selected Madam Mayo posts since the previous newsletter:

Q & A with Katherine Dunn on White Dog and Writing in the Digital Revolution

Doug Hill’s Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

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

Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm

Workshop & Reading

Women Writing the West doing a Real World thing back in the time of BC (before corona)…. sigh… Note my book of poetry, Meteor, second row back from front, far left. Book PR…. WAHHHH

Originally to be held this October in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the annual Women Writing the West conference has gone virtual. As originally scheduled, but now via Zoom, I’ll be teaching a break-out workshop on powerful yet often overlooked poetic techniques for novelists and writers of creative nonfiction.

Saturday, October 17, 2020
~~9:10-10:10~~
8:00 – 9:00 AM (Colorado time)
POETIC TECHNIQUES TO POWER UP
YOUR FICTION & NONFICTION
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.

P.S. You can find my book of poetry, Meteor, on amazon.com, et al.

And at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference also this October, also gone virtual, I’ll be reading from my translation of one of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s haunting short stories, “The Aunt,” which appeared in the beautiful Catamaran Literary Reader in 2019.

For those of you writerly readers who happen to be translators, or who might fancy to dip a toe in such waters, there’s still time to register for the conference, if you feel so moved. I can tell you that I have always found the ALTA conferences well worthwhile– old friends, new friends, everyone is friendly and encouraging, there are magazine and book editors, scads of thought-provoking panels, and readings galore of translations from an untold number of languages. (My own thing is Spanish, always amply represented in ALTA.) The most fun of all is the traditional “Declamation,” at the end. Thanks to the covid, rather than meeting for a weekend in Tucson, Arizona, this will be ALTA’s first ever virtual conference, spread out over three weeks. You can view the conference schedule here.

Cyberflanerie

B. Traven’s last novel, Aslan Norval, has been published in English in Kindle. Much more about this unusual novel and news anon.

Susan Brind Morrow’s essay for Lapham’s Quarterly “The Turning Sky: Discovering the Pyramid Texts” — and about her astonishingly beautiful and important work, much more anon.

Mexico Cooks! blog offers a fascinating and detail-packed post about Mexican vanilla.

Rick Black on The Amichai Windows:

Michael Minard’s 2 minute film Shiela Hale– Book Lover, Art Maker (hat tip to Deborah Batterman, who wrote about Hale’s work with her dictionary in this blog post, and supplies this link to an installation Hale did with a musician):

William Zeitler plays the glass armonica:

The Sociological Eye on the sociology of masks and social distancing.

Lady Evelyn Gray is just one of the many, many richly illustrated posts on the history of figure skating over at Ryan Stevens’ excellent Skate Blog. Tip of the sombrero to A. for this link.

“Viktor Schauberger: Comprehend and Copy Nature,” a documentary film.

To my delighted surprise, in this video below, Rev. Steve Hermann, author of Mediumship Mastery, warmly recommends my book (and my translation of Madero’s book), Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. (You can read my Q & A with Hermann about the mediumship of Francisco I. Madero, one of the more interesting of the many interesting interviews I’ve posted here on Madam Mayo blog, at this link. )