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.
As ever, I translate Mexican literature, so I’ll post news and links about those projects and writers as they become available.
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.
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> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.
One Simple Yet Powerful Practice
in Reading as a Writer
Q & A with Novelist Leslie Pietrzyk on Writers Groups,
the Siren Song of the Online World, and on Writing Silver Girl
Visit my website for more about my books, articles, and podcasts.
