Tag: Women Writing the West

Q & A with Judy Alter About “The Most Land, the Best Cattle: The Waggoners of Texas”

BY C.M. MAYO — August 1, 2022 
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

Through the rest of 2022, look for a post on Texas Books (apropos of my own book-in-progress on Far West Texas) on the first Monday of every other month.  On the fourth Monday of every other month I post a Q & A with a fellow writer. This Monday, August 1st, it’s a two-fer: a Q & A with Judy Alter about her superb contribution to Texas history and, of particular interest to me, ranching history. The Most Land, the Best Cattle also happens to be a wild story, and a fun read.

“I think there are two kinds of readers for this book: those who know Texas history and the cattle industry and will appreciate it on one level, while there’s a host of people who will read on another level for sort of vicarious experience, wishing they were cattle barons, had that money and power and what seemed a glamorous life. The first kind of reader is also more likely to appreciate the very real contributions W. D. Waggoner made to Fort Worth and North Texas generally. I think his work sometimes get lost in the glitz.”
— Judy Alter

From the catalog copy:

“In the 19th century, Daniel Waggoner and his son, W.T. (Tom), put together an empire in North Texas that became the largest ranch under one fence in the nation. The 520,000-plus acres or 800 square miles covers six counties and sits on a large oil field in the Red River Valley of North Texas. Over the years, the estate also owned five banks, three cottonseed oil mills, and a coal company.

“While the Waggoner men built the empire, their wives and daughters enjoyed the fruits of their labor. This dynasty’s love of the land was rivaled only by their love of money and celebrity, and the different family factions eventually clashed.

“Although Dan seems to have led a fairly low-profile life, W. T. moved to Fort Worth, became a bank director, built two office buildings, ran his cattle on the Big Pasture in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), hosted Teddy Roosevelt at a wolf hunt in the Big Pasture, and sent Quanah Parker to Washington, D.C., for Roosevelt’s inauguration. W. T. had three children including his daughter, Electra, the light of his life. W. T. built a mansion in Fort Worth for her—today the house, the last surviving cattle baron mansion on Fort Worth’s Silk Stocking Row, is open to the public for tours and events. Electra, an international celebrity and extravagant shopper (she once spent $10,000 in one day at Neiman Marcus), died at the age of forty-three.

“W.T.’s brother Guy had nine wives; his brother E. Paul, partier and horse breeder, was married to the same woman for fifty years and had one daughter, Electra II. Electra II was a both a celebrity and a talented sculptor, best known for a heroic-size statue of Will Rogers on his horse, Soapsuds, as well as busts of two presidents and various movie stars. She is said to once have been involved with Cary Grant. After marriage to an executive she settled in a mansion at the ranch and raised two daughters.

“This colorful history of one of Texas’s most influential ranching families demonstrates that it took strength and determination to survive in the ranching world… and the society it spawned.”

Judy Alter, author of
The Most Land, the Best Cattle

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write The Most Land, the Best Cattle?

JUDY ALTER: I’d studied this family for years, drawn by the career of Electra II who with wealth, beauty, and sophistication, could have spent her days reading Silver Screen and eating bonbons but she developed her talent and carved out a career. Of course when you scratch beneath the surface there’s a much bigger story. But that’s where is started some thirty-plus years ago.

C.M. MAYO: Of course your book was published in 2021, the midst of the pandemic, but apart from that, what has most surprised you about its reception?

JUDY ALTER: I guess the people who read it. I was so pleased with Red Steagall’s endorsement and with the sales—my books are not generally bestsellers, but this one did better than usual. I think Texans are always interested in the ranch families and their stories. I have not heard from the one descendant still living who had a prominent part in the book and that’s a disappointment—he wrote a nice note saying he had it and he and his family looked forward to reading it, but then I heard no more.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you in general— and also, specifically, when you were writing The Most Land, the Best Cattle? 

JUDY ALTER: The late Texas novelist Elmer Kelton, who captured Texas history from before the Alamo through the early twenty-first century had more influence on me than anyone else. He was a good friend and mentor. Erin Turner who edited my first book with TwoDot taught me a great deal about crafting creative nonfiction. I suppose McMurtry’s early novels—Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne—also were influential.

C.M. MAYO: I am genuinely surprised not to have come across much about the Waggoners and their stupendous ranch, and the celebrity Electras, before I read your book. Surely the Waggoner’s story, or rather stories about them, and the Electras, Electra I and Electra II, have been an influence on such novels as Giant (later made into the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean), and TV shows such as Dallas. Might you say more in this wise?

JUDY ALTER: It is surprising that more wasn’t known about the Waggoners, because their twentieth century history is full of divorce and scandal and lawsuits. Yet in their own way, they were private. None of them left any memoirs, glimpses into their thoughts and feelings (except two impersonal, disorganized scrapbooks of Electra II—I was fortunate enough to study them years ago; now they are in the Red River Valley Museum with public access forbidden). There were occasionally features in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas Monthly, and other places. 

I’m not sure what family Edna Ferber had in mind—in many ways, it could have been the Waggoners, or the King/Kleberg owners of the King Ranch (they generally kept a much lower profile than the Waggoners). I’ve never seen a reference to much research by Ferber. In the same way, parts of Dallas may have been inspired. W. T. Waggoner (second generation) was the patriarch for many years, and while crusty and taciturn and interesting, he was not flamboyant. That came with his daughter and his grandchildren.

C.M. MAYO: Electra II, Electra Waggoner Biggs has to be one of the most unusual artists in Texas history, which certainly has no shortage of characters! Do you think, or do you know of any evidence that she might have been inspired by the example of the sculptor Elisabeth Ney?

JUDY ALTER: No such luck. She took a sculpting class in NYC on a whim, discovered she had a talent for it, and began to work at it. In the afternoons. Evenings, she dined, danced, and partied; mornings, she slept. But she really did put a lot of hard work into the Will Rogers piece.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?

JUDY ALTER: I’m working on a book about the life and work of Helen Corbitt, doyenne of food at Neiman Marcus in the fifties and sixties, cookbook author, etc. I want to place her against the background of what was happening with food in America. Tentative title: Tastemaker: Helen Corbitt, Neiman Marcus, and America’s Changing Foodways. But, like Electra’s sculpture, it’s slow going and hard work.

PROCESS-RELATED QUESTIONS 

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing The Most Land, the Best Cattle, did you have in mind an ideal reader? If so, how might you describe that ideal reader?

JUDY ALTER: I think there are two kinds of readers for this book: those who know Texas history and the cattle industry and will appreciate it on one level, while there’s a host of people who will read on another level for sort of vicarious experience, wishing they were cattle barons, had that money and power and what seemed a glamorous life. The first kind of reader is also more likely to appreciate the very real contributions W. D. Waggoner made to Fort Worth and North Texas generally. I think his work sometimes gets lost in the glitz.

C.M. MAYO: What was the most challenging aspect of researching and writing this book?

JUDY ALTER: Fleshing out the story, because they left so little in the way of personal records. The editor encouraged me to use my storytelling skills and create scenes—I know purist historians frown on such. In fact, I cannot do that with the Corbitt book, and as a result it’s harder to catch her distinctive personality, red-haired Irish temper and all.

C.M. MAYO:  Researching a book like this requires extraordinary organizational skills. Can you talk about your working library and how you keep track of the books you read / consulted for The Most Land, the Best Cattle? 

JUDY ALTER: In recent years I’ve written more fiction than not, so the research skills I gathered in graduate school have grown rusty. I kept a pile of Waggoner-related books on one corner of a bookcase where they were handy, and I tried to keep a running bibliography as I went on my computer. Beyond that my notes are handwritten on legal pads, which is most inefficient but comes naturally to me. To find a specific note I sometimes had to page through an entire pad. 

C.M. MAYO:  And how do you keep track of articles, both on-line and on paper?

JUDY ALTER: I keep that running bibliography on my computer and labeled each legal pad page with the source—in my own handwriting which is increasing illegible, even to me, as I age.

C.M. MAYO:  Any other tips to share / hard-earned lessons in organizing one’s research?

JUDY ALTER: I’ve often though of going back to the 3×5 note cards of grad school. It was a much more efficient way to organize. But after one or two tries, I found myself reaching for a legal pad. I just bought a new supply of twelve of them.

C.M. MAYO: On research files: What happens to them when you are finished with the book? How do you store them? Do you give them to an archive? (Do you have any related advice for other writers with books that required significant original research?) 

JUDY ALTER: To my surprise, the Southwest Writers Collection, The Witliff Collecton, Texas State University-San Marcos, has kept my manuscripts, research materials, etc. for years. You can find my archive at Judy Alter : The Wittliff Collections (txst.edu) Since I now live in  600-square foot cottage, saving rought drafts, etc., would be impossible, and I’m grateful to the folks at San Marcos. As for advice, that’s a hard one: who knows whether or not your work will be of any worth. They tell me my efforts will help young writers see process. I hope. We are also increasingly losing a literary heritage because with computers, we simply rewrite rather than writing a complexly new manuscript each time as we did almost up into the eighties.

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? 

JUDY ALTER: Social media has definitely made it harder to focus. My technique is to read emails and Facebook first thing in the morning. Since I am a daily blogger (http://judys-stew.blogspot.com and http://gourmetonahotplate.blogspot.com ) and am also vocal about social and political issues, such early morning review can take the better part of a morning, and since I am addicted to an afternoon nap (that’s what retirement and age do for you), there is sometimes precious little writing done on some days, especially Mondays.

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

JUDY ALTER: That old word: persevere. And don’t be impatient. For most of us, success, if any, comes in slow drops and dribbles. But I would also advise joining writers’ groups. For many years I was active in Western Writers of America, inc. (editing the newsletter, chairing committees, serving on the board, and finally serving as president). Now, in my mystery-writing days, I find great support in the Guppies online chapter of Sisters in Crime.

*

Excerpt from Judy Alter’s The Most Land, the Best Cattle
(the conclusion of the section on Electra II),
reprinted by permission of the author:

[Electra Waggoner Biggs] was a woman of complexity. The wealth of her family—from the empire built largely by her great-grandfather and grandfather—enabled her to live and party on equal terms with East Coast celebrities, always surrounded by a cadre of admiring men. But, unlike her aunt, she did not content herself with that life; she spent time and effort developing her artistic skills and thereby bringing a certain stability to a family reputation that had been marked by flamboyance. In a family known for an astounding record of divorces, after one brief failed marriage she married for life in what was apparently a happy union. And she returned to make her life at the family ranch, as a wife and mother, the source of all good that had been given her. She once disparagingly claimed that there was no water on the land and the oil was played out, but she stayed there. She did not abandon society, traveling often to see friends and bringing celebrities to party at Santa Rosa. But the ranch seems to have been her anchor, and she was destined to be the one to preserve and continue the family heritage.

Yet when she tangled with Bucky Wharton over the future of the land, Electra was the one who wanted to sell and distribute the assets, although there is no record of the influences upon her by the early 1990s. Speculation is always dangerous, but without Johnny to guide her, she may have been influenced by those managing the ranch, including Gene Willingham. And during that period, there were no trustees of the estate, from whom she might have sought advice. It may be too that her health declined either mentally or physically, in her last years, coloring her judgment. If so, that is a well-kept family secret. 

When Electra Waggoner Biggs died at the age of eighty-nine, Bucky Wharton, W.T.’s great-grandson, was the sole Waggoner descendent left on the ranch—except for Helen Willingham, who continued to live there. And Bucky’s story is an entirely different chapter.

*

Learn more Judy Alter and The Most Land, the Best Cattle at her website.

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

From the Archives: 
A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire

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

Q & A: Carolina Castillo Crimm on De León: A Tejano Family History 

Q & A with Susan J. Tweit on Her Memoir, “Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying”

“My ideal reader is someone who recognizes that someone they love will die, and wonders how to make that journey with them in a way that is honest and open, supportive and loving.” —Susan J. Tweit

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

My writing students have often asked me if I think it worth the time, expense, and trouble to attend a writer’s conference. The older I get the less certain I am about what would be best for other writers, but I can say that for me the writers conferences I’ve attended have all been well worthwhile, and for many reasons, one of the most important being the chance to meet other writers and become acquainted with their work. One of these wonderful writers, whom I met some years ago at Women Writing the West, is Susan J. Tweit. I relished her splendid essays about the Chihuahuan Desert collected in Barren, Wild and Worthless. Her new memoir, Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying, out this week from She Writes Press, promises to be a beautiful, mind- and heart-opening read.

Susan J. Tweit, author of Bless the Birds

Here’s the publisher’s catalog copy for Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying:

“Writer Susan Tweit and her economist-turned-sculptor husband Richard Cabe had just settled into their version of a “good life” when Richard saw thousands of birds one day―harbingers of the brain cancer that would kill him two years later. This compelling and intimate memoir chronicles their journey into the end of his life, framed by their final trip together, a 4,000-mile-long delayed honeymoon road trip.

“As Susan and Richard navigate the unfamiliar territory of brain cancer treatment and learn a whole new vocabulary―craniotomies, adjuvant chemotherapy, and brain geography―they also develop new routines for a mindful existence, relying on each other and their connection to nature, including the real birds Richard enjoys watching. Their determination to walk hand in hand, with open hearts, results in profound and difficult adjustments in their roles.

“Bless the Birds is not a sad story. It is both prayer and love song, a guide to how to thrive in a world where all we hold dear seems to be eroding, whether simple civility and respect, our health and safety, or the Earth itself. It’s an exploration of living with love in a time of dying―whether personal or global―with humor, unflinching courage, and grace. And it is an invitation to choose to live in light of what we love, rather than what we fear.”

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write Bless the Birds?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: The subtitle explains it: Living with Love in a Time of Dying. Bless the Birds is a love story about the journey my husband, Richard, and I took with his brain cancer. Those two-plus years of “bonus time” after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer were our time to live, laugh, love, create, rail at fate, grieve, and travel—literally and metaphorically—through the tierra incognita of life’s ending. I wrote the memoir with the idea that our journey could be useful to others.

What I find compelling about memoir is that it is a way to make use of my life experiences, “composting” them, as it were, into stories that inspire, inform, or guide others, whether or not they will ever encounter similar situations. At its best, memoir proves the truth of the saying, “The personal is the political.” Meaning how we live offers wisdom to illuminate national and world events, whether the generational trauma of racism, the struggle to live through the COVID-19 pandemic, or the long-term planetary crisis of climate change. 

After this year of COVID-shutdown, with elders isolated in care homes and the acutely ill isolated in ICUs, we desperately need to return personal contact and loving care to life’s ending. And we must learn to accept normal death as a part of life, a turn in the cycle that carries us to whatever is beyond this world, and recycles the elements of what was “us” into other existences. Learning to embrace life’s ending in an open way frees us to live more fully in whatever time we have, to love more, and to be more compassionate citizens of this numinous blue planet. 

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: Not really. When I write, I work first at finding the deepest parts of the story, and weaving a tight narrative. Then I think about who might read it. 

C.M. MAYO: Now that it has been published, can you describe the ideal reader for this book as you see him or her now?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: My ideal reader is someone who recognizes that someone they love will die, and wonders how to make that journey with them in a way that is honest and open, supportive and loving. Not fearless, but without being paralyzed by fear. Perhaps they’re a caregiver for an aging parent, a friend who tends to the ailing, or simply a person of any age who wants to learn a healthier relationship with life’s ending time, what the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke called, “life’s other half.”

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you? And for Bless the Birds in particular?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: I am drawn to writers who understand landscape and the other lives, human and moreso, we share this planet with, and how those relationships shape our humanity. Those writers include the late and much-missed Barry Lopez, plus Tempest Williams, Kathleen Dean Moore, Craig Childs, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Robert Michael Pyle, Denise Chávez, Anne Hillerman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Priscilla Stuckey. 

C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now? 

SUSAN J. TWEIT: I am re-reading Barry Lopez’ Winter Count and other short stories for their magical realism, David Abrams (The Spell of the Sensuous), and Kati Standefer’s new memoir, Lightning Flowers.

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? 

SUSAN J. TWEIT: When I am writing, I am in another world. I turn off notifications on my phone and computer, so that I’m not distracted by the bing of email coming in or the ding of texts or news alerts.

My daily routine is pretty simple: I post a haiku and photo on social media every morning (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), and answer any comments on my posts. After half an hour on social media—I set a timer—I read the news online. When I’ve finished with the news—which is research time for me, as news stories, especially those about science, are raw material for my writing—I write until the well runs dry. And then, usually at two or three in the afternoon, I allow myself to go back to social media, answer other comments, check the news. Then I close my laptop and go outside into the real world and walk for a mile or two on the trails around my neighborhood to clear my head. Getting outside into the “near-wild” of the greenbelt trails in my high-desert neighborhood keeps me sane in turbulent times, and refills my creative well. Nature is my medicine, inspiration, and my solace.  

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you or problematic?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: I still work on paper. I write first on my laptop, and then when I’m ready to edit, I print a copy out, read it aloud, and edit as I go. The next round of editing is on screen, and then after that, I go back to paper and reading aloud, and so on. That way I “hear” my piece in different ways on the different media. 

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish a memoir, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: In the writing stage, be honest. When you get to a scene or place or event you want to skip over, stop and ask yourself, what am I afraid of? And then go there. Find the universal threads in your personal story—memoir works when it reaches beyond the personal into the territory that anyone can learn from. And when looking for an agent or publisher, be perseverant. Memoir is a crowded field these days, and yours has to be the best it can possibly be to stand out, and it also has to be so compelling that an editor or agent simply cannot put it down. 

C.M. MAYO: What important piece of advice would you give yourself if you could travel back in time ten years?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: Believe in yourself. Don’t compromise. You can survive this (Richard, my late husband, was beginning his journey with terminal brain cancer ten years ago). 

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?

SUSAN J. TWEIT: Right now, my writing is mostly answering interview questions related to Bless the Birds! When I have time for other work, I will start on the next book, which I call Sitting with Sagebrush. It’s a memoir about the native plants I have loved and worked with my whole life, and what these rooted, green beings can teach us about being human. 

Visit Susan J. Tweit and learn more about her work at susanjtweit.com

Q & A with Sergio Troncoso, Author of 
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son

On the 15th Anniversary of Madam Mayo Blog

Biographers International Interview with C.M. Mayo: 
Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution

*

My new book is Meteor

A Glimpse of the New Literary Digital Puzzlescape

My writing assistant, Washi, bright and shiny in this rectangular image. Not yet ready for Hollywood Squares!

Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve just finished up with two virtual conferences, the American Literary Translators Association’s, which was to have been held in Tuscon, Arizona and went to Crowdcast, and Women Writing the West, slated for Colorado Springs, which ended up on Zoom. Kudos to all the many volunteers who made these conference conversions-to-virtual possible, and on relatively short notice! There was a learning curve, indeed! I did my nitpicks on their respective post-conference surveys, but in all, I’d call both conferences well done, well worthwhile to have participated in, and I am sincerely grateful.

For the American Literary Translators Association I read an excerpt from my translation of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s short story “The Aunt,” and for Women Writing the West I gave a break-out workshop on poetic technique for fiction and narrative nonfiction. I also pitched a bunch of agents and editors, something I always find worthwhile for one reason or another (that would be another blog post). And there were cornucopias of readings and panels to Zoom in on. I guess that’s a new use of that verb.

Will I participate in another virtual writers conference? You betcha. I’m already planning on the Biographers International virtual conference scheduled for spring 2021. UPDATE Jan 2022: Meh.

It was weird, though. And frankly, the benefit of attending a conference isn’t quite so much in the quality of the panels, workshops, and readings— valuable and appealing as those may be— so much as it is the chance to get together with friends and colleagues old and new whether in scheduled meetings or serendipitous chats over coffee during the breaks, or say, in the evening, at a reading. For me conferences are about the people, and having to view those people boxed in Hollywood-Squares-style on a screen, and interact via computer program, and all while being recorded… Ick.

On the other hand, a real world conference can be far more expensive, time consuming, and exhausting—as you might guess if you read my report on AWP 2019. But I think that those massive conferences have had their Chicxulub. Post-corona, I wouldn’t be surprised to see AWP and some others, such as ALTA and Women Writing the West, return to their real world versions, however, on a much more modest and with tandem cheaper virtual options on offer—the latter at once appealing to new groups of participants and cannibalizing demand for the former. Many may remain virtual conferences permanently.

I took two lessons from these two recent virtual conferences, both surprising to me.

First, it’s really nasty, event after event, day after day, having to look at people’s grayish and distorted faces, swaths of oddly tilted ceilings, peculiarly placed pictures, and random household clutter. Ergo, turn the lights on, and clean the joint up! Get the camera elevated enough to avoid pointing at the ceiling (this can be accomplished by sitting the laptop on top of a fat book), and sit back a ways, so your face looks more natural. Thank you.

Second, email follow-up, always vital to making a conference worthwhile, has become even moreso.

The saddest, though unsurprising, thing to me about these virtual conferences was the fate of the book fair. Both conferences offered a virtual bookstore—at a click from each conference’s online brochure, the books of keynote speakers, award winners, panelists, could be found for sale online. But I missed both of them. By Jove, I already spend too much time sitting in front of a screen! Back when these conferences were held in the real world, however, strolling and browsing the conference book fair was always a joy.

Dear writerly reader, these virtual conferences may be here to stay, they do have some attractions and important benefits, and of course I would agree that, as I’ve heard others say many a time in recent months, they are “better than nothing.” I do not consider them an unalloyed “development,” however, for in turning us into disembodied images, and herding these images into the little boxes dictated by software programs, they seriously impoverish us as human beings.

I am ever-haunted by E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”

Notes on Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute

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

Waaaay Out to the Big Bend of Far West Texas, 
and a Note on El Paso’s Elroy Bode

Newsletter & Cyberflanerie (Way-out Artists & Ideas Edition)

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. )

#

Life is wacky good. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Pilgrim,” a masterpiece of early silent cinema– set in Texas!–is now in the public domain.

Newsletter: Podcasts, Publications, Workshop,
Plus Cyberflanerie (Extra-Eclectic Edition!)

Using Imagery (The “Metaphor Stuff”) 

Biographers International Interview with C.M. Mayo:
Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution

#

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

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 Work; Study 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.

# # #

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

#

Stay safe!

#

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

#

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!

#

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

#

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

Q & A: Amy Hale Auker, Author of “Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs”

This year, with some exceptions, the post for the fourth Monday of the month is dedicated to a Q & A with a fellow writer. This is the last Q & A for 2018; look for the series to resume on the fourth Monday in January 2019.

Amy Hale Auker

I had the pleasure of meeting Amy Hale Auker and of hearing her read from her work back in 2016 at the Women Writing the West conference in Santa Fe. She’s the author of several works of poetry, fiction and essay, including Rightful Place, the 2012 WILLA winner for creative nonfiction and Foreword Reviews Book of the Year for essays. Her latest collection, Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs, is a treat for anyone who relishes fine creative nonfiction– and it’s a vivid and moving look at a life lived close to the land, on a working ranch in Arizona.

As those of you who follow my blog well know, my work to date has focused on Mexico, but for a while now I’ve been at work on a book about Far West Texas, and this had led me to read widely and closely about the West. It has a grand if sometimes underappreciated literary tradition, so if you’re not familiar with it, take special note of Amy Hale Auker, and of her reading recommendations here. You will be richly rewarded.

From the catalog copy for Ordinary Skin:

“Touching on faith and body image and belonging, these essays explore our role in deciding what is favorable or unfavorable, as well as where we someday want to dwell, and who came before us. In that touching, they feel their way with observations about current affairs, drought, mystery, and the hard decisions that face us all as we continue to move toward more questions with fewer answers. This exploration is informed and softened by hummingbirds, Gila monsters, bats, foxes, bears, wildflowers, and hidden seep springs where life goes on whether we are there to see it or not. It is about work in a wild and wilderness environment. In the end, even as life changes drastically around us, we are better off for knowing that the ugly mud bug turns into a jewel-toned dragonfly.”

Visit Amy Hale Auker’s website www.amyhaleauker.com 

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for the essays in Ordinary Skin?

AMY HALE AUKER: Ordinary Skin is a book for anyone who loves language and story and first person narrative, who craves an intimate look at the natural world and the land, who recognizes the value of hard work and sweat with a pause, or many pauses, for falling in love with life, over and over again. While I think that women will find the deeper messages of the instinctual feminine, it is also a refresher course for men on why they love our Mother Earth.

C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read only one essay in your collection, which would you recommend and why?

AMY HALE AUKER:“Using Tools Backward.” That essay reflects our sense of place and those who came before, paving the way, and who we are as we stand in these places.

C. M. MAYO: You have been a longtime participant in cowboy poetry festivals, including the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas. My impression is that while cowboy poetry, fiction and song are beloved to many in the western US and Canada and elesewhere, they are also considered exotic, and alas, something to even disdain, by many in the literary communities in urban areas of the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Your writing seems to me to fall squarely in both camps– cowboy and what I would call (for lack of a better term) literary. Can you offer your thoughts about this? And perhaps comment on what people who read literary prose but who are unfamiliar with cowboy poetry (and cowboy culture generally) might look for and reconsider?

AMY HALE  AUKER: I have to admit to having run with this question directly to my editor and dear friend, Andy Wilkinson, who is often a clearer thinker and better communicator about labels and definitions than I am. I tend to simply write what I write and bang my head against category later. Wilkinson responded to my query in this way:

“The only way out is to question … artificial categorization. Stevens didn’t write ‘insurance executive’ poetry, Williams didn’t write ‘pediatrics’ poetry, Frost didn’t write ‘farmer’ poetry, etc. Poets write poetry, and though their poems may be about a kind of life, the poets are neither the subjects nor the classifications.”

I agree with Editor Dearest, but would also add that it is not my job to ask any reader to look more closely at any culture. It is my responsibility to simply do my job and step back (my clumsy paraphrase of Lao Tzu). This question looks too closely, in my opinion, at genre, marries me, as a writer/poet, too closely to a day job, a skill set, a means to earn a paycheck. Of course, my work in the natural world, with animals, growing food, informs my writing, my creative process, as did Frost’s… as does Wendell Berry’s. And yes, there are stereotypes out there, always, surrounding any profession or region that has been grossly, and often erroneously, romanticized to the point of becoming myth rather than reality. But an astute reader and listener will be quick to see where the stereotype breaks down and were reality shines through.

I would like to add that the elitist view of literature and life is what furthers the divide in this nation. That the only writing worthy of consideration can’t come from the pen of someone who grows food, who works as a peasant, who has shit on their boots, who works with their hands. This us vs them view of art, literature, and philosophy is dangerous and furthers our separateness.

C.M. MAYO: Speaking of shit, my own favorite writer on that topic is Gene Logsdon, who called himself “The Contrary Farmer,” and who wrote a book I highly recommend– it’s informative, beautifully written, and hilarious– with the title, Holy Shit.

For someone who appreciates good writing but is unfamiliar with writing about rural life / farming / ranching, apart from your works, what might be a few reading suggestions?

AMY HALE AUKER: I just added Logsdon to my list of things to read! Thank you.

I hope you will consider all of Wendell Berry’s work… poetry, prose, essay…. all of it. I highly recommend The Unsettling of America, essays surrounding the “green revolution” and the industrialization of agriculture.

Some other authors include James Galvin (Fencing the Sky), Verlyn Klinkenborg (The Rural Life), and Merrill Gilfillan (Magpie Rising).

McMurtry addresses this question you and I are tossing around in his excellent foreword to Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West.

Teresa Jordan wrote a gorgeous memoir, “Ride the White Horse Home.”

These are just a few, but if you really want to the peak of the pile, read The Unsettling of America. Berry is brilliant. 

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for your writing– and which ones you are reading now?

AMY HALE AUKER: My influences are eclectic and many… but I tribute the poetry and songwriting of Andy Wilkinson as an influence to write any and everything that burns brightly in me. I tribute Merrill Gilfillan, Jeanette Winterson, E. B. White, Verylyn Klinkenborg, Barbara Kingsolver, and Edward Abbey with influencing my first person narrative. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Natalie Goldbberg, Ann Lamott, and Julia Cameron are on my “forever shelf.” Recently I started reading Pema Chodron. I read a lot of fiction when I am writing nonfiction. So, right now I am reading novels. By my elbow is News of the World by Paulette Jiles. I love how she writes literary fiction in a western setting, breaking out of genre.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. 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?

AMY HALE AUKER:  I view my time as a pie chart. It is important to give of my creative energy consciously. However, my journey has also led me to consider all of the roles in my life as part of who I am as a creative being… author, cowboy, grandmother, gardner, cook, poet, performer, speaker. So, it has been fun to see how very creative I can be on my social media platforms, in particular Instagram. People point their cameras at things they love, so it is a glimpse at their hearts. That said, the most important thing I can do is to go to cow camp where I am unplugged and write in longhand on the unlined page. Or put a 38 pound pack on my back and walk off in the wilderness, solo except for the dog. And I do. When I am home, it takes discipline to turn it all off. But that is what we all should do, for more of the day rather than less.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the digital revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

AMY HALE AUKER:  I write three pages of longhand every single morning a la Julia Cameron. It is my discipline and my practice and it serves me well. Even if I don’t get to write the rest of the day, I know I showed up at the page Even if it reads like a “to do” list, I know I was present to my creative fire. I wrote most of “The Story Is the Thing” in longhand on yellow legal pad because a character in the book wrote in the same manner. What startled me was the dramatic and interesting process of transfering my handwriting to the screen. There was a magic there that I have not forgotten and crave to duplicate. So I am grateful that there are so many tools available to us… from uniball pens on blank journal pages to speaking into our phones while we drive to Schrivener (which baffles me) to Word where I can hurry up and get it all down. There is a freedom in having multiple ways to approach art in any medium.

C. M. MAYO: Can you talk about how and why you joined Women Writing the West?

AMY HALE AUKER: I joined Women Writing the West because my publisher, Texas Tech University Press, told me to. It has been an honor to be part of that group of highly talented people.

[C.M.M. post-interview note: Women Writing the West is open to writers (both women and men) living in and/or writing about the West, in any genre. I’ve been a member for several years now, and highly recommend it.]

C. M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?

AMY HALE AUKER: So many things…. I am working on both a very weird collection of short short pieces that are a mixed bag of fiction and nonfiction and meditations as well as what may very well end up being a new collection of essays. However, I don’t believe artists should discuss what they are working on at the time in much detail. It is too easy to talk about our process rather than dig deep and stay in it…. all the way to completion… if there is such a thing.

COMMENTS:
Ms. Mayo: Fascinating interview with Amy Hale Auker. I have two of her essay collections: Ordinary Skin and Rightful Place. Her word choices are poetic; her thoughts on ranch life are inspiring. Thank you for asking inciteful questions—they are challenging but she is up to the task.
–Judith Grout www.judithgrout.com

Thanks for your interview of Amy Hale Auker. I have read both her essays and her fiction and admire both, and heard her poetry at one of the WWW conferences (perhaps Tucson?). Your questions and her answers were thoughtful and interesting. I appreciated your delving into her thought processes and comments on poetry and essays. I loved both of your recommendations for books!
–Julie Weston

Q & A: Lynn Downey “Research Must Serve the Writer,
Not the Other Way Around”

Q & A: Nancy Peacock on The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson
and Writing in the Swirl of the Digital Revolution

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

Q & A: Lynn Downey, “Research Must Serve the Writer, Not the Other Way Around”

Starting this year, every fourth Monday I post a Q & A with a fellow writer. This month’s Q & A is with Lynn Downey, my fellow Women Writing the West member, apropos of the news that her book Life in a Lung Resort will be published next year by University of Oklahoma Press.

Lynn Downey

Lynn Downey is a widely-published historian of the West, with degrees in history and library science from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley. She has published books and articles on the history of jeans, the treatment of tuberculosis in California, American art pottery, and the history of Arizona. She was the Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco for twenty-five years. Her biography of the company’s founder, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World,was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2016, and won the 2017 Foreword Reviews silver INDIE award for Biography. Her next book, Life in a Lung Resort, is the history of an early 20th century women’s tuberculosis sanatorium in California where her grandmother received treatment in the 1920s.  In 2012 Lynn received a Charles Donald O’Malley Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Special Collections Division of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied the history of tuberculosis treatment. Lynn now works as a historical/archival consultant and exhibition writer, and is also a board member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Marin County Civic Center Conservancy. She lives in Sonoma County, California. 

C.M. MAYO: On organizing research: Any lessons learned from your previous book? And lessons learned from this one? Also, are there basic mistakes first time writers oftentimes make in organizing their research? 

LYNN DOWNEY: Organizing research materials — whether for fiction or non-fiction — is a very personal thing. And I think it depends on your life and educational experience. I’m 63 years old, and I loved researching and writing history from my very first term paper in the 5th grade. I’m also an archivist, so I like to keep paper files for the most part, and that has worked for me on all the books I’ve written. 

Levi Strauss by Lynn Downey

My last book, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, posed the greatest challenge because it was the longest and most detailed book I’ve ever written. I used to organize my research materials by chapter– just throw all notes, copies of articles, etc. into files by chapter. But that ended up being cumbersome. So I started keeping files by subject or topic, and also kept a running list of what topics would go into each chapter. I could then put my hands on a subject easily. 

But again, when it comes to research, I don’t know of anything first time writers could do that would be called a “mistake.” The best way to organize research is to find what works for you. That might mean doing down a few paths that lead nowhere — like I did — but as long as you find a method that helps you write, that’s the important thing. Research must serve the writer, not the other way around. 

C.M. MAYO: On research files: What happens to them when you are finished with the book? How do you store them? Do you give them to an archive? (Do you have any related advice for other writers with books that required significant original research?) 

A Short History of Sonoma by Lynn Downey

LYNN DOWNEY: I keep my research materials for quite awhile after a book is published, because I sometimes need them again: for interviews, for follow-up articles, etc. All of my files for the Levi Strauss biography will go back to the company eventually. I was the Levi Strauss & Co. Historian for 25 years and did all of my research while I was on the job. I wrote the book after I retired but the materials actually belong to the company and they will go back there once I have a moment to throw them in my car and take them to San Francisco. Once I no longer need the research files I used for my book A Short History of Sonoma I will give them to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society. My advice is to not jettison your files too quickly after you finish a book. They can still come in handy.  

C.M. MAYO: What were some of the more interesting books you read in the process of writing your book? (And would you recommend them?) 

LYNN DOWNEY: My book is a history of the Arequipa tuberculosis sanatorium for women in northern California, where my grandmother was treated in the 1920s. It was in business from 1911-1957. In addition to doing a number of oral history interviews with former patients, I read a lot of books about the history of TB treatment, how a cure was finally found, and about San Francisco history. The sanatorium’s founder was a male doctor named Philip King Brown but his mother was Dr. Charlotte Brown, one of San Francisco’s first female surgeons. She taught him to value women’s health, and most of the doctors who treated the patients at Arequipa were women. I did read some extraordinary books to prepare to write. 

A Rare Romance in Medicine: The Life and Legacy of Edward Livingston Trudeau, by Mary Hotaling, is a great biography of the man who pioneered sanatorium treatment for tuberculosis. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine by Regina Morantz-Sanchez is a fascinating look at how hard it was for women to break into medicine. Sheila M. Rothman’s Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History was a true grounding in the topic. I recommend all of these books to anyone interested in the history of medicine.  

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about your working library? 

LYNN DOWNEY: I have a bookcase in my office where I keep all the books needed for my current project. Sometimes I have to pile them on the floor too, but at least they are all in one place! When I finish a project they get moved to one of the five other bookcases I have in my house, and the books for the next project go into my office. I also have filing cabinets in my office for my working files: the subject files I mentioned earlier. Sometimes I have more than will fit in the cabinet and that means I have banker’s boxes on the floor, too.  

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. 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, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? 

LYNN DOWNEY: The best thing about the digital revolution for a historian like me is the availability of historic newspapers online. Sites like Newspapers.com, Genealogybank.com, and the Library of Congress Chronicling America site have fully searchable databases. These are the only places that have a “siren call” for me. I have spent many hours in my pajamas in front of my computer following a research rabbit hole on these sites! 

The other digital distractions really don’t get to me. Maybe it’s because I’m older and did not grow up with the instant availability of communication and information that we have now. After years of doing research and writing I am able to focus easily and not get distracted. I really don’t know how to advise someone how to do that, though. Like research, finding a method to stay on track is very personal. Some people I know keep a timer by their computer, and they can’t check email or social media until they hear the bell after an hour is up. 

There’s no single fix for what society throws at us, and what society expects us to do. Which I think is part of the problem. We’re supposed to be constantly checking up on everyone who wants to communicate with us. But my work and my time are important. I’ll check email now and then while I’m working, and if there are no emergencies I go back to what I’ve been working on. 

The joy of research, of writing, of getting the best words on the page far outweighs the need to have a constant connection in cyberspace.  

C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing this book, and if so, how did you break through them? 

LYNN DOWNEY: Honestly, I don’t really get blocks. That was especially true with Life in a Lung Resort because it’s a personal and family story as well as a work of history. I spent decades working full-time and commuting and only had weekends to do my writing. Blocks were not an option, and they also just didn’t arise. I was so happy to be at my desk working on projects I loved.

C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

LYNN DOWNEY: Do you mean writing longhand instead of on the computer? I did both with this book as well as all my others. Sometimes when I couldn’t get a topic to gel while writing on my laptop, I would switch to a pen and paper. This uses a completely different part of the brain and it always works. Once I was really stuck trying to get a difficult chapter started. I live 20 minutes from the ranch where writer Jack London lived (it’s now a State Park). So I went to the ranch, sat on a picnic table near London’s house, took out a pad of paper and a pen and started to write. Forty-five minutes later I had my chapter opening and a good start on the rest of it. 

I also collect vintage typewriters and I have one that I use now and then; again, to work another part of my brain to keep my writing from going stale.  

C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail? 

LYNN DOWNEY: I haven’t yet found a good way to keep in touch with readers, but I give a lot of lectures about my books and often keep in touch with people who have come to hear me speak. I am working with my website designer to make it easier for people to communicate with me, and I hope to do more when Life in a Lung Resort comes out. I am happy to hear from readers any way they like: email, social media, whatever.

C.M. MAYO: What enticed you to join Women Writing the West?

LYNN DOWNEY: Women are often seen as the second-class-citizens of western writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. The West is so often portrayed as a male domain but women have so much to say about this region! When I heard about Women Writing the West I joined up right away. We have to stake our claim here, girls.  

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

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

On Seeing As An Artist: Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühlung

Edited transcript of remarks by C.M. Mayo for the Panel on “Writing Across Borders and Cultures,” Women Writing the West Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 15, 2016

How many of you have been to Mexico? Well, viva México! Here we are in New Mexico, Nuevo México. On this panel, with Dawn Wink and Kathryn Ferguson, it seems we are all about Mexico. I write both fiction and nonfiction, most of it about Mexico because that is where I have been living for most of my adult life— that is, the past 30 years— married to a Mexican and living in Mexico City.

But in this talk I would like to put on my sombrero, as it were, as an historical novelist, and although my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is about Mexico, I don’t want to talk so much about Mexico as I do five simple, powerful techniques that have helped me, and that I hope will help you to see as an artist and write across borders.

I start with the premise that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and that seeing clearly, seeing as an artist, is what brings us towards truth.

My second premise is that through narrative we become more human—and that sure beats the alternative.

My third premise is that writing about anyone else, anywhere, is to some degree writing across a border. The past is a border. Religion is a border. Gender is a border. Social class is a border. Language. Physical conditions— people who have peanut allergies are different than people who do not have peanut allergies.

“writing about anyone else, anywhere, is to some degree writing across a border”

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge is this: As Walter Lippman put it, “For the most part we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see.” And I would agree with Lippman that in our culture, for the most part, and of course, with oodles of exceptions, we are not educated to see, then define. Ironically, the more educated we are, the more we as literary artists may have something to overcome in this respect.

The poet e.e. cummings put it this way: “An artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”

Betty Edwards, the artist who wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, calls seeing as an artist “a different, more direct kind of seeing. The brain’s editing is somehow put on hold, thereby permitting one to see more fully and perhaps more realistically.”

How many of you are familar with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain?

How many of you have tried that exercise where you take a black and white photograph of a face, turn it upside down, and copy it?

Turning the picture upside down tricks your brain to get past the labels of that is a nose, or, say, that is an eyelid, a wrinkle, a cheek… You are just drawing what you actually see, this weird jumble of shapes and shadows.

You turn it right side side up and, wow… it’s Albert Einstein!

And why is seeing this way, seeing as an artist so important? Because if we as writers cannot see as artists, with that wide open, innocent sense of attention and wonder that would see first, and then, maybe, define, whether we are writing about a Mexican or a Korean ballet dancer or a Texas cowboy or the old lady who died in the house next door one hundred years ago— whomever we are writing about, if we cannot see that human being with the eyes of an artist, our writing about them will not be fresh, it will be fuzzy, blunt, stale, peculiarly distorted. In a word: stereotypical.

It will be distorted in the same way that people who do not know how to draw will make the eyes too big, the foreheads too small, and ignore most of the shadows—the face they draw looks like a cartoon, not the way the face actually looks, because the left side of their brain was busy labeling things.

Seeing as an artist, on the other hand, is seeing without filters. Radical seeing. For us as writers this means seeing without prejudice, without bias, without the… shall we say, enduring presumptions.

It is, to quote the artist Betty Edwards again, “an altered state of awareness.” And “This shift to an altered state enables you to see well.”

So how do we get to that altered state? And then see?

FIVE TECHNIQUES FOR RADICAL SEEING

Technique #1
It starts with slowing down, being here now, in your body. Breathe in and breathe out, slowly, keeping your attention on following each breath, in and out. In and out. Five to 10 of these usually works just fine. If you’re really stressed out and distracted, maybe more. Whatever works for you.

Technique #2
This quiets the so-called “monkey mind.” Using a pen and paper, and using the present tense—using the present tense is key—simply writing down what you want to set aside for the duration of your writing session.

I write:

For now I’m not going to worry that
The phone might ring.
I am concerned that the front tire of my car looks low.
I am worried that so and so will say thus and such…

Whatever. You just write them down and set them aside. And because you are writing them down, no worries, they will be there for you when you need to pick them up again.

Really, it is that simple. And incredibly powerful.

Now to actually seeing as an artist. I think of it as adopting the mindset of a four year old child. A four year old is old enough to speak and maybe even read and write a little bit, but young enough to have no presumption, no bias, no definitions, no worry about time, no social status to defend. No need to be “cool.” It’s just, you’re four and you’re noticing things, playfully. Innocently. Dangerously. Like that little boy who asked, Why isn’t the emperor wearing any clothes?

So we can start noticing things. Like, ooooh, the person sitting next to us.

What is the shape of her hair?

What’s on her left hand?

If you could touch her sleeve what would it probably feel like?

Other people may inform us that a wall is, say, pink. But if we can see as an artist, get past all the filters, we will see that the wall is cotton candy pink, over there. Down in the corner, away from the window, it might be more of an ash rose. Over there, where it catches the glow from the reflection, it’s a salmon pink. Up near the ceiling light, almost white. It’s gray, it’s lavender. That wall might have hundreds of different colors.

As Matthew B. Crawford writes in The World Beyond Your Head:

“The uniformity of the wall’s color is a social fact, and what I perceive, in every day life, seems to be such social facts, rather than the facts of optics… To perceive the wall as variously colored, I have to suspend my normal socially informed mode of perception. This is what an artist does.”

Other people may inform us about other people, such as, say, Mexicans. Mexicans are like this or, Mexicans are like that. But if we can see as an artist, we may see something, someone who does not fit into, shall we say, the enduring presumptions.

Such as Maximilian von Habsburg.

Maximilian von Habsburg

Speaking of emperors, Maximilian wore some very nice clothes. Beautifully tailored suits and uniforms.

Who has heard of Maximilian?

Most Mexicans will tell you that Maximilian was not Mexican, that he was Austrian, he was the Archduke of Austria, he was a puppet monarch imposed by the French Imperial Army. But at the time Maximilian died, executed in Mexico by firing squad in 1867, there were many Mexican monarchists, a minority of Mexicans certainly, but many, who considered Maximilian Mexican, as he did himself—he considered himself the mystical embodiment of his people, his subjects, the Mexicans.

His skin was very pale and he had this down-to-here red beard. As you might recall, the Habsburgs had once ruled Spain. So to Louis Napoleon and the Mexican monarchists, for the throne of Mexico, Maximilian seemed a logical and very apt choice. And the Pope thought so, too, by the way.

Technique #3
Do your reading and research, and I could talk for an hour or more just about reading and research…archives and handwriting and photographs and newspaper clippings… but the clock is ticking.

One thing I would urge you to consider is to read for perspectives outside your comfort zone. For example, I am the last person who would pick up the memoir of Princess Di’s butler. But in fact, that memoir, Paul Burrell’s A Royal Duty, as well as many other dishy English and European palace memoirs that have oozed out over the past couple of centuries, helped me see palace life in ways I might not have been able to otherwise—to crack its brittle surface of glamour and glimpse some of those oh-so-very human beings.

Technique #4
Always, always question the source. You might be surprised— I certainly was— by how many “facts” rendered in standard histories turn out to have originated in wartime propaganda or were complete fictions tossed off by political enemies. Whenever someone says something about someone, ask, what was their aim? What was the information they had at the time? Their biases? And what were their incentives?

Finally:

Technique #5
Visit relevant places, if you can, always trying to see them from the point of view of your characters. When you’re there, put yourself in their shoes. You may or may not have sympathy for them, but your artist’s imagination, your artist’s eye, must.

MAXIMILIAN’S POV

I’d like to end with a brief reading from the novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, from a flashback in Maximilian’s point of view.

When he was a twelve year-old boy, there was a distinct moment of a gray winter’s day in the Hofburg when he looked up from his schoolwork, the endless hieroglyphics of trigonometry, and caught sight of his reflection in the window. Four o’clock and it was nearly dark outside. He had been horrified: how old he looked. The life drained out of him! In a whisper that neither his older brother Franz Joseph nor their tutor could hear, he solemnly swore: I shall not forget who I truly am.

Adults, it seemed to Max, were as butterflies in reverse: they too, had been beautiful and free, but they had folded in their wings, cocooned themselves, and let their appendages dissolve until what they became was hard, ridged, little worms. One’s tutor, for example, reminded one of a nematode.

Twiddling concern with numbers, “practicality” in all its Philistine guises makes Maximilian stupendously bored. He needs vistas of sky, mountains, swift-running, sun-sparkled water; he needs— as a normal man must eat— to explore this world, to see, to touch its sibylline treasures: hummingbirds. The red-as-blood breast of a macaw. The furred and light-as-a-feather legs of a tarantula. God in all His guises: mushrooms, lichens, all creatures. As a boy, Max had delighted in his menagerie: a marmoset, a toucan, a lemur. The lemur had escaped, and left outside overnight, it had died of the cold. A footman had opened the door in the morning, and there the thing was, dusted with snow and stiff as cardboard.

“I detest winter,” Max had declared. Franz Joseph, Charlie, and the little brothers, bundled in woollens and furs, they could go ice-skating or build fortresses for snow-ball fights; Max preferred to stay inside with his pets, his books, and the stoves roaring. The one thing he relished about winter, for it was a most elegant way of thumbing his nose at it, was to go into the Bergl Zimmer and shut the door behind him. Its walls and its doors were painted with murals, trompe l’oeil of the most luxuriant flora and fauna: watermelons, papayas, cockatoos, coconut trees, hibiscus. Where was this, Ceylon? Java? Yucatan? Sleet could be falling on the other side of the Hofburg’s windows, but this treasure of the Bergl Zimmer, painted in the year 1760 for his great-great-grandmother the Empress Maria Theresa, never failed to transport one into an ecstasy of enchantment.

Mexicans, walls, in the news. Couldn’t resist.

So in this excerpt I am writing across multitudinous borders and cultures: about a man, when I am a woman; about an Austrian turned Mexican, when I was born in Texas and grew up in the suburbs of California, then moved to Mexico, remaining a legal resident, not a Mexican citizen; someone whose native language was German, when mine is English; one of Europe’s highest ranking aristocrats, when I have no title nor did any ancestor I know of; someone who was born more than a century before myself; furthermore, someone whose personality, religious beliefs, political values, pastimes, intellectual interests and aesthetics were all dramatically different than my own.

Did I get Maximilian “right”? I don’t know. There is no triple-certified committee of quadruple-authorized red-bearded blue-blooded Austrian-Mexican monarchist-Catholic-sailing-and-botany-enthusiasts to tell us. And even if Maximilian himself were available to provide feedback by means of time travel or, say, a credible séance, would that Maximilian, plucked out of 1866 or disembodied orb of some 150 years of floating about the astral, have the self-awareness, confidence, and good will to communicate to us a valid yea or nay?

What I do know is that what I wrote, that bit I just read to you, is the product of my applying these five techniques, including heaps of reading, archival research, and a visit to Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, and however good it may or may not be— let the gods and the reader decide— it is a mammoth stretch beyond what I could come up with in my first drafts.

EMPATHY

The stretch is towards empathy. But be careful: Empathy is not the same as sympathy. I do not have sympathy for Maximilian von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and so-called Emperor of Mexico and all that he represented and fought for; but for Maximilian the human being, I do have empathy. That empathy was something I achieved because I wanted to see him.

In The Faraway Nearby Rebecca Solnit tells us that,

“Recognizing the reality of another’s existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfühlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out… Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so.”

In other words, such seeing takes heart and the writing that results is a journey of the heart, both for the writer and for the reader— although the latter may not choose, or perhaps may not be able to take such a journey. One can proffer “the pearls of the Virgin,” as they say in Mexico, and there will always be unhappy souls who loudly proclaim that they do not like hard little white things.

In the spirit of seeing past stereotypes, I would like to leave you with a quote not from an artist nor a beloved poet nor an esteemed literary writer but a Harvard Business School Professor of Marketing. In her wise and provocative Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Professor Youngme Moon writes, “Wherever you go, what matters less is what you are looking at, but how you have committed to see.”

Thank you.

Blast Past Easy: A Permutation Exercise with Clichés

Translating Across the Border

Peyote and the Perfect You

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


Podcasting for Writers: To Commit or Not (or Vaguely?)

(A repost of my guest-blog for Women Writing the West.)

Now that I’m working on my 54th podcast, I’ll admit, I love podcasting almost as much as writing. Starting back in 2009 I’ve podcasted many of my lectures, readings, and other events for my books, plus I created and continue to host two podcast series, “Marfa Mondays” and “Conversations with Other Writers.” It remains just as awesome to me now as it was with my first podcast that, whether rich or struggling, famous or new, we writers can project our voices instantly all over the world, while making them available to listeners at any time.

But first, what is a podcast? I often say it’s an online radio show. But the truth is, it’s a much wilder bouquet of possibilities.

A “podcast” is just an online audio (and, less commonly, video) file. It could be of a deeply probing interview; of a bunch of kids singing “Kumbaya”; or of say, you reading your epic poem about belly dancing in the grocery store. It could be a single file—your reading at your local bookstore on March 17, 2015, or, say, a radio show-style series of interviews with fellow horror novelists, one posted each Saturday upon the toll of midnight. 

There may be an eye-crossing number of ways to categorize these things, but if you’re writer thinking about getting started with podcasting, I would suggest that you first clearly identify the level of commitment you are willing to make to your listeners who— lets hope—are going to be eager for your next podcast.

My podcasting assistant checks out the PORTA-BOOTH

1. No Commitment 

This would be a single, stand-alone podcast. Such is my first, which is simply a recording of my lecture at the Library of Congress back in 2009 about the research behind my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

> Listen in to my lecture for the Library of Congress here.


2. Intentionally Vague Commitment

I call my podcast series “Conversations with Other Writers” an “occasional series” because, as I state on the webpage, I post these “whenever the literary spirits move me and the planets align.” Right now, that’s about once a year… maybe. By the way, I just posted the eighth podcast in this series, a conversation with historian M.M. McAllen about a mind-bogglingly transnational period in Mexican history.

>Listen in to this Conversation with M.M. McAllen here.

3. Meaningful but Capped Commitment

This would be my “Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project,” 24 podcasts to run from January 2012 – December 2013, apropos of my book in-progress on Far West Texas. Not all but most of these are of interviews, and although I have posted 20 so far, my self-imposed deadline of December 2013 did not hold, alas. For reasons too complex to go into here, in the middle of this project, I went and wrote a biography. And that’s OK. I may be slow, but with only four more podcasts to go, I’ll get there soon enough! 

> Listen in to all 20—so far— of the “Marfa Mondays” podcasts here.

4. High Commitment

This would involve high production values, a regular, strictly respected, and ongoing schedule, and would surely necessitate and perhaps even command fees from listeners by way of “memberships.” Into this last straight jacket of a category I quake to venture, for I really do love writing more than I love podcasting.

Why I Am a Mega-Fan of the FiloFax

Translating Across the Border

The Strangely Beautiful Sierra Madera Astrobleme

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