Thank you for reading Madam Mayo blog. It’s a wonder to me that, as a writer of books, I am still embracing this not altogether embraceable genre called “blogging,” heading into year 17. It’s been a wiggy ride to have been blogging from the dawn of the genre, along with that of social media, then through the doldrums as social media overshadowed the blogosphere, and into the resurgence of blogging in this, the Present Rhinocerosness. Sometimes now, as with the Substackers, bloggers call their blog a “newsletter.” How to distinguish a “blog” from an emailed newsletter or, for that matter, from a video-blog (v-log) or a podcast? It gets fuzzy. Sometimes it’s all of the above.
From near-daily scattershot Twitter-like posts in 2006, gradually, over the years, I’ve come to settle on a schedule of posting on Mondays, focusing on subjects related to my books; my writing workshop; and whatever other writers and works catch my interest (and perhaps also yours?).
For those of you new to this blog: to date, most of my writing has had to do with Mexico; my current work-in-progress is on Far West Texas, which includes a hefty chunk of the US-Mexico borderlands— so you will find a cornucopia of posts about Mexico and Texas. I also occasionally post on literary translation and the typosphere.
My book writing needs to step up a notch, so from now through the end of 2022, look for a post every other first Monday of the month on Texas Books (apropos of that work in-progress); every other second Monday of the month a post for my workshop; every other third Monday a post related to my own work, past or in-progress (and more of the Marfa Mondays Podcasts); and every other fourth Monday, a Q & A with a fellow writer. When the month has a fifth Monday, I’ll post a newsletter. As ever, at year’s end I’ll post my top books read list.
For more about this blog, and blogging as a literary genre, I invite you read my post on the occasion of this blog’s eleventh anniversary in 2017.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
From the Archives: Sam Quinones’
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
Grokking Scansion: A Teensy (Albeit Painfully Tedious) Investment
for a Megamungous Payoff in the Power of Your Prose
From the Archives: The Solitario Dome
