Author’s Sala Special Series

Bringing readers and writers together
By Linda Sorin, April 13, 2007



Readings by Albert Sgambati and Edward Swift
Fri, Apr 13, 5–7pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2
50 pesos, includes wine reception

The Author’s Sala is pleased to present readings by two authors, one originally from New York City and the other from Texas. Both have found their way to Mexico and both are multi-talented. Not only do they both write, but one is also a visual artist and the other is a teacher, journalist and film consultant. Their literary offerings are equally varied and include poetry, novellas, memoirs and novels. This week’s readings will certainly offer diversity and a forum for lively discussion. Please join the Author’s Sala and the Messrs. Sgambati and Swift for a provocative evening.


Edward Swift

Edward Swift was born in the lowlands of Southeast Texas. He spent his

formative years in Camp Ruby, Woodville and Abilene. In 1967, he moved 

to New York City and enrolled in the New School For Social Research where he studied literature and creative writing with Marguerite Young. He took her class weekly for four years, during which time he worked at Scribner Bookstore. His early New York friends included Robert Maplethorpe and Patti Smith, who also worked at Scribner’s. After publishing seven books he returned to his training as a visual artist and in the past 15 years he has enjoyed great success with gallery exhibitions in New York and San Miguel. He is also the author of three unpublished manuscripts.

Swift reads from his memoir, My Grandfather’s Finger. The memoir is a series of profiles of the members of his Big Thicket family and friends. The Big Thicket is a National Biological Preserve in Southeast Texas. The people in this memoir inspired Swift’s fiction. Various chapters were printed in Texas Magazine, a section of The Houston Chronicle. In 1991, Swift recorded a reading of five chapters for broadcast by the BBC. From time to time those chapters are still heard in the UK

Following is an excerpt from The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint:

On the day the President came to lunch Señora Josefina Esperon arose before dawn. She was eighty-two years old. Her country was celebrating three hundred years of independence, and she was determined to make the occasion a memorable one for herself as well as the nation. Wrapped in a black kimono that smelt faintly of camphor, she sat on her balcony overlooking the Street of Merchants and Peddlers, and in the first hour of dawn she bleached her face with oyster powder. Before the air was too heavy to breathe, she rouged her cheeks and lips, drew black lines around her eyes, and while the capital city, which she hardly recognized any more, slumbered in tropical heat, she smoked one filterless cigarette.

“Smoking aids the circulation,” she said to her servant who was making the bed. But the old servant, who was called Contenta and whose real name was long forgotten, had spent fifty-one years in that house, and she knew beyond a doubt that there was nothing wrong with her employer’s circulation, it was her nerves.

“At your age you should know better than to invite the President of the country to lunch,” Contenta said. “What were you thinking? How many times have I told you, there isn’t any food in the house?”

“All you think of is food,” Señora Esperon replied. “Food is the least of our worries, especially today.”


Allowing her thoughts to drift with the smoke that disappeared into the yellow sky, she gazed over tile rooftops to the harbor, where her parents had arrived, to the salt marsh, where oil derricks stood like prehistoric skeletons, and finally to the open sea, where red algae floated like ribbons of blood.

“Today,” she said, “the sea is the color of wine, and the sky is hiding behind sulfur smoke. Will there be a tomorrow?”

“There will always be a tomorrow,” Contenta answered with assurance.

“How can you believe such a thing?” Señora Esperon replied in astonishment. On realizing what she had just said, and the various answers she was likely to receive, she quickly added, “Please don’t respond to my question. Today I do not wish to cause myself unnecessary aggravation.”

While Contenta swept the balcony, Señora Esperon reminded her that their city, their capital, had at one time been the most beautiful city in the Americas, a city of boulevards, palm trees and gardens. A city with an opera house and a season, a national theatre, a museum, a symphony and many poets. “Oh where,” she asked, “are our beloved poets?”

“They are dead and buried, Señora,” Contenta answered. 

“Don’t remind me,” she cried. “Oh, what has happened to our city?”

Her eyes, which were once the color of water and sky, wandered over tile rooftops, into yellow clouds and down to the red-streaked sea. This was the harbor of her birth, the capital city, her home, and she had never ventured beyond its boundaries. “I can imagine what is out there,” she had always said. So why go?”

On the corner of Independence Avenue and the Street of Merchants and Peddlers she had lived in a house of forty-three rooms, four balconies, and two courtyards for her entire life, a life which now seemed too long and circuitous but not without a certain order. Both of her parents were buried in the larger of the two courtyards, and she would be buried there too; she had chosen her day, just as her mother had chosen hers, and she would not change her mind when the final hour arrived. She would not turn back; she promised herself this, because now, crippled with arthritis and burdened with the upkeep of such a house, there was nothing to turn back to and no one to turn back for. And so she waited in the yellow morning, and she smoked her cigarette slowly, and she thought of her mother, Eufemia Esperon y Blanco, immortalized in the minds of her countrymen. The dead poets had glimpsed the ocean in her eyes and the sun-bleached desert in her pale skin. They said that her hair was like obsidian and her cheeks and 
lips had been touched by the rainbow. From the day she had arrived in the capital until the day of her death, portrait painters had found their way to her door. They had gathered on the Street of Merchants and Peddlers to wait impatiently for one fleeting glimpse of the woman whose image they hoped to capture.

Like our poets, she was a citizen of another world, her daughter thought, as she faced a morning sky and the sulfur clouds. On a narrow tapestry so long it stretched three times around the large courtyard, her mother’s life and death had been recorded, and that day the woven document was being hung for the first time.

The Author’s Sala Special Series presents short works by local authors. The San Miguel Author’s Sala presents author readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. Look for books by local authors in a special section at the tienda in the Biblioteca. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com .

Author’s Sala special series

Digging in the background
An interview with Albert Sgambati 

By Daniel C Schechter

Readings by Albert Sgambati and Edward Swift Fri, Apr 13, 5–7pm Posada de San Francisco Plaza Principal 2 50 pesos, includes wine reception

Journalist, artist, translator and author Albert Sgambati spoke with us about his recently published novella, The Waiting Room, from his apartment in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma.

Daniel Schechter: Besides being a novelist, you’re also a visual artist and a journalist. Do you consider yourself a writer of fiction above all?

Albert Sgambati: Yeah, I always have. The visual art that I did always really had a narrative line, and in fact it was an aside from my fiction writing. (It was) years ago in Mexico City when I really started to get into it and develop it. I think the main tendency is to figure out ways to escape. There’s a real discipline to just stay in that chair. I started this kind of sandbox, a psychological sandbox, just playing around with little pieces. But it was to keep myself in the room. So it was kind of an outgrowth of the narrative, whether I knew it or not, that was happening inside the fiction. But they became their own sort of narratives.

In journalism, I always tried to dig into the background a lot, you know, the culture that it was in, the physical surroundings, the looks and the smells. The story was important to me. 

DS: Your recently published novel, The Waiting Room, was the winner of the Miami University Press Novella Contest for 2005. What is the difference between a novella and a novel?

AS: The way they define it is a shorter work of fiction that’s longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. The truth of it is it’s a really weird size. Books these days run at least 300 pages. But it’s kind of odd that when we were kids, at the bus station there used to be a lot of popular fiction that ran under 200 pages—all those Jim Thompson novels. Their idea in awarding this prize is that it’s been a time-honored form and a very important one, though it’s not mainstream literature because of its size. And it’s precisely the size that makes you have to do certain things. For me it’s great because I had this thing that I never knew what to do with. I tried to send it to an agent but almost had to apologize because of its shortness.

DS: Your novel presents two relationships. One is a cyber relationship and the other is a real one. Is this sort of dichotomy becoming part of people’s lives?

AS: I think very much so. I was working in an office in New York, an international interest that was headquartered in Tokyo, and they had offices everywhere. I was in contact with people all over the world, and then I eventually began to establish relationships. It’s kind of like reverse what you normally do, that is, intermix with people, then right afterwards you keep in contact with them—how we used to do it. So it’s become not only a part of life but I think an integral part of our lives, whether we want to or not.

DS: In the novel, the very immediate concerns of the real relationship seem to override the virtual one, even though the protagonist’s virtual mate seems to be a more suitable match. Do virtual relationships achieve some kind of perfection that reality can’t live up to?

AS: That’s an issue in itself, but it’s also attached very much to who this character is. Because he’s very isolated, he lives a lot in his head, and deals a lot in artifice and imagination. He kind of escapes a part of himself. A lot of us escape in many different ways. Some of us work, some of us grab a backpack—well, some of us used to do that—and it’s very easy for him to live in his head. I think this is a constructed relationship for both of these people. They’re both in pretty awful situations, in isolated situations. They’re both products of a lonely, alienated world, and two very alienating societies in a lot of ways. And they construct a relationship and they find companionship with that. They are who they think they are. 

DS: But in the end he realizes that the girl, Marie, is a more serious matter to attend to. 

AS: Marie is very real. She’s flesh and blood. And in some ways she is the antithetical relationship, or way of relating to the world. She has this instilled kind of street smarts and courage that he totally lacks. He withdraws inside of himself; she’s totally explicit with the world. Even if she runs away from certain things, it’s for her own protection, she’s conscious what she’s doing it for. He’s just a hurricane in his own head. She’s a lot more mature at some level than he is. 

DS: Your latest published work, a combination of “sudden fiction” and poetry called Siege of the Beau Monde, is one of four components of a limited run of hand-made books published by the Luddite Kingdom Press. Despite your obvious interest in cyber interaction, do you harbor Luddite tendencies? 

AS: Yes, I do. Hand-knit socks are so much nicer!

Writing to save oneself from unpardonable crimes

Readings


PEN San Miguel, New voices in literature (bilingual)
Mauricio Carrera and Victor Sahuatoba
Fri, Apr 20, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25



Lectura de escritos (bilingue)
Mauricio Carrera y Victor Sahuatoba
Vie, Abr 20, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25



The PEN San Miguel, “New Voices in Literature” series continues with readings from Víctor Sahuatoba and Mauricio Carrera.

Sahuatoba is a Mexican author and editor whose work covers many genres including poetry, essays and drama. His works include La Ola, Par de Lobos and El Libro del Felino Feliz. Sahuatoba is also the Vice President of the San Miguel de Allende’s PEN International chapter. In Cuaderno de San Miguel—a bilingual edition which has an introduction by Tony Cohan—Sahuatoba weaves stories that are intricately linked to the history of San Miguel.

Mauricio Carrera claims that he writes because if he did not do so he would commit unpardonable crimes. Having worn many masks, Carrera has played on an American University’s football team, been a messenger in Paris, a sailor in the Caribbean and a gambler in the casinos—just to name a few. Fifteen years ago, he became very disciplined with his writing and now has many works to his credit, including El Club de los Millonarios, Tormenta, Las Hermanas Marx, and La Muerte de Martí.

Both readings from these two authors are bilingual and sure to be riveting.