Author’s Sala Special Series presents Alice Denham and James Cervantes
By Linda Sorin


Readings
By James Cervantes and Alice Denham
Fri, Aug 10, 5–(N)7pm
Posada San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2
50 pesos (inc wine reception)

The Author’s Sala presents what promises to be another blockbuster event. A poet with an impressive list of publications and a former Playboy Bunny turned author. 

Initially trained as a cellist, James Cervantes began writing poetry while serving with the U.S.A.F. Orchestra in Washington, D.C. from 1963 to 1967. Since then, he has lived, studied, and taught in various US states and he now divides his time between Arizona and San Miguel de Allende.

His books include Temporary Meaning, which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times book award in poetry. Changing the Subject, which began as a dialogue-through-poems by Cervantes and Halvard Johnson, Live Music, The Headlong Future and The Year is Approaching Snow.

Cervantes's poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Laurel Review, The Boston Review, North American Review and other magazines. He is editor of The Salt River Review, an online journal of poetry and fiction.

Cervantes will be reading poems from two or three collections. The most recent is a series of poems centered around a single character, which was published last month by Via Loca Press and is available free of charge in downloadable PDF format. He will also be reading from Temporary Meaning, published last year, and possibly from Live Music, a chapbook in which jazz is a major element.

Alice Denham will read from her memoir, Sleeping with Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties, which received a full-page favorable review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Under the cover photo used in the review, Alice is quoted as saying, “Sex was my great adventure.” Bad Boys is about Denham’s struggle to become a writer in an era when male writers were gods and women were décor.

Alice Denham is the only Playboy Playmate whose revealing short story was published in the same issue as her revealing Playmate photos. It was later made into a prize-winning festival film. Denham’s first novel, My Darling from the Lions, was published in 1967 and reprinted in 2003. Her second is the cult novel, Amo (feminist centerfold from outer space). Her tale, Long Ago in San Miguel will appear in the forthcoming San Miguel anthology.

Following is an interview with Alice by Bob Kelly. Kelly worked on several US newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, and was a public relations executive in Chicago and New York.

Alice Denham was asked by the PEN chapter in 1993 to give a 45-minute lecture about authors she had known during a writing career that received its first big boost when she was the centerfold and her short story appeared in Playboy in 1956.

The lecture became the start of her memoir Bad Boys.

“I’ve always written down everything interesting that happened to me,” Denham said, which along with her writing skills account for the sense-of-place details, verbatim conversations and unsparing appraisals of the male authors who competed with each other for stature and women in Manhattan.

The list includes James Jones, Norman Mailer, Nelson Algren, Joseph Keller, Philip Roth, William Styron, Jack Kerouac, David Markson, Evan Connell, Anatole Broyard and William Gaddis (a former San Miguel resident), along with Hugh Hefner and her first great love, the actor James Dean.


By her account, Denham knew them all, many in the Biblical sense, and she tells all.

Jones was lacking in the physical department but had compensatory skills; Gaddis, however, did sport “a fine centerpiece”; Hefner was a good ride but mechanical; Roth was insatiable; Dean was fixated on her Playmate bosom and liked to nuzzle.


The only fallout she’s aware of from her A-list of authors was from Roth, who she said told a mutual friend to “tell Alice Denham to be careful.”

“I’ve been totally surprised by the reaction to the book,” Denham said. “For me, this was a blockbuster. The New York Times review made everything happen. A Times review is the difference between sales and no sales. It’s taken me from being unsuccessful to successful. It’s validation after these many years of writing,” she added, that include two published novels, short stories and non-fiction.

She credits rent control on her West Village apartment in New York and not having had children with being able to afford her writing career, along with teaching Creative Writing at Yale, Smith, University of Toronto, and CUNY (City Univ. of NY).

While enjoying the attention and actively promoting her memoir, Denham said she also works everyday on two other books. One, a memoir of her Southern family, “could be big because of all the derring-do,” she said. The other, tentatively titled Paradise Comes of Age, is a novel made up of short stories about three American sisters in San Miguel.

“This place has been as much a part of my life as New York since I started coming here in 1955, the year Jimmy Dean was killed in a car accident,” she noted. A part-time resident, Denham said she met her husband, John Mueller, another part-timer, when she picked him up on the street here in 1980. “When we decided to get married, I made him go back to that spot and get down on one knee and propose to me.”

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.