San Miguel Writers’ Conference 
By Adrienne Atwell, Feb 16, 2007

San Miguel Writers’ Conference

Sat, Feb 24, 8am–7pm 

Sun, Feb 25, 9am–3pm

Hotel Real de Minas
Ancha de San Antonio & Stirling Dickinson

Screenplay writing is the newest feature at the second annual Writers’ Conference, which will be filled with contests, panel discussions, open mic readings, book signings and almost two dozen breakout sessions. Many celebrated writers will speak, including screen writers Karl Schiffman, Ozzie Creek and Harry Burrus as well as award-winning authors Tony Cohan and Eva Hunter. For more information on the conference, see www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com 



Eva Hunter 

Eva Hunter’s work has appeared in numerous publications. She is a former faculty member at Portland State University in creative writing and is a founder of Connexus: The Writers’ School and the San Miguel Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent book, The Lord of the Dolls: Voyage in Xochimilco, a literary nonfiction/art photography collaboration with photographer Jo Brenzo, will be released in late February.



Excerpt from The Lord of the Dolls: Voyage in Xochimilco 

Jo Brenzo, a photographer; Eva Hunter, a writer; and Gary Berkowitz, a graphic artist, have taken a trip to Xochimilco, Mexico’s ancient canal system, to investigate an island said to be filled with grotesque formations of dolls. The dolls, a product of decades of collection by the now-deceased island’s owner, Don Julián Santana, are nailed to trees, hung with wire hangman’s nooses, crucified on primitive stick crosses. The writer feels that the island is “a testament to torture and sadism.” This excerpt begins with a conversation with Julián’s nephew, Anastasio.

If what we see here, now—a partial decade after his death—is truly representative of what Don Julián did with his island, I wonder about his mind.

Anastasio tells us that his uncle found the dolls in garbage cans in the city of Xochimilco or floating, abandoned, in the canals.

“Why did your uncle do this?” I ask Anastasio.

“The wind blows in over the island at night,” Anastasio answers. “The dolls are there to pacify the spirits that come at night.” When his uncle died, Anastasio inherited the island. He says nothing has been altered since Julián died.

There are three stick palapas on this island. One is the reception hut where Anastasio greets visitors. After that is a semi-enclosed hut that contains dolls, small toys, and various religious artifacts: prints of the Virgen de Guadalupe torn from calendars, small crucifixes, images of Pope John Paul.

One doll, as large perhaps as a four-year-old child, slouches in a chair. She wears a red flowered dress with a broad red sash; her arms are stacked with beaded and knotted string bracelets. A misshapen straw hat partially obscures her face, and rumpled cloth-and-elastic hair bands sag at her ankles.

Her name is Agustinita. She is the only doll Julián named.

Like the other dolls, she is dirty—splotched from the mud that leaks through the stick roof and covers everything when it rains. But perhaps because she has been partially sheltered, her face and body have escaped the ravaged aspect of most of the other dolls.

When Don Julián was a young man, Anastasio says, Xochimilco’s waters were clear, fed by natural springs. Sometimes Julián thought he saw La Sirena, the mermaid who lives in these canals, reclining underneath the water or hiding in the shadows behind the green reeds where the water laps at the land.

From the time he was a boy, Julián heard La Sirena singing to him. He was not the only one she sang to, of course. But it was dangerous to listen to her, because La Sirena’s song was a seductive one, and those who heeded it were drawn into the water to drown.

When he was a young man, a teenager still, three young women he knew went out onto the canal on a hot summer day to swim in its clear waters. One of them misjudged the depths of the water and drowned. When her friends pulled her lifeless body up from the bottom and onto dry land, the boat they had been in drifted away.

Early the next morning, just as the sun was coming up, Julian found the boat bobbing against the jutting piece of land at the edge of his island.

He was frightened that La Sirena had sent it for him.

Especially at night, alone on the island, Julián heard La Sirena singing. But if he sang very very loudly to himself—not to her, never to her, but only so he would not hear her song—he was safe, he thought, from her embrace.

He read his Bible, and sometimes attempted to preach from it to his Xochimilco neighbors, although the general reaction to his preaching was one of scorn.

San Miguel Writers’ Conference

Sat & Sun, Feb 24 & 25

Hotel Real de Minas

Ancha de San Antonio & Stirling Dickinson

US$225

Varied writers’ workshop includes memoir and children’s books

Life has been an interesting journey. You have some stories you’d like to get down, maybe for your family, maybe for yourself. How do you do that? How does one record one’s life in an interesting and readable document? 

The answers to these questions will be found at the 2007 San Miguel Writers’ Conference in breakout sessions such as “Write Your Life” by renowned novelist and memoirist Wayne Greenhaw, “Nonfiction Writing” by Gerald Helferich or “Writing the Literary Nonfiction Story” by Eva Hunter. If it’s a children’s book you’d like to leave for your kids and grandchildren, you’ll want to attend the session entitled “Writing Children’s Picture Books” by Dianna Hutts Aston.

Wayne Greenhaw is a memoir veteran. At age 26, he published My Heart Is in the Earth: True Stories of Alabama and Mexico about arriving in a frontier San Miguel, and later, The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow, written with a young grocer who collected many stories about the people and the black and white leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. This award-winning author, who divides his time between San Miguel and Montgomery, Alabama, is currently working on another nonfiction piece about conversations with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his wife, Coretta, and other civil rights leaders. In his session about writing your life, Greehaw will reveal how to creatively shape reality to make your life a publishable story. 

Gerald Helferich edited and published nonfiction for Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley before leaving publishing to become an author himself. His first book, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World, was published in 2004 by Penguin, and he is currently at work on his second, tentatively entitled High Cotton: Four Seasons on a Mississippi Cotton Farm, which will be published in 2006 by Basic Books. During his career, Helferich evaluated hundreds of non-fiction proposals to see which were publishable. Herferich will show conference participants what publishers look for in a proposal, how to organize a proposal and tailor it to your subject matter and what materials to include and exclude. 

Dianna Hutts Aston is the author of many children’s books, including the awarding-winning, An Egg Is Quiet and the upcoming A Seed Is Sleepy, both illustrated by Sylvia Long. Despite her success, her first attempts at writing children’s books were called “coy” and “didactic.” Aston will show conference participants how to create children’s picture books that have few words and beginning, middle and ends. She’ll tell you what kinds of stories make it in the bunny-eat-bunny world of children’s publishing. 

These are only a few of the almost two dozen informative sessions scheduled for the 2007 San Miguel Writers’ Conference. For more information on the conference, see www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com. You can register through the web page or by purchasing a ticket at La Conexión with either a US check or cash (exact change required in either dollars or peso equivalent) and a receipt will be emailed.

Santlofer shows the “written picture” at Bellas Artes
By Caren Cross

San Miguel PEN lecture Jonathan Santlofer Tue, Feb 20, 6pm Bellas Artes Hernández Macías 75 50 pesos

The next author in the San Miguel PEN series, Jonathan Santlofer, will present a slide lecture called “The Written Picture.” Santlofer is the best-selling author of The Death Artist, Color Blind and The Killing Art, which have been translated into more than 16 languages. His forthcoming novel, Anatomy of Fear, to be published in April by William Morrow, will include his artwork. 

As an artist, he has had over 200 exhibitions in the US and abroad. His work is displayed in the permanent collections of the the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and numerous private and corporate collections. It has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Arts, and Interview. 

Santlofer holds an MFA degree from Pratt Institute, has received two National Endowment for the Arts painting grants and has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. He serves on the board of Yaddo, the oldest arts colony in the US, and resides in New York City. 

A painter for 22 years before he became a writer, Santlofer describes this transition: “For many years I wrote about art for art magazines, but it wasn’t until I had a show in a Chicago gallery that burned to the ground with five years of my artwork inside that I started a novel. The fire knocked me off my art career path, but strangely—and wonderfully—started me on a writing career. I'm not recommending a fire, but it ended up enriching my life. One form feeds the other. Right now I’m combining the two, putting the art right there on the pages of the book, which is thrilling.”

CC: “What inspired you to base the story of your last book, The Killing Art, on the Abstract Expressionists?”

[PIX LIT PEN SANTOFLER 2]

JS: “The Killing Art is a blend of fact and fiction. Some years ago, on assignment from ArtNews, I interviewed several surviving members of the New York School, America's most famous group of artists from the 1940s and 50s (most of them now deceased). Like Kate in the book, I heard stories of wild parties and binge drinking, scandalous affairs, and the extreme poverty that was (for a few artists) to be replaced by fame and fortune. But there was also a story (a dirty little secret) that several of the artists recounted: a story about a private meeting held in the artist Ad Reinhardt's studio at which choices were made about which artists would be in and which would be out, dooming some artists to obscurity and failure, and catapulting others to fame and riches. Over the years the story stayed with me—the idea that artists, supposedly sensitive people, could be so cruel and play such games of exclusivity with such dire consequences—and finally recognized it could be the basis for a terrific tale of morality, b
etrayal, and revenge.”

Caren Cross: “How did your heroine Kate McKinnon evolve?”

Jonathan Santlofer: “In the early drafts of my first novel, The Death Artist, the main character was a man, a mid-career artist, like me. But after a while I got sick of him. It was great fun to kill myself, on the page, and wake up the next morning! After that, I wanted a character who would be totally unlike me, which is how Kate McKinnon was born. I made her tall (I’m not), rich (again, I’m not), smart (well, I try, but...). I wanted someone who was moral and strong, who had come up the hard way (Kate grew up in a family of cops in a lower middle class family in Queens), and made it big. I really like the idea of a main character who is rich and successful, because you rarely see that in crime fiction—the hero or heroine is almost always an outsider.”

CC: “Is it difficult to write about a female character?”

JS: “Not really, though it took some time. For a while I had to stop and think: how would a woman react to this? But now that I really know Kate it’s become intuitive. I even know what she would wear, and when I don't, I ask my wife and daughter. For The Killing Art, my daughter decided it was essential that Kate cut her hair and change her look, and I think it was a great idea. The only time it gets weird writing about a woman is when Kate has sex!”

CC: Why do you think people like stories about art?

JS: “I think people like good stories, period. When I use art I'm always thinking... is the reader learning something he or she will find interesting?”

Copies of Santlofer’s books will be available for 100 pesos. For more information write jjenya@yahoo.com  or call 154-7358. 

PEN New Voices in Literature reading series

PEN New Voices in Literature, reading by Bill Pearlman

Fri, Feb 16, 4pm

Sala Quetzal, Biblioteca Pública

Donation requested

The Sala Quetzal in the Biblioteca Pública will host a new reading series sponsored by San Miguel PEN. The first presenter, Bill Pearlman, will read from his new book, Brazilian Incarnation (Selected Poems 1967–2004). A donation is requested. 

All readings are in the Sala Quetzal on Fridays at 4 pm. Those interested in reading for future dates should send a poem or short piece to Bill Pearlman at bdpearl@yahoo.com. We are interested in poetry, fiction and plays in progress. 



CAJA

Future readings in the series



March 2: Leonard Bird, Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir

March 16: Halvard Johnson and Lynda Schor, poetry and fiction

March 30: Keith Keller, stories

April 6: Robert Creeley memorial reading

April 20: Victor Sahuatoba, bilingual reading, San Miguel Cuaderno

April 27: Judith Jenya, stories from Bosnia

May 11: Wim Coleman, poetry