Authors’ Sala Special Series

Bringing readers and writers together
By Adrienne Atwell, March 2, 2007

Authors’ Sala Special Series
Jan Baross and Terrence N. Hill
Fri, Mar 9, 5–7pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2
50 pesos, includes wine reception

Since 2004, the Authors’ Sala has promoted literacy and the art of writing through its outstanding literary programs. This month’s presentation features two award-winning authors and playwrights, Terrence Hill and Jan Baross. Each speaker will read excerpts from their latest publications, as well as talk about their careers as writers. Don’t miss this event!

Terrence N Hill

Terry worked in advertising as a writer and creative director for more than thirty years in Toronto, Detroit, Washington, New York, London and Paris. After quitting, Terry started writing for himself. He has written and published poetry, essays and short fiction. In 2005 he published his first book – Two Guys Read Moby-Dick (co-written with Steve Chandler) and won the ‘Playhouse on the Green’ playwriting competition (Bridgeport, CT) with his first play Hamlet – The Sequel. It was a good year. The second book in the “Two Guys” series – Two Guys Read the Obituaries – was published in the fall of 2006. 

Terry will read excerpts from both Two Guys Read Moby-Dick and Two Guys Read the Obituaries. In these books, Terry and co-author Steve Chandler, friends for almost five decades, maintain a lively and often hilarious correspondence about reading Melville, people who have died, and pretty much anything else that strikes their interest. They are engagingly susceptible to digression. Terry will also talk about why he's bald and why he writes.

Jan Baross

Writer, producer and director, Jan Baross has had a filmmaking career spanning almost four decades, and her film, Pioneer Woman, has premiered on the A&E channel. As a playwright, one of her productions was Mata Hari, which played at the Villa Jacaranda in San Miguel in 1997 with local actors. José Builds a Woman, Baross’s award-winning first novel, is set partly in San Miguel. Her most current publication is Ms. Baross Goes to Paris, an illustrated travel/food adventure with Henry Miller’s former chef. Visit Baross’ website www.barossmedia.com  for more information.

Excerpt from: José Builds a Woman, by Jan Baross (Ooliganpress, 2006)

In the shade of the purple jacaranda in the jungle by the sea, my son José builds a woman.

José makes adobe bricks in the hot morning sun with red clay from the River Rojo and straw from our fields. He rolls his hands over the wet earth. The bricks form to the shapes he will need. Rounded for the buttocks, curved for the breasts, sturdy for the flat toes.

While the bricks dry in the sun, José clears a knoll of pepper trees and builds tall scaffolding from the branches. In the center of the scaffolding, he lays dry adobe bricks, as deep and wide as five beds. On top of the base, José builds the woman’s feet. Her ankles are strong and slender, her shins straight, her thighs thick with being a woman, her mound gently curved. Her torso, small breasts, and strong neck rise gradually toward the top of the canopied trees. Creamy, wet clay between the bricks weds them like the layers of a cake.

José pauses to inhale the female landscape of the jungle, the hard-perfumed blossoms of orchids, the soft scent of tendriled trees and the rich tunnels of moist undergrowth.

He inhales all this and breathes it into the woman he is building.

As the woman reaches a great height, José grows until he reaches a great height as well. He no longer needs the scaffolding.

I look up at José’s wide back.

“My son, your brown body grows as the woman grows.”

José pours a gruel of wet clay over her body and polishes her skin until it looks as smooth as the sweat on his cheeks.

“My son, the woman is as high as one home on top of another, yet her body is headless.”

José strides to the bank of the Río Rojo, kneels, and scoops clay into the shape of a head. He molds the deep inset of the woman’s eyes, the slight droop of sleepy lids set close to a strong nose. His strong arms knot and unknot in light and shadow until he completes the woman’s face.

José picks up the woman’s head and carries it to her body in the jungle clearing. He is the height of his creation.

He places the woman’s head on her neck. She opens her eyes, though her feet do not move from the foundation. Her wide face above the treetops startles two cormorants in flight. José raises his mouth to kiss her. 

“My son, you have given the woman my face.” 

José bends over me and casts his giant dark shadow over my body. There is no escape from the consuming fire of his eyes. His fingers, red and cracked with crimson mud, reach for me.

Chapter One

I am Tortugina. They call me little turtle because I am snappish. My mouth has an overbite. Some say I look predatory, but I am good in bed.

I was born in a two-story house by the sea, in the village of El Pulpo, sixteen years before I gave birth to José. The village is called El Pulpo because octopus is the only thing we have to sell in abundance.

All houses in El Pulpo are white, built by the rule of one because one color is good enough for everyone. White homes built with stones from the quarry, white slate roofs, white lye walls of the church and white dust in the breeze from shells shattered by the sea. Our white village, high on a cliff, looks like a many-tiered wedding cake with a hundred black doors. To outsiders it may seem edible, but to me, it is stale as old bread.

On the night I was born, Mamá said a white dog howled in the doorway all night and a shattering storm brought hail the size of coconuts that cracked the church bell. When the hail was directly over our house, an albino bird dropped bloody from the sky onto the roof and Mamá grunted like a pig.

I slid out in a rush of liquid, small and pale like an octopus pulled from a dark cave. My bones long to return to the safety of fluids. 


“Ayee, another girl!” Papá said, holding my streaked legs apart. “I am going to Ignacio’s Tavern to curse in silence.”

My two sisters wept with Mamá. I was the last child she could have. No son to bear the burden of Papá’s store. But I did not cry.

It was my destiny to make my family weep for not wanting me as I was.

Most of the time I do not live in my white village. I live in my dreams, the only place where there is color. Not smooth legs of rich red topsoil, or yellow cracks of the arroyo, or tilled furrows of dark curled mud. No, my dreams are the colors of the sea, an escape into the weightless veins of manganese, stretches of purple through muscular green currents. A thin membrane separates the sea and the pulsing of my dream to be an octopus diver.

With my head dreaming on a white brocade pillow, the nightly enchantment begins. A plunge into the warm, green sea with Gabito. He is the most beautiful octopus diver in all of El Pulpo. We dive side by side past rocks packed in foam, from clear azure to dim greens, deeper and deeper, to ancient underwater caves. In my hands I hold a net. 

“Show me,” I whisper into Gabito’s perfect ear.

Gabito reaches into a hole, and because this is a dream, the octopus rush into our nets. 

“You see, Gabito,” I say. “Nothing is a struggle when we hunt together.”

Gabito pushes my shoulders back into the white sand. It splits with the weight of my spine and rises in granular puffs on the soft current. My body is trapped between his strong brown legs. He slides his hands inside my nightgown. 


“I want nothing more than you,” says Gabito.

In celebration, my flannelled hips rise off the sand toward the hard muscles inside Gabito’s goodluck yellow swim shorts. 

Gabito kisses me. Our lips release two long strands of silver bubbles that become one.

“Little turtle.” Mamá’s voice is the foghorn of my dreams. “Arise morning glory.”

I am caught in the undertow of her voice. 

Gabito slips sadly away, riding a dark current to the deeper safety of the sea. Mamá pulls back the quilt. A quick movement like a bird’s dry wing. The chilled air shrivels my nipples.

“Mamá,” I moan.

“Hush before you wake your sisters,” whispers Mamá.

She wraps her fat arms around me. Mamá’s blue robe has the sour smell of sleep. She slips her cold hand under my nightgown and pulls off my underwear. She holds it up to the crack of light at the door.

“No blood yet, Tortugina,” says Mamá. “If you delay being a woman this long, you are bound to have bad dreams.”

She pats my cheek too hard. I snap my overbite at her wrist. Mamá shuffles toward the bedroom door in her crushed slippers.

“Hurry, hurry, little turtle,” she says.

Mamá’s world turns too fast for 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. Local authors books are for sale at the Biblioteca gift shop, La Tienda, Insurgentes 25. Look for books by local authors in a special section at the Biblioteca. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com. 











Stories to start and end the day

Storytelling
Anne Montange
Sat, Mar 10, 11am
“Stories to be all ears” (for kids in Spanish)
Librería La Deriva
Fábrica la Aurora


Sat, Mar 10, 8pm
“Stories of Women of Dream” (for adults in Spanish and French)
El Viejo Topo Café–Teatro
Stirling Dickinson 28, Local 7
Plaza Pueblito
154 8701
100 pesos

From delving into Anne Montange’s past, it is not hard to imagine how she became a storyteller. Montange had a grandmother who was an artist; a father who was a storyteller; and she has traveled to Bulgaria, India and lived in Mexico working as a professional musician.

These experiences led her to look further into differences among cultures and—blessed with the art of language—she has been relating these contrasts to the public through the telling of myths, legends and stories which illustrate the uniqueness of an individual culture while highlighting the universal.


On stage, accompanied by a salterio or a harp, Montange relates these myths and legends which have transcended centuries and continents. Montange adds the magic of music to her words: a few notes are enough to sustain the emotion, to emphazise the action, and to create an atmosphere no one can resist—from the youngest to the oldest listeners, all the audience is transported by the magical and poetic worlds.

“The stories,” says Montange, “have no frontiers; their message is universal. Those from Japan, from Europe, from Mexico, Oceania or Africa, present many similarities. They differ, of course, by the geography, the context, the time; but all have the same goal: to transmit and to share the human experience.” As a reflection of the human psyche, all the stories have unsuspected pedagogic virtues, teaching us how to face and conquer challenges and come to know ourselves.

With this spirit, Anne Montange has created a series of stories (published in a collection of books and CDs) based on the history of several musical instruments on exhibit at the Musée de la Musique in Paris. Accompanying Montange are musicians on these same instruments, giving additional richness to her words.

Directly from Paris, visiting San Miguel only for a couple of days, Anne Montange is presented by El Viejo Topo in co-production with La Deriva—the new bookstore at Fábrica la Aurora—and gives two different shows. At La Deriva (in Spanish) for children at 11am, “Stories to be all ears” which includes stories such as “The King Frog,” “The Coin of Gold” and “Kalimambo and the Lion” among others. That evening she presents “Stories of Women of Dream” at El Viejo Topo (in Spanish and in French), for adults at 8pm. These are traditional stories, which oscillate between wisdom and madness with the inaccessible woman as the common theme.