San Miguel writers: Diverse and notorious
By Lou Christine

San Miguel has attracted artists since the mid-thirties. Painters and photographers praise the quality of the area’s high-desert light. Jewelers, especially those working in silver, have easy access to raw material. San Miguel’s sixteenth-century European architecture has, undoubtedly, inspired them all. 

San Miguel is also a writers’ town, although their presence here has often been less apparent than that of the visual artist. When it comes to showing off work, visual artists have an advantage over authors. If your neighbors are painters, they can just lean out their windows, show you their latest works and ask, “Whatcha think?” A novelist might have to ask if their neighbor can spare a mere 17 hours.

So here’s a rundown of what makes San Miguel a writers’ town. 

Icons of the Beat Generation hung their berets here in the fifties and sixties. Jack Kerouac never mentions San Miguel by name in On the Road, but this is the Mexican town he was referring to in his classic. Emulating Kerouac from time to time were novelist Ken Kesey and Merry Prankster bus-driver Neal Cassady, poet-guru Allen Ginsberg, junkie philosopher William S. Burroughs and gonzo-journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Old timers will tell you the lot used to raise hell in the original Cucaracha when the bar was located where Banamex stands today, under the portals, on one corner of San Miguel’s Jardín. 

Color in Neal Cassady as part of the literary lore attached to San Miguel. He wasn’t a writer, even though he typed an autobiography, but Cassady was the inspiration behind the “boss of beat” Jack Kerouac’s “Dean Moriarty,” and appeared in a number of Kerouac’s novels as the inspiration for outrageous rogues. 

In real life, Cassady became, to some degree, Kerouac’s mentor. He urged Kerouac to shed structure and convention in his writing, and to not cop out. Cassady died in San Miguel; it was not a death of distinction. This 41-year-old burn-out died in a drunken stupor on the railroad tracks at the edge of town. Over time, Cassady has been elevated to cult-hero status, mostly through inclusion in the works of the writers he hung out with. Some of this rascal’s shenanigans were chronicled in Wayne Greenhaw’s memoir My Heart is in the Earth. More about Greenhaw’s connection to San Miguel later.

Vance Packard first burst upon the scene in 1957. San Miguel was his base for over 20 years. He is most known for the bestselling The Hidden Persuaders, a nonfiction groundbreaker that revealed psychological manipulations and sneaky subterfuges whipped up by advertisers to hoodwink consumers. It sold over a million copies, mighty gaudy numbers considering the time and the book’s subject matter. Packard was known for his witty writing and his tongue-in-cheek slant on pop sociology. He was admired by his peers for being innovative with his homespun perspectives on human nature. 

Novelist Clifford Irving made San Miguel his base for a number of years on more than a few occasions. Unfortunately, Irving is often remembered for his fake biography about reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. He claimed he’d interviewed Hughes to get the story. But unfortunately for Irving, Hughes wasn’t quite as reclusive as Irving had thought, and Hughes issued a denunciation of the work from his Las Vegas penthouse. In 1972, Irving was convicted of fraud, sentenced to prison and compelled to reimburse his publisher $765,000 for the gone-bad scheme. After paying his debt to society, Irving, a fine writer and thought of by most (including myself) as an overall nice guy, wrote a number of successful novels here.

Gary Jennings wrote portions of his bestseller Aztec in San Miguel. Many wrongly thought Jennings was just a wannabe writer. Late nights, after a number of tastes in local cantinas, Jennings sometimes slurred that in the light of day he was researching and composing a historical piece about Mexico. Some people scoffed. 

Today, his novel is regarded by some historians as one of the most significant ever written in English about Mexico. Historians and literary critics have praised Jennings’ research and attention to detail. His curious nature prompted him to learn and then interpret ancient drawings, and he taught himself to read Nahuatl. He’s lauded for having an authentic written voice whose portrayals of violence and sex are graphically vivid. The author’s bias sided with accusations of indigenous injustice and made for solid argument. Jennings spent 12 years living in Mexico and went on to write other popular novels about the Aztec peoples in the time following the Conquest.

Short-story teller and novelist Hal Bennet lived and wrote here until close to the time of his death just before the beginning of the twenty-first century. He voiced the black man’s perspective. At first Bennet penned poignant stories about rural life in the segregated American South. 

Later he wrote “mean-street” brays. Lord of Dark Places, written in 1970, was Bennet’s most acclaimed novel. It is perverse yet brutally honest, illuminating the black stereotype, and drenched with “anything-goes” sexual encounters, as well as hisses of “shame on you, Whitey.” It revealed the seedier side of life in New York City’s ghettos during the fifties. A cult following is currently resurrecting Bennet’s writings. During his lifetime, Bennet wasn’t shy about claiming that he rubbed more than elbows with Truman Capote.

Acclaimed screenwriter Bill Wittliff can be spotted from time to time futzing with his old box camera up in the Jardín, taking photos of his favorite landmark, our Parroquia, the pink gothic-inspired church that dominates the town. Wittliff adapted Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove for a television miniseries and wrote the screenplays for Barbarosa, Legends of the Fall, Black Stallion and The Perfect Storm. His latest screenplay is A Night in Mexico, now in production.

In the recent past, writer Joy Nicholson made San Miguel her home. Nicholson hit pay dirt with her first novel, The Tribes of Palos Verde, a female surfing saga set in California, which was also about growing up in a dysfunctional family. Nicholson optioned the novel to a movie studio. Last I heard, she was somewhere around Cancun wrapping up her second novel, The Road to Esmeralda. When I interviewed Nicholson about her initial success, she confessed she wasn’t that enthused about writing, but was thinking of becoming a veterinarian.

Australian-born award-winning sports journalist George McCann graced the pages of Atencion, up to the time of his death, with his personal slant on the sports world, along with other tidbits about notable people he’d interviewed over his career.

San Miguel continues to lure writers. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet for Heart’s Needle,1960, W.D. Snodgrass makes San Miguel home half the year. 

Nonfiction bestselling author Joseph Persico spends part of his winter in San Miguel. The acclaimed writer has published an impressive line-up of biographies: My Enemy, My Brother; Men and Days of Gettysburg; Piercing the Reich; A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller; Murrow: An American Original; Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial; Roosevelt's Secret War and 11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour: Armistice Day, 1918. Persico wrote an “as told to” treatment of the autobiography of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, meaning that Powell did the talking and Persico did the writing.

Novelist, journalist and playwright Wayne Greenhaw, a one-time Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, is another part-time sanmiugelense. Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, said that Greenhaw is one of the South’s finest living narrative fiction writers. Greenhaw’s nonfiction books have gained attention with in-depth works such as Montgomery: The River City, an unflattering exposé undressing George Wallace, former segregationist governor of Alabama. Greenhaw followed up with an eye-opening, literary body-shot in his The Making of a Hero, the saga of Lt. William Calley who was held responsible for the massacre at Mai Lai during the Vietnam War. 

In the late fifties, right after high school graduation, Greenhaw took a train from Alabama to San Miguel, traveling alone. Greenhaw wanted to be a travel writer and attended Instituto Allende, taking his initial instruction from wordsmith Ashmead Scott.

German-born, Swiss-Turk Soledad Santiago, who immigrated to the US at age 12, spent considerable time in San Miguel. The activist/writer’s prose zeroed in on everyday life in American society, first with Puerto Rico, and then with New York City’s Hispanic community. Santiago’s heart-wrenching work, Streets on Fire, mirrored much of her own life and family. Her novel was acclaimed as a cross-over exposé well worth reading.

Tony Cohan has highlighted San Miguel in his bestselling memoir, On Mexican Time, a thoughtfully written depiction shimmering with descriptions, which offers an inside look at San Miguel de Allende, sauced up with servings of Mexican culture. These days Cohan resides in Guanajuato, a one-and-a-half-hour drive to the north, yet often adds muscle to the San Miguel writing community.

Beverly Donofrio is a townie and the author of Riding in Cars With Boys. The title alone may have said it all, yet Donofrio’s memoir about growing up Italian-American, and early motherhood and marriage was sassy enough to have Donofrio’s story made into a film starring Drew Barrymore.

Canadian-based film writer Karl Schiffman hangs out here. His film credits include Riddler’s Moon, Dead End, Back in Action and the soon-to-be-released sci-fi 2Human. His latest script, The Murderer Down the Road, was read aloud by some of San Miguel’s actors here in the winter of 2006.

San Miguel has scores of other good writers, and there are too many to mention, plus I wouldn’t want to leave anyone out, since I still have to drink in this here town. Some San Miguel writers are overtly visible while others choose to remain obscure. Who knows? Maybe a soon-to-be bestseller is being pumped out this very minute behind the walls of a San Miguel casa.

One downside: living and writing in San Miguel has become too pricey for many impoverished writers. When I first arrived, a blast of reposado tequila ran 15 pesos, now it’s up to 50 and more. The time has passed when an upstart writer can eke out an existence and create a masterpiece on a couple of hundred bucks a month.

Yet there is a solid venue here for writers to strut their stuff. The Authors’ Sala provides workshops and readings for the literary-inclined of San Miguel. Writers continue to arrive in San Miguel. They formulate their thoughts, chronicle events and develop plots in stories that—who knows, after all—just might live forever, all composed here within the boundaries of our fine town.

Lou Christine is a local writer and long-time contributor to Atención.

But can they cook? Opening night for Solamente En San Miguel

San Miguel Authors' Sala
Publication party for
Solamente en San Miguel
Fri, Oct 26, 7–9:30pm
Posada de San Francisco
Corner of Hidalgo & San Francisco streets
50 pesos, includes wine reception

Lou Christine’s article, “San Miguel Writers: Diverse and Notorious,” is the foreword to Solamente En San Miguel, the anthology of writings about San Miguel de Allende, to be released Friday. The publication party will include tastings of authors’ favorite homemade botanas, a wine bar and readings from the new anthology.

Solamente En San Miguel, published by Windstorm Creative Press, will be available in the US and Canada through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, as well as other literary outlets. The event here in San Miguel will be the first time the books are offered for sale, and many of its authors will be available for signing. 

Solamente En San Miguel contains stories and poetry that concern some aspect of San Miguel de Allende written by well-known writers such as Lucina Kathman, Wayne Greenhaw, Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin, Eva Hunter, Janet Sternberg, Alice Denham, and Victor Sahuatoba. Bilingual selections and several new voices are included in the 218-page book.

There’s no question these writers can write. But can they cook? Come taste their botana offerings, drink some wine and help celebrate San Miguel de Allende’s first anthology of writing about our town.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

What we’re reading

This book is dedicated to people whose names are, for the most part, unknown to me. They are men and women across the country who love literature and give it their lives; who respect literature’s capacity to mean, who perhaps teach, who perhaps write fiction or criticism or poetry, and who above all read and reread the world’s good books. These are people who, if you told them the world would end in ten minutes, would try to decide—quickly—what to read.

—From Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard

“Book Fever” asked people in San Miguel what new twenty-first-century novel they’ve read recently. Here were their responses.

Joan DiPiero: Saturday by Ian McEwan, 2005, limits its time frame to a single day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in this beautifully worded novel. The events of everyday life collide with the realities of today’s world.

Excerpt: “On a recent Sunday evening Theo came up with an aphorism—the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain, he said—when we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in—you know, a girl I just met, or this song we are going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto—think small.”

Cynthia Simmons: Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan’s 2005 novel based on a real incident, is a mystery with strong political overtones. Eleven Americans, touring Burma during Christmas vacation, disappear when they leave their Myanmar resort for a Christmas morning tour. This novel is an interesting departure from her earlier books. The book is narrated from the grave—the storytelling Bibi Chin, a San Francisco art dealer who organized the trip for some of her closest friends, was brutally murdered a few days before the tour began and shadows their travels from the spirit world. With a satiric tone, Tan explores culture clashes, religion, oppression and media spin.

Excerpt: “Bennie was understandably concerned about an early departure. If they left early, he would be the one scrambling to patch in a new itinerary. A day in the border town of Ruili and then three extra days in Burma—what would they do? But he said nothing in casting his nay, not wishing to come across as inadequate. He should have realized that the democratic process has no place on travel tours. Once you are a tour leader, absolute rule is the only way to go.”

Carol Lopes: The Namesake by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003, is the story of the Ganguli family, new arrivals to the United States from Calcutta, trying their best to become good Americans even though they long for their home. They name their firstborn Gogol, the theme of the story, and the name haunts Gogol through his own winding path of divided loyalties, comic detours and wrenching love affairs. 

Opening lines: “On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chilli pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones.”

Suzanne Smith: In The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford, 2006, Frank Bascombe grows up. Ford, in the third book of his trilogy (along with The Sportswriter and Independence Day), offers readers a mature Frank Bascombe trying to make sense of his life, which is peopled with quirky characters and surprising twists. Ford writes deftly with humor and insight into the psyche of the aging American male.

From the first paragraph: “Toms River, across the Barnegat Bay, teems out ahead of me in the blustery winds and under the high autumnal sun of an American Thanksgiving Tuesday. From the bridge over from Sea-Clift, sunlight diamonds the water below the girdering grid…I take a backward look to see if the New Jersey’s Best Kept Secret sign has survived the tourist season—now over.

Next week, “Book Fever” recommends five more twenty-first-century novels. Next month: Nonfiction. If you’re reading something good in this category, please email me at marciabookfever@hotmail.com with a few lines about the book and a short quote from it, usually the first paragraph unless you find something more intriguing you want to use. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.