Celebs to keynote 2008 Writer’s Conference
By Eva Hunter February 22, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel Writers Conference
Fri–Sun, Feb 22–24
Hotel Real de Minas

Four celebrity writers will share keynote positions at the 2008 San Miguel Writer’s Conference. What follows are excerpts from interviews with each of them, previously published in Atención and elsewhere. 

Norm Foster

Often called the most prolific and most popular contemporary playwright in Canada, Norm Foster spent 25 years in radio arts before he “discovered” the theater by accident in 1980. His plays included Sinners, The Melville Boys and over 40 other plays. According to Foster, “A friend of mine was going to audition for a local community theater production of Harvey, and he asked me to go along.

I went, just for a lark, and I wound up getting the part of Elwood P. Dowd. The funny thing is, I had never even seen a play in my life before this.”

About the writing process, Foster says, “I write for about three or four hours each day. I mean, if you can turn out even one page per day, it doesn’t take long before you’ve got a 90-page script.

“Another important thing is, you have to know when to stop writing. Know when your play is finished. One of the curses of being a playwright is that you’re never ever completely satisfied with your finished product. There is always that one line which you think you could improve. And when you improve that line, you find another. You must know when to stop.” 

—from “Canada’s Top Playwright” by Wayne Greenhaw, Atención, 2008.


Sena Jeter Naslund

Recipient of the 2000 Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award, Sena Jeter Naslund is the author of numerous pieces of short fiction and the novels Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits and Sherlock in Love. Her most recent novel is Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette. Naslund talks about how she came to write Ahab’s Wife. “The idea came to me...as a vision and a voice.

I was driving a rented car in Boston...and then out of nowhere I saw a woman standing on a widow’s walk beside the sea, looking out to sea at night hoping to see her husband’s whaling ship coming home. But then I realized she knew he wasn’t coming home, not then and not ever. And she stopped looking out and started looking up into the starry sky and...[she] began a spiritual quest of ‘Why am I here? What’s my place in the universe?’ instead of waiting for her husband to come home and define her as a wife.

“Along with that mental image...I heard a voice say ‘Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.’ And that became the first sentence of the novel.”

She was, essentially, writing a novel that would be contrasted with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Yet that fact did not daunt her, she says. “I am an experienced writer and...have some sense whether an idea can work or not. I wasn’t sure it would work and I thought about it for nine months, but I didn’t feel intimidated by Melville’s accomplishment. I felt inspired by it.”

Naslund says she wants Ahab’s Wife to be remembered as “a twentieth-century response to a nineteenth-century novel, and [for] a novel that provided one of the early models for the strong...successful woman...”

—from “Author says Ahabs Wife is an Epic story” by Jamie Allen, CNN.com, 1999.


Rebecca Walker

The daughter of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, Rebecca Walker is also a critically-acclaimed bestselling writer. Her books include the memoirs To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism; Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self and Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence.

In addition, her essays, articles and reviews appear regularly in magazines. She has contributed to the “global conversation about identity, power and the evolution of the human family” for more than 15 years (Walker website).

Walker talks about writing memoirs: [Writing a memoir about growing up with Alice Walker] “...certainly wasn’t the best financial decision I’ve ever made! Because my mother is such a powerhouse in the industry (think Oprah and many, many others) and people take sides, the estrangement has had a serious impact on my career and the resources available to me.

“Access aside, as millions of people know, my mother is a tremendous human being, and I love and respect her deeply. The rub is that, like her, I’m a writer: my life is my material. It’s an issue all writers deal with: Is it possible to tell my story without hurting others? What happens to the world of letters if writers only write what is acceptable? What’s the point of writing if you can’t be truthful?

—from “An Interview with Rebecca Walker” by Gina Hyams, Atención, 2007.


Laura Fraser

Laura Fraser calls herself a “journalist, author, writing teacher, traveler, Italophile and long time San Franciscan.” The author of the bestselling travel memoirs An Italian Affair and Losing It, she has written for Gourmet, Vogue and Glamour.

She speaks about writing, “I knew I wanted to be a writer from about third grade, when I started writing stories. My mom had a friend who was a freelance writer, and as soon as I knew that was a profession you could have when you grew up—working for yourself, writing stories—that was what I wanted. After I lived in San Miguel de Allende for a summer when I was nine years old, I came home with lots of things to write about. It opened up a whole new world for me as a child.”

Fraser comments on a certain “impulsiveness” that characterizes her life, “I decided to buy a house on Calle Loreto 15 minutes after looking at it. It was tiny, a dump and I didn’t have the money. But I’m hoping it’s one of those instances where my impulsiveness was a case of good, quick judgment. Since I bought the house, I’ve found out I was hardly the only person with her eyes on it.”

—from “Laura Fraser to Keynote” by Eva Hunter, Atención, 2008.

Eva Hunter teaches writing classes throughout the year in San Miguel and may be reached at evamhunter@gmail.com.

Kathy and W.D. Snodgrass commit poetic mayhem
By Kathy Snodgrass

PEN Winter Lecture Series
The Murdered Muse: The Worst Poems in English
Kathy and W.D. Snodgrass
Tue, Feb 26, 6pm
Auditorio Miguel Malo
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

PEN Winter Lecture Series presents Kathy and W.D. Snodgrass in a dual reading, “The Murdered Muse: The Worst Poems in English.” They’ll read clunkers committed by such revered writers as Wordsworth, Dickinson, Tennyson and Whitman, but will devote much more time to wonderfully bad verse by Julia A.

Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, who scoured the newspapers for gruesome deaths, and William McGonagall, without a doubt the prince of bad poets. One editor wrote of McGonagall, a weaver turned poet: “Bridge disasters, mining accidents, shipwrecks, and eight-alarm conflagrations send his pen effortlessly racing; in his hands, grammar and syntax themselves sicken and die and add to the litter of corpses.”

Writers Kathy and W.D. Snodgrass live in hope that their work won’t end up in a “Son of Murdered Muse” compilation. Kathy has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Delaware, where she taught for a dozen years. She’s the author of The Fiction of Hortense Calisher, the first book-length study of the American fiction writer. Her translations of contemporary Mexican poets have appeared in literary magazines in the US, Europe, Japan and Mexico as well as on the website, Poetry Daily. For the past 10 years she has been a regular contributor of essay-reviews to The Georgia Review.

W.D. Snodgrass is the author of numerous collections of poetry, translations, literary criticism and memoirs. His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Heart’s Needle (1959), England’s Guinness Prize, grants from the Guggenheim, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Academy of American Poets’ translation award for his Selected Translations (1998) and two honorary doctorates. Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of Delaware, he is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, most recently for his 2006 collection, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems.

Proceeds from the Winter Lecture series fund San Miguel PEN activities and help support the international organization.

Kathy Snodgrass, writer and translator, is a long-time winter resident here, in company with her husband W.D. Snodgrass. They divide their time between upstate New York and San Miguel.

Authors’ Sala announces Buy the Book Day
By Susan Page

Authors’ Sala
Buy the Book Day
Fri, Feb 29, 8am–noon

This is a leap year! You can be a part of helping the anthology, Solamente en San Miguel, take a giant leap forward onto the world stage. There is drama in numbers.

It’s simple and powerful. All you have to do is click onto Amazon.com and buy one or more copies. Amazon.com ranks all their books according to the numbers sold and they update this ranking every hour. Most books remain in five- or six-digit numbers as their ranking. If we all join together and Buy the Book during the same four-hour period, we can make our anthology Amazon’s #1 book!

Then Amazon will start paying special attention to our book, pair us with other Mexico books, alert all their Mexico-book buyers about us and sell even more books for us.

If you have read Solamente en San Miguel, you know that our talented writers deserve our support. If you haven’t read it yet, you have a delicious treat in store. One reviewer said, “Solamente en San Miguel is a collection that fully creates, cobblestone by cobblestone, story by story, the atmosphere, the culture, the people, the reality of San Miguel as viewed by those who know and love it. The scents, sounds, colors, tastes—the full spectrum of San Miguel is presented with great care.”

The book makes a perfect gift for all your friends and family who either wonder what’s so special about San Miguel or wish they could be here themselves. Buy five copies and use them all for gifts.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Enjoying memoirs

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Here are three more wonderful and varied biographies and memoirs I’ve enjoyed recently. All the books mentioned are in the library.

I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! Bob Newhart, 2006. I love Bob Newhart. I think The Bob Newhart show was one of the funniest sitcoms on TV. I love that he’s from Chicago and is a Cub fan. And I loved this book.

Excerpt. . . [his wife] Ginnie and I once had a fight over something that never happened.

I woke up one morning and greeted her with a “Hi, sweetheart.”

She didn’t respond. Right away I could see that she was angry. I did what all men do—an instant replay of yesterday. Let’s see. I got up. I complimented her on breakfast. I picked up my clothes and put them in the hamper. I spent the day on the golf course with the guys, and so on. I couldn’t find any obvious failings.

“You’re mad. . . . What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I had a dream that we went to a party and you spent the entire party talking to this beautiful young lady.”

“Honey,” I protested. “That was a dream.”

“Yeah, but it’s just the kind of thing you would do.”



Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006. I almost passed up this memoir because a friend of mine said it was light and fluffy, something like Tuesdays with Morrie. For some reason I brought it home anyway, looked at the first page, put aside whatever else I was reading, and finished it late that night. It turns out my friend didn’t read the book; she saw an Oprah show with the author and deduced its light and fluffy nature by the questions the audience asked. I found this book about a woman’s trip to Italy, India and Bali fascinating, profound and funny.

Excerpt: Last summer my five-year-old niece had a little friend over to my sister’s house to play. I asked the child when her birthday was. She told me it was January 25.

“Uh-oh!” I said. “You’re an Aquarius! I’ve dated enough Aquarians to know that they are trouble.

Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I’m not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcée in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn’t eat dairy but smokes menthols, who’s always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergartners and says things like, Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I’ll let you wear my mood ring. . . .”

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron, 2006. The author talks about her neck, of course, with her usual wit and good humor. She also talks about wanted and unwanted hair, nails, skin, exercise. She discusses parenting and what to do when the children leave home. She talks about moving and, oh yeah, about the D word. I’m going to quote from the back cover because it made me laugh out loud and led me to read the book. She thinks the answer to feeling bad about our necks is to wear turtleneck sweaters. I can wear one for about ten minutes before I rip it off and put on something more comfortable.

Excerpt: (The back cover shows her with a turtleneck sweater pulled up over her nose.) Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old. It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks?

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