January 25, 2008, The undeniable impact of High Cotton, By Caren Cross, Celebrity writers keynote conference, By Eva Hunter, Popular Mexican sayings, By Geoff Hargreaves, In between lands: The price of expatriation, By Gina Hyams

The undeniable impact of High Cotton
By Caren Cross January 25, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

PEN Lecture Series
Gerard Helfrich
Tues, Jan 29, 6pm
Bellas Artes
Hernandéz Macías 75
50 pesos

Gerard Helferich, who divides his time between San Miguel and Yazoo City, Mississippi, took a leap of faith five years ago. He wanted to write. He jumped off the cliff and left his 25-year career as an editor and publisher in New York where he worked for publishing houses, among them Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley.

Two years later Humboldt’s Cosmos (Viking, 2004) was published. That first book is a lush and engaging biographical adventure tale about the fascinating Alexander von Humboldt.

Now comes High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta.

Cotton has shaped American history in a way that no other crop can claim. It helped America stay independent, it caused slavery to take root deeply in the South and, because of the mechanization of the fields, it propelled the great migration of African-Americans to the northern cities. Even American music owes a huge debt to cotton, since the blues, the basis of nearly all our popular music, traces back to the field hollers of slaves and sharecroppers working the cotton fields.

But more than the chronicle of an ancient and essential crop, High Cotton is the story of the people who still risk everything to grow it. The colorful, real-life hero of High Cotton is Zack Killebrew, a small-time, present-day cotton grower who has lived and farmed in the Mississippi Delta all his life, as his parents and grandparents did before him. Zack’s story is a gritty, dirt-under-the-fingernails portrait, which the Wall Street Journal found “evocative” and Business Week called “a perceptive and unaffected look at an occupation that, however changed, is almost as ancient and venerated as human civilization.”

Most of us have only a vague idea of where cotton comes from and what’s necessary to coax it from the ground. This is the story told in High Cotton which, as the Times Literary Supplement wrote, “gives a vivid biography of cotton….with understated eloquence and a lyrical feel both for [t]his legendary crop and the processes by which it is eventually brought to mill.”

Following Zack Killebrew through a single year, from planting through harvest and beyond, we watch as he sows his cotton and struggles to protect it from insects, weeds, and weather. In the course of his tumultuous year, Zack teeters between the promise of a six-figure payoff and the threat of financial ruin. Then, as the harvest nears and the delicate fiber is at its most vulnerable, two hurricanes named Katrina and Rita devastate the Gulf Coast and steam toward the Mississippi Delta.

Bad weather has always been the biggest threat to cotton, but now, political factors threaten. Ultimately, High Cotton may prove to be an elegy to a vanishing and quintessentially American way of life. As Kirkus Reviews pointed out, “One year with a Mississippi cotton farmer reveals the harshness and fragility of life in the Delta…. [The book is] a portrait of a rugged man shaped and shoved by geography, weather, economics and race.”

Helferich’s talk is sponsored by the San Miguel chapter of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers. The contribution of 50 pesos goes to help writers around the world who are in trouble for what they have written. For more information: lucina.kathmann@gmail.com or 152 0614.

Caren Cross has been living in San Miguel for 10 years. She recently completed her first documentary film, Lost and Found in Mexico.

Celebrity writers keynote conference
By Eva Hunter

San Miguel Writer’s Conference
Feb 22–24
Hotel Real de Minas
www.sanmiguelworkshops.com/conference

This year’s San Miguel Writer’s Conference is so packed with talent it could almost pass itself off as a posh weekend at some trendy foundation’s “lectures in the arts” series. Four celebrity writers share the spotlight as keynote speakers, and the list of additional conference faculty supporting them is stunning. The keynote speakers include writers of memoirs, fiction, nonfiction and plays.

Rebecca Walker is the bestselling author of two well-reviewed memoirs: Black, White and Jewish and Baby Love. Walker, the daughter of author Alice Walker (The Color Purple), is a well-known lecturer, teacher and activist in her own right. Time magazine named her one of the 50 most influential future leaders of America.

Sena Jeter Naslund, author of the novels, Ahab’s Wife, Abundance and Four Spirits, currently is Writer-in-Residence at the University of Louisville and current Kentucky Poet Laureate. She also received the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award.

Laura Fraser wrote an exposé of the diet industry, Losing It, and a spicy memoir, An Italian Affair, which is part love story, part food reporting and part travel memoir. The memoir, which has been translated into five languages, was a New York Times bestseller. Fraser writes frequently for Gourmet, O the Oprah Magazine, More and The New York Times.

Norm Foster, author of more than 40 plays, including Melville Boys and The Love List, has been described as the “Neil Simon of Canada,” and the L.A. Daily News commented that his characters are “so believable that theatergoers see bits of themselves reflected on stage.”

Also part of this three-day conference are:

Wayne Greenhaw, who has published nearly 20 books, including The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People who Broke the Back of Jim Crow, and winner of the 2006 Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing;

C.M. Mayo, author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction;

Stephanie Bennett-Vogt, author of the award-winning book, Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are;

Susan Page, author of five bestselling books about relationships, including her latest release Why Talking is Not Enough; and

Tony Cohan, author of On Mexican Time and Mexican Days.

Opportunities to mingle with the writing cognescenti are numerous—a glittery Friday night cocktail party; professional manuscript reviews and coaching; readings from the anthology, Solamente en San Miguel; and practical tip-filled sessions with such well-known writers as Beverly Donofrio, Bill Pearlman, Gina Hyams, Albert Sgambati, Eva Hunter, Sarah Lovett and Dianna Hutts Aston.

The conference will be held February 22–24 at the Hotel Real de Minas. Check www.sanmiguelworkshops.com for more information. Now in its third year, the event features authors, agents, editors and publishers; an annual writing contest and a special review of one’s work for eight lucky writers; workshops and panel discussions.

Popular Mexican sayings
By Geoff Hargreaves

A regular glance at the popular wisdom of Mexico.

Lo que no ves no duele (What you don’t see doesn’t hurt). This is the Mexican version of “Ignorance is bliss.” Blissful ignorance often being viewed as a desirable alternative to witnessing ugly, sad realities, this saying enjoys many variants such as: Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente (literally, Eyes that don’t see, heart that doesn’t feel). In other words, what you don’t know doesn’t trouble you. It is also employed as a form of self-assurance to those who are up to no good, hoping that their victims will never know how they’ve been suckered.

Lo barato cuesta caro (literally, The cheap thing costs dear). This is a warning against false economies. Better to hire a plumber or electrician who charges a high rate and delivers the goods than a cheaper workman who leaves you with more costly problems than he solves. In the end you pay more for shoddy work or shoddy goods than you would by an expensive outlay in the first place.

Un bien con mal se paga (A good thing is paid back with a bad one). A piece of sour worldly wisdom tantamount to “No good deed goes unpunished.” Doing somebody a favor can leave him feeling indebted and resentful, so where you’d expect a favor in return, you get back only a nasty surprise. It is the nature of proverbs to overstate their case. They don’t allow for the nuances of experience. For them, it’s a case of “always” or “never.” So it’s up to the listener to judge when the saying applies and when it doesn’t.

De favor te abrazan y quieres que te aprieten (As a favor they hug you and you want them to squeeze you). Vanity is rarely satisfied. Often it is insatiable. A simple hug of affection is not enough for narcissists. They require extreme displays of admiration for their self-proclaimed virtues and can’t figure out why—so frequently, so disappointingly, so unjustly—it’s denied them.

Gina Hyams (www.ginahyams.com) teaches a travel writing intensive February 25–26 sponsored by San Miguel Writers’ Workshops. The following text is an excerpt of her essay, “Before and After Mexico,” originally published in Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad.

My husband Dave, toddler daughter Annalena and I spent the first of what would turn into four years in Mexico in Pátzcuaro. There we lived on a nameless cobblestone road in a little adobe house that had no telephone, no washing machine, no microwave and no television. The kitchen counter was a glorious, crazy quilt of Talavera tiles decorated with bananas and jalapeño peppers, and the bathroom walls were painted azul añil, a deep ultramarine blue believed to ward off evil spirits.

Wandering through Pátzcuaro’s outdoor market was a visual feast. Block after block was filled with the reddest tomatoes I’d ever seen, alongside pyramids of huge, ripe avocados, juicy cactus paddles, mangoes carved into flower shapes, baskets overflowing with dried chilies and pumpkin seeds, platters of chicken heads, candied sweet potatoes swarming with bees and more cow parts than I’d ever imagined. Enormous bouquets of tuberoses could be had for a song. I’d dare myself to go back by the butcher stalls to look at the ghostly tripe, pig snouts on hooks and glistening entrails. My legs would nearly buckle, the sensual overload was so confounding.

We made friends with Lupita, who sold roasted chickens in the market. She always gave Annalena a little cajeta and advised Dave and me to make more babies. Mexicans rarely asked what we did for a living. They were more curious about the size of our family and, though ours was small, the fact that we were a family seemed to normalize us. Annalena, with her blueberry eyes and impeccable Spanish accent, became our goodwill ambassador. No matter how dusty-poor or remote the village, people made a fuss over her. ¡Qué linda! (How pretty!), they’d exclaim. She was preciosa (precious), una princesa (a princess), una muñeca viviente (a living doll). By the time she was three, Annalena would answer, “No soy una muñeca. Soy un mono. (I’m not a doll. I’m a monkey).”

The view from my writing desk was one-third twisting cobblestone roads and red-tiled rooftops and two-thirds sky. When I sat down to work on my novel, it seemed ludicrous to try and invent a plot when the surrealism of everyday life in Mexico felt so compelling. I found myself trying to describe the sky outside my window¾surging and cleaving clouds, thunder and lightning, cotton-candy sunsets and a profusion of shooting stars. The constant drama of that sky seemed a testament to celestial will, grace and fury, an explanation of why there are so many believers in this part of the world. Instead of poetry, I wrote letters home.

Sent via email, these monthly dispatches to friends and family took on a life of their own. My loved ones forwarded the letters to their loved ones, who in turn often asked to be added to my mailing list. What began as a list of thirty grew to nearly three hundred recipients. A fledgling writer couldn’t ask for a greater gift. Knowing that there was an audience eager to read my words helped me develop confidence and discipline.

Through the letters, I began to discover my voice and core literary themes (death, lies and room service). Eventually I found work as a guidebook correspondent and published three books about Mexican traditions and architecture.

We loved living in Mexico, but ultimately tired of being outsiders. The downside of a culture rooted in family clans is that friends aren’t as integral. Annalena’s classmates rarely invited her home to play because there they played with their cousins. We had genuinely warm, but stubbornly superficial relationships with our neighbors. While it was possible for us to feel gloriously swept away by the splendor of saint’s day celebrations, these holidays would never belong to us. And because most of the expatriates we met were either cantina-hopping college students or cocktail party-hopping retirees, we didn’t fit in with the foreigners either.

After four years away, it was time to engage again with our own tribe. We returned to California and Annalena learned about the wonders of drinking fountains and central heat. Our community welcomed us back with open arms, but I wasn’t sure we belonged in California anymore either. We struggled to reconcile the Mexican sky that now filled our hearts with the daily grind of a more or less upwardly mobile life. I found myself willfully spacing out, trying to slow down the pace, trying to hold onto the sense that time is simply time, not money. Perhaps we’d become permanent expatriates¾neither fish nor fowl, forever lost no matter our location. But this fluidity also meant that we were now like mermaids and centaurs¾magic creatures who always know there’s another way.

Gina Hyams has published seven books, including the bestselling travel-design titles, In a Mexican Garden and Mexicasa.