The first San Miguel “Big Read”
By Alice Sperling June 6, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Summer Literary Festival
Authors’ Sala
Tom Robbins, Alan Rinzler
Tue–Thu, Aug 19–21
Hotel Real de Minas
Ancha de San Antonio and Stirling Dickinson

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

—Tom Robbins

The San Miguel Authors’ Sala announces its first Summer Literary Festival featuring Tom Robbins and editor Alan Rinzler. The three-day event will feature a public address and on-stage interview with Robbins, and an on-stage book group and a tell-all presentation by Rinzler, editor to Robbins, Hunter Thompson, Toni Morrison and Shirley MacLaine.

The prodigious Robbins bibliography includes Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Skinny Legs and All (1990), Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), Villa Incognito (2003) and Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005), a collection of nonfiction essays, reviews and short stories.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is his seventh and longest novel, published in 2000. The summer’s Big Read opens: “Lima, Peru, October 1997 – The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken. It was so old it had lost every single one of its feathers, even its pinfeathers, and its bumpy, jaundiced skin was latticed by a network of rubbery blue veins.” 

Switters, the wheelchair-bound protagonist, treks across four continents, in and out of love and danger. He embraces a contradictory nature—a government-hating CIA agent, a gun-toting pacifist, and almost a Manichaean theologian with his view that light and dark exist together.

All are invited to read Fierce Invalids in advance. Books may be purchased at La Tienda in the Biblioteca.
A lecture by Robbins in conversation with Rinzler kicks off the conference Tuesday. On Wednesday, Robbins leads a workshop for up to 30 writers and Rinzler talks about weird and wonderful writers. These events will be augmented by discussion groups, other workshops, a screening of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues with a discussion led by Hollywood screenwriter Michael Grais and an On-stage Bookclub with the writer and editor. If you would like to be part of the on-stage group, send an email to susanvpage@mac.com stating why, in 100 words or less. 

A raffle offers two separate eight-person dinners with Tom and Alan at The Restaurant at Sollano 16 and the Casa de Sierra Nevada restaurant. 

Special events open to Literary Society members include a reception at 7:30pm following the opening lecture and dinners in private homes for contributors and benefactors. Visit the website sanmiguelworkshops.com/litsocietymem to join the Literary Society.

For more information or to sign up for all or part of the festival, visit sanmiguelauthors.com. Special discount package prices are available for the entire event.

Alice Sperling is the publicist for the Authors' Sala.

Literary Festival Schedule

Tuesday, August 19

6pm “Language Is Not the Frosting; It’s the Cake.” Lecture by Tom Robbins in conversation with Alan Rinzler with questions from the audience (Real de Minas, 250 pesos).

7:30pm Reception. Open to Literary Society members only. Entertainment. Gifts to members (Real de Minas, free to Literary Society members).

Wednesday, August 20

11am, 1pm & 3pm Small Book Groups meet to discuss Fierce Invalids (various locations, free).

1pm “The Craft of Composing Memorable Sentences.” Workshop by Tom Robbins for up to 30 writers (Real de Minas, 750 pesos).

3pm Topic to be determined. Workshop by Alan Rinzler (Real de Minas, 750 pesos).

6pm “Weird and Wonderful Writers I Have Published.” Entertaining talk byAlan Rinzler (Real de Minas, 250 pesos).

Thursday, August 21

10am Coffee at Casa de los Ranas (Anado and Richard’s, free, with free shuttle).

2pm & 4pm Movie: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Discussion led by screenwriter Michael Grais (Teatro Santa Ana, 50 pesos).

6pm On-stage Book Club with Tom Robbins and Alan Rinzler (Real de Minas, 250 pesos).


8pm Fierce Invalids dinner for Literary Society benefactors and contributors (private homes, free).

A magical place in Mexico
By Kimberly Kinser

Authors’ Sala
Slide show and reading
Sandy Baum
Friday, June 13, 5–7pm
Bellas Artes
Auditorio Miguel Malo 
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

A new author finding his or her way into the world of commercial publishing faces a huge challenge.

Not so for Sandy Baum. Next week, authors and readers of San Miguel will have an opportunity to learn just how he did it and see the photographs that turned the heads of Schiffer Publishing, currently considering Sandy’s third book, San Miguel Style: A Magical Place in Mexico with the Lifestyle to Match. 

Baum defines himself as a visual person who can frame memorable photographs of images that residents and visitors of San Miguel see every day. His visual nature is clear throughout his books San Miguel’s Mexican Interiors and San Miguel’s Mexican Exteriors. 

Personality traits and work experience meld in Baum’s life to accent his visual nature. With university training in architecture and many years working for different construction companies in the United States, he has the confidence to communicate and endear himself to those around him. This was necessary for the Interiors book and he gives much credit and thanks to all the people who opened their doors to his camera.

For those of us who have tried to photograph the interior of our own homes to share with friends and family, this courtyard photo, one of Baum’s favorites, illustrates his talent with a camera.

Baum is also a pilot and he brings a passion for the high view to his photographs. His portfolio is full of aerial shots of San Miguel. These shots give a unique view of this ciudad and also some history.

In this aerial photo of the Parroquia, we learn that the current façade is not the original. The square bases of the original towers can be seen at the back of the building.

There are many talented photographers in the world and especially in San Miguel. Getting published requires different skills. After Baum participated in an Authors’ Sala book proposal workshop, he pushed forward to find a publisher for his photography project. Boldness is necessary to enter the publishing world and he certainly was not shy in approaching more than one publisher. Rejections did not stop him from continuing his quest. Once he realized Schiffer was interested, he rolled with the setbacks and changes necessary to meet the needs of the publisher. After he signed a contract for Interiors, he followed the advice of Susan Page, founder of the Authors’ Sala, “Meet every deadline.” In the end, not one book, but two were contracted. 

There is more. Baum currently is pitching his third project in as many years. “I fell into the honeypot again,” he laughs. His spirit of adventure, confidence and a belief in his unique combination of skills and experiences has led to a successful publishing career in his four short years in San Miguel.

Kimberly Kinser is the creator of Pizarra Blanca Writers, an Amherst Artist and Writers workshop offered in San Miguel.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

History in letters

Let us pity those poor rich men who live barrenly in great bookless houses. —Henry Ward Beecher

I love few things more than history—baseball, living in Mexico and a guy named Jon—so this month has been a pleasure to read and write about. These are some of the best.

The Zimmermann Telegram, Barbara Tuchman, 1958. Later books made her famous but this one established her reputation as a historian. On January 17, 1917, during World War I, a British cryptographer decoded a telegram, one of many he would work on that day. This one seemed routine until he came across the numbers 67893 and realized it stood for Mexico. Later he found alliance and Japan. What did it mean? As good a read as the best fiction thriller, this is a page-turner.

Excerpt: Perhaps Zimmermann’s initial reluctance was due to his being an outsider, a self-made man in the aristocratic ranks of the Foreign Office. This very attribute predisposed every American, bred to the automatic assumption that to be self-made is simultaneously to be virtuous, in his favor. In Imperial Germany it merely had the effect, as so often happens to the self-made in a society of exaggerated class distinctions, of making Zimmermann more Hohenzollern than the Kaiser. Because he wanted to be “one of them” he was the more anxious to be orthodox, the more easily taken into camp by the ruling elite. They did not appoint Zimmermann because they felt any necessity of liberalizing the government by bringing in a “man of the people,” as the Americans imagined, but because they knew he was more amenable to the looming decision for full use of the U-boat than his predecessor.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, Simon Winchester, 2003. In August of 1883 a volcano exploded in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. A tsunami that followed killed over 36,000 people. The sound was the loudest reported historically. It was heard on Rodriguez Island—at 2,968 miles away, that’s as if someone in Philadelphia heard a sound made in San Francisco. The island itself exploded, leaving only about one-fourth the landmass that existed before. In this fascinating account, Winchester explains tectonics, subduction zones and other science (science again—I don’t like science) and introduces me to such luminaries in the field as Alfred Russel Wallace and J. Tuzo Wilson.

In 1927, Anak Krakatoa (“Child of Krakatoa”) emerged from the sea and the chapter on the emergence of plant and animal life on the new island and the re-emergence of them on the remains of the old island is as fascinating as the rest of the story.

Excerpt: To the outside world the eruption of 1883 may have spelled death and devastation. To the world of biology and botany, however, the subsequent energetic happenings on islands in the Sunda Strait represent nothing more nor less than a freeze-frame picture of the future of life itself—a demonstration of the utterly confident way that the world, however badly it has been wounded, picks itself up, continues to unfold its magic and its marvels, and sets itself back on its endless trail of evolutionary progress yet again. The crucible of life turns out to be the most difficult of vessels to break. Not even the world’s most dangerous volcano could do it truly irreparable damage. 

The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger, 1997. If you saw the movie, don’t think you’ve read the book. The fishing boat featured in the film appears mostly in the beginning of the book. The rest concerns the rescue of a sailboat on its way to Bermuda, followed by the rescue of the Coast Guard crew that rescued the sailboat. I sat on the edge of my seat in my Chicago kitchen finishing this book. You might also want to try Fire by the same author.

Excerpt: The mechanics of a hurricane are fundamentally the same as a cutoff low, but their origins differ: hurricanes brew in the lukewarm waters around the equator. When the sun hits the equator it hits it dead-on, a square-foot beam of light heating up exactly one square foot of water. The farther north or south you are, the lower the angle of the sun and the more water a square-foot of sunlight must heat up; as a result the water doesn’t heat up as much. The equatorial sea cooks all summer and evaporates huge amounts of water into the air. Evaporated water is unstable and contains energy in the same way that a boulder on top of a hill does—one small push unleashes a huge destructive force. Likewise, a drop in air temperature causes water vapor to precipitate out as rain and release its latent energy back into the atmosphere. The air above one square-foot of equatorial water contains enough latent energy to drive a car two miles. A single thunderstorm could supply four days’ worth of the electrical power n
eeded by the United States.

Next week: Book Fever takes the pulse of history writer Erik Larson.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública. She can be contacted at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.