Bringing readers and writers together
By Kimberly Kinser May 2, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel Authors’ Sala
Works in Progress readings
Fri, May 9, 5–7pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2
50 pesos

On May 9, readers and writers have a fantastic opportunity to grow as a community. The Authors’ Sala is presenting a “Works in Progress” night.

Local writers will read from a screenplay (Linda Wolcott Moore), short stories (Al Tirado), young adult literature (Mary Heslin), a novel (William Henderson) and memoirs (Judith Jenya and Cynthia Huntington). The brief interviews below will help introduce their work and themselves. Everyone is welcome to the readings, which includes a wine reception. 

Kimberly Kinser: Where did you get the idea for the piece from which you will be reading?

Linda Wolcott Moore: The screenplay is biographical. My mother, Marion Post Wolcott, a beautiful woman of 28, traveled alone through rural America 1938-42 to photograph the Depression for the Farm Security Administration. The written biographies about her life seemed incomplete, sometimes lackluster, even inaccurate. Actors and screenwriters had inquired about the possibilities of making a film.

Talking with them about their visions and issues left me feeling that they didn’t really know my mother, her personality, her relationships, her passion, disappointments, frustrations, moments of joy and fulfillment. I had been her closest confidante and I have her personal letters filled with action, emotion and highly visual scenes. My parents have passed away; it’s okay to tell their story.

Al Tirado: The idea for my short stories comes from listening to older people who seem to me to speak wisdom and hold authority over many subjects. Age can bring wisdom and understanding and sometimes it gets a little crazy, or completely crazy, making the stories even more interesting.

Mary Heslin: I met a woman in a photographer’s studio who was having a family portrait taken to celebrate her 25th wedding anniversary. Proudly the woman showed me a photograph of her son who had died four years prior. “He will be with us in the photo,” 

she smiled. “We are having this image age-progressed and he will be in the picture right between his sisters!” The incident caused me to ponder the nature of grief, denial and healing. From that experience my young adult novel, Snapshot, was born.

William Henderson: I spent a year in China, during which the SARS craziness erupted. Most foreigners fled China. I stayed and learned much about the Chinese and about myself. My journals and newsletters sent home became the basis for this book.

Judith Jenya: Leap Before You Look is memoir of my work with children during the wars in Bosnia. A documentary, Memories Do Not Burn, was made about the programs that I created. After it won awards in film festivals, I was approached by a Hollywood screenwriter and producer who were interested in creating a feature film. After months of crazy meetings where my story received various “treatments” from comedy to soap opera, I decided that I was best equipped to tell the story.

I had been writing and speaking publicly on the project and was often asked “what motivated you?” or “are you crazy?”. These types of questions motivated me to keep writing, examining my heart and soul for the answers. 

Cynthia Huntington: I lived in Turkey among Turks and had some incredible adventures: drawing blood from centenarian Turks in mountain villages for the Red Cross, moving unnoticed, disguised as a boy. The idea for this portion of the memoir comes from these experiences.

KK: What was the greatest lesson you learned from the protagonist (if fiction) or narrator (if memoir)?

LWM: The surprising endurance of a great love in spite of trials, disappointment and continuous change, as well as how to sustain a long-term marriage. I learned specifically the keys to a happy and sustainable relationship: the importance of lending and receiving support, understanding and compassion to one’s partner; of maintaining one’s own identity and financial independence; of growing together and sharing interests; of sexual glue. 

AT: I believe that some people get a clear meaning of life and death and may die peacefully and painlessly because of that understanding. That is the definition of a Happy Ending.

MH: My protagonist, a seventeen-year-old girl, taught me that it takes courage to grieve, that it is good to be gentle with oneself and that healing takes more courage still.

WH: I discovered that it is interesting to create characters “whole-cloth” and then follow them around for the length of the story. During that long process, they grow and develop and surprise you. Characters have said things to me that I think, “I can’t put that in my novel,” and I found myself in an argument with the character. Ultimately, I guess I learned to be less controlling. 

JJ: I learned two lessons: humility and that writing is craft. I have learned my limits, the need to set boundaries and to be open to the energetic flow of the process. As a storyteller and raconteur, I thought writing was simply putting my spoken word on paper. The craft is much more complicated than that, requiring constant attention and development. 

CH: I learned discernment. I believe in risk-taking but now I mix the yearnings of my heart with logic. If I don’t take risks, I feel that I am not living, but just existing. So I continue to take calculated risks, because every stage of life can be an adventure.

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

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

The Canadians

Reading was not one of my boyhood passions. Girls, or rather the absence of girls, drove me to it.

—Mordecai Richler

Because San Miguel de Allende has many Canadian residents and visitors, I decided to include a month of Canadian fiction writers. I couldn’t have named many authors from Canada. I’d read Robertson Davies; I’d read Fall on Your Knees. I knew Carol Shields, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler and Yann Martel. I asked around and thanks to Naomi Zerriffi and Anna Buchanan, I got more names. What a swell time I’ve had discovering other wonderful Canadians in the course of researching and reading for this month’s columns.

Fifth Business, Robertson Davies, 1970. This is the first novel in the Deptford Trilogy, a series of books that revolve around the death of Boyd Staunton. The protagonist is Dunstan Ramsey, a retired college professor who reviews his life in a long letter to the school’s headmaster.

First paragraphs: My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on the 27th of December, 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

I am able to date the occasion with complete certainty because that afternoon I had been sledding with my lifelong friend and enemy Percy Boyd Staunton, and we had quarreled, because his fine new Christmas sled would not go as fast as my old one. Snow was never heavy in our part of the world, but this Christmas it had been plentiful enough almost to cover the tallest spears of dried grass in the fields; in such snow his sled with its tall runners and foolish steering apparatus was clumsy and apt to stick, whereas my low-slung old affair would almost have slid on grass without snow.

Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald, 1996. This first novel chronicles the lives of four sisters in the Piper family who grow up on an island off the Nova Scotia coast. One of them, Frances, is a stunningly flawed human being but I found myself liking her all the same.

Excerpt: The darkest eyes he’d ever seen, wet with light. Coal-black curls escaping from two long braids. Summer skin the color of sand stroked by the tide. Slim in her green and navy Holy Angels pinafore. His right eye wept while his left eye rejoiced. His lips parted silently. . . .

She smiled and said, “I’m going to marry a dentist.”

She had an accent that she never did outgrow. A softening of consonants, a slightly liquid “r,” a tendency to clip not with the lips but with the throat itself. What she did for the English language was pure music.


“I’m not a dentist,” he said, then rushed pink to his ears.

She smiled. And looked at the loose piano teeth scattered at his feet.

The Englishman’s Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe, 1996. I couldn’t put this novel down. Harry Vincent, who writes titles for silent films, is hired in 1923 by the studio owner to find a cowboy, the title character, and get his story for the great American film which the owner is anxious to make. The chapters alternate between Harry’s search for Shorty McAdoo and Shorty’s story, which begins in 1873. This novel won Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The library has two more of his books and I plan to read them.

First paragraph: Even from such a distance Fine Man could smell their camp, the fried-pig stink of white men. He took up a pinch of dirt, placed it under his tongue, and made a prayer. Keep me close, Mother Earth, hide me, Mother Earth. It was light as day, the moon’s bright face a trader’s steel mirror, the grey leaves of the sage and wolf willow shining silver, as if coated with hoarfrost. Under a full moon, it was dangerous to steal horses—even from foolish white men.


Next week: Book Fever takes the pulse of Carol Shields. Do you have a favorite novel by a Canadian author you’d like to share with Atención readers? If so send a few lines and an excerpt to marciabookfever@hotmail.com. Happy reading.

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

Word Watch
By Bill Gallacher

tlapalería. (n.f) Odd that such an exotic-looking word (from the indigenous language Nahuatl) should mean something as mundane as hardware store. In English, there aren’t any words starting “tl,” but it is a surprisingly easy sound to make, and really no more difficult than “bl” or “pl.” Tla occurs mostly in historical names (for example, Tlaloc, the rain god, and Tlaxcala the state). 

If you are ever in Guadalajara, most likely you will pay a visit to the district of Tlaquepaque. It is pronounced TLAK-eh-PAK-eh, and once you start saying it, you can’t quite get it out of your head.

ultimar (vb) Not just to finish, but to finish off, or to kill. The word ultimado, an adjectival noun, is much loved by the lurid Mexico City press, where pictures of ultimados in their grisly death poses are staple daily fare.

yerno (n.m) A curious looking word meaning son-in-law that stands almost by itself in the family tree. With the exception of madre and padre, all other words for family relations change from masculine to feminine, simply by changing the 'o' ending to an 'a' ending. Primo, prima, hijo, hija etcetera. The female version of yerno, daughter-in-law, is rendered by nuera, another word that is hard to get down pat.