Personalities for publication
By Susan Page
October 24, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Writing Workshop
Personalities for Publication
Sat, Nov 1, 8, 15, 10am–1pm
Biblioteca Science Room (upstairs)
Insurgentes 25 
US$150

Last year, journalist and author Laura Fraser came down to San Miguel to write a profile of women who had started “second acts” in their careers for More, a New York-based magazine for women over 40. She found the town—and the characters who live here—so interesting she decided to stay.

Now, the Authors’ Sala and Atención are teaming up with Fraser to present “Personalities for Publication,” a workshop focused on writing about people in our community. The class features Atención Editor-in-Chief Suzanne Ludekens, who will provide inspiration and story ideas for writing profiles of local personalities. “There is no end to the amazing characters who live in San Miguel and have great stories to tell,” says Ludekens. “I have a million ideas for assignments.”

Fraser, bestselling author of the travel memoir An Italian Affair and feature writer for national magazines for 25 years, brings to the class the skills she has honed teaching at the University of California’s Graduate School of Journalism, San Francisco State University, Aspen Summer Words, Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism and our own San Miguel Writers’ Workshop. Her focus is on teaching journalistic skills and writing as a craft.

“It’s in vogue now to scribble memoirs and personal essays, but what’s really exciting is to get out of the house and do some journalism,” says Fraser. “You meet interesting people, dig into who they are and why they’re passionate about their work and then bring that story back to share with the rest of the community. It’s totally fun.”

Fraser says she meets a lot of people who tell her they’d like to write a book or article, and she has one piece of advice: “Sit down and write.” She says so many people write daily emails and text for their jobs that they lose sight of the fact that writing is a craft, one that requires practice and skill.

“You have to think about writing the way you think about playing the piano,” she says. “You can’t just sit down and decide to perform a concert. You need to play scales, do exercises and practice every day. Then pretty soon you can sit down at a party and play for all your friends.”

Fraser says her students often focus more on how to get stories published—query letters, pitches, contacting agents and editors—than on the writing itself. “I take the approach that if you write well, getting published will take care of itself,” she says. “I don’t teach people how to sell, I teach them how to write.” She adds that the best place to begin to publish your work is in a local paper. “Then you can work your way up to the New Yorker,” she says.

The classes focus on journalistic and story-telling skills. Students choose an assignment the first class, then after learning some interviewing and reporting techniques, they go out into the field to report on the subject of their profile. They’ll have a deadline of one week to write the first draft of their stories. Students “workshop” the profiles in class, rewrite them and get editing advice from Fraser and Ludekens. Fitting stories will be published in Atención.

Fraser recently profiled African dance teacher Lamine Thiam for Atención, which gave her the idea of doing a profiles class. “I’ve written for The New York Times, but I have to say it gave me a thrill to write something for the local paper,” she says. “If I’m living here, I want to learn about my community and contribute to it. For a local writer, what better way to do that than to get published in Atención?” Plus, she says, “It’s great to wake up on Friday and see your byline in print.”

The Authors’ Sala co-sponsors the workshop as part of its ongoing mission to help the San Miguel literary community flourish—bringing great writers into the community and supporting local writers in becoming great writers.

Personalities for Publication meets three Saturdays beginning November 1, in the Science Room on the Biblioteca’s second-floor terrace. The registration fee, payable by cash or check, benefits the Authors’ Sala and the Biblioteca. The minimum is five students for the class, with a maximum of 12. Students should bring photocopies of their story for all class members at the second meeting. For advance registration, and to ensure a spot, contact laura@laurafraser.com. 

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Mysteries move to Florida

Mysteries are a mind game. Lovers of the form are drawn to the puzzle. Who done it and why? Will good triumph over evil and how? In the pulse-pounding race to the solution, will the writer or the reader cross the finish line first?

In this particular sport, the most important muscles are the theoretical ones between the participants’ ears. Intellect is everything. A canny detective armed with gobs of gray matter will beat out the Uzi-wielding bad guy every time. —Judith Kelman



I love mysteries set in Florida. I lived there for many years. I’ve always said only two things on earth really scare me: radio talk shows and palmetto bugs. Funny that I moved to a place that has the latter, but one of the excerpts in this week’s column was great. Not that I would ever get close enough to a palmetto bug to step on it. I don’t even kill them these days.

Free Fall in Crimson, John D. MacDonald, 1981. MacDonald wrote a lot of books set in Florida and created Travis McGee, a man who lives on a houseboat in Ft. Lauderdale and often helps people in trouble. This is the 19th in the series and all have colors in their titles. The story begins when a young man named Ronald Esterland asks McGee to investigate the death of his father a year and a half earlier, a father who was already dying of cancer. The story moves to California and Iowa and involves motorcycle groups, making a movie and hot air balloons.

Excerpt: [When asked why he waited so long to look into the death, Ronald says]

“I can’t give a good answer to that. I’m sorry. I was in London, and I had a chance to exhibit in the Sloane Gallery. I had enough work on hand for about half the space they were ready to let me have. And it was a chance to work in some bigger pieces. I kept telling myself I didn’t care what happened to my father. He was a brutal man. He said brutal things. He tried to destroy the people around him. And somebody had the good judgment to beat him to death. I worked like hell, and I filled the good spaces in that gallery. . . . I had a feeling of pride and satisfaction, but at the same time I felt a kind of desolation. A kind of bleakness. I realized then that my father had been dead a year and I hadn’t really understood what it meant to me. A lot of my motivation had been to show him that I had value, that I was valued by the world, and so I was worthy of his love and his respect. He had never shown me love or respect. I know how deeply I had wanted those things. I had wanted to make him come around. And I cou
ldn’t. He was gone. He had somehow escaped, and I felt frustrated. When the show came down, I closed the studio and moved back to New York. Back home. I found that I could work, after a fashion, but not as well as I wanted to work. I kept thinking about my father and Romola and the ugly fact of the murder of a dying man. . . .”

A tightly structured, absorbing murder mystery. —New York Times Book Review Cinderella, Ed McBain, 1986. McBain created the gritty 87th Precinct mysteries. He also created a series involving Matthew Hope, an attorney who lives in “Calusa,” a town similar to Ft. Myers or Sarasota on Florida’s west coast. His mysteries all have fairy tales in the titles. Hope is drawn into a murder investigation when a private detective he hired is killed.

Excerpt: So Jenny went to the party and met a lot of interesting quite far-out people who were doing coke and stuff and decided to hang around Miami a while, see if she couldn’t drum up a little trade at the fancier hotels on the beach, maybe even find some old geezer she could play house with, because Miami seemed to have less phonies here than there were in L.A., where they came a thousand to the square inch. What came a thousand to the square inch down here were the cockroaches. She remembered them from when she used to be a kid living down here. They called them palmetto bugs down here. They were as big as your forefinger, some of them. You stepped on them, you jumped up and down on them, they crawled away all crippled and broken but they wouldn’t die unless you hit them with a sledgehammer. Also they knew how to fly. Staying with Molly the first few weeks she was in Miami, she almost wet her pants when one of them flew right in her face.

A good rootin’-tootin’ Elmore Leonard adventure with the usual suspects, the locker full of money, the wheelers, the dealers, the crazies, and the girl. Get Shorty gets Hollywood right where it lives and the joke is so funny, so infinitely tricky, so perfectly synchronized on so many levels that it’s apt to make you spin. —Chicago Tribune

Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard, 1990. Much of the action in this novel takes place in California but it begins in Miami with a loan shark named Chili Palmer. There are crosses and double crosses and lots of fun with the movie industry when Palmer gets an idea for a movie. Leonard at his best.

First paragraphs: When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of the off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio’s on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off. One his wife had given him for Christmas a year ago, before they moved down here.

Chili and Tommy were both from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, old buddies now in business together. Tommy Carlo was connected to a Brooklyn crew through his uncle, a guy named Momo, Tommy keeping his books and picking up betting slips till Momo sent him to Miami, with a hundred thousand to put on the street as loan money. Chili was connected through some people on his mother’s side, the Manzara brothers. He worked usually for Manzara Moving & Storage in Bensonhurst, finding high-volume customers for items such as cigarettes, TVs, VCRs, stepladders, dresses, frozen orange juice. . . . But he could never be a made guy himself because of tainted blood, some Sunset Park Puerto Rican on his father’s side, even though he was raised Italian. Chili didn’t care to be made anyway, get into all that ##$@%&** having to do with respect. It was bad enough having to treat these guys like they were your heroes, smile when they made some stupid remark they thought was funny. . . . His wife Debbie ate it up, until they were married a few years and she got pregnant. Then it was a different story. Debbie said with a child coming into their lives he had to get a regular job, quit associating with “those people” . . . . He told Debbie he’d be selling restaurant supplies to the big hotels like the Fontainebleau and she believed him—till they were down here less than a year and he had his jacket ripped off.

Next week Book Fever presents three more mysteries. Happy reading!