The story behind Garrison and Garrison Books
By Michael Austin September 5, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

After a day of adventures trying to accomplish the simplest of tasks with poor language skills, the linguistically challenged traveller often just wants to kick back before bedtime and enjoy a good read in a familiar language.

Being on the road for a few weeks or months can reduce a favorite book to a discard on the hotel recycle shelf. If you are lucky, a previous traveller has opted to recycle, too. If you are not so lucky, you tend to buy anything you can find in your only language and end up reading classifieds and obituaries. If you are in a country like Japan, buying a book in English can break your wallet, forcing you to eat noodles for a week to get back on budget.

So imagine my feeling of good fortune when on an exploratory walk about I ducked into one of San Miguel’s many courtyards and discovered Garrison & Garrison Books. It brought back memories of the Pacific Northwest where the winter wind, rain and grey skies get us coastliners ducking for cover in the form of our favourite haven, the book/coffee/pastry/internet cafe. G&G Books looked, smelled and tasted just like home. Why shouldn’t it? The proprietor/barrista is fellow Pacific Northwest coastliner Michelle Garrison, a teacher and multicultural education scholar from Seattle who started G&G Books in March of this year. “I was teaching in Querétaro and visiting San Miguel quite often. Being a reader, I looked for a used English bookstore here, but I couldn’t find one. That started the wheels turning.” 

Now if you look around, really look around, San Miguel is filled with people living their dreams (particularly, it seems, fellow Canadians trying to get out of the snow or winter rain), but most of us are retired, right? Not so with Garrison.

Two years ago, when her US teaching assignments finished for the summer, thoughts of Mexico and a bookstore floated free until a book, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, brought the two together and convinced her to move to Mexico and later open G&G Books. “I was always thinking to myself, ‘What am I doing and where am I when I feel most alive? If I were independently wealthy, what would I do?’ The answer was read books all day, in a country I love, with a coffee at hand. I packed up, moved to Mexico, and now I am doing it.” 

Starting a bookstore in a foreign country in the Amazon.com era, on more prayers than money, is not without its challenges, but Garrison has faced adversity before and is prepared for the task. A former fundraiser for the foster group home she grew up in, Garrison transcended her circumstances to earn a graduate degree and go on to give motivational talks for schools and charity organizations. Garrison has lived the message she delivers. If you really want something, you can have it. You just have to have the courage to take the first step. “When you recognise what makes you feel most alive and act on it, everything falls into place. Once I decided to move to Mexico, it took three days to pack, leave the US, and start a new life with my teenage son in San Miguel. Here I am, living my dream.” The bookstore name bears her pride in herself and her son. 

Since moving to Mexico, Garrison has settled down with a Mexican man she loves and is expecting her second child.

When not in the bookstore, she can be found volunteering and organizing work parties to benefit CASA, San Miguel’s nonprofit birthing center that provides very economical health services for women and where her own baby will be born before September. 

G&G Books is a five-minute walk if the Jardín gets too busy or you want to discover a typical, Pacific Northwest rainy day get-away. Feel free to pop in, put the little ones in the children’s corner, grab a coffee (free until noon) and browse. Plop down in the couch and plug in the laptop. If you need a quieter perch, follow the spiral staircase to the sky-lit loft, cozily furnished with couch, armchairs and tables (if your laptop prefers something firmer than a lap). If you don’t know what Oprah is reading lately, check out the “Oprah’s Picks” shelf. The Wi-Fi, like the coffee, is always on. 

G&G Books has a selection of new and used books, magazines, audio books, children’s books, tapes, DVDs and small gift items. Paintings by Cuban/Uruguayan artist Walter Cruz, from the “Pieces of Havana” exhibit, are on display and for sale. Lattes, cappuccinos and homemade pastries are available. The bookstore is open 10am–6pm daily except Tuesdays, and Sundays 11am–5pm.

Getting there: G&G Books is located inside the Sautto Hotel, beside Bellas Artes, on calle Hernández Marcías. Turn left in the hotel courtyard and G&G Books is down the portal on your left. It is only a two-block walk from the Jardín.

Michael Austin speaks three languages poorly, but compensates with above-average mime skills. Having lived on the west coast of Canada, from Vancouver all the way up to the tip of Alaska, he is an expert at finding ways to nurse a coffee for several hours while pretending to browse books, waiting for the rain to stop.

Tom Robbins shared his genius at San Miguel’s first Summer Literary Festival
By Susan Page

The aim of the San Miguel Authors’ Sala was more than achieved during their recent three-day Literary Festival featuring Tom Robbins and his editor, Alan Rinzler. “We formed five years ago to create a visible community for the readers and writers of San Miguel and to encourage the appreciation of great literature,” said co-founder Jody Feagan.

 By inviting the whole community to read one of Robbins’ novels well in advance of the festival, the Sala created a large new following for this virtuoso of language and allowed die-hard Robbins fans to find each other. “I looooove reading your work," commented Alice Sperling during the on-stage book club. "I love wallowing in your images and metaphors.”

During his much-anticipated and richly satisfying keynote address, Robbins took us into his life of words and metaphors. In his world, plot is a vessel for the expression of ideas and for sentences with cadence, imagery, and mellifluence.

In his standing-room-only workshop, “Teaching a Sentence to Sing,” he told us he carefully crafts every sentence, and writes only about two pages a day. For example, when a lesser writer might say, “It was still dark out,” Robbins writes, “ . . .no single photon of dawnlight had squirmed through the curtain threads.” 

Alan Rinzler’s warm and compelling keynote about the many celebrated authors he has worked with over the years was filled with stories, like the three days he was holed up in a cheap hotel room working with the erratic Hunter Thompson, “who never liked me,” he told us, and the way fortune placed him in the path of Toni Morrison, early in her career.

This celebration of great writing (in a time when the gigabyte and sound byte culture threatens to supersede the pleasures of curling up with a great book) would not be possible without the generous support of the almost 100 members of the San Miguel Literary Society. The reception honoring them was a homerun of a different sort.

Hollywood set designer Kirk Wilson transformed a room at the Real de Minas into a softly lighted, sumptuous night club where Tony Cohan's welcoming remarks traced the history of great writers in San Miguel, Jennifer Grais and Derek Burrows provided exceptional music and storytelling, and Literary Society Supporting Members received a clever and valuable thank-you gift:

 a folk art plate commissioned by the Authors' Sala and created by Tonala artist Angel Solis. Each plate is painted with the traditional scene of a Mexican in a sombrero resting under a cactus—only this time, he is reading a book!

The Festival included a screening of the movie made from one of Robbins' early novels, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with a discussion led by Hollywood screenwriter Michael Grais and a lavish dinner for Literary Society Benefactors and Contributors in the elegant colonial home of Fran and Mike Schiavo, complete with games derived from the Festival’s featured novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.

But the three days reached, in the words of Robbins himself, “a crescendo of a different magnitude” when everyone gathered at the country home of Anado McLaughlin and Richard Schulz for a morning coffee.

The big surprise was that two of the main characters in Fierce Invalids made an unannounced guest appearance! Switters, confined to a wheelchair and with a secret passion for Broadway Musicals, was pushed in by a dear friend of his, Domino the nun! When Switters burst into song, the entire gathering, and Robbins himself, was thoroughly charmed. 

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Three modern American classics

I just finished three days of the literary festival, which featured famed author Tom Robbins and his editor, Alan Rinzler. If you missed it, you missed an extraordinary opportunity to enjoy marvelous keynote speeches and workshops by both men, as well as book discussions and other events. It’s one of the most memorable times I’ve experienced in the four years I’ve lived in San Miguel.

Today I want to share with readers three of my favorite books, all of them modern classics.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. This book was written before the three I discussed last week, but it feels more contemporary. I once heard this book described as 60,000 perfect words. I found about a dozen that could be eliminated, but then I’m picky. Still, that leaves 59,988 perfect words. I always read The Great Gatsby before I start writing a new story. I feel it inspires me to write better prose.

Excerpt: “I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”

“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.

“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

“There’s something funny about a man that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody.”

“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.

“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”

The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.

“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.

“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille skeptically: “it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively.

“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t have been that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credibility switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 1945. I knew I was going to love living in Evanston, Illinois, when I moved there from Miami. One of the first things I saw was a piece of graffiti on an overpass that said, “Holden Caulfield lives.” I was reluctant to read the book again.

I used to read it every five years but hadn’t looked at it in about ten and I worried it wouldn’t hold up. It does. It was even better than I remembered. Holden Caulfield is my favorite type of character in fiction: the unreliable narrator. He thinks he’s telling you one thing, but he’s really revealing something else about himself.

Excerpt: I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible. So when I told old Spencer I had to go to the gym to get my equipment and stuff, that was a sheer lie. I don’t even keep my @#%%* equipment in the gym.

Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. It was only for juniors and seniors. I was a junior. My roommate was a senior. It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking parlors all over the country that you could get members of your family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing after him.

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965. With this book, Capote claimed to invent a new literary category: the nonfiction novel. It was a classic from the day it was published. I re-read it before I wrote this week’s column and I was stunned at how remarkable it is.

The first 74 pages, which detail the last, achingly normal day of the four victims—16-year-old Nancy taught a young friend to make a cherry pie then rode her horse and watched television with her boyfriend, 15-year-old Kenyon and his father went to a 4-H Club meeting—juxtaposed with the inexorable drive across 400 miles of Kansas prairie of the two men who would kill them, is as riveting as anything I’ve read, even the third or fourth time around.

Excerpt: Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life—to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.

Next month: Latin America. Happy reading!

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.

The megalopolis next door: Mexico City
By Kimberly Kinser

Authors’ Sala Reading
David Lida
Fri, Sep 12, 5–7pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
50 pesos

The San Miguel Author’s Sala considers the 21st-century city in its Special Series featuring David Lida reading from his recently published book, First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century.

Lida moved to Mexico City over 15 years ago. In his book he shares the delights and the horrors of his new home in equal measure. What was missing on bookstore and library shelves was a “street-level panoramic view of Mexico City,” according to the author. When asked why First Stop in the New World is the only book written in English about contemporary Mexico City, he answered, “Principally because it is such a huge, complex and daunting place to write about. Sometimes I think I’m crazy for having taken it on.”

As we read the book we discover why Lida might just have been the perfect writer to take on the project. He grew up in New York City and, no stranger to the attitude of “watching your back,” he is at home in a vast urban environment. His book is filled with late-night cantina life and taxi rides that the casual tourist would certainly avoid. He found in Mexico City what most of us have found in our lives in Mexico: a rich and welcoming culture. He is just able to embrace much, much more of it.

This is no Frommers or even Lonely Planet guide to the largest city in the western hemisphere. This book is funny and frightening, with stories that we relate to—great wealth juxtaposed with relentless poverty, governmental wonders and unbelievable snafus, a justice system that is a mystery to someone raised in the US. The descriptions of the tianguis will be very familiar yet magnified. The work is crafted to mimic an urban chaos that resists linear narrative. Longer chapters on inequality, religion and sex are interspersed with vignettes about wrestling matches, a glue-sniffing street urchin and a 10-pesos-a-dance bar girl.

The general premise of the book is important: megacities are the cities of the twenty-first century. Many of the fastest growing cities today, Mumbai, Shanghai and Istanbul, fit Lida’s description of Mexico City: a “wild and chaotic hyper-metropolis that swells willy-nilly with monstrously expanding populations and virtually no urban planning.”

A megacity so important to Latin America and so close to the US needs to be understood. Join the Authors’ Sala on Friday and begin your studies.

Read all the news that’s fit to print at the Biblioteca Pública

As of Monday, September 8, daily editions of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will be available for sale in La Tienda and to read at Café Santa Ana. Beginning Sunday, September 21, the Sunday edition of The New York Times also will be available with a complimentary carrying bag. 

Be informed. Be at the Biblioteca!

Each week La Tienda at the Biblioteca Pública offers great specials and discounts. Drop by and discover what’s on sale!

For interesting and inspiring books come to La Tienda, inside the Biblioteca Pública, Mon-Fri, 10am-2pm, 3-6pm, Sun 10am-12pm, closed Sat. Tel: 152-0293.

Local author helps pueblo blossom
By Kate Holmes; Photos by Holly Wilmeth

A lavender affair
Sun, Sep 14, 10am–2pm
Petit Four
Mesones 99

From left, Aucencio Domenzain Martinez, who heads the farming part of the lavender co-op; Maria Fernanda Rebora, the project manager for St. Anthony’s Alliance, the US-based nonprofit that got the farm going; and author Jeannie Ralston, who is donating a percentage of her book sales to the lavender co-op.

Lavender is an herb that engages all the senses and soon you can see, smell and taste lavender. The lavender co-op from Rancho La Colorada will sell soaps, sachets, dried bouquets and lavender wands at Petit Four during a special Sunday event, and chef Paco Cardenas will offer scrumptious lavender muffins for sale. 

Through a new book by local author Jeannie Ralston, readers can get and give at the same time—get inspiration for their own lives and give inspiration to others. A percentage of each copy of The Unlikely Lavender Queen: A Memoir of Unexpected Blossoming, sold through Ralston’s website, will be donated to the co-op near Dolores Hidalgo. 

Ralston will implement the Seed Campaign on her website through the Amazon Affiliate program. For every book sold, Amazon returns four to eight percent (percentage increases with sales volume) to the Seed Campaign fund. Ralston hopes to raise US$60,000 for various causes in the coming year.

“My book is about making the most of the twists and turns life takes,” she says. “When I realized that the Amazon account was collecting money, I saw it as a great opportunity to reinforce the message of the book—by actually helping other people make the most of their lives.”

The lavender field in Rancho la Colorada, near Dolores Hidalgo. The pueblo is growing lavender and selling soaps, sachets and pillows in an effort to become self-sufficient.

The direct beneficiary of September’s proceeds will be St. Anthony’s Alliance, a US-based nonprofit that started and continues to oversee the lavender co-op, helping the pueblo to become self-sufficient growing lavender as a cash crop. Ralston has volunteered as an adviser to the lavender project for more than two years and feels especially close to the effort since lavender is being grown not just for its scent and beauty but also as a real lifeline for a whole community.

In June, Ralston did a book signing/benefit for the lavender co-op, and one-third of the sales price of each book was donated to the group. This current project will significantly expand the fundraising effort, since people across the US—not just in San Miguel—can donate to the cause by buying a book through her website, www.jeannieralston.com. 

“I’ve seen a lot of stories talking about these poor pueblos barely getting by because all the men have gone to the States to work,” she says. “I love this lavender project because it’s actually offering a solution to the problem. Women are making beautiful soaps, sachets, lavender wands and pillows, and the hope is that one day the men won’t need to leave for jobs in the States and families can stay together.” 

The Unlikely Lavender Queen follows Ralston as she reluctantly goes from a journalist in Manhattan to a lavender farmer in rural Texas. Eventually, Ralston turns the lavender farm into a thriving business and her small town into the Lavender Capital of Texas. She comes to embrace the change as the most rewarding adventure of her life, demonstrating how to “bloom where you’re planted.”

Good Morning America has recommended The Unlikely Lavender Queen as a great read, as have publications as diverse as the Dallas Morning News and Fortune Small Business magazine.