February 06, 2009, PEN Lecture Series, Bloom Where You’re Planted, The Unlikely Lavender Queen, By Lucina Kathmann, Biographies modern and historic, By Kimberly Kinser, Author Todd Gitlin at community book read, By Sara Fasy, Writers Aloud series begins at Biblioteca, By Bill Pearlman, Book-Signing Schedule

PEN Lecture Series
Bloom Where You’re Planted
Jeannie Ralston
Tues, Feb 10, 6pm
Auditorio Miguel Malo, Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

Jeannie Ralston advises, “Bloom Where You’re Planted,” as part of the San Miguel PEN winter lecture series. She spent her life as a journalist, writing about other people and their experiences and ideas. She never planned to write a book about herself, but then, she never planned to become a lavender farmer either.

Ralston’s book, The Unlikely Lavender Queen: A Memoir of Unexpected Blossoming, follows her transformation from a magazine journalist in Manhattan to a lavender farmer in rural Texas. She started working on the book in 2005, after what she suspected would be her last lavender season. It seemed an ideal time to reflect on the lavender business—how she got into it unexpectedly and how it had changed her and her worldview.

“I could see a real arc to the story and I thought that the ending was not what a lot of people would expect,” says Ralston, who has lived in San Miguel with her husband and two sons for three years. “Most people who pick up this book, I believe, will presume that it will end when I’m happily busy with my thriving lavender farm. But real life isn’t always like that. In the end, I’m pushed into a new direction once more.”

Ralston, who has been an adviser to a lavender farm started here by a pueblo near Dolores Hidalgo, says she wanted to write the book because she had seen quite a few movies—Baby Boom is one—and read several books, such as I Don’t Know How She Does It, that tie up all the loose ends by sending the heroine off to a life in the country, with the implication that their lives were blissful from there. “After my experience living in the country, having kids, running a lavender farm, I knew that this wasn’t necessarily true,” she says. “My book offers a different, more realistic—but ultimately happy—take on life in the country.”

The book also offers an accurate take on modern marriage, a union of two people with big careers and ambitions. Her husband, Robb Kendrick, is a well-known National Geographic photographer who has spent much of their married life traveling the world.

“Whenever I told my story to the visitors at our lavender farm, people seemed truly fascinated. Not only by the agricultural aspects, but by the major life changes, struggles and compromises I made to reach a place where I was happy and comfortable. What I think people were responding to was the idea that you can’t plan for happiness. You can think you know what you need to be fulfilled, but when life takes you down a completely different track, even if you’re far from where you thought you’d be professionally or personally, you can still find contentment.” This, Ralston says, is why she sums up the theme of her book and her talk at Bellas Artes as “Bloom Where You’re Planted.”

Ralston’s talk benefits the San Miguel Chapter of International PEN, the largest worldwide association of writers. The local chapter provides scholarships to high-risk and needy students and participates in many local and regional literary events, such as the annual Feria Internacional del Libro in Guadalajara, which is the world’s largest book fair in Spanish.

Copies of The Unlikely Lavender Queen will be available at US$24 or 325 pesos. One-fourth of sales go to The Lavender Project, the local lavender farm, and representatives will be on hand with lavender products to sell.

For more information or advance tickets, write lucina.kathmann@gmail.com or call Pat Hirschl at 154-9478.

Lucina Kathmann has lived in San Miguel for 31 years. She has been a member of San Miguel PEN since 1986.

Biographies modern and historic
By Kimberly Kinser

Authors' Sala Reading
John Virtue & Mamie Spiegel
Fri, Feb 6, 5–7pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
50 pesos

The Special Series presents two biographers with extraordinary stories. John Virtue has written several biographies of expatriate San Miguel residents, among them Canadian artist Fred Taylor (see Atención, Jan. 30, p. 29). Mamie Spiegel will read to us from her biography in process on the life of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17th-century poet and nun whose countenance is found on the 20-peso note.

Virtue is director of the International Media Center at Florida International University in Miami, as well as being an author of books dealing, in one way or another, with Mexico. Besides Fred Taylor: Brother in the Shadows, he has written the Model American Abroad, a biography of Stirling Dickinson; Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel; and South of the Color Barrier: How Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League Pushed Baseball Toward Racial Integration, which won the 2008 Robert Peterson award.

Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz

Mamie Spiegel was raised in a family of academics. Early on, she decided to deny her family programming and take the artist’s path. She picked up clay and molded herself into a ceramicist. After many years of success with her art, Spiegel decided it was time for a change. She went to Columbia University and completed a degree in anthropology. She found herself perfectly at home deep in the Columbia library stacks. After finishing her degree, she was ready to write.

Her first book, San Miguel and the War of Independence, was Spiegel’s way of learning more about her winter community. When she had completed it and was ready for her next project, a friend and fellow writer suggested that she meet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

The project might have seemed daunting given the shelves and shelves of academic writing available on the beloved Sor Juana. Siegel found the subject fascinating. She identified with the seventeenth-century nun’s rebellious spirit and admired her courage and intellect. “Though famous for her wonderful poetry, Sor Juana was also a philosopher, always thinking about the nature of reality and worrying about metaphysical and theological questions,” Spiegel said.

Sor Juana’s feminist writings also intrigued Spiegel. In a century so male-dominated that an unmarried woman was destined to join a monastery for protection, poems like the following were startling. Here are the first three verses of Hombres Necios (Stupid Men), one of Sor Juana’s most famous poems.

Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis:

You stupid men
who accuse women, without reason,
and fail to see that you are to blame
for faults you find in women.

Si con ansia sin iqual
solicitáis su desdén,
¿por qué queréis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

If, with eagerness without equal,
you solicit them,
why do you want them to be good,
if you incite them to evil?

Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia.

You fight against their resistance,
and then, with gravity,
say that it’s women’s waywardness,
when they succumb to your persistence.

Author Todd Gitlin at community book read
By Sara Fasy

Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival
Todd Gitlin
Sat, Feb 21
Keynote address, 4pm
Onstage book group, 5pm
Hotel Real de Minas
cnr Ancha de San Antonio & Stirling Dickinson
150 pesos
www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com

Todd Gitlin will be a keynote speaker at the Fourth Annual Writers’ Conference and Literary Sala, and his talk will be followed by an onstage Community Book Read discussion of his latest book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats and the Recovery of American Ideals. I asked him to share some of his thoughts on writing and politics with Atención readers in the wake of the presidential inauguration, renewed conflict in the Middle East and the disturbing state of the world economy.

Sara Fasy: The title of your lecture in San Miguel is “The Recovery and Revival: Obama and the New Prospects.” After the election celebration, you commented, “He stands on the shoulder of the crowds of four decades ago. His rebellion takes the form of practicality. He has the audacity of reason.” You’ve just come from the inauguration. Do you worry that the euphoria of the moment will collapse under the stress of a failed economy and myriad other woes, or are you hopeful that the Democrats have finally got it right?

Todd Gitlin: Damn right, I worry. Some of the problems are wicked problems—there’s not even a consensus on what to do about them. But at least we can breathe.

SF: You have written 12 books on politics and society, two novels, and a book of poetry.…

TG: There’s also an unpublished novel, or half-novel, and an unproduced screenplay—in case any small publisher or producer reading Atención is looking for curious material....

SF: You frequently comment on the blog TCMcafe.com and the Huffington Post. You write for periodicals that range from Mother Jones to Harper’s. You have been an international lecturer and scholar. You broadcast commentary on NPR and other radio programs. And you have spent your entire life teaching, currently at Columbia where you hold the chair for the Ph.D. program in communications. I confess: the first question I feel like asking is, “Do you ever sleep?”

TG: As often as possible.

SF: You are variously referred to as a journalist, social historian, political commentator, media expert and “public intellectual.” What do you call yourself?

TG: Lucky dilettante. “Public intellectual” is pretty close. Or plain intellectual will do.

SF: As a journalist, do you feel you are free of bias—and is there such a thing?

TG: Of course I’m not free of bias. What I aspire to, though, in my most thoughtful writing, is taking opposing points of view at their strongest points, not contenting myself with scoring cheap shots. I don’t think it’s possible to free oneself entirely from bias…but also think bias should not be worn as a crown.

SF: Do you worry about “preaching to the choir”?

TG: Online, and in occasional articles, I do think I’m preaching to a choir, but also to visitors who wander in and might stay for a chorus or two.

SF: Your book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage felt like a must-read book for my 20-something children to get a true sense of that era, both politically and socially. Was it ever used as a college textbook? Are your books used, or ultimately intended, for that purpose?

TG: Yes, the book still sells after 20 years in print, and I assume all sales are for college courses. But overall I intend my books for smart people who want to think their way into, or possibly through, difficult and interesting questions.

SF: As an early president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a few years before its rupture with the increasingly deranged Weather Underground, and later as an activist who organized the first national protest against the Vietnam war, you were one of the principal leaders of the era who stayed on the course of sanity.

TG: A weaving course, but yes.

SF: You do a masterful job of threading in your own place in the seminal events of the sixties, and not just the political ones. You moved to California in the dawn of self-realization movements, you talk about your romances and aspirations, and you catalogue your increasing disillusionment. Do you find “participatory journalism” harder to write?

TG: When I set out to write The Sixties, I got stuck at only one point: the beginning, when I tried to write in full third-person, from partway across the room, or better, a satellite zoom. After a week or so, I abandoned that foolish effort. I could only write that book by taking myself as not only a participant–observer but also a problem to be encountered: Why should I, a math whiz and romantic would-be poet, have ended up as a radical activist, and how did things get so wild and weird?

SF: The current political climate has gone through drastic change this year. Can you give readers a short synopsis of your book The Bulldozer and the Big Tent?

TG: If Democrats are clear about their values, they can preside over a new center of gravity in American politics. The Bush catastrophe will not be easily mopped up. But we’ve started awakening from the nightmare.

Writers Aloud series begins at Biblioteca
By Bill Pearlman

PEN “Writers Aloud” series
Eva Hunter and friends
Thu, Feb 12, 3pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

The first presentation of San Miguel de Allende’s chapter of the International PEN “Writers Aloud” series features a reading from a memoir-in-progress by Eva Hunter, followed by a lively collage-type presentation by Hunter and several members of her current writing class, “Style Workshop for Prose.”

Hunter will read a selection from her memoir, A Little Mormon Girl, which is set in a small desert town just outside Las Vegas, Nevada, in the 1950s and early 1960s. This selection from the memoir addresses the experience of being a small girl growing up in a strict Mormon family, both from the point of view of a six-year-old and a 13-year-old. The collage presentation will include short segments of both literary nonfiction and fiction that are tied together with a brief narrative line to make a whole. “Collage” is one of the newer styles of organization in short literary writing, and Hunter will give a brief explanation of the form. A question-and-answer period will follow to allow the audience to interact with all the readers in this program.

Eva Hunter is an award-winning author, with publications in over 100 journals, magazines and books in both fiction and nonfiction. She taught creative writing in Portland State University’s English department and is co-founder of Connexus: The Writing School and The San Miguel Writers’ Workshop.

This is the third year for the PEN “Writers Aloud” series, which continues every Thursday at 3pm in the Sala Quetzal through April 9. A 50-peso donation is requested to help benefit the Biblioteca and PEN scholarship funds for young Mexican students.

Book-Signing Schedule

Jeremy Woodhouse
Thu, Feb 12, 2–6pm
Galería Pérgola
Instituto Allende
Ancha de San Antonio 20
154-5595

Fri, Feb 13, 10am–6pm
Libros El Tecolote
Jesús 11
152-7395

Sat, Feb 14, 10am–noon
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
152-7305

La Luz del Pueblo

Texas-based professional photographer Jeremy Woodhouse visits here February 12–14 to sign copies of his new book, La Luz del Pueblo: Discovering a Sense of Place in San Miguel de Allende.

The images in this book are a collaboration with photographer and writer Nancy Rotenberg and were taken over the past four years during photography workshops held in San Miguel.

This richly illustrated photographic essay about San Miguel makes a great souvenir for residents and visitors to this Mexican colonial jewel. For more information, go to http://www.luzbooks.com.