Erica Jong: unapologetically sexual
By Cynthia Simmons February 13, 2009 San Miguel de Allende

Writers' Conference & Literary Festival
Erica Jong 
Thu, Feb 20
Keynote address, 4pm

Onstage book group, 5pm
Sun, Feb 22, 4pm

Poetry reading, Love Comes First
Todd Gitlin
Sat, Feb 21 

Keynote address, 4pm
Onstage book group, 5pm
Hotel Real de Minas
cnr Ancha de San Antonio & Stirling Dickinson

San Miguel hosts its fourth annual Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival, February 20–24, which includes panel discussions, book sales and signings, open mike readings and 20 workshops. The three keynote speakers are Southern novelist Josephine Humphreys, political activist Todd Gitlin and feminist Erica Jong..

You’ll never receive a tepid response when you mention Erica Jong, who kicks off the conference with her keynote address. I was discussing Jong with several women at a holiday cocktail party when a conservative gentleman in his late 70s, eavesdropping on our conversation, blurted out, “Worst writer I’ve read.” We all suppressed giggles—we knew it wasn’t Jong’s writing but Isadora Wing, the heroine of three of her novels, who was eliciting his reaction.

Before Fear of Flying, her first and most popular Wing novel, women weren’t writing about their bedroom experiences. When Fear hit bookstores in 1973, Karen Fitzgerald noted in Ms. magazine that Jong “was the first woman to write in such a daring and humorous way about sex.” Isadora was a new kind of heroine, a woman who refused to be defined by patriarchal standards. She wasn’t a princess waiting for a knight in shining armor to save her. She was courageous, took responsibility for her own life and challenged the accepted norm of female sexuality. Some critics disputed the book’s literary value. The sexual police accused Jong of promoting promiscuity. 

But women weren’t listening to the critics. The paperback edition became an immediate bestseller that has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Many women who came of age in the sixties and seventies, in what Jong calls the whiplash generation—American women who were raised to be Doris Day but grew up wanting to be Gloria Steinem—identified with Isadora’s dissatisfaction with her cookie-cutter life. Many thought about changing their own lives; some found the courage to act on their inner feelings.

Roz Tols, a retired Sixty Minutes producer living in San Miguel, was willing to talk frankly about how Jong’s first novel encouraged her to listen to her interior voice. Roz, who was in an unfulfilling marriage when she read the book in 1974, said, “In 1975, I had an incredible extramarital love affair. Jong made a momentous impression on me. She gave me permission to act out my fantasies. This one paid off…I’m still with this man after 34 years. In fact, we just renewed our marriage vows last fall. I always felt that Jong was speaking directly to me. It was as if I were one of her friends to whom she was confiding her innermost secrets. When she wrote Fear of Fifty, I gave that book to my women friends who were turning 50. Again, she confided in us.”

Jong had already published two books of poetry and was preparing to be an academic—she had received her master’s degree in eighteenth-century English literature and was doing doctoral work at Columbia—when she took time off to write a book about a woman’s sexual experiences. Since Fear of Flying hit bookshelves, she has published five books of poetry, seven novels, a book on her mentor Henry Miller, a children’s book, a memoir, two books of essays, and a book on witchcraft. Regardless of the genre, Jong is always honest, witty and commonsensical in her analysis. She challenges our ideas, not just about female sexuality, but also in other areas. Witches, according to Publishers Weekly, transformed our concept of witches from “loathsome hag to healing mother-goddess.” Her tribute to Miller, The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller, prompts readers to look beyond Miller’s bad-boy of literature image.

Jong’s life is the backdrop for much of her work. Her Isadora Wing books, Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life and Parachutes and Kisses, contain many autobiographical elements. She writes with audacious candor and humor about her own life in her book of personal essays, Seducing the Demon: Writing About My Life and her midlife memoir, Fear of Fifty, where she discusses juggling all of her roles—wife, mother, lover, daughter, writer, feminist and Jew. Her children’s book, Megan’s Book of Divorce, was written after her own daughter was forced to grapple with this issue. She explores her Jewishness in Inventing Memory, her epic novel about a Jewish family, told through four generations of women. Personal anecdotes and stories pepper the essays in What do Women Want. Jong’s interest in eighteenth-century literature shows in Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. Her love affair with Venice is captured in Shylock’s Daughter (formerly Serenissima). All her work is extremely 
personal.

The majority of her work has focused on the changing lives of women and always there is sex, sex, sex. When asked why, via email, Jong replied glibly, “Because I think sex is a part of life and an important part of life at that.”

Whether historical or contemporary, all of her heroines have “the Isadora spirit”—they refuse to bow to societal dictates and are unapologetically sexual. People praised How to Save Your Own Life, which chronicles Isadora’s Hollywood years in the late seventies, for being “shamelessly sex-saturated.” In her subsequent novel, Fanny, the heroine is an eighteenth-century woman with contemporary sensibilities, a woman who, according to the Washington Post Book World, “useth her reason as well as her rump.” In her multi-generational epic, Inventing Memory, Sarah lives in an unorthodox menage-à-trois with two men in the early 1900s.

Jong’s most recent novel, Sappho’s Leap, will be discussed in an onstage book group following her keynote address. The book reinterprets the life of bisexual Greek poetess Sappho, who embarks on an elaborate odyssey à la Homer, loving women and men alike as she saves lives with her poetry and quick thinking.

Jong will read from Love Comes First, her first new volume of poems in more than 15 years. She is grateful to Joel Fotinos at Penguin for bringing her poetry to a large audience again.

The complete conference schedule is posted at www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com.  

Cynthia Simmons is a writer and arts development consultant living in San Miguel.

Wild and Wonderful: El Charco del Ingenio
By Emily Hamilton

PEN Lecture Series
Wild and Wonderful: Nature Up Close in El Charco
Walter Meagher & Wayne Colony
Tues, Feb 17, 6pm
Auditorio Miguel Malo, Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

Tucked away in the southeast corner of San Miguel is a natural work of art of which many do not know.

The botanical garden El Charco del Ingenio is home to at least 535 species of flora, 156 of birds, and 110 of butterflies, all of which are featured in Botanist Walter L. Meagher’s new book Wild & Wonderful: Nature up Close in the Botanical Garden ‘El Charco del Ingenio,’ San Miguel de Allende.

Visitors are often attracted to San Miguel because of its architecture and historical context without ever recognizing its natural significance, according to Meagher. As a botanist, he was immediately attracted to El Charco and its vast biodiversity. In an effort to “make the natural heritage known,” Meagher wrote Wild & Wonderful as a tribute to El Charco. 

Instead of a dense, technical botanical study, Wild & Wonderful is, as Meagher says, “a book of ideas.” It tells the stories of the creatures of El Charco—hundreds of little stories—and is a compilation of life lessons that we as humans can learn from even the smallest of fauna. For example, Meagher describes the intricate structure of ant colonies, as “a window of discovery into natural history.”

Key to the book’s success and intrigue are Wayne Colony’s vivid, colorful images that accompany the writing. In compiling the book, Colony and Meagher spent countless hours in the garden, studying and photographing each species. 

The majority of Tuesday’s lecture will consist of a PowerPoint presentation of Colony’s photos, through which he hopes to show “evolutionary and symbiotic relationships between all living things.”

Since its release in 2008, Wild & Wonderful has been acclaimed for its unique approach to natural history. “Wild & Wonderful conveys both a sense of place and its environmental wholeness,” biologist and author E.O. Wilson says. “The beautiful photographs and background biology take us on a tour…. It is a glimpse of rightness in the world.”

In the opening paragraph of the section on “Beans and Squashes,” which will be highlighted in next Tuesday’s presentation at Bellas Artes, Meagher says, “The entire Mexican nation is connected by a placental cord of seeds to the uterus of an antique wild plant in the bean family,” He goes on to describe the evolution of the role of plants in the Mexican diet, the connection between Mexico’s food culture and its natural history.

For Meagher, Wild & Wonderful is a blend of his love of science and love of writing. He first fell in love with botany as a boy in Pennsylvania, and since then has studied at the University of Michigan and the Kellogg Biological Station. He is the author of several scientific papers, including Vascular Flora of the Augusta Floodplain Reserve and Vegetation and Habitat of a Caribbean Island. He is a regular contributor to Oxford University’s Oxford Magazine. He splits his time between San Miguel and England with his wife, Wendy, who designed Wild and Wonderful.

Colony earned a BS in Geology from the University of Washington and an MS in Geology from the University of Arizona. He spent 30 years as a professor of geology and often spent summers researching volcanology and writing papers on the Galapagos Islands, Mt. St. Helens, and the Pacific Ocean seafloor. He and his wife Susan retired full –time to San Miguel in 2003 and “instantly took pleasure in visiting El Charco,” Colony says. He teamed up with Meagher in 2005 to continue his biological and geological study of El Charco. He took up photography in retirement and has since documented most of the birds, butterflies, dragonflies and flowers of the botanical garden.

Copies of the book will be available at the talk for 300 pesos, and both the author and the photographer will be available to sign them. The San Miguel Chapter of International PEN sponsors local and statewide literary programs and scholarships. It also participates in major Mexican and regional literary events, Proceeds from the Winter Lecture Series fund local activities, interventions on behalf of writers around the world who are in trouble for what they have written and help support the international organization.

For more information and advance tickets, contact Lucina Kathmann: lucina.kathmann@gmail.com or Pat Hirschl 154-9478. 

Emily Hamilton is the 17-year-old editor of Palo Alto High School’s Verde Magazine in Palo Alto, California.

About E-art books 
By Roland Salazar

PEN Writers Aloud series
Roland Salazar Rose
Thurs, Feb 19, 3-5.30pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

As a visual artist I face the well-known problem both of how to get to show my art in proper venues and also how to communicate my creative concerns. I have enjoyed some success in showing my work, but nothing like that of many contemporaries. I write about my work, which is largely created in series, and afterward I display the images alongside the written material on my website, www.salazargallery.com. 

I recently found another way to show my art and to communicate the stories behind the images: I am publishing my work as E-art books (electronic books). Far from a new concept, electronic publishing is an increasingly an important medium in which books may be transmitted and read. Art books are notoriously difficult to get published, and even if one self publishes, the cost and problems of marketing become far more difficult than other POD books. 

My new way of communicating is certainly no ‘breakthrough’ in publishing. It is merely one way the ‘little’ folks in the marketplace may attempt to reach an audience. It would be nice if it were successful and economically rewarding! But as with the process of creating artistic images, the joy is in the mere doing, rather than in their marketing. 

Artists have a voice, yet we often refrain from expressing how our work has been completed and what it means to them in the doing. We often hang back, saying: “I do the images, but it’s up to you to express what they mean.” True enough! But this is an age when communication using both sides of the brain might assist us better than casting aside one side, favoring only the other.

Specifications of the Limited Edition books

Books printed in Mexico on 200gms of quality coated print paper; images are all in high resolution (300dpi or better); all are 8 ½ X 11 inches, they are spiral bound, allowing for you to open them easily. You may frame any page by simply removing it from the binding. Shipping within the US is included in the purchase price; other countries may require an additional charge.

Pricing E-Art

Ramblin/rose publications will most likely receive a very limited profit from publishing POD art books. The download price for a printed book (you print yourself or have printed) is only US$4.95. A full-color version, spiral bound is US$20–$30, including shipping costs from Mexico.