Spiritual Partnership
By Susan Page

PEN Winter Lecture Series
Susan Page
Surprising New Strategies for Your Relationship
Tues, Jan 27, 6pm
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
50 pesos

Most people say great communication and mutual respect are important keys to happy marriage, to a loving, successful relationship. I agree those are important, but I have found that the real key lies elsewhere. I will talk about “Surprising New Strategies for Your Relationship” in an event sponsored by San Miguel PEN.

For my second book, entitled The Eight Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive, I interviewed 35 couples who described themselves as “thriving,” in an attempt to find any single feature they all shared. I thought I might find that they all came from happy, “functional” families, or that they had unusual degrees of compatibility, or that their problems were relatively minor compared with other couples. None of that was true. Some of them had rotten childhoods and enormous challenges. But I found a quality in all these thriving couples that is usually missing in more troubled relationships, and that I now believe is a deeper key to happiness than even good communication or mutual respect.

It’s a quality I call a spirit of goodwill. Successful couples are on each other’s side. They view themselves as allies, not adversaries. They want to be happy together and together they make this happen. In a spirit of goodwill, they accept the traits in their partner that they wish were different. They have given up trying to change each other. When they argue, they understand that a different point of view may be valid. Because they want to experience their love all the time, they would rather work toward a solution than hang on stubbornly to their own “right” point of view.

The most widespread belief about marriage is that it is “hard work,” that true happiness in marriage is a myth, a bill of goods; that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce and the other half are just barely escaping it. But what you believe has a great deal to do with what you experience, because you view all of life through your beliefs. This pervasive negativity about love in our culture is extremely damaging.

Happy couples simply don’t buy it! They believe they can be happy together and their happiness is a priority for them. They keep a sense of adventure and excitement in their lives. As one couple told me, “There’s achievement and aliveness, and achievement is overrated.”

After I identified this spirit of goodwill in couples who thrive, I had to ask myself, “Is there a way I can teach goodwill to couples who don’t already have it?”

That question led to 15 years of work, during which I have made at least some progress toward an answer: Yes. It is possible to teach “goodwill,” but it requires a departure from some of the most commonly accepted wisdom about relationship work. My first realization was that the excessive emphasis on communication as the primary—perhaps even the only—tool available to couples for working through problems and trying to achieve greater closeness was seriously misguided. Communication techniques for couples are largely about the adversarial aspects of their relationship, so that they spend a lot of time working on their problems rather than nurturing the positive parts of their partnership. Also, communication requires skills that elude many people. I began to focus instead on developing specific “loving actions” that I found had far more power and more immediate results than, “What I hear you saying is . . .” or “Honey, we need to talk.” I found that most of these loving actions were unilateral and could be offered as a gift to a partner, in a spirit of goodwill, often with extraordinary results. I pioneered innovative “couples” groups to which I invited only one member of each couple! If they both wanted to do the work, they had to attend separate groups.

In my PEN lecture, I will say more about the limits of communication as a problem-solving tool (great communication is the result of a sprit of goodwill, not a tool for developing it). I will describe the unilateral, spiritually based loving actions that have been transformative for so many couples. I also explain why I have come to call this approach to relationships “Spiritual Partnership.”

International PEN, the largest worldwide association of writers, is dedicated to freedom of expression and the promotion of literature. The San Miguel chapter is one of 152 chapters in 110 countries. For more information contact Lucina Kathmann: lucina.kathmann@gmail.com or 152-0614.

Repeat Oprah guest Susan Page conducted workshops for couples from 1980 until 2003, when she moved to San Miguel. She is the author of five relationship books including her latest, Why Talking Is Not Enough. She is also the founder and coordinator of the San Miguel Authors’ Sala. www.susanpage.com. 

Southern novelist Josephine Humphreys
By Cynthia Simmons

Writer’s Conference & Literary Festival
February 20-24 
Featuring Erica Jong, Todd Gitlin & Josephine Humphreys
Teatro Ángela Peralta & Biblioteca Pública
US$195
www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com 

San Miguel hosts its fourth annual Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival this February.

The conference includes panel discussions, book sales and signings, open mike readings and 20 workshops that will cover writing genres from poetry to cookbooks and provide writers with tips that will help them get their work into the marketplace.

Three keynote speakers—groundbreaking feminist writer Erica Jong, political activist and writer Todd Gitlin and award-winning Southern novelist Josephine Humphreys—provide their perspectives on writing.

Charleston, South Carolina, native Humphreys, whose first three novels are set in her hometown, has been lauded by Elinor Walker in The Mississippi Quarterly as one of the contemporary Southern women authors who fill in the gaps of representation left behind by Southern authors of the past—the actions and beliefs of women, children and marginalized places.

When asked, via an email dialogue, why she has set the majority of her work in her hometown, Humphreys said, “I think I was lucky to get born in a place rife with contradictions, beauty, tangled history and an unending supply of characters and stories. Each novel, though, has moved a little farther from home. My first book (Dreams of Sleep) was set pretty much in my own house and neighborhood (though the story is not mine at all). The second novel (Rich in Love) moved north a few miles, across the river to a little town outside of Charleston. The third (Fireman’s Fair) jumped another river to one of the outlying barrier islands. But I think it’s still accurate to say that Charleston remains the imaginative center of my work, the place that formed my sense of mystery and story.”

The critical response to Dreams of Sleep was the type authors dream about—Ellen Douglass labeled it “an extraordinarily accomplished first novel,” in The New York Times Book Review and it won the 1984 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. Dreams was compared with the work of another Southern writer with auspicious beginnings, Walker Percy, whose first novel, The Moviegoer, won a National Book Award in 1964. Both writers create introspective and analytical characters who deal with feelings of dislocation in their lives. Percy provides only male perspectives; Humphreys includes the female angle.

When asked about Percy’s influence on her work, Humphreys described reading his The Last Gentleman as “the eye-opener.” She had read all the great Southern literature—Faulkner, Wolfe, Welty, O’Connor—and describes these authors as voices of the rural and small-town south. But Percy resonated with her. “Percy’s was the voice of the urban South, the real South I actually lived in and felt…. When I came to write Dreams of Sleep, I think my male characters automatically became similar to Percy’s, but are also similar to real men I knew, disaffected intellectual ‘heroes’ who sought unsuccessfully to reconcile themselves with their place and history. My women, however, seemed to go in other directions, directions which I find increasingly difficult to explain outside of the fiction itself.”

Humphreys has been praised for her ability to penetrate the minds of both her male and female characters and also for creating fully realized secondary characters. In Dreams of Sleep, the interior lives of both Alice and her husband Will are sensitively and convincingly explored while they struggle to understand the deterioration of their 10-year marriage. Humphreys’ second book, Rich in Love, delivers a fully believable portrait of 17-year-old Lucille Odum, a point of view generally ignored in Southern literature, as she struggles to hold her family together after her mother abruptly leaves.

The central character in Fireman’s Fair is a Rob Wyatt, whose early mid-life crisis is precipitated by Hurricane Hugo. The storm that devastated much of Charleston is a metaphor for the chaos in Wyatt’s life——he hates his job and is obsessively in love with his partner’s wife, Louise. The women in Wyatt’s life are as palpably real as the story’s narrator. His mother, Louise, and Billie Poe, the 19-year-old who moves into Wyatt’s spare room and subsequently into his heart, infuse this novel with a multi-generational female sensitivity.

Nowhere Else on Earth, Humphreys’ fourth novel, takes her readers a little farther north, to Robeson County, North Carolina, and back several generations, to the final years of the Civil War. This novel, drawn from the true history of North Carolina Lumbee Indians, was furthest from Humphreys’ realities. Her contemporary novels used her own world as backdrop. Extensive research was required to bring this story, set in another century and about a different culture, to life. Like Rich in Love, the narrator of this story is a teenager, 15-year-old Rhonda Strong, who is both Lumbee Indian and “mack,” a North Carolinian of Scottish descent.

Another thing that differentiated Nowhere Else on Earth from Humphreys’ earlier work is that it’s written in the first person. She describes writing a novel in the first person as a “bizarre experience. It’s a lot like acting. You may start out consciously recognizing a difference and a separation between the writer and the narrator. But pretty soon, if you like your book enough, that line becomes thin and even seems to disappear at times. The best times were when I could hear Rhoda’s voice in my dreams, especially in the early morning hours when I was slowly rising from sleep into waking. I did have the feeling that she was in me, and of course that made it much easier to speak as Rhoda.”

In an interview with Michael Sims published on www.bookpage.com, Humphreys stated that writing this book changed her notion of “Southernness.” When asked to elaborate on that statement for this article she said, “It alerted me to the nuances of race in the South. Growing up in South Carolina, we thought completely in terms of black and white. Everyone had to fit into one of those categories—everyone. But the history of the Lumbees and of similar groups showed me that the South held and holds a wider variety of people, and that race itself, or the cultural product that we call race, is more a spectrum than a collection of categories. Furthermore, we share a great deal more history, culture and genetic material than we may have realized in the past.”

Humphreys has been collecting a huge amount of research material for a new historical novel about a large mixed-race family in colonial South Carolina, but admits it may never come to be. She’s working on a new novel that takes her back to the contemporary world and is happy to be there. She will be talking about the mysteries of fiction and how writing surprises the writer during her keynote address on Sunday, February 22, 2pm at the Biblioteca Pública. Her keynote address is only open to conference attendees but other events are open to the public. The complete schedule for the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival is posted on its website, www.sanmiguelwritersconference.com. 


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