Authors’ Sala
Lucina Kathmann and Anthony Maulucci
Thu, Jul 16, 5pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2, Canal cnr. Hidalgo 
70 pesos

Authors return to Posada
By Sara Fasy

This month the Authors’ Sala presents two celebrated local writers: Lucina Kathmann and Anthony Maulucci. The event (originally scheduled for July 9) celebrates the return of the Authors’ Sala monthly readings to the original location at Posada de San Francisco, on the corner of Hidalgo and Canal across from the Jardín.

Lucina Kathmann reads from her two children’s books, Payshapes and the Bear and A Forest of Mathematics. The genesis of these books can be traced to her son, who thought up an imaginary forest world and demanded stories to explore it. Kathmann complied. “I had orders from a pipsqueak, so I tried. It came out pretty well and so did the subsequent stories which continue to this day.”

A creative family tradition grew into published work when Kathmann put the stories on paper during a literary workshop at Bellas Artes, taking advantage of the Spanish editing skills of her colleagues. “Payshapes had a good following, even among quite formidable adults. I knew children would accept him because of the exacting standards of my children, who are instantly allergic to anything saccharine.”

After reading one story, the mayor of Salta, Argentina, became such a fan he arranged for the press at Catholic University to publish the first Payshapes stories in 1990. The early version has been republished by Chiron Books in reader-friendly bilingual facing pages with two new stories.

The second children’s book, A Forest of Mathematics, came about when Kathmann was teaching math to upper grades. She found that kids had trouble because “they hadn’t picked up the prerequisites. I wrote a textbook using the Payshapes forest, explaining negative numbers with a kangaroo hopping backward, exponents in Granny Bunny’s great great grandchildren, Cartesian coordinates to map the forest.” This highly visual approach also worked for adults who never got it right in their youth. Kathmann says Forest is for “tweens, teens and imaginative adults.”

Kathmann came to write these bilingual educational books via a circuitous and unexpected route. She settled in San Miguel 30 years ago to study theater with the legendary Mascha Beyo and to continue running the writing workshops she had organized in Chicago. In the mid-eighties, she helped establish the San Miguel chapter of PEN, the international writers organization. Kathmann has traveled all over the world as vice-president of International PEN to support freedom of expression in world literature. Kathmann’s commitment to the work of PEN has “given me a great life with strong friendships around the world.”

Kathmann has written novels, essays and stories in addition to her continuous work for PEN. She also has raised her own two sons and the six children she adopted when her best friend died in childbirth. An earlier two-volume book, To Make Ourselves Heard (Para Que Los Escuchen) deals with women’s rights in two volumes of newspaper articles and other texts; it also recounts stories from her own extraordinary life in San Miguel.

Anthony Maulucci is a man with a mission. This teacher, painter, poet and novelist was so distressed by the distorted image of Italian-Americans in novels like The Godfather that he was moved to found his own publishing entity, Lorenzo Press, to refute the disturbing stereotypes rampant in the culture. (The name was extracted from three Lorenzos: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, D.H. Lawrence, and Lorenzo de Medici.) Maulucci called this his “ethnic awakening.” His essay, Can Italian-American Culture Be Saved? argues for an Italian-American renaissance by proposing the identification and study of writers like Pietero Di Donato, John Fante and Helen Barolini, gifted and half-forgotten authors who write of immigrant life without indulging in tired notions of Mafia dons and omerta. His own work reflects his interest in stories that explore the emotional complexity of human experience. He reads from his new book of short stories, Anxious Love. 

“The story I will read at the Authors’ Sala is about a middle-aged American woman who travels to Mexico and, as a result of wanting to end her marriage, has to deal with the question of the sacrifices a woman is expected to make and the contradictions of her own nature. My characters tend to be multilayered and full of anxieties, self-doubts and contradictions, because that’s how I find people to be in real life.”

Maulucci is a recent émigré to San Miguel from Zacatecas. He grew up in Connecticut and lived in Boston, Montreal, Toronto and New York City before moving to Mexico. For a time he worked in theater and later taught writing at several New England colleges. Before establishing the Lorenzo Press in 1995, he organized the Green Tiger Writers Workshops.

Help celebrate the return to Posada de San Francisco with two readings and a wine reception.