Reading thrillers and poetry 
By Cynthia Simmons

San Miguel Literary Sala
Kim Thomas & Marcia Wolff
Thu, Oct 8, 5–7pm
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2, cnr Hidalgo
70 pesos, or pay what you can
Includes wine reception

San Miguel writers Kim Thomas and Marcia Wolff explored interests in other arenas before undertaking their writing lives.

No one can accuse Kim Thomas of being a one-note samba. Since he graduated from the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley in 1973, Thomas has been involved in an array of ventures. He describes his journey from California financial consultant to writer in San Miguel as long, circuitous and most of the time rudderless.

Thomas has never tolerated a ho-hum job. Work had to be exciting and challenging to sustain his energy and imagination. When these criteria were no longer being met, which happened frequently, he tackled something new and never allowed lack of experience or training to prohibit him from undertaking a new project. 

Thomas has owned an executive search firm, designed and operated two small inns, represented dozens of wineries and restaurants in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys with his media relations firm and collaborated with Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, The Grateful Dead, Santana and The Rolling Stones to create collectors’ editions and private-label products for his clients.

Putting a new spin on an old idea has been his mantra. When he started his first bed and breakfast, Napa Valley already had 75 others. For his to be unique, he needed a hook that would make people prefer his B&B. The property he acquired had previously been the home of the curmudgeonly writer Ambrose Bierce, and he transformed the rooms into mini-museums to Bierce and his friends, Lillie Langtry, Edward Muybridge and Lillie Coit, who hung out together in San Francisco and Napa Valley.

During his Media Resources days, he stumbled onto the artistic process of sandblasting glass and adapted it to wine bottles. Thomas started making collector’s bottles for his winery clients that soon expanded to sports teams, hotels and other sectors of his client base.

Thomas had always intended to write and when, after 25 years, he exited the accumulation stage of his life for recess, he had time. He began playing with plots for his first novel, Bird of Prey, while he built his house in San Miguel. He applied his business mantra and spun his detective story in a fresh manner. Reader comments on Barnes & Noble’s website describe his first book as a page-turner with a storyline that kept them guessing right up to the end and with rich detail, uncommon in this plot-driven genre. “I loved the offbeat characters,” said one reader, “and how Thomas wove them together to tell a story I had never read before. I hope Detective Montoya returns in a sequel.”

This reader won’t get her wish anytime soon because his next two projects will take him in a different direction. He is collaborating with local San Miguel artist Oscar Heredia on Scenes from the 22nd Parallel, which will combine his prose with Heredia’s original paintings. Thomas also is completing a book of photographs, San Miguel at Work, illustrating the people who make the city function on a daily basis.

Like Thomas, writing wasn’t poet Marcia Wolff’s first occupation. Divorced at 28 with three children, she needed to make a practical career choice and pursued a degree in nursing and was eventually drawn to the psychiatric field.

When her last child left for college, Wolff returned to the campus and completed a degree in English literature. From Shakespeare to Kate Chopin, from Whitman to Sandra Cisneros and Adrienne Rich to Hemingway, this was the most expanding time in her educational life. She began to discover more of her authentic voice; a turning point was a professor’s invitation to a senior poetry seminar. Wolff was strongly impacted by poets Sandra Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell. Wolff’s poem, “Allowing Time: a Directive,” mirrors one of Kinnell’s reflections in his poem, “St. Francis and the Sow,” that “sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness.” 

After graduation, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to attend Southwestern College, a Jungian-oriented graduate school. Core parts of the experiential curriculum were the expressive arts; the history of consciousness, archetypes and mythology; multicultural values; gender issues and the spiritual dimensions of the human experience.

After receiving a master’s degree in counseling psychology, she worked in the District Attorney’s office as a counselor and later became the director of a domestic violence program. “What happened to us?” was a recurring question for men and women while she worked in this field. For answers, Wolff trained for a year to be a facilitator in gender reconciliation and communion, and applied the training to her private practice.

Wolff also participated in supportive poetry-writing groups. For her, poetry often was a guide from a larger place, the soul perhaps. Her book of poems, Frictions Becoming Pearl: A Slow Awakening, is essentially a heroine’s journey.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. He says, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are” and speaks of the hero’s journey as the Leaving, the Initiation or the Road of Trials and the Return. Just as a pearl is formed through frictions from sand and grit, Wolff has come to believe that trials in life become part of the soul’s development if we are willing to feel and integrate these experiences. 

In 2004, after vacationing in Puerto Vallarta, she realized it was time to stop the hard-driving lifestyle and moved there the following year. Although she hadn’t been thinking of Mexico when she wrote “The Sacred Pilgrimage,” she realized this poem had foreshadowed her move. She describes her tiny apartment, near the Bay of Banderas, as her birthing hut. There she completed a body of work while she wrote a weekly column, “Soul Connections,” highlighting art, creativity and the spirit that moves us, for the Puerto Vallarta Tribune. Several poems from Frictions Becoming Pearl, which hit bookshelves in September, have been published in Cactus Alley, a literary magazine from the University of Texas at San Antonio, Matrix magazine in Santa Cruz, California, and in the anthology Another Desert: Jewish Poets of New Mexico.

Marcia recently moved to San Miguel and has shifted her attention to creating beauty through collage and also plans another writing project.

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