New Mexico Author Q & A: Miriam Sagan

A Hundred Cups of Coffee, by Miriam Sagan. Tres Chicas Books, Española, N.M. 2019. Available in bookstores and online.

Longtime Santa Fe resident Miriam Sagan is the author of thirty books, including three memoirs, Dirty Laundry: A Hundred Days in a Zen Monastery, Gossip, and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space. She’s won numerous awards for her writing.

Miriam’s concept for this slim book was “to drink a hundred cups of coffee and record them, with my thoughts and surroundings.” It took her two years, and as she writes, “many things happened.”

I almost didn’t pick up the book because I’d been put off the concept of daily blog or journal posts after reading the Facebook posts of a new acquaintance. People LOVE her posts, so I was looking for the “there,” but trying to read them nearly drove me mad. They were all sweetness and light. Some people require the happy ending. I’m not one of them, though I do believe in redemption. Which you’ll see when you read my book The Dry Line: A Novel.

Back to Miriam, who embraces the contradictions, the pieces that don’t fit. The shadows. She observes in the moment and lets it be, without judgment. Instead of reading one or two of the “cups” entries per day, as I’d planned, I devoured multiple “cups” at one sitting.

Ramona: You can say so much—in a few words! Do you think this comes from being foremost a poet? And how long have you been writing poetry?

Miriam: Yes, I do think it comes from practicing poetry. I started writing poetry in high school, so let’s call it fifty years. Of course lots of people write poetry as teenagers—for me the trick was to keep at it and develop the craft and an adult voice. I also started keeping a journal in 1972. Journals tend to be short forms and daily. That also influences my approach to prose.

Ramona: In A Hundred Cups, you had me at Cup #7, where you wrote: “I am a bad daughter, and we both know it. Yes, I call my demented mother frequently, I send her cards and flowering plants. I visit every season. But I live thousands of miles away. And we do not like each other. I do not like her, but she started it. She has not liked me since we met, at my birth, sixty-one years ago. I loved her desperately for my first twenty-five years or so. I wanted her to stop saying I was fat, with horrible hair, a failure. I wanted her to stop saying I was a torment to her. Then I learned to get over it.”

How many mother-daughter relationships does this nail? I could’ve written it myself, about my own mother. I so much appreciate your writing so honestly about this matter. Did you write hundreds of journal pages about this before you arrived at “learning to get over it”? Anything else you want to add?

Miriam: I’m glad it seems accrete and relatable. Not hundreds of pages—more like hundreds of hours in therapy! And uncountable hours spent talking to other women, a lifetime of talking, and of listening. In retrospect, some of it does seem generational, or generational in my immigrant family. That is, many mothers my age seem to have better relationships with their own daughters, and less mania for control and criticism.

Ramona: In Cup #32, you write of “the terror of hanging suspended in the instant,” contrasted with “what remains, a husk, the carapace of a cicada, the paper wasp’s nest,” and how our feelings about those things don’t survive with the things themselves. How much does your Buddhist practice inform your writing? (I’m assuming you still practice Zen Buddhism, though your bio in the book doesn’t mention it.)

Miriam: Thank you for noticing and asking this question. My relationship to Buddhism remains somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, encountering its central ideas no doubt saved my life. On the other, I don’t do well in hierarchical, dare I say patriarchal, settings. Some years ago I had the opportunity to work with koans with a woman roshi at a time when I was very immersed in trying to use my writing to perceive things directly. This combination did open my mind, and hopefully it has not shut yet! My relationship to the “moment” comes out of a shared practice of Zen and writing—but the Zen is pretty informal—more domestic than monastic.

Ramona: I’m totally unqualified to review or write about poetry. So I’ll ask you instead to mention your favorite of your poems (and use it here if you like). How many collections of your own poetry have been published?

Miriam: If I add up the full-length volumes and the smaller chapbooks, it is probably upwards of twenty books of poetry.

My favorite poem always tends to be my most recent. It’s not that I’m improving that obviously as I go—just that I like what I feel close to.

Here is one from September, written because my husband had to go back east on a family emergency:

Unseasonable 

snow in early autumn

in these mountains

when only a few leaves have turned 

you leave a used

face mask

and a paper bag

of tomatoes

behind

how long we’ve lived

together, you and I

how easy—how difficult

to part

in this

unseasonable weather

Ramona: In Cup #34, you say the first draft of a novel is finished. Dated May 16, 2016. Please say more about this work.

Miriam: Ah, I’m always tormented by writing a novel! This one is called Future Tense of River, and is a utopian novel about a low-technological future and a community of potters. Who are menaced by drought, war, and more. About halfway through I realized I was writing about Santa Fe! It is still unpublished. A novella, Shadow on the Minotaur, was started later but is forthcoming from Red Mountain Press next year. My fiction writing is erratic and often tortuous. I’m glad it isn’t my only pursuit!

Ramona: On Cup #44, you write: “Dusty hollyhocks. It was so hot yesterday that my car’s tires went a little flat. I don’t know why I’m so happy. A pink hollyhock petal falls before my eyes.”

This reminded me of a poem by Li Po that I loved when I was in college…

“On the mountain: A conversation

you ask

why I perch

on a jade green mountain?

I laugh

but say nothing

my heart

free

like a peach blossom

in the flowing stream

going by

in the depths

in another world

not among men.”

Are moments like these, in nature, your refuge from the craziness of society?

Miriam: What an exquisite poem! Since the pandemic started, I’ve been reading the classic Chinese poets in translation—book after book. I even took one of those open online classes from Harvard on Chinese thought and poetry. It isn’t coincidence. No one can describe how an individual feels in a time of social chaos like the T’ang poets. Yes, nature is a respite, but nature can also be violent, and in today’s world full of destruction and crisis. I think the key is the level of perception in the poem, and how the sense of self is located “not among men.”

Ramona: How has your life changed now that you’ve retired from directing the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College? Did you find that young people are passionate about writing?

Miriam: Young and old, people love to write—and benefit so much from expression. At Santa Fe Community College many students were older, but still just starting out. That’s a delicate balance—life experience, but being a novice. The young, I think, are more fearless, but also tortured by the worry of being unoriginal. To settle down, to write what you want to express, to explore—it is a huge adventure. I was lucky to share that with so many people over the years.

Ramona: Do you want to say more about your joint creative project with your daughter? (My daughter created my author website for me, going in a direction I wouldn’t have thought of, but I love it.)

Miriam: Probably the greatest unexpected excitement in my life is working with my daughter, Isabel Winson-Sagan, a multimedia artist. We did numerous projects over the years, but really committed to working together as the creative duo Maternal Mitochondria four years ago when I retired. We went to Japan and were in residence in Kura Studio in Itoshima and created a poetry and suminagashi (Japanese ink marbling) video installation in an old abandoned grain silo. The whole experience was very inspiring, and remains a wellspring.

Right now we’re studying book arts together. You can see our sculptural text pieces, community teaching, and installations at our website: maternalmitochondria.com

I’m so fortunate to have the opportunity to work across disciplines and generations with an incredible woman who is also my daughter! The process isn’t always smooth—it’s good to know who is the leader on a project—but it has really extended my range, helped my thinking, and created amazing pieces.

Editor’s note: On the website Maternal Mitochondria, check out Miriam & Isabel’s latest project, Fairy Houses, inspired by their experience in Japan. Here’s a photo of one of the spirit houses created by Tim Brown. You can visit the installation in person at Santa Fe Skies RV Park.

And here’s Miriam’s blog, which she’s been writing faithfully for at least ten years. Must be a record, and even more of a record to keep it fresh every time.

New Mexico Author Q & A: Denise Chávez

Photo: Daniel Zolinsky

Loving Pedro Infante, by Denise Chávez. Washington Square Press, 2001. Available in bookstores and online.

A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, by Denise Chávez. Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2020 and 2006. Available in bookstores and online.

“I believe in the power of writing to heal lives and heal the many borders between people, real and imagined,” states Denise Chávez in her author bio in Poets & Writers. “I am a performance writer, novelist and teacher who lives and works on the U.S./México border corridor in southern New Mexico. I am the Director/Bookseller at Casa Camino Real, a bookstore and gallery on the historic Camino Real in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We sell books on Abebooks, www.abebooks.com.”

Chávez is the author of many books, among them The Last of the Menu Girls, The King and Queen of Comezón, and Face of an Angel, for which she won the American Book Award. Her plays have been staged internationally. The winner of numerous other writing awards, she was a founder of the Border Book Festival in Las Cruces.

In this interview she talks about two of her books—a novel and a memoir—as well as her activism on behalf of migrants at the southern border.

About her novel The King and Queen of Comezón, Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “Chávez’s voice is at once zany and knowing. She is la gran mitotera—a big troublemaker, stirring up rollicking mischief with wacky humor delivered in the lyrical tempo of Chicano slang.”

That zany voice comes through clearly also in Loving Pedro Infante, the story of Teresina or Tere, a young Mexican-American woman who lives in a border town and idealizes the Mexican film star Pedro Infante, while suffering through miserable relationships with men in her real life.

Ramona: Loving Pedro Infante is a brilliant novel that I keep finding more and more richness in. Feminism, the Chicana version; Mexican American relationships and cultures; Northern New Mexico versus borderland New Mexico—wow! Not to mention a primer on Pedro Infante’s films! What inspired you to write this book? Were you a fan of Pedro?

Denise: Growing up on the U.S./México border has been a great blessing for me. I am Mexican American, and like all proud Mexicanos and Mexicanas, we love our culture, our food, our music, our way of life. My sister and I would often go to El Paso, our near-by “Big City,” to shop and see movies. I remember going to double and triple features all in one day. My mother, a Spanish teacher, loved movies, and this meant she loved Pedro Infante, the great Mexican film star and singer. My mother, Delfina Rede Faver Chávez, studied at UNAM, the Universidad Autónoma, in Mexico City, and she was enamored of all things Mexicano. As I am. We would go to the Plaza Theatre to see movies in English and then walk down El Paso street to see movies in Spanish. It was a rich and colorful life. I thank my mother for giving me the gift of being Bi-Cultural and Bilingual.

Ramona: The dialog in Loving Pedro Infante is colorful and dynamic, a fusion of Spanish and English unique to the southern border that conveys so much through humor and inuendo. For example, the protagonist, Tere, says she’s desde. What does that mean?

Denise: The way I use the word “desde” is not to be found in dictionaries. One of my father’s caretakers often used the word “desde” to refer to something that was understood by those who were in a conversation without having to get to the nitty gritty of description. A word/mood/ understood. For example, she was so “desde.” Take it and make it what you will. And the speakers understand that she is how she is, without having to navigate the known language. It’s a complex and yet simple way of speaking. Something cultural you grow up with. In English you might say, “hand me that deal.” But what does a “deal” mean? The understood unstated.

Ramona: Did writing A Taco Testimony help you come to terms with your parents? Your culture?

Denise: I am not sure what you mean “coming to terms” with my parents and culture. I wouldn’t put things that way. My mother was my mother and my father was my father. Acceptance. They were not to be changed. I am a proud Mexicana/Chicana/Latina and always have been. They were children who grew up in poverty and struggle and I appreciate all they did for my sisters and me. Their lives were hard but full of joy and love.

Many wrestle with their parents and it’s part of growing up and becoming wiser, but to wish them to be what they weren’t seems illogical. I have accepted them completely and fully. Now that doesn’t mean that I may not have agreed with them or with their ways of being, but I loved them, love them still. I feel very blessed to be my parents’ child.

Ramona: In A Taco Testimony, tacos are the theme that ties together familia, celebrations, comfort, sustenance, and more. You say your family’s tacos were always rolled, not folded. And they were baked in a pan in the oven. In Northern N.M., I think that describes enchiladas, and of course you have to eat them with a fork. Were the rolled tacos of your youth also eaten with a fork? And are “enchiladas” a thing in Las Cruces?

Denise: There are rolled tacos and folded tacos. Ours were rolled. Although we do have folded and eat folded tacos. Not knowing Southern New Mexico is something you need to correct. Southern New Mexico is totally different from Northern New Mexico, where people tout their descendancy from only the Spanish, excluding the Mexican blood of the ancestors. This is a major struggle in New Mexico: the Spanish culture vs. the Mexican.

As far as tacos go, we rolled ours and we baked them in the oven (if you are doing a larger quantity) or sometimes we put them in a cast iron pan and cooked them on the stove top and added cheese at the last minute. They are very good that way. A little soft, a little hard. You can eat rolled tacos with a fork, but they are better hand-held.

You are confusing enchiladas and tacos! Enchiladas are everybody’s “thing.” Green, red, or Christmas as we say, a mixture of both green and red. As I mentioned earlier, Southern New Mexico is NOT Northern New Mexico.

Ramona: I was especially moved by your account of how difficult your college experience was, and how reconnecting with the foods of your family, tacos in particular, literally saved you. Did you have a hard time because you weren’t supported by the school or by your family? Or because you were determined to forge your own path, in a way that no one else in your family had ever done? Or something else?

Denise: I came from a small town and to move to a big town was hard. Graduate school was very hard, especially as a theatre artist. I was very poor and lived on a small scholarship. I was also working as a waitress the last year of graduate school. The school was intense, fierce, and top-notch. To be a theatre artist is no small thing. To be a Chicana in Texas was also no small thing. Sometimes overtly racist, sometimes not, it was hard to find my role in the world. 

Ramona: Tell me about your plan for the anthology We Are Here to Represent. What kind of stories and whose stories are you seeking?

Denise: Since the summer of 2018 I have been distributing books to Refugee, Migrant, and Asylum-seeking families in my hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Juárez, México. I received a grant last year from New Mexico Writers for a project called We Are Here to Represent, which will be an anthology of stories, poetry, photographs, and artwork depicting the voices of people we worked with whose stories have not been told. We are now in a submission period, collecting stories of people who come from different parts of the U.S. in Border Immersion groups to see what is happening on the border, as well as those who have worked locally and regionally with our families and children on both sides of the border. I know it will be a powerful testimony to the resiliency, beauty, and power of the human spirit.

Ramona: Please update me on your project Libros Para El Viaje. Have border closures and the pandemic affected your efforts to get books into the hands of migrants? What would you like readers of this blog to know about Libros Para El Viaje?

Denise: I have not been to Juarez personally to deliver books since the U.S. border has been closed, although members of other sister organizations travel back and forth on a regular basis. I look forward to visiting our distribution sites soon and working with our children and families. At present, my bookstore, Casa Camino Real, donates books, notebooks, and school supplies on a regular week basis to various shelters in Juarez. There are many, and we rotate our donation schedule. The books have been donated by hundreds of bookstores, organizations, readers as well as the American Booksellers organization, The Children’s Reading Foundation, etc. etc. We have distributed thousands and thousands of books since the summer of 2018. It’s been a labor of love for our Book Stewards and all concerned. And we continue to collect Spanish language books, bibles, Spanish/English dictionaries, and all types of books for babies, children, youth, and adults.

If anyone is interested in our program, please visit this page: https://www.newmexico.org/nmmagazine/articles/post/libros-para-el-viaje/

Please contact me for more information at:  comezon09@comcast.net.

Ramona, thank you for this invaluable opportunity to share my thoughts and world with fellow writers. ¡Adelante!

New Mexico Author Q & A

After nearly thirty years living in a remote New Mexico village, Charlotte Plantz (aka Claudia Clavel) had a prodigious collection of stories to tell. During that time I was a frequent visitor to Mike and Charlotte’s adobe home and heard the stories as they happened.

The initial question of course is how do a couple of Anglo artists from California fit into a traditional Spanish village? Many small social signals are given when people are getting to know each other.

Charlotte laughs when she says her neighbors must have figured she and Mike were okay when they had huge shouting matches in their yard. (This was during their early years there, when money was tight and many survival decisions had to be made as they worked nonstop to make their small adobe house livable.) “They heard us fighting and must have decided we were normal people!” she says.

In the early colonial days, life in these N.M. villages was really hard. Today, some of the problems have changed, but life remains hard. In the modern era, Spanish settlers and Native Americans were no longer waging gun battles over territory, but many small land holders lost their land to unscrupulous Anglos who knew how to work the new U.S. legal system. Poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, and other ills followed.

Charlotte and Mike got to know the village’s families as babies were born, grew up, and had children of their own. While hosting their own grandsons during the summers, Mike and Charlotte offered village kids acceptance and new experiences, such as tasting Romaine lettuce for the first time and swimming in the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa. They hired locals for construction projects at their home, realizing these men had artistic and craft skills that the wider world had overlooked.

For many months, Charlotte agonized over whether to publish Accidental Anthropologists, even though she’d changed all the names. Finally she sat down with some neighbors and read the book aloud to them.

“Have I gone too far?” she asked.

The response from “Perfecto”: “I tell the same kind of stories when our family gathers. I want my children and grandchildren to know this is the way life is here. It’s part of our culture.”

And “Pilar” said: “I could listen to your stories all day. This was better than watching a telenovela.”

(Disclaimer: I edited early versions of both books.)

Accidental Anthropologists was published in 2014 and continues to sell steadily, especially in N.M. bookstores. Why do you think it's so resilient?

Charlotte: The feedback I continue to receive comes from the fact that it is the only book written about a specific time frame that includes Vietnam vets and their relationship with their neighbors in a Spanish Northern New Mexico village.

Ramona: I know you've gotten some unexpected responses from readers far and wide. Do you want to share any? 

Charlotte: A number of readers have found their way to my door, in spite of my changing the names of people and places, including my pseudonym as author. A San Diego couple emailed via my publisher to ask about place names. They were connecting mileage to cities and villages, to no avail. We began a correspondence. The couple flew out to meet me and we became friends. The Pfaffs visit twice a year, timed around Las Vegas cultural events.

A recent couple found me via my acupuncturist, who has bought around 30 books to give to clients. By now, I’ve agreed to meet folks who enjoy Accidental Anthropologists because I’m curious to know what they have to say about it. 

One of my favorite stories is Chapter 10, “It took a village,” in which you describe how people go up to the cemetery on the hill when they need a break from their problems. Do you think they might be connecting with their ancestors there?

I also loved reading about how you drove in circles around the church as various people approached to find out why you were distraught. Do you want to say anything more about that experience?

Charlotte: The people here stay very connected to those who have passed on. I’m pretty sure parking at the cemetery has that connection. Over the years, Mike and I have experienced the same feeling. We lost all the “drinkers,” and they rest in peace in the little campo santo, so we continue to feel their presence whenever we are near there.

Times have changed in the village. We have lost so many neighbors it’s hard to imagine I would have that same experience (driving around the church). Though those of us who remain still care for one another.

You and Mike faced some pretty scary situations over the years. Do you think fearlessness is necessary in order to be accepted in a different culture? 

Charlotte: The biggest change for us came early on, when I stormed the village over an ugly rumor that I was on the “take” from a movie company. I knocked on every door in the village and gave a frantic speech about honesty. From that day forward my neighbors nearly bowed when they met me; I had everyone’s respect for standing up to gossip. The people here have great respect for fearlessness. I continue to wear that like a shawl!

Accidental Anthropologists opened my eyes to how our society judges disadvantaged people so harshly. For example, I saw how easy it is to get on the wrong side of the law enforcement and legal structure if you’re poor. Do you want to say anything about this?

Charlotte: Landing in the middle of a group of Vietnam vets with drug and alcohol problems touched the core of my being. I have always been sympathetic to down-trodden folks so it was natural for me to interact. The “drinkers” made it easy for us, as they respected our privacy and space. They knew we couldn’t enter their world of self-medication, and were grateful for our respect as human beings. They were hard workers and helped us in a number of ways throughout the years. We feel privileged to have been a part of their lives.

Has life in San Ignacio changed for you since Accidental Anthropologists was published? Are you happy you used a pseudonym?

Charlotte: I am happy I used a pseudonym for a couple of reasons: I was so insecure as an “author” I had a hard time writing my name over and over. The minute I changed my name to Claudia, my brain opened up and words flew out of me. My new name gave me distance and allowed me to feel free to write whatever came out of my head.

The other reason the pseudonym worked for me had to do with the village and our neighbors. I did not want to bring attention to San Ignacio or myself. I was pretty sure readers would be checking us out, and that proved to be true. I can’t tell you how many readers have told me they drove around villages trying to figure out where the story took place.

Someone in the real San Ignacio, north of Las Vegas, told a friend that people knocked on doors there asking about the book.

Me and My Magical Life begins with your life before you arrived in San Ignacio. A lot of people throw off the conventional life, but many of them crash and burn. You, on the other hand, discovered your true calling as an artist and have thrived. What was the hardest thing you ever had to do?

Charlotte: The hardest thing was to walk out the door of my old life. If it hadn’t been for my daughters, and Mike and Murray (a close friend), and the Abeyta family, I’m not sure I would have succeeded. Although, survival is a powerful force, so who knows how it might have played out.

Did you wrestle a lot with what to tell and what to leave out of Me and My Magical Life?

Charlotte:  I probably have enough untold stories to fill another book. I often wake up with that thought. It was easy to leave out negativity, and sometimes too much information. With both books I automatically wrote a chapter of equal length every time I sat down to write. It was like automatic writing, and self-editing. Very strange!

Writing Me and My Magical Life was a wonderful experience. I felt free to use my own name, and those of my friends and family. I felt like I had things to say of importance: mental health, women’s rights, belief in oneself. I hoped my book would be inspiring and educational. Most of all, I now trust the subconscious part of my brain completely. From that place, all the connections came together.

I’m about to start another book: My Two Felons and a Misdemeanor. This book will tell the stories of our three grandsons and how they got into trouble, and how they found their way out. The three of them are doing well and finding success in their lives. It’s a story worth telling. 

***

Accidental Anthropologists and Me and My Magical Life  are available at Tome on the Range in Las Vegas, N.M., and on Amazon.