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Mexican author Martín Casillas de Alba has written several books related to Lake Chapala
1990s onwards No Responses »
Martín Casillas de Alba, whose published works range from journalism and non-fiction to Shakespearean analysis, has published several Spanish language books related to Chapala, including two outstanding full-length novels. His family has lengthy and important connections to Chapala.
His grandfather was the architect Guillermo de Alba (1874-1935). Between 1895 and 1920, de Alba designed numerous fine buildings in Chapala, including the Hotel Arzapalo, the town's first modern hotel, which opened its doors in 1898, a second hotel, the Palmera (part of which is now the Presidencia Municipal) in 1907, several private residences, and the iconic Chapala Railroad Station (now the Instituto Cultural González Gallo), completed in 1920. He also completed numerous commissions in Guadalajara, including the city's first high-rise hotel, the Hotel Fenix (1912), and several fine homes for the city's elite.
In 1900, Guillermo de Alba married Maclovia ("Cova") Cañedo y González Hermosillo. The couple's only daughter, Guillermina ("Mina") de Alba y Cañedo (Martín Casillas' mother), was born in Guadalajara on 9 January 1902. She married José Luis Casillas y Cruz in Chapala in 1933. Their civil ceremony was held aboard a boat, Bremen, in the middle of the lake.
Mina and José Luis had three children, including architect Andrés Casillas de Alba (who clearly inherited his grandfather's genes and won the Premio Jalisco Arquitectura, 2017) and author and publisher Martín Luis Casillas de Alba, who was born in Mexico City in 1941.
Martín Casillas de Alba. Credit: El Informador.
Martín Casillas completed his high school education in Colegio Cervantes Costa Rica (despite its name, a Jesuit school in Guadalajara) and then studied chemical engineering at ITESO, the Jesuit university in Guadalajara. He admitted later in life that he had chosen the wrong subject for his degree and should have chosen to study English literature. He graduated in 1963 and then took postgraduate courses in applied mathematics at the University of Freiburg, Germany (1964-65).
After returning to Mexico he worked for IBM de México for 12 years as head of public relations and assistant to the company's president. In 1974, Casillas was the founding editor of Nonotza, the in-house magazine of IBM de México. Nonotza, published until 1994, was a quarterly magazine disseminating the latest scientific, technological and cultural developments. Casillas relinquished his editorship in 1976 to pursue other interests.
In 1976, Casillas took a storytelling workshop with innovative Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003) who was born in Honduras but lived most of his adult life in exile in Mexico City.
Casillas returned to the world of scientific publishing in 1978 when he was made editorial director for Ciencia y Desarrollo, the magazine of Conacyt, the National Science and Technology Council, a post he retained until 1980.
In 1980, Casillas founded his own publishing company, Martín Casillas Editores. Within the next five years he published more than 100 titles of Mexican literature. In 1986, he began publishing La Plaza and El Inversionista. La Plaza, published in Guadalajara, was a literary and cultural monthly subtitled "Crónicas de la Vida Cultural de Guadalajara." One of the many fascinating articles in this sadly short-lived publication was a transcription by Martín Casillas of his mother's account of her own wedding. In the previous issue, Casillas' sister, Mina Casillas, had reviewed the Posada Ajijic.
El Inversionista was a Mexico City business publication. In 1988, Casillas was one of the founders of the national financial daily El Economista; he began a regular column, "Juego de espejos", and remained the paper's managing editor until May 1994.
In the next decade he focused on writing several books, starting with La Villa de Chapala (1895-1933), published in 1994, a non-fiction account of some of the personalities and stories associated with Chapala's transformation into a tourist destination. Much of the same material was incorporated into his later work, ¡Salvemos a Chapala! (2004).
In 1995 he published his first novel, Confesiones de Maclovia (Confessions of Maclovia). Inspired by the life of his grandmother, Cova, this was planned as the first book in a trilogy related to Lake Chapala. The second volume in the proposed trilogy was released in 2002. In Las batallas del general, Casillas spins a fictionalized account of the life, loves and actions of General Ramón Corona. Corona was born in Puruagua, near Tuxcueca on the south shore of the lake, and was governor of the state of Jalisco at the time of his assassination in 1889. The final volume in the trilogy, which was never published, was provisionally entitled Los invitados de honor and was to be based on the events surrounding the gala opening of the Chapala railroad station (designed by the author's grandfather) on 8 April 1920.
In 2008, after taking a workshop in England with Richard Olivier, the son of famous British actor Sir Laurence Olivier, about Transformational Leadership (based on Shakespeare's The Tempest), Casillas began teaching at ITAM (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México), a private university with an outstanding business school and widely regarded as one of Mexico's top "think tanks". Casillas taught an Executive Development course there about leadership, based on lessons from Shakespeare. He has since given dozens of similar courses, workshops and lectures looking at the leadership lessons that can be learned from studying works such as Henry V, The Tempest and Julius Caesar. Casillas has also written, edited and published more than 40 works on Shakespeare and his plays.
In 2015, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), a Spanish language non-profit publishing group partly funded by the Mexican government, appointed Casillas as the head of its subsidiary in Spain.
Martín Casillas de Alba's autobiographical Fe de erratas en la vida de un editor was published in 2017.
We will take a closer look, in later posts, at the two Spanish language novels written by Martín Casillas de Alba that are related to Lake Chapala.
Marcela Alejandra Duharte Solís. 2017. "Divulgación y tecnología en México: la revista Nonotza" in Reflexiones Marginales, Año 6, #41 (Oct-Nov 2017).
Martín Casillas de Alba. 1994. La Villa de Chapala (1895-1933). Mexico City: Banca Promex; Martín Casillas de Alba, 2004. ¡Salvemos a Chapala! Mexico City: Editorial Diana.
Martín Casillas de Alba. 1995. Confesiones de Maclovia. Mexico City: Ediciones del Equilibrista.
Martín Casillas de Alba. 2002. Las batallas del general. Mexico City: Editorial Planeta.
Martín Casillas de Alba. 2017. Fe de erratas en la vida de un editor (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores).
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Posted by T B at 5:11 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, author-non-fiction
Juan Pablo Guzmán, author of a prize-winning novel about Lake Chapala
1950s No Responses »
Juan Pablo Guzmán, a renowned Guadalajara physician, wrote several books, including a novel – El gran Chapa – set at Lake Chapala. We will take a closer look at the novel, which won the inaugural Premio Jalisco for literature in 1950, and offers valuable insights into lakeside communities and culture, in a separate post.
In this post, we consider the life and work of its author, Juan Pablo Guzmán.
Juan Pablo Guzmán Alemán was born in Guadalajara on 26 June 1909. His father died when Juan Pablo was still in his teens. At the time of the 1930 census, Juan Pablo's mother, María Jesús Alemán viuda de Guzman, was head of a large household which included four children older than Juan Pablo (then almost 19 years of age) and three younger children.
The previous year, having just entered university to study medicine, Juan Pablo had won a statewide oratory competition, held in the Degollado Theater in Guadalajara, before going to on place second in a national competition in Mexico City. His younger brother, Victor, who also became a doctor, accompanied him on his trip to the capital.
Juan Pablo had completed his medical training and was practicing in Guadalajara when, at the age of 31, he married María Dolores Serratos on 29 October 1940. The couple's son, Juan Bernardo Guzmán Serratos, born in 1945, also entered the medical profession, training as a medical surgeon and odontologist (forensic dentist) and teaching at the University of Guadalajara.
Juan Pablo Guzmán was a multi-talented individual who combined his professional life as a gynecologist with active involvement in the arts as a poet, musician, painter, writer and dramatist. He published three books, the first of which – El gran Chapa, was set at Lake Chapala.
His second novel, a decade later was Llaga viva ("Open Sore"). It also won a Premio Jalisco. Guzmán's third book, Tres voces en tres cuentos, was published in 1997.
The two early novels are extremely difficult to find though copies are held by several U.S. university libraries and the Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco Juan José Arreola in Guadalajara.
When Llaga viva was published, in 1961, Winston Allin Reynolds, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Santa Barbara, supplied the introduction. The 181-page novel was enthusiastically reviewed by Dr. Alfonso Manuel Castañeda in El Informador who praised the author's "penetrating and scrupulous observation of people".
Castañeda described the succession of everyday characters that populates the pages of Llaga Viva as "pilgrims without a destination and migrants without a direction in the constant wanderings of life."
For a sense of the style of Llaga Viva, here is a loose translation of a short passage lamenting the fact that it has become money not knowledge that establishes a person's position in society:
"In the city you learn the urgency of money; the main thing in choosing a profession is to work out which one can most easily bring you wealth. People with experience, and all of society, had constantly yelled at him: Gold! It takes gold for you to live among us! It's no use if you stuff your head with books while your pockets are empty. The old days, when a man was considered a man on account of his knowledge and virtue, have passed. Do you have the gold? With that you will buy a place in society; you will buy the sensuality of all women; you will buy valuable friends; you will buy the glories that cultured citizens pursue; you will buy life…."
A sentiment that is surely even more true today than it was in the 1950s.
Alfonso Manuel Castañeda. 1961. "Llaga Viva." El Informador, 24 September 1961, 14.
Juan Pablo Guzmán Alemán. 1951. El gran Chapa. Guadalajara: Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco.
Juan Pablo Guzmán Alemán. 1961. Llaga viva. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara.
Juan Pablo Guzmán Alemán. 1997. Tres voces en tres cuentos. Guadalajara: Secretaría de Cultura, Gobierno de Jalisco.
El Informador, 25 May 1929, 6; 20 June 1929, 6.
Posted by T B at 5:35 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, novel
English-born novelist Leonora Baccante lived in Ajijic in the 1950s
Leonora Baccante had published two novels prior to living in Ajijic in the 1950s, at the same time as Eileen and Robert (Bob) Bassing.
Source: New York Evening Post, 7 March 1931
Baccante's novels are not set in Ajijic, but Baccante herself was the basis for the character of novelist Victoria Beacon, the central character in Eileen Bassing's novel, Where's Annie?
Little is known about Baccante, who is reported to have hated publicity, children and pets.
According to a short profile of her by Selma Robinson in the New York Evening Post (7 March 1931), "Mrs Baccante," who was born in London, England, "has lived for the past few years in New York, part of the time in Woodstock, part of the time with her sister in Manhattan." Robinson added that even Baccante's publishers "know nothing about her. She is a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl who looks Latin, although her Italian name is hers only by marriage." Baccante was born in about 1905.
A 1928 Kingston, New York, newspaper account describes Baccante as a "former New York World staff writer" (The New York World ceased publication three years later.)
Baccante's two novels are
Johnny Bogan: A Realistic Novel Of Violent Young Love (New York: Vanguard, 1931) and
Women Must Love (New York: Vanguard, 1932).
Johnny Brogan is set in a small town and is a character study and love story rolled into one. The striking cover art by Puerto Rican artist Raphael Desoto shows a young brunette undressing in front of a handsome guy in a bedroom. The novel is about a ladies' man Johnny Brogan, the son of a murderer, who falls in love with Cathy Willis, a girl who initiated their relationship at school. According to Baccante's friends, the character of Cathy is autobiographical.
A short piece by Baccante, "Can't we be Friends?", with illustrations by Ty Mahon, was published in the October 1931 issue of the College Humor magazine. Baccante also wrote an unpublished play, Making the man; a play in 3 acts, recorded as written in 1929 when she was living in New York City.
Baccante renewed the copyrights of her two novels in 1958 and 1960 respectively.
Note: This is an updated version of a post first published in 2014.
Posted by T B at 6:54 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, novelist
Novelist Joan Van Every Frost (1929-2012) lived in Jocotepec for more than 40 years
1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards No Responses »
Novelist Joan Van Every Frost, born 28 Feb 1929 in Los Angeles, California, lived in Jocotepec from 1966 to 2012. She died at age 83 on 6 June 2012 in Santa Barbara, California. Her father, Dale Van Every, was a famous writer and screenwriter most active in the 1920s and 1930s.
Joan gained an undergraduate degree in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1951 and a librarian certificate from the University of California at Berkeley. She served as a librarian after the second world war on US military bases in France and Germany, and was later the Head Librarian of the Santa Monica Public Library for several years.
Joan Van Every (then 35) married artist and photographer John Frost (41) on 26 September 1964 in San Bernadino, California. In 1966, the couple relocated to Mexico, living for a short time in Uruapan in Michoacán, before establishing their permanent home and John's photographic studio in Jocotepec on Lake Chapala. John maintained his commercial photography studio (specializing in aerial photography) in their home for more than 40 years.
Prior to finding their home in the village, the couple spent 6 weeks at the historic La Quinta inn in Jocotepec. Sadly, La Quinta, which had been an inn ever since 1824 and was one of a small number of truly historic buildings in the town, was wantonly destroyed in the 1990s.
Joan was an indefatigable supporter of numerous charitable organizations at Lakeside, including the pioneering Centro de Salud in Jocotepec, the Lakeside School for the Deaf. For many years, she helped coordinate medical consultations and surgeries for Chapala-area children via the Shriners organization. Joan was also the co-founder in the 1970s of Amigos de Salud (which in 1993 became the Programa Pro Niños Incapacitados del Lago), and was a co-founder of the Lakeside region's major annual fund-raising event: the Ajijic Chili Cook-off.
Using her married name of Joan Van Every Frost, Joan wrote six novels, several of them set in Mexico.
Her first novel, This Fiery Promise (Leisure Books, 1978), dedicated to Tam, is a historical romance set at the start of the Mexican Revolution. It tells the fiery adventures of a horse-loving American girl who marries a rich, much older Mexican hacienda-owner. Their lives become entangled in the Revolution, and she eventually flees by joining a circus. The novel covers lots of territory from Santa Barbara (California) to Nayarit, Guadalajara, Colima and the port of Manzanillo.
Lisa (New York: Leisure Books, 1979) is dedicated "For John, with all my love". This historical romance, set in 1880s Britain, unravels the complex relationships of a dysfunctional family, in the midst of scenes involving horses, fires, medical doctors, and class differences.
Her third novel includes scenes set in Guadalajara and at Lake Chapala. A Masque of Chameleons (Fawcett 1981) looks at the adventures and misadventures befalling a troupe of traveling actors in mid-nineteenth century Mexico. The theater troupe withstands lots of internal intrigue and external pressures as it tours Mexico, from Veracruz, Puebla, Mexico City and Cuernavaca to Morelia, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Guadalajara and Lake Chapala. This novel displays a sound background knowledge of Mexican history and is engagingly written.
This is how Frost first describes the troupe's arrival at Lake Chapala: "They finally came to a large body of water that stretched as far as they could see to the west, like an inland sea the color of a silver coin. Across the lake were green, brush-covered mountains, ancient dead volcanoes that had thrust themselves up when the world was still young to form this pocket cradling the endless lake." ( p 228)
In Kings of the Sea (Fawcett, 1982), the publisher's blurb claims that Gideon Hand is determined to endure all hardships as he struggles to forge a shipbuilding dynasty and to possess the woman he loves but cannot marry. Genius and passion hold sway in this sweeping saga of a shipbuilding dynasty.
Frost's fifth novel, Portrait in Black (Fawcett 1985) has a Santa Barbara portrait painter Crystal Perry as its main protagonist. Perry not only paints portraits of Santa Barbara's upper crust, but also paints horses, and she is quickly dragged into a web of extortion and murder.
Silvershine (Fawcett 1987) is set in Mexico, and looks at the drugs scene in the glittering Los Dorados hotel in Manzanillo, where swimwear designer Blaise Cory has opened a new boutique. A minor part of the action is set in Oaxaca (at Mitla). This is a tale of smuggling, money and corruption. The Los Dorados hotel is clearly based on Manzanillo's famed Las Hadas hotel complex.
All of Joan Van Every Frost's novels are well-crafted, and enjoyable light reading. While long out-of-print, copies are readily available via used books sites such as http://abebooks.com.
Joan was an active correspondent for the Guadalajara Reporter for many years. She wrote her first column for the paper in August 1975 and ended a column the following year by writing that, "There may be many irritations to living in a foreign country, but they dwindle to insignificance when we can revel in golden days, sunsets blazing red on towering thunderheads, and the comforting splash of rain as we lie warm in our beds at night."
This profile was originally published on 22 December 2014.
Jan Dunlap, aka "Big Mama", and her novel Dilemma
1960s, 1970s, 1980s No Responses »
Alice Janice ("Jan") Dunlap, who lived in Ajijic from 1967-1998, was born on 15 June 1927 in Addison, Texas, and died in Los Angeles, California, on 19 October 2018. Jan was one of eleven children born to Clinton Adolphus Dunlap and his wife Janice Blackburn and was suitably thrilled later in life when she discovered that she was a descendant of an aide to U.S. President George Washington.
Jan studied to be sociologist and was a member of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She had a son, Michael, from her first marriage (when only a teenager), and four children with Ramón Rivas Jr. from her third marriage. She met Rivas, from Puerto Rico, when both were studying at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas in the early 1950s. The couple lived for a decade in Puerto Rico, where on one occasion Jan met Fidel Castro.
Later, when Jan was studying at the University of Texas at El Paso, she met and married artist Wesley Penn. Penn had friends who lived at Lake Chapala and suggested that they live in Mexico. Jan quickly agreed when she learned that Mexico wanted more English teachers ahead of hosting the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
The couple decamped to Ajijic, with Jan's four children. Tragically, Penn was killed in 1970 when the car he was driving was hit by a bus on the Chapala-Guadalajara highway. Jan and her children remained in Ajijic where she became one of the village's more colorful and warm-hearted characters of the 1970s and 1980s. Jan felt as though nobody was a stranger and believed that anyone in need was worthy of help and assistance.
Known to everyone in Ajijic as "Big Mama", Jan ran a succession of restaurant-bars, boutiques and galleries, including El Tejabán, the Blackfoot Contessa Boutique, the Wes Penn Gallery, Big Mama's (on 16 de Septiembre) and El Tapanco. Jan was especially proud of having arranged an exhibit of Ruth Anaya paintings in El Tejabán that got the gallery (and Ajijic) listed in Who's Who in American Art. Jan was the "Grand Dame" of the "Rowdy Bunch" which contributed its positive energy to many Ajijic events.
Declining health forced Jan and her husband, Michael Shapiro, to move back to the States in 1998. Shortly afterwards, Jan founded Grandmothers Against Smoking, a campaign to help persuade young people not to smoke.
Jan finally realized one of her long-term dreams in 2017 when she published, shortly after her 90th birthday (and with a little help from me) her debut novel, Dilemma, an exciting tale about a drug-dealing cartel capo and a beautiful, youthful female DEA agent. The novel is loosely based on Ajijic gossip and her personal experiences in Mexico.
The novel, set mainly at Lake Chapala in Mexico, takes us back to the 1970s. Natalie, a beautiful young DEA agent, is sent to investigate an alleged king-pin in the drugs world who lives in Ajijic. Her life soon becomes far more complicated than she bargained for. The positive reviews on Amazon for this tale of international romance, drugs and intrigue speak for themselves.
The striking artwork used for the cover is by B.C.-based artist Oliver Rivas, one of Jan's grandsons.
Jan also completed several other works including a novel entitled With Money Dances the Dog, and associated screenplay, based on an infamous series of murders in Ajijic in the mid-1970s.
Jan was predeceased by two of her five children: Janina Rivas died in Mexico following a dog bite in 1973; Ricardo Rivas died in 2015. She leaves behind her husband, Michael, and three sons – Michael, Ramón and Roberto – as well as many grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.
Dilemma is available (print and ebook) via Amazon.
Big Spring Daily Herald, Big Spring, Texas: 13 February 1935, 8.
Guadalajara Reporter: 13 Dec 1975; 17 Jan 1976; 31 Jan 1976; 28 Feb 1976; 10 Sep 1977, 19; 15 Oct 1983.
Henrietta Clay County Leader, Henrietta, Texas: 11 June 1970.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in this series of mini-bios are welcome. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Sybille Bedford and her elegant prose about Lake Chapala
1940s 2 Responses »
The most elegant prose related to Lake Chapala ever written is almost certainly that by Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) in her first published work, A Sudden View, a book that New Yorker journalist Joan Acocella quite rightly thought should be read by everyone, whether or not they planned to visit Mexico.
Sybille (she disliked being called "Bedford") was a dedicated if not especially prolific author. By the time of her death, at the age of 94 in 2006, she had completed several semi-autobiographical novels and a handful of non-fiction works including a landmark biography of her early mentor and good friend Aldous Huxley.
A Sudden View was first published in 1953 and later re-issued as A Visit to Don Otavio, the title by which it is now generally known. The book was based on a trip to Mexico in 1946-47. The book opens in New York as the author and her traveling companion, Esther Murphy Arthur ("E" in the book), start their train journey south. After exploring Mexico City and its environs, they then traveled to Guadalajara via Lake Pátzcuaro and Morelia. The remainder of the book is set almost entirely at Lake Chapala, with several relatively short and adventurous forays to other parts of the country.
Sybille was born on 16 March 1911 in Charlottenburg, near Berlin, Germany. Her German father and English mother named her Freiin Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck. Sybille had a peripatetic childhood that precluded formal schooling, though she did pick up several languages. After her father died, she lived with her mother in Sanary-sur-mer in southern France. In the 1930s, Sanary was a magnet for a wave of intellectuals fleeing from other parts of Europe, particularly from Germany. These cerebral refugees, many of them fun-loving bohemians, included Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and – most importantly for Sybille – Aldous and Maria Huxley who became her mentors and inspiration. Occasional visitors also included D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda.
Sybille spent the war years in the United States where she met (and fell in love with) Esther Murphy Arthur, her traveling companion in Mexico.
A Visit to Don Otavio is best characterized as a "fictionalized travelogue." There is no doubting the essential authenticity of Sybille's descriptions of many of the places she and Esther visited in Mexico during their trip. Her accounts of Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Morelia, Mazatlán, Guanajuato, Querétaro, Acapulco, Taxco, Oaxaca and Puebla are convincing.
However, Sybille's descriptions of the various villages at Lake Chapala are as much fantasy as fact. For example, the name of the fictional village San Pedro Tlayacán (where Don Otavio's hacienda is located) may have been derived from the real-life villages of San Pedro Tesistán and San Antonio Tlayacapan.
When I first read A Visit to Don Otavio, more years ago than I care to remember, I thought that Sybille must have stayed at the Hacienda San Martín, located at the western end of the lake, near Jocotepec, but I now accept that her fictional hacienda was based on the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala.
On their first visit to Don Otavio's hacienda, Sybille and Esther had to abandon their borrowed car when the road beyond Chapala gave way to a "rutted trail" that passed "some stucco villas decaying behind tall enclosures. Sixty years ago, during the heydays of the dictatorship, Chapala had been a modish resort." The trail "consisted of two not always parallel ruts of varying depth and gauge, caked hard, strewn with boulders, cut by holes and traversed by ditches." [107-108] This is a very similar description to that given by Ross Parmenter when he drove from Chapala to Ajijic in March 1946.
Sybille Bedford moves her locations and characters around to suit her purposes. Several of the characters said to be living in Jocotepec in the book were people who actually lived in Ajijic. The novel's Richard Middleton and his much younger wife, Blanche, for example, were based on an English couple, Herbert and Georgette Johnson.
Val Biro. Illustration for A Visit to Don Otavio, Folio Society edition, 1990.
The lake itself is the ever-present backdrop to A Visit to Don Otavio. Sybille found the views across it and its changes of color enthralling. Early in her stay with Don Otavio, she remarks how "In the late afternoon it is smooth like gelatine and shot through with unexpected reverberated colours, ruby and amethyst, cornelian and reseda." [117] Some weeks later, it is dark by the time they return from Mazatlán but the lake is equally beautiful: "On the lake, the night was very clear, and filled with shooting stars. The mild water sparkled, phosphorescent, around our prow. Fish leaped, shone, and fell again. The shore lay softly, half-divined." [179]
By spring 1947, Sybille and Esther were readying themselves to return north. Looking back in her memoirs (Quicksands), Sybille reflected that leaving Mexico was something of a wrench: "Foreigners are apt to get stuck – oh those Anglo-American enclaves: it's the climate, the cheapness of living, the throngs of servants (rumour had got through about people now doing their own washing-up in England)." [Quicksands, 12-13]
By the summer of 1947, Sybille was back in Europe where she began writing her Mexico book in July 1949 while living in Rome. When A Visit to Don Otavio was published in 1953 it was a revelation and established Sybille as a serious writer with an individual style and viewpoint. In many ways it is a stunningly insightful work, penetrating the psyche of Mexicans of diverse backgrounds in a manner that is essentially timeless.
A Visit to Don Otavio marked the beginning of an impressive career, in which periods of self-doubt and introspection were punctuated by lengthy stints of powerful writing. A Visit to Don Otavio was followed in 1956 by Sybille's best-known novel, A Legacy, and a series of other books before she reached her peak with her brilliant work, Jigsaw, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989.
My sincere thanks to Fernando Partida-Rocha for helping explain the links between Sybille Bedford and the Villa Montecarlo via an exchange of emails.
Joan Acocella. 2005. "Piecework: The writings of Sybille Bedford." New Yorker, 18 April 2005.
Sybille Bedford. 1953. A Sudden View (London: Victor Gollancz); reissued as A Visit to Don Otavio (William Collins, 1960). Page numbers for quotations are from the Folio Society edition, 1990.
Selina Hastings. Undated. "Sybille Bedford remembered." The Royal Society of Literature website. [30 December 2018]
Fernando Partida-Rocha. 2017. "Sybille Bedford, genial autora de "A visit to Don Otavio"". El Informador, 19 June 2017.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Novelist Christopher Veiel lived at Lake Chapala in the early 1950s
According to American writer Oakley Hall, the novelist Christopher Veiel (born in 1925) was living at Lake Chapala at the same time he was in 1952. A New York Times reviewer described Veiel as looking "a little like a British F. Scott Fitzgerald."
It is not known what Veiel was working on, if anything, during his time in Mexico, but his first (and apparently only) novel was published two years later, in 1954, in the U.K. as Intrigue (London: H. Hamilton), and in the U.S. as Hearts and Heads (Boston, U.S.: Little, Brown and Company).
Michael Hargraves says that at the time of its publication Veiel was living in Connecticut, having settled there after some extensive traveling.
Veiel was also the translator (from French) of Francois Clement's book, The Disobedient Son (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956) in which "Juan, an ignorant but proud and ambitious Indian, learns the ways of power in Veracruz and Mexico City, and returns to his village to lead the fight against those attempting to become the village bosses."
The Kirkus Review of Hearts and Heads, describes it as "A frivolous entertainment" and "saucy and skittish". The novel "follows the emotional escapades of Edward Wallingford and Constance, his young wife, as their first months of marriage take them to Geneva where Edward does not find with Constance the sexual incentive he has had with other girls… Constance, on the other hand, while appreciative that Edward is "such a rock" finds something softer in Pierre – the brother of the housekeeper of their neighbor Carlos, and now their chauffeur. Constance decides to marry Pierre but postponing the admission to Edward, the three leave for England where Pierre, in a moment of petulant pride, bares the past and turns on Edward – with a poker. Edward almost dies, and both Constance and Pierre are tried but cleared when Edward comes to their defense…"
"A. Christopher Veiel" (it is unclear what name the initial A stood for) was born in Switzerland and educated at Chillon College and the University of Geneva. He became a teacher of French, German and Latin and retained his Swiss passport after moving to the U.S. in about 1949 to work at Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut.
Choate alumni, according to Wikipedia, include President John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, playwright Edward Albee, novelist John Dos Passos, investor Brett Icahn, philanthropist Paul Mellon, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, actors Glenn Close, Michael Douglas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bruce Dern, Paul Giamatti, and businesswoman Ivanka Trump, daughter of President Donald Trump.
Note: This is an updated version of a post first published on 7 July 2014.
Michael Hargraves. 1992. Lake Chapala: A Literary Survey (Los Angeles: Michael Hargraves).
New York Times, 24 July 1955, 89.
Posted by T B at 6:45 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, novelist, translator
Garland Clifton, author of "Wooden Leg John", lived at Lake Chapala in the 1960s
Garland Franklin Clifton was an American author who lived in the Chapala area in the 1960s. He wrote Wooden Leg John. Satire on Americans living in Mexico (apparently privately printed in Washington D.C., 1971). While the book is not set at Lake Chapala, it is highly probable that parts, or all of it, were written or conceived while Clifton was living there.
Wooden Leg John is written as a series of 20 letters dated from Christmas Day 1967 to Christmas Day 1968 from Bullard A. Loney (Bull A. Loney) to his "Uncle Sam". "The "Bull" has deserted his wife and is living it up in Mexico and on the U.S.-Mexico border. The book includes many verses and lyrics.
Back cover art of Garland Clifton's "Wooden Leg John, a satire on Americans living in Mexico".
Clifton also wrote American meccas in Mexico: Guadalajara, Chapala-Ajijic, Manzanillo: a detailed discussion of these three vacation and retirement areas of Mexico, a 27-page booklet published in Laredo, Texas, in 1966.
Clifton was born 6 December 1922 in Yardelle, Arkansas, USA, and died 29 December 2013 in Gulfport, Mississippi. In the preface to Wooden Leg John, Clifton describes himself as a "Scotch-Irish native-born Arkansas Mountaineer and the tenth of 14 children."
He joined the U.S. military in September 1940 and retired from military service in November 1960, having served overseas in New Guinea, the Philippines, Germany, Japan and Korea, by which time he had been awarded numerous decorations and ribbons and risen to be a U.S. Air Force master sergeant.
Not long afterwards, he married a Mexican girl, María. The couple had four children, and lived for some time in Chapala, before moving, in 1967, to Douglas, Arizona. By 1971, he was living in Washington D.C. with wife Maria (then aged 26), Manuel (8), Laura (7), Carmen (5) and Armando (1).
Clifton's quirky, sometimes piquant, sense of humor enlivens Wooden Leg John. Satire on Americans living in Mexico. Judging by his writing, Clifton would have been a highly entertaining, if somewhat provocative, dinner party guest.
Note: This is an updated version of a post first published on 30 May 2014.
Garland Franklin Clifton. 1971. Wooden Leg John. Satire on Americans living in Mexico. Privately printed in Washington D.C.
Ruby Woods-Robinson, M.S.L.S. "Garland Franklin Clifton" [accessed 4 May 2014]
Dane Chandos, part three: Anthony Stansfeld and the Mexican detective Don Pancho
1950s, 1960s No Responses »
Anthony Ralph Wolryche Stansfeld was born in Winchester, Hampshire, on 4 March 1913.
Cover of first edition (published by Michael Joseph)
It is unclear how he and Peter Lilley first met, though they were very close in age.
Continuing the pen name Dane Chandos, the duo wrote two travelogues: Journey in the Sun (a trip from Mexico to Spain) and The Trade Wind Islands (which takes the reader from Mexico to several Caribbean islands).
The two men also created the huarache-wearing Mexican detective Don Pancho and wrote two well-constructed stories about his crime-solving exploits: Boiled Alive and Three Bad Nights, for which they used the pen name (or more accurately pen name of a pen name) Bruce Buckingham.
Bruce Buckingham. 1956. Three Bad Nights. London: Michael Joseph (Reissued as Penguin edition, 1961).
Bruce Buckingham. 1957. Boiled Alive. London: Michael Joseph (Reissued as Penguin edition, 1961).
Dane Chandos, part two: Peter Lilley
The second strand of the pen name Dane Chandos, and indeed the originator of the name, was Peter Lilley. How, when and where Lilley first met Nigel Millett is currently unknown but they became literary collaborators and good friends during their time in Ajijic…
Peter Lilley is not known to have published anything under his own name, or any nom de plume, prior to the books about Ajijic.
The name Dane Chandos was conjured up by Lilley himself, since it combined his nickname at Stowe – "Dane", on account of his blond hair and square, Danish-looking jaw – with Chandos, the name of one of the school's boarding houses. Interestingly, though, Lilley had actually spent his own school years in a different house, Grafton.
Village in the Sun tells the story of building a house (located in real life in San Antonio Tlayacapan). The house was Peter Lilley's home in Mexico. In House in the Sun the author has added extra rooms for guests and taken on the role of amateur hotelier, "held hostage by maddening servants and equally unpredictable and maddening guests."
The two books share many of the same characters.
The final Dane Chandos book
Leslie Chater and his wife, Moreen, long-time friends of Lilley, eventually became the new owners of the house in San Antonio Tlayacapan.
A chance find there in a desk drawer by Moreen Chater caused her to revive the Dane Chandos brand in 1997, long after all three original Dane Chandos authors had died. Chater stumbled across a "scruffy folder" containing a manuscript of recipes "faintly typed and badly eaten by mice." Providentially, these proved to be Candelaria's original recipes, with notes and anecdotes added by Lilley. Chater used them to compile Candelaria's Cookbook, an unusual bilingual book of more than forty recipes (and related stories) sold as a fund-raiser to support projects benefiting children in San Antonio Tlayacapan.
Dane Chandos. 1945. Village in the Sun. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Dane Chandos. 1949. House in the Sun. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Sophie Annan Jensen. 1999. "Candelaria's Cookbook" (review) on MexConnect.com –
[25 May 2018]
Artist and serial prankster Jim Moran lived in Ajijic in the mid-1980s
1980s, 1990s onwards No Responses »
Ajijic has certainly attracted more than its fair share of strange and colorful characters over the years but perhaps nobody with quite so many true tales to spin as serial prankster Jim Moran.
By the time Moran "retired" to Ajijic, he was almost 80 years old and had put his pranks behind him. Tall, rotund, with a flowing white beard and a deliberate walk, he focused on his photography, art, writing and classical guitar playing.
James Sterling Moran (1908-1999) was one of the most original publicists and press agents in the U.S., pulling one stunt after another to boost the products, services or politicians he sought to promote. Moran never attended college but held a wide variety of jobs from tour guide to airline executive and radio studio manager. In 1989, Time called him, "the supreme master of that most singular marketing device–the publicity stunt."
In chronological order, Moran's most noteworthy pranks, many based on acting out old sayings, included selling a refrigerator to an Inuit in Alaska on behalf of General Electric (1938); spending 10 days to find a needle in a haystack to promote a real estate development (1939); leading a bull through a china shop on 5th Avenue in New York City (1940); changing horses mid-stream in the Truckee River, Nevada, during the 1944 US Presidential election; sitting on an ostrich egg for 19 days, until it hatched, to promote the film The Egg and I (1946); and opening an embassy in Washington D.C. for the fictitious country of Grand Duchy of Fenwick to advertise The Mouse That Roared (1959).
His best-known outright hoax was to paint an abstract – "the worst thing I could think of" – and get a friend to submit it to a Los Angeles Art Association show in November 1946 as the work of a previously-unknown artist, "Naromji". The work, entitled "Three out of Five", was accepted for an exhibition of abstract art.
Woman holding Naromji's "Three out of Five". (Life archive)
The Los Angeles Times described it as "an astonishing conglomeration of paint, chalk, magazine cut-outs and carmine fingernail polish." At the end of the month, Moran stepped forward to claim authorship, pointing out that Naromji was Moran spelled backwards, with a 'ji' added for confusion and that "Three out of Five" was the name of a hair restorer, since abstract painting always made him want to tear out his hair.
Moran wrote several books, including Sophocles, the Hyena: a fable (1954). The first edition was illustrated by Roger Duvoisin, but a later edition featured illustrations by Andy Warhol. Moran also wrote Why Men Shouldn't Marry (1969); How I became an authority on Sex (1973) and The Wonders of Magic Squares (1982).
Jim Moran. Sophocles the Hyena. Illustrated by Andy Warhol.
In Ajijic, the multi-talented and highly imaginative Moran was known as a writer, artist and photographer, as well as a skilled classical guitar player.
In 1986, the Galeria Gentes, run by master lithographer Bill Gentes, held a one-person exhibit of Moran's artwork. The show was comprised of about 100 works by "Naromji". A contemporary reviewer found that, "His use of brilliant color gives the works an alluring touch. His birds and other serious subjects are strikingly beautiful, while most of the rest convey something of the cosmic giggle to be expected from Jim Moran the prankster."
Ajijic watercolorist Enrique Velázquez remembers Jim Moran with great affection. He recalls Moran as having lived in Ajijic for several years from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. Velázquez prepared a series of stunningly beautiful illustrations for a children's book by Moran entitled Linda and the Magic Dream Bubble, a work that was apparently never published.
My sincere thanks to Ajijic watercolorist Enrique Velasquez for first bringing Jim Moran's artistic side to my attention.
Anon. 1986. "Portrait of the Artist" (Jim Moran). El Ojo del Lago, March 1986.
Ezra Goodman. "High Priest of Hoopla." The New York Times, 14 December 1947.
Los Angeles Times. 1946. "Gagster's masterpiece hung as authentic art." Los Angeles Times, 30 Nov 1946.
Douglas Martin. 1999. "James S. Moran Dies at 91; Master of the Publicity Stunt" (Obituary), New York Times, 24 October 1999.
Christopher Reed. 1999. "Jim Moran" (obituary), The Guardian, 1 December 1999.
Posted by T B at 5:55 am	Tagged with: artist, author-fiction, photographer
Dane Chandos, part one: Nigel Millett
1930s, 1940s 2 Responses »
In the 1940s, two superbly written books introduced readers in the U.S. and U.K. to life in the village of Ajijic. Both have remained perennial favorites on the must-read lists of anyone interested in Lake Chapala. Village in the Sun and House in the Sun were both written by "Dane Chandos", who later wrote several travel books.
Dane Chandos was not a real person but a pen name of two distinct writing duos. Peter Lilley and Stansbury (later Nigel) Millett wrote the early Dane Chandos books. After Millett's death, Lilley's partner for later Dane Chandos works was Anthony Stansfeld. All three men were well-educated Englishmen with an excellent ear for languages.
Stansbury Girtin Millett was born in London, England, on 23 October 1904.. .
Owing to the unauthorized and uncredited use of material from this post on a third-party website, this article has been removed from public view.
If you have a genuine interest in the subject matter, please contact us via the comments section and we can discuss terms and conditions.
The cover art has a tiny signature (below). If anyone knows who this cover artist is, or anything more about them, please get in touch!
Signature of cover artist, Village in the Sun.
Dane Chandos. 1945. Village in the Sun. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Published in London, U.K., with same title by Michael Joseph in 1948. Reissued in London by Country Book Club in 1953. Reissued in Mexico (Tlayacapan Press) in 1998.
Dane Chandos. 1949. House in the Sun. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. U.K. edition in 1950 by Michael Joseph. Reissued in Mexico (Tlayacapan Press) in 1999.
Dorothy Bastien, author of juvenile fiction, wrote at Chapala in the 1970s
Dorothy Bastien, a writer of juvenile fiction, and her husband Clarence Bastien appear to have lived in Chapala for about a decade in the 1970s. A brief note in the Guadalajara Reporter in 1972 says that Dorothy, living in Chapala, has just received an advance for a book accepted by the Teenage Book of the Month Club. The book in question must be Lori, published in New York by Scholastic later that year. Lori, her first book to be accepted for publication, is about a 17-year-old girl who is forced to spend the summer with her estranged father in Mexico while her boyfriend is back home in Texas.
Dorothy Bastien also wrote several other books: Westward to Destiny (1973), an historical account of Missouri and Oregon in the early and middle 1800s; The Night Skiers (1974); Shy Girl (1980); Remember to Love (1980); and I Want to Be Me (1981). She had previously written several articles and stories, including "Friendly Harvest", published by The Country Home Magazine in 1936.
Dorothy Bastien (née McNamara) was born on 14 March 1906 in Wisconsin. She married Clarence James Bastien in about 1932. The couple's son, James William Bastien, was born on 10 April 1934 in Bellingham, Washington. By 1940, the family was living in Portland, Oregon, where Dorothy was a teacher in the Tigard-Tualatin School District. She taught English and Latin for many years at Fowler Junior High School, where she introduced telephones into the Latin class. She described the positive impact of this idea in a piece for the November 1963 issue of the National Education Association Journal:
"Students who become ill at ease if they attempt to speak one word of Latin to the class will talk with some confidence over the telephone. Two students converse while the class listens in."
The Bastien's family home was at 7665 SW Oleson in the Portland neighborhood of Garden Home. Don Krom, a nephew of Dorothy Bastien, contributed to the Garden Home History Project with recollections of life there in the 1950s that shed some light on the kind of literary and intellectual circle in which the Bastien family grew up. Don recalls that Dorothy Bastien was in a writing group that met in Garden Home and included some well-known personalities: L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology) who was better known at that time for writing science fiction; Peg Bracken, author of humorous books on etiquette cooking, such as The I Hate to Cook Book; and Charlotte Goldsmith who wrote stories about war and planes for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications.
Dorothy Bastien's husband, Clarence, was musical and a violinist (and quite possibly also a high school teacher). The Bastiens' son James (1934-2005) became a professional pianist and educator who, with his wife Jane, wrote more than 300 books related to piano playing that have been used by millions of piano students, including the series Bastien Piano Library, Bastien Piano Basics and Music Through the Piano. Their books have been translated into 15 languages.
It is unclear when the Bastiens moved to Chapala, though Dorothy Bastien is recorded as taking a flight from Guadalajara to Mexico City in July 1968. Further details related to Dorothy and Clarence's time in Chapala have not yet surfaced but it appears that they lived there from about 1970 until Clarence's death on 5 July 1980, of respiratory failure, at the couple's home (5 de Mayo #224). Clarence was interred in the local cemetery.
Dorothy later moved to La Jolla, California, where she passed away on 19 May 1985, at the age of 79.
Guadalajara Reporter: 18 March 1972
New York Times. 2006. "James Bastien" (obituary). New York Times, 29 January 2006.
The News Leader (Staunton, Virginia): 6 Nov 1963, p 5.
Valley Morning Star (Harlingen, Texas), 25 Oct 1974, p 23.
Don Krom. 2017. "Dorothy McNamara Bastien and her writing group in Garden Home in the 1940s". Posted at website of Garden Home History, 9 April 2017.
Posted by T B at 5:27 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, children's fiction
American novelist Norman Mailer and sexual shenanigans in Ajijic
1950s, 1960s 1 Response »
Several Lake Chapala websites boast that the talented and multifaceted American author Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923-2007) is among those writers who found inspiration at the lake. But is their pride in his visits to the area misplaced? Mailer's biography has been exhaustively documented in dozens of books and there is no doubt he is a great writer. However, this post concentrates on the less savory side of his visits to Ajijic and Lake Chapala. Is he really someone local residents should be proud of?
According to normally reliable sources, Mailer visited the area more than once in the course of his illustrious career. Mailer's first visit to Lake Chapala was in the late 1940s with his first wife, Beatrice Silverman. Journalist Pete Hamill referred to this visit in his "In Memoriam" piece about Mailer:
"Moulded by Brooklyn and Harvard and the Army (he served as an infantryman in the Philippines in World War 2), he erupted onto the literary scene in 1948 with "The Naked and the Dead", the first great American novel about the war. For the first time, he had money to travel and hide from his fame. He went to Paris where he succumbed to the spell of Jean Malaquais, the critic and novelist. He went to Lake Chapala, where he did not succumb to the charms of the American expatriates."
This is presumably the occasion referred to by Michael Hargraves when he wrote dismissively that Mailer "only passed through Ajijic back in the late 1940s to have lunch".
While Mailer may not have fallen immediately in love with Lake Chapala and its American expatriates, he certainly grew to love Mexico and spent several summers in Mexico City during the 1950s. In July 1953, and now with painter Adele Morales (who became his second wife the following year) in tow, Mailer was renting a "crazy round little house" a short distance outside Mexico City, in the Turf Club (later the Mexico City College). Mailer described the house in a letter that month to close friend Francis Irby Gwaltney :
"At the moment we're living at a place called the Turf Club which is a couple of miles out of the city limits of Mexico City in a pretty little canyon. We got a weird house. It's got a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room shaped like a semicircle with half the wall of glass, and a balcony bedroom. It looks out over a beautiful view and is furnished in modern. This is for fifty-five bucks a month."
In another letter (dated 24 July 1953) from the Turf Club, Mailer was clearly referring to Ajijic when he wrote that "There are towns (Vance was in one) where you can rent a pretty good house for $25 a month and under." Mailer was referring to novelist Vance Bourjaily, a long-time friend who lived and wrote in Ajijic in 1951.
In October 1953, Mailer was guest speaker at the Mexico City College (then in its Colonia Roma location) at the fall session opening of its Writing Center, along with Broadway producer Lewis Allen. Bourjaily also gave lectures at the Mexico City College.
Norman Mailer book cover
By a not-entirely-surprising coincidence, one of the owners of Turf Club property at that time was John Langley, a former concert violinist living on insurance payouts following a shooting accident that had cost him the index finger of his left hand. During the 1950s, Langley spent most of his time at his lakefront home in Ajijic. (The 1957 Life Magazine article about the village includes a photograph of Langley, at his Ajijic home, relaxing with Jeonora Bartlet, who later became the partner of American artist Richard Reagan). Langley and Mailer definitely knew each other and more than likely shared the odd joint.
Struggling to complete a worthy follow-up novel to The Naked and the Dead, Mailer found that smoking pot gave him a sense of liberation. Biographer Mary V. Dearborn quotes Mailer as writing that, "In Mexico… pot gave me a sense of something new about the time I was convinced I had seen it all".
She then connects this to Mailer's cravings for sexual experimentation:
"But it was also bringing out a destructive, event violent side to his nature. Friends have recalled some ugly scenes in Mexico and hinted at sexual adventures that pressed the limits of convention as well as sanity."
In 1955, Mailer co-founded The Village Voice (the Greenwich Village newspaper in New York on which long-time Lake Chapala literary icon and newspaper editor Allyn Hunt later worked) and in the late 1950s or very early 1960s, Mailer and Adele were back in Mexico, living for some months in Ajijic.
In his obituary column, Hunt described how Mailer "discovered weed when he lived in Greenwich Village" and then "began using marijuana seriously", before asserting that when Mailer and Adele "landed in Ajijic, their consumption of grass and their sexual games continued." This is supported by Mack Reynolds, another journalist and author living in Ajijic at about that time. In The Expatriates, Reynolds, who eventually settled in San Miguel de Allende, recounts a more-than-somewhat disturbing story told him by the aforementioned John Langley:
"A prominent young American writer, who produced possibly the best novel to come out of the Second World War, had moved to Ajijic with his wife. His intention was stretching out the some $20,000 he had netted from his best seller for a period of as much as ten years, during which time he expected to produce the Great American Novel. However, he ran into a challenge which greatly intrigued him. Their maid was an extremely pretty mestizo girl whose parents were afraid of her working for gringos. They had heard stories of pretty girls who worked for Americans, especially Americans in the prime of life, and our writer was still in his thirties. Still, the family needed the money she earned and couldn't resist the job. After the first week or two, the maid revealed to the author's hedonistically inclined wife that each night when she returned home her parents examined her to discover whether or not she remained a virgin.
To this point the author hadn't particularly noticed the girl, but now he was piqued. The problem was how to seduce her without discovery and having the authorities put on him by the watchful Mexican parents. He and his wife consulted with friends and over many a rum and coke at long last came up with a solution.
The girl, evidently a nubile, sensuous little thing, which probably accounted for her parents' fear, was all too willing to participate in any shenanigans, especially after she'd been induced to smoke a cigarette or two well-laced with marijuana. The American author and his wife procured an electrical massage outfit of the type used by the obese to massage extra pounds off their bodies. They then stretched the girl out on a table, nude, and used the device on her until she was brought to orgasm over and over again."
These brief descriptions of Mailer's visits to Lake Chapala suggest that websites may like to rethink his inclusion on their list of the great writers inspired by the lake and its friendly communities. Mailer clearly pushed the bounds of friendship well beyond the reasonable. (Perhaps a Mailer biographer reading this can pinpoint precise dates for Mailer's visits, and suggest some of his more positive contributions to the area?)
Mailer does have at least one additional connection to Ajijic via the Scottish Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), who worked on his controversial novel Cain's Book (1960) in Ajijic in the late 1950s. Shortly after its publication, and live on camera in New York, Trocchi shot himself up with heroin during a television debate on drug abuse. Already on bail (for having supplied heroin to a minor), and with a jail term seemingly inevitable, Trocchi was smuggled across the border into Canada by a group of friends (Norman Mailer included), where he took refuge in Montreal with poet Irving Layton.
Mailer's novels include The Naked and the Dead (1948); Barbary Shore (1951); The Deer Park (1955); An American Dream (1965); Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967); The Executioner's Song (1979); Of Women and Their Elegance (1980); Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984); Harlot's Ghost (1991). He also wrote screenplays, short stories, poetry, letters (more than 40,000 in total), non-fiction works and several collections of essays, including The Prisoner of Sex (1971).
Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction with The Armies of the Night (1969) and a Pulitzer for Fiction with his novel The Executioner's Song (1980).
Anon. 1953. "Writers hear Mailer speak", in Mexico City Collegian, Vol 7 #1, p1, 15 October 1953.
Mary V. Dearborn. 2001. Mailer: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Pete Hamill. 2007. In Memoriam: Mailer y Norman. (Published, translated into Spanish in Letras Libres, December 2007, pp 42-44.
Allyn Hunt. 2007. "Norman Mailer, Contentious Author And Provocateur Who Died A Death He'd Have Scoffed At…", Guadalajara Reporter 23 November 2007
J. Michael Lennon (editor) 2014. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Random House.
Mack Reynolds. 1963. The Expatriates. (Regency Books, 1963)
Posted by T B at 5:41 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, author-non-fiction, novelist
Novelist and playwright Ray Rigby (1916-1995) lived at Lake Chapala in the 1970s
English novelist and playwright Raymond "Ray" Rigby was born in Rochford, England, in 1916 and died in Guadalajara aged 78 on 19 May 1995.
Ray Rigby, ca 1970
In 1972, Rigby turned his back on a successful Hollywood career to move to Mexico. He lived initially in Jocotepec and for a short time in San Antonio Tlayacapan. He married María Cristina Quintero in Guadalajara in 1975. The couple lived in Jocotepec for several years before moving to the outskirts of Guadalajara in about 1980.
Rigby, who claimed to be a descendant of Saint John Rigby, one of 40 English martyrs canonized in 1970, had a troubled early life, doted on by his mother but abandoned by his father. It led to him finding it a challenge to form lasting partnerships, as evidenced by his five marriages, the last of which was by far the most successful. Rigby had five daughters, all born prior to his move to Mexico.
During the second world war, Rigby served as a private with the British Eighth Army in North Africa, but got into trouble due to various nefarious activities, and spent two spells in British field punishment centers. His experiences there would later form the basis for his award-winning novel The Hill, which he later turned into the famous anti-war movie of that name starring Sean Connery.
Rigby's writing career began in 1948, when he began to write for television series, documentaries, radio and theatre. His greatest success came in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was employed as a screenwriter by MGM, 7 Arts, Warner Brothers, David Wolper Productions, Nat Cohen, 20th Century Fox, John Kohn Productions and Associated British Productions.
The screenplays and adaptations for numerous TV series and movies that Rigby worked on included: The End Begins (1956); Shut Out the Night (1958); Armchair Mystery Theatre (1960); The Avengers (1961); The Night of the Apes (1961); Operation Crossbow (1965) and his own masterpiece, The Hill (1965).
The Hill won the 1966 BAFTA Film Award for Best British Screenplay, the 1965 Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, and the 1966 Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for the Best British Dramatic Screenplay. It was translated into 13 languages and enjoyed a resurgence of interest following the break-up of the former Soviet Union.
Rigby's novels, several of which are largely autobiographical, were The Hill (1965); Where Have All The Soldiers Gone? (1966); Jackson's War (1967); Jackson's Peace (1974); Jackson's England (1979); and Hill Of Sand (1981) (written as a sequel to The Hill).
As can be seen from their publication dates, several of these novels were completed after Rigby moved to Mexico.
Rigby was always positive and cheerful and led a very disciplined life. He would "exercise" by walking round and round the small patio of his home on the outskirts of Guadalajara every morning for at least an hour, a habit possibly instilled during his spells in detention. He also had specific times set aside for writing and for socializing. He loved cooking and would watch and re-watch classic old Mexican movies. At the same time, he was one of the most gracious hosts imaginable, with a never-ending treasure chest of amazing experiences and stories. I first met him in about 1987 and we quickly became good friends. Indeed, it was Rigby who urged me to start writing and who provided moral support during my first struggling attempts, provided I visited him at a time when he wasn't exercising or writing.
Rigby was a born raconteur, with keen street-smarts and a ready wit. Author Alex Grattan was not exaggerating when he described Ray in a memorial piece as a "world class wit and a fabulous story teller".
While living in Jocotepec, Rigby had numerous run-ins with the local postmaster who was apparently accustomed at that time to check all incoming mail personally for any cash or valuables.
In 1973, Rigby and Wendell Phillips of Ajijic sold their joint script Ringer, written at Lakeside, to Universal Studios for a 90-minute pilot TV film. The two authors traveled to Hollywood to make the sale. This is almost certainly the last direct contact Rigby had with Hollywood.
Ray Rigby died in Guadalajara in 1995; his papers are in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
This post was first published in April 2015 and was revised in 2018. I owe a massive personal debt to Ray for having encouraged me to begin writing non-fiction articles about Mexico. Without his initial enthusiasm, none of my books (or this series of posts about artists and writers associated with Lake Chapala) would ever have seen the light of day.
Alex Gratton. Remembering Ray Rigby, El Ojo del Lago, July 1995
Guadalajara Reporter, 16 Dec 1978, 23.
Informador 6 August 1982, p 20-C
Posted by T B at 6:44 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, novelist, playwright
Author Vance Bourjaily lived and worked in Ajijic in 1951
Author, playwright and lecturer Vance Bourjaily (1922-2010) lived in Ajijic during the summer of 1951.
Bourjaily was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 17 September 1922. Writing was in his blood: his father was a journalist and his mother wrote feature articles and romance novels. By the time he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1947, he had already been commissioned to write a novel about a young man coping with the experiences of war. This first novel, The End of My Life (1947), established Bourjaily's reputation as a fine writer. Bourjaily's later novels explored other great American themes, though none of them garnered the same degree of praise as his debut novel.
Owing to the unauthorized and uncredited use of material from this post on a third-party website, the remainder of this article has been removed from public view.
Vance Bourjaily in the 1960s. Credit: patricktreardon.com
By toss of a coin in Chapala, Jack Vance won the opportunity to write an amazing novel
Jack Vance was a successful mystery, fantasy and science fiction author who wrote more than a dozen books and also wrote TV screenplays.
He and his wife Norma spent several months in Mexico traveling with Frank Herbert (author of Dune) and his wife Beverly and their two young sons in the second half of 1953.
Vance had met the then less successful Herbert a year earlier in California, and the two had become friends and writing companions, sometimes working on joint projects. They decided to visit Mexico in search of new experiences and stimulation. The Vance-Herbert friendship was the start of one of the greatest literary bromances related to Lake Chapala.
Many aspects of the families' joint trip to Mexico in the Vances' new blue Jeep station wagon are endearingly told by Herbert's elder son, Brian, in Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert.
Selection of covers of books by Jack Vance
Vance and his wife Norma bought a new blue Jeep station wagon for the trip and the families shared driving, expenses and domestic tasks. After stopping briefly at a roadside monument marking the Tropic of Cancer, Norma accidentally left her purse on the car as they drove away. By the time they made a quick U-turn to recover the purse, which contained Jack's favorite fountain pen (Vance was accustomed to writing long-hand whereas Herbert used a typewriter), it had been run over by another vehicle and the pen squashed.
A few days later they reached Chapala and rented a large house in the village. Brian Herbert describes the lake and surrounding farmland before writing that,
"A fishing and artists' colony, Chapala was much favored by tourists, especially Americans. The town, while small, boasted one of the world's great beer gardens – a large tavern by the lake that had outdoor seating under a shady, striped canvas roof. On hot days, my parents and the Vances could be found there, cooling themselves in the shade. Sunsets on the lake were spectacular."
The "two-story adobe and white stucco house, which had been converted to a duplex" rental property was on the hillside a block from the lake. Strict silence was enforced during the mid-morning to mid-afternoon "writing hours", so that both men could concentrate on developing plots and characters.
While the writers did cooperate on some "joint ventures" while in Chapala, they each also wrote short stories, hoping to sell some to magazines north of the border and thereby extend their stay in Mexico.
According to San Francisco book and art dealer Tim Underwood who edited a work about Vance, the origins of his futuristic novel To Live Forever (1956) date back to 1953 at Lake Chapala:
"One night Frank and Jack tossed around an idea for a novel and afterward flipped a coin to see who would write it. Jack won the toss and the book became To Live Forever."
It should be noted that To Live Forever was Betty Ballantine's choice for the title, not the author's. Well received by critics, it was later renamed Clarges.
After two months in Chapala, with funds running low, the Vances and Herberts decided to move to the larger, lower-cost city of Ciudad Guzmán in southern Jalisco. After about a month in Ciudad Guzmán, with funds running low, the group returned to the U.S. and then shared the Vances' farmhouse in Kenwood, California, for several weeks.
John Holbrook Vance was born in San Francisco on 28 August 1916 and died in Oakland on 26 May 2013. He wrote more than 60 books. In addition to work published under "Jack Vance", he published 11 mystery stories as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen as well as single titles using various different pen names, including Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See and Jay Kavanse.
Vance, educated at the University of California Berkeley, held a variety of jobs prior to serving in the Merchant Marine and becoming an established writer.
Described by Carlo Rotella (in a 2009 profile for the New York Times Magazine) as "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices", Vance won numerous awards, including the Edgar Award (1960), the Hugo Award (1963, 1967), the Nebula Award (1966), the Jupiter Award (1975), the Achievement Award (1984), the Gilgam's Award (1988), the World Fantasy Award (1990) and the Grand Master Award (1997).
Jack Vance: Official Website
Brian Herbert. 2003. Dreamer of Dune: the biography of Frank Herbert. (New York: Tom Doherty Associates).
Erik Jorgensen. 2014. "'The Spice' Flows From Santa Rosa", Oak Leaf (SRJC's Student Newspaper), 8 December 2014.
Carlo Rotella. 2009. "The Genre Artist", The New York Times Magazine, 15 July 2009.
Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (eds). 1980. Jack Vance. (Taplinger Publishing Company).
Jack Vance. 2009. This Is Me, Jack Vance! Or, More Properly, This Is "I" (Subterranean Press).
David B Williams. "Vance Museum – Miscellany – Biographical Sketch".
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
How Lake Chapala and some cookies led Frank Herbert to write Dune, the all-time sci-fi classic
Near the start of his writing career, an impecunious Frank Herbert, the genius behind the epic science fiction novel Dune, lived in the town of Chapala for several months. It was September 1953 and Herbert was 32 years old and struggling to make a living as a writer.
Herbert would not have been in Chapala at all had he not met fantasy writer Jack Vance for the first time a year earlier. The two men were about the same age, but Vance was already a successful writer known for his science fiction "pulps" and was making decent money writing scripts for Captain Video, a popular TV show. Herbert was a reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, had not yet found much success as a writer, and was struggling to pay the family bills.
As the two men got to know each other they talked of joint writing projects and of the two families traveling together to Mexico in search of new experiences and stimulation for their work.
This joint trip to Mexico, endearingly told by Herbert's elder son, Brian, in Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert, was the start of one of the greatest literary bromances related to Lake Chapala. Brian was only six years old at the time so much of what he writes is presumably based on notes written by his father and recollections shared by his mother, Beverly.
Frank Herbert, 1952. Photo by Jack Vance (used in Jorgensen 2014 by courtesy of Jack Vance estate)
While the writers did cooperate on some "joint ventures" while in Chapala, each of them also wrote short stories, hoping to sell some to magazines north of the border and thereby extend their stay in Mexico. Herbert was also working on a psychological thriller set in a submarine, serialized in Astounding magazine as "Under Pressure", and later turned into the book The Dragon in the Sea (1956).
Herbert also completed a humorous short piece entitled "Life with Animalitos", submitted to Reader's Digest but never published.
After two months in Chapala, with funds running low, the Vances and Herberts decided to move to the larger, lower-cost city of Ciudad Guzmán in southern Jalisco. Shortly after arriving in the city, Herbert was invited to the home of a retired Mexican Army general. When sweet cookies were brought round, Herbert hungrily consumed two before discovering they were laced "with the most expensive North African hashish in the world" and experiencing hallucinations.
This was the initial experience that gave Herbert the idea for melange, the fictional spice found only on the planet Dune that was "the most important substance in the universe". According to Herbert's son, "Paul Atreides's experiences with that drug [in the novel] mirror the author's personal experiences."
After about a month in Ciudad Guzmán, and almost out of funds, the group returned to the U.S. and then shared the Vances' farmhouse in Kenwood, California, for several weeks.
Herbert eventually found his financial footing, in part by writing speeches for Republican senator Guy Cordon. In 1959 he began work on Dune (published as a hardback in 1965) which opened all kinds of literary doors and enabled him to achieve the success he had previously only dreamed about.
Dune, one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and was the first major ecological science fiction novel. The movie version of Dune in 1984, screenplay by David Lynch, was shot entirely in Mexico: at Churubusco Studios, Mexico City; Samalayuca sand dunes in Chihuahua; and at Puerto Peñasco and the nearby El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar in Sonora.
Many elements from Dune – including warring noble houses, "aura" spice and "moisture farming" – are evident in the later Star Wars movies. Herbert was the first to recognize this and formed, with a number of like-minded colleagues a lighthearted club called the "We're Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society".
Herbert wrote more than twenty other novels, including The Green Brain (1966), The Santaroga Barrier (1968), Hellstrom's Hive (1973), The Dosadi Experiment(1977) and The White Plague (1982).
Science fiction fans everywhere should be eternally grateful that Frank Herbert accompanied his friend Jack Vance to Chapala, and that he then ate those two cookies at the General's house in Ciudad Guzmán.
Frank Patrick Herbert, Jr., was born on 8 October 1920 in Tacoma, Washington, and died on 11 February 1986 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Wikipedia. Frank Herbert.
Artist and writer Allyn Hunt has lived in Jocotepec since the 1960s
1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards 12 Responses »
Artist and writer Allyn Hunt has lived in the Lake Chapala area since the mid-1960s. Hunt was the owner and editor for many years of the weekly English-language newspaper, the Guadalajara Reporter. His weekly columns for the newspaper quickly became legendary. (Hunt's wife, Beverly, also worked at the Guadalajara Reporter and later ran a real estate office and Bed and Breakfast in Ajijic.)
Hugh Allyn Hunt was born in Nebraska in 1931. His mother, Ann, was granted a divorce from her husband J. Carroll Hunt, the following year. Allyn Hunt grew up in Nebraska before moving to Los Angeles as a teenager.
He studied advertising and journalism at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where he took a creative writing class under novelist and short story writer Willard Marsh. Marsh had known Ajijic since the early 1950s and later wrote a novel set in the village.
At USC, Hunt was associate editor of Wampus, the USC student humor magazine, and according to later bios he also became managing editor of the university newspaper, the Daily Trojan.
After graduating, Hunt worked as public relations representative for Southern Pacific Railroad, and edited its "house organ", before becoming publicity director and assistant to director of advertising for KFWB radio in Los Angeles. Hunt also worked, at one time or another, as a stevedore, photographer's model, riding instructor and technical writer in the space industry.
Living in Los Angeles gave Hunt the opportunity to explore Tijuana and the Baja California Peninsula. As he later described it, he became a frequent inhabitant of Tijuana's bars and an aficionado of Baja California's beaches and bullfights.
Hunt and his wife, Beverly, moved to Mexico in 1963, living first in Ajijic and then later in the mountainside house they built in Jocotepec. They would remain in Mexico, apart from two and a half years in New York from 1970 to 1972.
Winnie Godfrey. Portrait of Allyn & Beverly Hunt, (oil, ca 1970)
This portrait of Allyn and Beverly Hunt was painted by Winnie Godfrey who subsequently became one of America's top floral painters.
In their New York interlude, Hunt wrote for the New York Herald and the New York Village Voice, and apparently also shared the writing, production and direction of a short film, released in 1972, which won a prize at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany and was shown on European television. (If anyone knows the title of this film, or any additional details about it, please get in touch!)
When the Hunts returned from New York, they decided to build a house in Nextipac, in Jocotepec. They moved into their house, "Las Graciadas", towards the end of 1973. The following year, they agreed to purchase the Guadalajara Reporter. They became owners and editors of the weekly newspaper in 1975 and Hunt would be editor and publisher of the Guadalajara (Colony) Reporter for more than 20 years. Hunt's numerous erudite columns on local art exhibitions have been exceedingly useful in my research into the history of the artistic community at Lake Chapala.
As a journalist, Hunt also contributed opinion columns to the Mexico City News for 15 years, and to Cox News Service and The Los Angeles Magazine.
As an artist, Hunt exhibited numerous times in group shows in Ajijic and in Guadalajara. For example, in April 1966, he participated in a show at the Posada Ajijic that also featured works by Jack Rutherford; Carl Kerr; Sid Adler; Gail Michel; Franz Duyz; Margarite Tibo; Elva Dodge (wife of author David Dodge); Mr and Mrs Moriaty and Marigold Wandell.
The following year Hunt's work was shown alongside works by several Guadalajara-based artists in a show that opened on 15 March 1967 at "Ruta 66", a gallery at the traffic circle intersection of Niños Héroes and Avenida Chapultepec in Guadalajara.
In March-April 1968, Hunt's "hard-edged paintings and two found object sculptures" were included in an exhibit at the Galería Ajijic Bellas Artes, A.C., at Marcos Castellanos #15 in Ajijic. (The gallery was administered at that time by Hudson and Mary Rose).
Later that year – in June 1968 – Hunt showed eight drawings in a collective exhibit, the First Annual Graphic Arts Show, at La Galeria (Ocho de Julio #878) in Guadalajara. That show also included works by Tom Brudenell, John Frost, Paul Hachten, Peter Huf, Eunice Hunt, John K. Peterson, Eugenio Quesada and Tully Judson Petty.
The following year, two acrylics by Hunt were chosen for inclusion in the Semana Cultural Americana – American Artists' Exhibit at the Instituto Cultural Mexicano Norteamericano de Jalisco in Guadalajara (at Tolsa #300). That show, which opened in June 1969, featured 94 works by 42 U.S. artists from Guadalajara, the Lake area and San Miguel de Allende.
The details of any one-person art shows of Hunt's works in the U.S. or Mexico remain elusive. (Please get in touch if you can supply details of any other shows in which Allyn Hunt's art was represented!)
In the early-1960s, Hunt was at least as keen to become an artist as a writer. Rex Oppenheimer later recalled in an article for Steel Notes Magazine that when he visited his father in Zapopan (on the outskirts of Guadalajara) in 1965,
"Among the first of my father's friends that I met were Allen and his wife Beverly. Allen was an artist. He looked like a beatnik or incipient Hippie and had a very cool house out in Ajijic near Lake Chapala. After touring the house and taking in his artwork, we went up on the roof. I don't remember the conversation, but there was a great view out over the lake, and I got totally smashed on Ponche made from fresh strawberries and 190 proof pure cane alcohol."
Despite his early artistic endeavors, Hunt is much better known today as a writer of short stories. His "Acme Rooms and Sweet Marjorie Russell" was one of several stories accepted for publication in the prestigious literary journal Transatlantic Review. It appeared in the Spring 1966 issue and explores the topic of adolescent sexual awakening in small-town U.S.A. It won the Transatlantic's Third Annual Short Story Contest and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1967 & the Yearbook of the American short story, edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett. Many years later, Adam Watstein wrote, directed and produced an independent movie of the same name. The movie, based closely on the story and shot in New York, was released in 1994.
One curiosity about that Spring 1966 issue of Transatlantic Review is that it also contained a second story by Hunt, entitled "The Answer Obviously is No", written under the pen name "B. E. Evans" (close to his wife's maiden name of Beverly Jane Evans). The author's notes claim that "B. E. Evans was born in the Mid-West and lived in Los Angeles for many years where he studied creative writing under Willard Marsh. He has lived in Mexico for the past year and a half. This is his first published story."
Later stories by Hunt in the Transatlantic Review include "Ciji's Gone" (Autumn 1968); "A Mole's Coat" (Summer 1969), which is set at Lake Chapala and is about doing acid "jaunts"; "A Kind of Recovery" (Autumn-Winter 1970-71); "Goodnight, Goodbye, Thank You" (Spring-Summer 1972); and "Accident" (Spring 1973).
Hunt was in exceptionally illustrious company in having so many stories published in the Transatlantic Review since his work appeared alongside contributions from C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Malcolm Bradbury, V. S. Pritchett, Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Ted Hughes, Joyce Carol Oates, and his former teacher Willard Marsh.
Hunt also had short stories published in The Saturday Evening Post, Perspective and Coatl, a Spanish literary review.
At different times in his writing career, Hunt has been reported to be working on "a novel set in Mexico", "a book of poems", and to be "currently completing two novels, one of which is set in what he calls the "youth route" of Mexico-Lake Chapala, the Mexico City area, Veracruz, Oaxaca and the area north and south of Acapulco", but it seems that none of these works was ever formally published.
Very few of Hunt's original short stories can be found online, but one noteworthy exception is "Suspicious stranger visits a rural tacos al vapor stand", a story that first appeared in the Guadalajara Reporter in 1995 and was reprinted, with the author's permission, on Mexconnect.com in 2008.
Broadcasting (The Business Weekly of Radio and Television), May 1961.
Daily Trojan (University of Southern California), Vol. 43, No. 117, 21 April 1952.
Martha Foley and David Burnett (eds). The Best American Short Stories 1967 & the Yearbook of the American short story.
Guadalajara Reporter. 2 April 1966; 12 March 1967; 27 April 1968; 15 June 1968; 27 July 1968; 5 April 1975
The Lincoln Star (Nebraska). 15 August 1932.
Rex Maurice Oppenheimer. 2016. "Gunplay in Guadalajara". Steel Notes Magazine.
Posted by T B at 5:18 am	Tagged with: author-fiction, painter, short stories
Best-selling novelist Barbara Bickmore: Ajijic's very own Cinderella
American novelist Barbara Bickmore was born in Freeport, New York, on 10 June 1927 and died in Anacortes, Washington, on 23 February 2015 at the age of 87. She lived and wrote in Ajijic from 1990 to 1997 and often described these seven years in later interviews as the happiest years of her life.
Bickmore grew up in a middle class family in the New York City suburb of Freeport on Long Island. She wrote her first short story at seven and saw her first Broadway theater play a few years later, beginning a life-long love affair with both literature and theater. At thirteen years of age, while attending Freeport High School, she won second place for oratory for her presentation of "Selections from President Roosevelt's Inaugural Address".
She completed an undergraduate degree in drama and then married a fellow teacher, Frank Clapp. Her husband taught in Morris, the town where they lived, in upstate New York and Barbara began to teach English and French at the high school in the nearby town of Laurens. Five years later, in about 1955, Barbara gave up this job in order to stay home and start a family. Three children – Debra, Lisa and Mark – arrived in quick succession. By then the family was living in Irondequoit, a suburb of Rochester, on the edge of Lake Ontario in upstate New York.
Barbara returned to teaching in about 1961, gaining a position teaching American literature and creative writing at Webster High School, a position she held for twelve years. During that time she also directed a musical "even though I have no musical ability whatsoever and can't even carry a tune".
After 16 years of marriage, Barbara and Frank Clapp divorced. Not long afterwards, in 1968, Barbara, who continued to live in Rochester, took a sabbatical from Thomas High School in Webster to do her masters degree at the State University of New York at Brockport. She turned down an offer to teach at that university because it paid less than her high school position.
Seeking a change of pace, Bickmore moved with her children to Eugene in Oregon in 1973 to teach writing at the University of Oregon and try her hand at farming. Whatever romantic notions the family had entertained about their life on the land quickly evaporated: "Here we went totally broke after our well dried up and coyotes ate the sheep and our cows proved sterile and even our rabbits didn't breed."
Three years later, forced to give up the farm, Bickmore opened a shop for knitting and crochet supplies. The family scraped by for several years but that venture also ended badly, mired in the economic downturn and banking crisis that led to many downtown stores in Eugene being boarded up.
Making things even more difficult for the family, Bickmore's short-term teaching job at the University of Oregon was not renewed because she lacked a doctorate degree.
In 1985, Bickmore's elder daughter, Debra, was working in China, teaching English to Chinese doctors at a university in Xian. Debra invited her mother to join her on a six-week trip, during which they got to know a South African couple who were both doctors. Bickmore was enthralled and, even before the trip ended, had started writing a novel about life in South Africa. (She would later write a novel set in China while living in Ajijic, Mexico!)
Back in Eugene, she completed her first novel and submitted it to an agent recommended by one of her former creative writing teachers. The agent was successful; the novel – East of the Sun – was published in 1988, and Bickmore never looked back. Within a few years, her financial future was secure and royalty payments were sufficient to allow her to live the rest of her life however and wherever she chose.
Shortly after the publication of her second novel – The Moon Below (1990), set partly in Australia – Bickmore visited Ajijic where she planned to stay for a couple of months to start writing her third novel: Distant Star (1993), set in China.
She liked the village so much she moved there in September 1990 and it became her home for the next seven years. These seven years were easily the most productive period of Bickmore's writing career. During her time in Ajijijc, she completed Distant Star and four additional books: The Back of Beyond (1994), set in Australia; Homecoming (1995), set in Houston, Texas, and reissued in 2012 as Oberon; Deep in the Heart (1996); and Beyond the Promise (1997), set in Oregon. Despite writing so many books while living in Ajijic, Bickmore never set any of her books in Mexico.Bickmore also wrote a sequel to East of the Sun, entitled West of the Moon (2003) and a book set in the U.K.: Stairway to the Stars (2007).
Interestingly, Bickmore found far more success with European publishers than with U.S. publishers. Her nine novels were translated into 16 languages and sold in 23 countries. Note that the titles used for translations often differed significantly from the original English language titles. Bickmore lamented the fact that U.S. publishers claimed many of her books were too long and lacked sufficient violence and action. Even so, at least two of her books made the New York Times bestseller lists.
In her later years events conspired to prevent Bickmore from completing her tenth novel. She lost her only son in a traffic accident in 2006, when a truck driver ran a red light, and, later that same year, was sidelined for months after breaking her arm.
Bickmore's novels are light reading, aimed at a predominantly female audience. Their main characters are invariably women whose socially unconventional behavior enables them to overcome challenging situations while proving their humanity.
After she had become a successful novelist, Bickmore liked to tell interviewers that they were not interviewing her but Cinderella because from the time she had started to write she had lived a fairy tale existence. Ajijic's very own Cinderella!
Barbara Bickmore. Website.
Barbara Bickmore. 1992. "They Changed My Life". Ojo del Lago (Chapala), July 1992.
The Nassau Daily Review-Star (Nassau County [Freeport], New York), 21 Feb 1941
Eugene Register-Guard. 2015. Barbara Bickmore Obituary. Eugene Register-Guard, 28 February 2015.


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