The Shebooks Interview

They asked questions such as, "How does your religious identity influence your writing?"  Who would have expected that one?
     I told them about my first published story, about a raindrop (me, I was about age 9) who fell to the earth and provided the material from which Louis Pasteur worked out germ theory. 

 It was fun to give the interview, and lovely to be one of the authors (we had to wear tiaras onstage) at the reading for the celebration of Shebooks, the new e-publisher of long form journalism, memoir, fiction and my new book, Ricochet. 

Read about Ricochet here on Amazon

What advice do you have for an aspiring writer who is just starting out?

"Write every day.  Not every other day, not when the spirit hits. Every day."

I think you'll enjoy the rest of the Shebooks interview Just click right here

Advance Praise for Ricochet

 “Extraordinary writing, evocative, riveting and wise.” – Jake Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter

“A book for anyone who cares about the impact of war and the power of human relationships.” – Lindsey Hilsum, award-winning television reporter, author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution

“Lush…captures the bloody violence swirling in the midst of beauty--an extraordinary piece of historical reportage.” -- June Carolyn Erlick, author of Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced, and editor-in-chief of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America.

 From Shebooks

General launch May 21.  Buy now on Kindle

Here are complete versions of early comments on Ricochet.

“An extraordinary piece of writing. McConahay's spot-on prose is evocative, riveting and wise. Her story beautifully captures the tension that exists within the best war correspondents. How does one stay tough and also empathetic? How do you balance a capacity for outrage with a need for self-care? I've had the privilege of watching these two extraordinary women work. Now you can too. They didn't parachute into their war zone, they immersed themselves in it. The journalism that resulted shined. This unflinching account follows the same path and we are better for the journey.”

       ---Jake Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter

"Mary Jo McConahay's poignant memoir tells not only of the brutality that tore El Salvador apart in 1989, but of what it was like to cover the war as a reporter. The horror of that time is redeemed by friendship forged on the road, under fire, that endures when all other certainties fade away. A book for anyone who cares about the impact of war and the power of human relationships."

       ---Lindsey Hilsum, award-winning television journalist, author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution

"This understated but lush narrative evokes a very special time for many foreign correspondents, the wars in Central America in the 1980s. Through the lens of her friendship with a fellow American photojournalist, Mary Jo McConahay captures the bloody violence swirling in the midst of exquisite beauty. This nuanced portrait is not just an extraordinary piece of historical reportage; it is a window on the decisions that journalists caught in war must make about their daily lives even today." – June Carolyn Erlick, author of Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced, and editor-in-chief of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America.

Skipping Lisbon, Hitting Nazaré

            Any traveler who has tried to book a hotel online with sketchy Internet for the next destination on short notice knows the feeling: EEEKK.

When it happened to us seeking a room in Lisbon only 48 hours in advance on a national holiday, Robert finally put his finger on a map of Portugal, where neither of us had ever been (but for which we carried air unrefundable tickets) and said, “Forget Lisbon.  We’re going here.”

“Nazaré” read the nearest dot.   That is how we flew in to its airport but skipped one of Europe’s loveliest capitals, at least for the time being, and took a bus immediately to one of its

loveliest fishing towns, where a room we liked was available. We’re here now and an hour ago told the hotel’s front desk we’re extending our stay.

Mornings are for walking, up in the “Sitio” part of town, on a towering cliff with its spectacular view of the bay below. Or in the “Praia” part of town below, which – after the weekend tourists, mostly Portuguese, have disappeared – has the feeling of a Greek village with small cafes and white-painted buildings.  On the high side of town a cathedral housing a black Madonna, believed miraculous, glows inside under a gold coffered ceiling, nearby walls covered with mesmerizing blue tile depictions of saints and secular legends. Twin funicular cable cars climb and descend the cliff separating the two parts of town every half hour or so during daylight, passing each other in the middle of the 1000-foot railway built in 1893, on a 42 per cent grade, a heart-in-your-throat experience (we’ve done it twice now) that locals appear to take in stride.

A few months ago Nazaré became famous world-wide when big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara, who lives in Hawaii, set a world record riding a foamy 100-foot breaker here. 

Photos of the astounding ride are posted around town, and a scientific explanation of the underwater canyon that creates the big ones is available in hotel lobbies.  These spring days the waves are calmer, but surfers paddle out anyway to enjoy the ride.

Nazaré is no longer remote, with Lisbon only about two hours away by bus on fine roads, and no longer very small – population is some 10,000.  A proper tourism desk sits inside a cultural center showing photos and artifacts of the fishing village as it was in the last century, oxen hauling the laden boats up onto the sands as late as the 1970s. Nazaré’s new ibrary (one of my measuring sticks for developed civilization) is clean and well-lighted; we happened in and saw an outstanding two-room exhibit of modern art from Mozambique, once a Portuguese colony.

But the feeling remains here of a town unafraid of its past, with a truly distinct local character, unhomogenized by the wider world. Some women still use the traditional seven-skirt costume of old with its sash in the back, and widows wear black head to toe.  

Old and young participate in the town’s traditional spiritual life, such as we saw yesterday: the annual commemoration – on the same day – of the life of the sea, those lost at sea, and mothers young and old.

A widow watches procession, which also commemorates those lost at sea

Surfers line up for a blessing

Oh, and did I say the food is great?

Pick your fish, it's weighed in front of you and thrown on the grill 

We hope to see Lisbon someday, indeed we must. For this trip, however, serendipity has brought us to this sunny fishing town. I can’t imagine a better first door into Portugal.

            

St. Patricks -- Celebrate with Words!

I'll be reading on St. Patrick's Day in San Francisco, from the feminist journalist Nuala O'Faolain-- There will be Jameson's, Baileys, home-made soda bread. Other Irish (roots) authors will be reading Yeats, Toibin, and more. Folio Books, 3957 24th, 7-9 p.m.  Come, and enjoy!

New Writers' Workshop -- November

Nov. 9-16, 2014

  

Writers’ Workshop

on magical Lake Atitlan

The gift of time to write.  Inspiration, and experienced support.

                                                        

With Mary Jo McConahay, Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year

Author of Maya Roads,

One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest (www.mayaroads.com) 

http://www.eat-write-travel.com/guatemala.html

or write to mjmcconahay@gmail.com

This will be a small group -- ideal for a spirit of retreat, and individual attention to each writer. We will work on structure, and voice. Feedback and thoughtful critique are central to developing the craft -- these will be key elements in our days at the beautiful Posada Santiago on the Lake.

*Independent Publishers' Award, Best travel essay book; Northern California Book Award, best creative nonfiction; USA BookNews International Book Awards: Best travel essay book, best autobiography/memoir, best new nonfiction; A National Geographic Traveler Honored Book.

   Mary Jo’s travel stories have won four Solas Best Travel Writing awards in the last two years, appeared in Best Travel Writing and Best Women’s Travel Writing (Travelers’ Tales), and on Gadling.com. Her story on GoNomad.com, was judged one of the site’s top five of the last year. Her award-winning reporting has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and more than two dozen other publications. Photo of the dock at Posada Santiago by Jeff Speigner.

Adoptions in Wartime?

This is my latest in the current edition of ReVista, the magazine of Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, edited by veteran Latin America journalist June Erlick.  If the subject is controversial, let the discussion unfold.

UNEARTHING THE PAST

Discovering Dominga

 Adoptions and Tangled Truths

BY MARY JO MCCONAHAY    

     In the open central market one morning in Rabinal, Guatemala, 28-year-old Denese Becker picked up a bolt of corte cloth, woven fabric used by Achi Maya women to make their skirts, and brought it to her face. She closed her eyes. “My mother,” she said. “This smells like my mother.” I knew which one she was talking about.
     That was more than a decade ago; we were in Rabinal to shoot the PBS documentary Discovering Dominga, the story of an Iowa housewife—Denese—a survivor of the 1982 Rio Negro massacre in which both her parents died. Denese, the former Dominga Sic, was returning to look for the bones of her father and to untangle the truth of a lifetime of nightmares. On that journey she also discovered a world of memory that might have remained hidden in small-town Iowa, where she arrived at age eleven, adopted by an evangelical pastor and his wife. Her adoptive parents were loving and attentive to her, their only daughter. However, as I watched Denese Becker in the Guatemala highlands, among trees and flowers once familiar to her, I couldn’t help thinking how much this young woman had lost by being taken from her roots to live in a strange land.
     “What is this tree called?” she would ask. “I know you can eat its leaves.” Or, “I think I recognize that flower. It’s bad. Don’t touch it.”
     Like Denese, thousands of children during the Central American conflict were adopted by foreigners, mostly from the United States and Europe. When my husband and I arrived in Tegucigalpa from San Francisco with our 8-month old in 1987, the hotel clerk glanced at the infant slung across my chest and said, “I assume you want the adopting parents’ rate.” During the week it took us to find a rental house, we learned that a dozen U.S. couples at the hotel, and several single individuals, had come to Honduras not to live, but to adopt.
     When conflict, displacement and extreme poverty were national conditions in the 1980s and 1990s in Central America, “orphans” was a term used indiscriminately for youngsters separated from their families, whether they had a living parent or close relatives or not. Reasons were myriad: both parents might indeed be dead, killed in the violence, as in Denese’s case, although close relatives said later they had searched for her fruitlessly in Guatemala; soldiers and other armed authorities took children after families were killed; in many cases desperately poor single mothers, pregnant again, gave away newborns or sold them to enganchadores, front men for corrupt lawyers connected to ostensibly legitimate operations that can only be called “the baby trade.” In Honduras, and sometimes in Guatemala, newspapers periodically ran stories about the latest discovery of a casa cuna, houses where multiple infants were fattened up from low birth weights before presentation to prospective adoptive parents.
     We will never know the true answer to the endless question, “Weren’t those children better off raised elsewhere?” We simply won’t know. What we can suggest in the wake of those terrible spasms of violence in Central America, at least, is that those of us who were meant to be watching events so closely did not track the region’s youngest and most vulnerable inhabitants to the degree they deserved.
     Their stories are many. In 1980s El Salvador, for instance, a six-year old being adopted by a blind Italian man and his wife at our hotel approached me to say her mother sold grilled meat near the Parque Libertad. She wanted to return to her mother. Engaged with my own toddler, covering post-earthquake events daily, I never investigated, and the moment slipped away. At a holding camp for civilians “rescued” by the army from Guazapa, a rebel stronghold, an elderly woman said her grandson had been taken by an officer; she feared he would raise him as his own. In mountainous Las Vueltas, known as territory sympathetic to rebels, a man showed me where he had lain in tall grass as his seven-year old was taken away in a helicopter during an army sweep, while she cried out, “Papi!” He wept to recall he could not reach out to her without endangering others who hid around him.
     “Do you think they will know that she is not an orphan?” he asked. “That I am her father and I am alive? Will she know that wherever she is?”
     There are reasons why journalists, academic researchers and others do not investigate such stories at the time, including the urgency of other coverage and the general confusion of war. Some feel that any child removed from the risk of war or life of poverty is indeed better off, and questions ought to stop there for the good of all.
     During the weeks we filmed Discovering Dominga in 2001 and 2002, Denese could not bring herself to accept invitations to sleep in the dirt-floor houses of her relatives; their lives and living conditions were too foreign to her. One day, we met an ajq’ij, a spiritual guide charged with giving thanks to the Creator lords, keeping the Maya calendar and performing ceremony. “What does his red kerchief mean?” she asked me later. “My grandfather wore one.” Now an evangelical Christian, she seemed to struggle with the knowledge that her grandfather had been a guardian of Maya spirituality, so inimical to the beliefs of her extended adoptive family. In the film Denese says that as a child in Iowa she never “fit in”; but off camera in Rabinal, it seemed clear that neither did Denese Becker/Dominga Sic “fit in” any longer among the people to whom she was born.
     An advantage of peace is the gift of space and time to ask questions about what has come before. How much of the memory of the homelands is carried in the minds of children, now adults, as they live far from where they were born? Should adoptions during time of war be forbidden, or truncated in any way? They are questions we might consider before we are forced, should the occasion arise, to answer them again.
 

Mary Jo McConahay is the author of Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest(Chicago Review Press). She wrote the original story for the PBS documentary Discovering Dominga and co-produced it with producer Pat Flynn.  Here is the link to the ReVista story, in an issue on Memory: In Search of History and Democracy: http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/fall-2013/discovering-dominga