A conversation with
C. M. MAYO | By CHRISTY ZEMPTER

Strange things happen in the worlds C.M. Mayo creates.

In her recent short story, "The Building of Quality" (featured in the summer issue of The Kenyon Review), a violent storm drops a building into a suburban backyard. Such an occurrence might seem unusual if her work weren't filled with images of similarly alien elements suddenly appearing on the landscape.

Mayo says she doesn't even know what draws her to such images. "¿Quién sabe? [Who knows?] But I can tell you that I have always been fascinated by the occult, synchronicity, and the spoon-bending weird," she said in a recent e-mail interview. "The germ for this story was its epigraph, taken from James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, a rant n' rave about 'the tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside' that so much of America has become.

"Kunstler writes, 'The average citizen—who went to school in a building modeled on a shoe factory, who works in a suburban office park, who lives in a raised ranch house, who vacations in Las Vegas—would not recognize a building of quality if a tornado dropped it in his yard.' I read that and I thought, 'Whew, nasty. But hey, what if?'"

The story began as an epic poem, written to round out Mayo's collection, Things Fall from the Sky. "As the title suggests, indeed, in these poems things fall from the sky (such as a meteor, a zeppelin, a mango, and USAF Captain Joseph Kittinger, Jr.)," Mayo said. "Once I had a draft, I realized that, with a little reformatting and punctuation, 'The Building of Quality' could also be a short story. And so it is."

The leap from poetry to fiction is a relatively minor one, given Mayo's varied background both within the literary realm and outside it. Prior to focusing her attention on literature, she taught economics and finance at the university level and published two books on Mexican finance. And while she may have left that world behind, she still makes use of her financial knowledge in her stories. The tallying of damage figures and insurance estimates in "The Building of Quality" is just one example of the ways she brings her financial background to bear in her fiction.

"First, when I wrote this story, I'd just moved a van load of furniture and art over the border, so I was intimately familiar with all the terms of insurance contracts," she said. "Second, I earned two degrees in economics and later taught international finance at the ITAM, a university in Mexico City, so financial terms are relatively easy for me to throw around. I find that financial mumbo-jumbo oftentimes has a funny and scary kind of energy."

Mayo’s first foray into book-length fiction, Sky Over El Nido, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction after its 1995 publication. She followed that with an inventive take on travel writing, 2002's Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico. In it she weaves her own experiences as a visitor to the region with tales of its history and stories about the wide variety of residents it currently hosts. As a result, the book expands on traditional travel writing to touch on literary themes, cultural values, and economic realities. Miraculous Air offered an extended example of Mayo's use of a sort of palimpsest in her writing to create a multi-layered experience for the reader.

"I think of my stories as nets of images," she said. "From the moment Douglas Glover explained it to me, I was hooked on the concept. In his essay, 'The Net and the Quest for Christa T.' in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Glover writes, 'the book as net will have the appearance of being woven together, that is, it will have a feeling of going back and forth within itself, a feeling of simultaneity ... achieved primarily through repetition, repetition of ... words, images, and situations.'

"The concept is of a story as nonlinear, very 'right-brain,' and I think (I hope) I can thus render meaning itself like a kind of music. And—this also interests me —the story as net explores the nature of reality itself, which I believe (it has been my experience, certainly) to be woven through with synchronicity, which itself suggests pattern and (oftentimes deeply mysterious) meaning. As the physicist David Bohm wrote in The Undivided Universe, 'The whole world is in some way enfolded in everything and ... [e]ach thing is enfolded in the whole.'"

In addition to her books, Mayo found time to indulge her passion for translation by creating Tameme (a Nahuatl word meaning porter or messenger), a bilingual literary journal devoted to translating the works of North American writers from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English to broaden their audiences within the continent.

"I got the notion to found it when I was living full-time in Mexico City and just beginning to publish my short stories in U.S. literary journals, and translating Mexican poetry," Mayo said. "NAFTA was the big thing then, and it seemed to me that very little of the enormous body of contemporary writing from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico was being translated. I was seeing translations of Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway—but what about Edwidge Danticat? A. Manette Ansay? Margaret Atwood? Almost no one in Mexico had heard of them. And it was the same situation with Mexican work being translated into English.

"So I thought I had the skills, the contacts, and the enthusiasm to make a contribution toward that end. My father, Roger Mansell, had twenty-five years of experience in the printing and graphics industry, and he was willing to help out. We set up Tameme, Inc., as a nonprofit foundation based in the state of California (because that's where his office is). He put together a board of directors, and I invited several poets, writers and other friends to serve as editorial advisers. And we took it from there. Later, we were awarded a grant from the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture to cover the publication of two issues, 'Sun and Moon/Sol y Luna' and 'Reconquest/ Reconquista'."

The first issue of Tameme was published in 1999, and the annual journal is distributed by Ubiquity and Ebsco and available online at www.tameme.org . As a translator of poetry, Mayo said the variety of the English language allows for some breathing room in terms of bringing not just the literal meaning but also the rhythm and music of the original to her translation.

"English may be Germanic, but it also has a vast number of Latinate words, as it is a blending of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French—not to mention a motley bunch of other stuff," she said. "In fact, I read somewhere that English has twice the number of words as Spanish. So, translating into English gives one an enormous range of choices for achieving effects of rhythm and sound. In practice, I just try to feel the music of a line and choose words intuitively."

Mayo didn't speak Spanish before her 1986 move to Mexico, but an earlier knowledge of French and German attests to an affinity for language that began at a young age. "In high school I had a splendid teacher, Madame Jarman, who, by the way, was the translator for Göering in the Nüremberg Trials. And I never asked her about that! Drat," Mayo said. "Madame, as we called her, was from Alsace-Lorraine, so she spoke both French and German. She sang Edith Piaf songs on her guitar, she was crazy about the TV actor Telly Savalas, and she had about a hundred itty bitty dogs that tried to nip anyone who tried to get near them. She also wore these heavy hand-knit knee socks, and when she had a cold she would press a eucalyptus-soaked handkerchief to her mouth—you could smell it down the stairs. She made us stand and recite poems, and if we stumbled, we were 'Dizzy Lizzies,' and I think she must have made every girl in the class cry at least twice. Her sister had been married to a famous painter in Paris, and Madame herself, in her eighties, married a four-star general! Ralph Smith. He lived to 104.

"So Madame, if she was tiny, was a big personality. I was terribly fond of her, and later, when I went to Mexico, learned Spanish, and published Tameme, I think she was proud of me. Little had I known: she had lived in Guatemala and she spoke Spanish!"

Mayo, who was born in Texas and raised in northern California, has lived in Mexico City for nearly two decades and currently splits her time between there and Washington, D.C., where she is on the faculty of the Writers Center. Her experience as an American living in Mexico has fed her work in many ways, not the least of which is an awareness of detail that allows her to establish a well-drawn sense of place in each of her works. "I think that traveling or living anywhere yonder from one's home turf tends to open up one's eyes, ears—all the senses," she said.

Mayo continues to stretch the boundaries of her literary world and is currently at work on her first novel. "The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is inspired by the true story of Prince Agustín de Iturbide y Green of Mexico, who was adopted, or, according to his American mother, kidnapped by the Emperor Maximilian," she said. "It is set mostly in Mexico City in 1865-1866, but flits off to Yucatán, Cuernavaca, Veracruz, Washington, D.C., and Paris, where his mother went to try to persuade Louis Napoléon to intervene. The narrator is a disembodied eye. It's sort of 'Carlos Castañeda meets Gone with the Wind.' But the meat of the story is true. It's based on extensive research, including in the Kaiser Maximilian von Mexiko archives in Vienna, and it is far weirder than anything I could have invented. You might recall that General William Tecumseh Sherman makes an appearance in ‘The Building of Quality’—he may well show up in this novel, as he did anchor the Susquehanna off Veracruz in the last, terrible days of the empire.

"So far: 175 pages."

Christy Zempter is a writer for ThisWeek Newspapers in Columbus, Ohio.