Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Catherine Marenghi, a poet and writer living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She was formerly a publicist, business writer, journalist, and entrepreneur in the Massachusetts high-tech industry. More information is at www.marenghi.com. She had previously contributed to this series on Genealogy - her decades-long search for her roots in Italy. Here she writes about her new life in Mexico:
Like many people who have had a long career in the high-tech world, I had a public self and a private self. The public self was a responsible citizen. I earned money, served employers and clients, provided for my family. I saved for my son’s college education and for my retirement. I invested and planned for a future whose parameters I could only guess.
My private self was a poet. Few people even knew of that side of me. I quietly wrote poems, occasionally submitting them for publication, but never had the time or the energy to develop my creative side to its fullest.
When my son graduated from college in 2013 and was finally launched into the world, my private self said, “It’s my turn!” I felt like a lab animal sprung from my cage. Still gainfully employed in corporate marketing at a global software company, I starting allocating my precious vacation weeks to writers’ retreats and conferences.
The first was a writers’ retreat in bucolic Vermont. I was prepared to write poetry all week, but one evening, while exchanging stories over the dinner table, I found my fellow writers staring in disbelief when I told my personal history – something I had never done before. They frankly didn’t believe me when I said I was raised in a one-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing.
Then the retreat owner said to me, “You should write a memoir.”
The idea had never occurred to me. I didn’t think my life was important enough to warrant a memoir. And I had kept my private story secret my entire life, even from my closest friends. I always wanted to be known for what I am and what I achieve, not to be pitied as the poor girl raised in rural poverty. But the timing was right. I was in my late 50s, and no longer worried what people thought of me. It happened, too, that I was in the process of cleaning out my mother’s house after her recent death. I was finding documents, pictures, and a family history I had never known.
That’s when I started writing Glad Farm: A Memoir, about the thriving flower farm my parents had in the late 1940s, before I was born. I never knew, until I searched my mother’s cedar chest, that my parents grew gladiolus. The farm prospered and then failed when the gladiolus fell from popularity, and I had been raised on the same flower fields never knowing their origin. My parents never talked about it.
I worked on the book obsessively, nights and weekends, while still working full-time in corporate marketing. The book was published in 2016, and I launched it in a rented conference room overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, MA, in the same building where I worked every day, in front of my co-workers and friends.
Meanwhile I had also started attending writers’ conferences, including the annual San Miguel Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, encouraged by a friend who had traveled there. At the time I knew nothing of Mexico. I spoke no Spanish. But the conference inspired me with world-renown keynote speakers like Alice Walker and Mary Carr, informative panels on the publishing business, workshops to hone my craft, and the company of fellow writers.
And San Miguel itself was dazzling: a gorgeous Spanish colonial town, high in the Sierra Madres. I was seduced by its exquisite architecture, draped in bougainvillea vines, drenched in color and sunlight. I felt strangely happy, and young, when I walked its cobblestone streets. I would sit on a bench in its central Jardin, staring up at the soaring pink gothic spires of its parish church, the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, and wonder why I had never known of this magical place.
In San Miguel I found reemerging in me the young poet I once was in my college years. I was even dressing the same way as I did in my youth, wearing blue jeans, Frye boots and peasant blouses. A feeling of well-being, and intense belonging, washed over me.
I attended the same writers’ conference in 2014, 2015, and every year since, allocating a week’s vacation in February each year. To further nudge me toward San Miguel, Boston experienced consecutively the three worst winters in its history. Since the conference is in February, I found myself making the painful transition from Mexican sun to blistering Boston winter at its worst.
Finally I said, enough. No more digging out my car from under mountains of snow. I am going to retire a little early, and live the creative life I had been deferring so many years. After my memoir was published in 2016, and feeling encouraged by the positive response, I quit my high-paying job, sold my house, and moved lock, stock and barrel to San Miguel de Allende, where I own a lovely house and live as a permanent resident.
It's not that I have totally abandoned technology in favor of the rarefied poet’s life. Technology has enabled me to participate in readings and book clubs anywhere in the world. For example, my book Glad Farm has been the selection of book clubs as far away as Bogota, Columbia, and I have joined their discussions via Facetime and Skype.
And after a miserable experience publishing Glad Farm with a traditional publisher (the outfit abruptly shut down and ran off with all its authors’ earnings), I self-published a second edition on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (formerly Amazon CreateSpace), and receive monthly royalties and sales reports like clockwork. It’s a beautiful thing. (Vinnie's note - if you want to see how efficient the Amazon process is, read my post here)
I actively market my writing on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and my own website. Facebook in particular lets me connect with current and prospective readers in real-time, run surveys, and post upcoming events. And Submittable lets me submit my poems and stories to publications worldwide without ever leaving my home.
I’ve never regretted the move to Mexico. The town has a vibrant creative heart that pulsates with activity. Besides the writers’ conference, there are monthly author events, and a Poetry Café hosts monthly poetry readings. I have since joined the board of the Poetry Café and have frequently read my work before warm and receptive audiences. I belong to author groups and book clubs. There is also a lively arts community, and often the literary and visual arts come together in art gallery readings.
My first poetry book was recently published, Breaking Bread, and I am actively researching and writing an historic fiction based on my Italian immigrant grandparents. I continually publish my poetry in literary journals in the U.S. and Mexico and approach all my writing from the perspective of a poet at heart.
I often travel to the U.S. to see family and friends – the low cost of living in Mexico makes it possible. And I don’t regret waiting so long to do the creative work I always wanted to do. My career in high tech put my son through college, with no debt, and gave me the retirement funds to live in the most beautiful place on earth.
I’ve never believed in impetuously “following your bliss” if you don’t have a way to make a living. My creative writing is not enough to pay my bills. It rarely is. But through practical planning, I have found a way to pursue my passion while living in comfort and surrounded by beauty. There is no money in poetry – but there is also no poetry in money. I have found a way to bridge the two in el corazon de Mexico.
I always love reading your story!! Stay well cugina mia ❤️
Posted by: Celestina Kopech | March 20, 2020 at 11:06 PM