Sayulita Writers Blog

Thanksgiving Day

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:49:00 GMT

Today I surfed from 9 til eleven in the morning, completely glassy (smooth surface, ideal for wave-riding), head high sets, four to six people out--I gave thanks for that, having a wave to myself less than five minutes' walk from my house. We're roasting a turkey we bought at costco last week, except that our propane tank is running on fumes and so we probably will run out of gas when the bird is half-cooked. But no problem, our friends are arriving from Seattle at six today, and I have the key to their rental house up the road. We'll just haul the bird up there and roast it in their rental oven.

Sayulita is really beautiful this time of year, with the high season just getting underway. Lots of activity in town, including the unneeded, unnecessary, and pretty much unwanted soon to be opened OXXO, which is kind of the 7/11 of Mexico, except that it isn't even a Mexican company running it. OXXO is owned by coca cola and there seems to be one on every corner in every city in Mexico. The arrival of this chain store in Sayulita is insignificant in and of itself, except that it indicates what is coming in future--all the chain stores that will within five years, I would guess, turn downtown Sayulita in another festering nest of corporate retail, with Starbucks on one corner and MacDonald's on the other, and maybe a Subway in between. Welcome to my nightmare. But other than that, the waves have been good, the weather perfect, and the beach just grand as hell. People who come down to study writing here will have a great time, no doubt about it.

The lot next door is almost completely enclosed now, by a high cinderblock and cement wall that has been put up in the last two weeks by a crew working for the owner, a guy from Guadalajara who showed up at long last, having no doubt heard that his lot was overrun with squatters and their dogs. He seems like a friendly enough guy, so we're hoping he'll box it in and leave it be for a while at least, rather than start building a house immediately and/or selling it to the highest bidder, which will give us a nice year of construction next door to look forward to. But it's out of our hands.

Two of the three lot dogs are in our hands now: we first adopted Paloma. Then when the squatters left, leaving their dogs, we started feeding them, took them to the vet to get spayed and shots, and they followed up by pretty much moving onto the sidewalk outside our gate. So when we talked our tile guy Felix into taking one--the black one we named Freda Malo--we decided to let Mamacita into our patio as well--mostly because she was barking all night and terrorizing other dogs and the occasional person walking by from her base on our sidewalk, and so we were being held responsible for her attacks. We brought her inside the gate one night to see if she'd stop barking all night, and sure enough, she did. So now we are a three dog family. Damn! We thought we came down here to let Paco run out his string and that would be that, dogwise, but no, instead I have to get up at six everyday and walk Thing one and Thing two, or is it heckle and jeckle, dragging me seawards at the end of their leashes as they strain and yap at passing dogs, people, cars, bikes, atvs, and birds. But all said and done, they're sweet little pups and tho we're trying to find homes for them, if we don't, they're here for a long run it would seem.

I've started the Sayulita Surf Safaris to go along with the Sayulita Writers Workshops. Entrepeneurial instincts run amok. So far I've spent time and money and made nothing. We'll see.

Check out my surfing history on the other blog, Bottom Turns. And check out some of my mysteries at jjhenderson.net/blog. I'm giving it all away now.

Where Have I Been?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:19:00 GMT

I'm not sure how to answer that question anymore.

The weather is turning perfect, cool evenings warming through the early morning into hot afternoons. The town is filling up with the usual assortment of travelers, winter expats, hippies, and surfers. I'm surfing every day, and still trying to figure out how to get people to take my classes. Mi esposa Donna and I are now teaching as well, as two of my teachers have bailed on the program. I understand there was a long piece in the LA Times recently discussing the fall off in Mexican tourism from the US. Bummer for me, first year of the SWW, but let me assure you that those things keeping you away from Mexico--swine flu and drug cartel paranoia--do not exist here. No is there much crime, although some enterprising individuals did blowtorch an ATM the other night in the town square between 2 and 5 am, and made off with about fifty thousand dollas worth of crisp new pesos. Nobody got hurt, good thing. How did they pull that one off?

The streets are getting pavement, the swells are coming from the west and soon from the north, and I'm still waiting for students. I'm working on getting the workshops college accredited, which will open it up to more younger student types, the types that would jump on the chance to come to a cool Mexican beach town to study writing, maybe study Spanish, maybe do some surfing on the side. So where are you, dudes? Surely one college credit can't make that much difference. Well, I'll let you know, believe me, when the college credits come rolling in down here.

The hideous OXXO chain, Mexico's version of 7/11, is about to open its first branch in Sayulita. This will be the first chain store of any kind to open here, and we can only hope it isn't the leading edge of a wedge which will bring the rest of the boring, predictable, monotonous, and indistinct chains--you know, your starubucks, your mcdonalds, your wendy, your of fuck you know them all, we all know they all, the litter the urban landscape of the world and we hate the face that any of them are showing their ugly faces here in Sayulita. Oxxo is owned, I hear, by the cocacola corporation, which tells you exactly where they are coming from.

The squatters have disappeared as the owner of the lot showed up last week, at long last--a man from Guadalajara named catarino Rodriguez. He brought with him a bulldozer with driver and a couple of hombres, and they proceeded to crush and destroy the squatter hut, bathroom, concrete pads, and everything else. Then dug a ditch around three sides of the property in preparation for building a wall around it, he says. Left piles of debris. Today some guys came back and readied the ditch for a concrete pour.

I should mention that the squatters, wherever they went, did not take any of the three dogs. We had adopted one, Paloma, the flying dog. Her sister, Freda, or Freda Malo as I liked to call her, disappeared the day the lot owner arrived, we don't know how or what happened to her. The mamacita we have now also adopted, as she had nowwhere to go. So now we have three dogs, Paco the ancient grouchy poodle, Paloma the mexican street pup, and her mamacita. The latter two live in our patio, while Paco is in the house. They are all off white. They make quite a stir when we walk them, and the two little ones, the lot dogs, attack people on bikes, atvs, and sometimes on foot. Our neighbors do not like them at all but they get what we're doing, trying to save their little canine butts from a life of misery in the streets, or worse. So suddenly we are a three dog family--last I heard, Donna and I said, no more dogs after Paco. Damn!

I'm going to have to give up on these workshops, people, because no one wants to take them. Instead I'll be starting the Sayulita Surfing Safari company, driving my friends and clients from here to my favorite waves. So come on down and even if you don't take a workshop, ride a wave.

Meanwhile read my novels at jjhenderson.net/blog. Thanks, until next time, hasta luego.

High heels and Long pants

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:24:00 GMT

The quinceanaria the other night turned out to be a very long event. We got to the church an hour late to find our debutante, for that is the only US event I can compare this with--a coming out ball?--wearing a beautiful pink prom-style dress, her mother in white with a flower in her long flowing hair, and 12 young men in white suits with pink vests and pink hatbands on their white, wide-brimmed hats. The suit coats were down to the calf--zoot-suit style is all I could think of, but they looked very dapper and cool and suave. The church was nearly full of people that were part of Belen and her daughter's lives. Their was some singing and some church ritual, none of which added up to anything for me, not being religious or Catholic even in my past lives. We got there around 6:30, when it had already been going for an hour, and Donna shot some nice photos while the thing went on for another hour. When they finished in the church everybody came outside and eventually formed a procession and headed towards the pink hall, maybe a mile away, where the party would take place. They all walked off in some sort of implicitly understood order, while we went to the opening night at the Bicyclette, a far different kind of place, a decadent French restaurant and bar, a wine-drinking, even coke snorting sort of place--we heard it got pretty crazy later that night. I had a glass of wine and sat on the patio and watched the party start to build. Saw a few familiar faces and then we took off, by car, ftothe pink hall for the Quinceanaria party.

I guess I should mention that I was wearing jeans, black jeans, long pants, for this event, along with a short sleeve button up shirt. I only mention it because it was the first time I have put on long pants since I moved to Mexico in July, and it didn't feel too bad. Black jeans were formal enough for this event, and the comfort level signalled that the humidity is going away and the evenings are cooling off, good signs of the oncoming winter, when the weather gets really sweet, cool nights, lovely warm days.

The party hall was a sea of white plastic tables and chairs, a big stage, a video screen on one wall running Mexican music videos, a bar and kitchen set up along one side. Several hundred people eventually showed. They served beer, and left huge bottles of fanta and sprite on the tables. The soda was warm, the beer was cold. Everybody sat for an hour, people all saying hello hello. We three, Donna and Jade and I, Donna in a dress and Jade in her favorite formal outfit, a black suit, a striped shirt, and a bow tie, sat with Nick and Treva and Astrid, the only other gringos present. We chatted and eventually were served plates of meat, rice, and beans. Basic pretty good stuff. Then the rituals started up again. The debutante dancing amidst and with the 12 guys in white and pink. They kneeled as she passed, hats over their faces. They lifted her overhead. She stepped between them, in a sort of ritualized viewing of the suitors, with some small dance steps. It went on for quite a while. It was all very sweet and the boys, all of them, took it seriously, it seemed to me. There was no smirking or mugging going on. At the same time, this seemingly traditional stuff was being done to very trashy contemporary pop songs, which undermined its traditional quality for me at least.

At one point in the ritual one of her friends brought her high heels on a pillow, meant to represent, what, the passage into womanhood? Something like that. An odd sort of symbol, I thought, since high heels (useless and dangerous in dusty, cobbled, muddy, potholey Sayulita streets) are designed to sexualize women. But that makes sense, doesn't it, in a macho culture? Well anyway, in the end I felt badly because the whole thing was completely boring to me and I was not really engaged by it. I was outside it and there was no way in, not for me. I know Belen invited us because she likes us and considers us her friends, or at least good gringos she knows, even though we are her employers, and I was honored by the invite, but the actual event was nothing worith praising, in my opinion. I guess a small town American prom would have some similar vibes, in some respects, I don't know. Eventually the band came on, a huge band with like four trumpets, a tuba, trombones, drums and I can't remember what else because they had amplified their already incredibly loud sound up to a volume that was completely intolerable to Jade and Donna, who fled into the night, followed shortly by Treva and Astrid. Nick and I sat for ten more minutes and then we, too, left blown out of the hallway by the howling tubas and the squalling trumpets.

But at least I was comfortable in my jeans, and Belen's debutante daughter--I keep calling her that because I don't know her name--looked very beautiful, as did Belen, that night.

And now its a few days later. The Sayulita Writers Workshops are sitting out there on my horizon, just two and a half months away, and I have no students. I've lost two teachers, who've understandably decided to make other plans for their prospective teaching weeks, and so Donna Day my wife and I are going to teach a class, and I'm going to teach another class. We are also going to start discounting the classes in an effort to get some students. I will post it elsewhere on the site but for now be apprised, if you are reading this and considering taking a class, that the cost is now $450 instead of $500 and if anyone wants to take two in a row I'll go down to $800. The US economy still sucks and so here I am, high and dry. As I told my teachers in an email today, I really thought--and still think--this is a viable enterprise, with a lot to offer. And the weather and the vibe in town keep getting better every week. It is going to be a great season down here, SWW or no, and hey, you can get away from the swine flu epidemic with a little trip to Mexico, people. So come on down.

T^h

Wedding Daze

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:50:00 GMT

The town is very crowded this week because, as it turns out, there are five wedding parties scheduled, including at least one involving celebrities. So, for those of you who like to know or hear about such things, yesterday at the Breakfast Cafe on the beach in town I saw the guy who plays the bar owner Sam Merlotte on the HBO series True Blood, sitting with three or four other guys, one of whom, I was told, has been on the show Desperate Housewives. Someone else told me she'd seen the guy who plays (played? don't know cuz I don't have a TV here so don't know what's been cancelled or what) Sylar on the show Heroes and also Spock in the Star Trek remake. Drew Barrymore was/is here. Blah blah yak yak leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, that sort of chatter, but I'm sticking it in here just to demonstrate that this ain't some backwater village, it's a kind of hot spot on the international vacation circuit, and therefore much-deserving of its own cultural attractions such as...hey, how about we start a writers workshop?

That's what I thought, earlier this year, and here we are, waiting for the show to begin. I sure hope some of you people get dialed in and signed up for a class or two, because the writers workshop show is going to be a good one. Speaking of which, I'm sad to announce one of our teachers has bowed out--Jennifer Belle--and so in lieu of replacing her with someone from out of town I'm planning to teach a class myself, I think, on the topic of turning FACT INTO FICTION. In a personal sense, that is: I wrote my Lucy Ripken fearless girl travel/writer photographer series (check it out at jjhenderson.net) based very much on real stuff that happened to my wife, Donna Day (model for Lucy Ripken) and myself. I mixed the two of us together to make Lucy and then sent her off to many of the places Donna and I have been--Jamaica, Isla Mujeres, and Sayulita, to name the three exotic spots that serve as locations for the first three Lucy books. There are four other Lucy books that I haven't published because my original publisher got sold out from under me before the first three could get any traction in the market, and my agent hasn't been able to find a deal for these very cool and I think reasonably well-written sequels because the (unpromoted, unmarketed, undistributed) sales on the first three were so low. So I got screwed as it were, in spite of my big multi-book contract. Anyway, this class I will maybe teach if I can find some interested parties will be about how you use the material of your life to make stories, in a very literal sense. I've got a good plan, and if you like the idea of this class please let me know via email and I'll be sure and put it on the schedule.

Our flying, broken-armed dog finally got her cast off this week and while she's still hobbling, we are hoping she's going to make it all the way back to normal with a few weeks of recovery. But she may be a lame dog all her life, like so many dogs are here in Sayulita, dogs that were run over, or attacked when they were small, or beat up badly in fights, and are now lame, half blind, scarred and gnarly. Dogs have a great time here, running up and down the streets and the beach in a kind of free for all, but many of them are sadly neglected and abused. If you come down, try to bring a few bucks for the SayulitAnimals.org and their clinic. They do good work and run pretty much on donations.

Tonight we are invited to our housekeeper Belen's daughter's 15th birthday party, or Quinceanaria (sp?) which is apparently a very big deal in Sayulita. It starts at 5:30 pm at the usually underattended church in the town plaza and then moves to this enormous pink open air building which happens to be right next door to the free animal clinic I just mentioned. The party will be long and late, and we will probably sneak out after an hour and go back to the plaza, where the restaurant La Bicyclette, formerly around the corner from us here on the north side of town, is grandly re-opening tonight in a new prime location right on the corner of the plaza close to Sayulita Fish Tacos. We hope they make it there, its a fine French restaurant and every town needs one of those, right?

Well, its time to go surfing, as Nick and Treva will be arriving shortly from their Costco run into Puerto Vallarta, where along with whatever piles of stuff they bought for themselves they bought for us a slab of salmon--one northwest commodity we really miss--and a large bag of small organic carrots. Some things you just can't live without.

Hurricane Surf and Memory

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:56:00 GMT

Not that they're related, but I'm thinking about them both. My surf partner Nick Sherman--everybody I know here surfs or is learning, it seems, but only Nick and I among the gang of gringos I hang with, more or less, manage to find the time to go every day. He's determined to get good at it, and I'm determined to keep it going. We both love it. I'm getting back to where I was at my best, and he's making progress towards proficiency, which is a lot in surfing. His mother tells him it's a "spiritual quest" and I say we definitely need to spend at least two hours a day at the temple. Today the temple at La Lancha was head high storm surf, the leading edge of the surge generated from Hurricane Rick, no longer a hurricane but still pushing out some swell as it whirls towards southern Baja. We were out there with four or five guys, the boat captain Oso Negro riding a shortboard and ripping, and three or four of his "customers", guys from the states who didn't really surf well and were seriously overmatched out there. But they kept at it, catching big waves and sliding down them only to pearl dive, nose of board deep into the water, and slide off the front end as the water stopped the board and not the body...classic element of learning to surf, getting your butt kicked a bit.

Being here in Sayulita, I find myself remembering my hippie and early surfing years--I was part of the tribe in southern California--Venice, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu were my stomping grounds--that went from teenage surfing into teenage hippiedom, sliding down the vines of acapulco gold and panama red and your basic mexican dirt weed along with lsd and the rest of the mind bending stuff we ingested, not mindlessly but certainly very recklessly, back in the day. I smell pot in the air around here all the time, but don't smoke it any more. Yet there are hippies here, and surfers, and even a few that are both. Surfing for the most part is a little too aggressive, at least in its crowded, dog eat dog mode, the mode you find at Malibu, and Pipeline, and even here at Sayulita. I quit surfing for years because I couldn't deal with that aggressive edge. But now I find I can dodge it, avoid it by going out at certain times, especially dawn or dusk, or driving 15 minutes to Lancha or Burros.

But remembering those old days, memories of epic surfing adventures undertaken while stoned, brought on by the whiff of someone smoking a reefer down the beach, brings to mind thoughts of memoir writing: the idea of memory is one that my friend Rich Goodman http://www.richardgoodman.org/ will help writers tackle in the workshop class From Memory to Story: Writing Your Life. A Workshop on Memoir. Sayulita is an ideal place for this class, liberating in its foreignness and yet welcoming and completely unthreatening--a perfect environment for doing good work. A few years back Rich wrote a book about moving to France and planting a garden--FRENCH DIRT--so he knows how to get it done, the garden and the book. This February class will no doubt produce some elegant, beautifully written memories--so if you have them and would like to find a way to put them on paper with some grace, I urge you to sign up. The dates are February 8-11.

Blog to Book to Blog blah blah blah

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:36:00 GMT

This week I have been busy posting a lot of unpublished writing online, essentially turning several of my would-be books into blogs. This brings to mind, of course, that which all five zillion of you bloggers would like to do: turn your blog into a book deal. Candace Dempsey will be teaching a workshop here at the http://sayulitawritersworkshops.com/ on that very topic, come April. She's teaching the very last class on the schedule, and should have a draft of her book on the somewhat sensational Amanda Knox murder trial done by then. Maybe? Candace? Are you getting there? What happened to Amanda Knox? Can someone email me with an answer to that question? Being a former Seattleite, I was sort of tuned in to her case, since she's a west Seattle kid, went overseas to study in Perugia, Italy, and some college age bad behavior involving hashish, some bad people, and perhaps a dose of satanic silliness spun out of control and her roommate died of a stab wound and she has been charged with the crime. From what I've read and heard I think she is guilty of bad judgment and getting loaded on hashish and deeply, stupidly irresponsible behavior but not murder. I hope that the jury agrees instead of sending a 20 year old girl to jail for the rest of her life. God, can you imagine? But then there are the parents of the dead girl, and they want justice. Revenge? Blood? What is it one wants in such a situation? Maybe Candace can tell us: Blog: Italian Woman at the Table
Official Website with clips

Anyway enough about that, what about me? That's what blogging is all about after all, tooting the horn. So here are a couple of toots: at http://jjhenderson.net you can add slash blog to the URL and find yourself with a bunch of chapters of my fourth in the series Lucy Ripken book, called Lost in New York. I'll be adding chapters as I go along and eventually will publish the entire book and then its on to the next one and the next. I published three of them in book form with CDS Books back a few years, then they (CDS) got sold and my contract went away. No one's looked at them since, so...Also on this very workshop site, http://sayulitawritersworkshops.com/ you can click on Bottom Turns on the home page, next to the Blog header for this blog. Bottom Turns is my surfing memoir, and since there is a sort of running surf theme herein--and in my life these days, since I am surfing about six days a week--I figure I might as well put this one up in blogland as well.

So while Candace Dempsey has been able to get the deal to turn her blog into a book--good job, Candace--I have been unable to get the deal and so I'm turning my books into blogs. Maybe someone out there will read a few pages and find something they like, who knows?

Fish Tacos and Tequila

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:59:00 GMT

This is your program director out front of the Sayulita Fish Tacos restaurant and tequila bar on the plaza: three stories of food and drink. I'll try to upload a few other pics from the other night at Gabby's birthday party.

Birthday boy, turning 40, with program director. Birthday boy Gabby Villarubio has a cool blog at http://sayulitatequilajournal.com.
Some local talent, the Frijoleros, who play beautiful Mexican folk music and sing up a storm.

What the joint is famous for: fish tacos, and
Tequila in a couple of flavors. In the end, you get this:

We don't do this every night but we do try when there's a birthday. My friend Sheryl, foreground, Gabby's wife Andrea in the hat, assorted characters. At this point everybody's roaming the restaurant's three levels and the kids are all out in the plaza eating ice cream cones and having their own party. A fine fiesta. All photos by mi amor y esposa, Donna Day.

A final word, of a sort: There is a huge hurricane called Rick not far offshore now, category 5, which is supposed to send big waves, big wind, big water, God knows what, our way in the next few days. Mark who owns the Fish Taco place is warning everybody to batten the hatches. Everybody else is taking it in stride, especially the surfers, myself included, who think we might get some epic good surf this week.. We'll see....

La Comida--FOOD

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Hey this morning I woke up thinking about food in Sayulita. What I like are the tamale ladies, one younger, one older, not working together, both really beautiful, who walk up and down the beach and into some streets some days, selling hot chicken, cheese, pork, or combo tamales from a five gallon plastic bucket. The tamales are invariably fresh and made with just enough chile to zing your palate. I also love the limon (lime) flavored popsicles from the little ice cream store on Avenida Revolucion, the main street leading into town. We go there after school a lot, Jade gets an ice cream and Donna and/or I get limon popsicles. The family that runs it has a son in Jade's class at the Costa Verde School. We love the fish tacos and even more the shrimp chile rellenos at Sayulita Fish Tacos on the town square, where my friend Gabby Villarubio holds forth on the relative merits of various tequilas at Mark the owner's increasingly elaborate and well-stocked tequila bar. We love buying a kilo of shrimp for about five bucks and serving peel 'em yourself shrimp cocktails on the verandah here at our house on Calle Chiripas. And I love that Becky Selengut, food writer and blogger supreme, is coming to teach a class on writing about food--The Art and Soul of Food Writing-- right here in Sayulita commencing April 5th in her Sayulita Writers Workshop. Becky's bio, blog links, and all other relevant matters can be viewed here on the site, so have a look and consider learning how to make a chile relleno and then write a poem about it right here in the outdoor kitchen on my rooftop verandah, under the palapa, surrounded by palms waving in a tropical breeze and the sound of the waves two blocks away interrupted by the occasional cries of the Chachalacas, the wild Mexican turkeys that hang out in the neighborhood screeching at each other from the treetops.

Don't forget to check out chapters of my unpublished novels as they begin to appear at http://jjhenderson.net/blog. You have to add the slash blog to the URL once you get there, and sorry for the missing paragraph breaks. I gotta work on that.

Tiny Waves and Backaches

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:29:00 GMT

So today we raced over to La Lancha, our 20 minutes away spot, convinced that after yesterday's macking, as they say, south swell we'd get bombed by monster barrels or at least get our surf yayas out. I rode my back in the dawn to Chocobanana, the coffee shop at the center of town on the side of the plaza, the center of everything in Sayulita, to grab a coffee and a muffin and meet Nick, who usually drives, and whoever was with him. Today it was Theo, a Californian who's been down many years, very cool character, works in real estate and house management with his wife Tamra, a lovely pair and both surfers. He and Nick and I zoomed over to Lancha in Nick's enormous black four wheel drive vehicle which is very politically inappropriate except that down here bigger is especially better with cars. At Lancha you park on this little forgotten stretch of abandoned highway next to the main highway, walk a few yards, and are confronted with a seemingly impassable cyclone fence/gate topped and bottomed with coils of razor wire; except that you can walk down a small trail fifty feet into the jungle to the right and the cyclone fence turns to barbed wire and the barbed wire has been cut so around you go, piece of cake, fifty feet back to the dirt road and ten minutes walk brings you out to the Lancha beach where upon arriving we saw almost zero waves. We hung around and saw some small surf and went out and got some. After yesterday's bombs here in Sayulita it was a bit of a letdown but still, getting to surf THIS MUCH every week is a real privilege and I shouldn't forget it.

Spent much of the rest of the day doing that which I should have been doing all along, friending frantically and facebooking. So I'm collecting friends to what end, to promote the http://sayulitawritersworkshops.com and, I guess, myself. In pursuit of that elusive and weird thing, self-promotion, I have also brought Lucy Ripken's long sleepy website, http:// jjhenderson.net, back to life, and will be offering installments of several Lucy books over the next few months. I already posted an introduction to Lucy in the form of a speech I made a few years ago, and two chapters of a Lucy book as yet unpublished. So, go to http://jjhenderson.net, and when you are there, add /blog/ to the title line, and you'll be taken to the Lucy Ripken Files, where my old new work is being posted. I am working on ironing out the problems with indents and paragraph breaks, which disappeared in the first two chapters I posted, turning them into Beatnik style unpunctuated rants, not what I intended at all...sorry about that.

Also working on a massive email list that will be going out with more SWW news. Look for it soon if you're on the list.

All this desk work gives me a backache. God how do you all do it, desk it all day? Even when I was in an office, and it wasn't for long, I always got up and jumped around a bit or whatever. Well anyway, maybe its the surfing breaking my back. I am after all pushing along in years here and not getting any younger and looked recently at pics from a high school reunion I didn't attend and everybody looked like Aunt Betty and Uncle John but they were my contemporaries (everybody but GW Harris looked that way, that is, GW Harris didn't look a day over the day after he graduated from graduate school).

I am done and the dogs are barking loudly outside, as they are wont to do are far too many occasions.

Rock and rolling into October, and why am I here?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:25:00 GMT

Back from the dead we are, as the heaviness of the rainy season at last subsides, the air is getting palpably lighter, the evenings cooler, and best of all, a big south swell hit today, bringing the first overhead surfing waves to Sayulita in over a month. It was great out there today, half a dozen good surfers, half a dozen beginners, and half a dozen pretty good women surfers in really small bathing suits carving up the head high rights. Blue and white waves, frigates wheeling high in the sky, the palms along the beach nodding to the beat--I tell you this town is so sweet on a good day you might call it paradise--in fact many do, and that's why I'm here and you should be.

But forget about that, what I want to mention here is my first workshop, upcoming in January, with Charles Cross, rock n' roll writer extraordinaire, at the helm and telling all you students how its done; it being the fine art of music biography and related topics. Charles has been on the Seattle music scene for many years now, and he knows whereof he writes, whether it be about Kurt Cobain, Led Zeppelin, or Jimi Hendrix, to name a trio of rock n' roll legends about whom he's written to great acclaim. Check out his stuff in the bio up top, follow the links to his own pages, and then jump on board the workshop bandwagon. It'll be rocking come January 11 2010 for sure.

OK enough hype for the moment, but seriously folks, its time to get rolling here. We have 14 weeks of very cool classes coming up. I've been watching the town clean itself up for the imminent high season--there's a community beach clean up scheduled for Saturday and I will be there collecting beer cans and cigarette butts--people still smoke in Mexico, although not like they do in Paris--along with the rest of the volunteer Sayuleros.

While I'm talking Charles Cross I want to mention another Charles, Charles Salzberg, my old friend from New York--we were in a writers group together way back in the 1980s, who will be teaching the workshop on magazine journalism. Charles is a fine writer--he is up for a Shamus, an award given for the best new private eye, for his recently published book Swann's Last Song, and he's published a number of other very successful tomes--but I want to emphasize here what a great teacher he is. He has been recognized as one of New York's great teachers, and while he's probably sick of this anecdote for back up, I'm going to use it anyway. A few years ago one of his students brought in to class her somewhat disorganized but highly intriguing writings about her job working in the offices of a certain very high level fashion magazine editor in New York. Charles worked with this writer on shaping these notes into a manuscript, and voila! You have THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, best seller, movie with Meryl Streep, etc. Not everybody gets so lucky but if you've got the talent Charles will definitely help you hone it into a marketable product.

Our flying dog is still in a cast. I took her mother and sister to be spayed, thereby cutting the number of stray dogs in Sayulita down by several dozen, which will keep it in the low four figures at least for the foreseeable future. Just kidding--there are a lot of dogs wandering around this town, but most of them are accounted for. Even Mamacita and Esmeralda, the mother and sister of our adopted Paloma, she who flew off the roof, are taken care of--we feed them every day and are beginning to attempt to train them, with water attacks, not to attack the feet of people walking or biking by. They're really sweet when they know who you are, but until then you gotta watch out. Ah, life in paradise.

Why am I here?
Well, why does someone up and move from an American city to a small beach town in Mexico? There is obviously the lure of the beach, the tropics, in my case the waves, and the many things about Sayulita which draw people here. But honestly, people, when you cut out like we did, there is also an element of flight involved. And our flight was driven by economics and existential despair as the undercurrents to the adventure of moving to paradise. The economics were simple: the mortgage was beginning to eat us alive. Some of you surely have been there. But there was also my existential despair, if that's what you call it when you hit that point in the road, after years and years of work, where suddenly nothing is working. All the things you've been doing end up not amounting to much (ye olde hill of beans) and you're tired of doing them, tired of banging on doors behind which sits nobody; tired, in my case, of pretending that my completely indifferent agent in New York (well she lives and works out of Jersey, but she does work the publishing world in NY) was actually going to get me something when she won't even answer my emails or phone calls. So what the fuck. How long could that go on? I could only get so much work by cruising the writing gigs on Craigslist--and I did get connected to Roaring Forties Press, whose editor and publisher--not sure who is who there--Deirdre Green and Nigel don't know his last name even--were willing to jump on my Grunge Seattle proposal. The advance was tiny and the book got killed before it got to print, but now it is being resurrected and will be out soon, folks so snap one up, Grunge Seattle from Roaring Forties Press, http://roaringfortiespress.com.

Anyway enough of that aside, This business about the books and the agent is by way of letting the huge wide wonderful world of people reading my sayulita writers blog know that there will be several of my unpublished books arriving on other blogs here and there in the next few weeks, so that you can all see that I not only attempt to administer workshops, surf, and hang out with parrots and iguanas and my eleven year old daughter and our two dogs and my lovely and eternal muse, Donna Day, but I also am a writer. So check it out. I'm going to be blogging on this site with excerpts from a memoir called BOTTOM TURNS, which is the story of my surfing life; and I'm going to be blogging on my long dormant mystery writer site, http://jjhenderson.net, beginning very soon.

September Fade Out

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:33:00 GMT

Two weeks have blown by since the last post. Not exactly busy booking students for my wonderfully exciting Sayulita Writers Workshops, since I have yet to fill a class although many people seem to be checking out the site. But time, as slow as it flows here in the honey-dripping air of Sayulita's (non)rainy season, still races past and I can't seem to find the time to do this. I think that I have quickly come to the same existential question that most of you who blog must come to at least several times a day if not on a constant, simmering, anxiety-tweaking basis: who am I writing this for? As a long time professional writer I have been used to doing specific kinds of writing for specific kinds of editors, readers, people who expect this or that: for example I just got word that a book I wrote about Seattle's Grunge music era, that late 20th century moment in rock n roll musical history, canned by the publisher a year or so back, has been brought back to life. It will be appearing first as an E-book and then hopefully in print. The publisher is ROARING FORTIES PRESS, out of Berkeley California, and the book, a kind of cultural travel guide to the short unsweet life of the grunge music movement in Seattle, is a pretty entertaining bit of work if I don't say so myself. Of course the grunge era was happening pretty much under my nose the first five years I lived in Seattle, and I didn't exactly plunge into it, but I did check it out along the peripheries, and I did know some people on the scene, and so...shopping Craigslist for a gig a couple of years back, I stumbled on Roaring Forties Press who were shopping for writers to write guidebooks about musicians tied to specific cities. Seattle's most famous musical alumni are Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones, but since neither of those dudes actually made their musical mark while living in Seattle, they were not really options. But Grunge, the musical movement, was. And so I sold them on the idea, wrote the book, did all the work except the interview--nobody from Pearl Jam or Soundgarden wanted to talk to me even tho I had friends who were friends of theirs--and then the book got canned until now. Here I am living in Mexico and I have to edit this manuscript and otherwise put on my writer shoes and get back to work on an actual real manuscript.

Not like this blogging business. So if you are reading this, anybody out there, let me know.

Sayulita's rainy season is the driest this year that anyone can remember. And in spite of that, because the city or municipality or state government agencies are kind of broke this year (remittances from the US to Mexico are way down, I hear, so budgets are bleak south as well as north of the border), there has been no spraying of mosquitoes, that rainy season plague, and as a result several Sayulitans have come down with dengue fever in the past few weeks. DONT WORRY, those of you considering a trip down and already terrified by drug cartels and swine flu, the dengue will be gone in another couple of weeks. Meanwhile if you're overweight view it as an opportunity to lose some weight since a kick ass sweaty fever will do that, and if you're not, well, put on your bug repellant and get your ass down here and take a class in January, or February, or March, when the SWW will be going full tilt and all my geniuses in residence will be here teaching you all how to make your sentences since.

The other reason I haven't been blogging is surfing, which I have been doing much of. While I don't surf Sayulita itself these days, not being partial to the aggressive local crowd, I have been surfing almost everyday, well, four or five days a week anyway, at a place nearby called La Lancha. Before we travel to La Lancha I want to mention the names of my surfer friends here, all of whom seem to be bloggers. I surf with Nick Sherman almost every day, with a shifting crowd of other wave riders including Mariano Ricci, Terry Orr, Jackson Kirkendoll, Steve the science teacher whose last name I can't remember, Gaby Villarubio, and other assorted Sayulita characters, all of whom have great stories to tell. But the one I'm going to mention today is Gaby V, whose a serious blogger and whose comments on his newfound rediscovered love of surfing, a sport whose macho/aggro energy, as it played out in Sayulita's point break waves, scared him out of the water for thre past three years, are blogged at http://gabrea.blogspot.com
Here is the cover of my upcoming book. You can check it and other similar titles out at http://roaringfortiespress.com

Enough for now: coming soon, tales of La Lancha and Punta Mita, the Costa Verde International School, pavement, Sayulita dogs, and many other illuminating bits of this and that from down here.

What are we doing here?

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:29:00 GMT

Well, obviously its been a while. A week, or what? Losing track of time as we have hit one of the proverbial bumps in the road that led us from Seattle to Sayulita, from being a fairly engaged if not particularly well- paid writer to being the "creative director" of the workshops here. This is a big bump having to do with the kid hating her new school for its lack of intellectual challenges, a week without surf, too much sun, head lice, dog shit, and hey out there, a complete lack of response to this brilliant workshop program. Where are my students, I ask into the dark sky and nothing no one answers back. I have gotten, this week, two pieces of form junk mail with various characters named after that weird little guy in the old Superman comix, Mr Mxvgldxtqs or whatever it was. In the comix it was always superman's job to trick this guy into saying his own name backwards which would send him back into the evil dimension from whence he came. Well I got two signups from Mr. xfhjrt5ncpjg this week, and two queries from people who would love to TEACH a workshop, but not one single query from a possible student. Which is kind of a shame. I wish that those of you who are signed up to be teachers in this program would ante up a couple of your favorite students sometime soon so that my faith in the project returns, because I need a jolt of something. So my next program is to advertise, good old fashioned print media, somewhere in the near future. And send a shitload of email out.

Meanwhile I did swim a beautiful calm half-mile along the edge of the Sayulita beach today, with not a soul on the beach and no one else in the water except my wife. I swim from a point directly down from our house--its two blocks to the beach from the front gate--to the last house on the north end beach save that of the ex-president, whose lovely beach house sits amongst the rocks another two hundred yards up the beach. Which ex-president? Anyway the swim is 1000 strokes, and then a ten minute walk back and it is a wonderful way to start the day. Actually we first jump on our bikes, the three of us, and zoom thru the crowded muddy streets in front of the public school, where all the kids are getting dropped off, and then around a few muddy corners and down a few soggy streets to get to the Costa Verde School, currently an object of serious scorn in Jade's eyes, and from what she's telling us, with good cause. So we shall see how it goes in the next week or so, or month or two. After we drop Jade come back here walk the dogs reconnoiter then hit the ocean for the swim. Which will be The surf when the surf comes back. Meanwhile I am twitter and facebook challenged and those sites are causing consternation in my soul, for I do not like them and thus they do not like me and so we don't work well together. So how do I reach you, mine potential students? Come to me, please come to me...

Sayulita Surf Hotel and Rollie's restaurant.

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:04:00 GMT

Hey people my friends Terry and Sheryl have a really cool little hotel here in Sayulita, http://sayulitasurfhotel.com, which has only two rooms but they're large ande cheap and comfy with a huge patio with great people watching and a territorial view. About two blocks south of the town plaza you'll find it on the hill behind Rollie's restaurant. Rollie was a school principal up in Salinas California, and then about five years ago he came here to visit, loved it, came back and opened his restaurant which has fabulous pancakes and breakfasts in general. Also Rollie is some kind of an old commie or at least a socialist at heart and has been bringing his employees in as partners in the business ever since her opened. I'm not sure of the status at the moment, since this tail end of August first part of September is the deadest time of year in Sayulita and Rollie, like everybody else except for us, is somewhere else. Anywhere else. A hurricane blew by this week and we didn't even get rain and the swell it was supposed to bring never materialized, at least not yet. But I admire Rollie for his principles and for the way he encourages all his child age guests to make art which he then shows to everyone in the restaurant with cries of amazement at the talent on display.

I was talking with a friend today who told me when you blog the best thing to be is informative, so I'm going to try and be informative from now on. At the moment I'm short on information so I'll sign off. But briefly note that my friends at the New York Writers Workshop, who've done a lot to help me launch this one, are holding their pitch conference soon. Learn how to sell your non-fiction book with real editors in NYC! Sounds like fun to me. Check it out at the NY Writers Workshop site.

Another day at the beach

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:57:00 GMT

Day before yesterday, while I was out in the water--one of those little surfers in the background--my wife, muse and photographer, Donna Day, was taking pictures of boys cavorting on the beach. This is what some of the local surfer dudes--guys in their late teens and twenties--do when the surf is small, as it is. I was out there with my friend Terry, a longboarding goofyfooted Canadian who runs a small hotel here--two rooms with a very cool outdoor shower. He shows surf movies on the wall of his backyard every now and then, does web design and marketing, and has a daughter, Jasmine, who's in my daughter Jade's class at the Costa Verde Internnational School. Jade and Jasmine are to the left of this photo boogie boarding, which they do almost every day after school. Here are a few more from that day:

In case you want to stay on the beach for cheap, this is Papa's Palapas, which you can get prices and reservations for at Sayulitalife.com, or they might even have their own website, check it out. Pretty funky, plus at three stories and that rooftop, Mr. papa is definitely pushing the three story zoning limit. But it is RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE SURF if surfing is your be all and end all when you aren't writing that is. Here's a picture of me, just out of the water that day, wherein
The aging, scraggle-headed gringo/surfer/writer/creator of the SWW contemplates the surf. Life could be worse but then again the surf could be a lot better, and I could have a best-seller, a hit sitcom, and a house on the beach in Malibu instead of two blocks from the beach in Sayulita. I'm thinking, amigos, that if the SWW doesn't fly that I will be starting up the Aging Gringo Surf Safaris, in which I will pack my six surfboards, all of them long, and five surfing tourists, and take them on surf trips in the neighborhood. I've got the car and the boards and I know a few spots, so...don't want to study writing down here? How about wave-riding?

Flying Dog

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:40:00 GMT

Yesterday morning I surfed at Burros for the second day in a row, in the company of Nick Sherman, Steve Pomeroy, and Jackson. Nick is a web design guy from Seattle and other places; Steve is from I don't know where but he teaches science at Jade's school, tracks turtle nestings and other eco-projects, and tends bar at Afortunada, a restaurant in downtown Sayulita stuck in a round building that used to house a surf shop and before that I don't know what. Jackson's a guy who's been around here a decade, very mellow old surfer, used to live in Chile; I'm not sure what he's up to when he's not surfing but he's always apprised of the swell possibilities. Seems to be our main waves on the web tracker.

Anyway we hit Burros around 7:30 and by 9 the crowd was heavy--two dozen plus, too many shortboarding 22 year old dudes and boogie boarders, and not enough waves to go around. I've been battling crowds in the ocean for too long. I can't do it any more. We left around 9:30 and came back to Sayulita, with our customary stop at the little tienda where we buy ice cold coconut water, supposedly better than gatorade for electrolyte replacement. I like that the bottles contain lots of little pieces of coconut as well as the icy clear liquid--food in a bottle!

When I got home I was just unloading, washing up the board etc. on the sidewalk, went into the patio inside the gate to do something when I heard this horrid dog screeching racket coming from the sidewalk outside. I ran out and found Paloma, our sweet, cute new puppy, on the ground screaming in agony, her mother and sister and some other dogs milling around, Donna coming shouting down the stairs, Jade crying coming out of the house, me pushing the other dogs away and carefully picking her up--after smashing my toe on a curb and now profusely bleeding myself--and carrying her to the car where I held her and Donna drove us to the vet, Jade in the back crying, the puppy yipping and whining and biting at me, terrified and confused and even disoriented...

She'd fallen off the roof, the deck, the second floor, fifteen feet to the sidewalk, we're not sure how it happened but it is a long, long way for a little dog to fall. Poor baby.

The local vet, who is a good guy since his operation, Sayulita Animals, does so much for the local stray dog and cat community, but is not a very experienced vet, managed after we spent fifteen minutes trying and finally muzzling her--in her hysteria and pain she was quite visious, the little princess--he checked her out and pronounced her left upper front leg broken and said we needed an x-ray. After rushing back here to change and get money, etc., Donna and Jade and I zoomed to Vallarta, where the nearest pet xray machine could be found. We found the place after nearly an hour's drive--the cops at the state border (Just north of the airport here lies the border between Jalisco to the south and Nayarit to the north) were rousintg suspicous cars or something, and their eyeball vehicle checks had traffic backed up a couple of miles--and the vet and he did his xray and pronounced that she had a small bone fracture or bruise or something, not that serious, not operable or requiring a cast. Thank God. But it will require a lot of bed rest and care and carrying her to and fro so she can do her business. A big adventure for our newly adopted baby dog. And for us.

All last night she woke every fifteen minutes crying and yowling, waking us up. We'd get up and stroke her and shift her to make her more comfortable, then go back to sleep and do it again fifteen minutes later. It was a very long night and as a result I missed my surf session this morning--exhaustion and rain will do that--and have gone through today like a zombie. C'est la Mexican vie.