One of the biggest tourist draws in Guatemala is in the highlands, Lake Atitlán, and the many towns that surround it. We stayed over night in Panajachel and then, led by a tour guide from Guatemala City, we took a boat to visit three towns: Santa Catarina, San Antonio and Santiago.
I was recently interviewed via email by a high school student interested in arts and entertainment journalism. Here are some of the questions and answers:
Q: What different professions have you held in order to get where you are now?
A: I had a journalism internship at the Bellingham Herald in Bellingham, Wash., when I was still a college student majoring in journalism, but I also taught English in Japan, edited a phone book, worked as a copy writer for an advertising agency, and worked as a copy editor at a newspaper before becoming the arts and entertainment editor, all the while I wrote freelance reviews of books, plays and concerts.
Q: What classes did you take, throughout high school and college, to put you in a place to get the job you wanted?
A: In my high school, I was on the honors track, meaning I got to take AP classes (history, chemistry, English, calculus), as well as other advanced-level class, but I also took theater courses throughout high school. In college, I was a journalism major, but also took many courses in political science, philosophy and English. In graduate school, I earned a master’s of fine arts in creative writing, but also studied Japanese language and culture.
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I have a short story in a new anthology of military sci-fi called “Veterans of the Future Wars.”
In conjunction with the release of this new book, I was interviewed by the publisher about myself, books, writing and the story behind the story, among other things. After years of being a journalist, it was fun to be on the other side — answering questions instead of asking them.
Read the full interview (it is a little long) at http://martiningham.blogspot.com/2014/03/author-interview-michael-janairo.html
What a great idea!
Hey kids! Want to help raise the visibility of women writers of the fantastic? With trumpet’s blare, let me unveil:
A Broad Universe Project for Women’s History Month: Women Authors on Wikipedia!
Women artists made a concerted effort recently to get more of them written into history. More people turn to Wikipedia than to any other source. Women are still largely missing unless they are the few really big names in history. Here’s Mary Shelley’s page. It’s fairly comprehensive, but there aren’t enough 20th C women with the same detail. Comprehensive is great, but every little bit helps.
Only 2% of the users edit Wikipedia. A huge percentage of them are male. And as time goes on fewer people are doing any editing, so diversity is bound to be an issue.
This is a great way for members who want to be more active in promoting ALL…
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Vote for The Duck! Do so before the poll closes on March 2, 2014.
Bartleby Snopes Story of the Month
The voting for the February 2014 Story of the Month is now open. Read all of the February stories and then vote for your favorite. Voting will close on March 2nd. Please only vote once.
The winning story will earn an automatic spot in the 12th Issue of our semi-annual magazine due out in July 2014.
UPDATE: Fresh new fiction from yours truly now live on Bartleby Snopes http://www.bartlebysnopes.com/theduck.htm
I just got a note from the editor of the online journal Bartleby Snopes that my short story, The Duck, will be going live online next week at http://bartlebysnopes.com.
So be on the lookout for the story AND be sure to stay tuned, because the story will be in competition for Story of the Month, with voting done online by readers just like you.
I’ll have links to the story and to the voting site when they go live.
I spent most of my visit to Guatemala in Antigua, which you can see and read about here, but I also took trips to other parts of the country.
All these trips were put together Walter, the owner of the Don Quijote Travel Agency in Antiuga Guatemala.
Here’s Walter’s van to the right. Our trip from Antigua to Chichicastenango took about three hours, which included stopping for breakfast at a place high in the mountains. Though the roads we traveled on included the four-way Pan-American highway, it also included going though plenty of towns and villages and mountain passes, where the roads are twisty and traffic is controlled by speed bumps. Lots of speed bumps.
Walter is the best kind of travel guide — he knows where he’s going, he explains things clearly and he has a great sense of humor. On the morning of our trip to Chichi — as the town was called — I sat up front in the van with him, my camera on my lap. He pulled over now and then as we drove along so I could get shots, such as the one of the volcano/mountain landscape with thick fog in the valley at the top of this post, and (after I turned around) of him and Crit in the early morning sun. (more…)
The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The TV show Haven brought me to this tale, which was more of a story about stories — a kind of using fiction to figure out a kind of aesthetic — that makes a clever distinction between stories that are good for the news media (ones that have only one thing strange about them and that can be summed up easily) versus stories that don’t work in the news media, that is stories that are too strange or unresolved or have too many points in them to be easily summed up.
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