Strolling the cobblestoned streets of San Miguel de Allende with a
friend on her first visit to Mexico, Pamela Alma Bass could
scarcely remember the last time she’d been kissed. “In Mexico it seems
anything is possible,” she wrote of that visit in an award-winning
short story. “Like no one here will know I was that dorky girl in high
school with the navy blue uniform … talking too loudly to seem cool.”
In a club, she meets Antonio, an aspiring cartoonist who admires her
hands before taking her to another bar that is painted to look like
heaven: “He pulls me down next to him on a sofa, lights a cigarette,
and wraps one hand around my waist … but I can’t think about it long
because then comes the kiss. I fall into that kiss like a girl falling
into a meadow full of poppies.”
That night, and that trip, were part of a grand transition for Bass,
who will appear at Diesel (5433 College Ave., Oakland) on June
28 with several fellow contributors to The Best Women’s Travel
Writing 2009 and The Best Travel Writing 2009. “I completely
fell in love with Mexico when I first visited. In fact, it was a
life-changing kind of love,” which inspired her to move to San Miguel
de Allende. “What was supposed to be one year of studying Spanish and
finding myself turned into three years of adventure, heartache,
exploration, and eventually — after many wrong turns
— discovering I wanted to become a writer. There was
something about the Mexican way of viewing the world that helped give
me permission to follow my outlandish and arrogant dream.”
In Mexico, she also felt “millions of miles away from home and
family and all of the pressures of what-you-are-supposed-to-be.” A
graduate of Princeton University and the Hunter School of Social Work,
Bass was “supposed to be” a lot of things, to pursue life paths more
stable and fruitful and less solitary than the literary one. Yet the
pervasive spirit of “this small bohemian expat town in the Mexican
mountains … allowed me to take this risk. It wasn’t, however, until I
moved to San Francisco that I was actually able to make those dreams a
reality — through taking classes and working with great teachers
at the Writing Salon and Book Passage’s Travel Writing Conference.”
Now living in Marin County, where she has written about Mexico for
the Marin Independent Journal, Bass has contributed to other
anthologies including I Should Have Gone Home: Tripping Up Around
the World and Hot Flashes 2: Sexy Little Stories and Poems.
A mother of young twins, she blogs about this experience as well. And
she’s working on a novel, Tail of Frog: A Mexican Remedy for a
Gringa Gurl, which might very well be autobiographical.
The book, Bass says, “follows the journey of the
almost-thirty-year-old Margaret Herrick, as she flees New York City, a
broken relationship, her social-work career and an overpowering family
in search of the perfect man, a fulfilling career and ultimately
herself. She imagines — somewhat delusionally — that
she will find these things in the small artistic town in the Mexican
mountains, San Miguel de Allende. San Miguel is a place where people
find themselves and lose themselves; Margaret will do both.”
Other writers slated to appear with Bass at Diesel include Laurie
McAndish King, Diana Cohen, Y.J. Zhu, Ken Matusow, and Millicent
Susens. 3 p.m. DieselBookstore.com
