On Seeing as an Artist or, Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühlung

This is the transcript of my remarks for the panel "Writing Across Borders and Cultures" on October 15, 2016 at the Women Writing the West Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It includes a brief reading from The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.

How many of you have been to Mexico? Well, viva Mexico! Here we are in New Mexico, Nuevo México. On this panel, with Dawn Wink and Kathryn Ferguson, it seems we are all about Mexico.

I write both fiction and nonfiction, most of it about Mexico because that is where I have been living for most of my adult life— that is, the past 30 years— married to a Mexican and living in Mexico City. 

But in this talk I would like to put on my sombrero, as it were, as an historical novelist, and although my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is about Mexico, I don’t want to talk so much about Mexico as I do five specific, simple, powerful techniques that have helped me, and that I hope will help you to see as an artist and write across borders and cultures. 

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