CM Mayo

C.M. Mayo: Which is a big group of people. I'm interrupting you because I'm just passionate about this. When I edited Tameme, I had the idea that it would be the U.S. Mexico and Canada, bilingual, English/Spanish that was my concept. When I started inviting submissions I was astonished at the veritable avalanche, some of it really good in Spanish f... rom the United States. I was really amazed by that. I really didn't appreciate that there was this whole literary scene there, and very high quality, very, very good. I think that's just completely off people's radars. Rose Mary Salum: You know, what happens when you live in the United States or when you move to the United States you start losing your connections in your literary realm in your country. So when it comes time to publish your own book, you don't have any connections, you don't know anybody. When you send your stuff for submissions nobody even knows who you are and they don't pay attention to your material. Some other people, they just give up and they say, "you know what, I cannot publish this anymore. The more established authors, what they do is they send it to Spain or the big publishing houses in Latin America. What happened with the authors that are not very well-known in the Spanish scene, they get trapped in a limbo. There are no venues where you can [channel] all these productions. C.M. Mayo: Maybe now it's changing with the blogs. I think a lot of them have started blogs and self-publishing. Rose Mary Salum: The big publishing houses are understanding that they also need to sell their books in Spanish because they have a lot of people that read in Spanish. So when Gisela and I were talking about this subject we decided to talk to Rice University and we got their support. We started this series that's called Dislocados and so far we have published three books. One is called Poéticas de los Dislocamientos, an anthology of essays about what it means to be writing in Spanish in the United States. So, that was the first book, which was the opening ...Read More