September 8, 2011 Thursday: 5:00 – 7:30
Posada San Francisco (across from the Jardin)
70 peso Donation * 50 pesos for Sala Members
Complimentary Wine Reception
Susan McKinney de Ortega
&
Alice Denham
My Chemical Romance: Flirting in Spanish tells the story of how Susan McKinney de Ortega struck up a starry-eyed yet strewn-with-obstacles romance with Mr. Wrong – a Mexican teenager from a San Miguel barrio. McKinney will address the process of trimming all the life events that led her to meet Carlos, and letting the love story that became Flirting in Spanish emerge.
Susan is a Philadelphia-born writer living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico since 1992. She writes about raising a bicultural family with her Mexican husband in One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk about Polyamory, Househusbandry, Mixed Marriage, Open Adoption and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love, edited by Rebecca Walker (Riverhead Books, 2009).
Selections from Flirting in Spanish are included in Mexico: A Love Story (Seal Press, 2006); Not What I Expected, The Unpredictable Road from Womanhood to Motherhood (Paycock Press, 2007), Sport Literate Magazine (2009).
McKinney´s personal essays and fiction appear in The Huffington Post, The Hawk Will Never Die, Tales from St. Joseph´s Hardwood (2005), Philadelphia Stories (2006) and The San Miguel Writer (1994), SOL Literary Magazine (2010) and Solamente en San Miguel (2010).
Her essay on bicultural living was broadcast on National Public Radio (2000). She has written for various regional magazines and newspapers.
McKinney is an award-winning former television news reporter for WEAU-TV, Eau Claire, Wisconsin and WISC-TV, Madison, Wisconsin.
Flirting in Spanish tells the extraordinary true love story between the 33-year old daughter of a former Los Angeles Lakers coach and a poor Mexican teenager. When Susan McKinney moves into Carlos Ortega´s house in San Miguel de Allende, she finds herself not only sharing a room with her boyfriend, his brother and his sister but struggling to find her place in another macho world – exactly what she had come to Mexico to escape.
“Susan McKinney has a real story to tell, both fraught and magical, and she knows how to tell it. FLIRTING IN SPANISH will take you places you’ve likely never been, and you will emerge amazed and illuminated.” – Tony Cohan, author of MEXICAN DAYS and ON MEXICAN TIME
Alice Denham received a glowing New York Times review for her most recent book, Sleeping with the Bad Boys, a rollicking romp through the literary circles in New York in the 1950s and 60s, a group of which she was an intimate part, so to speak. She tells juicy tales in the book about literary luminaries like Phillip Roth, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, James Dean, Marlon Brndo, and of course, Hugh Heffner, to name only a few of the many.
Reviewer Wim Coleman calls the book, “ . . . nothing less than an eye-witness account of the unfolding of an era. Denham’s personal memories of key writers frequently seque into keen literary criticism, while her travails as a woman author and model are firmly set against the bourgeoning feminist movement of the sixties.”
One of Denham’s early literary coups was to be the only Playboy playmate to have a story published in the same issue in which she appeared as the Centerfold attraction. In 1989, that same story was made into a movie that garnered awards at several festivals. A pioneer feminist, Denham is a founding member of the National Organization for Women. She appeared on a landmark Walter Cronkite CBS News show in the first national TV interview with feminists in 1970, and she participated in the famous feminist takeover of the Ladies Home Journal. Her stories and articles have appeared in the Village Voice, the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, and many other publications.