Here's an interesting piece on living as a writer in Guatemala. Originally published March, 2008 in the New York Times. [LINK]
Guatemala as Muse and Base for a Writer
By LOUISE TUTELIAN
TO reach her favorite place in the world, Joyce Maynard flies for five hours from San Francisco, near her main home in Mill Valley, Calif. Then she is jostled for two and a half hours in a hired minivan over dusty two-lane roads beset by construction delays and clogged by buses spewing fumes. Finally, she boards a launch for a 45-minute ride to the tiny dock near her casa.
Ms. Maynard’s two-story wood and adobe second home perches on a green hillside just outside the village of San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, on the edge of Lake Atitlán, one of the deepest lakes in the Americas. Three dormant volcanoes, their peaks often clouded by mist, rim the southern shore of the lake, standing guard over the teal blue water. One of them, San Pedro, is perfectly framed in the view from Ms. Maynard’s bedroom balcony, but every window has a spectacular vista.
Stone steps curve gracefully down from the house, through tall wrought-iron gates, to Ms. Maynard’s own dock on the lake, from which she takes her daily swim. On the water, pale blue launches, called lanchas, ferry passengers from village to village. Fishermen drop lines from their cayucas, small wooden dugout boats with upturned prows.
It is here, somewhat to her own surprise, that Ms. Maynard spends up to four months a year, writing and running workshops for writers.
She had no intention of owning a home in Guatemala when she set out to travel there seven years ago with her daughter, Audrey, who was studying Spanish in a Guatemalan school. On her stone patio one recent morning, a tan Ms. Maynard, wearing a magenta camisole and khaki capris, recalled the conversation that changed the course of her life. “I said, ‘I so envy you, Aud, for getting to be here and study your Spanish,’ and she said, ‘What’s stopping you, Mama?’ ” Dramatic pause. “And I realized, ‘Nothing!’ ”
She had been divorced for over a decade. The youngest of her three children, Will, had just finished high school. Her older son, Charlie, was in college. Her work as a writer required only a laptop. She was supposed to be traveling on to Hawaii, but cashed in her ticket and rented a house for eight months. The longer she stayed, the more certain she became that she had stumbled on the next chapter of her life story.
“For the first half of my life, the big adventure was raising children,” said Ms. Maynard, 54, author of 11 books, including “To Die For,” which was made into the film starring Nicole Kidman, and “At Home in the World: A Memoir,” setting the record straight about, among other things, her complicated romantic relationship in the early ’70s with J. D. Salinger.
“I was writing books, I was having a career, but the biggest adventure was watching them grow and launching them into the world, and they’re launched,” she said, stretching her arms wide with an incredulous laugh. “I had a bit of a crisis figuring out what could possibly be an adventure after that.”
The adventure turned out to be San Marcos, west of Guatemala City in the central highlands. The village is poor. Its indigenous Maya population of 2,500 lives in one-room pueblos and cooks over open fires. Tiny adobe markets called tiendas stock a few staples. Women in traditional dress sit with baskets along the dirt and cobblestone paths, accepting quetzales, the local currency, for their avocados, potatoes, onions and eggs.
About 65 expatriates, half of them Americans, live full time in the town; another 150 come and go. Many have an artistic bent. Ms. Maynard’s neighbors include a Czech glass artist; a cabinetmaker originally from North Carolina who started a blues club in town; and the former owner of a record store in Hamburg, Germany, who runs a restaurant and inn with his wife, once a Manhattan social worker. A science professor from Tufts and a writer for The Washington Post live nearby part-time.
SOME North Americans and Europeans who visit San Marcos come to study at its Spanish-language school, founded in 2006 as a branch of an established school in another lakeside village. Others are drawn by its reputation as a center for healing and spirituality. The San Marcos Holistic Center, built in 1998, offers classes in yoga, massage and holistic therapies. Las Pirámides meditation center, founded in 1991, holds sessions in pyramid-shaped temples, including a moon course, running from full moon to full moon, and a three-month sun course. Its students can stay in pyramid-shaped cabins, but there are also cozy eco-hotels and inns in town, and several good restaurants.
As she finished writing a book, “The Usual Rules,” and learned some Spanish that first year, Ms. Maynard was enchanted by the landscape and the Maya, whom she describes as gentle and generous. She was hooked, in a plot twist she recognized. “At the very moment I thought I was going to have the saddest, loneliest year of my life,” she said, “I had the happiest, richest one.”
She found her house when she passed it on one of her regular swims. She bought it, with the acre of land it sits on, for $85,000 in 2002, a few years after the United Nations oversaw a peace accord to end years of internal conflict in Guatemala. (The State Department still advises travelers there to be cautious.)
The main house consists of a kitchen and large bath on the first floor and two rooms upstairs. Although the kitchen is basic, Ms. Maynard cooks there frequently. “I live pretty much vegetarian when I’m here,” she said. “I make stir fries, carrot ginger soup, Key lime pie, fruit tarts with local mango and pineapple,” for example. She has local electricity and telephone service, and Internet access. The property has its own septic system, and a pump draws water for most uses from the lake. Drinking water comes in large containers from the tiendas.
The house has no dining room. “I try to eat every meal outside,” Ms. Maynard said, sitting at the wooden table on the patio. “Even at night, you can eat dinner very happily under the stars.” An outdoor wood-burning pizza oven received its inaugural firing last month.
Up a staircase with gnarled carved-wood handrails, the large master bedroom and a living room that can double as a guest room share a double-sided fireplace. The bedroom has hardwood floors, a cathedral ceiling, wide ceiling beams and doors opening to a balcony that overlooks the lake. Ms. Maynard watches the sun rise over the volcanoes and the stars appear at night. The living room, decked out in eye-popping shades of red, orange and fuchsia, has a nine-foot-long daybed and the same jaw-dropping views.
Throughout the house are dozens of brightly colored cotton napkins, tablecloths, cushions, spreads and pillows. “Most of the textiles in my house used to be worn on a woman’s body,” Ms. Maynard said. “They were huipils, and every village in Guatemala has a classic design of this garment. I turned a lot of them into pillows. This is a country that really celebrates color and hand work.”
THE hand work extends outside the house, where a tiered garden extends 70 yards up a hill from the patio. It has been seven years in the making and has taken thousands of hours of work by local stonemasons. Ms. Maynard calls herself the “sponsor” of the garden; its real visionary, she says, is Bob Miller, 55, a landscape designer originally from Ottawa who lives in nearby Santa Cruz. Ms. Maynard, who calls him “Canadian Bob,” met him on a lancha ride when she overheard him speaking knowledgeably about gardens. A two-hour consultation the next day blossomed into a working relationship with no end in sight.
The garden’s terracing and walls interweave, forming a wave pattern, interspersed with rocks bearing carved Maya faces. Mango, papaya, lemon and lime trees flourish, as do begonias, calla lilies, azalea, hibiscus and orchids. Monarch butterflies flutter and hummingbirds hover. Water flows from small ponds, ending with a splash in a waterfall.
Elsewhere on the property, Ms. Maynard has added a treehouse with its own bedroom, bath and kitchen, an aerie inspired by the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse at Disneyland. It serves as a guest house and also as her secret spot for serious writing. “I’ve written three books here,” she said, pointing to a small desk in the treehouse, overlooking the water. “And not one of them has been about Guatemala.” That’s about to change as she embarks on a book about an expatriate woman making her way in a certain Central American country.
Ms. Maynard depends on the help of her Maya neighbors for much of what she needs done, especially construction. She offers year-round work and pays fair wages, she said, and also works with groups that aid women and children in the village — all efforts that help her coexist with the economic disparity between herself and the villagers.
She has spent about $60,000 in improvements over the years. Her property is worth about $500,000 now, estimates Annika Boerner, owner of Atitlán Visions real estate company. Values have tripled in the last 15 years, Ms. Boerner said.
But Ms. Maynard’s investment can’t be counted in quetzales. Besides having a tropical paradise to enjoy, she can walk down a main street where everyone knows her name and she knows theirs, even if that main street is only a dirt path.
“The kind of adventure that feels richest to me now is sinking my roots — and the roots of my plants — and getting to know the people here and the culture here,” she said. “That’s been my adventure, knowing this one little place.”
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