It wasn't the Mexican beer. It wasn't the bougainvillea and the butterflies. It was serendipity and the kindness of a stranger that prompted George Szanto to choose Michoacán as a place to write for a year. In 1984, a half-Vietnamese, half-French hotel keeper provided sanctuary to George Szanto and his family in a remote Mexican village. Nearly a year later this same friend kept his promise and found the Szantos a delightful house in Tacámbaro, even helping to supply furniture and arranging the move. The morning after they moved in, the earth moved. "We huddled, a bit scared and bewildered, in the centre of the courtyard,"; he says. "Walls swayed, graceful and mysterious, for more than three minutes... On the cathedral dome the clock said 7:19. It would remain 7:19 all year."; The novel Szanto planned to write that year never materialized, but three others have since arisen after the tremors of that earthquake.

More BC fiction about Mexico:

• Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947).
• Norman Newton's The House of Gods (1961), recalls Toltec culture from the 15th century. His The One True Man (1963) incorporates Mayan and Aztec stories to theorize that Phoenicians could have colonized North America.
• Daphne Marlatt recorded her visit to Mexico with Roy Kiyooka for Zocalo (1977).
• George McWhirter's Cage (1987), about a B.C. priest in Mexico, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
• Paul St. Pierre's In the Navel of the Moon (D&M, 1993) is set in the fictional Mexican border town of San Sebastian de Hidalgo.

[BCBW 2004]