Saturday, October 17, 2009

Sabotage Attempt Overcome

Reading!


A Siddha Yoga Tea-Bagger tried to sabotage our gathering last week by calling the restaurant and telling them the event was canceled. Well, we got wind of the plot and set things straight, and the evening was a resounding success. Sorry, tea-baggers, right-wing fundamentalists whose beliefs are threatened just because I have written a story that is absolutely accurate to my experience.

Here are some more photos, all in the wrong order!



Alphie McCourt introducing Marta


Fred Poole opens the program


Friends and well-wishers gather


Malachy McCourt sings & inspires


Getting ready




Friday, September 18, 2009

Manhattan Writing Workshops

I will be offering three Authentic Writing workshops in Manhattan on Saturday mornings -- if you want to do some writing, this is the place to be.

All the writing will be from life -- spontaneous and personal. The workshops are for people who have written for years, people who have wished they were writing, people who write in their heads but don't manage to get it down on paper and everyone in between.

These are studios more than workshops, a place for artists to come together and practice their art -- without competition or comparison.

I do almost all my writing in these workshops. The Guru Looked Good was almost all written in workshops.

You may take one or more workshops, or you can sign up for the series of three.

We will meet at:
TRS, 44 E. 32 Street (between Park and Madison), 11th floor

Dates and Times:

October 10, November 14, December 12.
10am - 1pm.

Rates:
$75/workshop (please specify which date)
or
$180 for all three workshops

To register:

You can use PayPal
or
email me at: martaszabo@yahoo.com
or
call me at: (845) 679-0306

Hope to see you there!!

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Special Guest

Alphie McCourt -- author of the memoir A Long Stone's Throw and brother of Frank and Malachy -- has graciously agreed to join us at the book gathering in New York City on Thursday, October 15, 7pm, Via Della Pace. He has long been a true supporter of The Guru Looked Good. The night is building!...See you there!

September 25th update: And Malachy McCourt will be there too!!!! Hold onto your hats!!!!!!

Monday, August 24, 2009

SAVE THE DATE!


You're Invited! ~ Thursday, October 15, 7pm ~ I'll be hosting a very fun reading party at Via Della Pace, a charming Italian eaterie at 48 E. 7th St. right near Second Avenue in Manhattan ~ bring a friend or two, order yourself a fine Italian dinner, a glass or two of wine, splurge on an espresso and a pastry, and we'll have a wonderful evening together! I'll read you some pieces from the book, answer questions, maybe we'll get into a conversation about what a cult really means, or what writing memoir really means, or something else entirely. In any event, I hope to see you there!

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Interview with Steve Cleaver of "Leave It To Cleaver"

Here's a clip of my interview on Panda TV that of course has been broadcast on all major networks constantly, but in case you missed it, just click HERE

I come in after the first 27 minutes.

And Steve Cleaver is one cool dude.

Monday, July 27, 2009

On The Road

Had a great time at Oblong Books, reading from and talking about the book.

Will be having another book party this Saturday, August 1, 7pm at Inquiring Minds bookstore in New Paltz, NY. Good food, good company! Please come!




Tuesday, July 21, 2009

INTERNATIONAL!



My dear friend Lindsay was in Jerusalem last week. She was in the middle of reading The Guru Looked Good, and took this photo at the Wailing Wall.

She also tucked a prayer into the wall, asking for good fortune for the book.

Wow. Thanks, Lindsay!

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

July 17, A Reading in Rhinebeck, NY

I will be reading from the book and answering questions, laughing and enjoying the crowd of whoever can make it, Friday, July 17, 7:30pm at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY -- please come! It will be fun.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Praise from Alphie McCourt

Alphie McCourt -- brother to Frank & Malachy McCourt and a most praiseworthy memoirist in his own right -- is the author of A LONG STONE'S THROW, a book that I deeply admire. I am honored that he read the book and had such a strong feeling for it. Thanks, Alphie!

"The book was easy to read, a ready disguise for all the complexity contained within its pages. You didn't go for the sensational revelation at the end, the Chinese food that is commonplace writing. Instead, you painted a complete picture and let us judge for ourselves. It is a fascinating portrait of guru, ashram and, most of all, of yourself. I coudn't wait to pick up the book and read more and I was sorry when it ended. You writing enriched my life."





Wednesday, May 20, 2009

THE PODCAST!

Thanks, Yarrow, for reminding me to post the podcast of the Leave It To Cleaver show we did a couple weeks ago. It's fun. Hope you enjoy it. I think the first 30 mins are skippable!

Listen here!

Sunday, May 10, 2009

An Invitation

I invite you to keep up with my current writing at Experiments in Memoir.

See you there!

Friday, May 8, 2009

MARTA ON THE RADIO!

Saturday, May 9 -- noon-2pm EST

(click here to)
LISTEN!


I'll be appearing on 'LEAVE IT TO CLEAVER', Steve Cleaver's wild mix of a radio show, talking about writing and memoir and The Guru Looked Good and writing and memoir!

CALL IN DURING THE SHOW!!! (845) 752-5300

Friday, April 17, 2009

Review from April's Chronogram Magazine

Eat Pray Love from the opposite side of the sticky mat. Authentic Writing and Woodstock Memoir Festival co-founder Szabo launched this intimate account of her decade on staff at Gurumayi’s Siddha Yoga ashram online, drawing hundreds of passionate fans. Her just-published book, clear-sighted and true to the bone, should attract many more. -- Chronogram

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

BEST PLACE TO BUY THE BOOK!

I'm very happy that the book is available through the globally recognizable Amazon.com, of course, but you know what? If you purchase the book through LULU, I get a few bucks (I promise you not too many), whereas if you buy it through the big guys I get, literally, a few cents.

Monday, March 23, 2009

FACEBOOK!

I'm inviting you to join THE GURU LOOKED GOOD Facebook page!

Monday, March 16, 2009

FROM ABIGAIL THOMAS, author of A Three-Dog Life

THE GURU LOOKED GOOD is the superb account of one woman's journey through a glass darkly and out the other side. This memoir is a triumph, I couldn't put it down.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Review by Martha Frankel

I have never been involved with Siddha Yoga --- I have never searched for, or found, a guru. I have never lived communally or wanted to. That said, The Guru Looked Good was the best read of the winter. Marta Szabo writes with a searing insight into what would make someone give up their choice to think freely. This is the book people pretend Eat, Pray, Love is, but The Guru Looked Good is the real deal. -- Martha Frankel, author of the memoir Hats and Eyeglasses.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

THINKING BACK

A piece about what it's like to drive by the South Fallsburg ashram these days. It's called Time After Time and the date of the posting is February 25, 2009... read.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

A Reader's Review

Marta Szabo’s online memoir, The Guru Looked Good, is now available in paperback and essential reading for anyone once involved in SY, corporate culture, or dysfunction al relationships where they repeatedly betrayed themselves or felt betrayed. So, basically, everyone should read it.

In TGLG, Marta brilliantly lays bare (without ever pointing fingers, attacking anyone’s “experience,” or memories) the dysfunction within SY. Without knowing anything about me personally, Marta clarified most of the questions I had about SY, helped me put together a puzzle I’d resigned to not solve, helped me finally let go and accept SY and GM as a part of my past.

Ironically I bumped into Marta’s blog early last year while searching for GM’s Message for 2008 – I’d heard through the guru-line she’d emerged from seclusion and made a (vocal) appearance at the NY talk. Upon visiting the SY site to see the message (years ago it was always posted there for all to see by Jan. 2nd), I was asked to register and pay $100 and thought with a sigh: Some things about SY never change.

The entrance fee was typical, if outrageous, and I knew that in 2008 someone somewhere would have written something about GM’s talk so made a few free google searches and landed on Marta’s blog.

Wow.

In a straightforward, here’s-my-story-draw-your-own-conclusions way, Marta’s story helped me look back, trust and accept things I’d always known intuitively. Suspicions and secrets I’d buried as well as SY had buried its own. After I finished her book I felt a combination of great sadness and relief.

I’ve now read TGLG several times, shared it with the person who introduced me to GM in 1989, and the close circle of friends I introduced to GM in the years since. All came away with a similar take.

TGLG inspired me to revisit my personal history with SY (overall positive) as well as the history of SY itself from a sober, absence-of-the -“shakti”-perspective, from where I am now: a parent in my 40s, living in the post- 9/11, internet age, having survived the hell of working for an international corporation, having travelled on three astounding adventures through Asia, having a little more life, growth and experience under my belt (a nd yes, SY was a significant part of that) than I did when I first bowed down before GM at age 23.

Marta’s book also helped me understand why someone would go throw themselves at the feet of a Baba or Gurumayi – a longing that never called me. I was intrigued but could never relate to that kind of devotion. I judged it at a bit extreme, though remained curious about “life on the inside.”

My participation very much took place on the periphery of the devotee fanbase. I loved seeing GM every few years when she glided into town on tour. I chanted, read her books, dreamt about her often . . . but never really did much in the way of seva or time in an Ashram. I did visit SF once for two weeks one summer, just to satisfy my curiosity, and wrote in my journal at the time that “despite all it’s through-the-looking-glass-wonders, there’s something sinister about the place”.

As things began winding down with SY’s active, public presence several years ago, GM gradually fell off my radar. Without my even noticing it, my interest and participation just sort of faded away. It was as if the volume had been turned down to a low, dull hum.

One of the most significant things that became clear to me after I finished TGLG is this:

There was a time when Gurumayi was Malti – and Malti was a young, beautif ul girl living in 1960s India with every aspect of her life dictated to her by her parent s, (and the no doubt suffocating at times for someone with her personality) culture, beliefs, traditions, protocol and religion in which she was raised.

In hindsight, Malti was thrust by her parents at age 13 into the arms of a man she believed or was led to believe was God incarnate. Now, as a parent, the ultimate results of this scenario are heartbreaking to me. Think of Malti at 13; think of her now.

Baba showed her the world, adulation, wealth, fame, and perhaps most significantly A WAY OUT of her oppressive life and the times in which she lived (if only she could hold on . . .).

He also abused her wholly (mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually), abused others, and succeeded in silencing her about that abuse forever, long after his death, long after all his wealth, fame and adulation be came hers. And even, as it turns out, long after she decided she wanted a way out of those things too.

The above conclusions may have been drawn and expressed countless times on countless other blogs over the years – I am posting here for the first time today. They may read as complete speculation but they are truth’s for me that Marta’s book helped me realize I’ve had buried deep in my gut for years, ones I chose to overlook during SY’s heyday in the early 1990s, feelings TGLG inspired me to revisit and accept.

The above conclusions also put together for me the puzzle pieces of GM’s intense rage towards her parents – from everything I can glean she attended neither of their funerals when they both passed away a few years back – her rage against her brother, desire to erase her family from personal history, have control of the organization, all of it.

These are tragic conclusions about a tragic story.

Worst of all perhaps is the epic dysfunction/karma of Gurumayi’s relationship with Baba.


But, sadly, GM’s early years in many ways parallel that of so many of us who were damaged, abused or oppressed as children – and then later sought ways, successful or not, to escape or heal ourselves through our relationships, spiritual seeking, drug use, or our work in the world.

Someone I know who read Marta’s book asked me afterward if I thought GM was a charlatan. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to answer.

Someone else I shared the same question with replied: “She’s not a charlatan, she’s a human.”


I met GM for the first time in 1989 and something big changed in my Life. It was quite a ride. One I don’t regret.

Twenty years later here I am. My understanding feels more complete now. More real.

More Thoughts from the Reviewing Reader Posted Above

February 20, 2009


Dear Marta,

First of all, congratulations. I’ve been hoping since I first read your blog last January that a publisher would find you. As the offspring of two writers I can appreciate, if not exactly relate from direct memoir-writing experience, the sheer will and perseverance it must have taken to compose something of this scope. Clearly you needed to write this story and clearly it needed to be read.

Second, I’ve written and re-written you several times in my head, wished I could call and invite you to coffee and share what your story has meant to me. Haven’t been able to capture what I want to say in writing – it is an ongoing conversation, it evolves – but decided to finally take an initial crack at today so here goes:

After reading your story I went back and wrote my own (though just one chapter!) about my early experiences in SY, circa 1989-1993, and may someday send it your way as a thank you, as proof of how reading about your experience inspired me to look back at my own with sober detachment.

In the past, almost everything I’d ever read about SY that was “critical” (mainly the magazine articles in the 90s) seemed tinged with a nastiness that felt personal and led me to question the motives of the authors.

Your book was the opposite. I suppose had I encountered it, say, ten years ago – when I was that much closer in time to and need of GM, and that much more submerged in the “shakti” – it might have devastated me. But the volume on SY began to slowly turn down several years ago, and your book came at a time when I could really hear it.

Your story (and the comments “heaped upon it” by your other readers) helped me look back and finally reconcile the disparity that was always present between my own personal experience (overwhelmingly positive) and the things about SY the “organization” that continued to gnaw in my gut.

Although for a time a dear friend became one of GM’s personal assistants, I understood, even as someone on the outside, the unspoken rule that information about such a relationship was "sacred"/off limits. Because I never lived in an ashram, never wanted to, and remained far removed from the inner workings – the dark side of SY was something I was chose to overlook as “not part of my experience.” Of course now I can look back and see all the subtle and not so subtle ways I was supported in that choice.

Your book helped me see with such clarity how within dysfunctional relationships there are rationales on both sides for everything; how what you deeply want to beleive, what you hope is true, and what you're too afraid to admit or let go of can keep you enslaved. It's the old "They beat me, but I stay, because this is what I know."

Though I have no regrets about my particpation in SY, and am grateful for what the experience taught me (and since reading your book, is as it turns out, still teaching me) I realize that if I encountered SY today – especially as it was marketed to me in 1989 – I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.

With the above realization came countless others about how much I, the world, even SY have changed.

After finishing your book, I went back and read the New Yorker article again. In 1994, it made me sick to my stomach; this time around it had no charge, even seemed a bit long-winded and dull. So much of what was in there just didn't matter anymore. The revelation for me now was that I could have read something so scalding about SY – and still stayed involved. Wow. No, I never lived in an ashram, never "served" GM, but clearly, in my own way, I was completely committed. If shaktipat had come with a side-effects warning label it might have read: "Caution: Repeated doses may blunt critical thinking."

In hindsight, SY was my salvation at a crisis point in my life where, under different circumstances, I might have just gone to my Dr. and gotten a prescription for Ativan. Ultimately I’m glad I chose the former option but glad I now know I don’t need it, evo lved/am evolving out of it, can’t/won’t use it anymore.

Your book helped make this new direction easier for me.

Baba once said “The practices of Siddha Yoga belong to you” and I always felt that was right – in spite of all the hoopla, insanity, dysfunction and corruption, it has been important for me to remember that things like Om Namah Shivaya predate degrees in marketing, trademarks, PR campaigns, satellite programming, and perhaps, even sexual abuse.

Thankfully, as it turns out, the practices of Siddha Yoga don’t belong to SYDA. Now that truly would have been tragic.

Thank you for inspiring the look back. I doubt I would have ever done it had I not found your book. Thank you, thank you.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

THE BOOK IS HERE!

We had a really great event this past Sunday at the Woodstock Memoir Festival to present the book. It was alot of fun. People brought food and we had a full house with lots of books for sale in the back. And then Bob Brader (the actor/writer who had performed Spitting in the Face of the Devil, his incredible one-man autobiographical show the night before) joined me up on stage for a back-and-forth conversation about the writing of the book, the story of this blog, for some readings and then some Q&A with the audience. Thank you to all who came and made it the grand celebration that it was. I spotted one agent-from-ashram-headquarters for a moment by the door. I can't remember his name. I don't know how long he was there. Far more exciting was the surprise appearance of a very old, dear friend from ashram times who had made the trip to express his friendship and support.

Buy the book!

Thank you to every reader of this blog. Let's see where we go from here!

Marta

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

January 28, 2009


This blog began in April 2007 with the posting of the first chapter of The Guru Looked Good. Every Tuesday morning from then until September a new chapter went up. And they all stayed up until this morning.

Now the book is coming out in book form, a paperback that you can hold in your hands, dog ear and prop doors open with.

The book will be out in about two weeks, coinciding with the Woodstock Memoir Festival.

If you can't make it to the festival, the book will also be available by that time online and I'll post information on how to get a copy.

It's a turning point for sure. All the chapters and all the comments heaped upon them -- both wildly supportive and the malicious -- are preserved, not deleted.

For those coming here for the first time, welcome. Below are a few excerpts to give you a feel for the book.

with warm wishes,
Marta