Sing, And Don't Cry: A Mexican Journal

Sing, and Don't Cry is Cate Kennedy' s sensual and touching evocation of her time spent working as a volunteer in small town Mexico. The people she comes to love in Tequisquiapan, and their gusto for celebration, pilgrimage and family, force her to cast a penetrating light on her own Western values and ways. 'What is truly essential, and who is truly poor?' asks Kennedy in a book that also challenges the reader to care more for his or her world. Described as 'a travel book with a social conscience' this essential memoir, from the award–winning fiction writer and poet, is funny, warm, yet ultimately disarming.

"If you're sick of being eaten to death by little stories about interest rates, then Cate Kennedy's big story of working as an Australian volunteer in a credit cooperative in Mexico is the solution. This tale of cross cultural discovery is wide-eyed and funny, unflinching and alive. It says a lot about Mexico but even more about Australia." - Michael McGirr, author of Bypass.

"an eloquent portrait of how lived experience can inform and alter a person's intellectual and spiritual alignment ... a profound and evocative document of a particular place." - Kate McFadyen, Australian Book Review. cate-kennedy * *

Cate Kennedy has won many awards for her poetry and short fiction, including The Age short story competition, the HQ Short Story Prize, and the Vincent Buckley Award for her first collection of poetry Signs of Other Fires (Five Islands Press, 2001). Cate is also the author of the internationally acclaimed short story collection Dark Roots (Scribe 2007). She works as a writer and editor and lives in north east Victoria, where in summer the landscape looks a little like Central Mexico, if you blur your eyes.