Life-changing event
NMSU professor wins Hillerman Prize
Warming to her subject, Carol Potenza was getting animated, her hands moving about as quickly as the expressions of delight that rippled over her face. “DNA is the most resilient stuff,” she said. “DNA is fascinating. They are working with mammoth DNA and elephants. If they get a mammoth at a zoo, I’m there.”
Potenza, 55, has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and cell biology and a doctorate in biomedical sciences. She is an assistant professor at New Mexico State University, where she teaches classes in biochemistry.
On this day, she was at a northeast Albuquerque apartment building, sitting on the 10th-floor balcony of rooms that belong to a sister-in-law. She was not there to talk about DNA and mammoths, elephant-like creatures that have been extinct for 4,500 years.
She had, in fact, been talking about her budding career as a writer of fiction and the fact that her unpublished novel, “Hearts of the Missing,” received the 2017 Hillerman Prize for the best first mystery novel set in the Southwest. The prize consists of $10,000 and a contract with St. Martin’s Press, which expects to publish Potenza’s novel in the fall of 2018.
But with Potenza, science is never far from the surface. Genetics play a role in “Hearts of the Missing,” a novel featuring Nicky Matthews, a white woman who works as a cop for the police force serving a fictitious New Mexico pueblo. Potenza said the second Nicky Matthews book will deal with the science required to clean up the spill of hazardous materials into New Mexico rivers and the third will involve fertility research.
Potenza is as pumped about becoming a published author as she is about science. She said the fact she won the Hillerman Prize, named for bestselling New Mexico mystery writer Tony Hillerman, should serve as encouragement for all would-be writers.
“Look what I did,” she said. “This could be a life-changing event. So put your pen to paper, sit down at your computer, write your story.”
Rich and atmospheric
Potenza is the eighth recipient of the Hillerman Prize, which was started in 2007 but has not been awarded every year. Initially the prize was presented by St. Martin’s Press and the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference. Last year, the Western Writers of America, a national organization of more than 650 people who write about the American West, took over for the Writers Conference and teamed up with St. Martin’s Press to continue the prize.
Potenza was notified about her win in March and was honored during a luncheon at the WWA convention in Kansas City, Mo., in June.
Dozens of manuscripts are submitted in the Hillerman competition each year.
“This year we received more than 70 manuscripts and one picture of a couch, which is what happens when you have online submissions,” Elizabeth Lacks, senior associate editor at St. Martin’s Press, said during the WWA luncheon. Lacks praised Potenza’s work for its rich and atmospheric details and for the unique perspective of a character working with a culture that is alien to her.
Like Potenza, Tony Hillerman, who died in 2008, wrote mysteries set among a culture other than his own. His novels
about Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee routinely made national best-sellers lists and won honors from writing organizations, including two WWA Spur Awards. He is a member of the WWA Hall of Fame.
Hillerman’s daughter, Anne, is writing novels that put her own twist on stories featuring characters created by her father. Her fourth entry in the series, “Cave of Bones” is due out next spring. She said her father would be happy that a New Mexico writer won the Hillerman Prize this year.
Potenza is the third winner of the prize with New Mexico connections. The first winner, in 2007, is Christine Barber, an Albuquerque resident who has worked as a writer and editor for New Mexico newspapers. John Fortunato, the 2014 winner, was at one time an FBI agent assigned to Gallup.
“My dad was so involved in the local writing community, and he was always happy to endorse the work of new writers,” Anne Hillerman said.
A perfect fit
The daughter of a Marine Corps fighter pilot, Potenza was born in Hawaii and moved around a lot, settling finally in Southern California. She met her husband, Albuquerque native Leos Flores, when they were students at the University of California, San Diego. They moved to Las Cruces in 1991 and Potenza went to work at NMSU. Her husband is a physician at a clinic in Anthony, N.M.
When she moved from a research to a teaching position at NMSU a few years back, Potenza, the mother of two adult children, found she had more time on her hands, or, as she puts it, “more brain space.”
An ardent reader and admitted daydreamer, she decided to take a crack at writing.
“My New Year’s resolution in 2015 was to start writing,” she said. “I’d write one to two hours in the morning, five days a week. I wrote two books — romances — the first year. Some people say they want to write, and they don’t. Or, they start writing and don’t finish. I finished two books and didn’t know what to do with them.”
She went looking for a writers group to help her. She joined one made up of writers around New Mexico who communicate on the internet. She credits the group with helping her turn “Hearts of the Missing,” which started out as a short story, into the novel she submitted to the Hillerman contest.
“My 2017 New Year’s resolution was to enter contests,” she said. “I did not set out to write (“Hearts of the Missing”) for the Hillerman contest. I did not even know about the Hillerman Prize when I wrote it. But it fit perfectly.”
Far-away eyes
It was Potenza’s sister-in-law, Fran Flores, a police officer on a New Mexico pueblo, who provided the inspiration for the character Nicky Matthews and details about police work on tribal lands, the long distances, for example, that officers often have to patrol alone. The fictitious pueblo where lead character Matthews, an Albuquerque native in her early 30s, does her policing is set between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
“When I started writing this, I had not actually been out to the pueblos,” Potenza said. “But I started going out to the feast days and just driving around the pueblos, soaking up the atmosphere. And there’s no problem going into the casinos.” She said she asked a couple of pueblo friends to read the manuscript to make sure she had not written anything foolish or offensive.
The story in “Hearts of the Missing” is about Matthews’ investigation into the death of a young pueblo woman, a student at NMSU. There is science, pueblo culture and police procedure in the novel, but there’s a mystical side, too, based on eerie visions of an elderly native woman and other things that Potenza’s sister-in-law experienced while working on pueblo grounds.
In the novel, Nicky Matthews sees similar visions, but attributes them to stress or fatigue.
Potenza said that Matthews does not want to believe that she has special or psychic abilities, but members of the pueblo think she has “far-away eyes.”
That fact, combined with their respect for her as a person and a police officer, is enough for those people to seek the help of Matthews, an outsider, in finding out what happened to their loved ones.
Writing chills
Does Potenza the scientist believe in ghost stories, visions?
“Not really,” she said. “I’ve never experienced anything like that. Might others have a different perception of the world around them? Sure. The brain is pretty mysterious. I think for protection sake, human brains are hard-wired to be wary of things that go bump in the night because so many predators are nocturnal.”
Even so, Potenza admits to getting the chills listening to her sister-in-law’s stories about the visions she has seen. And chills, in part, is what Potenza is trying to give her readers.
“Because they provoked fear and excitement (Fran’s) stories really stuck with me,” she said. “I wanted to learn to write that way. Chills from books are a safe way to elicit fear. When a reader tells me they get the shivers reading my stories, it makes me happy. I like starting this new writing adventure. But I have so much to learn. I’m just at the elementary school level.”
Maybe so. But you don’t need “faraway eyes” to see she’s a fast learner.