READING NEW MEXICO
Pasatiempo asked more than 35 authors across the Land of Enchantment one crucial question: What is your favorite book by a New Mexico writer, and why? The thoughtful responses that follow make up a diverse cross-section of voices, many of whose own works help to define the New Mexico literary canon.
IN DOUGLAS PRESTON
March of 1536, four Spanish slave traders, riding along the northernmost frontier of Mexico, came across a white man, naked, with wild hair and a beard reaching to his waist, and a black man carrying a gourd rattle, stumbling out of the wilderness, crying out in Spanish. They were Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca of Spain and a Moor named Estevanico or Estéban, from North Africa, survivors of a shipwreck eight years before on the Florida coast. In their wanderings they had become the first European and African to walk across the continent of North America. The book, La Relación, that Cabeza de Vaca wrote about his journey is, in my view, the most astonishing narrative ever to come out of the European exploration of the New World. Rich with detail, it is full of keen and sympathetic observations of the indigenous people, customs, and landscapes of America as yet untouched by European conquest. His extraordinary journey led directly to Coronado’s search for the Seven Cities of Gold and the conquest and settlement of New Mexico. In 1555 he wrote a more expanded version of the story entitled Naufragios ,or Shipwrecks. A number of excellent translations in English have appeared, the most famous being the one by Cyclone Covey, entitled Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America.”
Douglas Preston is the author of thrillers, mysteries, and horror novels, many of them with Lincoln Child; and nonfiction books, the most recent being The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017).
NO NASARIO GARCÍA
single writer, New Mexican or otherwise, has influenced my writing. Rather, the greatest influence on my work, namely, oral history, folklore, and creative writing, has been the viejitos, the old-timers whom I’ve interviewed across New Mexico over the 30-plus years, including family members. Of fundamental importance in my 30-plus publications is a tribute also to having been raised in rural New Mexico, my native state.”
Nasario García is the author of Grandpa Lolo’s Navajo Saddle Blanket (2012), Hoe, Heaven, and Hell: My Boyhood in Rural New Mexico (2015), and many other works.The recent documentary at nasarioremembers theriopuerco.com sums up his work in oral history as well his childhood in what he calls the hinterland.
DH. JAMES REICH
L awrence was, as I am, the descendant . of coal miners, a working-class writer, and transplant to New Mexico. Recently, I visited the chapel near Taos where Lawrence’s remains are, and at the altar I left an offering of my book Soft Invasions, which has thematic links to Sons and Lovers (1913), but is not autobiographical. Soft Invasions begins with a quote from Lawrence, which is the key to everything I have written. I think I assimilated Lawrence at an early age when I read him in England, taking some things fully into my unconscious. I am still fascinated by his modernism, his chthonic sexuality, his explorations of mysticism psychoanalysis, religion, and being.”
James Reich’s most recent book is Soft Invasions (2017). He is the former chair of creative writing and literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
“The greatest influence on my work, namely, oral history, folklore, and creative writing, has been the viejitos, the old-timers whom I’ve interviewed across New Mexico over the 30-plus years.” — Nasario García
DH. HENRY SHUKMAN Lawrence, the great English wandererpoet, . wound up in New Mexico, so the story goes, because Mabel Dodge Luhan sent a necklace to him and his wife, over which she had had spells chanted: Once they touched it, they wouldn’t be able to stay away. Mornings in Mexico (1927) was a strange little book, a collection of rambling essays about Mexico as well as New Mexico and Arizona. I discovered it one night in a house where I had digs while studying at university in England as a young man. In the depths of a long, rainy English winter, the book’s evocation of the mesas and deserts, the mountainsides, tall pines and adobe homes of Northern New Mexico, came as a shock of hope. The prose was unlike anything I knew — sometimes humorous, sometimes preposterously profound, sometimes spell-bindingly vivid. He knew how to conjure a place like no one else I’d ever read. He didn’t describe, he made the place come to life in your mind. And it wasn’t just the writing, it was the place itself. That book not only made me a writer, it did end up bringing me to New Mexico, 27 years ago.” Henry Shukman has authored Savage Pilgrims: On the Road to Santa Fe (1996), In Doctor No’s Garden (2002), Archangel (2013), and other books. He is the guiding teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe and is at work on a book about the Zen koan tradition.
MY JOHNNY D. BOGGS
introduction to Eugene Manlove Rhodes came when a VHS of Four Faces West, a 1948 Western starring Joel McCrea and filmed in New Mexico, arrived from my literary agent. I’ve since read Pasó Por Aquí (1927), the novella upon which the movie was based, often. The title comes from a carving — meaning ‘passed this way’ or ‘passed by here’ — at El Morro’s Inscription Rock. The story follows a cowboy-turned-outlaw whose flight is interrupted when he happens upon a diphtheria-stricken Hispanic family.
Born in Nebraska in 1869, Rhodes arrived in southern New Mexico as a teenager and took to cowboying. When he wrote, he recalled what he knew and loved. Rhodes didn’t write shoot-em-ups. Not one gun is fired, not one punch is thrown in Pasó Por Aquí (and
Four Faces West). His strongest character was often the land: ‘Out on the sands magic islands came and went and rose and sank in a misty sea.’
Rhodes published fewer than a dozen novels and roughly 40 short stories, articles, and book reviews.
Pasó Por Aquí first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926. He died in California in 1934 and was buried in New Mexico. The epitaph on his tombstone at White Sands Missile Range reads: ‘Pasó por aquí.’ He passed this way. I’m glad he did.” Johnny D. Boggs is the author of several Western novels. The next one is called Taos Lightning, out in June from Centerpoint Press. MY JOHN PEN LA FARGE father, Oliver La Farge, wrote Laughing Boy (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and many other books on New Mexico. My father’s book on my mother’s childhood, Behind the Mountains (1956), is a classic and a wonderful read if one is curious about pre-war Spanish New Mexico. The
Mother Ditch (1983), another children’s book, was written in the 1950s when making a living farming on an acequia system was still in practice. It is the old Spanish way of life as seen through the eyes of a boy on an archetypal New Mexico farm.” John Pen La Farge is the author of Turn Left at the Sleeping Dog: Scripting the Santa Fe Legend 1920-1955 (2001) and is president of The Old Santa Fe Association. He is currently working on a memoir. MIRABAI STARR I read Winter in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan (1935) when I was a teenager, having grown up in Taos. It was one of the best evocations I’ve ever read, before or since, of the sacred quality, the hush of deep winter in Northern New Mexico — which of course we don’t have now, and it’s hard to believe we ever had.” Mirabai Starr is the author of God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2012)
and Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation (2015). Her new book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, is forthcoming from Sounds True in 2019. P JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS aul Horgan’s 1938 work Far From Cibola is an achingly beautiful novella set in Roswell during the Great Depression. The authenticity of this slim and rarely read novel certainly stems from his firsthand observations of the ravages of the Depression.
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