Tempo contributer Josephine Ashton at SOMOS
YOU’VE BEEN WRITING A LOT of stories for Tempo lately, and recently returned to New Mexico; what brings you here this time around? I was born in Los Angles during the depression, but grew up in Fillmore, a small, southern California town about twenty miles from the Navy bases at the ocean, and remember WWII air-raids. The part-Hispanic, part-Caucasian rural community is surrounded by mountains — the Sespe Condor Sanctuary was created in 1947 north of town — and the Sespe River runs through. I suppose the Taos landscape reminds me of my rural hometown — orange groves instead of sage! But the Rio Grande keeps calling me back to New Mexico. Feels like my creative “home.”
You have two book talks scheduled this month: Sunday, Jan. 22 at 4 p.m. at SOMOS, and Sat. Jan. 28 at the Taos Public Library.
I’ll introduce my New Mexico-based novels. Three of these were birthed here. In my former studio gallery in the Cabot Plaza building, I began “Code of the Running Cross” thanks to an e-mail exchange with a Paris friend. In the story, the protagonist Erin Kelly — an attractive, mid-age National Geographic photographer living just north of Taos, and her lover, a creative, Parisian businessman — get caught up in a lifethreatening neo-Nazi international art mystery with roots in WWII.
“Ride the Wild Wind - Sheriff Robert Gallegos - Friends and Enemies” also saw the light here. Baby-sitting my paintings in Charles Collins’ Gallery, I did twenty or so small watercolor portraits of imaginary people to pass the time. One day, I “sensed” the portraits demanding, “Write our story!”
The 1965 story with flashbacks to WWII takes place in the fictional Aragon Valley town and county located somewhere between Mesilla and El Paso. Sheriff ‘Rob,’ part Hopi, part Mexican, former WWII U.S. Marine and friends, stand against a cut-throat Juarez crime family.
Where do you find the energy and inspiration to stay productive and creative with your writing and your art?
I’ve been plagued with an over-active imagination since childhood. Indulging in reading books from every shelf in the library, even some in Spanish and French, made me feel like I was one of those curious folks called writers. Now, in Taos, I write every day, and design covers for my books.
When did you first realize that you wanted to write?
At five, I was already reading. Books sailed me away on the moon-beam sea of imagination. My first “write” came in the 7th grade, a one-act play based on the Christmas scene in “Little Women.” In my twenties, I wrote songs, plays and had a few articles published in Western magazines. The bohemian ‘little mag,’ “Wormwood,” published my “Ode to Bukowski,” a poem-letter to the poet, Charles Bukowski, whom I knew. His writing — very Hemingway-esque — encouraged me to write dialogue the way people speak.
During the 60s, rehearsing my usical version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in a cabaret theater in the Santa Monica, Calif. area, a man walked in. “Understand,” he said in a British accent, “you need a Scrooge.” He was a well-known actor in London’s Doly Carte Opera Company. Encounters, experiences and small miracles helped move me forward.