Jim O’Donnell gets bookish
TAOS RESIDENT JIM O’DONNELL is well known in our community and beyond. Travel and nature come to mind when one approaches the award-winning author and photographer’s work.
O’Donnell’s years of wandering have taken him to wild places around the world. O’Donnell is the author of “Notes for the Aurora Society: 1500 Miles on Foot Across Finland and Rise and Go.” As a writer and nature photographer, his work has been shared by this publication as well as many others both regionally and nationally.
Recently, Tempo heard that O’Donnell has a book coming out with Torrey House Press, so we reached out to him, to get the scoop.
Congratulations on this great news that you have signed a book deal, can you tell us a little about it?
Thank you. Yes. I’ve signed a publishing contract with Torrey House Press, a conservation-focused publisher out of Utah (torreyhouse.org). The contract is for my non-fiction book “The Fountain: Travels in Anthropocene Waters” due out in February 2025. Essentially, the book will be about the Fountain Creek watershed of southern Colorado. The Fountain is one of the least-known but most interesting waterways in the American West.
The Fountain is one of the most human-dominated water systems in the West – and that’s saying something. Over the years, it has been dammed, diverted, poisoned, re-routed, mapped, named, channelized, filled with physical and human debris, reduced, augmented, confused, litigated, studied, stolen, replaced, known, unknown, forgotten, misunderstood, blamed, monitored, sampled, screened, broken and tamed. More than anything else, humans have altered the very nature of the Fountain, pumping water from Colorado’s western slope into the Fountain watershed, making what once was a creek into a river, and threatening to make it a dry creek yet again. Given the number of real rivers that have dried up throughout the American West over the past 100 years, the creation of a ‘new’ river is more than a bit mindbending. The Fountain is the posterchild Anthropocene watershed.
The goal of my book is to place the Fountain Creek in its full ecological, historical and socio-cultural context while looking both to the past and the future for creative solutions to the problems faced by river and human alike. I see this book as thought-provoking, envelope-pushing and — hopefully — controversial, something to be argued over. I’m looking to “shift the Overton Window” when it comes to our relationship with Western waters.
Please tell our readers a little about yourself — you didn’t just pull this out of a hat — you are an accomplished photographer, but also a writer and were a longtime blogger.
I haven’t blogged for many years now, but I’ve always been a writer. I was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado — fourth or fifth generation depending on who you talk to in the family — and so the Fountain, which runs through Pueblo, has been with me my entire life. Our family spent lots of time in New Mexico while growing up and I moved here permanently. I’ve been an archaeologist, public lands activist, journalist and photographer over the years.
Writing has always been my true calling. Over the years, I’ve published a slew of articles, works of fiction and one book “Notes for the Aurora Society: 1500 Miles on Foot Across Finland.”
Writing about the Fountain was always in the back of my mind but there is something extremely challenging when it comes to writing about a place you know intimately — some place that has deep meaning for you on a personal level. It’s almost easier to dive into something or someplace you know nothing about. Point being — this book has been on my mind in one form or another for decades but it only coalesced in my mind over the past two years.
Will the writing (and rewrites) prevent you from doing a lot of the other stuff you have been involved with in this community over the years?
Somewhat, yes. I’ve been an activist in our community for 20+ years and I’ve increasingly felt ineffective and burned out. It’s been a real struggle for me the past few years to get involved working for change when progress is so elusive. It has been a process. There wasn’t a sudden epiphany or anything but, over time, I realized that I was no longer being effective, no longer having any sort of noticeable impact and I came to understand that it was time to shift and focus on some of the things that I really wanted to accomplish in this short life. None of this means that I’m forever abandoning working for a better Taos, just that my efforts are shifting to a place where I might still have an impact while fulfilling my own dreams.
Your kids are growing and presumably that has plenty to do with the timing of this book?
It really does — and on two levels. For one, my kids are nearly grown and out on their own paths. My daughter is already off to UNM! All parents understand this. Suddenly, you have more time on your hands than you have had for eighteen years and you start to think about the next stage of your life. What the hell happened to the last 18 years and what am I going to do with the next 18 years?
Second, I’ve become an angry person. I know anger doesn’t help anything but I’m furious about what we are leaving our children and grandchildren. Climate change? Mass extinction? Water pollution? Air pollution? Isolation, racism, a teetering Republic….I’m disgusted. After a lifetime of working for change and progress, all I see is that we’ve gone backwards. Victories are minor and fleeting and far from what we need.
To be clear, I’m horrified at the world I’ve brought my children into and I feel the need to create something — not just for my own children and grandchildren but for all our kids — that will help to guide them and give them context for the fight they have on their hands. Previous generations left them a mess and my generation did precious little to deal with this mess. Our kids face a deeply troubled future and I want to create something that will help them think about where we’ve come from and where we might go. This is far larger than just me.
Your long involvement with the Taos Land Trust has served to bring a lot more awareness of environmental issues to schoolage kids here in Taos, are you planning to continue that type of work now that you have hit the big time?
I left the Land Trust over a year ago, in large part to begin focusing on this book. I think I did all I could at TLT and I was exhausted. I’m happy to say though that TLT still has a truly amazing crew of people on-hand to continue the important work they’ve done for years. They are a priceless organization in this community.
Anything else you’ like to talk about?
This book for Torrey House Press is not the only book that I’m working on.
I’ve nearly completed a novel titled “Who Broke the World.” I’ve been working on it for six years. Essentially, the novel is a climate-fiction/magic realism work focused on a near-future scenario where coastal climate change refugees have come to Colorado and New Mexico to escape rising sea waters, only to find themselves held in massive refugee camps. This is far from fantasy. It is very much what is already happening to climate refugees from Syria, North Africa and Central America. But what happens when it starts hitting Americans? Well, its dark.
At the core of this story is the idea that we may need a new religion focused on water and human dignity. This emphasis on water, how we relate to water and how we treat other human beings is likewise core to “The Fountain” — so while one book is fiction and the other is non-fiction, they work in tandem. I hope to see “Who Broke the World” ready for publication later in 2023. Almost there!