Western Photographers
An Interview with Desert Photographer Stephen Strom
Stephen Strom has been photographing the deserts of the American Southwest for thirty years, creating arresting images of forbidding, breathtaking landscapes containing geological formations and striking colors like nothing else on earth. Strom worked for over a decade as an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, where he first began to “love the desert.” Strom’s photography has been featured in several books, including the recent Otero Mesa: Saving America’s Wildest Grassland and the new Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 96 pages, 43 photographs, $45), which collects his entrancing photographs of multi-colored mudhills in New Mexico, the red rock formations of Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and canyons, cliffs, and desert lands throughout California, Nevada, and Arizona. This fall, Strom will present Earth Forms at several galleries, including Tucson’s Etherton Gallery (book signing on October 17, 3-5 p.m.), the Tubac Center for the Arts in Tubac, AZ (book signing on October 28), and Santa Fe’s Verve Gallery of Photography, which will display Storm’s photos from November 13 through January of next year. I recently interviewed Strom via email about his work process, his explorations of the desert, and how the desert at times becomes “a two-dimensional painting.”
New West: What first attracted you to the desert landscapes that you photograph?
Stephen Strom: The time I spent in Tucson from 1972-83 (as a staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory) transformed me into a confirmed desert rat. I learned to love the desert, and over time, began to see and feel the subtle rhythms – color, sculptural, floral – of what appears to most people to be desolate and lifeless.
New West Book Review
A Reissue of “Antonio Montoya,” Rick Collignon’s First Guadalupe Novel
The Journal of Antonio Montoya
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 214 pages, $15.95
This month Unbridled Books reprinted Rick Collignon’s The Journal of Antonio Montoya, first published in 1996. Antonio Montoya was the first of Collignon’s four novels set in the New Mexico town of Guadalupe, and it establishes this traditional, insular, and unchanging desert place through the story of Ramona Montoya, an artist who tried to leave it behind. It’s a contemplative, gently humorous novel, and reading it is an experience that fills one pleasantly, like the nourishing food that Ramona’s resurrected grandmother cooks throughout the book.
As a young woman, Ramona moved away, but the people of Guadalupe seem to be like plants that can’t take root outside of their native ground, and she returned in mid-life after she inherited her grandparents’ old adobe, which she suspects is “turning back to dirt.” Oddly for Guadalupe, Ramona lives alone, passing the days painting pictures of the town, until her brother and sister-in-law are killed in a car collision with a cow, leaving their son José orphaned. José is to live with his mother’s relatives, but then his mother, Loretta, sits up in her coffin at her funeral and asks Ramona to raise José.
Beetle hysteria has raised its head again, and I am not talking about the Fab four. A prominent article in the New York Times titled “Tiny Beetle Adds New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” quotes many foresters and others who suggest that beetle-kill trees across the West will create larger wildfires and by implications are “destroying” our forests.
For instance, Montana’s State Forester Bob Harrington said as much at conference recently, as in the article. While it may seem “intuitively obvious” that dead trees will lead to more fires, there is little scientific evidence to support the contention that beetle-killed trees substantially increases risk of large blazes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.
At the heart of this and many other media reports are flawed assumptions about fires, what constitutes a healthy forest, and the options available to humans in face of natural processes that are inconvenient and get in the way of our designs.
New West Book Review
Ghost Ball: Rick Collignon’s “Madewell Brown”
Madewell Brown
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 213 pages, $23.95
Rick Collignon returns to the town of Guadalupe, New Mexico for his fourth novel, the quietly powerful Madewell Brown. The title character is a mystery man, long gone, who turns out to have been a talented pitcher for a Negro league team out of Illinois. Brown lived for seven years in a shack on the outskirts of Guadalupe, barely interacting with the townspeople, before he disappeared without leaving much of a trace. Guadalupe is a town that keeps its secrets, counts family loyalty above all else, and doesn't welcome newcomers, so if Cipriano Trujillo is to uncover the truth behind the ancient canvas bag stamped "Madewell Brown" that he finds after the death of his father, he's going to have to overcome the congenital reticence of the older townspeople who might know something. Collignon takes his time settling the reader into the story, told in spare, acute prose, mainly through flashbacks, and the novel gradually gains in momentum as the pieces fall into place.
Collignon begins the tale in South Cairo, Illinois, where an elderly former Negro league ballplayer, Obie Poole, encounters an 11-year-old orphan named Rachael Parish, whom he recognizes as the granddaughter of his old teammate, Madewell Brown. "You've got your granddaddy written all over you," he says.
Obie begins to tell her stories about the man he believes is her grandfather. "I played ball with a man named Madewell Brown my whole damn life and never did I see the likes of him. You put a ball in that man's hand and he'd turn bats into kindling and buckle a man's knees so bad he looked the fool." Rachael and Obie become friends, intensely drawn toward each other's company to ease their isolation, though they keep up a cranky patter with one another, never admitting their strong bond out loud. Obie's death, when Rachael is in her twenties, sets her to seeking information about her grandfather.
Rick Collignon will discuss Madewell Brown at the Main Santa Fe Public Library on June 1 (7-8:30 p.m.) and in Las Vegas, New Mexico at Tome on the Range on June 13 (4 p.m.).
New West Book Review
Robert Boswell’s “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
by Robert Boswell
Graywolf Press, 288 pages, $24
Robert Boswell's varied new collection The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards features some stories that pass by in a few pages while others stretch out to novella length, some that are light and comic, and others that are dark and death-obsessed, and still others, such as the title tale, in which death and comedy mingle. They are set all over the country, from a Colorado mountain cabin filled with druggie dropouts to a decadent Florida community inhabited by current and future divorcées ("No River Wide"). There's a bleak tale set in the North Dakota countryside ("A Walk in Winter") and a quirky one set in Albuquerque ("Miss Famous"), where a cleaning woman with artistic aspirations works for a fastidious client named Mr. Chubb who "was black, too tall to be a dwarf, too short to be normal."
It's impossible to guess what you might encounter next in a Boswell story, though every tale is realized with skill. Boswell, who teaches at New Mexico State and the University of Houston, could use his own book for examples to students of the myriad possibilities for the contemporary short story. But that would be a bit pompous, and one thing Boswell excels at is milking humor out of pompous displays, as in "In A Foreign Land," in which a divorced man attends a literary party thrown by one of his ex-wife's friends and simultaneously participates in and mocks the banter.
Western Writers
An Interview with Stanley Crawford
Stanley Crawford, born in 1937, is the author of five novels (Gascoyne, Travel Notes, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, Some Instructions, and Petroleum Man) and three non-fiction works (Mayordomo, A Garlic Testament, and The River in Winter), and has been writing and farming with his wife Rose Mary in Dixon, New Mexico, for nearly forty years. His novel, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine was reissued last September by the Dalkey Archive. A fantastical tale of a troubled husband and wife sailing the world on a raft of their own invention, its reissue has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as "a heroic homecoming...his novel is to marriage what Cormac McCarthy's The Road is to parenting."
I recently discussed the reissue of Log, his current work, and farming and writing in Northern New Mexico with Crawford via email.
New West: Dalkey Archive's reissue of The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, originally published in 1972, has garnered an impressive amount of critical attention. You have said that the novel was, in part, your response to the tumultuous atmosphere you found upon returning to the U.S. in 1969. Do you think that the current national mood, forty years later, has anything to do with the sudden revival of interest?
Stanley Crawford: Yes, but I hadn't re-read the book for many years, perhaps decades, until Dalkey decided to reissue it last year. I came to think of it as an apocalyptic novel, which I suppose it is, but to a lesser degree than what I had come to imagine. It may be this, or the "freedom" from institutional and political constraints that the Unguentines seem to have attained that readers are picking up on, but reviewers have focused more on the relationship, the marriage, the interpersonal—or their pathological aspects. And the times are very different: 1968 and all that had to do with a younger generation trying to elbow its way into a society that was perceived as being repressive and controlling and murderous. Today, I think people are trying to find, or imagine, places of refuge during this slow-motion collapse. Perhaps the barge offers a sort of refuge.
