ABQ / Santa Fe News

New West Book Review

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
by Leslie Marmon Silko
319 pages, Viking, $25.95

Leslie Marmon Silko has a thing for rattlesnakes, and I’m a little worried for her.  I don’t want her to end up like the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary “Grizzly Man,” who loved grizzly bears too much for his own good.  But I don’t think the rattlesnakes will turn on Silko; as she details in her new memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, she respects them so much that she understands their habits and knows how to keep out of their way even as she allows them to remain living inside her house (she has one rattlesnake house pet), under it, and around it.  Silko is perhaps the ideal human inhabitant of the desert where she lives outside of Tucson.  She treads lightly there, looks out for the flora and fauna, gingerly rescues trapped snakes, and draws her inspiration for writing and painting from the land around her, as well as from the traditions of her Pueblo ancestors.

Western Writers

Novelist Liza Campbell grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, about forty miles from Santa Fe, where her debut novel and first published work of fiction, The Dissemblers, is set.  Campbell studied English at Wellesley College and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco.  After that, she moved to Boulder to work for VeloPress “and to pursue my dreams of being a hardcore endurance athlete,” she says.  “Thank goodness I’ve grown out of that stage,” she adds.  Campbell left Boulder to live in Bozeman for a couple of years, and then returned to Colorado to attend nursing school.  The Dissemblers (The Permanent Press, 199 pages, $28) is an elegantly crafted, introspective novel that tells the story of a young painter named Ivy Wilkes who moves to Santa Fe to work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.  O’Keeffe is Ivy’s artistic idol, and Ivy becomes frustrated that her own paintings can’t compare to O’Keeffe’s.  When a friend suggests she try copying O’Keeffe’s work for profit, Ivy puts aside her moral qualms and plunges into the world of art forgery.  Liza Campbell will discuss The Dissembers at the Boulder Book Store on Wednesday, December 8 at 7:30 p.m. (I should note that we share the same publisher—The Permanent Press will publish my novel, The Ringer, in March.)

New West: Growing up in New Mexico, were you aware of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art since you were a kid?  Are you as big an admirer of O’Keeffe as Ivy is?

Liza Campbell: I was only loosely aware of O’Keeffe’s work.  Primarily, I had seen her famous paintings of skulls with flowers, which are not my favorite.  I didn’t really become familiar with her work until after I started writing the book, but the more I learned about her the more I admired her.  So I would say yes, now I am as big of an O’Keeffe admirer as Ivy is, but that came through writing the book.

FALL MUSKIES NOT FOR WUSSIES

Beware of Muskie Fever. It can ruin the life of a perfectly normal fishaholic.

And contagious? You betcha. I caught it even before I went anywhere near water where the mighty muskellunge lurks. Then, last year, I finally had my first chance at a muskie, and what an introduction! Six long days and 8,600 casts without a single hook-up. (Click here to read the gory details.)

But even such a royal butt kicking can’t come close to curing Muskie Fever. Instead of giving up and going back to trout, I couldn’t wait to go back for another beating. Catching a muskie was high on my life list, so it had to happen. All I needed was a better time and place, eh?

SASKATCHEWAN FISHING LODGES

I’ve had all kinds of fishing experiences, and some of them--perhaps too many of them--have been in somewhat primitive, if not brutal, conditions. Roughin’ it is okay, I guess. I’ve done plenty of it, but now, as I get older every year, I’ve discovered that a little relaxation and indulgence goes just fine with fishing.

Which is one reason I thoroughly enjoyed my stay at Selwyn Lake Lodge.

New West Book Review

River House
by Sarahlee Lawrence
Tin House Books, 272 pages, $16.95

River House is the searchingly honest, foursquare memoir of a young woman struck with an unconventional dream: After college and years of world travel, Sarahlee Lawrence decides she wants to build her own log house on the high desert ranch in central Oregon where she was raised.  This is nonfiction, but Lawrence’s life provided her the material of a classic, woman-vs.-nature drama that makes this a transfixing read.  Even if the closest you’ve ever come to building a house involved the use of Lincoln Logs, you’ll be taken in by River House.

There’s a daunting task ahead of Lawrence—building a log house with minimal equipment and the help of only her father, with just a frigid winter’s worth of time to complete the bulk of the project before she has to return to work as a river guide.  The story largely revolves around the elemental triad of mother, father, and child as Lawrence pushes the three of them through this job she’s set for herself. 

Sarahlee Lawrence will tour throughout the West this month to discuss River House.  Her stops include The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman on November 13 (4 p.m.), Fact & Fiction in Missoula on November 15 (7 p.m.), Chapter One Books in Hamilton on November 16 (7 p.m.), Maria’s Bookshop in Durango on November 17 (6:30 p.m.), Back of Beyond Books in Moab on November 18 (7 p.m.), The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on November 20 (2 p.m.), the Blue Sage Center in Paonia on November 22 (7 p.m.), and Bookworks in Albuquerque on November 30 (7 p.m.).

New West Book Review

The Ghost of Milagro Creek
by Melanie Sumner
Algonquin, 258 pages, $13.95

In the moving and evocative new novel The Ghost of Milagro Creek, Melanie Sumner transports readers into a part of Taos, New Mexico that is well off the tourist path.  The Taos Sumner depicts is rife with violence, teen pregnancy, high school drop-outs, alcoholism, and the aftermath of plain bad decisions, but she renders it without judgment, and with considerable affection in this melancholy story of a love triangle that culminates in a death.

As the book opens, Ignacia Vigil Romero speaks in first-person from beyond the grave on the day of her funeral.  “In the barrio at the edge of town, my neighbors called me abuela, which means grandmother,” she relates, “but behind my back, their tongues snapped like flags in the wind.” Ignacia is a Jicarilla Apache whose use of traditional herbal medicines to cure physical and psychological ailments has earned her a reputation as a witch. 

HERE, WE CAN REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE

During a bout of insomnia last night, I watched CNBC to see if any of the talking financial heads thought my retirement funds might stop disappearing, and there it was. Perhaps the biggest environmental, wildlife habitat and water quality problem we don't like to discuss. Yes, it's touchy, but that has never stopped me, so why start now.

We all need to stop buying fool's gold. [more]

LET'S GET OUR WORDS STRAIGHT

Have you ever heard somebody say they prefer "multiple use" over Wilderness? I have what seems like a thousand times, and every time I hear it, I say, silently, to myself, wrong!

So, it seems like a good time to say it out loud because the words, "multiple use" have been lost in the Wilderness. [more]

Western Photographers

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

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.