BOOKPATHS

Zuñi Pueblo, New Mexico, U.S.

Dance Hall of the Dead, by Tony Hillerman (New York: Harper, 2009; first published in 1973; second title in Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police series)

While characters and story are “purely fictional” the setting for Dance Hall of the Dead, according to the author, is “genuine,” with  “the Village of Zuñi and the landscape of the Zuñi reservation and the adjoining Ramah Navajo reservation…accurately depicted.”  Readers are immersed in the New Mexico landscape and Zuñi traditions as Navajo Tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn searches for two missing boys and a “brutal killer.”

In another two or three minutes the lower edge of the red sun would sink behind the strata of clouds hanging over western Arizona.  Now the oblique angle of its late afternoon rays were almost parallel to the slope of hillside toward Zuñi Wash.  They projected the moving shadow of Ted Isaacs almost a thousand feet down the hillside, and beside it stretched the motionless shadow of Lieutenant Joseph Leaphorn.  Every juniper, every bushy yellow chamiso, every outcrop of stone streaked the yellow-gray of the autumn grass with a stripe of dark blue shadow.  And beyond the hillside, beyond the gridwork of twine that marked Isaacs dig, two miles across the valley, the great bulk of Corn Mountain loomed, its broken cliffs sharply outlined in the reds and pinks of reflected sunlight and the blacks of shadows.  It was one of those moments of startling beauty which as a matter of habit Joe Leaphorn took time to examine and savor.  But he was preoccupied. – from Dance Hall of the Dead, by Tony Hillerman

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Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

The News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown visits the Spoken Word Club at the Santa Fe Indian School.

“Through verse, members of the Spoken Word Club at the Santa Fe Indian School articulate identities both modern and traditional, and maintain links to the past through native language and culture.” -- from the News Hour Website

New Mexico; World

“Gov. Bill Richardson has ordered flags around New Mexico to be lowered to half-staff to honor world-renowned author Tony Hillerman, who died Sunday in Albuquerque.”

Tony Hillerman is remembered in The New York Times.

“In the world of mystery fiction, Mr. Hillerman was that rare figure: a best-selling author who was adored by fans, admired by fellow authors and respected by critics. Though the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with an avowed purpose: to instill in his readers a respect for Native American culture.” – from “Tony Hillerman, Novelist, Dies at 83,” by Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

New Mexico, U.S.

Amanda Bensen interviews Doug Fine, whose book, Farewell, My Subaru, describes his life, “liv[ing] off the land – and off the grid.”

Fine: I started out in the suburbs of New York, where I didn't see a real tomato until I was in college. I thought tomatoes were supposed to be orange baseballs, like you see them in the supermarket. The way I live now is an absolutely drastic change. But when people visit me here at the Funky Butte Ranch, they're not saying, 'Wow, what a wacko.' They're saying, 'How can I do this?' – “Interview: Doug Fine Journalist, New Mexico,” by Amanda Benson, Smithsonian Magazine

Taos, New Mexico

John Nichols talks about his life and work, including his latest novel The Empanada Brotherhood, with Susan Salter Reynolds.

“When Nichols moved to Taos in the 1960s, there were 19,000 people living in the area. Now there are 30,000. ‘When I first came,’ he jokes, ‘there were hardly any writers. Now you can't walk into a cafe without hearing scribbling.’ Along the way to the trail head, he tells stories, recounts the history of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and names plants (osha, witch's beard, water hemlock, purple gentians, cinquefoil, valerian and subalpine evergreens).” – from The Empanada Brotherhood Survived Multitude of Rewrites,” by Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Bookpath: Pecos River Valley, New Mexico

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (Lebanon, Indiana: Grand Central Publishing, Inc., 1999; first published in 1972)

When Antonio Marez is six-years-old Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. A curandera, “one who cures with herbs and magic,” Ultima takes Tony under her wing, gently guiding him as he probes “the family ties that bind and rend him” and discovers “himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.” Considered a classic, Bless Me, Ultima takes readers on an unforgettable journey.

“Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. She took my hand, and the silent, magic powers she possessed made beauty from the raw, sun-baked llano, the green river valley, and the blue bowl which was the white sun’s home. My bare feet felt the throbbing earth and my body trembled with excitement. Time stood still, and it shared with me all that had been, and all that was to come….” – from Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya

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New Mexico

Mary Duenwald enters "the world of Willa Cather's archbishop."

"Eighty years after Cather's novel was published and more than 150 since the events she recounted, it is possible to use her narration as a visitor's guide. One warm March day, paperback in hand, I found my way to all three pueblos, grateful for Cather's sensitivity to the great beauty and mystery of the Southwest and for her ability to bring to life the characters who had encountered one another in the same landscape so long ago." -- from "Entering the World of Willa Cather's Archbishop," by Mary Duenwald, The New York Times

Bookpath: New Mexico

Off the Map, by Joan Ackerman (New York, New York : Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1999)

Whether reading Off the Map, seeing it performed, or watching the movie version, the northern New Mexico setting pulls its audience into the story. Off the Map captures the memory of Bo Groden as she looks back on the summer she was eleven-years-old. She’s tired of living “off the map” and longs for a normal life. Her father, Charley, has “spiraled into depression,” and her “resourceful” mother, Arlene, and long-time family friend, George, are struggling to bring him back. It’s also the summer that William Gibbs, an IRS agent, comes to audit the Grodens and ends up staying. Inspired by Arlene and the New Mexico landscape, as freeing to him as it is constricting to the young Bo, Gibbs “emerges” as an artist, painting large canvases that will eventually sell for large sums. Joan Ackerman’s play transports its audience to northern New Mexico and into the lives of people who’ve chosen a homeland “off the map.”

“Set – A small bit of the front yard and homey inside of a cabin in northern New Mexico, creatively built out of logs, rocks, carved wood, odd pieces. This homestead has been organically sculpted up out of the ground by two highly imaginative, industrious and able people who love each other and the land where they live. The kitchen area has a great wood table and chairs, old refrigerator, wood stove, a couch made out of wood and cushions, and a bathtub. Dried flowers and herbs hang from the ceiling. Charley’s old rocking chair where he sits much of the time is on the far side of the cabin. A front deck is a useful playing space with perhaps a side screen door leading out of it. Nearby are an outhouse, gardens, a chicken coop, neatly stacked old appliances, VWs, fruit trees, a river, hillsides and beyond that, sage-covered desert which sweeps up to mountain ranges. Above all that…a dazzling blue New Mexico sky.” – from Off the Map, by Joan Ackerman

Taos, New Mexico

Henry Shukman takes New York Times’ readers to D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico.

“The last time I was at the Lawrence ranch, just after Christmas, snow lay on the ground, the roofs were crisp with a frozen bed of it and long gray icicles hung from the gutters like beards on old-time Russian mystics. The bottoms of the clouds drifted through the big ponderosas. My mother was with me, visiting from England, and was overawed to be standing in the home of her early-adulthood hero. Why did he ever leave, she kept musing aloud, as we peered through the windows into the locked cabin. Behind us an ancient ponderosa stirred and let down a shiver of crystalline snow that glittered in the high air.” – from “D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico: the Ghosts That Grip the Soul of Bohemian Taos,” by Henry Shukman, New York Times

Bookpath: New Mexico

“There are few other civic institutions left in this country in which members have as much control over an important aspect of their lives; relatively autonomous, in theory democratic, the thousand acequias of New Mexico form a cultural web of almost microscopic strands and filaments that have held a culture and a landscape in place for hundreds of years.” -- from Mayordomo : Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, by Stanley Crawford

Mayordomo : Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, by Stanley Crawford (Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, 1988)

Mayordomo chronicles the “life of an acequia” during the course of a year. Work begins in early March as crews clean and repair the ditch. Shortly thereafter the gate is opened, allowing irrigation water, a “lifeline,” to flow. Spring yields to summer maintenance, followed by the last irrigations of mid-September and the gate’s November closing as winter takes hold. As Crawford describes a year in the life of Acequia de la Jara and his role as mayordomo, readers become acquainted with the people of the valley, landscape, history, weather, politics, rules, laws, and the wildlife sharing the watershed. Through his irrigation community, we glimpse the unique culture of New Mexico’s acequias and those who depend on them.

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“The ditch is running again its full length, two miles or so, through the back yards of its thirty parciantes, through their fields, behind their houses and sheds, past their abandoned cars and trucks, pigpens and chicken coops, under the highway, under arroyos, driveways. People will be thinking about irrigating their alfalfa fields and orchards soon and planting peas and lettuce, carrots, beets, spinach, and reseeding their pastures. And somewhere in the thickets of the Gregory Serna place a muskrat couple is rejoicing again at the water dribbling through the ceiling of their living quarters, and they are planning to expand their burrow, and indeed they may already be at work extending and widening a new tunnel down from the side of the ditch, down through a forest of roots to another smaller hole in the side of the bank a few feet below the channel, their outlet, their desagüe, in the soft fragrant clay….” – from Mayordomo : Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, by Stanley Crawford