Taos Writers on Taos: A Book and Literary Festival

July 24—26: Historic Taos County Courthouse

In late July the Taos County Art and Artifacts Committee, Taos Arts Council and Taos Literary Society are sponsoring a festival for writers who specialize in Taos County/northern New Mexico subjects. On Friday night, July 24, John Nichols will deliver an inimitable keynote on the subject of his own work in a style and manner that is familiar to many of us. On Saturday and Sunday those who wish to read, sign, and/or make their books available for sale will be upstairs in the old courtroom with the frescoes.

For the last six years, on and off, I have taught courses in the literature of the Southwest with roots in northern New Mexico at UNM’s Bachelor and Graduate Divisions. While the academic selections for my courses represent scholarly and popular approaches that touch on Taos, whether published by university presses or major publishing houses, there are also a variety of small press and self-published works that reflect the deep experience of those living and working in the area.

Occasionally I have invited authors, including Nichols, or Elizabeth Cunningham and Skip Miller (“On Contemporary Rhythms” about Blumy) to address my classes. I have also had occasion to listen to John Suazo, for instance, read “The Man Who Really Killed the Deer,” a response to Frank Waters’ seminal book and fictional interpretation of Taos Pueblo.

Currently, I am reading anthropologist Severin Fowles’ “An Archeology of Doings: Secularism and the study of Pueblo Religion,” a major work and scholarly analysis focused primarily on Taos Pueblo, published by the School for Advanced Research Press SAR) in Santa Fe. Fowles has been called a “rising star” for his breakthrough theories by Sylvia Rodriguez, whose book, “Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place,” also published by SAR, focuses on the Taos Valley acequia system. The very popular and controversial book,  “Blood and Thunder” about manifest destiny and Kit Carson by Hampton Sides, is published by Anchor Books. The list continues on and on.

Then there are a number of books from Nighthawk Press in Taos, recently published, such as Gringo Lessons from yours truly, Phaedra Greenwood’s collection, “Drinking from the Stream,” and Robert J. Silver’s “Tributes and Tirades.” This Thursday at Taos Mountain Outfitters, Cindy Brown will be signing “Taos Hiking Guide” (a supplement to Kay Matthews’ Cross-Country Skiing and Hiking Guides from Acequia Madre Press in Chamisal).  Soon, there will be a new book from Nighthawk, composed of Steve Tapia’s fine columns about the flora and fauna of northern New Mexico.

Indeed, a number of books by friends like Iris Keltz’s “Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie,” Rick Richards’ “Ski Pioneers,” Milagro and Steve Parks’ “Jim Wagner, Taos: An American Artist,” Gene Sanchez’s “Gene Kloss,” Nichols’ “Nirvana Blues,” and Paul O’Connor’s “Taos Portraits” capture the mosaic of experience of my generation. Further, a number of authors, Paul Martinez, Bertha Quintana, Julian Romero, Mary Johnson, Cecil Dawkins, and poet/storyteller Richard Trujillo catch the history and provide vignettes of the culture in formal or less formal publications.

In addition to Nichols’ fiction set in northern New Mexico or the odd piece by D.H. Lawrence, and the influence of El Norte on Aldous Huxley, there are the works of Rick Collignon, Robert Westbrook’s Howard Moon Deer Mysteries, and newer writers like Robert Mirabal and Chipper Thompson, poets like Phyllis Hotch and Renee Gregorio, essayist John Brandi, the venerable Stan Crawford, and celebrated William de Buys, photographer Lenny Foster and fly fisher Taylor Streit, not to mention all the cookbook writers, mapmakers, and travel guide writers, memoirists, both famous and infamous like Mabel, her biographers and literary groupies along with contemporary books about Millicent Rogers or fiction books based on Taos characters, “The Painter,” for instance, not to mention all the books about artists making art.

One can pass by a painting or visual object in a minute or two, listen to a CD or watch a DVD almost painlessly but it takes a commitment to read a book—even a coffee table book with little prose or only a few lines of poetry. So let’s celebrate the writers and the readers on the last weekend of July.

One of my dreams as an aspiring student of Taos culture concerns creating a “metadata” base of all the writers who have written about Taos or who wrote other books while living here or passed through anonymously but dropped in a scene or two as John Le Carre did (in a novel which name I’ve forgotten). As part of the preparation for the festival, I shall try and summarize books on Taos Friction, books which seem to capture the authentic experience of the Taos culture.

Caveat: I shall never catch up with all the works written about the area.

Those of you who wish to participate and/or have ideas about authors or books should please email me: bwhaley@newmex.com. This is your chance to make yourself and your work better known to the public at large. And it’s a chance for readers to visit with writers, whose passion speaks of Taos, the place and the people.