Melissa Sevigny will be appearing at the Southwest Festival of the Written Word on Sunday, October 1, 2017, 11:30am to discuss her book Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest. In a lyrical mix of natural science, history, and memoir, Melissa L. Sevigny ponders what it means to make a home in the American Southwest at a time when its most essential resource, water, is overexploited and undervalued. She explores a landscape literally remapped by the search for “new” water, where rivers flow uphill, dams and deep wells reshape geography, trees become intolerable competitors for water, and new technologies tap into clouds and oceans. Sevigny shows how recognizing the rights of rivers is a path toward water security.

The following is a review by Sonnie Sussillo of Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest, posted with her permission.

In Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest author Melissa L. Sevigny has written a scientific survey couched in a memoir wrapped in a parable ending with an ethical challenge.

The el Rio de San Buenaventura is the mythical river of the title. Its history is the parable that Sevigny uses to share her personal history and memories as well as the scientific realities and ethical dilemma of water in the arid Southwest.

The Buenaventura River was imagined by the Spaniards who set out from Santa Fe in 1776, hoping to find an easy route to California. The Spaniards discovered an ephemeral river pouring out of the mountains and assumed that this river would lead them west. They couldn’t imagine the mountain ranges and crippling desert, not yet seen. Through the following decades of the beaver trade, the gold rush, and homesteading, the myth of the Buenaventura persisted in stories, on maps and in national politics.

The author uses the parable of the Buenaventura River throughout her book to illustrate the West’s expectations, romance and illusions about water. Her primary focus is the Colorado River, the huge basin that it drains and the demands on the water that the Colorado has – or in reality, doesn’t have.

Beginning with her childhood at her grandparents’ home on the western outskirts of Tucson, with stories continuing through her youth and into her professional life, Ms. Sevigny shares her love of all things water. From tales of waiting for the arroyos to flush after a monsoonal storm so she could go looking for tadpoles to getting lost in the weeds and brush along a river that no longer bent the way it used to, she says, at one point, “Call it grace: that I could spend a day here, filling my heart with wildness.”

Ms. Sevigny surveys the scientific history and events of the Colorado River and its basin. For example, she reviews the history of the Central Arizona Project and describes what’s required to provide water to the desert cities of Phoenix and Tucson.

“Every acre-foot…consumed 3,140 kilowatt-hours of coal-fired electricity to get to Tucson, twice the energy consumed to deliver CAP water to Phoenix and four times the energy consumed to pump groundwater.”

She discusses the dams that hold back the Colorado into reservoirs, and the impact the lack of natural flow of the river has on the bio-communities downstream. She contrasts the dropping water levels of the river and the reservoirs with the increasing demand for and conflict around the water provided. California vs Arizona? Cities vs agriculture? What are the answers to an ever increasing demand on a diminishing supply?

The myth extends to efforts to make “new” water in the Colorado River basin. Local, state and national government efforts to create additional water are the mirage of the title: everything from pulling vegetation in riparian systems, perceived as “stealing” the water, to expensive yet ineffective desalination plants, to seeding clouds in the hope of causing more rain or snow to fall. She makes the case over and over that there is no “new” water to be made; rather, the only answer lies in conservation.

To escape the stranglehold that the myth, represented by the parable of the Buenaventura, holds on us, Ms. Sevigny challenges the ethics of water use in the Southwest. Over and over, she comes back to the theme: “A great challenge lies ahead: to learn how to limit ourselves, for no other reason than the sweet inclination of the human species to keep company with other living things.” She prophesizes that “Left unchecked, the Southwest’s water woes will enforce human emigration one day…People have lived in the Southwest for a long time, but that history includes the collapse and dissemination of entire complex civilizations. Our modern society isn’t exempt, for all its technological advancement.” She says that, “Managing for the health of entire ecosystems means stripping away the stereotypes and labels humans have crafted and seeing what’s really there.”

Despite or because of the myth, mirage and miracle of water here in the Southwest, we have an ongoing love affair with the stuff. My own experience in my little high-desert town echoes Ms. Sevigny’s: “It’s an old joke…that you can tell the locals apart from the tourists by watching who goes outside when it rains.”

Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona where she fell in love with the Sonoran Desert’s ecology, geology and dark desert skies. Her lyrical nonfiction and poetry explores the intersections of science, politics, and history, with a focus on the American Southwest. She is the author of two nonfiction books: Under Desert Skies, published by the University of Arizona Press, and Mythical River, published by University of Iowa Press and named a “Nature Book of Uncommon Merit” by the John Burroughs Association. She is currently the science reporter for Arizona Public Radio in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Tim Z. Hernandez will be appearing at the Southwest Festival of the Written Word at 3 p.m. at Old Elk’s Lodge in downtown Silver City on Saturday September 30, 2017. He will discuss his research and his book All They Will Call You, which focuses on the subject of a famous 1948 plane crash, in which the U.S. government was deporting 28 Mexican nationals. Hernandez’s book and research has uncovered who those people were.

The following is JJ Wilson’s review of All They Will Call You, reposted here with his permission.

In 1948 there was a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. In the plane were 28 undocumented Mexican workers who were being deported, and four Whites – the pilot, co-pilot, stewardess, and immigration agent. Nobody survived. The papers carried the names of the four Whites, but the Mexicans at first went nameless. The Whites were given a funeral service and burial. The Mexicans were interred in an unmarked mass grave and none of their families were notified of the service, let alone invited to attend.

Eventually, the Mexicans were identified, but the authorities confused their names so badly that the tall, stoic Guadalupe Ramírez Lara – a man – became Guadalupe Laura Ramírez, a woman. Tomás Gracia de Avina became Tomása. Tragedy turned into farce.

The whole episode prompted Woody Guthrie to write a poem that became a famous protest song, and the line “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” echoes like a chorus throughout the book.

Tim Z. Hernandez, a multi-award-winning poet and novelist, has brought the story back to life nearly seventy years on. He tracked down the victims’ relatives, old friends and lovers and asked them about those who had died in the crash. He traversed the U.S. and crossed into Mexico and the Navajo Nation to interview these ancient rememberers, knocked on doors, made phone calls, learned their stories.

He spoke to Casimira, an old lady in a wheelchair (her name means “almost sees”). He spoke to Dottie, who remembered Frank, the pilot of the fated plane. He found eyewitness accounts and delved into the archives to dig up historical records. He even visited a 94-year-old Pete Seeger, who’d made the song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)” famous, and played him the earliest recording of it on his MP3 player.

What Hernandez has done with all of this material is astonishing. Rather than presenting only the facts, he has re-imagined them with a novelist’s eye for detail.

On the fateful day, we see Bobbie the stewardess adjusting the strap on her red high heels. We watch as Maria and Lupe snuggle up on the cramped plane. José Valdivia pulls a baseball cap down over his eyes. Chaffin, the surly immigration officer, snaps, “son of a bitch” when the plane lurches. Bar the names, all of this is fiction, made-up stuff. But fiction can sometimes tell the truth better than facts, and the best fiction always does this.

The chapters are short. Some are in the style of a diary, with dates and times, while others are vivid vignettes, re-imaginings of old scenes. Yet others are straight non-fiction narrative describing the interviews.

Towards the end, we find ourselves hurtling, with the plane, to the inevitable, and suddenly Hernandez’s writing bursts into life with a terrible, focused energy. “Luís gripped the armrests, but the plane bucked again.” “The wing sailed down like a shimmering leaf.” Tomás “somersaults across the morning sky.” “Liquefied metal hissed on a nearby digger pine, and the tree went up in flames.”

Then, finally, the names of the dead flutter down the page like men and women tossed from the heavens.

This section is a tour de force. Its grim, visceral poetry makes real the unimaginable. Above all, it is earthy. Men of the soil come to clean up the remains of other men of the soil and find nothing but charred body parts and detritus strewn across the valley.

Later, as the victims descend to their final resting places in the earth they toiled upon, a great pathos sweeps over the narrative. It is an unbearably sad story, yet the sheer act of rescuing it has also rescued the men and women from the long void, the nothingness that accompanied their deaths. How apt that Hernandez uses Studs Terkel’s “In their rememberings are their truths”as his epigraph.

This is a wonderful piece of work, a book that honors the dead and the living, and reminds us of the fragility of life and the durability of memory.

Tim Z. Hernandez is a writer and performance artist. He is the recipient of an American Book Award for poetry, the Colorado Book Award for poetry, and the International Latino Book Award for historical fiction. His books and research have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Public Radio International, and National Public Radio. Named one of sixteen New American Poets by the Poetry Society of America, he was a finalist for the inaugural Split This Rock Freedom Plow Award for his work on locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, the incident made famous by Woody Guthrie’s song of the same name. The result of this work is the basis for his newly released book, All They Will Call You (Univesrity of Arizona Press). Hernandez holds a B.A. from Naropa University and an M.F.A. from Bennington College. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas El Paso’s Bilingual M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing.