Philip Connors has made not one career but two from “looking out.” Since 2002, Connors has spent five months of the year as a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness, living in a 7 x 7 glass and steel cube fifty feet in the sky. In this occupation, his main task is to watch for the telltale string of smoke winding up the sky that signifies a forest fire. But his acute observations—his other “looking out”—have also powered his writing career. The possessor of an exquisite eye for detail, as well as a beautiful prose style, Connors has engaged and delighted readers with three memoirs that place Man firmly in the context of nature, history, and the—largely failed, in his view—human project.

In this fourth book, we learn, if we didn’t know already, that Connors is just as adept at looking inwards. The Mountain Knows the Mountain is a journey of the mind. Ostensibly a diary, with its five chapters named for the months of April to August, it weaves a path through both the wilderness and the author’s psyche. Connors reflects on love and friendship, longing and loss, the natural and the modern worlds, and how all of these intersect.

But if this book has a motif, it is minimalism. Some years ago, wracked with pain following double hip surgery, Connors lost the ability to read extended prose. A thoughtful friend gave him a book of haiku, and he became hooked. He studied the masters of the form—Bashō, Issa, Buson—and began writing his own. (Serendipitously, he notes, the 5-7-5 syllable count of a haiku is his area code.) He playfully rejected the cliché “think outside the box” and found freedom in thinking “inside the box” of the haiku form – an apt metaphor for someone cooped up in a 7 x 7 cube.

In The Mountain Knows the Mountain, Connors intersperses prose with haikus and line drawings. The latter two are wonderfully amateur. The drawings reflect a childlike, Neruda-esque love of everyday objects, while the haikus are sometimes a little “off” in a way that his prose never is. (The longer poems included here are stronger; his best writing requires the type of bounding rhythm that you can’t get in a haiku.) In fact, his prose is more poetic than his poetry. Here he is, unexpectedly face to face with a fox: “We froze and stared at each other, my headlamp glowing a glacial blue in its eyes. After a slight cock of its head that made my soul feel seen, the fox turned and ran, its bushy tail swaying like a tiny dancer as it picked its way over the edge of the mountain and into the night.” (p. 36)

In line with his use of haiku, Connors embraces minimalism as an aesthetic. The whole book can be read in a couple of sittings. The chapters are short and the design contains copious white space. Sections are demarcated with three hand-drawn horizontal lines – perhaps the visual echo of a haiku or a symbol of sound waves or the Holy Trinity. Simplicity is his goal and his method – a deliberate reduction of everything, consistent with life on the mountain, where he knows he is both transient and insignificant.

While there, he busies himself with some repairs and other menial tasks, but his days are largely spent experiencing all that is around him and letting his mind wander. He eats, sleeps, and watches. At one point, he likens his life to that of the hero of the 1993 film Groundhog Day, who keeps reliving the same twenty-four hours. That hero, played by Bill Murray, was called Phil Connors. (A meteorologist, the fictional Connors was another sky-watcher.)

Why does the author Philip Connors keep coming back to the mountain? It isn’t the salary; he averages $10,862 per annum over thirteen years. The answer is found in this book, a paean to nature. He simply loves the landscape and the creatures who inhabit it. He “bears witness as the wild world goes about its cycles of rejuvenation and renewal.” (p.18)

While exalting the wild world, inevitably Connors ends up skewering our man-made, screen-based, fame-obsessed world. A self-confessed curmudgeon, he critiques our modern habits and excesses. Some of this is funny. He tells us his anti-Zuckerbergian motto: “move slowly, and try not to break anything.” Sometimes, the critique feels unnecessary; his target readers are probably not big users of Shapchat and Instagram. Occasionally, the diatribes feel unfair: people with much-maligned office jobs can still revere and spend time in nature; the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

A New York editor once told Connors he’d written his lookout book (Fire Season) and was only entitled to one. And it’s true that The Mountain Knows the Mountain doesn’t cover much new ground, literally or metaphorically. Connors has no major epiphanies here that we haven’t seen in his earlier work. But what it does have, despite the author suggesting he prefers places to people, is testimony to a powerful human connection. The most moving parts of the book are about two visitors to his mountain hideout: Mónica, Connors’s wife, and the late Bobby Byrd, Connors’s publisher, friend, and fellow writer. The book features sections written by, about, and to them and is all the richer for it. Against all odds, The Mountain Knows the Mountain turns out to be a love story.

The post The Mountain Knows the Mountain by Philip Connors – a review appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

Some urban raccoons can untie knots and open doors. Fisher cats aren’t felines and don’t eat fish. A bobcat’s teeth have evolved to fit precisely into the spaces of its prey’s spinal cord. Spotted skunks warn away predators by doing a handstand on their front feet and spreading their back legs in the air. As Sharman Apt Russell’s excellent new book shows us, the animal kingdom is a riot and a hoot.  

Like so many of the creatures that the author references, What Walks This Way is a hybrid: part memoir, part field guide, part natural history. The tone is that of a generous mentor talking you through a topic—wildlife tracking—that she clearly adores. Potted histories of coyotes, bears, raccoons, etc., are intermingled with anecdotes about the author’s time wandering the wilderness in southern New Mexico with a beloved friend, or stories of legendary trackers, her rugged great-uncle among them, or evenings spent on the porch listening for mysterious rustlings that might lead to discoveries. 

While Russell possesses the curiosity of a serious scientist, endearingly there remains something of the enthusiastic amateur about her. She writes, “You . . . have to care, really care, about what animal was here a day ago . . . The truth is that sometimes I care, and sometimes I don’t” (p. 85). Elsewhere she states that professional trackers carry rulers to measure pawmarks; she usually forgets hers and measures everything with her fingers. (She assures us that the distance from fingertip to first crease is about an inch.)  

The book is full of enjoyable digressions. Besides brief introductions to biologists and ecologists doing vital conservation work, Russell offers copious examples of nature’s whims and absurdities. The gray fox can scramble sixty feet up a cottonwood tree and leap from branch to branch; the red fox can’t climb trees at all. Coyotes and badgers often hunt together, sometimes with the same partner throughout the season. Researchers in Chicago have seen coyotes wait at stoplights until a road is clear, wander into the middle, then pause to check for traffic going the other way.  Javelinas mourn their dead.

In some ways, the digressions are the point. The author quotes the ecologist Mark Elbroch: “The competent tracker is both scientist and storyteller.” Russell, a novelist as well as a nature writer, concurs. She mentions that imagination is key to tracking because imagination allows us to interpret the signs discovered. Why was this mountain lion bounding so quickly up this particular slope? Why did this herd of deer change direction and veer towards the trees? Trackers use everything they know about an animal and weave it, along with the signs that the animal has left behind, into a story.

Stories can be wonderful, but of course the budding tracker needs a few basics. In What Walks This Way, practical information comes in panels with a shaded background. These panels consist of brief explanations of how to identify a particular animal’s tracks, as well as handy (paws-y?) diagrams of these tracks. Kim Cabrera’s illustrations are a model of clarity and elegance. Cabrera also offers possibly the best advice imaginable for trackers: “You teach yourself by spending time in the dirt” (p. 121). 

While the book is joyful, it does touch upon serious ecological issues. Each chapter details the degree to which the animals described are endangered. More often than not, human intervention, a.k.a. greed, is the cause. Climate change looms large. There is also a section that describes how and why we hunt. (Hint: it’s not always for food or self-preservation.)  

What Walks This Way will send you back to the wild places. If you live in a rural area or go hiking, you’ll find yourself eyeing the ground as you walk, hoping for the telltale sign—a triangular palm pad, the X shape of a dog’s hind track, a dewclaw toe—of some gorgeous critter who passed this way. And all the while, you’ll have Russell’s friendly voice in your head imploring you to pay attention, to notice the things worth noticing: in this case, the creatures with whom we share this sacred planet.

The post What Walks This Way appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

Marty Eberhardt, Silver City/Tucson mystery novelist, is a rare find. As in her premier outing for garden employee Bea Rivers, Eberhardt’s Bones in the Back Forty tells a sweet, sweet story. She offers a new genre of joyful suspense every time a reader cracks open one of her books.

A mystery reader who plunges into a chilling Scandinavian tale of mayhem knows that a sleepless night lies ahead. Not the case for Bones. A follower of the “classical” authors – Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, P.D. James, and even that pinnacle of sardonic humor, Janet Evanovich- encounters some stiff moments in their narratives. In Bones mystery has shucked its false ties to terror.

And the blue-eyed gossip of St. Mary Mead, the oh so deceiving Jane Marple? With a steely regard of humanity, she regularly rendered hapless English policemen to hopeless sputtering. Author Agatha Christie delivered well-constructed puzzles but seldom told sweet stories.

Is Eberhardt distinctive because she portrays no real villains? Just the opposite.

Bones is rife with miscreants able to commit murder in a fit of anger or to launch a lethal scheme for professional promotion. Her villains are the types who work next to us, whom we meet in grocery store aisles. For example, an adjunct academic who wears flip flops and Hawaiian shirts to the garden board meetings, rubbing colleague’s faces in his advanced degree, has surely earned our suspicion.

If her suspects, including shrewish wives of millionaires and snarky presidents of Chambers of Commerce, meet the villainy test, her “detectives” don’t belong to those mystery writers cited above. Macho, brooding males weigh down those “classics.” Bea and her buddy policewoman Marcia and the National Forest anthropologist Ramona and the town cop Sandra almost dos-y-dos through Bones.

In the end Eberhardt’s secret to sweetness lies In Bea’s kids. Kids keep the story real and the novelist’s insistence that Bea must sometimes obsess over parenting lifts the Bea Rivers series into new territory. The closest parallel is Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley’s creation whom critics call hard-boiled but who is really a sentimentalist crisped by the Southern California sun.

As a first-class mystery novel, Bones offers a compelling subplot, Bea’s romantic entanglement. Cliches like to pillory the modern American guy who refuses to commit to a relationship. Without commentary Eberhardt pulls a switch: Bea doesn’t want to face the changes that love may demand. The deck is stacked. Great-with-kids and sexy to boot, Frank needs to accept a plum job offer in Washington near to his mother who suffers from ALS. All the same, Bea hesitates. Occasionally the sweetest story has sour streaks.

Silver City readers can find a special attraction in Bones in the Back Forty. Besides sussing out who done the murder 30 years before the story began and besides predicting the crooked course of Bea’s love life, Silver Citians can uncover Eberhardt’s elaborate disguise of the Gila and of Silver City, the Burros and Lordsburg. (I don’t approve of her renaming our patch of paradise “Salvaje” but she saved matters by calling a particularly obnoxious character “Gert,” after the digestive disorder.)

If your book club selects this book, members can debate why Tucson can keep both its city name and its university while Silver City must accept the dull “Copperton” and a nameless college. In book club discussion, you may relish the author’s wry reference to Turfing Tucsonians who are campaigning to replace their gravel yards with fescue, guaranteed to suck the Colorado River dry.

This review has yet to mention an outstanding feature of the novel: plants. Pause for this paragraph. “At the end of the day, the rain had let up, and the desert smells pulled Bea out into the garden. She went out past the cactus garden with its huge barrel cacti massed together, raindrops glistening on yellow spines, past Madagascar pachypodiums, so-called because they looked like elephants’ trunks, past the limberbush in the native plant garden, leafless now, red-stemmed and springy, full of a latex-rich sap. In the wildflower garden, she took a sniff of an early blooming yellow brittlebush flower. The rain-smell propelled her past the fifteen acres of planted gardens to the back forty….”

Sweet, isn’t it?

The post Silver City Writer Invents a New Mystery appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

Gila Lost and Found: Search and Rescue in New Mexico by Marc Levesque

Reviewed by JJ Amaworo Wilson

Gila Lost and Found recounts the author’s experiences as a Search and Rescue (SAR) field coordinator in the Gila Wilderness. It’s part a “how to survive” and part an adventure book, although some parts read like entry attempts for the Darwin Awards – an annual prize given posthumously to those who die the stupidest, most preventable death. The tone is that of a wise, good-natured uncle who’s seen and done it all.

Most of the book describes cases in which hikers get lost or injured and have to be rescued. The hikers are a diverse bunch, including testosterone-fueled septuagenarians, unprepared out-of-state teenagers, families, dogs, and a pair of pack goats. Levesque is an excellent storyteller. He also shows remarkable patience and restraint faced with the litany of human follies that make his job so much harder.

A third of the way through the book, he mentions the true story of George and Joseph Cox, aged five and six. In the year 1856, the boys wandered into the woods of Pennsylvania and never returned. For two weeks, a thousand-strong search party scoured the area, to no avail. Then a local man named Jacob Dibert had three dreams in which he found George and Joseph. The following month he led a search party to the exact spot where the boys’ bodies were located.

Such tragedies strike every now and then, and Levesque has been witness to several, including the death of the well-known writer Richard Mahler. Most of the cases, though, have happy endings thanks to the heroes of this book, the SAR volunteers. Time and again they come up with brilliant solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They coerce the weary up cliff faces; they put themselves in the shoes of the lost and imagine their way to a rescue; they measure out flat terrain so a helicopter can land. Overall, they come across as unflappable, smart, and courageous, as does Levesque himself.

Also fascinating is learning just how complex the rescue missions are, and how many different organizations and decisions are involved. At various points, state police, local police, border patrol, and SAR volunteers all need to be coordinated. News to me was that large search parties of volunteers can often be more of a hindrance than a help – they scuff up vital footprints and sometimes get lost themselves.

The final section provides lists of tips for hikers and campers. The first list is about being prepared for the wilderness, the second about survival in dire straits. If you read the first, there’s a good chance you won’t need to read the second. In any case, whether you’re planning a six-day trip in the field or a couple of days on the sofa, my advice is to read this book. It might save your life.

The post Review: Gila Lost and Found by Marc Levesque appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It by Sharman Apt Russell
Pantheon
April 6, 2021
ISBN-10: 1524747246

Reviewed by JJ Amaworo Wilson

Humans have been hungry for a long time. The four-thousand-year-old tomb of Ankhtifi holds the inscription “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children.” The traces of our ancient hunger are left in Paleolithic skeletons: a rough winter or a poor harvest shows up as stunted growth in the bones. The horrors of the Holocaust are embodied in the public mind not by the infernal chimneys and barracks but by photos of emaciated survivors.

Within Our Grasp describes a human tragedy, but as we infer from the title, it’s a tragedy with a sliver of hope. Based on Apt Russell’s 2016 sojourn in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, the book describes numerous programs and ideas designed to combat childhood malnutrition. Interspersed with the stories of innovation and the autobiographical material, there are chapters that explain the biology of hunger and others that use a wider lens to examine the world’s attempts to reduce it.

Apt Russell’s signature statement is that “we are the storytelling animal” and sure enough, it’s in the stories of individual men and women—researchers, biologists, farmers, community organizers—that the book finds much of its hope.

Take Steve Collins. An idealistic English doctor-turned-researcher-turned nutritional snack entrepreneur, Collins began by hitch-hiking and cycling across Africa. He spent time working with Mother Teresa in India, and wound up back in Africa creating locally-sourced health food. Collins’s enthusiasm and can-do spirit animates the book. He’s a mover and a shaker, a dreadlocked iconoclast. On his first meeting with Apt Russell he announces that an end to childhood malnutrition is “within our grasp,” the words that give this book its title.

With such focus on the likes of Collins, inevitably the trope of the white savior springs to mind. Apt Russell pre-empts this by naming numerous Malawians who are humbly making a difference: the teacher Fanny Chimbaya, the organizer Lizzie Shumba, the farmer Noera Sauka. More than once, she describes her discomfort at her status as a privileged, white, western writer-researcher. At one point, she visits a village with her husband. She is immediately surrounded by adoring local children. As they take her hand, instead of feeling universal love she finds herself worrying about catching scabies, an infectious disease. It takes a writer of rare courage to put such thoughts on paper, but courage she has in spades. 

She doesn’t shy away from naming the bad guys. Malnutrition is not a blameless malaise and it turns out that corporate greed has left a trail of destruction in Africa and elsewhere. For decades, the food company Nestlé aggressively marketed sugary baby formula as a replacement for breastfeeding. The results were catastrophic. Agribusiness, too, is a major perpetrator, forcing farmers into monocultural farming for profit instead of sustainable multi-cropping to feed local people. While Apt Russell names them, she stops short of shaming them.

Instead, the book examines the interconnectedness of issues that lead to childhood malnutrition. Colonialism, climate change, economic inequality, the patriarchy, poor sanitation – all are huge factors, often in ways one wouldn’t predict. For example, women do a day’s work in the field but also do all the household chores. This means they frequently lack the time and energy to breastfeed their children. Changing the patriarchal patterns of domestic life is no easy task and yet there are success stories among the villages of Malawi.

As this theme of interconnectedness develops, it becomes the book’s thesis: meals and medicine have a part to play, but success—as in nations as disparate as Malawi, Brazil and Vietnam—will come only through holistic means chosen and implemented locally. It’s a beautiful lesson perfectly conveyed in this beautiful book.

The post Review: Within Our Grasp by Sharman Apt Russell appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections by Eliane Brum is a book of essays based on interviews with Brazil’s marginalized people. Among her interviewees are an 85-year-old hoarder, a street performer who eats glass, and a dying factory worker – poisoned at work for decades – who tells her, “I am made of asbestos.” Brilliant and harrowing.

How to Pronounce Knife is the debut story collection by poet Souvankham Thammavongsa. Its theme is the immigrant experience in the U.S. from the perspective of Laotian children. These tales of non-stop hustle and linguistic confusion are a delight.

JJ Amaworo Wilson, WNMU writer-in-residence, co-chair of SWF 

Told in her candid, intelligent, gracious voice, Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir, looks back on her family’s remarkable rise from slavery only five generations earlier to her role as First Lady of the US. My favorite read of 2020, I loved this behind-the-scenes look at Michelle’s life and the Obama presidency so much, I didn’t want it to end.

My favorite of all of Tana French’s elegant literary mysteries, Faithful Place looks back on when French’s enigmatic protagonist, undercover Dublin detective Frank Mackey, had been left by his first love, Rosie Daly, when they planned to run away together from their dysfunctional families. The crime surfaces with the discovery of Daly’s long-dead body, which ties into the theme, that of warring definitions of fidelity, loyalties that some would kill for.

Kris Neri, author of Hopscotch Life

Pat Conroy, Our Lifelong Friendship by Bernie Schein is a memoir of a friendship which began in high school and ended at Conroy’s bedside when he passed away. They were always best friends, from the very beginning “inseparable.” This is a first-hand account of a friendship—passionate and loving but far, far from easy.

Based on some real persons, events, and conspiracies, Steve Anderson’s thriller, The Preserve, returns to the aftermath of WWII. 1948: WWII veteran Wendell Lett desperately seeks a cure to his relentless combat trauma by reporting to a secretive training camp in Hawaii code-named The Preserve. There they seek to rebuild him into a cold-blooded assassin as part of a deadly conspiracy to recover pillaged Japanese gold.

Wildlife biologist Sage McAllister is startled one snowy night by an odd scratching noise at her cabin door and is shocked to see two gray wolves sitting on the deck communicating with her. In Barbara J. Moritsch’s Wolf Time, an eco-friendly fantasy, Sage receives three precious gifts: a reunion with her own human pack, an astonishing glimpse of the connections existing among all species, and an unprecedented opportunity to help humans make peace with wolves.

Peter Riva, author of Kidnapped on Safari and President of International Transactions, Inc.

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy is classified as “history/nature,” but it is also a memoir of Savoy’s trip across the country to fill in the unknowns of her family tree. Her journey starts in the West with her sharing childhood memories, including as a teenager having a door literally shut in her face when a potential employer saw she was Black. Savoy ends up out East at a former plantation, still manicured and open for tours, and an unkempt and nearly forgotten slave cemetery—and at a dusty archive where an estate inventory reveals her great-great-great grandmother, Eliza Savoy, had been valued at $300. Savoy’s prose undulates like the landscape of the Grand Canyon, where Trace begins, and the beauty of her lyricism makes the ugliness of history digestible. 

Elaine Stachera Simon, New Mexico Press Women

Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo is a funny and intelligent road trip novel that reads like a memoir. Wonderful writing, hilarious at times, deep and wise. I also read the sequels: Lunch with Buddha and Dinner with Buddha. All were terrific, entertaining and not heavy-handed about the Buddhist over-tones.

How to Cuss in Western by Michael P. Branch is a book of environmental personal essays about living in the high desert of Nevada. Humorous and poignant. A fun read that will also feed your brain.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman is a brilliant and funny memoir about becoming a brilliant and funny physicist working at Los Alamos Labs. Really, you owe yourself this read if you haven’t read it; and to re-read it, if you haven’t read it recently.

Eve West Bessier, Poet Laureate of Silver City and Grant County

There is something very uplifting about Kris Neri’s engrossing novel Hopscotch Life. I couldn’t put it down, reading it in three days, absorbed in the unusual and compelling plot twists and provocative conflict. Hopscotch Life is an engaging read filled with emotionally charged high jinx to pathos, keeping one’s interest till the final page. 

Experiences of life are forged through the profound bond between Chris and Rikki, two diverse characters in Kate Towle’s Sweet Burden of Crossing. At first awkward and uncomfortable, a casual acquaintance turns into a union of strength and deep friendship spanning decades as models of courage and honesty develop through transparency and understanding. As Ms. Towle delves into many societal questions concerning race relations in a remarkably timely narrative, one can glean valuable insights into how to break the cycle of fear and prejudice.

It’s been nine years since a devastating virus decimated the world, with climate change making most of the map uninhabitable. The second book in a trilogy, Growing Home by Laura Ramnarace continues Lakshmi’s life of survival in the Gila. So vivid in its depiction of apocalypse I had to put it down at times and take a breath. We would do well to learn the lessons Ms. Ramnarace’s eerily familiar book teaches.  

Lynne Zotalis, author of Hippie at Heart: What I Used to Be, I Still Am

The post Best Books We Read in 2020 appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

Correspondent and producer for the New Mexico PBS series “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future,” Laura Paskus has been reporting on the environment since 2002. Her book At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate came out in mid-September from the University of New Mexico Press.

At the Precipice is, stylistically, easy to read, but it’s not an easy book to read—which makes it an important addition to current environmental literature. You can’t make the excuse that the material is too dense, or you don’t understand the science. Paskus lays it all out, clearly, in plain (and often eloquent) language.

 At its heart, At the Precipice is a story about people as much as it is about climate change. You won’t find a dry academic discussion of climate facts, science (both wrongheaded and right-but-ignored), politics, the harshness of extraction industries, or the agricultural juggernaut that consumes 75% of New Mexico’s water. Yet these issues are addressed, thoroughly, through the lenses of unfolding stories that contain both evidence and nuance.

The stories are compelling because we know these places. Paskus’s love of New Mexico and New Mexicans percolates in her prose as she presents the voices that have, in one way or another, spoken for the land and its inhabitants, human and non-human. Not surprisingly, significantly different agendas have driven those voices. Early on in At the Precipice, Paskus shows us a paradox of people when it comes to the issue of climate change. “If I weren’t hopeful . . . I wouldn’t have bothered to share this book with you” (p. xvii). Yet, she also makes a point to thank those who did their level best to keep information away from her, because this alerted her to how valuable that information really was.

New Mexico is warming at twice the global average, and is the 6^th-fastest-warming state in the nation. Our new reality is not becoming, but already is, hotter and drier. Since the 1970s, the average New Mexico temperature has increased by 2°F, and rising temperatures mean less water, regardless of the amount of precipitation.

Paskus’s cry is that, as a state, we need to decide—now—what our future looks like. She pulls no punches in addressing the political hostility to climate change initiatives at the state and national levels that has allowed oil and gas to remain the economic driver of the state budget and push New Mexico to the point at which it is the 5^th largest in terms of oil production.

Educated as an anthropologist, Paskus became a journalist subsequent to working with New Mexico Native American tribes helping them navigate federal projects. Throughout the book, her respect for Native people and their histories is clear. Her description of what has been done to their lands is stark.  The constant search for oil has left some Four Corners residents expressing that Native lands have become a “sacrifice zone” (p. 56). Indeed, the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation contains 900,000 acres of oil and gas allotments. People have been paid by energy companies to drill on their allotments next to their home or on grazing land (lands deeded to them by the federal government), sometimes up to $100,000. Yet, many who sold may not have been able to read the contracts, may not have realized that it was a one-time payment even if a well runs for decades, or may not have realized that drilling a well means roads, waste pits, and 24-hour days of semi-truck traffic. Similarly, cattycorner on the southeastern side of the state, a Cessna ride over the Permian Basin left Paskus “sweaty and nauseous,” not from turbulence, but from the sight of thousands of oil wells, each with their own road and most with waste pits, splattered across the landscape. She notes, “it was plain to see how hard this land was worked” (p. xiv).

Another victim of climate change in New Mexico Paskus addresses may be the ponderosa pine. Problems started in the 1970s with the policy to prevent all forest fires, creating overgrowth that has since turned into kindling for massive fires. However, higher temperatures and less water mean now-common conflagrations are bigger than ever before.

The 2011 Las Conchas fire ignited when a power line blew into an aspen tree. At the time (late June) it was 90 degrees with six percent humidity. Las Conchas became the largest fire in New Mexico history, burning 156,000 acres—until the following year when the Whitewater-Baldy fire consumed nearly twice that amount. Unless you are a firefighter on the front lines, the numbers are hard to fathom. The Las Conchas fire burned an acre each second—what does that mean? Paskus shows us. “Close your eyes and count to ten. During that time, flames devoured ten acres. Think of the ponderosa pines and Steller’s jay nests, the fox burrows and salamanders obliterated in the time it takes to draw and exhale two breaths” (p. 66).

Drought conditions and snowpack that doesn’t materialize means trees do not develop deep root systems. Weakened by the warmth and lack of water, trees fall victim to moths and beetles. Tens of thousands of acres of ponderosa pines simply won’t come back.  Even if re-seeding took place on a massive scale, there’s no guarantee pines can survive the warming world.  

As I noted, at its heart, At the Precipice is about people, and Paskus explores climate change as approached by some of the faith communities in New Mexico and what they see as the moral responsibility to act to mitigate not only the damage to the environment, but to protect vulnerable populations. Rising temperatures will perpetuate social injustice. As warming continues, New Mexicans will experience more extreme heat, and the most vulnerable among us—seniors, low-income households, the homeless—will be disproportionately affected.

Paskus’s presentation is dispassionate, although it’s clear that she herself is not. She notes that her job as a journalist is to “talk with experts, question those in authority, and act as a proxy for the public.” Her perspective is also that of a mother. She has a teenage daughter to whom the book is dedicated, which is perhaps one reason why Paskus doesn’t talk about, but actually talks to, young people whose futures depend on what we do today. She quotes Olivia Gonzalez, who says, “I’m fifteen and I’m doing the most that I can for my age.” What young people need now, Olivia says, is for adults “to do what they can” (p. 163).  The time is now for the conversation to go beyond the political and economic—the moral considerations must be addressed and choices must be made.

According to a Las Cruces Sun-News article, the forecast for fall and winter in New Mexico is warm and dry, with a “50% chance for lower than average precipitation this year” thanks to La Niña (Romero, L., Oct. 5, 2020, La Niña May Leave New Mexico High and Dry This Winter). Warmer temperatures mean less snowpack, and less snowpack means less water in the river and the reservoirs. According to State Climatologist Dave Dubois (in the same article), “we’re going to be relying more on pumping groundwater again for irrigation next summer.” La Niña events are not unusual, and occur naturally. Yet, as of October 5—Elephant Butte reservoir is only at 4.2% capacity.

Paskus urges us to take a chance, and do something different. Heed science. Diversify our economy. Because the time to fight for New Mexico is now.

At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate by Laura Paskus is available through the University of New Mexico Press and other online booksellers.
The Southwest Word Fiesta interviewed Laura Paskus here.

The post Review: At the Precipice by Laura Paskus appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

Perdido: Sierra San Luis by Michael P. Berman

When the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V asked Mexico’s conqueror, Hernan Cortes, what Mexico looked like, Cortes crumpled a piece of parchment, threw it on the floor, and said, “Mexico.” Mountains, bluffs, peaks and ridges.  

Five-hundred years later, Michael Berman, longtime photographer/adventurer and teller of the tale above, is trekking through the mountains of Sierra San Luis. He comes across a white rock face on which someone has scrawled the word perdido, Spanish for “lost.” The word echoes across time and space, song and story. We think of lost immigrants traversing the desert to reach la frontera. We think of Gogol’s Lost Souls and Dante’s Inferno, with its dark woods and eroded pathways. Someone has left their mark, and the ambiguity of their one-word message tantalizes. Is perdido a cry for help? A statement about mankind? An improvised road sign? A warning? Is it like the underwater hunger stones that warn of droughts (under the River Elbe in the Czech Republic one such stone reads ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep’)? Maybe if you see perdido, you are lost.

Lost or not, there is no sense of despair in this masterly book. Berman’s photos show largely pristine landscapes. A river glistens under a canopy of branches. Foliage-flecked hills stretch far away. The photos of humans show clearly that we belong to the land rather than the other way round. Our incursions seem trivial. Berman writes, “Wilderness is … the thing we fear most: an affirmation of our insignificance.” In one photo, three lines of barbed wire mark a minuscule fence set against vast highlands. In another, four border patrol officers wander a landscape that dwarfs them.

Many of the photos focus on the land beneath our feet, as if honoring the archaeologist’s concept of ground-truthing – you make discoveries by digging in the soil rather than looking down from an airplane. They show the treacherous earth and the detritus of our days: abandoned water bottles, a discarded balaclava. And they tell stories: “… each photograph reflects an infinite number of events we have missed.”

What surprises the reader more than the striking photos is Berman’s prose. He writes beautifully, with the lyricism and wisdom of one who’s spent time alone among mountains. He knows the name of everything he sees and much that he doesn’t, and lets the poetry of the natural world resound: “a cathedral-columned expanse of old trees,” “quick-fire bracken fern and moss understory,” “silver fir so old the trees crack in a smoking-mist-charred memory of fire.” He asks questions: What is our relationship to this soil? How do we protect it? And just how has the Sierra San Luis managed to flourish in these times of human depredation?

The narrative and the photos are complemented by fine short essays from the ecologist Rodrigo Sierra Corona, climate activist Tim DeChristopher, and conservationist Valer Clark. While Perdido comes in the guise of a coffee-table art book, it turns out to be something different: part travel memoir, part ecological cri de coeur. It’s a book in which to lose oneself.  

JJ Amaworo Wilson

The post Review: Perdido by Michael P. Berman appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

JJ Amaworo Wilson

(Re)birth: Jimmy finds a new meaning for the word “sentence”

When Jimmy Santiago Baca was in his early twenties and serving time in a high-security prison, a Good Samaritan from the outside world—Henry Gould—wrote to him. Gould ran a soup kitchen. His legs had been blown off during World War II, but his heart was pure. Jimmy began to write regularly. Gould sent a dictionary and Jimmy sent poems.

Eventually, Gould broke off the correspondence; he was a Christian Evangelical and Jimmy, surrounded by murderers and rapists, could see no sign of God. But by then Jimmy was on his way. He wrote from sun-up to sundown. He sold poems to inmates in exchange for cigarettes. He got published. When his time was up, the sadistic prison warden refused to grant his freedom. Letters poured in from editors at national journals and the outcry got him released.

Tightrope

Jimmy walks a tightrope. A high-wire act. That high up, there’s nothing but euphoria and the knowledge that you’re one misstep from the abyss. And Jimmy’s always looking down. He’s a mass of contradictions and he knows it: the penniless poet, the party animal. On page 102 of his new book of autobiographical essays, Laughing in the Light, he writes, “I was not into accumulating goods, no property or money or savings.” Two paragraphs later, “whatever I touched resulted in success … beautiful girlfriend, book contract, movie deal, new house, new cars.” On page 114 he was “[n]ear starvation.” In the next paragraph he goes to Taos and rents a rubber raft.

He’s a hell-raiser and a nature-lover at the same time, his nose either poised above a line of coke or in the Buddhist works of Thich Nhat Hanh, the guru’s guru. He tells us about his readings at packed university halls, his five-figure fees, the tears his audience sheds for him. And in the same breath he says he’s nothing. In the final chapter he comes clean: “parts of me dueled between death and life.” Life won.

El Profesor

He goes back to prison as a teacher. His workshops are packed. The inmates see the light, become writers, thinkers. Their lives gain purpose. When they get out, they’ll return to their wives and kids, begin afresh. Heck, even the prison guards start showing up.

Months later, the workshops have ended and he asks his assistant to contact the former students who have now served their terms. He wants to reconnect, see how they’re doing. “That won’t be possible,” says his assistant. Why not? “Most of them are dead, overdosed.” Talk about a dying fall.

Pinche Gringos

There are several antagonists in Laughing in the Light. We don’t have addresses for all of them, but one currently lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Others include sadistic prison wardens, sellout poets, conquistadores, pioneer-settlers, greedy ex-wives, and oil company lobbyists. Most are rich, white males: pinche gringos. Jimmy’s poetic awakening also brings a political awakening. Social justice is a potent theme—perhaps the potent theme—in the book, and for Jimmy, poetry possesses redemptive power: “Poets are like the clean-up crew. We come in after the mess has been made.”

Outlaw

He says he’s an outsider. It’s true that he is, but most writers are. All of us chose the road less traveled. And he’s certainly not the only jailbird-scribbler; many have taken a walk on the Wilde side. Jean Genet was a thief. Jimmy Boyle was a Glasgow gangster. Chester Himes was an armed robber. Brendan Behan did three years for getting caught with IRA explosives, and wrote Borstal Boy as a result. In any case, there aren’t as many sellouts as Jimmy thinks, partly because poetry doesn’t sell. As for being an outsider, another Jimmy (Baldwin) said it best. When asked about the hell of being black, Jewish and gay in America, Baldwin replied, “It’s a gift.” Our struggles make us who we are.

Crack (no, not that crack)

“There is a crack in all of us. It’s how the light gets in” (Leonard Cohen). Jimmy’s childhood was marked by abandonment (mother), alcohol (father), violence (father, step-father), drugs (everyone), racism (society). He went from orphanage to juvie to jail to prison without passing Go, and he saw some of the worst things a human being can see. From these beginnings, he became a bestselling, award-winning author, a Hollywood writer and producer, and a man full of love. There is a crack in him, for sure. But genius is more often found in a cracked pot than a whole one.

Laughing in the Light is a vivid, rollicking book, part-diatribe, part-memoir. With all his flaws and in all his glory, Jimmy fascinates and charms in equal measure. May the last laugh be his.

Jimmy Santiago Baca will present Laughing in the Light as a guest of the Southwest Festival of the Written Word in Silver City, January 2021.

The post Review: Laughing in the Light appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

With incredible speed our world moved from disconnected villages to a global network — one owned by the power brokers. The consequences couldn’t be foreseen.

In this second book of the Bitpats, a revolutionary group working to preserve the right, the ability to stay out of sight. In a world dominated and driven by data, the digitization of information we didn’t even know was important, the big players not only know where we are but they can make reasonable guesses about what we do next…what products we will buy, what cause we will support. This changing world makes even silence into a statement.

Ed Teja is a writer, poet, musician, and boat bum. He writes about the places he knows and the people who live in the margins of the world. After being friends with tech giants, pirates, fishermen, and a coterie of strange people for many years, he finds the world an amazing place filled with intriguing, if sometimes crazed, characters. He is a longtime resident of Silver City.

Lee Porter is a former IT specialist, programmer, and data analyst for banking, security, and government agencies. He left the IT world behind on July 4, 2016, declaring it his personal Independence Day to travel the world full time in search of inspiration for his writing. He is currently living in Cambodia

CRYPTO CITIZENS is available as an ebook and in a paperback edition. Find it here:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086KXG2P4

The post Cyber-threat Novel appeared first on Southwest Word Fiesta™.