Thank you,
Marc, for sharing your stories on pages for us to read and
enjoy again and again.
-- Shelly
Robinson, glass artist and friend
PILLOW
OF CLOUDS
1991 (Purchase a copy)
While working at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, I heard the story of a colleague's
son. He was approaching the age of twelve. He would soon
be forced to make a choice. According to the divorce agreement his parents
had reached he must decide whether to live with his mother or his father.
He was having a horrible time deciding. Choosing to live with one was
to reject the other.
He couldn't win. He was acting out. Who
could blame him?
At the same time, it was becoming clear
to me that I hadn't quite shed my midwestern
upbringing. I loved living in New Mexico, outside of
Santa Fe. But there were times when I longed for the comfortable blanket of
green cornfields and the bland but comforting casserole culture I grew up
with. The startling blue New Mexico sky was often
blinding, and as much as I love green chili, the
churning New Mexico culture can give a body heartburn.
Intellectually, I knew where my home
was. It was New Mexico. Emotionally it seemed as
if I had two homes. And to choose one was to reject the
other. Could IU live in New Mexico without rejecting Iowa?
I explored this issue through Chester's
dilemma. Santa Fe, where his father lived, was
exotic. Iowa, where his mother lived, was comfortable.
Living with his father was comfortable. Living with his mother was
beyond exotic. It was uncomfortable.
This book, more than any other, is my
most autobiographical. But I want to make
something clear: I have never faced Chester's choices. I wasn't. My parents
have never divorced. They have moved from Iowa and now live in New Mexico.
This book is autobiographical because I would
have felt and thought and acted like Chester.
And because I lent him poetry I wrote when I was his age.
My poetry, Chester's poetry, introduces each section of the book. Chester
took my poetry and made it his own.
THE
PURPLE HEART
1992 (Purchase a copy)
I grew up with Vietnam on television.
Until I went off to college, it was only
something I experienced through television. And then, my freshman year, the
draft lottery stuck. I had never considered the possibility of going to Vietnam
until the number I drew was number five.
Five! In a year where men drawing
numbers into the fifties and sixties were sent
to Vietnam!
For a variety of reasons, I had grown
up believing that the Vietnam War was not a good
war. I grew up in a university town, where there were regular protests
against the war. Political candidates, from Eugene McCarthy to Robert
Kennedy, had swung through Ames, Iowa, campaigning against the war. I had
lived for a year in Sweden, a neutral country in which the people were mildly
anti-American because of the Vietnam War.
And now I was being ordered to go to
Fort Des Moines for an induction physical (which
I passed) in preparation to going to Vietnam to fight, to perhaps
give my life for a cause I couldn't make heads or tails of.
I spent the rest of my freshman year
working hard to earn status as a Conscientious
Objector -someone who could not fight as a matter of conscience.
I refused to get out of serving by
claiming fake medical or psychological illness.
I refused to become a conscientious objector on religious grounds (even
though my grandfather was a Quaker-I was not). I decided to earn CO status
on the merits of my beliefs that the Vietnam War was wrong.
It took a year, and an interview in
front of my local draft board, but I earned my
CO status. Two years later, the lottery no longer existed. Before long
the Vietnam War was history.
I didn't go to Vietnam. But somebody
else went in my place. That's the wait worked. A certain number of men were
inducted - that was the reason for the lottery.
Who went in my place? I'll never know.
The war may not have been good, but many good
men went to fight in it. What if the person who went in my stead was
wounded? What if he came back to a son who considered him a hero-came back
with a Purple Heart, one of the most beautiful and terrible of war medals?
Those were the questions I asked as I
set out to right this book. They haunt me still.
A
SUNBURNED PRAYER
1995 (Aladdin Paperbacks) (Purchase a copy)
Every year in northern
New Mexico, on Good Friday, thousands of devout Catholics make a
pilgrimage to the little mountain village of Chimayo. They go
for the holy dirt in the camposanto (hole) in the anteroom (off
the alter) that they believe will cure illness-mental,
emotional, spiritual, and physical. It is moving to see so many
people, from so many walks of life, trudging along the highways
from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Espanola, Taos, and surrounding
villages, aimed for the Santuario.
Every year, on my way
to Los Alamos, I would see these people. Every year they moved
me to tears.
What kind of faith did
these people have? What would inspire them to walk more in one
day then they usually walked in a month? Were any of their
prayers answered? Were any of them disappointed? Why were they
walking-for themselves or for others?
These were the
questions I asked myself as I began writing A SUNBURNED PRAYER.
But first I felt that I
needed to do some research. I needed to make the pilgrimage from
my house (about seventeen miles from the Santuario). I had
driven the route many times, but I discovered in walking that
the emotional landscape of the journey and the physical
landscape of the journey were almost identical. The beginning of
the pilgrimage, through the fruit tree lines Tesuque Valley, was
as fresh in my thoughts and sprits. Doubts began to seep into my
thinking when I hit the four-lane highway going north. Trucks
and cars roared by and, for the first time, I was in the company
of other pilgrims. Turning off into the lush Nambe Valley was a
relief, but the crows of pilgrims got thicker and an unbroken
line of slow moving card shadowed me. Just when fatigue set in,
I climbed out of the Nambe Valley into a stretch of badlands.
The sun was hot, there were no trees and the road kept climbing
and winding. I began to wonder what the blazed I was doing.
It was a relief to turn
off onto the road leading to Chimayo. But the steep downhill was
painful on my calves and thighs after fifteen miles of trudging.
Eloy appeared in my
mind partway through the walk and accompanied me most of the
way. Magdalena was stretched out in front of the altar at the
Santuario, asleep. Pilgrims stepped around her as they helped
themselves to holy dirt. Eloy's reason for walking came to me in
a dream.
But when I began
writing the books, I didn't know how Eloy's pilgrimage would
end. Did the dirt have healing powers?
This book about one
boy's faith was written on faith. I had faith that the ending
would reveal itself.
My faith was rewarded.
HEART
OF A JAGUAR
1995(Aladdin Paperbacks) (Purchase a copy)
My wife, Moo, spent a
summer in high school living with a family in Merida, the
capital city of Yucatan, Mexico. She was eager to show me that
part of Mexico, which she had fallen in love with (even with its
horrendous climate and its lack of mountains). I had no
particular interest in Mexico, but agreed to join her and her
family on a family vacation in Cozamel, an island off the
Yucatan Peninsula.
The water was great.
And the people were charming. But what really took me by
surprise were the Mayan ruins we visited at nearby Talum.
On our next trip, Moo
and I visited the magnificent ruins of Chitchen Itza, with its
pyramids and its cenote and its ball fields. MY mind went crazy.
I felt the presence of the ancient Maya in the air I was
breathing and the rain forest I was looking at and the ruins I
was exploring.
What had happened to
these magnificent people? Why had their elaborate and advanced
civilization disappeared, even before the coming of the
Europeans?
I went home and read as
much as I could on the Maya. A story began to form in my head.
But it came to me first as an ending. Because I couldn't work my
way through the story backwards, I had to create a beginning and
aim at the ending, hoping I would hit it.
Of course, I needed
more research. So Moo and IU took our daughter Molly, at that
time less than two years old, to the Yucatan. I wanted to smell
and feel and see and hear the landscape, to watch and listen to
the Mayan People who still live there and speak in their own
languages, to try out ideas and see if these ideas worked.
I wanted my characters
to be true Mayan people, not Americans dressed up as Mayan
people. I wanted my setting to be the Yucatan, not some generic
jungle setting from Tarzan movies.
Molly was our passport
to many Maya villages. The Maya keep to themselves and do not
bother with strangers. But hen they saw Molly, with her little
blond head poking out of her embroidered huipil (smock) they
couldn't resist coming up to us. That gave us a chance to ask
questions while they touched her hair and picked her up and
hugger her in that wonderful way of Mexicans.
We went to Chitchen
Itza and Uxmal and many villages and ruins in between. I loved
it.
My head was alive with
Balam and his family when I got back. I did more research,
concentrating on Mexican anthropologists who often studied the
common Maya instead of Mayan royalty. I fell in love with the
writing of the late Linda Schele. I began to write, structuring
the novel so that it would embody the structure of the Mayan
universe.
Of course, the hardest
part was writing the last chapter. It couldn't have ended any
othjer way. Everything I had worked so hard to achieve would
have been lost if I'd chickened out.
I grieved for Balam,
even as I celebrated him. But I am planning to write another
Mayan book, this one contemporary. And it will star Balam-the
same Balam from HEART OF A JAGUAR. In the way of Mayan time,
this is not only possible but also wonderfully probable.
STAR
OF LUÍS
1999(Clarion Books) (Purchase a copy)
The things families keep
secret from others-family members from other family members and
one generation from another-are often more interesting than what
families are eager for the world to know.
The idea for this novel
was the gift on my wife's uncle, Buzz Bainbridge. By accident,
he stumbled onto the session of a conference at a downtown Santa
Fe hotel that was so bizarre that it made strange sense. This
"something: was just starting to be openly talked about:
Hispanic families that had descended from secret Jews escaping
the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. This phenomenon is called
Crypto-Judaism and is the uncomfortable secret of certain
Hispanic families who considered themselves Catholics but who
fare descended from old Sephardic Jewish families that were told
by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand to convert, leave Spain, or
die.
Uncle Buzz thought it
would be a wonderful subject for a novel. So did I.
But Crypto-Jewish
families are uncomfortable talking about their Jewish heritage.
Luckily for me, there
is a man in Santa Fe, a former New Mexico state historian, who
knows something about secret Jews in New Mexico, and was
learning more all the time. Dr. Stan Hordes is not only
knowledgeable; he was approachable and enthusiastic about my
wish to write this novel.
He told me a little of
what he knew. It was fascinating. I learned about Jewish
practices that had been passed down through generations some
families, practices that had lost their meaning but that had
survived anyway-burying the dead in shrouds, lighting candles on
Friday evenings, circumcising boys, slaughtering animals in
kosher ways. He told me that entire families that were
"allergic" to pork ( a mainstay in Hispanic diet).
I visited the Las Vegas
(New Mexico) Public Library and spent many days reading oral
histories collected by students at Highlands University. These
students often interviewed older relatives in little mountain
village in northern New Mexico. These histories were rich with
the details of rural life in the 1930's and earlier, with a few
details that seemed to indicate the existence of Crypto-Judaism
in neighbors or in the family of the person being interviewed.
I visited cemeteries in
many little villages and saw stares of David on crosses or
Hebrew lettering on gravestones.
I joined the Society
for Crypto-Judaic Studies. I talked to a few Crypto-Jews who
were willing to share, sometimes reluctantly.
And then I agonized
over when the story should take place.
I decided that it had
to take place before television. Television, even more than
radio has led to a homogenization of culture, even in little
villages in New Mexico, where a child's first language is likely
to be the old Castilian Spanish of three hundred years ago.
I decided to set my
story in a little village in northern New Mexico. But then. in
my eclectic reading . I discovered something that shifted the
setting slightly to the west. To Los Angeles, in fact.
I was surprised to
discover that during the late 1930's and early 1940's that part
of Los Angeles that we now know as East Los Angeles was a
predominantly Jewish neighborhood that was slowly becoming
Mexican. I flew there and, with a friend talked to the last
remaining Jewish business owner on old Brooklyn Avenue (now
Caesar Chavez Boulevard) about what it must have been like to
experience such a change. I already knew about the strong New
Mexico-California connection, because so many New Mexican young
people leave this poor state to make their fortunes in
California and often come back just as poor but with a new
appreciation for the beauty of New Mexico.
And then, for whatever
strange writerly reason, I remembered a few stories of where
people were, and what they were doing, when they heard about he
bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.
It all began to come
together. My story would start in Los Angeles on Pearl Harbor
Day, where a Hispanic boy would be living in a Jewish
neighborhood that was becoming Mexican. His father would enlist
to fight the Japanese. His mother would take him back to the
hometown in northern New Mexico, where he would discover a
devastating family secret.
And in the middle of
all this, at a family reunion, I was shocked to learn that I
have Jewish roots.
My story was becoming
personal. And more difficult to write.
Like Luis, I was asking
the question: Who am I?
It is a question most of us ask all our
lives. We may get a little closer to the answer as time goes by, but the more we
learn about ourselves the more we realize we don't know.
THE TRAP
1999(DK Ink) (Purchase a copy)
We used to have a wonderful Manx cat
named Cloroz. He didn't have a tail, he has a bizarre sense of humor, and we
loved him.
And then, one day, he slipped out late
at night, about the time certain coyote liked to serenade our house, and we
never saw him again.
At least, we never saw him alive. I
have, on my desk, part of the skull of a cat, the upper pallet with teeth that I
believe was Clorox's.
I went through a period of hating
coyotes. I wanted to get rid of all the coyotes around us. It would have been a
monumental task-we have several coyote families that live within yodeling
distance (and their yodeling is loud and musical).
How to do this? I turned, as I often
do, to books. I read as much as I could about coyotes. And the more I read, the
more I found myself admiring these creatures I wanted to hate so much. It's hard
to hate and admire something or somebody at the same time.
In fact, coyotes are beautiful animals,
with rich family lives. They are very intelligent and adaptable. If mankind
succeeds in destroying most on earth there will be two species that will
survive: cockroaches and coyotes.
I soon began to see that ignorance of
coyotes is what fuels much of our hatred of them.
And so came the story of Ellie and her
cat, Bob, and the old dog that befriends them. And a coyote, of course, and a
trap.
My oldest daughter, Molly, especially
liked showing me coyote dens in the hills around our house. Some of them
actually were coyotes dens,. One she crawled into, so she could tell me what it
was like looking out from the inside.
Many thoughts came into my head as I
wrote:
We often fear things we cannot control.
There is a beauty in the dance and balance of life around us.
Humans are part of the dance, and not always the best dancers.
It is hard to dance with traps set all around us.
Sometimes traps catch things they were not intended
to catch.
SMALL
CHANGE
2000(DK Ink) (Purchase a copy)
Most Americans live
incredibly rich lives. Few of us appreciate how much we have. In
fact, many of us spend a lot of time feeling sorry for ourselves
because we don't have enough cars, computers, friends, clothes,
time, money, whatever.
Makes us sound like
spoiled brats, doesn't it? In many ways we are.
Every time my family
visits Mexico, I am struck by how little so many Mexicans have
and yet how dignified they are in life. I am also struck by how
much they value their children and their families.
Wealth, it seems, is
measured differently in Mexican families. Because so many
Mexicans don't have lots of money, they value things they do
have. That is not to say Mexicans wouldn't like more money, or
an easier way of life. Poverty in Mexico can be brutal-just as
wealth in America can be brutal, but in different ways.
We love going to the
fishing village of Zihuatanejo, on the west coast of Mexico. It
is in the state of Guererro, where the first Mexican revolution
began. Guererro is a rugged, sparsely settled state where the
rule of law is often the rifle you hold in your hands. There is
uneasiness in Guererro, and a disdain for the federales in
Mexico City. Drugs are grown and traded in the Sierra Madre Sur
Mountains. Breathtakingly strong mescal is produced in many of
the mountain villages. Yet, there remains a sweetness to the
people there-a sweetness the comes from devotion to family and
gratitude for the little things in life.
Watching American
families vacationing on the beaches alongside Mexican families
brought all of this into focus for me. That, and visiting a few
villages in the Sierra Madre Sur (where taxi drivers refuse to
go-saying the roads were too bad and the people too dangerous),
gave birth to Tom and his slow (if partial) growth into an
American boy who appreciates a little better what he has back
home and what Mexicans have in their lives.
I wish for a little
Ignacio in all of us. And for those small changes that helped
Tom learn a little better what is important and what is not.
HOLDING THE REINS, with Barbara Van Cleve
2003(Harper Collins) (Purchase a copy)
Real ranching country, real ranching girls!
Whether it's summer in Colorado and Utah, fall in Montana, winter in Wyoming, or spring in New Mexico--every season is busy when you live on a ranch.
Sheep need docking and cattle need branding, and there are plenty of daily chores besides. Ranch work is tough, and it's not for just snyone. But it's the work--and the life--that cowgirls love best.
With respect and a keen eye, Marc Talbert vividly captures the busy days in the lives of four cowgirls: KaDee Chew, Sarah Guenzler,
Katy Whitlock, and Leslie Barmann. These young women share a love for family, teamwork, the animals they care for, and the wide-open, western spaces they each call home.
They balance the routines of ranch work, schoolwork, and fun--all of which are important to these well-rounded young women. Striking black-and-white images by nationally acclaimed
photographer Barbara Van Cleve portray these cowgirls at work and play, holding the reins of life with confidence, energy, and joy.
