Jimmy Santiago Baca New Book Prompts Talk of His Life and Purpose

By Verona Winn

Noted New Mexico poet Jimmy Santiago Baca is giving his children a gift of words. For each of his four children he is writing a book of poetry. The first Breaking Bread with the Darkness—The Esai Poems was recently celebrated at Collected Works Bookstore. His daughter Lucia will receive the next book in the series.
    Baca chose the Collected Works for the early April reading because he signed the original contact for the books sixteen months ago at the store. He said he was closing a circle, going back to where he started.
    Between reading the poems he wrote for his son, Baca talks about moments and events from his turbulent past.  A runaway from home at age 13, he was arrested for a crime and imprisoned for five years. Illiterate, he taught himself to read and write during his imprisonment. He began to write poetry, working in the dark when the prison guards turned the lights off. When he was released, he recalled, walking into the woods to sit and write in the dark again.
    His first collection of poems was soon published.
    At Collected Works, he recalled a time he came across some old newspapers accounts of his arrest. When he looked at the pictures of his younger self, he couldn’t believe he was once that man. The younger version of himself was so filled with anger. The older, wiser self, he said, has found love in his family and children. He has let the past go and found joy in his children and family, Baca said.
   Baca’s event at Collected Works was not solely to promote his new book of poetry but also to raise funds for a film company comprising his own son, Gabriel Baca and New York filmmaker Daniel Califf-Glick.  They hope to produce Baca’s book A Place to Stand as a documentary.
    Anyone wishing to contribute to this fund can write or email Cedar Tree, Inc. P.O. Box 9311, Albuquerque, NM 87119 or aplacetostand.documentary@gmail.com for information

Pioneers of Sixties Counterculture to Read in Taos March 22 and March 30

The SAGE Institute for Environment, Creativity & Consciousness has joined with two Taos arts institutions to cosponsor readings by two important leaders of the Sixties counterculture. Both events are free and open to the public.

On Tuesday, March 22, from 4 to 6 pm, pioneering psychologist Ralph Metzner will give a lecture and reading at Moby Dickens Bookshop from his recent memoir collaboration with Ram Dass: BIRTH OF A PSYCHEDELIC CULTURE: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT LEARY, THE HARVARD EXPERIMENTS, MILLBROOK AND THE SIXTIES.

Published by the independent Santa Fe-based Synergetic Press, which has been publishing books about ethnobotany, biospheric science and cultures for several decades, BIRTH OF A PSYCHEDELIC CULTURE is an inside look at the seminal 1960s work of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass’s birth name) and Ralph Metzner, the cultural resistance to their experiments and the way in which psychoactive drug use became a part of contemporary society. Metzner has been involved in consciousness studies--including psychedelics, shamanism, yoga and meditation--for more than 50 years. He is the author of seminal books on the cartography of consciousness (Maps of Consciousness), ceremonial uses of ayahuasca and mushrooms (Sacred Vine of Spirits and Sacred Mushroom of Visions) and ecological consciousness (Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth), among many others. He was the editor of The Psychedelic Review for 10 years.

Metzner will be available to sign books from 4 to 6 pm and will read from BIRTH OF A PSYCHEDELIC CULTURE at 5 pm. Moby Dickens Bookshop is located at 124A Bent Street, #6 Dunn House, downtown Taos. For more information call (575) 758-3050 or email mobyop@newmex.com.

On Wednesday, March 30, at 7:00 pm, Lenny Foster's Living Light Gallery, SAGE Institute and Neem Karoli Baba Ashram present an evening with the spiritual teacher Ram Dass and his new book, BE LOVE NOW (HarperOne, November 2010). Ram Dass’ co-author, Rameshwar Das, will be on hand to discuss BE LOVE NOW and show a short video from the new electronic version of BE HERE NOW. Due to fragile health, Ram Dass no longer travels, but he will make a rare Internet appearance by joining the audience for questions and answers via a special live webcast from his home in Maui.

Ram Dass is the much beloved author of the 1971 spiritual classic, BE HERE NOW, bridging Sixties psychedelic sensibilities to the eastern traditions of yoga and meditation that now permeate our culture. The original box that became BE HERE NOW was created at the Lama Foundation north of Taos, and a small temple commemorating Ram Dass’ guru, Neem Karoli Baba, resides west of the Taos Plaza. Book sales will benefit the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram, which feeds many local people and seeks to embody the ideals of its namesake to love and serve everyone. Donations to the gallery to defray expenses are welcome.

Lenny Foster’s Living Light Gallery is located at 107 Kit Carson Road, downtown Taos. For information contact Mirabai Starr at (575) 779-2406 or mirabaistarr@earthlink.net, or John Kane at (575) 776-1464/770-2109 or hanumandas1@gmail.com.

D'Agata Meets with Santa Fe University Students

by Verona Winn 

John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain, attended a question and answer session on February 16 with students at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.  The session was sponsored by the Creative Writing Revisions Class taught by Matt Donovan, the Faculty Chair of the Creative Writing Department, and Emily Rapp, author of A Poster Child.
    D’Agata's use of composite characters in his non-fiction work has been criticized and lead to a question from one of the students as to how far one can go before a book become fiction.
One of SFUAD’s students asked D’Agata how far can an author go before it does make a book fiction?
    D’Agata explained that in the case of About a Mountain he chose to create composites after making numerous trips to Yucca Mountain with numerous  guides.  Rather than listing each trip with each tour guide, he created a composite of all the tours by taking specific events from each tour and combining them into one tour.
    He also assembled a composite of the tour guides, by combining the personalities of all of them into just one guide. When one does something like this the writer needs to be up front with the readers and the publishers, D’Agasta said.
    Writers need to make their own decision on how far to go.  He admitted to reading those reviews that questioned the trustworthiness of his work because of his use of composites. But, D’Agata said, the fact remains that the information is all factual and that he only streamlined the tours to keep the book readable.
    “The only relationship I want with you as reader,” D’Agata said. “You’re not my conscious, my priest, or my editor.”
    Another student asked if there were no ethical and moral issues when D’Agata worked at suicide hotline and used what he learned in his book.
    The author said he came from a family that volunteered a lot and his mother, who was involved with the hotline, suggested he join as well. He admitted he wasn’t very good as a counselor because he couldn’t follow the rules.  He received a call one night from a young man whom he thought was the same young man who later committed suicide. This, D’Agata said, was telling. Here was this mountain that the government was expending enormous amount of money and resources on, yet all the while ignoring these young people who are dying.
    After twenty-five years of research, still no one knows if it’s safe to store radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, he said. What is clear after a suicide is that family and friends are left without knowing why? These contrasts represent our lack of capacity to understand and that frustration is the point of the story, D’Agata said.
    Concluding his session with the students, D’Agata closed with some words of wisdom: “I don’t want all the information to come up all at once.  I like the idea of me as a reader meeting the writer half way.  A reading experience for me is where you the reader is pulled into a relationship with the writer.”
   D’Agata is also the author of Halls of Fame and editor of The Next American Essay, a collection of experimental nonfiction and The Lost Origins of the Essay.  He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, teaching nonfiction writing.

Garcia Street Books Sold

Edward and Eva Borins have sold Garcia Street Books to Francoise Paheau and Zaire Benhadje.

"After close to forty years  as partners in business and life, we have decided it was time to step down to devote more attention to our family in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa." the Borins said in a letter to customers and friends. "We have three children, four grandchildren, with the fifth and sixth, identical twins, expected this month in Vancouver; and Eva has a ninety-one year old mother in Ottawa. We are also looking forward to more time to pursue our other passions: adventure travel, art and literary consulting, physical fitness and wellness, gardening, and community work.We plan to continue living in Santa Fe."

Self-Publishing Workshop Coming on Saturday

"Be Your Own Publisher" is the title of a daylong workshop Saturday, March 5, at the Sage Inn, 725 Cerrillos Road. It will be lead by Tom Johnson and will cover print-on-demand tools, computer programs, and techniques to help writers publish their own works. The cost of the workshop is $140.

Johnson is founder and co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism, here in Santa Fe. According to his website,  his "35-year career in journalism has taken him from the classroom to the newsroom and back. He began using computers to tease meaning out of data while a Ph.D. candidate in the early '70s and studying the impact of technology on urban spaces. By the early '80s he was writing about dedicated word processing systems (think $13,000 in 1978 dollars) and covering the early stages of personal computing in Silicon Valley for Time and Popular Science.   He worked for Time Magazine in El Salvador in the mid-'80s, was the start-up editor of MacWeek, and a deputy editor of the  St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

To register for the workshop, visit this website.

Santa Fe Author Turns to Fiction to Warn of the Consequences of Climate Change

Melting Down, a novel by Santa Fe environmental consultant Harvey Stone, is coming to stores in April. An environmental thriller about an international terrorist plot conceived by high-ranking Russian nationalists to exploit the global consequences of climate change for world domination, the book offers a tale of political intrigue, suspense, and action that spans the globe, all the while educating the reader to effect of climate change.

As publication date nears, we will have more information but already the book is catching the eye of early readers. Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, suggests Stone may have the right approach.  “Sheer weight of scientific data seems not to have gotten across the point about global warming,” McKibben said, “maybe a good old red-blooded American thriller can help do the trick!”

You can learn more about Stone and the book by visiting this website.

Poet of Conscience Veronica Golos to Read at SOMOS Feb. 18, Collected Works Mar. 6

Taos poet Veronica Golos will read from her new book, Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, February 2011), for the SOMOS Winter Writers Series on Friday, February 18 (along with award-winning Santa Fe poet Dana Levin), at 7 pm at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in downtown Taos. On Sunday, March 6, Golos and Levin will team up again at Collected Works in Santa Fe at 2 pm. Golos's book tour will also include readings at the renowned Cornelia Street Café and the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, as well as a class she’ll be teaching for actors at Juilliard; readings in Northampton and Boston, Massachusetts; and appearances on the West Coast.

Vocabulary of Silence is a searing poetic and personal examination of the ongoing U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the occupation of Gaza. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, Golos writes in the international tradition of poetry of conscience. Like such poets she admires as Mahmoud Darwish and Carolyn Forché, Brian Turner and Yusef Komunyakaa, she struggles to find words to carry the weight of her felt accountability. As the Middle Eastern writer and Pacifica Radio producer Dr. Barbara Nimri Aziz explains, “Golos takes the fragments, the bits and pieces that reach us from the battlefield, and weaves them, with a morality and a sorrow, to make us understand both our helplessness and our responsibility.”

At the book’s center is the horror of Abu Ghraib. “Those photographs, like the famous Nick Út photograph of the Vietnamese girl running down the road, are in me like a deep splinter,” says Golos, who is a self-taught poet from a working-class background, as well as a lifelong political activist who has also won awards for her work as a curator and teacher for Poets & Writers and 92nd Street Y/Makor in New York City. “My poems are about not forgetting, even as a witness from afar. I want to keep rubbing this stone against our skin so we can keep seeing what is being done in our name—and what that means.”

A veteran of the spoken word movement, Veronica has performed at New York’s Lincoln Center and the Nuyorican Poets Café, Claremont Theological Center in California, and venues throughout the Southwest. Red Hen Press is also reissuing her earlier book, A Bell Buried Deep, which Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch nominated for a 2004 Pushcart and which won the 16th annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.