The good place

May 19—Don Usner has spent his life chronicling the physical geography and cultural landscape of his native New Mexico, but at this point, he admits that even he's running out of words to capture the magnificence of the world around him.

Usner, the author of tomes on Valles Caldera and Chimayó, says he considers himself a storyteller who works equally well in writing and photography.

He's lived and wandered in these hills for most of his life, but he finds it hard to conjure words to describe them.

"I have kind of a split personality that way," he says of the vistas that comprise his working canvas. "I love to write, and I love to take pictures. But I think the photos have become a lazy way of writing in a sense. I don't have to dig for vocabulary. But on the other hand, trying to invest the photographs with the feelings and ideas I have is a challenge as well. I've stopped trying to get greatly descriptive on landscape, and I do let the picture tell the story."

Usner, who holds a master's degree in geography, will join authors Stanley Crawford and Lucy Lippard to discuss writing about place on Saturday, May 20, at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. Both Lippard and Crawford had distinguished writing careers before they moved to New Mexico and then spent decades here and found successful new avenues for their work.

Usner, meanwhile, was born in Embudo and can trace his ancestors on his mother's side in this area all the way back to 1600. He lived in California for about a decade before coming back to his home state.

Still, he says, he can access many perspectives.

"I'm kind of an insider-outsider," Usner says. "I'm from here many generations, but my father's side is not. I grew up going to school in Los Alamos, which is kind of the anti-Chimayó. It's not rooted in place. It has no real history. It's not connected to the land beyond 1944. They call Los Alamos, 'The Hill.' I have access to that perspective of looking down from the hill to the valley, but also the perspective of looking up from the valley to the hill."

----Stanley Crawford arrived in Dixon in 1969 with two published novels and a third partially written. He and his wife bought a property in 1970 while he completed work on his third novel, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), which he describes as the best thing he's ever written.

But at some point along the way, he says, he shifted from novelist to farmer.

"There was nothing here but apple trees," says Crawford, who now runs a thriving garlic farm at the same location. "We started gardening, and the gardening got bigger and bigger, and my income got smaller and smaller. By 1979 or so, we were basically full-time farming."

At that point, Crawford found himself thrust into a life and writing path he had never envisioned. How did it happen? Now, decades later, he says that building his house and garden were the most interesting things he'd ever done, and he naturally gravitated toward writing about them.

Slowly, Crawford learned more about his local acequia that fed water to his farm, and then he learned more about the workers who maintain them. He first became a ditch commissioner and then later a mayordomo. That last position — ditch boss — gave Crawford pause because he would be working with rough-hewn men who had spent a lifetime there.

"They were tough guys," Crawford says. "I thought, 'Gosh, I'm going to become their boss as mayordomo. This could be not good.' It turned out I'd been around so long they accepted me. I had become part of the landscape."

details

The Village: Writing Northern New Mexico with Stanley Crawford, Lucy Lippard and Don J. Usner

Saturday, May 20, 3:30 p.m.

Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy St.

Visit sfinternationallitfest.org for ticket information.

Read more about Don Usner at donusner.com. He will lead a "Plaza del Cerro, Chimayó" tour for the Historic Santa Fe Foundation Friday, May 26, at 10:30 a.m. ($125 per person; more information at historicsantafe.org/chimayotour).

Read more about Stanley Crawford at stanleycrawford.net.

Crawford says that as he learned more, he pondered how to write about it. At first, he was hesitant because he wasn't sure it was his story to tell. He started writing by pencil in the back of his notebook and eventually recognized that he had gathered enough material for a manuscript.

The resulting book, Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 1988), provided an insider's perspective of sustainable agriculture in the region. But in order to transition to nonfiction, Crawford says he had to invent a new writing style for himself.

"You have to become an actor," he says. "'I' is not a character, so you have to give body to your 'I,' to your first person.

"That makes you look around and fill out that otherwise flat character. You kind of have to invent yourself as a participant and as an observer."

Crawford eventually went back to fiction, and he says writing about landscape has general application even if you're not writing about a specific place. For instance, in his novel The Canyon: A Novel (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), he says he was describing a gorge he knows in New Mexico but ultimately decided to set the book in Colorado.

"I moved it to Colorado and depopulated it because it's a story of a young man coming of age and vacationing at his family lodge in the middle of nowhere," he says. "I used the description of the Rio Grande Gorge here that I know. But I have a friend who has a summer house up in Westcliffe, [Colorado], and he said, 'This is exactly what it's like.' But I've never been to Westcliffe."

----Lucy Lippard wanted to be a novelist.

But her career took a few twists and turns, and as she sits here in New Mexico, she's published more than 20 books on art.

Lippard has been awarded honorary doctorates and even a distinguished lifetime achievement award for writing on art by the College Art Association.

Today, if you ask her about her fiction, she'll take a potshot at her own ability.

"I published a novel and a lot of experimental, unreadable things," she says. "I've freelanced all my life, and graduate students come up and say, 'How can I make a living as a cultural critic?' I say, 'Oh, you keep your standard of living very low, and then you can do what you want.'"

As an only child, Lippard says her parents were attentive to her work as a young professional and as her readers, they helped shape her writing style. She went from being a formalist, in her words, to somebody who wrote more directly.

"My father came from the working class but was dean of the medical school. He liked art and always said that if he knew art history existed, he'd rather have done that than be a doctor," she says.

"Daddy said, 'I just don't understand a lot of this,' and I thought, 'Who am I writing for if my father's smart and likes art and can't read it?' So I managed to get my style to a more readable level. I always say that theory is ideas with hardening of the arteries. Neither Stan nor Don are theorists."

Lippard came to New Mexico in 1972 for the first time as a tourist and a working professional, but it wasn't until later when she settled in permanently. She moved to Galisteo, a community of 250 people just outside Santa Fe, about 30 years ago. Once she got there, she became fascinated with local culture and history.

In 2010, Lippard published her first nonfiction book about the region, Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin 1250-1782 (Museum of New Mexico Press). A decade later, she followed up with Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo since 1814 (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2020), a project that required her to interview many of the elders in town.

Lippard says she met some resistance from the community in telling her story, but she wanted to document the trajectory of Galisteo's development while she could. The town has been gentrified in her 30 years, she says, and she didn't want the past to disappear on her watch. She is proud of the work and considers it definitive but is aware of her status as an outsider.

"I'm the newbie," she says. "Stan has been here since the '70s, and Don has been here for generations. I've been here 30 years, and I'm very aware of when people come into the village, and they think they know a lot. They get on the planning committee or something and don't really know [anything] about New Mexico. If you're smart, you shut up for a while."

----Like Lippard, Usner spent a long time chronicling a small New Mexico community. He's written three books about his hometown, Chimayó, two in close collaboration with his mother, Stella Chávez Usner. His mother died in June of 2022, but he may still have one additional collaboration in the works: The documentarian says he is deciphering a collection of family documents and photographs that date back to 1706.

It's a staggering task, he says, in that many of the letters are written in an archaic dialect of Spanish that is not really spoken anymore. Some of the people in the photographs are identified, he says, but others require detective work.

In the grand sweep of New Mexico, he says he can make some generalizations. For instance, the area experienced pulses of change in the late 19th century. The railroad came and connected New Mexico to other urban centers, which quickly resulted in corporations raiding natural resources. Livestock came in on the trains, and people who previously owned land were pushed out.

But for Usner, the detective work skews toward the personal.

Pull Quote

"I started out from this deeply romanticized view of collecting oral histories from the old people because that's what I revered and grew up with," he says. "The Spanish-speaking elders who were sources of inspiration and wisdom. And then I moved through chronicling the landscape and expanding beyond my neighborhood where I grew up to the whole valley. Eventually, I started exploring some of the difficulties and problems that are going on there now."

Usner recently chronicled stories of opioid addiction as part of his photojournalism work with Searchlight New Mexico, a digital independent investigative journalism publication, and has written that Chimayó is a community that has struggled with those issues. That distressing fact stands in stark contrast to the town's designation as a pilgrimage site and sacred place for Easter visitors.

With that full perspective, Usner appreciates Chimayó even more now but admits that all humans — himself included — are guilty of remembering a place as a particular snapshot in time. For him, that means holding Chimayó as the place of his youth.

He recalls wandering through town and seeing the place his great-great grandfather lived; people in the town spoke of his ancestor in the present tense long after he had passed. Living in Chimayó was a different experience than living in Los Alamos, and he still appreciates it, warts and all.

"We live in a time of great disorder socially," he says. "I think that's one of the reasons I love Chimayó and the valley so much. There was still a strong sense of connectedness between people and the land and each other. There was a friendly sense of safety and security, knowing that you were walking by houses that were in your family forever.

"People there instantly know you and who you're related to; that felt really sane to me, whereas living in Los Alamos where people were famously trying to build the biggest bombs on earth felt kind of crazy."