BETSY JAMES:  Worldbuilding and Wilderness

BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness

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Tag Archives: cow skull

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Alas, Poor Ferdinand!

March 21, 2021 Betsy James Leave a comment

Under a juniper instead of a cork tree. Picked clean by coyotes and bleached by the desert sun.

bleached bonescow skulldesert boneshiking in New Mexicohiking in the desertjuniper
Speculative Fiction:

It started out simple. 

I wanted to exploit my hiking journal for a fantasy setting: thirty years’ walking the New Mexico desert wilderness, about six hundred hikes. Wonderful stuff: the deer skull shrine, the bear fall, the sliding rock, the grave of locked stones; the red stone altar-bowl full of blood, which was even weirder in real life because whoever (I assume) belonged to the blood had used one finger to paint a spiral on a nearby rock. So many of those places are gone now, changed, no longer accessible. I wanted to share them, and I wanted to walk through them again myself.

So I thought: If there are two young people, a sciency white ecologist—Ben—and a mixed-heritage artist—Trace—both of them violently destabilized by rage and mourning, what is the world their combined psyches might build from those adventures? They are climbing a mountain that is a cloud, trying desperately to reach a beloved grandmother—who happens to be dead—and are pursued by a being with a knife. They know who it is. If it catches them, it will kill them.

That was the idea. But fiction: You think you know where it’s headed, and it goes feral…

Available from: Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon

“A breathtaking book.” —Connie Willis, SFWA Grand Master, winner of eleven Hugo and seven Nebula awards

“A heart-stopping quest through a dangerously beautiful landscape toward a mysterious destination pairs with vivid portrayals of irrational evil and irresistible human kindness.  A fine read.” —Anne Hillerman, author of the best-selling Leaphorn, Chee, Manuelito mysteries

“A good book bridges worlds. A great book drops you into its own. Practicing to Be Lightning is a great book. We can’t help but follow its call into the landscape of the malpaís, all sharp edges and sheer drops, as perilous and beautiful as our inner selves.” —Zach Hively, Reading the West Book Award-winning author of Desert Apocrypha

“In order to understand the truth, you need more than one way of knowing. What Betsy James does here is to meld two ways of thought—science and religion—into a better description of what the world really is.” –Dr. K. Kitts, retired NASA scientist

***

Nonfiction

For four years in the 1990s, writer, artist, and backcountry hiker Betsy James shared an old adobe in the village of Placitas at the northern foot of the Sandias. Breathing Stone: Living Small in a Southwest Village is a cache of warm, minute observations of nature and neighbors—the dogs and birds, cats and children, weather and weeds of rural New Mexico. It is both a small haven and a quiet suggestion that we observe our own lives, nudging us to catch the small things that are so easy to forget. It is illustrated with field sketches from James’ own journal.

“Breathing Stone: Living Small in a Southwest Village immerses you in the magic of the New Mexico desert. Mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and plants spring to life through the sharp, observant eye of Betsy James. This book is an unexpected gem sparkling in sunlight."—Judith Schiess Avila, author of Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII

“Transcendentalist poet and iconoclast Henry David Thoreau wrote in the 1850s that ‘The question is not what you look at, but what you see.’ … [James has] bested Thoreau, in my opinion, with a keener eye and a broader sensitivity to her environment. ... This book is a genuine addition to New Mexico literature.” —Don Bullis, historian, New Mexico Centennial Author 

Breathing Stone: Living Small in a Southwest Village is available from your favorite local bookstore or:

https://casaurracapress.com/bookstore/p/breathing-stone

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Roadsouls: Finalist, World Fantasy Award

Roadsouls...is a stellar performance, very touching in its intimate otherworldliness. Deeply concieved and fleshed out, exhibiting a primal simplicity of emotion and drama and language, yet not naïve nor unsophisticated. ... The twists and turns of her plot are organically unpredictable...there are some killer dramatic moments... But she never lectures, instead embodying all her observations and lessons in beautiful, vivid moments experienced by unique characters.  Roadsouls conjures up a landscape as fantastic as any Tolkienesque sage, yet more naturally linked to the everyday passions and fears of its readers.  ---Paul Di Filippo, Asimov's, Jan/Feb 2017

Novels by Betsy James:

On Writing, Art, and Walking in the Desert

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