Checking a town’s creative climate

When you’re thinking about moving somewhere new, you research things like housing prices, how far it is from a major airport, and weather. It occurred to me recently that it’s also important to check the place’s creative climate. What are the people there making, thinking, and writing?

On a recent visit to Silver City, New Mexico, I saw many galleries in the old town and enough high-quality street art to make a big city jealous. But it can be harder to get a read on what the local writers are doing, unless, like I did, you stumble into a little help.

During my visit, a small hardback in a bookstore window caught my eye. The black-and-gold wings of a Monarch butterfly took up half the cover. I liked the title, An Obsession with Butterflies, and loved the subtitle, Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect, because it included me in that collective romance.

The bookseller wouldn’t sell it to me.

Was that a thing in this town, tempting people with what they couldn’t have? My mouth watered. It was like I’d chosen the one éclair in the bakeshop window, only to be told it wasn’t for sale.

Turned out, the butterfly book was by a local author, Sharman Apt Russell, and it was the bookseller’s only copy. The window display, books by local writers, was in preparation for the following week’s Southwest Word Fiesta.

I tracked down the almost 20-year-old book when I got home, and it was worth the wait. It’s my favorite kind of non-fiction: natural history filtered through one person’s wonder and delight. I’ll read a paragraph and then have to stare into space for a while, savoring the sensory detail and the philosophical implications. Here’s one such passage, about a male Tiger Swallowtail patrolling for a mate.

When he finds her he will flutter and she will flutter, and sweet pheromones will scent the air. Even a human passing at the right moment might pause and sniff, and sniff again. Honeysuckle? Lavender? Jasmine? The pheromones of butterflies have long co-evolved with the sexy scent of flowers promising food and drink (the flowers desiring sex, too) and we have long since taken these scents for ourselves, for our perfumes and our colognes, for our own longing.

Russell writes fiction, too, and another pleasure I’ve had–set in motion by that glimpse into a small town bookstore window–is seeing a through line in the author’s work, at least her 2003 butterfly book and her 2016 speculative novel, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which won a New Mexico/Arizona Book Award.

I tore through that novel like there was a dire wolf on my heels. It’s the 23^rd century, and the few humans who’ve survived have reverted back to a Paleolithic lifestyle, hunting once-extinct species like dire wolves and wooly mammoths that scientists managed to clone. Though their lifestyle is primitive in many ways, they still have computers, fueled by the sun, and email, and remote writing classes (the author teaches at Western New Mexico University in Silver City).

The main character, a paleo huntress and a writing teacher, gets student papers emailed from the last three human outposts: a bunker in Russia, a Quaker community in Costa Rica, and the labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

As a writing teacher I love what Russell has done with that vocation in the unlikely setting of a semi-nomadic Paleolithic future. The student assignments reproduced in the book show us young people grappling with the strange world they’ve inherited and wondering what their place in it might be. The teacher’s responses to student work are wise and empathetic, which fits with the novel’s emphasis on a kind of radical empathy that connects people, species, and even the living with the dead. Most post-apocalyptic novels feel more dire than any dire wolf; this one feels actually hopeful.

Both Russell’s butterfly book and her novel share settings (Costa Rica and the American Southwest) and themes, namely how humans fit into the natural order and how everyone and everything is connected, whether we acknowledge it or not.

We all have our obsessions, squeaking (or roaring) out in whatever we choose to write or do. I like to think that no research or writing is ever really wasted. You can double-dip, express an idea in many ways in various genres. You might not get it right the first time. An idea or scene may be a small part of an essay, for instance, maybe even one that never sees the light of day. A reworking of the same material years later, in another context, may be where it truly comes alive.

Back to the books by local authors in that bookstore window: they became my Silver City reading list. Next up is Damnificados, by JJ Amarworo Wilson, born in Germany to a Nigerian mother and English father, and now a teacher at Western New Mexico University in Silver City. His novel is about none of these places: it’s loosely based on a true story: how squatters took over a half-finished skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela. Sounds right up my international alley.

You can walk the streets of a place to get to know it. You can also wander the back alleys of the worlds the people living there have created, whether that takes you to the 23^rd century, a Caracas high-rise or deep into the love life of a Tiger Swallowtail.

I know that there are many artists doing amazing things here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But the sheer scope of that category paralyzes me, not to mention the fact that much of the creative energy in this area seems to be put towards apps, business plans, and filling out Chapter 11 paperwork.

The creative output of a small town is so much more manageable.

It’s funny that as I scout for a new home, a place where I can feel rooted and inspired, I’m also traveling through time, across species, and around the world, reading the work of people who one day might be my neighbors.