Imagination on Board

I have always loved photos of churches, Santuario at Chimayo, New Mexico, photography as much as writing. I still do my own black-and white processing, though I use a digital camera at work upon occasion. In Snap Me a Future, Shelby McCoy is an art photographer. Her photography both gets her in trouble and saves her when she goes shooting in New Mexico’s Badlands. In Snap Me a Future, they’re called The Hono’ji, a Navajo word for bad space. They are called something different in real life. Since Shelby is dealing with an antiquities thief, I didn’t want anyone to find out where ancient Indian sites actually are in the Four Corners. But, the image of the canyon below is a real place in Northwest New Mexico, and more or less figures into the story.

The picture of the church is the Santuario at Chimayo, a place of pilgrimage and healing for centuries. This is not in Shelby’s neck of the woods. It’s between Taos and Santa Fe. But Shelby would certainly enjoy going there to shoot photos

A Mouth Full of Shell takes place in the eastern United States, where I arrived at age 16 when my father was transferred by his company from the Midwest. The book’s heroine, Betsy Craig, lives with Mountain Birches in her little university town of Mountain View. She is not a photographer, but I believe photos influence my descriptions of her surroundings and life.

She also enjoys travel, and once went to Germany. Maybe she stopped in this Village along the Rhine, called a Rheindoerfchen in German. Maybe she snapped a picture similar to the one I took. This is what you’ll see in many villages as you walk into town from the boat landing.

I also have a short story in an anthology from DLSIJ Press. The anthology’s called Insomniac Tales by Chaucer’s Women, and it’s based on his famous Canterbury Tales In Insomniac Tales, a group of women find themselves at a wellness spa on a stormy night. As a distraction from the lightening, they tell stories–all Chaucer’s from a woman’s point of view. Different DLSIJ Press authors provided the updates. I chose The Cook’s Tale to work on. It’s just a fragment of a story, and scholars don’t know if Chaucer never finished it, or if a draft got separated from the final copy; or if he ment the story as a cautionary tale, or a cautionary autobiographical tale. That speculation caught my attention, and with Imagination on Board, I did an update. hung out in London in the 1300s, so in honor of that, here’s a photo of The British Museum I took way back when you could go to London and watch Concorde cartwheel across the misty sky. She reminded me of a sting ray. Same shape, same graceful turns. The British Museum has fascinating stuff, like the original Magna Carta, music scores by Beethoven and other famous composers, and Chaucer folios. When I was there in the mid 80s, there was also an exhibit on credit cards and how important plastic money would become by the end of the century. The exhibition predicted that ATM cards would be the big thing. They are–sort of–in Europe, and a tiny bit in China, but its an American thing, I think, and is heaviest in tourist areas in the rest of the world.

Upcoming Photo Shows

June 2008 Shifting Color Changing Light Artifacts Gallery Farmington New Mexico.

April 2008 Best Two Dimensional Piece Faces of Women Show Las Vegas Arts Council Las Vegas NM

March 10-April 10 Thailand Travels One Woman Show of trip to Thailand San Juan College Farmington New Mexico