Author Suenammi Richards on choosing Taos as a location for her new book

I haven't visited Taos in years, but after reading this essay from today's guest, Suenammi Richards, I think I may need to book a trip there soon...

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Picking Locations with Heart

By Suenammi Richards

There was a swirl of thought placed into the development of my characters for my latest book. Even more so into the location where this great and magical love should grow wings and take flight. During the research side of writing my latest book, So a Psychic and a Rocket Scientist Walk into a Bar, I decided to set the locale as Taos, New Mexico. Taos is an interesting artistic hub bub of modern and indigenous art. Taos went very hippie in the '70s and thankfully, never quite recovered from it. This legacy of art, peace and free love leads us to one of Taos’ most prolific and well-known visual artists. This artist is mentioned briefly in my book. He is Ted Egri. My female protagonist has a piece of his. He represents a blending of indigenous art and regional legacy. 

Taos has a very prolific culture of art. This art is a mix of indigenous stylings and contemporary takes on historical folklore and canon. The art ranges from pottery from very early indigenous tribes to modern digital media. While my characters did not delve into the visual arts scene, it would be remiss to not point out that visual art is Taos’ most valued cultural contribution.

Even though I write, my first artistic love is visual art. Years ago I studied some of the contributions from this area. I was impressed and moved by the cultural history and authenticity of Taos’ artistic scene. So when I wanted to really immerse characters in a place where magic could be believed, I dedicated this location to the cause.

Author Suenammi Richards

I also desired to point out the importance of indigenous voices. Art as it exists and lives is much like writing in the idea that it is a living tangible expression of the most poignant aspects of the human soul. As artists it is important to recognize our roots and how they have influenced where we are as a species. What our artistic futures can hold. In the shards of a dish that is thousands of years old we can see the parts that carried us and made us. There is the need for community, sustenance and care. A bowl is a symbol of how we should preserve and treat our art. We carry the best of it. We carry as much as we can. Not only for ourselves but to share with others.

So a Psychic and a Rocket Scientist Walk into a Bar

Clair wasn’t sure what she should expect when she literally ran into Sergei and promptly passed out. There had always been whispers about Clair and her family. No one knew quite what they were but it was a history and a birthright Clair had deftly avoided for almost all of her life. This new occurrence puts Clair on the cusp of what was always fated to be her calling. With someone’s life at stake she knew she finally had to literally choose between life and death. 

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You can learn more about Suenammi Richards on her blog and by following her on Twitter.

You can purchase So a Psychic and a Rocket Scientist Walk into a Bar on Amazon.

J.L. Newton on the importance of environment in her novel OINK

We do love a touch of satire on Jester Harley's Manuscript Page, so it's a pleasure to have J.L. Newton with us today. The target of her humorous novel, Oink: A Food for Thought Mystery, is the world of universities. She wrote a very interesting piece for us about how the environment in your novel's setting can be far more than a backdrop.

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Making Environment a Character in Your Fiction

by Judith Newton

In writing Oink, a humorous send up of the university for its increasing devotion to self-interest, competition, and profit, I also wanted to emphasize the importance of values that are less about profit and more about the common good. I planned to do this, in part, through my characterization of Emily Addams’s campus community. It is comprised of faculty in women’s and ethnic studies who have come together to support each other and to resist having their programs defunded by an increasingly corporate-minded administration.

I wanted to do more, however, to engage the reader in positive feelings about community, and so I decided to suggest the interconnectedness of human and natural life in the very texture of the novel. To feel oneself in relation to the world of nature and to value the smallest forms of life are  precursors to valuing human community as well.

I decided that elements which appear as background—animals, plants, the weather, the seasons—could subtly enforce a feeling of interrelation. There are many animals in the novel, for example, both domesticated and wild, which just appear as the characters are carrying on their lives. As Emily drives to meet with the biologist Tess Ryan, who she hopes will have important information, “a single red-tailed hawk flapped twice, launching itself into air. The sight of a hawk’s glide always brought me to life, making me feel as if I too were capable of soaring.” Many of the characters also look like animals. The Chair of the English Department has a hound dog face which “seemed to sag into his tweed jacket.” The Vice Provost, with her long nose, resembles a hummingbird, and the greedy Peter Elliott, victim of the poisoning, is compared to a pig by another character—although the actual pigs in the novel are far more charming than he.

I named streets after animals or native California plants—Wild Deer Lane, Coyote Court, and Badger Crossing, Poppy Lane, Ceanothus Drive—and  I made the weather heighten people’s moods. Emily feels oppressed by the ninety-six degree heat as she realizes that, with the poisoning of Peter, something sinister has entered into the atmosphere at Arbor State. Later, she gets lost in a tule fog at night, making her feel even more depressed about her inability to discover the culprit.

J.L. Newton (photo: Eliot Khuner)

In all of this, I wanted to be accurate. I studied the birds and animals of northern California, and I worked with a weather calendar from October 1999, when the novel is set, to capture how the weather really operated that month in that year. Knowing what hummingbirds really do inhabit northern California made me feel the kind of attention to and connection with nature that I wanted to instill in my reader.

I also set the novel at a time of year that would convey a message. Oink begins on October 11, 1999, in the midst of harvest and Indian Summer, and ends on November 1, El Dia de Los Muertos, which marks the coming of winter, the dying of leaves, and the diminishment of the sun, reminding characters of their own mortality. El Dia also celebrates those who have died, asserts the continuation of life, and demonstrates the power of communities to fortify their members against the forces of darkness and despair.  In the context of conditions such as these— conditions in which we all live—Oink poses an implicit question: do we spend our lives in an individualist pursuit of profit, or do we work toward more communal ways of being?

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Learn more about J.L. Newton on her website.

You can purchase Oink: A Food for Thought Mystery on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers.