After a very long and sometimes unhappy struggle, I have recently had all of my rights to my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, returned to me. I am just now in the process of preparing the manuscript for publication as a Kindle eBook which I intend to offer at a reasonable (read cheap) price on Amazon. Herewith, a bit about the inspiration and writing of that novel.
We were living in Taos at the time. Elaine was working as the chief photographer at The Taos News—I was struggling to focus on a writing project and feeling relatively useless.
Listening to the radio one morning, I learned that Larry McMurtry and Leslie Marmon Silko were going to give talks at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, in a couple of days. I knew and admired both Larry and Leslie, hadn’t seen either since my days at OU, and thought that being in touch with them and hearing their talks might give me a boost. Durango was just a couple of hundred miles from Taos, and it was Fall and the drive alone promised to be beautiful.
We drove up to Durango arriving about noon and got a motel. The talks were scheduled for that evening and so we went out to explore the town. I am, by nature, unable to pass a bookshop without going in. At least I am unable to pass a small, independent bookshop—the kind of place that, sadly, has grown rare.
I don’t recall much about the little, used bookshop itself, but I came upon a book by a writer/photographer friend of ours in Taos—Nancy Wood—that I didn’t know about and had never before seen. Out of print, the book, When Buffalo Free the Mountains, is a non-fiction account of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Indians in southern Colorado, and is illustrated with Nancy’s photographs throughout. The book was a fine first edition hardcover with a dust jacket and cost, as I recall, something less than twenty dollars. Later, we returned to the motel to prepare for the talks on campus and I laid the book on the bedside table.
We were living in Taos at the time. Elaine was working as the chief photographer at The Taos News—I was struggling to focus on a writing project and feeling relatively useless.
Listening to the radio one morning, I learned that Larry McMurtry and Leslie Marmon Silko were going to give talks at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, in a couple of days. I knew and admired both Larry and Leslie, hadn’t seen either since my days at OU, and thought that being in touch with them and hearing their talks might give me a boost. Durango was just a couple of hundred miles from Taos, and it was Fall and the drive alone promised to be beautiful.
We drove up to Durango arriving about noon and got a motel. The talks were scheduled for that evening and so we went out to explore the town. I am, by nature, unable to pass a bookshop without going in. At least I am unable to pass a small, independent bookshop—the kind of place that, sadly, has grown rare.
I don’t recall much about the little, used bookshop itself, but I came upon a book by a writer/photographer friend of ours in Taos—Nancy Wood—that I didn’t know about and had never before seen. Out of print, the book, When Buffalo Free the Mountains, is a non-fiction account of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Indians in southern Colorado, and is illustrated with Nancy’s photographs throughout. The book was a fine first edition hardcover with a dust jacket and cost, as I recall, something less than twenty dollars. Later, we returned to the motel to prepare for the talks on campus and I laid the book on the bedside table.
McMurtry and Silko, Durango, Colorado
The talks that evening were well attended and well received. We visited with Larry and Leslie both before and after their presentations and agreed to meet the next morning for breakfast at their hotel. I remember we had a fine visit in the course of which I mentioned that Scott Momaday was just then doing a residency in Taos at the Wurlitzer Foundation and that he had told me he was working at finishing up a Billy the Kid novel. (The Ancient Child, 1989) McMurtry was very interested in this, saying he was doing a Billy the Kid novel, as well. Anything for Billy appeared in 1988.
Anyway, after the talks that evening, we went to our motel. I was thumbing through Nancy Wood’s book, looking at the images, two of which struck me in particular and became the inspiration for my first novel—my first attempt at fiction of any kind.
The first photograph showed a young Indian woman sitting in a lawn chair holding an infant on her lap. The woman is dressed in a beaded dress and her hair is done in braids. She is, it appears, at some sort of powwow or other doin’s. The caption on the photo states that the woman is Regina Box and her infant son and that the picture was taken five months before her death.
A few pages later there is a photo of a young Indian man singing and beating on a drum. He wears jeans and a down vest and his hair is in braids. The caption says he is Jim Box and that he is shown at a Bear Dance shortly before he killed his wife.
To this day I have never read When Buffalo Freed the Mountains. But The Death of Bernadette Lefthand began with those two photographs.
Some years later—I believe it was when Bad Medicine came out and I was signing in Taos—I saw Nancy and told her about how her photographs had been the touchstones for my earlier novel. She said she should get some money, then. I think she was kidding. Maybe not. In any case, I did not offer her any money. I’m sad to say that Nancy died in March of this year.
The talks that evening were well attended and well received. We visited with Larry and Leslie both before and after their presentations and agreed to meet the next morning for breakfast at their hotel. I remember we had a fine visit in the course of which I mentioned that Scott Momaday was just then doing a residency in Taos at the Wurlitzer Foundation and that he had told me he was working at finishing up a Billy the Kid novel. (The Ancient Child, 1989) McMurtry was very interested in this, saying he was doing a Billy the Kid novel, as well. Anything for Billy appeared in 1988.
Anyway, after the talks that evening, we went to our motel. I was thumbing through Nancy Wood’s book, looking at the images, two of which struck me in particular and became the inspiration for my first novel—my first attempt at fiction of any kind.
The first photograph showed a young Indian woman sitting in a lawn chair holding an infant on her lap. The woman is dressed in a beaded dress and her hair is done in braids. She is, it appears, at some sort of powwow or other doin’s. The caption on the photo states that the woman is Regina Box and her infant son and that the picture was taken five months before her death.
A few pages later there is a photo of a young Indian man singing and beating on a drum. He wears jeans and a down vest and his hair is in braids. The caption says he is Jim Box and that he is shown at a Bear Dance shortly before he killed his wife.
To this day I have never read When Buffalo Freed the Mountains. But The Death of Bernadette Lefthand began with those two photographs.
Some years later—I believe it was when Bad Medicine came out and I was signing in Taos—I saw Nancy and told her about how her photographs had been the touchstones for my earlier novel. She said she should get some money, then. I think she was kidding. Maybe not. In any case, I did not offer her any money. I’m sad to say that Nancy died in March of this year.
Nancy Wood at Taos Pueblo
Within a couple of days after we returned to Taos from Durango, I began writing Bernadette. I didn’t have any kind of outline or plan—as I said, I’d never written fiction before—I just started writing.
At the time, we were living in a small, dreary, poorly-constructed 1960s vintage two-bedroom, single-wide mobile home that we rented from a nice woman named Margaret because the rent was inexpensive by Taos standards. We were starting into the winter season and the nights were turning colder. I’d begin work at my old dual floppy-disc computer as soon as Elaine left for her job. In the evening when she returned I’d usually read her what I’d written that day. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I am taken with language—that the sounds of words are important to me. Reading aloud—to myself, or to Elaine—was and is important to me, it is, I think, essential to my writing process. I have to hear the narrative—especially the dialogue. It’s got to sound (to me, anyway) like people really speak or it’s not real.
Within a couple of days after we returned to Taos from Durango, I began writing Bernadette. I didn’t have any kind of outline or plan—as I said, I’d never written fiction before—I just started writing.
At the time, we were living in a small, dreary, poorly-constructed 1960s vintage two-bedroom, single-wide mobile home that we rented from a nice woman named Margaret because the rent was inexpensive by Taos standards. We were starting into the winter season and the nights were turning colder. I’d begin work at my old dual floppy-disc computer as soon as Elaine left for her job. In the evening when she returned I’d usually read her what I’d written that day. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I am taken with language—that the sounds of words are important to me. Reading aloud—to myself, or to Elaine—was and is important to me, it is, I think, essential to my writing process. I have to hear the narrative—especially the dialogue. It’s got to sound (to me, anyway) like people really speak or it’s not real.
1984. My first computer—dual floppy disc.
Elaine rarely, if ever, criticized my efforts. On the other hand, I am extremely self-critical and I suppose she knew that I was hard enough on myself. Sometimes tears would well up in her eyes as I read and I knew I was getting it right.
The Taos News was (and is still) a fine weekly newspaper. This means that Elaine had time off pretty much whenever we needed to travel. And we traveled a good deal that winter. We spent a good deal of time driving across the vast Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. We especially liked visiting Hopi, which is located in the middle of Navajo-land. We attended dances and rodeos and fairs and ate in small cafes and at trading posts. We shopped in trading post food stores and essentially spent time hanging out where Navajo people were. As much as anything, I think, I was eavesdropping—listening to Navajo people talking. I remember how in Gallup we would frequently eat at Furr’s Cafeteria and sit near Indian families. There are phrases and even whole sentences, I think, in Bernadette that I overheard while eating in Furr’s.
We once spent a night at the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa and were told by a young woman selling jewelry the next morning that we should go to her Second Mesa village of Shongopovi because, as she said, “there are some doin’s there today.” I asked her if we would be welcome there and she assured me we would. And so it was that we chanced to see first-hand the wonder of ninety-nine Tasapkachinas dancing on the dusty little plaza at old Shongopovi—to watch from atop the roof of a small gray house built of undressed stone and mud the dance Bernadette and Gracie Lefthand and Tom and Anderson George watched later in Bernadette. We had spent a wonderful afternoon watching a dance that I described in detail—exactly as I recalled it happening—in my novel. I named the character of the young girl at Hopi after the young woman who directed us to the dance—she had given us her card. Another day we were lucky enough to see forty-one Tasap Yeibichai Kwa-um dancers at Mishongnovi. I will add that taking photographs at Hopi has been regulated and prohibited, to an increasingly greater extent, since 1902 (signs today caution “Don’t Even Ask!”) I understand, too, that the dances at the village of Shongopovi have now been closed to visitors.
We spent time at Canyon de Chelly and at Chaco National Monument. We often visited Gallup and it was our habit to take a room in the El Rancho Hotel there. The rooms are named after 1940s and 50s movie stars who allegedly stayed there while making movies. The El Rancho is the place where Bernadette and Gracie and Tom stay in my novel.
Some of the most beautiful country in northern New Mexico is to be found around Chama and the Jicarilla Apache Reservation where we would visit the “shopping center” at Dulce and eat lunch at the Jicarilla Inn and—if it happened to be open—admire the beadwork and baskets in the Tribal Museum.
We crisscrossed Navajo Country in our pickup, and always we favored the back roads—even in those rare instances when there was a choice—the narrow blacktop ribbons between Shiprock and Chinle and Piñon . . . between Gallup and Window Rock and Keams Canyon. And when we traveled we listened to the powerful radio stations for the Navajo Nation—the Navajo call radio “Wind That Speaks”—listened to the voices of Selena Manychildren and Harrison Dehyah speaking in Navajo and in English.
We would often visit Canyon de Chelly—hiking or riding horseback into Canyon del Muerto, where, if we tried hard enough, we could hear the sounds of gunfire from Captain Albert Pfeiffer’s troops in 1864.
When I was writing Bernadette I assumed that my reader would not likely be Indian—certainly not Navajo (I was writing, after all, about Navajo witches). At the same time, I assumed that my reader would not be a student of the scholarly works extant on Indian—and specifically Navajo and Jicarilla Apache—cultures. Rather, I had in mind that there are aspects of the cultures that even the most casual, non-Indian would find fascinating and so felt compelled to tell about them.
I do not think that I have a great deal of imagination. That is, I don’t seem to have a knack for making up things out of whole cloth. Rather I think that I see individuals and places and events and that I like to imagine these individuals’ lives in those places and at those events. I look at pictures, for example, and imagine what’s happening or happened. Or, because when we would make these trips both Elaine and I would be doing our respective “jobs”—she making photographs where allowed and I making notes—I very often had Elaine’s photographs as reminders . . . as visual notes, if you will.
When I become interested—preoccupied may be a more accurate term, here—in a specific subject I tend to focus all my energy on that subject. When I began to think about Navajo tradition—and I am thinking here of witches in particular—I read everything I could find. Not fiction, mind you, but everything in the ethnological and anthropological literature—dry, scholarly tomes and monographs, treatises and first-hand accounts. Just everything. And I was surprised at what I found and was able to work much of what I learned into Bernadette’s story.
Indeed, I learned a great deal while writing my novel . . . a great deal about Navajo and Apache cultures—about lifeways and customs and, yes, about witches. It is curious to me to find that now, having written about the things I learned, that they are, in the main, gone from my memory. It is as though all those things that I absorbed in the months of reading and study are a part of the novel. I read the treatises on Navajo witchcraft, to be sure, and thinking about those scholarly works I tried to write a novel that was/is accessible, interesting, and above all, true. The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is a novel, but it is, at the same time, true.
Elaine rarely, if ever, criticized my efforts. On the other hand, I am extremely self-critical and I suppose she knew that I was hard enough on myself. Sometimes tears would well up in her eyes as I read and I knew I was getting it right.
The Taos News was (and is still) a fine weekly newspaper. This means that Elaine had time off pretty much whenever we needed to travel. And we traveled a good deal that winter. We spent a good deal of time driving across the vast Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. We especially liked visiting Hopi, which is located in the middle of Navajo-land. We attended dances and rodeos and fairs and ate in small cafes and at trading posts. We shopped in trading post food stores and essentially spent time hanging out where Navajo people were. As much as anything, I think, I was eavesdropping—listening to Navajo people talking. I remember how in Gallup we would frequently eat at Furr’s Cafeteria and sit near Indian families. There are phrases and even whole sentences, I think, in Bernadette that I overheard while eating in Furr’s.
We once spent a night at the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa and were told by a young woman selling jewelry the next morning that we should go to her Second Mesa village of Shongopovi because, as she said, “there are some doin’s there today.” I asked her if we would be welcome there and she assured me we would. And so it was that we chanced to see first-hand the wonder of ninety-nine Tasapkachinas dancing on the dusty little plaza at old Shongopovi—to watch from atop the roof of a small gray house built of undressed stone and mud the dance Bernadette and Gracie Lefthand and Tom and Anderson George watched later in Bernadette. We had spent a wonderful afternoon watching a dance that I described in detail—exactly as I recalled it happening—in my novel. I named the character of the young girl at Hopi after the young woman who directed us to the dance—she had given us her card. Another day we were lucky enough to see forty-one Tasap Yeibichai Kwa-um dancers at Mishongnovi. I will add that taking photographs at Hopi has been regulated and prohibited, to an increasingly greater extent, since 1902 (signs today caution “Don’t Even Ask!”) I understand, too, that the dances at the village of Shongopovi have now been closed to visitors.
We spent time at Canyon de Chelly and at Chaco National Monument. We often visited Gallup and it was our habit to take a room in the El Rancho Hotel there. The rooms are named after 1940s and 50s movie stars who allegedly stayed there while making movies. The El Rancho is the place where Bernadette and Gracie and Tom stay in my novel.
Some of the most beautiful country in northern New Mexico is to be found around Chama and the Jicarilla Apache Reservation where we would visit the “shopping center” at Dulce and eat lunch at the Jicarilla Inn and—if it happened to be open—admire the beadwork and baskets in the Tribal Museum.
We crisscrossed Navajo Country in our pickup, and always we favored the back roads—even in those rare instances when there was a choice—the narrow blacktop ribbons between Shiprock and Chinle and Piñon . . . between Gallup and Window Rock and Keams Canyon. And when we traveled we listened to the powerful radio stations for the Navajo Nation—the Navajo call radio “Wind That Speaks”—listened to the voices of Selena Manychildren and Harrison Dehyah speaking in Navajo and in English.
We would often visit Canyon de Chelly—hiking or riding horseback into Canyon del Muerto, where, if we tried hard enough, we could hear the sounds of gunfire from Captain Albert Pfeiffer’s troops in 1864.
When I was writing Bernadette I assumed that my reader would not likely be Indian—certainly not Navajo (I was writing, after all, about Navajo witches). At the same time, I assumed that my reader would not be a student of the scholarly works extant on Indian—and specifically Navajo and Jicarilla Apache—cultures. Rather, I had in mind that there are aspects of the cultures that even the most casual, non-Indian would find fascinating and so felt compelled to tell about them.
I do not think that I have a great deal of imagination. That is, I don’t seem to have a knack for making up things out of whole cloth. Rather I think that I see individuals and places and events and that I like to imagine these individuals’ lives in those places and at those events. I look at pictures, for example, and imagine what’s happening or happened. Or, because when we would make these trips both Elaine and I would be doing our respective “jobs”—she making photographs where allowed and I making notes—I very often had Elaine’s photographs as reminders . . . as visual notes, if you will.
When I become interested—preoccupied may be a more accurate term, here—in a specific subject I tend to focus all my energy on that subject. When I began to think about Navajo tradition—and I am thinking here of witches in particular—I read everything I could find. Not fiction, mind you, but everything in the ethnological and anthropological literature—dry, scholarly tomes and monographs, treatises and first-hand accounts. Just everything. And I was surprised at what I found and was able to work much of what I learned into Bernadette’s story.
Indeed, I learned a great deal while writing my novel . . . a great deal about Navajo and Apache cultures—about lifeways and customs and, yes, about witches. It is curious to me to find that now, having written about the things I learned, that they are, in the main, gone from my memory. It is as though all those things that I absorbed in the months of reading and study are a part of the novel. I read the treatises on Navajo witchcraft, to be sure, and thinking about those scholarly works I tried to write a novel that was/is accessible, interesting, and above all, true. The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is a novel, but it is, at the same time, true.
