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Poetry is my inheritance. My dad, raised by Scottish immigrants in New York City, was taught by Catholic nuns to memorize poetry. He passed the practice on to me; I remember standing at the edge of the Pecos Wilderness as a child, repeating the lines of “The Fairies,” by William Allingham, until I could recite it by heart.
When I’m out walking I often pause to consider the landscape, trying to imagine what a specific place may have looked like one hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago.
While editing this issue of El Palacio, I spent a lot of time thinking about the body. Work has always been central to the American identity and in the West this work has—and continues to be—rooted in hard, physical labor.
My Aunt Kate had a poster in her living room that I liked to look at as a kid. It featured two Zimbabwean women in colorful clothing with their arms extended and hands linked.
There’s a place I like to walk with my dog on the outskirts of Santa Fe. The trail offers views of the city and the pink and orange cotton candy clouds that often illuminate the sky at sunset.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the power of imagination. It’s incredible to me that humans can create something tangible from a dream. Although many of us have access to infrastructure like roads and indoor plumbing—to name two basic ones—these things we take for granted were brought into being by imagination.
Returning from a trip once, the woman seated beside me peered out the window as the plane began its descent to Albuquerque. “Oh my,” she said. “Look at how brown it is.” I looked.
There are several threads running through the articles and essays in this issue of El Palacio, but as I edited the work, Diné poet Jake Skeets’s idea of the memory field kept returning to me.
Throughout the eight years I lived in Montana, I wrote essays that were essentially love letters to New Mexico. If you had asked me in high school if I wanted to stay, my answer would have been a resounding “No.” But I was born near the red willows on the banks of the Rio Grande and raised in the seam between the Great Plains and the foothills of Hermit’s Peak.
It is fitting that this issue of El Palacio Magazine is filled with so much dirt—from Rick Dillingham’s clay vessels, the melting adobe walls at Fort Selden, and the dusty Great North Road near Chaco Canyon.
