New Mexico Mercury

Five Questions for New Mexico Authors - Sharon Oard Warner

This week we ask author, UNM English professor, and founder and director of the Taos Summer Writer’s Conference Sharon Oard Warner about her intriguing new novel Sophie’s House of Cards, published this year by the University of New Mexico Press.

New Mexico Mercury: One of the many fascinating aspects of this novel is the use of tarot imagery as an organizing principle for the story. How did you come to that idea?

Sharon Oard Warner: Many years ago, I listened to a fellow writer, Wayne Johnson, talk about his writing aspirations. He said he wanted to write a novel that took its structure from a metaphor or recurring motif...

Fool’s Gold: Presage Against the Machine

I like to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world. That’s why I try to examine magazine covers every time I’m in the grocery store checkout lane.

Hoo boy. Already I can envision the fan mail I will receive from the educated-at-a-college-that-doesn’t-even-HAVE-a-football-team crowd. They will ream me for collecting my news from the impulse-buy section. And then they will slyly inquire—you can practically hear them typing more quietly—whether the rumors about Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise are true...

El Machete: Voting Cycle

Voting Cycle

Michael Datcher takes ABQ on a distinct ‘trip down memory lane’ this Saturday at the Outpost

Sometimes nonfiction is just not quite creative enough. Not even creative nonfiction. “With fiction, my goal is to remind people about the vitality of fiction. In our world people prefer nonfiction,” says Loyola Marymount Professor and New York Times Bestselling author Michael Datcher. “Because it is made up material people don’t respect it as a way to talk about the real world. They don’t look at it as a way to learn something about the real world, as opposed to a book of theory…people want to be entertained, rather than learn something about the past or themselves.”

This Saturday, Datcher is bringing his newest work to Albuquerque thanks to 516 ARTS and Outpost Performance Space. AMERICUS is a uniquely American story swaddled in Egyptian mythology and set in East Louis circa 1917...

Immortal Desires & the Seduction of Art

If you ask me what the most important, let’s say intellectually challenging, non-fiction, book written in the 20th century, it would have to be Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown. First published in 1959, when I read it in 1968 I found myself re-reading almost every page just to make sure what he said was what I thought he said. The sub-title is The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Brown was profound.

When he wrote LAD Brown was a professor of classics at Wesleyan University, and later at UC Santa Cruz, in California, where he died in 2002 at 89. During the 1960s the Movement raised him up to an icon. Remember the Movement?...

On Stage: A Thinking Animal, a Beastly Man

At the start of Act I, a rooster talks and acts like a man. At the end of Act II, a man talks and acts like a rooster. That in a nutshell is the story of Year of the Rooster, the current offering of the Fusion company at the Cell Theater in downtown Albuquerque.

How and why the rooster becomes humanoid and the human becomes beastly is the plot of this funny, violent, difficult and provoking story by the 20-something Eric Dufault that opened Off-Broadway in New York less than a year ago...

When water supplies ebb, users go with the flow

Fool’s Gold: Busy to the Core

For two thousand and fourteen years—the entire period known either as A.D., “After Democracy,” or C.E., the “Congressional Era”—our government has been gridlocked. And Americans are SICK AND TIRED of it. We showed in the midterm elections that we finally want to get things done, so long as one of those things isn’t voting.

Hey, we never claimed that we wanted to DO things! We just want them DONE...

US Ignores Responsibility in Fossil Fuel Divestment

Recently the fossil fuel divestment campaign added to their numbers the heirs of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, when the great-great grandson and great granddaughter withdrew their funds from oil investments.  This is the latest indication that in fact there will be a turning away from the current course of self-ruin, even by the petroleum industry’s own elite.  When the Rockefellers decide to turn their (green)backs on oil and coal, we must ask if this will make it easier for others of their ilk to do the same...

Screaming at the Mayor and City Council Is Where It’s At!

I really like it when ordinary citizens scream at city officials, there are mass demonstrations, people are arrested and carted off.

It seems when the civic volcano blows its top, that’s the only time the powers that be realize there’s a problem they must respond to.

Otherwise, the complacency is so thick, you could cut it with a knife.

Nothing really happens until the pressure builds again to the eruption point and citizens once more start screaming at officials.  That sure seems true regarding the Albuquerque Police Dept. crisis...