Guest Review by Irene Wanner

Memoir
Weekends with O'Keeffe
By C.S. Merrill
University of New Mexico Press
224 pages, hardcover, $24.95

In November 1972, 26-year-old poet C. S. Merrill wrote to 85-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe to ask if she could visit the painter at her Abiquiú home. Uncharacteristically, the privacy-craving O’Keeffe wrote back and agreed. For months, Merrill kept the response folded in her pocket, but didn’t act on it until an artist friend explained how rare this opportunity was and urged her to follow through. When she did, O’Keeffe replied that she would be available for one hour on Sunday morning, August 12, 1973.

But as Merrill’s journal entry for that day records, the single hour became several, then lunch, then more, as the two visited O’Keeffe’s extensive but “musty and messed up” library—something Merrill might bring to order if, as O’Keeffe suggested, Merrill worked in Abiquiú on weekends. By this time, O’Keeffe’s eyesight, severely damaged by macular degeneration, kept her from doing the task herself. “This was my job at first,” Merrill explains: “to take care of the book room.”

The job grew. In the seven years Merrill worked for O’Keeffe (1973–1979), she became secretary, cook, reader, typist, nurse, and companion, as well as librarian. “I could never call her a close friend,” Merrill notes, “though we had many friendly moments.” These times formed the basis for Merrill’s book of poems, O’Keeffe: Days in a Life (La Alameda Press, 1995), and now a memoir, Weekends with O’Keeffe.

Anyone interested in the painter and her extremely private daily life will find this thoughtfully detailed account fascinating, for beyond O’Keeffe’s high garden walls and guardian chow dogs, Merrill observed “a visual feast.” Everything “looked very utilitarian, but was exquisite. Everything was beautiful.” There were flowers, huge jade plants, big windows, smooth rocks and bones—all understated.

O’Keeffe didn’t like poetry, so the women found little common ground there. But she adored classical music, and Merrill often read aloud to her. Merrill records almost nothing of O’Keeffe’s actual time painting, and “didn’t pump her for information.”

Two recurring topics are O’Keeffe’s independent spirit and belief in hard work. Her brother, the artist claimed, was the family’s favored child, and this, Merrill writes, “was something that helped her in the long run”—she always had to “stretch her canvases better, paint better, and in effect make a better show than her male counterparts.” In O’Keeffe’s early years, few liked her work. O’Keeffe now understood that these were times of freedom, before fame began to make its ever-increasing demands.

Merrill also recounts many pleasant walks with O’Keeffe, who was mindful of her health. In particular, meals often featured fruits and vegetables freshly harvested from O’Keeffe’s garden.

As the years pass, there are longer gaps between Merrill’s journal entries, and the entries themselves are sketchier. Merrill’s final visit to O’Keeffe was in July 1979. She never learned why the artist stopped contacting her, but notes that it was time to move on. Merrill completed a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, taught in China, and eventually returned to New Mexico to live in Corrales. Today, she is a librarian at Kewa (formerly Santo Domingo) Pueblo Public School and Cochiti Public School.

Irene Wanner is a writer and editor who lives in the Jémez Mountains.

[back to the top]

Book Briefs by Ashley M. Biggers

History
Home Lands: How Women Made the West
By Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken
University of California Press
184 pages; hardcover, $60, paperback, $24.95

“The history of women in the American West is like the history of air,” write the authors of Home Lands. “You could certainly write history without it. You just can’t have history without it.” Virginia Scharff, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico (and New Mexico Magazine’s Featured Author in January), and her colleague Carolyn Brucken, assistant curator of Western Women’s History at the Autry National Center, a museum of the American West in Los Angeles, look beyond the well-worn, male-dominated narrative to describe women’s roles. Though those roles were often domestic, Home Lands does not glorify this domesticity. Rather, Scharff and Brucken “argue that claiming a home is a potent way of changing the world. Instead of worrying that the association of women with home will trivialize women’s history in the West, we want to expand our definition of home beyond domesticity to encompass the process of inhabiting places.” Three locations guide their exploration: Río Arriba County, New Mexico; the Front Range, near Denver, Colorado; and the Puget Sound region of Washington. In the section on the Land of Enchantment, the authors recount the stories of important women, from Ancestral Puebloan mothers to the founders of Sociedad Folklórico de Santa Fe, an organization that to this day preserves Spanish language and traditions—and from adobe preservationists Amelia and Martha White to Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor-poet Nora Naranjo-Morse. Academic in its approach and its dedication to accuracy, Home Lands is also an accessible and engaging look at the history of the West, and at women’s roles in shaping its present.

[back to the top]

Children's
The Lovesick Skunk
By Joe Hayes, Illustrated by Antonio Castro L.
Cinco Puntos Press
32 pages, hardcover, $16.95

Santa Fean Joe Hayes’s books are always delightful, perhaps because, as I read them, I can almost hear the warm, inviting voice of this professional raconteur, who throughout each summer lends his storytelling talents to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, in Santa Fe. The Lovesick Skunk is no exception. In this “wild, unbelievable story,” Hayes harks back to his boyhood, when he loved nothing more than his pair of black-and-white tennis shoes. One night, while Hayes is camping out, a skunk sidles up to his smelly old shoes and . . . well, I guess the title tells you the rest. This story celebrates the best of childhood: playful adventures, best friends, and unlikely tales that parents just never understand. Hayes has written more than 20 books for children and young adults, including Dance, Nana, Dance/Baila Nana, Baila (Cinco Puntos Press), a collection of Cuban folk tales that earned the 2009 Aesop Award for Children’s Literature. The Lovesick Skunk is best shared with young readers aged 4 to 8.

 

[back to the top]

Photography
In the Places of the Spirits
By David Grant Noble, Foreword by N. Scott Momaday
School for Advanced Research Press
176 pages, paperback, $30

An ancient cave dwelling at Tsankawi. An eerie sky above carved petroglyphs in Santa Fe River Canyon. The receding doorways of Pueblo Bonito, at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park. You’ll find all of these images and more in In the Places of the Spirits, a collection of photographs and essays by Santa Fean David Grant Noble. Described as the culmination of Noble’s 40-year career, the book includes 76 images of the landscapes that ancient peoples have marked with their dwellings, art, and culture. In his foreword, famed Native American author N. Scott Momaday writes, “It is clear that Noble has touched the earth of the Southwest, has breathed its purest air, has looked into the secret recesses of its mountains and valleys, has traversed its ancient trails, has observed the innumerable forms of life that give it motion and sound—and a diversity that is almost beyond imagining. And beyond these he has seen into the presence of Man.” And yet Noble has not documented only these vestiges of ancient civilizations; he has, with his evocative photographs and his thoughtful observations in the accompanying essays, documented truths about all human civilization. Momaday: “And yet every time we behold evidence of our human ancestors, every time we gain some understanding of their thoughts, their customs, their beliefs, their spirit, we see something of ourselves and our possibilities. Indeed the understanding gives us a chance.” Enthusiasts of the ancient cultures of the Southwest will enjoy this handsome book.

[back to the top]

Poetry
Blood Desert: Witnesses, 1820–1880
By Renny Golden
University of New Mexico Press
76 pages, paperback, $16.95

In Blood Desert, activist and poet Renny Golden transports readers to one of the most turbulent periods in the history of New Mexico. She draws on historical documents, such as the diary of Sister Blandina—who, along with other women, “rode the Trail to the frontier in order to build schools and hospitals, to nurse renegades, peasants, and the destitute.” Golden references the regret of U.S. General George Crook at his treatment of the Native peoples of New Mexico; the excommunication of Padre Antonio José Martínez, who faced off against Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy during the formation of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe; and Kit Carson’s siege of the Navajo in Canyon de Chelly. These poems allude to history, but convey more emotion than fact. As Golden writes in her introduction, “These narrative poems intend to reclaim dangerous memory, to resurrect the spirit of those who walked and rode the high desert. . . . Why poetry and not history? Poetry seems to match the music and mystery of a time of betrayal and bravery.” This compelling collection is rich in historical detail and wrought with feeling.

[back to the top]

 

History
New Mexico Baseball: Miners, Outlaws, Indians and Isotopes, 1880 to the Present
By L.M. Sutter
McFarland & Company
251 pages, paperback, $38

This month, as players crack bats at Isotopes Stadium, in Albuquerque, baseball fans should crack open New Mexico Baseball. In this well-researched book, L. M. Sutter, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, traces the sport’s history in the Land of Enchantment from games held in 1882, at the Great Exposition in Albuquerque, through today’s Connie Mack World Series—the high school baseball tournament Farmington has hosted since 1965. Sutter excels at honoring little-known aspects of New Mexico’s baseball history, from the penitentiary teams to the Flying Kellys, a World War II–era team composed of soldiers from Kirtland Air Force Base, in Albuquerque. However, the histories of today’s Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes and their predecessors, the Dukes, is surprisingly scant. Still, the occasional photos—of an Albuquerque Indian School team (circa 1900); of the Madrid Miners, “one of the most feared teams in the Central New Mexico League of the 1930s”; and others—add a dynamic component. Overall, this readable guide belongs on the bookshelf of every lover of baseball.

[back to the top]

Discover more Southwest books in our archives.