Unflinching and magnetic, the language and structure of Aurum never strays from its dedication to revealing the prominent reality of Native people being marginalized and discarded in the wake of industrial progress. With images that taunt, disturb, and fascinate, Aurum captures the vibrantly original language in Santee Frazier’s first collection, Dark Thirty, while taking on a completely new voice and rhythm. Frazier has crafted a wrought-iron collection of poetry that never shies away from a truth that America often attempts to ignore.
Below, Santee Frazier answers five questions about his second poetry collection.
What inspired you to write this work?
It’s hard to point to anything specific in regards to inspiration. My poems tend to be receptacles for research, lived experiences, and techniques acquired from other poets (mostly dead poets). In this way, poems manifest through ritual and mindfulness. For instance, the final poem of Aurum, “Half-Life”, was written on train rides from the Northeast to the Southwest. On stops along the rails I would write two to three lines. Over a period of 2-3 years the poem took shape, and you can see this process unfold in the form. This is representative of all my poems, but the ritual varies from project to project. I am continuously working in three voices, perhaps more, but there are three in Aurum. I am of the mind that a poet should have many voices, and through those voices different modes of verse making and revision.
Detailed descriptions of food appear frequently in these poems. What is the significance of food in your writing?
I had this idea of using images of food to introduce cultural leanings without exorcizing the figures that populate the poems. In Aurum, the food images or references to culinary knowledge are isolated to a specific milieu. For instance, in “Sun Perch” the image of the Vietnamese dish served to the speaker is elaborate, which contrasts with their experiences with food. This image also introduces the recursive image system that dominates the poem and the larger collection. Going back to contrasts, the references to food in “Half-Life” are basic. The world the speaker experiences is devoid of the vividness represented in “Sun Perch”, “Sanguinaria”, and “Chaac”. The images of corn, beans, and potatoes hold significance to many peoples and cultures indigenous to Turtle Island. (Note, I use the moniker “Turtle Island”, due to the fact that phrases and terms used to describe North America and the indigenous peoples are inaccurate, and were conceived within oppressive political constructs.) In some cultures, corn, beans, and potatoes will be the only food that grows in a prophesied dystopian future. Furthermore, corn, beans, and potatoes represent horticultural knowledge lost to many of us living hand to mouth.
Mangled is a character who appears in Aurum and who also appeared in your collection titled Dark Thirty. Could you tell us about what Mangled represents for you?
The Mangled Creekbed poems work in a serialized form. The character is a container for research in music, pop culture, violence, and oppression in America. Mangled is what I write when I’m not obsessing over another poem or set of poems. I get these long periods of silence where I am reading and taking in lots of information, but not making art. When this happens I revisit Mangled and see if he will give me any new poems. In Dark Thirty my research in the Impalement Arts dominated the poems, in Aurum, my research into the accordion factored into many of the poems. The serialized form allows for verse driven and prosaic poetic modes. Some of these poems can occur in a moment, some longer narratives delve into back story. Mangled’s world also serves as historical context to poems set in a contemporary milieu.
Speaking of Mangled, the title “Mangled & the Accordion” is ascribed to five of the poems in Aurum. What is the significance of repeating this title?
The title is both representative of his anatomy and the structure of the collection. At times the poems have a dense structure, sometimes fragmented while utilizing white space. Similar to the constraints of the accordion. There are certainly allegorical and biblical references. As many Indigenous people create identities rooted in western religious morals and ethics, Mangled suffers on multiple levels. However, he is unaware of the threads of oppression that lord over his life. This mainly harkens back to some of his origin story in Dark Thirty, but in Aurum Mangled attempts to reconcile his history of violence through performance akin to vaudeville.
What are you working on now?
I am working on these small vignettes which I am calling nonfiction, but at times they feel like poems. I have always been so interested in Eduardo Galeano’s nonfictions and histories, specifically, Memory of Fire. I am also a fan of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and by proxy The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover. So, I am writing these small pieces of text that take on different prosaic forms. There are no line breaks, but there is attention to sound. I’m hoping to shape some kind of book out of these vignettes, but I write slower and slower these days.
Below, read a poem from Frazier’s Aurum.
TWICE-RUINED
Mangled does not remember the beating outside the tavern, just that when he woke the air under the rumbling bridge smelt like hot engine oil, like tire. His twice ruined face inflated, cheeks and hair crusted with muddy earth, boots spackled with blood.
Crouched near a creek, saw his face wavy in the ripple, slit eyes buried under swollen flesh. He thought of the knife, its baptism—flicker of sunlight in the current— blade hidden behind the rust. As Mangled dipped his face in the water he saw the creek bed, minnows darting along the moss-covered stones.
Santee Frazier received his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his MFA from Syracuse University. Frazier is director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA Program. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
Norma Elia Cantú‘s new poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza, is a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands. Written by the award-winning author of Canícula, Cantú has crafted a collection which carries the perspective of a powerful voice in Chicana literature— and literature worldwide.
Meditación Fronteriza is a collection of poems from the last 40 years and many poems were inspired by my life… I was inspired to put the poems into a book by the need to counter the general view that the border is a violent place and to counter the erasure of our culture and our reality by the mainstream.
The speaker of these poems often asks questions. What is the function of posing questions within your poetry?
I believe life is a series of questions that we pose— to ourselves and to others. I often teach using questions. I write in search of answers.
Many of the poems in this collection appear in both Spanish and English. Could you tell us a little more about why you chose to translate certain poems, and have others appear solely in English?
Usually the poems that were originally written in Spanish stayed in Spanish without translation; however, I also found that I had already translated some of the poems that were first written in Spanish, so I kept the translations. I also want to honor the Spanish of the borderlands and to keep the language we use, so many poems include both Spanish and English. Translating everything seemed to be a betrayal of sorts to the linguistic spirit of the work.
The poem “Song of the Borderlands” calls for six voices to perform the lines. What do you think the importance of performing poetry out loud is?
Poetry has always been about sound and rhythm— about oral delivery, even when it went from oral to written, the essence lies in orality. Spoken word and slam poetry are rooted in this orality. I first recited poetry as a child in a tradition called declamación where one memorizes the poem and declaims it in public. Hence, my love of poetry is intimately linked to my love of hearing the voice and performing poetry out loud. This particular poem was written for my students to perform and it works really well as a performance piece for a class.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a novel called Champú, or Hair Matters. It is set in a beauty shop in Laredo, Texas. I am also working on a collection of poems called Elemental Odes, I am writing poems inspired by the Periodic Table of the Elements. It is challenging but so much fun!
Rio Grande flows from the Rockies to the Gulf holy waters heal the border scar pecan, nogal, retama sway, tower o'er mesquites, huisaches buried treasure brown
fiery gold crown sun sets over Mexico death defies life a packed train speeds by transports precious cargo arrives with the moonlight
Norma Cantú and UA Press Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles
Norma Elia Cantú is a daughter of the borderlands, a scholar, and a creative writer. She serves as Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González‘ new book, Reel Latinxs, dives into Latinx representation in film and television in the twenty-first century. Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dig into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture.
Today, Frederick Aldama and Christopher González share with us some of the inspiration and thought that helped craft Reel Latinxs.
Frederick Luis Aldama: We both spend a bunch of time thinking, writing, and teaching all varieties of Latinx pop culture, film, and TV. I often get asked, “What shows or films do you recommend watching that get Latinx representation right?”. My reflex answer for recent brown televisual reconstructions: check out the representations of Latinas in Golden Globe awardee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the playful panoply of Latino-ness represented in East WillyB, and those awesome Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D webisodes that feature Cisco Ramone or Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez. My reflex answer for recent brownings of the silver-screen: Robert Rodriguez’ Alita, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco, and, of course, Bob Persichetti’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I add to this, that it’s not just the representation that matters, it’s the shaping of the representation, too. That is, we can have Latinxs in front of the camera, but we also need Latinx writers, directors, cinematographers, costume designers, and showrunners.
Christopher González: Those are all great examples, and we may as well confront the specific difficulty when it comes to representation of the Latinx community. Representation is not merely about casting a Latinx actor in a given role. We know that characters— their function within the narrative, their reliance on or avoidance of recognizable tropes or even stereotypes, and their capability of signifying a given community— all highlight why the kind of representation we encounter in film and television is so powerful. And you are correct in pointing to why it’s so crucial to examine the other major contributors to a given instance of representation such as writers, producers, and so forth. The shaping that you are referring to, however, is also something with which audiences must contend. What do you feel are the challenges audiences of these Latinx representations face with these emerging televisual narratives?
Frederick Luis Aldama: Subtlety. Nuance. Knowing the difference between an abuelitas throwing a spoon at us— that would never happen— and a chancla— always happens. If Lalo hadn’t been brought in to consult Disney in the making of Coco, it would have been a big wooden spoon that Mamá Coco would’ve launched at Miguelito. We would have noticed, and likely exhaled our inner Latinx-sigh of disappointment. But subtlety and nuance in other ways. How many times have you seen an East Coast Puerto Rican Latinx family preparing tamales or mole— and not, say, mofongo or lechon asado? A show like Ugly Betty did this in spades. It also cast non-Nuyorican actors to play Nuyoricans, including LA-born, Honduran ancestral Latinx America Ferrera and Cuban Latinx Tony Plana as the papa.
Christopher González: So, a kind of insider knowledge is helpful, then— someone who knows the nuances and subtleties you mention. But we also have to contend with what we might call unconventional Latinx representation. For instance, let’s take the example of the new version of Magnum P.I. (2018-present). Thomas Magnum is an iconic 80’s character that was a career-defining role for Tom Selleck, who is of English ancestry. This new reboot stars Jay Hernandez as Magnum. Thanks to his Hispanic surname and mestizo looks, most reasonable viewers will instantly recognize Jay as Latinx. The writers of the show, however, are much more reserved in expressions of Latinx identity for the character. The question as to whether or not Thomas Magnum, the character, is Latinx is made ambiguous for most of the first season. Hernandez is now playing a role that was conceived of originally as a white man, and it is nothing more than his physical presence in the visual medium of television that signals the possibility that this new version of Thomas Magnum is Latinx. More complicated still is Hernandez’ turn as the voice of Bonnie’s dad in Toy Story 4 (2019). Though he performs the role with no hint of a Spanish accent, Bonnie’s entire family is rendered as olive-skinned, dark-haired, people. I left the theater wondering, along with my family, if Bonnie’s family was Latinx. It was possible, but not confirmable. What I’m suggesting here is that Latinx representation is much more complex of late than it has been for most of the history of television and film.
Frederick Luis Aldama: We could say the same of a lot of Demi Lovato’s roles for Disney, right? As Mitchie Torres in Camp Rock (2008) do we read her last name and the fact that her mom’s a cook (aren’t all our mamas preternaturally good with food?) as Latinx? Gosh, I remember doing that way back when I was a kid. Starved of Latinxs on TV I wish-fulfilled the Addams family as Latinx. I guess what I’m saying, Chris, is that we haven’t arrived yet. We’re still so few and far between on TV and silver screens that I think we need clear, affirming Latinx identifiers. So, yeah, today’s Magnum should be loud-and-proud Latinx. This brings up another important issue. Do we fault the Latinx actors for playing roles that whitewash a given character’s Latinidad? Do we fault an actor like Zoe Saldana for taking roles that either portray her as African American or Outerworld Alien, and not for roles, say, that would affirm a complex Afrolatinidad? I raise this because of late one of my brilliant PhD students had an Instagram exchange with Saldana. My student wrote this super insightful piece about how the industry itself is at fault for essentializing and simplifying— even alien-afying Saldana. I don’t know if you caught the piece, “Race and Alien Face“? Saldana read it as somehow a critique of her choice of roles played. My student, of course, wrote a heartfelt further explanation: that it was the industry at fault, not Saldana. My point here is that, well, in the end Latinx actors have to play the roles that pay the bills. I have noticed that as Michael Peña, one of my favorite actors long with Saldana, has become more famous, he’s been either more choosy about his roles, or playing less-than-straight stereotypical Latinx roles. As far as I know, he’s the first Latinx actor to be the protagonist in a mainstream sci-fi flick. I’m thinking of Extinction. And, let’s face it, he steals the show from Paul Rudd in the Ant-Man franchise. And, when he’s playing a Latinx gangbanger, there’s always a wink to the Latinx audience. He knows he’s playing a stereotype, subverting it from within.
Christopher González: I am always very quick to point out that actors (Latinx or otherwise) are professionals who are pursuing their careers to the best of their abilities. We should not fault non-white actors for making business decisions in an industry that has often been inhospitable to them. In one of my current book projects, I uncover how the film industry has deep-rooted insecurities about how Latinx actors could and should appear in speculative films in genres such as Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, and more. Raquel Welch made a business decision to take on her white husband’s surname rather than use her own (Tejada) because she knew that doing so would limit the kinds of roles she would be offered. In the mid-1960s she had to whitewash her own Latinx identity in order to play characters such as Loana the Fair One in One Million Years B.C. and Cora in Fantastic Voyage. Now, over fifty years later, Zoe Saldana has to confront many of the same issues Welch faced. That Saldana took exception to your PhD student’s take reveals to me that Saldana is keenly aware that the roles she plays do matter, and that she perhaps feels frustration over how she is able to express her Latinx identity. But it should stagger us to consider that Saldana has starred in three of the five all-time grossing films at the box office (#1 Avengers: Endgame, #2 Avatar, #5 Avengers: Infinity War), and she still does not have the clout to make more forceful demands concerning the roles she takes. On the other hand, her Marvel co-star, Scarlett Johansson, is the highest-paid female actor in Hollywood, and she has taken roles that effectively whitewash characters. She came under fire recently for saying, and I’m paraphrasing, that as an actor she should be able to play any conceivable role. She later clarified that she was aware of how non-white, non-majority don’t have the same sort of access to roles of their white, cisgendered counterparts. In all of these cases, it is easy to get wrapped up with the actors and their decisions to take certain roles. What we should continue to critique is the system itself that allows these discrepancies in representation to occur. And, of course, we should take note of the opportunities some actors take to discretely subvert the stereotypical material they have been given.
Frederick Luis Aldama: Checking one’s privilege, now there’s a topic— and an urgent need, everywhere. We’ve seen a lot of push from historically underrepresented audiences for folks to check their privilege. We’re seeing the rearing of our collective ugly heads. We’ve had enough. I’m not only thinking of the #HollywoodSoWhite #OscarsSoWhite movements that have led to a lot of studios and television production units to create pipelines for young folks of color to become writers, directors, showrunners, and actors. I also think of the power of the internet as a platform to air our consumption needs and wants. Netflix canned the Latinx reboot of One Day At a Time. And, now after a hailstorm of internet mobilization, it’s back. We still need those boots-on-the-ground watchdogs like the National Hispanic Media Coalition and research centers like USC’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change, of course. However, with social media it seems like the power is really with the people.
Christopher González: Fede, our TV’s and silver-screens have shrunk. Elsewhere you talk about carrying these around in your back pocket, now. Sometimes I think this has emancipated #brownTV and also diminished our presence, representationally and physically.
Frederick Luis Aldama: The two-edged paradox: social media platforms like YouTube as well as spaces like VIMEO offering distribution channels to us Latinxs without deep Hollywood pockets yet the seeming continuation of stereotypical representation. I just watched a good friend, Ernesto Martínez’s short film, La Serenata, on VIMEO. It’s a masterpiece of short filmmaking, telling the much needed story of a Latinx niño telling his parents about his love for another boy. Queer Latinx Roberta Colindrez as the queer Latinx character, Devon, grabs the limelight in I Love Dick— a show made possible with funding from Amazon Prime. And, well, the way that Netflix’s One Day At a Time weaves into its one-familia storyworld the great variety of linguistic, religious, cultural, sexual, gender, class, regional resplendent variations that make up Latinidad is breathtaking. And, I have to say I love how Gabriel Iglesias uses humor to decolonize minds in Mr. Iglesias— an informal reboot of Welcome Back Carter from back in the day. Network TV could do these shows, but it doesn’t and it hasn’t. But then on the flipside, we have an abundance of us as “bad hombres”, not only in the super abundant narco Netflix offerings, but also in platforms like Discovery’s Border Live, where you can literally see ICE officers shake down innocents in real time.
Christopher González: Yes, distribution and availability are certainly enhanced. We can now watch these shows and films on the go, seemingly anywhere. That is the inevitable cost of the miniaturization of the screens we watch. The examples you just listed have benefitted from the almost grassroots efforts of audiences and creators to take more control of what they consume and what they make, even of the behemoth studios of Hollywood are still stuck in cement and antiquated ways of imagining the possibilities of visual storytelling. My sense is that there are many things that make this confluence of time, media, technology, and activism a great opportunity to see such change in how Latinxs are imagined within televisual spaces. There is no magic wand for instantly changing how things have been and where they are now. It takes hard work, bold choices, and the courage to be dogged enough to blaze a new trail. Our book, Reel Latinxs takes inventory of this shifting landscape and reveals what’s at stake for all of us, but particularly Latinxs like you and me who are old enough to see the progress that has been made and take stock of what work remains.
Frederick Luis Aldama: As we wrap this up, I wanted to mention that I’m super optimistic. At Stanford’s Great Books Program this summer, I got to spend time with a young, up-and-coming amazing Latinx actor, Emilio Garcia-Sanchez. He’s not bitter about having to step into the non-Latinx identified jock character, Jason, in Netflix’s The Society. He’s super comfortable with the fact that he brings his Latinidad with him, everywhere. Organically super-savvy about how he plays roles, he’s like a new gen Peña/ Saldana all rolled into one, and without effort. Like so many new gen Latinxs, he’s comfortable in his own skin— his self— as Latinx, y por vida.
In the early 1970s, understanding of the Mimbres region as a whole was in its infancy. In the following decades, thanks to dedicated work by enterprising archaeologists and nonprofit organizations, our understanding of the Mimbres region has become more complex, nuanced, and rich. New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeologybrings together these experts in a single volume for the first time. Focusing on the social contexts of people and communities, the role of ritual and ideology in Mimbres society, evidence of continuities and cultural change through time, and the varying impacts of external influences throughout the region— the volume presents recent data on and interpretations of the entire pre-Hispanic sequence of occupation.
Below, editors Barbara J. Roth, Patricia A. Gilman, and Roger Anyon discuss the inspiration for their research, the unfortunate consequences that have accompanied the beautiful Mimbres ceramics, and future directions for understanding Mimbres life and culture.
Why did you embark on this research?
Patricia A. Gilman: This book is a compendium of the most recent research in the Mimbres region of southwestern New Mexico, and we decided that it was time to do such a collection. Also, 2014, when we presented the first drafts of what would become the book chapters at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting, was the 40th anniversary of the Mimbres Foundation doing archaeological research in the Mimbres Valley. We wanted to honor that and Steven LeBlanc, whose vision started the Mimbres Foundation and its research. Both Roger and I worked for the Mimbres Foundation, as did several other chapter authors.
Roger Anyon: It can probably be said that this research began over 40 years ago when the Mimbres Foundation established a research presence in the Mimbres Valley. Without the pioneering work of Steven LeBlanc and the Mimbres Foundation, the current book would not have been possible. For me, working with this group of talented individuals and pulling together the most recent research on the Mimbres archaeological culture has been a particularly rewarding experience.
Barbara J. Roth: This was a collaborative effort that resulted from many discussions with colleagues working in the Mimbres region about the changes in our interpretations of what had happened through time and the reasons for these changes since the foundational research in the area by the Mimbres Foundation. We were excited to bring together a group of scholars actively doing research in the region to put these new finds and interpretations in context, and we were able to include perspectives from some of the people who had worked on Mimbres Foundation projects (including Gilman and Anyon, two of the co-editors, along with Steve LeBlanc, who started the Mimbres Foundation.)
Why is there so much interest in Mimbres Ceramics?
Patricia A. Gilman: The paintings of people and animals on some Mimbres black-on-white pottery attracts the attention of many archaeologists and non-archaeologists. Unfortunately, the price that such vessels can command has led to the wholesale looting and sometimes the bulldozing of Mimbres sites. Such looting destroys the contexts in which the bowls are embedded, and it is context that allows archaeologists to understand how people lived in the Mimbres Valley in the past. While the paintings on the bowls are beautiful, we want to say things about peoples’ lives.
Roger Anyon: Simply put, Mimbres ceramics are a unique ceramic decorative tradition that illustrates aspects of Mimbres life in ways unlike any other Southwestern ceramics. The designs are intricate, delicate, bold, and strong. It is, however, most unfortunate that Mimbres designs have such vitality and presence to the modern eye, as it is looting for these ceramics that has contributed to the destruction of Mimbres archaeological sites.
Barbara J. Roth: I think it has to do with their artistic beauty. Many of the pots are absolutely exquisite and to think about someone making that kind of artistic design with a yucca brush is awe-inspiring. I think they are attractive to archaeologists for different reasons, primarily what they can tell us about Mimbres society. I have to admit I have been frustrated at times with the focus on ceramics, as in the past (not in the present volume!) this has led to an overemphasis on the role of ceramics in the society. They were clearly important to Mimbres people, but they only represent a small portion of their lifeways, and there are a lot of other data, much of which are discussed in the volume, that help us piece together what life was like in the Mimbres region.
What do you hope will come next in Mimbres archaeology?
Patricia A. Gilman: Current research projects are examining sites and artifacts to the north and west of the Mimbres Valley, and I hope that a better understanding of what makes Mimbres Mimbres will come from these. Another major research project is using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis to source the pottery to the sites at which it was made. This has been and will continue to be ground-breaking in terms of who was and who was not making pottery and where that pottery ended up. What I hope will come next that no one is apparently doing in a major way is to collate the elements in the paintings of people and animals. That is, do staffs (perhaps staffs of authority?) associate with men, women, or both? With what or whom do specific animals— dogs, macaws, antelopes— associate? Even though we have admired Mimbres painted pottery since the early 1900s, no one has ever done such a study.
Roger Anyon: There is so much research yet to be done in both the field and in existing museum collections. We are just beginning to understand the pre-ceramic period and I see this as a major avenue of future research into the origins of agriculture in southern New Mexico. I also hope that we get a much clearer idea as to how Mimbres pithouse and pueblo society was structured, and how internally and externally driven dynamics caused change. Finally, there is so much to learn about the late periods, after Mimbres ceramics are no longer made, when there is dramatic societal change on many scales.
Barbara J. Roth: I’d like to see a resurgence of research in the area. As I said in a recent grant proposal, we can still fit most of the scholars actively doing fieldwork in the area in a minivan. I’d like to see more student involvement, and I’d like to see researchers start to ask different questions. When the Mimbres Foundation started, archaeology as a discipline was very focused on topics like ecology, land use, subsistence, and climate. These are very important and are crucial to understanding Mimbres society. But through time, there were all kinds of interesting social and ideological things going on, and we have only started to explore them.
In New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology, the contributors discuss current knowledge of the people who lived in the Mimbres region of the southwestern United States and how our knowledge has changed since the Mimbres Foundation, directed by Stephen A. LeBlanc, began the first modern archaeological investigations in the region. Many of these authors have spent decades conducting the fieldwork that has allowed for a broader understanding of Mimbres society. Additional contributions include a history of nonprofit archaeology by William H. Doelle and a concluding chapter by Steven A. LeBlanc reflecting on his decades-long work in Mimbres archaeology and outlining important areas for the next wave of research.
The author of more than 30 books, Stephen J. Pyne is known for his expert works on landscape fire and histories of place. His writing is thoughtful, informative, occasionally humorous, and above all well-crafted and engaging. MacArthur, Fulbright, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships are just some of the many honors Pyne has received for his writing and scholarship. Pyne has been a professor at Arizona State University since 1985 where, among other things, he has taught nonfiction writing to graduate students. His new book, Style and Story, is for anyone who wishes to craft nonfiction texts that do more than simply relay facts and arguments. With abundant examples, the book shares pragmatic guidance on how to create powerful, engaging texts by employing suitable literary tools and strategies. Pyne recently answered six questions about his work:
Why did you decide to write this book?
In 2009 I published Voice and Vision to accompany a graduate writing class I developed—it looked at writing issues that most caught my fancy. Over the years I realized that I needed to address a lot of other topics as well. Style and Story is the result. Each book can stand alone, but they are intended to complement one another.
What are three hallmarks of great nonfiction that you look for in your reading and writing?
For me the best nonfiction is one that invites me into an imagined world—not a fictional world of invented facts and characters, but one that nonetheless absorbs me into a state of ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ The style adds something beyond the particular sources or data. Most fundamentally, it sparks in me a sense that I’d like to write something similar. Often, somewhere, I’ll try to do just that.
What is the biggest mistake new nonfiction writers make?
I think the best nonfiction begins with voice. Get your voice right and a lot of other good things follow. The students that struggle the most are trying to write in a voice that isn’t theirs, and the course becomes a literary detox project. They can’t concentrate on art and craft until they know who is speaking and why. Then they can focus on the how.
Who are the nonfiction writers you looked to when you started your nonfiction writing career? Who do you admire now?
When I worked on the North Rim, the Coconino County bookmobile would roll in once a month and that was my only source of reading materials apart from subscription magazines. There were a lot of regional books, which introduced me to Wallace Stegner, which is where I realized nonfiction could be literature. In fact I thought he was best when he played against type—when he, who thought of himself as a novelist, wrote nonfiction, especially history and biography.
I’m pretty much an omnivore when it comes to reading. Mostly, I read to learn rather than for pleasure —reading as part of my research. When I read to improve my writing, I tend to read John McPhee (for openings and transitions), Joan Didion (for profiles), Simon Schama (for big narrative), and Tom Wolfe (for humor). All of them are even older than I am, so my sense of style continues to be a shade behind contemporary taste.
The book expands on your previous guide, Voice and Vision. What are the new topics you cover?
Openings and closings, which matter particularly if you are writing narrative; settings, technical material, short and long narration, and varieties of nonfiction humor. Academics in particular have humor beaten out of them, yet it can be very effective when done right (it’s hard to do). I also include some thoughts on writing as a discipline, on how to read as a writer, and on the challenges to nonfiction posed by fiction. I don’t care to have the borders between the two blurred. If you want to tweak stuff as you would in fiction, then write fiction. Nonfiction has rules.
But it does not have an aesthetic as fiction does. It could, it just doesn’t. When nonfiction crosses the border into fiction, I don’t regard it as an excess of literary imagination but as a failure of imagination. A good writer will find a way to play by the rules.
Also, on the recommendation of readers, I include a roster of writing exercises.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a short book – an idea book and synthesis – called The Great Ages of Discovery that will provide an interpretive framework for thinking about the last 600 years of geographic exploration by Western civilization. It’s a concept I’ve used in several other books but have never isolated and treated fully in its own right.
Then back to fire. For some time I’ve wanted to do a fire history of Mexico. And I’ve had my sights on a book that would survey concisely the fire histories of South America, Africa, and Asia, maybe modeled on To the Last Smoke.
I try to have some long-term projects, though I find new prompts appear and are fun to pursue. I never thought, for example, I would write books about writing. Now I’ve written two. I’d also like to consider another biography, and maybe try some sustained humorous or at least satirical writing, but all this is probably more than I can realistically manage.
Stephen J. Pyne is a Regents’ Professor in the Human Dimensions Faculty of the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is the author of many successful books, mostly on wildland fire and its history, but also dealing with the history of places and exploration.
Laura Da’s new poetry collection, Instruments of the True Measure, moves its reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland. This collection proves how truly entwined the words poets craft and their personal experiences are. Laura Da’ spoke with us about her inspiration for these poems, as well as how an unexpected turn in her life led to a new form of poetic energy.
“Writing the poems and essays for Instruments of the True Measure started as a natural continuation of the poetic obsessions that have always motivated my work: history, identity, alienation, family, and place,” she says. “As such, this book has direct connections to my first book, Tributaries. Seeking to learn more about my Shawnee ancestors by way of their movements across the land, I became very taken with multiple American histories of surveying, geography, and cartography. I was struck with the ways forms of measurement became such a crucial and destructive tool of colonialism. This became a foundational element of the book.”
“About mid-way through my work on this book, I swerved. Out of the blue, I fell very ill in 2015 and ended up on dialysis until I received a transplant in 2018. I can track the change in my voice and style clearly from a more muted, objectivist tone to a more searing and lyrical connection between the traumas of the present and the past. There is a juxtaposition between my established process of obsessive research leading to image and narrative driven poems with a raw new poetic engagement with personal pain, fear, and sense of exile. I dig in with these poems and I see this book now as an artifact of my own desire to survive and mark my own place here.”
Below, find the poem titled “The Point of Beginnings” from Laura Da’s collection. This poem opens Instruments of the True Measure with themes of birth and the power of the natural world placed within the definition of geodaesia, rendering them inseparable concepts in the context of the poem. Carrying the weight of American history, this poem launches a collection that is deeply concerned with Shawnee lives and the forced removal and frontier violence which they endured.
THE POINT OF BEGINNINGS
Geodaesia: The art of surveying and measuring— footpath stamped and deer path trampled.
Wily agents of creation
foliated under great pressure;
white-banded rock embedded
in absolute time’s alluvial fan.
The first creeping
act of range
is the infant’s change of heart
from open to closed
upon the initial intake of breath. Thence with the meanders of the river.
Laura Da’ is a poet and a public school teacher. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, won a 2016 American Book Award. In 2015, Da’ was a Made at Hugo House Fellow and a Jack Straw Fellow. She lives near Seattle with her husband and son.
Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River by Beth Rose Middleton Manning documents the significance of the Allotment Era to a long and ongoing history of cultural and community disruption. It details Indigenous resistance to both hydropower and disruptive conservation efforts. With a focus on northeastern California, this new book highlights points of intervention to increase justice for Indigenous peoples in contemporary natural resource policy making. Today Middleton Manning answers five questions.
What inspired you to embark on this project?
Generally—a lifetime of love of the land coupled with a deep commitment to justice. More specifically—my work with the Maidu Culture and Development Group (MCDG) beginning in 2001, and later the Maidu Summit Consortium and Conservancy beginning in 2004. Mentors and friends in the Maidu community took the time to take me around their country, welcome me to their ceremonies, gatherings, meetings, and events, and talk with me about struggles to access and protect their homelands.
Back in about 2002, MCDG board member Lorena Gorbet showed me a map she had made documenting the status of the lands under hydroelectric projects in the Maidu homeland. Many of these lands were former Indian allotment lands. I began assisting with the project to find out how, specifically, these lands transferred out of Maidu hands. I traveled to local, regional, state, private, and federal archives containing Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management (then, General Land Office) records, and found documentation of over 600 allotments in Plumas and Lassen counties. Some of the files contained more details, including extensive correspondence about the land, and photos of the lands. I was deeply moved by the stories of Maidu and other Indigenous (Pit River, Paiute, Washoe) resistance and ingenuity in the face of oppressive paternalism by the Indian Agents and greed by the corporate developers. Outside of this research and conversations with community members, I had not learned about this struggle before, or about the role of allotment lands in the seizure and development of rural California. It seemed almost as if history was repeating itself in the early 2000s with the utility company settlement and recommended divestiture of some of these headwaters lands in Maidu country. Lands around or near the reservoirs and other hydroelectric operations were recommended for conservation but Maidu allotment history and contemporary Maidu presence and care for the land were not mentioned in the settlement or process. As members of the Maidu community advocated for the return of these areas of the Maidu homeland, I was able to provide supportive information on specific histories of Maidu lands seized for timber or hydro development and now targeted for conservation, to support their return to Maidu ownership.
This book has been called a must-read for wilderness advocates. Why do you hope they’ll read it? The history of post-contact land use and management is deeply intertwined with institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusion. One must look deeply at the history of land use planning, and how it reverberates into the present day, so as not to perpetuate institutionalized injustices. Locking lands up in industry can be similar to locking lands up for conservation or wilderness preservation if Indigenous peoples are excluded. Indigenous peoples must be leaders and partners in land planning and land stewardship. The work to protect land must correspond to the work to bring justice to the ways Indigenous people are being and have been treated, in terms of exclusion from planning and jurisdiction within their own homelands. This leads to better projects as well as to building “a future of justice“ as my friend Farrell Cunningham (yatam) wrote in the Maidu Summit Land Management Plan for Tasmam Koyom/ Humbug Valley.
You point out that during your course work for your PhD in Environmental Science Policy and Management you weren’t required to take any Native Studies courses. Why is this problematic? Every inch of the world is an Indigenous homeland. That means that every place has sacred sites, food growing or gathering sites, burials, medicinal gathering sites, and other important places. It also means that there is a tradition of knowledge of specific places and the species found there. By not highlighting Indigenous homelands and Indigenous stewardship in the study of environmental science, policy, and management, we are disregarding millennia of Indigenous scientific knowledge and practice, and perpetuating a colonial process that disregards Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous struggle, Indigenous survivance, and Indigenous leadership in land and water planning and stewardship.
Where do you hope the conversation among conservationists and tribal communities goes next? I would like to see more equitable collaborations between Indigenous people and conservation entities, with deferral to Native expertise, joint leadership or deferral to Native leadership, fair compensation to Indigenous partners, revenue sharing in grants and agreements, and collaborative planning.
What are you working on now?
I am working with a colleague on an article on tribal participation in the carbon market, with a focus on the experience of one Native nation in California that has really opened the door for increased Indigenous participation and leadership in cap-and-trade projects. While the carbon market may be seen negatively as a form of commodification of ecosystem services, tribes are creatively using cap-and-trade systems to achieve tribal goals, within a framework of protecting and reacquiring homelands. This is particularly important in California with the statewide mandatory cap-and-trade system, which includes the participation of two Native nations in California, and other nations in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Maine, and Arizona. I am also interested in other tribal-led applications of environmental policy, legal, and financial tools, such as tribes’ creative use of new market tax credits (NMTCs) to buy back traditional lands. While they are more often used for low-income housing projects, NMTCs have been used by at least one tribe in California to facilitate a land purchase. I also continue to be interested in Native-led conservation initiatives, especially Native land trusts, and use of conservation easements and land trust structures by tribes in California and beyond.
I also recently received a small Diversity Innovation grant to develop an area of teaching on the Indigenous Caribbean. The Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis has a unique hemispheric perspective, but there is currently no teaching on the Caribbean. My paternal family is from the Caribbean, and I have done some work on conservation of cultural heritage sites with Garifuna organizations in St. Vincent. I will be working with an incoming graduate student with interests in Indigenous and African relationships in the Caribbean to develop a course on the Indigenous Caribbean, with a focus on contemporary politics and land stewardship.
I also have a project with a senior graduate student in NAS working on the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) between the University of California (both the central Office of the President and individual campuses) and Native nations in California.
Finally, I am engaged in two regional collaborations with climate scientists throughout CA and the greater southwest. I hope to collaboratively develop research and implementation projects that foreground tribal collaboration and tribal leadership in climate change analysis, adaptation, and mitigation.
Encantado is a poetry collection which weaves a myriad community of individuals together through detailed windows into their lives. Inspired by the real and imagined stories around her, Mora brings us to the heart of what it means to be a chorus of voices together.
About her writing process, Mora says, “When I give an idea or scene or emotion quiet and time, a draft of a poem can emerge from a place inside. I’m both listening and pondering. All my grandparents were born in Mexico as was my dad. That fact is part of my inheritance, my wealth, but I write as a human ultimately to share with my fellow humans.”
Below is one of the poems and personalities in Pat Mora’s forthcoming collection. Both playful and profound, “Gilberto” examines themes of aging while capturing the nostalgia of a youthful past. A sense of reverence for the changes that passing time imparts on individuals envelops the poem, creating a space where resistance and acceptance beautifully coincide.
GILBERTO
Grace now, my scruffy canine compañeros.
We old dogs must show the way.
We savor mornings and day-old bread
in ways young pups don’t understand.
When I was a boy, I’d climb
at dawn to an arroyo
that tasted of mint,
water so clear and cold
it hurt my teeth, so sweet
I’d laugh out loud.
I was a mountain lion,
eyes red, body sleek, lean, agile,
poised to pounce,
gnaw impatiently on life.
Now my ankles and knees
teach me to taste my days,
slowly. I make pronouncements
only you heed, but
I still burn, shake my fists,
consoled by my own voice.
Pat Mora is an award-winning author of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. Her previous books of poetry include Agua Santa: Holy Water, Adobe Odes, and Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints. Among her awards are Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, Honorary Membership in the American Library Association, and she was a recipient and judge of a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mora is the founder of Children’s Day, Book Day, El día de los niños, El día de los libros. A former teacher, university administrator, museum director, and consultant, Mora is a popular speaker who promotes creativity, inclusivity, and bookjoy. She’s the mother of three adult children, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In the new volume Ten Thousand Years of Inequality archaeologists Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith, along with other leading archaeologists, provide analysis of ten millennia of wealth disparities in the ancient world. Today, they answer our questions about the nature and implications of wealth disparity in the distant past.
Why did you embark on this project?
Timothy A. Kohler
TK: I have a habit—not sure if it’s good or bad—of reading as widely as I can, including lots of things that are outside of archaeology. That’s brought me into contact with books like The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker (2006) and Ian Morris’ 2010 book Why the West Rules—For Now. Over the years I’ve also had interesting contacts with a number of economists, most of whom I met through the Santa Fe Institute: people like Sam Bowles, John Miller, and Brian Arthur. All this gave me motivation to study wealth inequality (and the wider problem of how wealth gets created). Then at some point I ran across Mike Smith’s 2014 publication with good ideas about how we can measure abstract quantities like wealth in the archaeological record, even without texts. That provided a method. When I want to understand a new measure I try applying it to a dataset set I know well, so I decided to see what would happen if I looked at wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient in the archaeological record of the Dolores Archaeological Project, which I was lucky enough to be involved in from 1979–1985. The result was a short report in Current Anthropology in 2016. By that point Mike and I started collaborating.
Michael E. Smith
MS: I have been interested for a long time in the nature of social inequality in ancient cities and state-level societies. This goes back to my undergraduate senior honors thesis, which asked the question of whether houses of different wealth or status levels at Teotihuacan could be distinguished on the basis of their artifacts. Most of the fieldwork throughout my career has been addressed—at least in part—at issues of wealth variation within and between Aztec settlements. I experimented with using the Gini coefficient in a 1992 publication, and then let it drop for a while. In 2012 I revisited my earlier work and added some new cases and published a paper (2014) on wealth inequality at Aztec sites (the paper Tim mentions). Then in about 2013 Tim and I had a short meeting with Sam Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute. Sam is a leading economist on the issue of social inequality in society today. He was branching out to study inequality in the past, using the Gini coefficient, and he encouraged Tim and me to do more work on the topic. We decided to see who else was working along these lines, and we organized a symposium at the 2016 SAA meetings on ancient inequality. That led to an advanced seminar at the Amerind Foundation, which was the basis of our book.
When we say “ancient wealth,” what do we mean?
MS: “Wealth” refers to valuable resources, both the possession of such resources and access to them. Today inequality is measured in money: both income and total wealth. Most ancient societies did not have money (or if they did, we have little information on the wealth of most individuals), but a variety of material remains do reflect the wealth of individual households. Of the various such remains (e.g., portable artifacts, burial goods), the strongest measure of household wealth is the size of the house.
TK: We’ve both been influenced by an important series of papers (with a large number of co-authors) that came out in Current Anthropology in 2010 on “Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies.” These papers identified three main types of wealth: embodied (for example, number of offspring), relational (for example, number of trade partners or allies), and material (for example, acres of fields, size of herds). One reason we settled on house size as our preferred measure (other than the fact that it can be measured for many sites) is that it seems to integrate aspects of all these dimensions.
How do archaeologists describe and measure who is wealthy and who is not?
TK: Over the years archaeologists have tried a number of different measures. Some of these (for example, the costs embedded in the materials found in the house or in its associated trash) probably work fairly well but most of them are also subject to various “formation processes.” For example, some houses get cleaned out before they are abandoned, whereas others are accidentally burned with all their materials inside. In some sites, it is straightforward to associate extramural trash with a specific house, in others it is nearly impossible. One reason we settled on house size is that it relatively immune to such confounding factors.
MS: In order to be consistent in comparing the wealth measures from different regions and time periods, we mostly limited our consideration to the sizes of houses. Several chapter authors touched on other measures of wealth at their sites, but all contributed house size measurements. Our basic assumption (borne out by a number of ethnographies) is that wealthier people live in larger houses. While this is not an absolute statement, it does work well in many cases where we know the house sizes and have independent measures of wealth. This justifies our reliance on house size.
Since publication, your book has received a lot of notice, including an article for the public in Smithsonian Magazine. Why do you think this concept is so interesting to people right now?
MS: Wealth inequality is hot topic today, both among economists and other social sciences, and by the press and the public. The level of wealth concentration in the U.S. is now much higher than it has ever been in the past. A variety of social problems seem to flow from pronounced wealth inequality in a society. The fact that we were able to present data in inequality in the past – using a measure that other scholars understand and use all the time (the Gini coefficient) – helps make our work more attractive to a wider audience.
TK: I think there’s a widespread feeling, at least in the U.S., that even though unemployment has been declining for a number of years, most people aren’t making the same sort of economic progress that was widespread from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is also widely understood that Gini indices computed on total wealth were also a lot lower (indicating more equitable distribution) than now. It’s easy enough to put these two facts together. That naturally makes people interested in what causes concentration of wealth, and whether there have long-term trends that help us understand its consequences.
What are you working on now?
TK: The data we published in the book are a nice start, but there are many regions (most of Africa and all of South America, for example) that were not represented. I’m working with a group (that includes Mike) to start a project to fill in these data gaps, and also to make more progress on the causes of changes in wealth concentration in different regions, and through time.
MS: In addition to participating in Tim’s project that continues our work on ancient inequality, I am working on Teotihuacan. I recently took over as Director of the ASU Teotihuacan Archaeological Laboratory, and I am completing some of the unfinished analyses, of the influential Teotihuacan Mapping Project. I am also writing a book on early cities that will be called something like “Urban Life in the Distant Past: Archaeology and Comparative Urbanism,” and I am involved with several interdisciplinary research projects on cities.
Timothy A. Kohler is Regents professor of anthropology at Washington State University. His most recent book, edited with Mark D. Varien, is Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology.
Michael E. Smith is a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University. His latest book is the prize-winning At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life.
In Discovering Pluto historian William Sheehan along with his co-writer Dale P. Cruikshank uncover the behind-the-scenes history of the enigmatic and much discussed icy orb at the edge of our solar system. Today, William answers our questions about the outer Solar System.
William Sheehan and Alan Stern at Lowell Observatory, June 2018
Why do you think Pluto has so captured the public imagination since it was first identified by Clyde Tombaugh in the 1930s?
From times immemorial, there were five planets—wanderers—tracing movements across the starry background of the night sky. After the Copernican revolution, the Earth of course became a planet, like the others traveling around the Sun, but still Saturn marked the outer boundary of the Solar System, and the stars were at unfathomable distances beyond. This ancient picture changed in 1781, when William Herschel discovered Uranus. Suddenly the scale of the Solar System had doubled, and within a few short years other astronomers began to discover new planets, as they were then called; these were the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Inspired either by the discovery of Uranus itself or by the first asteroids, Keats wrote the stirring lines,
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.”
Uranus began after a few years to wander inexplicably off course, and this led two mathematical investigators—John Couch Adams in England and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier in France—to use the discrepancies in its movements to calculate the position of an unseen planet beyond—Neptune—whose optical discovery was made on the basis of these calculations in Berlin in September 1846. This was seen at the time as the greatest achievement of Newtonian celestial mechanics—the discovery of a planet, “with the stroke of a pen.” Adams and Le Verrier were duly enshrined in the pantheon of astronomical greats. Few developments in astronomy were awarded greater accolades than this, literal discovery of a new world.
Le Verrier himself thought that there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and even gave it a name, Vulcan; it does not exist, and never did—the movements for which its existence was invoked were explained by Einstein on the basis of the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. However, Uranus continued, apparently, to be wandering off course, even after Neptune was entered into the equations. Several astronomers, of whom Percival Lowell was the most celebrated, developed an elaborate program to track down another putative planet—Planet X—which might be indicating its presence as Neptune had done for Adams and Le Verrier. Lowell was an extraordinarily colorful and interesting figure, who is best remembered for founding the Southwest’s (and Arizona’s) first major observatory in Flagstaff, and for his exciting and provocative theories about the canals of Mars, which won over the general public (and inspired science fiction writers like Wells and Burroughs) but were harshly criticized by many professional astronomers. Lowell’s motivations in searching (secretively for the most part) for “X” were complex, and included the hope that recapitulating the great feat of Adams and Le Verrier would restore his prestige in the eyes of other astronomers. Unfortunately, Planet X was undiscovered when he died in November 1916.
The story of how later the search was resurrected at his observatory, how a self-taught farm boy from Kansas (Clyde Tombaugh) was hired to carry out the mind-numbing and backbreaking work of searching for it on photographic plates exposed in all weather under the stars, and how Clyde found a planet that at first was hailed as the incarnation of the icy planet of Percival’s dreams in 1930 provided the perfect coda to the story of frustrated ambition redeemed by faith and hard work. The planet was also the first discovered by an American, and came just as the Great Depression—and the rise of Fascism in Europe—were getting underway, so that the world, and Americans in particular, were in need of “good news.” In the end, Pluto proved to be a most peculiar planet, and was shown—rather definitively by Dale Cruikshank and David Morrison who in 1976 discovered the presence of methane ice on the surface—to be smaller than the Earth’s moon, and has now been seen as a kind of dual object—planetary in some ways, including rotundity and having an active (if extraordinarily odd) geology, but also the largest of the Kuiper Belt Objects which roam the outer Solar System.
What was the most surprising thing you uncovered during your research for Discovering Pluto?
The most surprising thing was what the New Horizons probe found when it passed by Pluto in July 2015. Most people, including me, had probably expected a cold and inert world, not perhaps unlike that the celebrated British astronomy writer Patrick Moore had invoked in 1955, “Beyond all doubt, Pluto is the loneliest and most isolated world in the Solar System—cut off from its fellows, plunged in everlasting dusk, silent, barren, and touched with the chill of death.” Far from it; instead, areas of Pluto show evidence of quite recent geological activity, with changing “land” forms that consist of exotic ices—including recently, methane ice dunes in Sputnik Planitia. It is also exciting to see—on an actual body in the Solar System—examples of the behavior of these ices that has already been elucidated in the laboratory.
You have written many books about planetary science, including Planet Mars. What keeps you coming back to writing these histories?
I have been fortunate in having been born just before Sputnik went into orbit around the Earth, and being consciously aware as the first spacecraft set out for the Moon and planets. I acquired my first small telescope in the mid-1960s, at a time when visual observations by amateur astronomers were still often better than the most detailed photographs by professional astronomers at the great observatories, and when it still seemed that amateurs might contribute usefully to their study. When I started out, Mariner 4 had not yet passed by Mars (July 1965, fifty years to the day before New Horizons made its Pluto flyby!), and it was still possible—just—to believe in Percival Lowell’s canals of Mars! Mariner 4—which showed there were craters on Mars—brought what seemed at the time to be a Great Disillusionment; almost like finding out (and I was at that age, just ten or so) that Santa Claus didn’t exist.
Robert Burnham, Jr, who wrote the Celestial Handbook series, and used the Pluto telescope for the proper motion study at Lowell Observatory in the 1960s, was a mentor, and encouraged me to look at Comet Ikeya-Seki in October 1965—it remains the most spectacular comet I have ever seen. This shows how important an interest of a professional can be in encouraging a young person. After a number of years, I was invited (in the summer of 1982) to Lowell as a guest investigator with a somewhat tentative project of trying to understand how observers like Lowell could have seen canals on Mars when obviously there are no canals. Art Hoag was the director then, and Bill Hoyt, who had written the landmark book Lowell and Mars published by University of Arizona Press, was in-residence historian. While there—and coming into contact with the observing books of Lowell and his associates, and seeing how their visions of canals gradually unfolded and became elaborated over time—and also observing directly through the Clark telescope they had used, I had a flash of insight—I was in the NAU library at the time; I remember it as if it were yesterday–that the key aspect no one had recognized was that because of fluctuating seeing the canals were seen only in brief intervals of a fraction of a second or so. All the observers of the canals—including Clyde Tombaugh, who graciously corresponded with me on his experiences—described this. Thus the phenomena of the canals could be related to experimental psychology. I had always been drawn to interdisciplinary work—this has become the fashion now but at the time represented an aspiration that was more honored in the breach than the observance, simply because the various disciplines had become so developed and complex that it was difficult for anyone to master them at the same time. In any case, I came away from Lowell with the thesis of a book—Planets and Perception—which I drafted during the summer of 1983, while living in a small town in southern Minnesota, just across from the Iowa border, with no resources more than those I brought with me and the Carnegie library with a six-foot shelf of books on astronomy, physics, and math. In retrospect, I think I was crazy to tackle such an ambitious project more or less alone and unaided; had I been in a graduate program, I might have worked for ten years on it, but I finished the draft in several months and then—put it away in a desk drawer as I began my medical studies.
Eventually, I got around to submitting it—and did so only to one publisher, the University of Arizona Press. Though they quailed a bit at the cross-disciplinary nature of the thing—and had to send it out to three academic reviewers, two astronomers and one psychologist!—they graciously accepted it. It was published thirty years ago in November, and I didn’t know what to expect. I was in my internship then. In January, I got a good review from Richard Baum in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, which I remember reading in the on-call room, and thought that I was lucky to get that. By early May, I was at morning rounds on the psych service the VA in Minneapolis; the attending physician, Charlie Dean, who subscribed to Nature, rather casually congratulated me on the review the book had received in Nature by the renowned historian of science, Albert Van Helden. I was over the Moon. Of course, the book had many faults which I see only too clearly now—how could it not?—but proved to be quite seminal in its small way, and I will always be grateful to the University of Arizona Press for taking a chance with an unknown scholar and a very experimental piece of work and believing in it.
But to get back to your question, this book has defined my lifelong career interest—and until recently, when I retired, I have been both a practicing psychiatrist, interested in the brain and the way we “know,” and a historian of astronomy—and have found the history of Solar System studies during this period of time to be perhaps the most important thing we as a species have done. It has been our Parthenon, our Cathedrals. Obviously there are a lot of writers who understand this, and have devoted themselves to the documentation of this wonderful era, including many of the scientists who have been in the forefront of research (like Dale Cruikshank, my co-author of Discovering Pluto). But I think my background in psychiatry has given me a somewhat unique perspective on the human angle of this story, and that story—the exploration of the Solar System—is, after all, passionately and irreducibly a human story, whose grandeur and magnificence far exceeds the explorations (and too often bloody) conquests of previous eras. It collectively represents some of the best aspects of human nature, Something, I would add, that we desperately need to affirm and reaffirm at the present time, when it is too easy to be disillusioned about our species in light of some of its more unsavory aspects. These are things that keep drawing me back to this subject.
With the New Horizons space probe back in action after a 6-month break, what do you think will be the next chapter in Pluto’s history?
We are looking forward to New Horizons’ close approach to another KBO, MU69, which most of us expect to show only an ancient battered landscape. But as with Pluto, we are foolish not to expect to be pleasantly surprised, and perhaps we will discover fresh patches of surface exposed by a recent collision with another KBO, in which case we may have an opportunity to see deeper into the interior where so much of the early history of the Solar System lies hidden.
What are you working on now?
I have been working on a series of books on each of the planets for Reaktion Press in Great Britain—so far I have finished Jupiter and Mercury, and am on to Saturn. I am also working on a book on Mars with Jim Bell for the University of Arizona Press, who is the PI on the camera system for the 2020 Mars rover (and sample return mission). As with the Pluto book written with Dale, I will be covering mostly the historical backgrounds, in this case how we came to know Mars (including our long tendency to see it as the image of the Earth, or even of Arizona!), while Jim will take over the torch and bring to it his unrivaled knowledge of the spacecraft era. I always prefer, by the way, if possible, to work in collaboration, as it not only provides an opportunity for me to greatly extend the range of my own knowledge but also is as much more enjoyable for the shared companionship.
William Sheehan is a historian of astronomy and psychiatrist. His many books include Planets and Perception, Worlds in the Sky, and The Planet Mars, also published by the University of Arizona Press. Asteroid No. 16037 was named in his honor.
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In 
are just some of the many honors Pyne has received for his writing and scholarship. Pyne has been a professor at Arizona State University since 1985 where, among other things, he has taught nonfiction writing to graduate students. His new book, 
What was the most surprising thing you uncovered during your research for Discovering Pluto?