Nora Holzinger

By now, thousands of people have seen my article, The Artist’s Way is Elitist Trash . In it I critique the classic book by creativity guru Julia Cameron. The article got a lot more attention (and hate comments) than I anticipated, but I stand by everything I wrote. Well just a few months ago, at a charity book store in Silver City, New Mexico, I happened upon a copy of Writing Down the Bones (1986) by Natalie Goldberg, for a sensible $2. I had never heard of this book before, but for $2 I was willing to risk it.  I took the book back to the strawbale cabin I was renting at the edge of the Gila Wilderness and sat in the warmth of the late-winter sun and read. I read and read and finished the book, and then I turned back to page one and read it a second time. At this point, I think I’ve read this book four or five times. Part writing/creativity book and part Zen meditation guide, this slim volume teaches writing as a kind of meditative practice, a practice that can produce quality,...

I begged my partner to ferry me on the back of a motorcycle up the rutted, unpaved eastern side of the Sandia Mountains. I was searching for something. It was mid-October and still hot in Albuquerque, especially in the valley. The AC was on and we wore shorts while our local stores stocked plastic pumpkins and Halloween decorations. An unusual spate of rain gave the parched weeds false hope, and they rioted green in our yard. Autumn was not arriving, despite all the faithfully conducted rituals. The chile had been roasted, ristras strung, the hay baled and put up in barns, the crows returned, Balloon Fiesta chaos packed in, and tarantulas scuttled across the road searching for mates.  Every morning the sun rose a little later over the top of the Sandias, and every evening the sun painted them adobe a little earlier. Slowly the sun traced its way south along the eastern ridge of the Sandia mountains.  Every marker of the changing season had arrived except the one I lusted after...

  Everywhere I turn I am confronted by my own rootlessness. I lack a connectedness to any place. There is no place I can say that I am from. No “homeland”, that is important to my antecedents. No single constant through the changing seas of time and generations come and gone.  I currently live in New Mexico - a place that in some senses hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Outside the cities, the economy and way of life is still agrarian, with some people working the same piece of land since the 1500s. Folks here identify strongly with the land and don’t typically leave if they can help it.  As an obviously Anglo person, the (correct) assumption is that I’m not from New Mexico. Nuevomexicanos often guess where I am from (always California or Texas) and each time, I have to make a choice about where I want to say I am from, because the answer is really “no where”.  I come from a specific kind of nomadic Americans - the ones that travel city to city, state to sta...