Where I Got the Crazy Idea for Under the Tucson Moon & Other Tidbits
For nine winters, Mario and I travelled to Arizona for a writing retreat, and every year I wrote on my blog, first Furious Spinner and then later on my website. I wrote about how I was feeling. I wrote about the desert, migrants, border issues, the shootings in Tucson, my family, illness, healing, and my writing. I've taken the best of those pieces and gathered them into this book. If you generally like the essays on my blog or you enjoy my Facebook posts about my life, this book is for you!
Wholly Inadequate Descriptions of This Book
The One Sentence Pitch
Enter the life of a deeply creative artist in these 39 essays about life in the Sonoran Desert, gathered in one place for the first time.
Cover Blurb
For nine winters, writer Kim Antieau and her husband, Mario Milosevic, travelled to the Sonoran Desert. Kim wrote many novels on these retreats, including the well-loved Church of the Old Mermaids, The Fish Wife, Whackadoodle Times, and The Monster’s Daughter.
While in the desert, Kim also wrote a series of essays about borderlands: not just political borderlands, but those in-between places where creativity thrives or dies, those places profane or sacred, joyful or despairing. In her novel, The Desert Siren, Kim describes one of her characters as “a siren. She sings to the wild things, she wrangles sea horses and dust storms. She directs coyote choruses and bargains with ravens. She does not hear the call of the wild. She is the call of the wild.” Kim is a desert siren, too, only she wrangles words, instead of horses.
Introduction
FIRST
In the fall of 2004, I put out a call to friends and family, asking them to help me find a beautiful, environmentally safe place where my husband, Mario Milosevic, and I could stay for part of the winter. We live in the Pacific Northwest in an area where the winters are long, cold, rainy, and icy. I longed for sun and warmth.
As it happened, like a wonderful fairy goddessmother stepping in to save the day, Terri Windling answered my email and told me about a retreat in the Arizona desert she had helped create called Endicott West. I hesitated at first because we had lived in Tucson eighteen years earlier, and we had not enjoyed the experience. But Endicott West sounded peaceful and beautiful. Best of all, it had been designed to be a safe haven for writers, artists, and those who needed an environmentally safe place to shelter.
We started out driving to Tucson from the Columbia River Gorge where we live, but we had a car accident the first day out. Then we spent a week going from doctor to doctor and test to test to make certain Mario was all right because we weren’t sure how the accident had occurred: Had Mario fallen asleep at the wheel or had he passed out? It was a harrowing week, and at the end of it, I got on a plane with Mario and we flew to Phoenix. I don’t normally fly, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
Eventually we made it to Tucson. The moment we opened the green metal door and stepped into the casita, I knew I had come home. Every nook and cranny, every wall, every door—all of it—was beautiful and meaningful. The place pulsed with mythos, magic, stories, and nature. It was as if it had been created just for me—for me and every creature, human or not, who sometimes needs a way station, a resting spot, a betwixt and between place to rest and recuperate before carrying on. Virginia Woolf wrote that every artist needs a place of her own. This was my place.
For the next nine winters, Mario and I came to Endicott West. We renamed it the Old Mermaids Sanctuary (after the Old Mermaids came out of the wash and gave me the stories for my novel Church of the Old Mermaids), and we eventually shorthanded it to the Sanctuary. It was always wonderful and difficult to be at the Sanctuary. We looked forward to it every year.
During these nine years, my best friend died, two of our close friends died unexpectedly, I had two surgeries, I started and finished school again, I struggled with illness, depression, and identity, a family member struggled with drug addiction, a brother-in-law had a stroke, my father had major heart surgery, and my mother died. I also sold several books during this time, but then the bottom fell out of traditional publishing, and Mario and I became indie writers.
Also during this time our country was fighting two wars, our economy tanked, and we eventually elected a new president (and then re-elected him). Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson, and the country experienced numerous mass shootings, including Aurora and Newtown. Around the world, parts of Indonesia were crushed by the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, and Japan endured an earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukishima nuclear disaster, and oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The weather continued to go crazy. Wildfires burned up the West, Hurricane Katrina changed New Orleans and environs forever, Hurricane Sandy devastated the East, and monster tornadoes carved deadly swaths through the Midwest and Southern regions of the United States.
Sometimes it felt like the world was coming apart at the seams.
Through everything, I felt like I could survive and even thrive as long as I could eventually come to the Sanctuary with Mario.
I wrote hundreds of thousands of words during our writing retreats in Arizona and posted them on my blog. The first year I didn’t write a novel, so I wrote more essays than I did the subsequent years. I had too many words to put in this volume, so I tried to include essays that showed who I was during each year and how I felt about being at the Sanctuary. Although I edited these essays a bit for sense, I tried to leave them as they were when I first posted them. I wanted the reader to see the evolution of my thinking, writing, and identity. Plus, each piece is of a particular time and place, and I wanted to honor that.
I went to the Sanctuary for healing. I went to find beauty and hope. Essentially I went to find myself again. I found the desert. I found myth in the desert, beauty in the desert. And I found stories. Oh, the stories I discovered—the stories the place told to me! I wrote down as many of them as I could.
Did I find healing, beauty, hope, and myself?
The desert changed me. That is how it should be. The land—place—always shapes me. It shapes all of us. I often say that I am a stenographer to the imaginal. Perhaps I am also a stenographer to the land. Perhaps I am a mouthpiece for the land. If that’s true, I hope my words have done this place and my experience justice.
I’ll leave that for the reader to decide.
