2008 Writing D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September
2008
Write All About It
An outpouring of authorship for this years' writing contest.
Maybe those signs for Silver City along the interstate ought to change from boasting about "Four Gentle Seasons" to "A Zillion Aspiring Writers." Deming might want to consider dropping its annual Duck Races in favor of a keyboard competition. And Las Cruces should perhaps rethink that spaceport tax and look to building an ink and typing-paper industry instead.
Southwest New Mexico, it turns out, is a hotbed for authors — at least judging from the monsoon-like flood of entries in our annual writing competition. We received more than 70 short stories, essays, articles, poems and even a song, making the picking of just five winners to print in this issue more challenging than ever before. The writers ranged from a teenager to countless grandparents. We were touched by a posthumous submission by the late author's spouse, by painstakingly handwritten poetry, by stories emailed with youthful enthusiasm regardless of the entrant's age.
Nor was this surge of submissions limited to Desert Exposure's geographic coverage area. Somehow, by word of mouth and via the Internet, news of our annual contest spread far from our little corner of the Southwest; one packet of short stories arrived all the way from England. (Even these far-afield entries, typically by New Mexico expatriates, carefully adhered to our lone submission requirement — namely, that the piece of writing somehow reflect life in Southwest New Mexico.)
The winners, once we winnowed the stacks of submissions by reading, rereading, sorting and sharing favorites among the staff, proved equally diverse. Two of the winners — Danna Stout and Betty McMahon Buman, both of whom live and write in Deming — have placed in the prestigious top five in previous years' Desert Exposure Writing Contests. The other three 2008 honorees are new to our writing winners' circle. David Popelka, whose winning poem reflects his experience fighting fires, lives in Glenwood. Sharon Barr, also a poet, wrote about a cemetery in Lordsburg but calls Silver City home — thanks in part, she says, to Desert Exposure, which helped inspire her to move here from Alamogordo.
The 2008 Grand Prize Winner is both a newcomer to our writing contest and yet might be a familiar name to regular Desert Exposure readers. Jack Warner retired — sort of, as he now keeps busy as a reserve sheriff's deputy — to Silver City after a long and stellar career as a journalist, primarily working in Atlanta with the Journal-Constitution and the late, lamented United Press International (UPI). He also wrote a novel, Shikar, before leaving Atlanta, which hit bookstores after his arrival in New Mexico; we wrote about Jack and that publishing accomplishment in only our third issue as the new owners of Desert Exposure, in June 2003. Since then, Jack's spent more energy with the sheriff's department and Office of Medical Investigation (OMI) than at the keyboard, though he did write an article for us about his OMI experiences (December 2007).
All that being said, the final judging for the Grand Prize was done blind, without Jack's name on his winning manuscript. So it's a pleasant surprise to welcome him back to our pages with his first published fiction since Shikar. His winning story, "Emiliano's War," was begun as part of a larger work. But, as you'll see, it also stands alone as a riveting, multiple-viewpoint tale of how part of the region's past comes back to haunt an all-too-familiar part of our present along the Bootheel's borderline.
Interestingly, all three short-story winners this year take the inspiration for their setting from the southern stretches of "Desert Exposure country," close to where the US collides with Mexico. Betty McMahon Buman's locale isn't spelled out exactly in her story, "The Old Goat's Secret," but that US-Mexican intersection is essential to her tale. And although Danna Stout's story, "Rabbit Hunting," takes place decades ago, shortly after World War II, its richly rendered setting is "way down south of Deming."
Maybe there's an explanation in that coincidence for the explosion of written creativity we saw in this year's competition. Living so close to the border, with its intersecting cultural influences and undeniable tensions, must inspire the impulse to take pen to paper or tap out words onto a glowing screen. Here where we can see the seams of the country, we're moved to stitch together meaning from lives sometimes lived likewise at the edge.
Enjoy these five exceptional examples — and thanks to all who entered and made our task of selecting winners so happily hard!
You Drink, You Nuke, You Lose
It's silly season for campaign commercials.
One good thing about the debate in New Mexico's US Senate contest shifting to the subject of energy is that we may have seen the last of Rep. Tom Udall's ads boasting about what a tough attorney general he was. Call us persnickety, but the TV commercial's focus on battling DWI bothered us every time it aired. Like fellow Democrat Harry Teague's primary-season ad about education funding, Udall's commercial made us wonder if the candidate knows what office he's running for.
Memo to Tom Udall: The US Senate has very little to do with locking up DWI offenders and throwing away the key. After your years on the other side of the US capitol in the House of Representatives, you should have picked up on that fact by now.
Unfortunately, the shift in the campaign has also brought us an ad by Rep. Steve Pearce — Udall's GOP opponent — touting his support for nuclear power. This commercial, too, makes us holler back at the TV. At one point, the ad shows spiraling prices at a gas pump, and the announcer says nuclear power will liberate us from "Middle East oil cartels."
If Pearce has really invented a car that will run on nuclear power, his talents would be wasted in the US Senate. We're flummoxed as to how the heck nuclear power — whether you're for it or agin' it — could reduce the price at the pump or the grip of foreign oil. OK, theoretically, we suppose that once we're all driving electric cars, nuclear-generated electricity could provide some of the power. Or maybe electric heat from atomic plants could substitute for some of the oil burned up north? (We'd still be importing oil by the millions of barrels.) In either case, you're looking at an awful lot of infrastructure changes before those oil cartels would have anything to worry about — not to mention the long time horizon for actually bringing a new nuclear plant online.
The good news, though, is that if somebody drives a nuclear-powered Pearcemobile while drunk, Tom Udall will be there to put him in the clink.
Doing a Slow Burn
Out West, returning to 55 mph is a non-starter.
Speaking of silliness, let's hope that outgoing Sen. John Warner's suggestion that the US return to a federally mandated 55-mph national speed limit goes out the capitol doors with him. A 55-mph limit might make sense in parts of Virginia, which Warner represents — especially the traffic-clogged highways around Washington, DC, where getting up to 55 is just a dream, anyway. But let's put the good senator in a car crawling at 55 mph across the vast expanses of New Mexico and see how long he thinks this is a good idea.