Having decided to write a mystery, during the spring of 2015 I mulled plots, starting points, endings, and what to include in between, but I made no progress. In an effort to understand the genre and break the logjam in my mind, I began reading as many mysteries as I could. I began with Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa historical novels, featuring a toga-clad detective, whose books were popular with Sterling, our son. I expanded to P.D. James, Agatha Christie, and Louise Penny before settling on a long run of books by Donna Leon, who police procedurals are set in atmospheric Venice. It was good stuff, but it wasn’t helping me much figure out how to get started. Finally, I took a plunge one afternoon and made a rapid, stream-of-conscious list of story elements:

“Private lands, grazing permits, big rivers, small towns, wildfire, wildlife, endangered species, anti-grazing activists, the Farm Bureau, organic farms, quarries, medical clinics, watershed groups, Boy Scouts, real estate agents, off-roaders, fly fishing, beaver dams, hunters, elk, wilderness, cheap food, local restaurants, pesticides, Big Ag, oil and gas, mining, forests, county commissioners, nonprofits, regulators, water quality and quantity, a leaky dam, lawsuits, showboating politicians, Red vs. Blue, rural vs. urban, water rights, acequias, land grants, land grabs, tribal rights, ghosts, windmills, storms, headcut gullies, riparian restoration, drought, dropping water tables, poisoned predators, cattle getting shot, spiked trees, shoot-shovel-and-shut-up, subdivisions, wildcatters, hikers, tourists, a B&B, a fancy lodge, grassfed beef, raptors, horses, flat hats, kerchiefs, snowbirds, hippies, pot farms, meth labs, wet meadows, a historic flood, a historic graveyard, pioneer families, museums, a haunted hotel, hot tubs, electric fencing, herders, illegal help, immigration services, lookout towers, writers, a jug band, hoedowns, barns, young agrarians, mentors, apprentices, home cooking, heritage orchards, failed bean fields, empty houses, wine collections, archaeological sites, deep canyons, sedges and rushes, fracking, title disputes, old mills, second homes, Safe Harbors, snakes, owls, cats, wilderness warriors, the Rainbow Family, red and green chile, traditional villages, foreign visitors, scientists, range experts, a mobile slaughterhouse, blood and guts, sheep, coyotes, vacation rentals, wi-fi, artisan cheese, dairy cows, a movie set, documentaries, a sheriff, Smokey the Bear, academics, graduate students, a local college, big geology, lakes, backcountry hikes, environmental art, performance artists, forbs, low-stress livestock management, GPS, hay, homemade beer, jeep tours, medicine wheels, fake shamans, vortexes, golf courses, industrial fertilizer, CSAs, CAFOs, feedlots, free-range chickens, banjos, bureaucrats, annual conferences, the radical center, roping tricks, rawhide, abandoned mines, pickup trucks, widowers, toxic spills, sweet spots, marsh gas, solar power, wind turbines, leaky pipes, grass lawns, wild turkeys, buried treasure, lost mission bells, adobe walls, bullet casings, utopian communities, box stores, county courthouses, historical reenactors, public hearings, NEPA, ESA, BLM, red tape, overgrazing, trespass cattle, brands, reporters, television crews, good coffee, bad laws, dust, climate change, big profits, angry bears, rare birds, migrations, pancakes, double-wides, Sunday mass, far horizons, silence, warm-season grasses, springs, teepee rings, isolated cabins, line shacks, wild mustangs, bankruptcy courts, wild bees, local bars, desperados, Hot Shot crews, tree-cutters, fence-sitters, backhoes, poop-and-stomps, opera halls, annual festivals, backyard gardens, mud holes, guns, militia, butterflies, flow charts, Friday night football, taxes, jeans, cowboy hats, more drought, dirty snow, round-ups, resorts, airplanes, and the wide open range.”

The first thing I did after writing the list was pour a cup of coffee. I needed the extra caffeine. After settling into my chair again, I reviewed the long list and decided there wasn’t one book here, but many. That wasn’t a stretch – after all, aren’t most mysteries part of a series? What would I call mine? Two thoughts came to mind: Quivira County (or Country); and The Sun Ranch, the name I had assigned the property. I knew the actual location of both – the Cimarron country in northern New Mexico. There was a big ranch up there I knew pretty well that could serve as a model for The Sun, though its historical trajectories would be different. Having a geography in mind helped hugely in sorting out the arc of the stories – or at least grounding the first story in the series. I could see the ranch, the roads, the town, the mountains, the grasslands, the river, on and on. The next step was easy – call the series the Sun Ranch Saga.

Except I didn’t know what a saga was exactly. I looked it up (in a dictionary that my father gave me in 1974 that I treasure) reading this: saga (n) – a prose narrative recorded in Iceland in the 12^th and 13^th centuries of historic or legendary figures and events of the heroic age. Ok, not really applicable. There was another definition: a long detailed account, such as the saga of the winning of the West. That was more like it! A different dictionary provided a list of synonyms: epic, chronicle, legend, folk tale, romance, history, adventure, myth, story. I like all of them. It gave the series a feeling of heft, I thought, and I couldn’t resist imagining a small group of people telling the story around a campfire. I checked one more source. Saga: a form of novel in which a family or social group are chronicled in a long and leisurely narrative; a dramatic history of a place or people; a very long story. I liked all these definitions too. I had a place – The Sun Ranch – and a hero and a ton of possibilities for drama, minus the 12^th century violence, and a long time frame, or at least a long sequence of books. A saga indeed!

The last thing I did that afternoon in May, 2015, was to sketch out the plots and overall trajectory of each book in the series. In the first book, the murder is resolved (though I didn’t know how yet) and our hero decides to keep the ranch – or else no saga. In the next book, someone shoots her cattle and then commits suicide (based on a true story). There are other threats as well, which destabilize her effort to keep The Sun, with cascading implications for the entire community. In the third book, a lone wolf appears – and a wildlife photographer disappears (or maybe a biologist). Someone is poisoning fish in the river and coyotes are being shot – you know, the usual! Fire and flood dominate the next book, and maybe drought. A body is discovered. A dam bursts. In the next book the healing begins. At the heart of the saga was the ranch – The Sun. I’d start there and build outward, one book at a time. But I had to get my hero to New Mexico first. That proved harder than I expected. In fact, it took two full years before I could even try.

The novel that I published in October is called The Sun: a Mystery.

It wasn’t the first novel I wrote – I’ll discuss that book later – but it was the first one I could make available to readers. I’ve had the idea for the story since early 2015, though the desire to transform my experiences with the Quivira Coalition into fiction extended back by at least a decade. The environmental and cultural landscape I was getting to know well through my nonprofit work was so rich and ripe with characters and possibilities that it practically begged for a plot. But what plot? As I traveled around the American West visiting with progressive ranchers and farmers and becoming familiar with the issues confronting the region’s land and people, I kept an eye out for potential story lines. Trouble was the nonfiction angle on these issues was fantastic enough. Feed the world with regenerative agriculture? Mitigate climate change with soil microbes? Work together in the radical center to bridge cultural divides for the benefit of all? That already sounded like fiction!

Then in January 2015 a small plot popped into my mind involving an outsider who inherits a large historic ranch without warning. I’m not certain where the idea came from – part of the enigma of how imaginations work, I suppose – but as I toyed with its possibilities a world began to unfold itself. I made some quick decisions. First, the main character would be a she. Second, she would be a doctor – Gen and I come from doctor families. Third, her specialty would be bone cancer, which I knew very little about other than it was a devastating disease. In the back of my mind, I was already thinking about the link between her work and a cancer cluster situation in the story that I would develop. Fourth, our hero flies out to New Mexico from back East someplace – Boston, say – to sell the ranch to the highest bidder, but her plans are foiled when a ranch hand is found dead in a cattle tank…murdered. A mystery novel? Hmm. Why not? Alright, then. But who would commit such a terrible crime? I had no idea.

Here’s what I jotted down in my writing notebook at the time: “There are a range of suspects, all of whom want the ranch, and she’s menaced at various times. Her ranching neighbor gets shot and she saves his life with her medical skills [this didn’t happen], introducing new characters to the story. She works an intense 10-day schedule and then goes surfing. She can’t make up her mind…events come to a boil…the story ends with her decision to keep the ranch, defying everyone, especially the murderer.”

Except I didn’t know was the murderer was yet!

The trouble with my decision to write a mystery is that I’ve never been a mystery reader. In my youth, my reading habits were shaped by two sources that stuck with me. The first was my passionately devoted book-reading mother who had eyes mainly for serious literature, particularly William Faulkner and other southern writers (she hailed from West Virginia). She also loved biographies of great writers and I have fond memories of books scattered around our house featuring cover photos of stern-looking authors. Inevitably, I picked a few up. I was soon hooked, especially on the books of Joseph Conrad, whose dark themes and exotic locations appealed to my young heart. He was stern-looking too! My mother’s tastes weren’t all sturm-und-drang, however. I know she loved the racetrack mysteries of Dick Francis – I just didn’t pick them up. I stuck with the serious stuff. As an aside, when my father, who was not a reader, discovered a family connection to Faulkner on his side of our family tree my mother nearly died of envy.

The other literary source was my rapidly growing interest in the environment and literature of the American West. Exploring the region physically as well as intellectually during my high school years, I discovered Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and other western writers, consuming their books with a passion as fervent as my mother’s. I tried to introduce them to her, but she wasn’t interested. John Steinbeck was tolerable in her eyes (he won the Noble Prize after all), but that was it. In her defense, my mother never warmed up to the West. She moved to Phoenix, where I grew up, reluctantly and never adjusted to the city’s reputation as an unsophisticated ‘cow town.’ It was an attitude she extended to the region. It wasn’t just her of course. Many literary critics were dismissive of ‘western writers’ (and continue to be). I never understood why the South could be considered a legitimate source of ‘serious’ literature but not the West. Anyway, after college I quickly expanded my reading on the region, devouring as many words as I could, fiction and nonfiction alike. On the mystery front, I read nearly the entire oeuvre of Tony Hillerman, set in Navajo country, which I enjoyed.

So, it was a thrill to see my book on display at Collected Works, our wonderful local bookstore, sitting on the fiction table next to Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book that had a big influence on me as a young man. Abbey was a hero of mine and I read nearly every book he wrote. He inspired my early interest in the American West and conservation. I thought he was a fine writer, though maybe a bit too breezy and polemical at times. Perfectly in tune with the era, his work had a big impact in the wider world, especially within the wilderness movement. Toward the end of his life, Abbey struggled to complete a sprawling novel that he sardonically called (as I remember) his “fat masterpiece.” Although Abbey’s writing was widely respected, he chafed at the label of being an “environmental” writer. That’s where you would often find him in a bookstore, lumped in with more traditional conservation fare. I think he wanted to be taken more seriously as an author and despite having written a masterpiece already – Desert Solitaire – he set out to write a big work of fiction. Unfortunately, the book – A Fool’s Progress – wasn’t well received, as I recall, but I admired his desire to push personal boundaries, the sign of a true writer, in my opinion.

As much as I admired Edward Abbey as a writer, he wasn’t very helpful as a mentor for composing a mystery. Although his fiction often confronted the inexplicable and contradictory ways of human behavior, including his own, and his plots were occasionally peppered with a dead body, Abbey never wrote a mystery per se. Nevertheless, the ‘high drama’ of much of his writing and the ‘placeness’ of the western lands they inhabited provided a useful backdrop to the composition of a mystery, I thought, especially one set in the Southwest as I intended to do. Abbey was also funny, which was refreshing in a genre – environmental writing – that was notoriously pious and gloomy. It was an admirable quality and one that I stored in the back of my mind for writing purposes. By the way, the ‘environmental’ section of bookstores has noticeably shrunk over the years, I noticed, reflecting an important change in reading habits and interests among Americans, I suspect. Apparently, ‘save-the-planet’ books, once prolific, don’t hold the same appeal anymore – but that’s a topic for another day.

I became a novelist at age fifty-eight.

That’s as crazy as it sounds. What’s the normal career path for a novelist, if such a thing even exists anymore? Start young, earn a creative writing degree, find a job, write day-and-night, take a second job, keep writing, hook an agent, get published, garner praise, write the next novel, win awards, become a social media star, write another book, pray again, grow your career, build your platform, earn a living if you’re lucky, sell the TV rights if you’re luckier.

The wrong career path, I suspect, is to publish your first novel at fifty-eight. No writing degree, no agent, no platform, no awards. For nearly twenty years, I ran a nonprofit conservation organization called The Quivira Coalition that I cofounded with a rancher. I did a ton of writing as part of my duties, but all of it was heavy nonfiction stuff. I hadn’t planned to pen a novel – until I decided to give it a go. It didn’t feel crazy because that’s what writers do. We write. I didn’t want to write just one novel, however, I wanted to write a bunch of them. A series, possibly. I knew my timing was terrible and the path forward ridiculously difficult, but I’m the sort of person who doesn’t follow paths very well anyway. I like to find my own way. That makes life harder, but more interesting. Stick close to the edge, the views are better!

The decision to become a novelist didn’t arrive out-of-the-blue. I dabbled in creative writing over the years, including two screenplays that I wrote during my film school days at UCLA. In the mid-1990s, I worked out the plot for a murder mystery set in Old West. I also wrote a two-act play titled Canyonlands, which is set in a bicycle shop in southern Utah during the glory years of the so-called New West. However, my work at the Quivira Coalition precluded any major literary endeavors, though I put a great of energy into essay writing.

All that changed in 2010 when I stood on the Rialto Bridge in Venice on my 50^th birthday and decided to start writing books. A sequence of nonfiction publications followed each focused on the hopefulness of regenerative agriculture and other save-the-world schemes. I intended to keep going, but I had begun to suffer from a serious case of futuritis which necessitated a change of gears professionally. Besides, stories were drifting into my head – fiction stories – occupying larger and larger amounts of my addled brain, sort of like hearing voices.

They were voices I decided to heed.

This is a journal about my 30+ year career telling hopeful stories about land and people, starting with my decision to become a novelist at age fifty-eight.

I chose this particular title because my creative journey has been as unconventional and daunting as trying to navigate a river in a canoe made of grass. That I made it this far is something of a miracle. From the beginning, I knew my mission in life was to chronicle our times. I was drawn to archaeology and anthropology initially though I knew I would never be a scientist or academic. What I really wanted to be was an ethnographer – someone who studies a people and their culture during a particular time and place. I began by creatively examining the American West, my home ground, eventually becoming a participant-observer with my decision to start the nonprofit Quivira Coalition in 1997. My activism, which I always considered to be a form of storytelling, took me to a hopeful and wonderful land, expanding horizons and provoking new creative responses. Eventually, my adventure down the river carried me beyond Quivira and I adjusted my chronicling accordingly. Looking back, I see that my work, in all its variations, achieved my original goal. It forms a creative ethnography, not of a people or place so much as of a time – The Age of Consequences.

My journey in the grass canoe began in a small stream in the desert and flowed downriver in twists and turns, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes eddying, sometimes discouraging, sometimes anxious, but always exciting and always hopeful. The water grew wider and deeper as I went, which changed the nature of the journey in ways I didn’t expect, challenging my faith in the future at times. Still, you keep paddling and pray that your little canoe can hold together just long enough to see what’s around the next bend. Life should be an adventure – make it a good one!