By: Maida Tilchen

Maida Tilchen — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I used to have a similar dilemma because I write about New Mexico, a place I’ve visited often as a tourist but have never lived. Then I read a wonderful sentence in a 1954 book about the history of tourists in the West, “In Search of the Golden West” by Earl Pomeroy. Pomeroy said “[The tourist] can tell us not only something about what the West was, but much about what it wanted to be and pretended to be, and what he thought it was” (p. xvi-xvii.) When I read that, I felt not just liiberated from feelings of inadequacy about writing about NM, but I felt that I had been given a goal for my writing: to present a version, or even a vision, of New Mexico that a “local” could never do. I also like to remind myself that “Death Comes for the Archbishop”, considered the greatest novel of NM, was written by a tourist – Willa Cather. She also wrote about other places in which she was a tourist, such as her writing set in Canada.

Comments on: write what you know. or don’t.

By: Maida Tilchen