Long Biography with All the Books
I started my journalism career on the women's pages of the local newspaper writing about food and fashion. I left that life in 1968 to try the counter-culture lifestyle, for a while in Northern California. I learned to gather some edible wild plants from a Native American neighbor. After another brief stint in traditional journalism (more cooking articles), I ended up for a winter season in Taos during the heyday of communes such as New Buffalo and Morningstar where I was a frequent visitor. Eventually I made my way home to Arizona and began living at Rancho Linda Vista, an artists' community in the tiny town of Oracle, Arizona.
At that point I got the opportunity to write what was called "an Indian cookbook." A month of research taught me that early Native American cooking was mainly wild plants. So I, who studied zoology in college, started a crash course in ethnobotany guided by a compassionate librarian and lots of ethnobotany texts written in the early 1900s. I traveled through the Southwest in a rattletrap car talking to Native American women, asking them to take me on plant walks and teach me their recipes. That book ended up American Indian Food and Lore which has been republished as American Indian Cooking: Recipes from the Southwest.
During those years I met so many interesting women, the next book focused on them. In order to detail customs in the various tribes or nations, which varied greatly, I again hit the museum library, reading early texts that reported Native American life before they had been changed by White contact. That book became Daughters of the Earth, the Life and Legends of Native American Women.For the next book, I returned to wild food with The Tumbleweed Gourmet, modern recipes for Southwestern Wild Plants. Next it was a toggle back to Native American women with a biography of Navajo politician, Annie Dodge Wauneka called I'll Go and Do More, followed by a young reader version of the story called Keeping the Rope straight.
With interest in natural food increasing in in the new millennium, I concentrated on the most popular wild plant in the Southwest with The Prickly Pear Cookbook followed by The New Southwest Cookbook, with recipes from top resort and restaurant chefs. Cooking the Wild Southwest includes recipes from 23 edible wild plants that are easy to recognize, easy to gather, and taste good.
When Tucson was named the United States' first UNESCO City of Gastronomy, I immediately thought "that's my book." There was much new material to research, but because of my long years writing about the food scene in the Southwest, when I didn't know something, I generally knew who did know and so many experts were generous with their time. I tramped over local farms, read countless archeological papers, and visited all sorts of kitchens. The result was A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson's Culinary History.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I had spent time researching the life of Nellie Cashman, an Irish immigrant, renowned for running cafes and boarding houses throughout the West from the 1870s through the early 1900s. When I couldn't compile all the facts, I turned it into a novel, making Nellie a secondary protagonist in The Piano Player, set in Tombstone and Dawson City, Alaska.
My latest book, Everything We Thought We Knew, also a novel, relies on my experiences in those early days in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I visited communes and lived in an intentional community in Oracle, Arizona. The story and characters are pure fiction, but the setting and a minor scene here or there and a trait here or there are plucked from that long-ago reality. It's sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, but it is also war protests, the anguish of veterans returned from VietNam, and the struggle to remake society in a less corporate more collaborative mode.
I share a blog about Southwestern food with three other women. WWW.SavortheSouthwest.blog comes out once a month. Please subscribe if you are interested in Southwestern flavors and edible wild plants.