An Interview with Author Tim Amsden

Tim Amsden is a retired attorney whose poetry can be found in national and international publications, as well as several anthologies. His first memoir, Love Letter to Ramah: Living Beside New Mexico’s Trail of the Ancients (University of New Mexico Press, September 2024), was inspired by two decades of living in the Ramah Valley. The memoir has been called a book of “gentle wisdom and quiet inspiration” that “reveals a deep sense of the land and lore of that patch of paradise presently known as New Mexico.” You’ll find Tim on Amazon and his SWW author page.

What do you hope readers will take away from Love Letter to Ramah?
The book’s narrative follows my wife Lucia and me as we take a midlife “off the cliff” leap from Kansas City into the natural beauty, deep history, and strong sense of place that pervade northern New Mexico. There we deepened our heightened visceral understanding that to survive and prosper as a species, we must live in concert with each other and the needs of the living earth. It also gave us a belief that those things are possible.

My hope is that in the process of walking along with us through our experiences and discoveries, the reader will feel a similar shift. I also hope they are entertained and surprised as they encounter such things as singing toads, talking pots, vampire bugs, and the daughter of the sun god in a land where ravens soar above the rhythmic yelp and drone of Native music, and old Spanish missions hunker over the bones of ancient peoples.

Tell us about the journey from inspiration to push to begin and completion of your first memoir.
Love Letter began its conceptual life some fifteen years ago with the working title Folk Music, a reference to the eclectic and diverse community of loving, earth-rooted people we encountered in the Ramah area, then it grew and morphed over a number of years, somewhat like Topsy.

A few experiences and people in the book were described earlier in other publications, including New Mexico Magazine and the volume I edited about the medicine man Bear Heart Williams titled The Bear Is My Father. Other pieces were written along the way, and some were added during the process of editing with the University of New Mexico (UNM) Press.

Although I’m listed as author, Love Letter was shaped by several other people as well. My wife Lucia was part and parcel of the entire process. She is also a writer, and her memories, suggestions, and editorial expertise are present throughout. Credit also goes to the folks at the press, especially my editor, who masterfully edited and championed the book, and to friends and early readers who provided invaluable input. Finally, the community itself deserves credit for creating many of the experiences related in Love Letter. Particularly notable is Ramah photographer Nancy Dobbs, who contributed the exquisite photograph that graces the book’s cover, shot from her front door.

What challenges did this work pose for you?
I think the greatest challenge was having the patience to let the process unfold in its own time until all the pieces were there, the narrative complete, and the central thrust clear. And although the book took a long time to create, that was a good thing, because some key portions were added at the very end. In addition, it was important to know when the book was complete and the time had come to stop tweaking and tuning. I once heard a painter say that one of the most challenging things for her was knowing when to stop, and that is true of many creative processes, including writing.

How is the book structured and why did you choose to put it together that way?
To some extent the structure is inherent; it follows the timeline through our move from Kansas City to the Ramah Valley, our twenty years in Ramah, and our eventual relocation in Albuquerque. Other pieces, such as experiences and explorations, natural and human history, sense of place, the night sky, sun dances and ghosts, were arranged to help readers flow easily along and remain engaged. In some ways it was like assembling a music compilation.

What was the expected, or unexpected, result of writing/publishing Love Letter to Ramah?
I had just started what I thought would be a long and tedious process of searching for a publisher (I do not have an agent) by sending out query letters to three publishers. One of them was UNM Press. The publication of the book exceeded any expectations I might have had, because of all publishers, UNM Press was my first choice. They responded by requesting to see the manuscript. The process that followed of creating the book with them was rigorous, very productive, and highly supportive.

Do you have a favorite quote from the book?
One of my favorite qualities of New Mexico is its resplendent sky, especially in the Ramah area, where air and light pollution are at a minimum. Here’s a bit from the chapter titled “Starry Starry Night”:

Sometimes after returning home at night and pulling into our garage, we would step out under the sky and one of us would whisper, “Look at that!”  People where we lived tended to talk in hushed voices when they were out beneath the stars, nightly reminders of the vastness of which they are a part. Perhaps awe of the night sky is even embedded in our DNA, a connection to universal mystery that we have experienced throughout our long evolutionary path.

We are literally children of the stars; every atom in our bodies was created in the furnaces of stars that died long ago. As the astronomer Carl Sagan once put it, “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we come from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us.” We are, however, in danger of losing that knowing, as our visibility of the night sky dims. To me, that is a very sad thing, perhaps even a subtle limitation of our ability to be a global tribe together. Gazing at the stars is an experience that gives us all common ground and connects us to the vastness of creation.

Any “Oh, wow!” moments while doing research for Love Letter?
There were so many. A few examples are the unlikely story of Esteban, the Moroccan slave owned by a Spanish conquistador, who was the first person to make contact between Spain and the Zuni people; the macabre method tarantula hawks use to feed their young; the existence of the groups of people called Penitentes and Genizaros; and the strange desert-adopted life of the singing spade-foot toads.

A definite wow was the fact that a Native American oral constitution — the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy — was an important model for the documents that defined the values and structure of our new country, including the U.S. Constitution.

The most personally interesting was a dawning awareness that unlike most of the rest of the country, many of the artifacts and indications of earlier people in New Mexico are readily visible, present, and sometimes still in use. Spain, for instance, introduced acequias (a type of irrigation canal) to New Mexico around 400 years ago, and they still carry water for crops. Among other places, they crisscross parts of Albuquerque, and we sometimes take walks along them where they run through parks and behind homes.

Also, there are areas still held by their owners under old Spanish land grants, and signs on highways let motorists know when they are entering and leaving them. Finally, Catholic Missions built when New Mexico was part of the Spanish empire are numerous, especially on Native reservations.

Native people have also left their artifacts in and on the land. It’s not unusual to spot sherds, grinding stones, arrow points, petroglyphs, and ruins that were created many hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Before we moved to New Mexico, Lucia and I visited Albuquerque and stayed in a Bed and Breakfast near the Rio Grande River. The first morning, the owners led us down a staircase to the basement, where there was a dirt wall marked with dates of native settlements going back hundreds of years.

How did your work as a poet influence your memoir?
Being a poet has given me a love of lyrical and unusual ways of saying things, a fascination with the ineffable, and the practice of editing closely and repeatedly. Hopefully there are whiffs of those things in this book. In a broader sense, poets are somewhat like monks. They know their work will mostly be read by other poets, so they tend to be less ego-driven and more engaged in their creativity for its own sake. As a result, writing poetry has given me the habit of finding satisfaction in the process itself. It helps me see this book as a gift to the world, a small gesture toward loving the earth and each other.

Did you ever feel as if you were revealing too much of yourself (or anyone else) in writing your story?
No. I tried hard to avoid including things about other people that might disturb or hurt them. In the case of myself and my wife Lucia, we both wanted to share anything, good or bad, that made this a better book.

What is the first piece of writing you can remember completing?
When I was in the seventh grade in Robinson Junior High School in Wichita, I wrote a humor column in our little school paper called “Off the Deep End with Tim.” After reading my first submission, my home room teacher, who was also the paper’s editor, contacted my parents and said that it was so well written that I must have plagiarized it. That backhanded compliment put me over the moon and, I think, lit my writerly fuse.

Do you prefer the creating or editing aspect of writing? How do you feel about research?
I love them all. I am by nature a scavenger, always looking for unusual bones and stones, bright lizards and flowers and birds. So a phrase that pops, a clarifying shift, or a fact that casts new or different light are all grist to my scavenging mill.

What do you consider the most essential elements of a well-written memoir?
To me, a memoir is especially memorable if it contains a theme that provides a takeaway for the reader. As I was working with UNM Press, someone there asked, “What is the book’s raison d’être?” I could answer the question, but it motivated me to amend the text, so it expressed the central message more directly.

Is there something you’d like to develop from material you haven’t been able to use?
In downtown Kansas City, Kansas, there is a small shady cemetery dating from the late 1800s that shelters the remains of many Wyandotte Indians, most in unmarked graves. Among the few headstones that do exist are ones for the three Conley sisters, Lyda, Helena, and Ida, who dedicated their lives to protecting the graveyard from attempts to replace it with new development. They lived at that time on the land, often sitting with shotguns in their laps in front of the shack they built there. Eventually, Lyda Conley became a lawyer, and she defended the cemetery before the Supreme Court of the United States, thereby becoming the first woman of Native Ancestry to be admitted to the U.S, Supreme Court Bar. Although her case failed, the sisters gained support for their cause and the cemetery was not sold. I came across this cemetery once while taking a walk from my office in the EPA building a couple of blocks away, and returned many times because the energy of the place is palpable. I would get shivers every time I read the message on Helena Conley’s stone: “Cursed be the Villains that molest their graves.” I think this story calls out for an author, and I’ve thought about it for years.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
I wish you all good things, and thank you for spending this time with me.

KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.