The schedule that follows is provisional - we will be adjusting the final details up to the point of launch. But what follows will give a good sense of the richly immersive, culturally stimulating and academically rigorous pleasures in store.
Day 01 - Arrival
Arrive Albuquerque Airport. Shuttle to Santa Fe; check into La Fonda Hotel.
Group dinner and introductory talk: Willa Cather’s Santa Fe.
Days 02 & 03 - ‘Bookpacking’ in Historic Santa Fe
Our morning seminars on these first two days will focus on colonial Hispanic history and the period of the Anglo Annexation - the context of ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop’. We will dissect Willa Cather’s inspirations and study her historical sources. We will discuss her representation of Hispanic attributes and character - and compare these with the portrait of Latina life presented in Quade’s short stories, particularly ‘Nemecia’ and ‘The Five Wounds’.
We will follow the story of Santa Fe into the early 20th century, when Cather herself came to Santa Fe and stayed at La Fonda. This was the era in which the city developed its reputation as an artistic and bohemian enclave - a phenomenon explored in Quade’s titular short story ‘Night at the Fiestas’. We’ll ask ourselves what it was that drew artists and writers to this particular dusty town in America’s high desert.
In our afternoons, we will take in the sights and sounds of Santa Fe. We’ll visit the Palace of the Governors, built by the Spanish in 1607 - the oldest continuously occupied public building in the US. We’ll visit the Bishop’s Lodge, the home of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the real-life prototype of Cather’s fictional hero Latour - and we’ll admire his Cathedral, a lovely piece of Romanesque in soft yellow sandstone that complements the adobe buildings all around. We’ll walk the streets and take in the independent galleries and shops. We’ll sit in cafes and soak up the atmosphere - and we’ll read, delighting in the pleasure of absorbing Cather’s exquisite and life-affirming prose in such a perfect setting.
Day 04 - Chimayo - Faith and Folklore
On this day we will check out of La Fonda and head north to Taos.
Our morning seminar on this day will dig deeper into the nature of New Mexican faith and folklore. We’ll look at representations of Catholic faith in Quade’s stories - particularly ‘The Five Wounds’ and ‘Ordinary Sins’. And we’ll discuss the nature of the syncretic - the merging of Catholic with Native American beliefs, celebrated in the works of Chicano authors Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros. We’ll revisit early Hispanic history to see how this syncretic tradition first evolved, and how fundamental it is to an understanding of New Mexican heritage and contemporary identity.
En route to Taos, we’ll visit a location that will bring our morning discussion into vivid focus - The Sanctuary of Chimayo. This shrine, dating from the early 19th century, remains a place of contemporary pilgrimage.
Group dinner.
Days 05 & 06 - Transcendent Taos
“The landscape lived, and lived as the world of the gods, unsullied and unconcerned. The great circling landscape lived its own life, sumptuous and uncaring. ”
For the next two nights we will be staying in a very special ‘Bookpacker’ location - the Mabel Dodge Luhan Lodge, outside Taos. In the 1920s, the remarkable Mabel Dodge Luhan founded a literary colony in Taos. Willa Cather lived at the Lodge for a while, as did Robinson Jeffers, Georgia O’Keeffe and Aldous Huxley. Most famously, Luhan invited D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to join this Taos set; we’ll visit the ranch Luhan gave Frieda in exchange for the manuscript of ‘Sons and Lovers’, where D.H. Lawrence wrote much of his later fiction.
We’ll explore the story of this 1920s bohemian world. We’ll study Quade’s short story ‘Canute Commands the Waves’, which taps into the nature of New Mexico as a place of artistic reclusion, and which echoes similar stories (‘St. Mawr’ and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’) written by D.H. Lawrence.
We’ll visit Taos and Taos Pueblo - and we’ll head into the hills and valleys of Northern New Mexico - sacred spaces where artists and indigenous peoples alike have communed with the natural and the supernatural, experiencing visions both visceral and life-affirming.
Day 07 & 08 - Albuquerque and Acoma Pueblo
The final part of the class will focus on New Mexico’s Native American cultures.
We will stay at the Los Poblanos Historic Inn in Albuquerque. From here, we’ll visit Isleta, Laguna and Acoma, the three Native American ‘Pueblos’ visited by Cather’s fictional protagonist Bishop Latour in the glorious, central sequence in ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop’.
‘Pueblos’ - literally ‘villages’ - signify settled (as opposed to nomadic) cultures, and the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico have lived in these places for hundreds of years. Acoma, sitting atop a mesa in the desert west of Albuquerque, has witnessed continuous human settlement for longer than any place in the USA. Visiting Acoma is a rare and unforgettable privilege.
Our seminars will focus on literary representations of Native cultures, in the worls of Willa Cather and others, and we’ll explore the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko, whose novel ‘Ceremony’ is set on Laguna Pueblo, just north of Acoma.
We will celebrate a final group dinner, and a final reflective seminar - and then we’ll depart for Albuquerque airport, and the journey home.
