photo by Dorie Hagler
“Mid spring and everything knows it. Nest making, photosynthesizing, rush and tumble of green, even the light takes on that grassy hue. The earth gone soft and its odor’s indiscreet, cow shit and cottonwoods…
Cloud puff-in the pale blue and over the ridge a howl short of melody, like pain that can’t find words and comes out moan.
Up to my elbows in the smear of it.” ~ Summer Wood, Arroyo
Summer Wood looks like her name. A pixie, a faerie, a woodland sprite; she is a fine boned, ethereal looking creature. If translucent wings were to sprout from her back and she were to fly away, twinkling, at dusk, it would not seem entirely surprising. Paradoxically, her body language conjures images of a gangly and shy high school basketball player. Like the northern New Mexico spring she describes in her critically acclaimed novel Arroyo, Summer Wood is earthy, complicated, fiercely bright, magical, and entirely, unquestionably real.
Writer, teacher, mentor, and parent of three sons on the cusp of adulthood, Summer is also a licensed general contractor. Building houses trained her to “think three dimensionally, to look at the architecture of a story and to be able to see a story as a shaped thing.” “It taught me how to spend a lot of time making something,” she told me over coffee at Loka. “It takes time to write a novel. It takes time to build a house. And both take some audacity.”
“Being a builder fits into the hunter gatherer life of a writer. You do a project and then have some time off. You have a lot of flexibility to arrange your own time. And it’s a great counter balance to the sitting at a desk thing you do as a writer. It puts you out into the world and introduces you to so many stories you would never have a chance to hear otherwise.”
And hear them them, she does, with a pitch perfect sense. According to Summer, “Your ear is the most important part of writing.” In a post on her blog thewhereofit.com, which is devoted to readers and writers who “care about place,” Summer pays tribute to her idol Grace Paley: “Her ear was exquisitely tuned to the nuances of the heart as expressed in the music of our language, and her success at it capturing both takes my breath away.” When the late Paley’s daughter happened upon Summer’s post , she invited Summer to initiate a reading of Paley’s works in an effort to “help keep her words in the air.” Summer credits Paley with being one of the premiere writing stylists of the twentieth century. “Her work showed me that there were no rules, other than to listen to people.”
Summer’s writing has been described by author John Nichols as “full of sweet weather and tender mercies.” While her novel Arroyo was set in a tangibly familiar New Mexican mining town, her upcoming novel Wrecker takes place in San Francisco and Humboldt County, California.
“It is critical for me to place my writing somewhere,” Summer told me. “I think there is such a connection between who we are and where we’re from and where we live and the stories that inform that relationship. I’ve always been interested in place and land, both rural and urban. Writers pee on things. You mark your territory.” Summer will teach two classes entitled “The Where of It” as part of the 2009 Taos Writer’s Conference (unm.edu/~taosconf/) during July.
Summer has also been involved in applying for a community reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for The Arts entitled “The Big Read.” Taos Public Library and SOMOS have teamed up to apply for this grant funded program in the hopes of adopting Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima, a coming-of-age story set in the 1940′s on the eastern plains of New Mexico, as the focal point for a month long celebration of reading in Taos during November of 2009. Additionally, Summer, who has participated in the SOMOS Young Writers Mentorship Program for years, is currently mentoring an eighth grade student at Country Day School who is in the midst of writing her own novel.
Throughout Summer’s work, themes of metamorphosis, and of love choosing us in unexpected ways reappear in different forms. Her sensitivity to her often adrift characters, as well as her empathy for their predicaments and personal struggles allow her readers to experience their transformations. During our conversation, Summer defined a hero as “someone who didn’t expect to do what they have been faced with and yet have risen to the challenge day after day, with nothing personal to gain – and yet who then gains everything through it.” She referred to a Fred Hughes adaptation of the works of the Roman poet, Ovid, whose writing she describes as astonishing, bawdy, ribald and erotic. According to Hughe’s translation in Tales from Ovid, Ovid wrote, “It is no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.”
“Isn’t that beautiful?” Summer asked me. “Ovid understood that, he got that, and was able to distill so much experience into his gorgeous poetry. Not to say that we’re not responsible for our choices, but it’s just that really, it is no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.”