One thing I didn't mention earlier about my Taos stay is that I stayed at the Sagebrush Inn, which is where Georgia O'Keefe stayed when in Taos painting her vagi-flowers. I stayed in what I think must be one of the original rooms. It was upstairs and relatively secluded an close to the lobby and restaurant. It also had to bedrooms with king beds, a fridge, and fireplace--which I didn't need. I only had two neighbors--one next door and one downstairs. I checked to make sure that I wasn't getting charged for the extra room and the clerk assured me that I wasn't. I guess they just ran out of singles and I lucked out.
I didn't much care about the extra bed, but the extra room gave me a place to work and practice my ukulele without having my neighbor pounding on the walls next door.
I don't hold with a lot of the new-agers who believe that Taos has some magical quality (the mountains humming and all that). It could be true, but I'd rather concentrate on the explainable.
One thing I did notice was the frequency and intensity of my dreams. Our fiction workshop leader mentioned this too. He had several nightmares while in Taos. I didn't have nightmares, but each night I would have an intense dream full of archetypal goings-on. I would awake, then fall back asleep, have another dream, wake up again, fall back asleep again, have yet another dream, and so on until morning. I probably had at least three such dream per night. I would have written them all down, but I would never have gotten any sleep.
A product of the Taos hum? Maybe. But it could have been the altitude. It could have been a product of the intense weather. It could have been because I kicked in full gear with the creative process all week and my subconscious just wanted to join me.
On a practical note, when cleaning my glasses, I forgot my strength and twisted the frame, which threatened to just break for the first half of the week and then finally did on Wednesday. So I spent the last three days having to hold my glasses to face so I could read.
Among the topics for the week-long workshops, for those who are interested: Writing Poetry that Matters, Writing for Change (non-fiction), Writing Your Family Story, Writing a Screenplay, Mystery Writing.
The website: Taos Writers's Conference
As long as I'm in the linking mood, here is a picture of last year's fiction workshop.
The guy next to me with the up-turned baseball cap is Dan Meuller, the workshop leader both this year and last year. He wrote a book of short stories called How Animals Mate. The girl in front of me was in both last year's workshop, as was the short guy on the end. But he isn't as cute.
2 comments:
It looks like the fiction workshop was also called landscape and characters. Interesting.
I think you're right about the dreams; most likely all of those factors contributed. I dunno about the hum, though. One theory is that it's a very low frequency defence communication system with an antinode or transmitter or something near there.
Or mebbe it's coming from the aliens living in the boulders, huh?
Another thing that I noticed was I seemed to have frequent drops in blood sugar. On my current dosage of diabetes medication, I need to eat about every three hours. If I don't, I start bonking. While in Taos, I found that I needed to eat something about every two hours. A fellow diabetic told me that it was the altitude. Strange.
Post a Comment