Otero Arts Inc. in Alamogordo, New Mexico
…Not exactly a wilderness but a great expanse of desert, south of Santa Fe, that goes on for miles and miles to the sprawling town of Alamogordo. This was my destination a few days ago, to give an early reading from the manuscript of Taken by The Shawnee, to be published in April, 2024 by the estimable Turtle Point Press.
Three and a half hours south of home, I found myself in a landscape that had—as far as I could tell—no definition: miles of sagebrush and sand with purple mountains in the distance. I didn’t use my GPS, on principle, and so stopped at an enormous truck rest to ask directions.
The woman behind the counter finished her phone call and began to show me the directions on her phone but clearly knew almost immediately that I didn’t get it. So she found a piece of paper (which I now prize) and wrote out the directions in clean print. Later a kind friend showed me the simple operation of my GPS but I will continue to keep the paper out of a nostalgia, no, a reference for the past when we mostly tried to help each other, independent of screens. That time won’t come again.
After a little less than four hours of driving, I got to Alamogordo, home of an amazing creation called Otero Arts Inc. Supported by a community of volunteers with the devoted leadership of one couple, the group was able to lease the handsome WPA adobe building that was built in 1937 to serve as a woman’s club, one of the clubs that used to be found all across small town US. I know the importance of these now-vanished clubs because the Richmond, Virginia version was the creative force of my great-grandmother Sallie Montague Lefroy’s life during her decades of widowhood. The Alamogordo building certainly served some of the same purposes for women denied at the time most participation in public life. They are due to be remembered and even recovered.
Inside the Center, a spacious room serves to showcase local artists’ work as well as concerts and readings. The twenty or so who came to listen, rapt, to the first chapter of my historical novel may have been the retired teachers, librarians, doctors and lawyers of the little town, many having come from perhaps more stimulating lives in our big cites. A beautiful buffet was offered, and I had the great satisfaction of talking with people who care about books and ideas.
How do they keep going? Private donations and eventually perhaps some foundation grants, but beyond money, it is the dedication of these volunteers, all of whom may feel that even a lost desert town deserves to have its arts, its place in the creative universe.
Where I live in Santa Fe, the arts have become big business, sustained by large endowments and grants and run by professional staffs, but I doubt that they will ever be able to display the extraordinary faith in the transformative possibilities of the arts that Otero is displaying, day in, day out.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
[If you have a few pennies to spare, this is where they should go: oteroartsinc@gmail.com.]
The Wikipedia entry for Alamogordo has these two remarkable sentences:
“In 1983, Atari, Inc. buried over 700 thousand Atari 2600 video game cartridges, most notably E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in Alamogordo’s landfill. Alamogordo briefly made international news in late 2001 when Christ Community Church held a public book burning of books in the Harry Potter series, and several other series, on December 30.”
Sallie, thank you not only for an outstanding evening of reading and talking about literature and the writing life, but also this post on your blog about Otero Arts! It would be lovely for Alamogordo to be known as much for its arts community as for the wikipedia entries mentioned above!